Quote from: Intergalactic Threat;850666I might just buy 1e again. The location supplements were decent enough. Don't really need anything more.

I've heard of several groups that have done this and seem to be doing just fine.

re: the Crafting system argument:

 I guess my problem with the crafts system is almost a "get off my lawn" thing. Did people really need the Exalted Devs to tell them how to play an entertaining crafter that badly? I find that idea that players have be baited and lead by the nose like donkey with a carrot tied to its head more than a little patronizing.
 
   "I can make things to bribe people, I can sell things to make myself rich, I can devise mundane but effect large scale weapons..." these seem like pretty bog standard things to do with a "crafter" (assuming your concept is inventor its a pretty broad archetype with several possible variations). You get rewarded for it by getting experience and having fun like everyone else that plays their character. Do you really need a complicate system of number juggling to tell you this?

And frankly, if you're having fun sitting in the Craft Cave and churning out items and artifacts and its not destroying the game... more power to you. The game is about having fun not playing "right", whatever that means.

OMG the artifact crafting in Exalted 2.0 was a fucking nightmare.  Scion did a much better job with relics in their companion supplement.  Just borrow from that Exalted 3rd Edition devs.  You don't make complicated just make it easy to understand.

In all honesty you can't beat this is how many dots this ability is worth.  Oh you want your relic to heal people like a third level boon?  That is three dots in the relic.  You want a +2 dice bonus?  Why bother when you can just double the dice pool for that specific dexterity + medicine dice roll for only one dot.  That way you got a four dot relic that doubles your dice pool when you try to heal people.  Which means you can do more healing.

Do you see how simple that is?  Exalted can't even do that shit right.  No they gave me vague as fuck rules so I can't even produce a balance item of power without breaking the game.

Quote from: Nexus;850386As I understand the Trinty games are being done by a completely different design team with different objectives.For one, they won't be Storyteller. Also, as far I have heard OP other kickstarter projects have been much better handled. I don't back Kickstarters at all but from those that have invested in others aside from Exalted 3rd by OP they generally seem to be pleased with the results.

But again, this is secondhand knowledge so please don't risk money on my word alone.

Here is Holden Shearer's current sig over at TPB:

QuoteExalted game line co-developer
Current projects: Arms of the Chosen, Dragon-Blooded: What Fire Has Wrought, The Realm, Trinity Continuum: Æon

Given the big lesson he took from developing Exalted was that they didn't keep the playtest group small enough, I expect he will limit the playtest to himself.

I'd be less baffled with the insane fear of piracy if they hadn't already sold the damn thing upfront.

Well, fuck.

At least there's still some hope for Aberrant I guess.

Quote from: Nexus;851025Well, fuck.

At least there's still some hope for Aberrant I guess.

I always liked Aberrant.  And Adventure!  Trinity not so much.

JG

I never actually played Aberrant, Trinity or Adventure. I had reached the point of total Storyteller system fatigue by then. Actually, that's not entirely true, as I did buy Exalted 1st edition.

Partly, it comes down to the fact that I have never had much interest in running superhero games. I am fine with playing in them, but they don't engage me as a GM. As for Trinity, I was into Fading Suns as my SF game of that era. Adventure just passed me by.

The Trinity System being proposed code named "Sardoynx" (which will cover Aeon, Adventure, Abberant as well as a modern day action setting in the core book) looks very...interesting.

The Onyx Path website has links to the beta system documents. It's very ambitious and I hope it works, but I'll have to see it more in play. It's too complicated for me to give a short description.... Suffice to say it will be Attribute+Skill only your powers can give you extra "effect" Successes that can be spent for things like....hitting multiple opponents, or completing a task faster more impressively and the like.

Also, damage to extra's versus main characters is handled differently. An examples such as a Nova who can blow up tanks and cars with no issue because he does something like 35 damage to non-important NPC targets and areas... but only does 8 damage as direct attacks against the player controlled car they're running away in.

There's also a token economy of red and black points earned when PC's "Fail" a roll. Every time they fail they get another one of these points which can start being spent for extra "Effect" points. So as a battle goes and builds, Fate begins sweeping in the direction of the PC's.

Overall very interesting, but I'll have to see how it happens in play.

I just hope Onyx Path has learned from this debacle, and either pulls him from the project, or keeps a much tighter rein on him.  I would prefer the latter, since he can write and has shown that he can do good work, but letting him be the final arbiter of a project is the reason Exalted has been such an issue.

Quote from: Orphan81;851055The Trinity System being proposed code named "Sardoynx" (which will cover Aeon, Adventure, Abberant as well as a modern day action setting in the core book) looks very...interesting.

The Onyx Path website has links to the beta system documents. It's very ambitious and I hope it works, but I'll have to see it more in play. It's too complicated for me to give a short description.... Suffice to say it will be Attribute+Skill only your powers can give you extra "effect" Successes that can be spent for things like....hitting multiple opponents, or completing a task faster more impressively and the like.

Also, damage to extra's versus main characters is handled differently. An examples such as a Nova who can blow up tanks and cars with no issue because he does something like 35 damage to non-important NPC targets and areas... but only does 8 damage as direct attacks against the player controlled car they're running away in.

There's also a token economy of red and black points earned when PC's "Fail" a roll. Every time they fail they get another one of these points which can start being spent for extra "Effect" points. So as a battle goes and builds, Fate begins sweeping in the direction of the PC's.

Overall very interesting, but I'll have to see how it happens in play.

Is it a new system or a Storyteller derivative?

Quote from: James Gillen;851026I always liked Aberrant.  And Adventure!  Trinity not so much.

JG

Aberrant was the one that grabbed me too, hated the ham fisted heavy handed way the developers and writers drove the meta plot down your throat though. It worked so much better divorced from Aeon continuity so the PCs could actually DO things that mattered.

It's a Storyteller derivative, it will still be Attribute+Skill just with success now more about spending for "Effects" and powers giving extra "effect points" (But not success) and new ways to spend those effect points.

Quote from: Brand55;850416Yeah. Some people were happy, of course, but a significant portion of the backers were extremely upset. I don't follow the V20 line (or OPP in general) too closely, but it does seem that they learned their lesson.

It remains to be seen if the Exalted team will learn from their mistakes as well.

The big problems with the V20 Companion, so far as I can tell, were that:

a) they didn't do a brilliant job of communicating what it was going to be about, which meant people felt they got sold a pig-in-a-poke, and

b) it was probably too trivial product to build a Kickstarter around.

The Companion is just a grab-bag of stuff which is interesting, but isn't essential enough to Vampire to go in the big fat V20 core book. That's a reasonable concept for a book, but by definition any such book is going to be inessential - because if it were essential, the material in question would have been in the core - and less cohesive and interesting than a book on a more fully-developed subject.

I bought the Companion after the controversy had long since died down. I'm fine with it, but that's knowing that it's a grab-bag of stuff that by definition isn't particularly important or essential. It doesn't seem like a book which would merit all the fanfare and excitement of a Kickstarter - more like a fatter-than-average version of the sort of booklets of odds and ends that get packaged with GM screens in more conventionally-published product lines.

The big lesson they learned were as follows:

To solve a), make it clear exactly what the scope of the proposed project was going to be for their future WoD Kickstarters. This has extended to putting the full first draft text up for download at the start of the Kickstarter, which has worked much better than anyone anticipated - just about the only time that's blown up in their face has been when they had the big backlash against Beast based on the first draft, but I think OP would have rather had the controversy kick off around a first draft that they had plenty of time to change and revise than go through the full process of making the book and then having it kick off a massive flamewar in the fanbase, so even when offering the books upfront has failed, it's succeeded in other ways if you see what I mean.

To solve b), don't bother doing a Kickstarter for this sort of product - save it for products with a strong central concept that people can get excited about. Anarchs Unbound, the revised Hunters Hunted, Lore of the Clans - those are all books which Vampire fans can get excited about. Provided you are interested in the central concept of the product in question and they don't actually botch the design (and to my eyes their batting average there is much better for V20 than it ever was for the original product line), it's highly unlikely you'll be disappointed in what you get. People who don't give a shit about Anarchs didn't back Anarchs Unbound, those who do did and were very pleased with what they got.

Quote from: Orphan81;851055The Trinity System being proposed code named "Sardoynx" (which will cover Aeon, Adventure, Abberant as well as a modern day action setting in the core book) looks very...interesting.

The Onyx Path website has links to the beta system documents. It's very ambitious and I hope it works, but I'll have to see it more in play. It's too complicated for me to give a short description.... Suffice to say it will be Attribute+Skill only your powers can give you extra "effect" Successes that can be spent for things like....hitting multiple opponents, or completing a task faster more impressively and the like.

Also, damage to extra's versus main characters is handled differently. An examples such as a Nova who can blow up tanks and cars with no issue because he does something like 35 damage to non-important NPC targets and areas... but only does 8 damage as direct attacks against the player controlled car they're running away in.

A bit simplified, but it seems like it could work.

JG

Quote from: Orphan81;851076It's a Storyteller derivative, it will still be Attribute+Skill just with success now more about spending for "Effects" and powers giving extra "effect points" (But not success) and new ways to spend those effect points.

Thank you. Color me dubious. I don't feel Storyteller is a very flexible system and doesn't seem to work well very far from its roots particularly for high powered games. And on a more personal level this system sounds fairly narrative and "meta". Such systems never click very well with me (such as Exalted 3rd). But I'll probably take a look when its released.

One of the issues with storyteller, structurally, lies in it's VTM design roots - VTM was originally designed as a pensive game in which vampires manipulated and schemed with each other in which, when violence took place, it was terminal. VTM 1E characters had amazing powers but they were fragile with their 7 health levels. VTM characters were discouraged, systemically, from fighting. The mechanics of VTM 1E (which carried into later WoD iterations) encouraged this play style.

This started to show cracks as this mechanical system was ported to other games. For games with more or less human characters, like Changeling, this really wasnt an issue. But cracks started to show in games as early in Werewolf. By the time you got to the Aeonverse games (Trinity, Aeon, etc) you had horridly unbalanced games which were fundamentally flawed, and games like Exalted, which developed systems like Paranoia combat because the bones of original VTM (Attribute+Ability, Soak, 7 health levels) simply could not support game action absolutely at odds with the original 20 years prior game design. Exalted sought to emulate Final Fantasy - Advent Children, a kind of fiction directly at odds with the Anita Blake books, Anne Rice Novels and other vampire fiction that VTM 1 was designed to emulate.

This clearly illustrates one thing - rules and design matters. The base bones of Aeonverse, Scion and Exalted (VTM 1) are not designed to handle high powered action, being created for a pensive, moody vampire game. Game mechanics are designed to emulate and simulate various fictions.