Quote from: Nexus;861903Okay, what is "Male gazey" and what makes it so horrible vs a picture of a dude in a posing pouch so snug that with a slight zoom you could tell if his people practice circumcision being awesome? 2ed keeps getting thrown under the bus again and again in this respect .

So as a an exercise, I went through 2nd edition core and counted up the number of "problematic male gaze" images I could with the widest generous definition available.

Overall, it's about 10-11 pictures with an extreme definition of any female character who is showing some amount of skin.

A more reasonable definition, but still following these guidelines drops the numbers down to around 6-7 where the women are attractive and could be seen as presented as purposefully sexy..

When you finally get down to flat out nudity you get about 3-4 images total..
And one of those images, the infamous "green dude with two girls" is entirely about showcasing the decadence of the Dragon Blooded.

But anyway, considering there's something like over a hundred pieces of art through out the whole book, only 4-8 being "problematic" is not a big deal..

It certainly doesn't deserve to be thrown under the bus as some book of "Terrible Misogyny". Particularly when it's art and presentation overall is superior to 3rd editions.

Edit: Male Gaze Theory is an old 70's Feminist term whose original creator later discredited herself in the 80s and 90s...but which has been picked up again by extremists. The idea is that most art and media is presented with the "Male Gaze" in mind. That is, the only reason we have attractive women in media is to please the straight male gaze and nothing more.

This discounts the idea that Lesbians might also enjoy attractive women, or that women themselves enjoy seeing attractive women in their own escapism too, just as guys like seeing bad ass looking dudes in their own escapism.

This theory has been widely used to attack modern comic books, with the idea that the burly adonis men wearing skin tight superhero outfits don't count as sexual to the eyes of women because they're all "Power Fantasies" for men...While the scantily clad goddess superheroines are of course the worst thing ever..

This meme explains it all quite perfectly..
http://41.media.tumblr.com/bcb7694c58b274a5a2f926091dc6c8a7/tumblr_n34az5n03J1seq1n3o1_1280.jpg

I'm just irritated that I got not one, but TWO of those Exalted books, and after waiting two years... That some of the art is atrocious is just insulting. It's all I can thikn about whenever I try and look at the pdf.

Some of the art is legitimately good, and then while reading it I come across another stinker. I knew the Ex3 team had some issues... But at a certain level, I guess, I just didn't want to believe they were that bad. The art - just reminds how badly bungled this game has been.

Ok, so rather than just let other people think for me and work myself up into a righteous fury over nothing... I just went through the PDF and counted up all the art. In my estimation (not including weapons and armor) there are roughly ~168 pieces of art in the book, not including weapons & armor.

There are

7 pieces of art I think are just objectively bad.

4 pieces of art I think where something weird happened that messed up the quality.

Things like the dude in the thong are IMO - silly, but not actually bad per se.

I'm a data analyst, not an artist, but this is just my opinion - 1 piece of art in 15 needs replaced or fixed. Of course, one could make the argument that some of the art isn't necessarily doing what it should, and certainly, it looks like there was one main style of art with a few other dramatically different styles peppered in as well.

Not as bad as I thought.

We've been playing for a while off of the "We swear this is not the final iteration, the real game will be totes different!" leak for...about 2 months now give or take. So, that seems to have been a fib. It's a perfectly competent game. Not groundbreaking by any stretch, but the combat runs smoother, the social combat/influence portion runs smoother (Or rather, runs at all! 2E was kind of a shit show in that regard). It's a bit faster, but most of the changes seem to be getting it to say, go down a highway doing 40MPH rather than bumping down an old dirt road that hasn't been maintained in 30 years doing 40MPH.

Combat hasn't taken too long, but we haven't had Exalt v. Exalt combat yet.

If anyone has questions about how things play out, I'll be happy to give answers if we've used it in play.

Quote from: Nexus;861900It was more dolls (as in Barbie like) dolls more than action figures. I can respect the attempt to be different but it didn't play out well. With a bigger budget and more time it very well might have.

I think the CP2030 art comes under the category of "failed experiment" rather than "half-assed, lazy mediocrity". It was trying to do something different, and boy howdy was it different, but the execution was not up to scratch.

I imagine R. Talsorian found themselves forced to ship it as was because they couldn't afford to commission all-new art when the final product came back looking as utter ass as it did. I can completely believe that they kept thinking to themselves "OK, it looks a bit goofy now, but once we put on the photoshop filters... OK, well it's still silly, but this is looking at the image in isolation, once we put it in layout... ah, crap! No, no, it's still good, it'll look just fine once we actually have the printed product... aw, shoot, we're stuck with this aren't we?" (Or, alternatively, I could equally believe that they were so enthusiastic about the idea that they genuinely thought it looked good and weren't able to get sufficient objectivity to think about what the illustrations would look like to someone outside of their inner circle.)

Then again, it could just be that Mike Pondsmith just got completely out of touch with the zeitgeist and has sufficiently idiosyncratic taste that he isn't capable of discerning between stuff which looks good to him and stuff which would look good to anyone else. CP2030 made a whole bunch of setting changes which turned people off too because of some desire to update the game in a manner which there was no real demand for among the player base.

Either way, it's at least trying, which is more than I can say for some of the phoned-in crap in the new Exalted.

I'd be willing to try this game as a Demetheus clone/wannabe, just to see how the unarmed combat system plays out this time.

I honestly want to try the melee war stuff. Mass combat has always been absolutely shit in the previous editions and I like swords.

The evocations seem a bit much though. I read the stuff for Volcano Cutter, and holy shit is that a bunch of bitch work to track.

Quote from: Michael Gray;861937We've been playing for a while off of the "We swear this is not the final iteration, the real game will be totes different!" leak for...about 2 months now give or take. So, that seems to have been a fib. It's a perfectly competent game. Not groundbreaking by any stretch, but the combat runs smoother, the social combat/influence portion runs smoother (Or rather, runs at all! 2E was kind of a shit show in that regard). It's a bit faster, but most of the changes seem to be getting it to say, go down a highway doing 40MPH rather than bumping down an old dirt road that hasn't been maintained in 30 years doing 40MPH.

Combat hasn't taken too long, but we haven't had Exalt v. Exalt combat yet.

If anyone has questions about how things play out, I'll be happy to give answers if we've used it in play.

Good to hear a balanced and informed opinion. What you say matches my impression of the ruleset. I would play it over 2e any day, but overall its an minor improvement on that existing base.

Quote from: Anglachel;861891The owners of rpg.net really should put a stop to this. Or are they themselves part of that crowd? I mean this is really not funny anymore.

They never will.  Hell ZakS pointed out how much of a hypocrite they are by showing ads of sexy ladies, but continue to judge others if they do something similar.  They will not fix the site unless they are force to make changes.

I'm reading the character generation and example combat threads and its just makes me eyes glaze over. I think the posters are legitimately excited about the mechanics and how they play out but they really just bog me down. And some of the build stuff just seems so strange. To build an excellent unarmed fighter, get some sorcery then avoid your "splats" particular charms (unless you want to be WWE Luchador) and get a bunch of unusual packages of limited supernatural powers (the require a high cost merit by in and different ability for each package).

I just want to play Ryu, is that so wrong?

Quote from: Snowman0147;861948They never will.  Hell ZakS pointed out how much of a hypocrite they are by showing ads of sexy ladies, but continue to judge others if they do something similar.  They will not fix the site unless they are force to make changes.

Motorskills just tripped up on that.

Quote from: Nexus;861966I just want to play Ryu, is that so wrong?

There's an actual Street Fighter game for that. Though I haven't read it so I don't know if it lets you play Ryu or if it's any easier mechanically than Exalted since it was a White Wolf game, too.

I sympathize though. The final release just cemented what all the leaks had me pretty sure of these past two years. Exalted is just more crunchy than I like these days. It's too much work. More power to the people that love it, but I want faster, more stream-lined systems when I sit in the GM's chair. Finally seeing the new Exalted has just made my anticipation for Godbound grow even more.

Quote from: Brand55;861968There's an actual Street Fighter game for that. Though I haven't read it so I don't know if it lets you play Ryu or if it's any easier mechanically than Exalted since it was a White Wolf game, too.
.

The Street Fighter Storytelling Game isn't any mechanically easier. In fact, as I recall, it was far and away the most complex system 90's WW ever released. This is particularly odd as the whole stated purpose of the project was to act as an introductory game for kids. It's also depressingly very heavy on optimization and system mastery (Ugh.)

I picked up a used copy on a lark thinking it would be a fun goofball wahoo game. I was pretty disappointed.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;861885Monte Cook is a professional. That's the difference.

More like, Monte Cook isn't tonguing his own appendix through his colon, that's the difference.

JG

Quote from: Warboss Squee;861967Motorskills just tripped up on that.

What happen after that?