Quote from: One Horse Town;863847Other than roll buckets of dice, what the fuck do you do in Exalted anyway?

Exalted has a strong and compelling starting story for those new to the RPG. It is one of its strengths. You are a normal person given the powers of a demigod and you are being hunted down or harangued for favour.

If you are familiar with the RPG then the number of stories you can tell outside of this default is immense. At its base, Exalted deals with fantasy stories where heroes are powerful yet deal with their all too human flaws. You can draw on sword and sorcery, mythic fantasy, wuxia and a bunch of other genres. On top of this, each Exalted type presents a new focus which lets you revisit many of the stories from a different angle.

Quote from: One Horse Town;863847Other than roll buckets of dice, what the fuck do you do in Exalted anyway?

Basically the same as in most fantasy RPGs: You wander around, right wrongs, plunder ancient crypts/temples.
There is also the thing where your character is a reincarnated hero of all that was betrayed and whose soul was locked away for over a millenium and prevented from reincarnation by the evil empire and the schemers behind it.

The setting is a really good mix of different elements, sword&sorcery, sword&planet, myths & and a fabled lost age that was qutie fresh when it came out (still is in my opinion) and has a multitude of reasons to do the things adventurers usually do anyway baked into the premise.

I do love the setting and played a lot in it. Despite the warts and all the mechanics of the past were actually engaging. I genuiely liked building characters in Exalted 2e and playing it, too.

As for Holden's comment: He is a really bad game designer and here it shows the most. Bad might be overdoing it - INEXPERIENCED is probably the word I am looking for. I actually think there are some intruiging mechanical bits in Exalted 3e, but it is so cluttered from poor design decisions...
He is unable to take criticism well, but being able to take criticism well is one of the basic skills one has to have to make it in any field with project work. Sadly his reaction to criticism is to double down on stupid and throw more mechanics at it.

Quote from: Efaun;863870As for Holden's comment: He is a really bad game designer and here it shows the most. Bad might be overdoing it - INEXPERIENCED is probably the word I am looking for. I actually think there are some intruiging mechanical bits in Exalted 3e, but it is so cluttered from poor design decisions...
He is unable to take criticism well, but being able to take criticism well is one of the basic skills one has to have to make it in any field with project work. Sadly his reaction to criticism is to double down on stupid and throw more mechanics at it.

Inexperienced would imply this is his first gig.  It's not.  He was with the 2e crew originally.  No, you have it right.  He's just bad.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;863874Inexperienced would imply this is his first gig.  It's not.  He was with the 2e crew originally.  No, you have it right.  He's just bad.

I am a big fan of giving people the benefit of the doubt, especially when not knowing them personally.
However, still defending this BP/XP thing, that boldly I might add... I am more and more leaning towards just "bad".

Quote from: One Horse Town;863847Other than roll buckets of dice, what the fuck do you do in Exalted anyway?

I've got to say, this whole "what do you do" question is the most stupid question in RPGs. You only have an excuse to ask it if you've never actually played an RPG before.

Otherwise the answer is always the same: do what you always do in RPGs. Make some characters and head out into the world to get in some trouble.

Quote from: Kiero;863883Otherwise the answer is always the same: do what you always do in RPGs. Make some characters and head out into the world to get in some trouble.

Still, it's fair to ask what sort of characters you play, and what sort of trouble you get into.

Quote from: The Butcher;863885Still, it's fair to ask what sort of characters you play, and what sort of trouble you get into.

Of course it is. I only ever see folk going on about npcs in the setting, which doesn't really tell me much, other than a lot of Exalted fans seem hung up on the setting rather than the game.

Quote from: Efaun;863870Basically the same as in most fantasy RPGs: You wander around, right wrongs, plunder ancient crypts/temples.

Thus the gag "Exalted is D an D for people that think they're too good for D and D."

QuoteAs for Holden's comment: He is a really bad game designer and here it shows the most. Bad might be overdoing it - INEXPERIENCED is probably the word I am looking for. I actually think there are some intruiging mechanical bits in Exalted 3e, but it is so cluttered from poor design decisions...
He is unable to take criticism well, but being able to take criticism well is one of the basic skills one has to have to make it in any field with project work. Sadly his reaction to criticism is to double down on stupid and throw more mechanics at it.

Holden isn't that inexperienced. Worse he doesn't seem to be learning anything from his experiences. But that ball's note solely in his court. Somewhere along the line someone should have stepped up and, frankly, muzzled him or at least vetted his comments. If not a professional in customer relations someone with more distance between themselves and the project so every negative comment wouldn't be taken as someone slamming their "baby".

Quote from: Kiero;863883I've got to say, this whole "what do you do" question is the most stupid question in RPGs. You only have an excuse to ask it if you've never actually played an RPG before.

Otherwise the answer is always the same: do what you always do in RPGs. Make some characters and head out into the world to get in some trouble.

I don't think it's as stupid as it seems; some campaign settings have more obvious hooks for that sort of stuff than others, and some are explicitly not set up to encourage heading out into the world to get in trouble. Much World of Darkness stuff (plus its imitators) tends to assume that the campaign will remain focused on a particular city. (Indeed, some versions of Vampire go out of their way to emphasise just how difficult it is for vampires to go travelling.)

On top of that, some settings send at best muddled messages, and at worst seem to actively discourage PCs getting involved in great swathes of stuff. "Doing (whatever) is seen as being a very, very bad thing and people who break this rule face a ferocious response from (monster) society" is sometimes used in White Wolf-y stuff to mean "this is an excellent thing for players to do which will create lots of exciting, game-worthy trouble", and is sometimes used to mean "this is something that the PCs should abhor if they're playing their characters according to the setting briefing".

Demon: the Fallen was a game with this problem: it explicitly set up a situation where a player character could, quite legitimately and with full justification, decide that they're not interested in summoning their higher-ranking superiors from Hell or carving out power in the mortal world in their own right but instead want to seek redemption. It's more or less directly stated that in the process of possessing their human hosts, the demons end up discovering a spark of residual faith which they thought they'd never feel again, and the system seems to be set up to encourage players to strive to lower their Torment score in order to attain better self-control and eventually regain their former angelic status, or at least move beyond what happened to them in the rebellion and their punishment and try to reach a peace with the world. At the same time, the setting materials completely failed to answer the question of what a campaign based around low-Torment demons trying to rediscover the good inside them would actually involve, or to provide any support for that sort of thing.

In addition, "go travelling, find trouble" is nowhere near as universal as you make it out to be. I've played and run a lot of horror games where the idea was that the PCs are ordinary people going about their lives when trouble comes to them, and their lives won't get back on an even keel unless and until they deal with that trouble. (This is a particularly good setup if you want to run a game whose duration isn't completely open-ended, but instead is intended to wrap up once the trouble that perturbs the PCs' lives is resolved.) I've also run games where the PCs have been the leaders of a community and so they have to deal with the problems facing that community and if they packed their bags and left they'd be strolling out of the campaign altogether; a campaign world existed beyond the borders of the city, naturally, that's where the threats came from, but the parameters of the campaign were such that they were expected to spend most of their time in the vicinity of the city and resigning their post in the city would be broadly equivalent to retiring their character.

"Go travelling, find trouble" is reasonable enough in a setting where a) the PCs don't have responsibilities tying them to a particular locale, b) the scope of the campaign allows for the PCs to travel wherever their fancy takes them, and c) the setting and game are set up for open-ended campaigns in which the PCs are expected to move on and find more stuff to do once the issues in a particular locale are resolved, rather than closed-ended games where the point is to play through a particular crisis and then have done with it. Forget avant-garde story games: there's plenty of traditional RPGs where those criteria don't apply, which doesn't invalidate "go travelling, find trouble" as a possible mode of play but does mean that a) it might not be the mode of play which gets the most out of the setting or system in question and b) you might find you have to retcon a whole bunch of setting stuff to make it work.

Quote from: One Horse Town;863887Of course it is. I only ever see folk going on about npcs in the setting, which doesn't really tell me much, other than a lot of Exalted fans seem hung up on the setting rather than the game.

One of the nice things about Exalted is that the setting is HUGE. There are some badass NPCs but by the time you step on their toes you might be pretty badass yourself. If you're not, well, there's always a bigger fish — Creation probably has sem its share of fledgling Exalts who thought they could take on the Mask of Winters or the Bull of the North.

Quote from: Brand55;863855That depends entirely on who you ask and which edition you're looking at. It can have a tone that's pretty light or unrelentingly dark and depressing. That's a big part of why there's so much disagreement about what the "real" Exalted is.
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Complete agreement here. Ask any 5 Exalted fans what the game is "about" and you'll get at least 6 different answers. And they'll all be convinced they're right and the others are heretics with an almost religious conviction and zeal.

And at this point I don't have much of an idea what the writer goals are. They've said so many things, promised others and delivered different things yet again that's hard to follow along with game claiming so many diverse influences (and only growing more with even more "splats" coming drawn from diverse source material). Themes and mood also drift from edition to edition, depending in part on which fans gripe the most like how "anime and magitech" used to be of major importance in mid to late 2nd and no bordering on heretical.

I've felt that one of Exalted's problems is that its that its trying to serve too many masters; a trend that just been getting worse since 1st.

Quote from: Warthur;863890"Go travelling, find trouble" is reasonable enough in a setting where a) the PCs don't have responsibilities tying them to a particular locale, b) the scope of the campaign allows for the PCs to travel wherever their fancy takes them, and c) the setting and game are set up for open-ended campaigns in which the PCs are expected to move on and find more stuff to do once the issues in a particular locale are resolved, rather than closed-ended games where the point is to play through a particular crisis and then have done with it. Forget avant-garde story games: there's plenty of traditional RPGs where those criteria don't apply, which doesn't invalidate "go travelling, find trouble" as a possible mode of play but does mean that a) it might not be the mode of play which gets the most out of the setting or system in question and b) you might find you have to retcon a whole bunch of setting stuff to make it work.

Yeah, some settings just aren't conducive to "Wandering adventurers" as a basic and plain archetype. I've found that its usually modern/futuristic settings that don't assume some kind of new frontier or Post Apocalypse, etc. GURPS Transhuman Space, for example. Its a well developed, expansive setting but "wander and get into trouble" is going to to get most PCs swiftly arrested or worse in major swaths of the setting or at least possibly result in a limited game for many. There are possibilities, of course but they can use some additional explanation and detailing for people fresh to the setting that might not grok them right off..

Quote from: Efaun;863720I really don't care about the female/male disparity here. We can have years of all female example characters in RPG-examples before we reach any sort of parity - if that is something one strifes for.

Edit: I debated replying to this but I felt clarification was worth the risk of derail. But really it should probably move to another thread or PM.

I don't expect anyone else to "care" in the sense of getting worked up about it.  I just think its odd, particularly how strident they are about it. It's an odd habit and seems more like showy "Look how progressive I am!" posturing way than productive as far as encouraging presenting interesting and developed female characters.

Plus I've never been fond of the idea that inverting a discriminatory practice evens the score particularly when that practice was more the result of thoughtlessness rather than deliberate exclusion (I doubt many writers, rpgs or others wise have deliberately not used any female characters for quite some time) particularly doubling down on in the process by doing it deliberately then going a step further. I haven't seen even minor, subservient or  "token" males in their writings though in fairness I might have missed them I tend to skim the "fiction" as I find it overly florid.

It's not "unfair". It their stylistic choice. I can't say its sexist or misandrist as I haven't seen Mengtzu demonstrate any such feelings at other times.  Its just odd and doesn't really seem to serve much of a purpose aside from drawing attention to the doer. So. mission accomplished I suppose as I did comment on it when it would otherwise have been typically mediocre game based fiction.

Quote from: Nexus;863896Yeah, some settings just aren't conducive to "Wandering adventurers" as a basic and plain archetype. I've found that its usually modern/futuristic settings that don't assume some kind of new frontier or Post Apocalypse, etc. GURPS Transhuman Space, for example. Its a well developed, expansive setting but "wander and get into trouble" is going to to get most PCs swiftly arrested or worse in major swaths of the setting or at least possibly result in a limited game for many. There are possibilities, of course but they can use some additional explanation and detailing for people fresh to the setting that might not grok them right off..

One of the things that Shadowrun did very, very right was making Shadowrunning an obvious and enjoyable default activity for PCs. It solves so many problems of modern-day/future settings, like:
- "Where's the action?" Don't worry about it: the next Mr or Ms Johnson you encounter will tell you where the action is.
- "What's my motivation for getting involved in the first place?" Mr/Ms Johnson is paying you to.
- "Why can't we just get the authorities to deal with this terrible crisis we've discovered?" Well, firstly, the authorities are extremely corrupt and you probably can't match the Big Bad's bribery budget. Secondly, you found out all this shit in the process of undertaking violent criminal activity, which you do for a living and which often involves causing death or injury to cops or security people. The police are not your friends and if, by some incredible chance, they smile at you when you come into the precinct it's probably because they're really looking forward to the severe beating they are about to dish out to you once they get you behind closed doors.
- "Why can't our employer deal with it?" You know how your employer handles this sort of problem? They hire Shadowrunners to look into it. If the heat is too much for you, sure, by all means let some other team take the contract and the fat payout on offer for the follow-up work. Just don't expect this particular Mr/Ms Johnson - or, for that matter, anyone they talk shop with - to come to you with anything particularly juicy ever again, since you've clearly declared that this shit is above your pay grade. No, no, really, it's fine. We'll just take the contract to someone else and hope the Big Bad's goons believe you when you say that you've given up the job and are no longer interested. You never know, they might be especially gullib- what's that? You'll take the job after all? Well, that's great. I'm so glad we could fit this into your busy schedule.

Quote from: One Horse Town;863887Of course it is. I only ever see folk going on about npcs in the setting, which doesn't really tell me much, other than a lot of Exalted fans seem hung up on the setting rather than the game.

That's fair. Allot of online Exalted discussion seems to be more about arguing over setting minutia that much else aside from mechanical issues. Who's is or is not doing it "right" is up there too so concern about other people's games seem to rank pretty high on the list of concerns too.