Quote from: AsenRG;904933snip

Looks like AsenRG is the only guy who really gets Exalted.  Someone give the guy a gold medal, because he's apparently the only guy playing it right and the rest of us are wrong.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;904934Looks like AsenRG is the only guy who really gets Exalted.  Someone give the guy a gold medal, because he's apparently the only guy playing it right and the rest of us are wrong.

Its functional if you ignore the jacked up rules and setting inconsistencies or patch them with spit and duct tape. But that can be said of, well, anything. I think it was called earlier. People are mostly in love with the idea of Exalted and the notion its something somehow more "sophisticated" than other mere rpgs. Enough so that they'll put up with some all sort of crap that would put them off other games. Like the guy with a smoking hot but high maintenance, maybe slightly deranged girlfriend.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;904934Looks like AsenRG is the only guy who really gets Exalted.  Someone give the guy a gold medal, because he's apparently the only guy playing it right and the rest of us are wrong.

I'm not particularly fussed. If he and his group are having fun, hey, good for them.

For me, the original Exalted concept (1e core) was intriguing, and the first iteration of the rules, while a far cry from "ideal", was at least salvageable. But with the supplement treadmill the original concept was progressively scrapped and the system is unworkable at this point.
Neither me nor any of the players I know would even think about approaching a monster rule book with over 600 exception-based powers in it. We just don't have that kind of time anymore, that's all. And now with far better (for our purposes) alternatives out there (i.e. Godbound) it would make no sense.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;904934Looks like AsenRG is the only guy who really gets Exalted.  Someone give the guy a gold medal, because he's apparently the only guy playing it right and the rest of us are wrong.

Thanks for the medal:).

Quote from: Nexus;904936Its functional if you ignore the jacked up rules and setting inconsistencies or patch them with spit and duct tape.

Or if you find a way to use them to your advantage, yes.

QuoteBut that can be said of, well, anything.

True. In some cases, it wouldn't actually be true, but it sure can;).

QuoteI think it was called earlier. People are mostly in love with the idea of Exalted and the notion its something somehow more "sophisticated" than other mere rpgs.

...no. It's a more fun setting than many other RPGs, bus "sophistication" sounds too pretentious - and knowing you, that's on purpose.

QuoteEnough so that they'll put up with some all sort of crap that would put them off other games. Like the guy with a smoking hot but high maintenance, maybe slightly deranged girlfriend.

It might amuse you to know that I'm now going to introduce such a couple as (likely) antagonists;).

Quote from: Luca;904941I'm not particularly fussed. If he and his group are having fun, hey, good for them.

Thanks. I always figured that this should be the default assumption for all games...
Obviously I was wrong.

QuoteFor me, the original Exalted concept (1e core) was intriguing, and the first iteration of the rules, while a far cry from "ideal", was at least salvageable. But with the supplement treadmill the original concept was progressively scrapped and the system is unworkable at this point.
Neither me nor any of the players I know would even think about approaching a monster rule book with over 600 exception-based powers in it. We just don't have that kind of time anymore, that's all. And now with far better (for our purposes) alternatives out there (i.e. Godbound) it would make no sense.

I'm a backer of Godbound. My players just voted unanimously that if they're to use an exception-based system, it might as well have more defined and specific powers;). Plus they like occasionally throwing a big dicepool.
Since I'd found a way to run Exalted 3 already, I didn't veto that, and there we are.

So at this point, all I can say is "have fun with Godbound"!

Quote from: Warboss Squee;904934Looks like AsenRG is the only guy who really gets Exalted.  Someone give the guy a gold medal, because he's apparently the only guy playing it right and the rest of us are wrong.

At this point, I think he's a God.  Not only is he actually USING the system, he's the ONLY person who hasn't houseruled or handwaved away any of the mechanics and made it WORK.  That is an impossible feat worthy of a Gaming God, there's no other way to explain how he does it.

^I ran it RAW without being any sort of gaming god.  It can be done.  It was just way more trouble than it was worth.  The system was a constant obstacle.  It did nothing but trip people and get in the way.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;904934Looks like AsenRG is the only guy who really gets Exalted.  Someone give the guy a gold medal, because he's apparently the only guy playing it right and the rest of us are wrong.

That seems to be the case with every serious Exalted fan.  They are all the only one who gets the game and plays it right.  They all seem to be playing different games though.  Ask 10 Exalted fans what Exalted is really about and you get 12 different answers.  I have pressed a few and it turned out that they were all playing homebrew games that were loosely derived from Exalted.  None of them were playing a game that bore much mechanical resemblance in the one in the book I own.  One had junked the entire system and was using (iirc) Weapons of the Gods with the Exalted setting while still decrying criticism of the Exalted system by saying that he was playing it and that it worked just fine thank you very much.

Quote from: yosemitemike;905080That seems to be the case with every serious Exalted fan.  They are all the only one who gets the game and plays it right.  They all seem to be playing different games though.  Ask 10 Exalted fans what Exalted is really about and you get 12 different answers.  I have pressed a few and it turned out that they were all playing homebrew games that were loosely derived from Exalted.  None of them were playing a game that bore much mechanical resemblance in the one in the book I own.  One had junked the entire system and was using (iirc) Weapons of the Gods with the Exalted setting while still decrying criticism of the Exalted system by saying that he was playing it and that it worked just fine thank you very much.

  I've heard stories of the same thing being the case with AD&D.

Quote from: yosemitemike;905080^I ran it RAW without being any sort of gaming god.  It can be done.  It was just way more trouble than it was worth.  The system was a constant obstacle.  It did nothing but trip people and get in the way.

Which edition? 1st ed worked as RAW. Sorta. If you didn't push it too hard and go past a certain level. Players that were willing to play along and either missed certain exploits or weren't into optimization helped immensely. And even then there was some stuff you just had to ignore or patch. I'd still say it was the most functional versions I've played. And yes, you were fighting the system. 2 and 2.5 worked to a lesser extent with even more pitfalls and things you had to patch and then results left something to be desired. I had to patch, houserule and just flat out handwave all three and I'm not unique in that regard.

I commend anyone that didn't on their patience and/or exceptional improv skills. The gamers I've met that said they were "running it by RAW and it worked fine!" were doing it Old WoD/Storyteller style. That is avoiding actually using the mechanics as much as possible and "storytelling" things out, maybe occasionally rolling dice and making shit up from the results enough to make them feel like they were using the system when they were at best a guideline. There's not innately wrong with that but I don't feel like paying for a few hundred pages of rules for it and claiming that's using "RAW" is disingenuous at best.

3rd Edition leaves me cold but it appears to work in a workman like fashion but the complexity and design choices are not for me and according to some the cracks are already starting to show.

Quote from: yosemitemike;905080That seems to be the case with every serious Exalted fan.  They are all the only one who gets the game and plays it right.  They all seem to be playing different games though.  Ask 10 Exalted fans what Exalted is really about and you get 12 different answers.  I have pressed a few and it turned out that they were all playing homebrew games that were loosely derived from Exalted.  None of them were playing a game that bore much mechanical resemblance in the one in the book I own.  One had junked the entire system and was using (iirc) Weapons of the Gods with the Exalted setting while still decrying criticism of the Exalted system by saying that he was playing it and that it worked just fine thank you very much.

I don't know why but for some weird reason this description makes me want to check out Exalted 3E. Must be the masochist in me.

Quote from: yosemitemike;905080That seems to be the case with every serious Exalted fan.  They are all the only one who gets the game and plays it right.  They all seem to be playing different games though.  Ask 10 Exalted fans what Exalted is really about and you get 12 different answers.

This. I've been saying this for years. It why all the "This is what Exalted is!" noise just make me roll my eyes at this point. That and what its intended to be seems to officially change with each edition when the last one collapses one itself.

^Unless people are talking about a verifiable fact like the atomic weight of iron or something, people declaring, "This is what (fill in the blank) is about!" make me roll my eyes.  It's almost always just pompous, self-important horseshit.

Quote from: camazotz;905089I don't know why but for some weird reason this description makes me want to check out Exalted 3E. Must be the masochist in me.

I don't know about 3e.  I have never read it.  I already have a big stack of 1st edition books and a big stack of 2nd edition books that are mostly unused and no players interested in Exalted at all.  The fact that it is $30 for a pdf copy doesn't encourage me to look at it out of curiosity either.  I have heard that 3rd functions better as a system but I have no first hand knowledge of it.

Why do they charge the PDFs so much?  Considering making copies of these are free you think these digital books would be cheap by now.

Quote from: Snowman0147;905123Why do they charge the PDFs so much?  Considering making copies of these are free you think these digital books would be cheap by now.

My guess...

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Charge what the market will bear and with Exatly evidently it will bear a great deal. The idea of Exalted 3rd made just over half a million dollars. and that was for a "fancy" edition. The game itself was happening regardless.

Quote from: Snowman0147;905123Why do they charge the PDFs so much?  Considering making copies of these are free you think these digital books would be cheap by now.

PDF copies of core books are mostly $15-20 or so.  Beast: the Primordial and Chronicles of Darkness are both in this price range.  It's just Exalted and the 20th anniversary editions that are at $30.  It's not a huge amount of money or anything but it's enough to make me think twice about getting it just to check it out.

Quote from: Snowman0147;905123Why do they charge the PDFs so much?  Considering making copies of these are free you think these digital books would be cheap by now.

The fact that PDF prices don't inevitably gravitate toward the marginal cost of production- zero dollars- has a couple reasons behind it. First, you still have to recoup non-print production costs, which are the same for a PDF and a print copy. Art, layout, writing, editing, and your own sweat equity all have to get covered. If you're selling POD, where the customer pays before you have to print the book, these non-print costs are effectively your entire production cost and are the same between formats.

For one example, take Godbound's $60 premium color hardcover at 251 pages. Print cost is approximately $31, OBS's taste is 35% on the rest, netting $18.75 profit for me. If that's my share of the take, the customer is paying me, personally, 7.5 cents/page for my writing, apart from the print format costs and OBS's cut. The $20 PDF gets me $13 profit at a 5.2 cents/page cost  to the customer. Both editions cost me basically the same amount of up-front money to create, given POD realities, but the PDF is already losing me almost six bucks in profit per copy sold, and the ten dollars given back to the PDF-only buyer off what they're paying to me specifically for the premium print.

To compare, look at Exalted 3e. Premium hardcover runs $114 for 656 pages. Print cost is about $74, OBS takes 35% of the rest, giving OPP $26 profit/copy and a to-the-customer cost of... 3.9 cents/page. About half what they paid to get my stuff in print. The $30 PDF they're selling nets them about $20, but leaves the customer paying a rock-bottom price of three pennies per page to OPP. OPP is netting approximately 50% more profit than I am on each copy sold of Exalted 3e, but I can tell you up front that Exalted 3e sure as Hell took more than 50% more effort to put together than Godbound did. A monster book like the 3e corebook simply cannot economically work without the sort of Kickstarter push it got. People get uncomfortable paying 3 cents a page for something that big. Pay your writers 3 cents a word, and you need to sell about 1,000 copies of the damn thing just to pay your writing costs.

The second reason that PDF prices don't naturally fall to zero is that they're a luxury good marketed to a small group of relatively affluent patrons. They're almost the opposite of a commodity. Unless you're churning out Processed Extruded RPG Product, you're offering something that no other publisher can exactly replicate, so whoever wants your stuff has to buy it from you, and their only alternative to pushing the 'buy' button is to pirate it. The latter course is possible, but a correctly-chosen price will be more convenient for this niche market to pay than it is to try to navigate the pirate sites and find the thing there. Since a huge swath of our market is 40something knowledge workers in their prime earning years, they're just not going to quibble over five bucks either way if you're able to convince them that they need your specific brew.

And since you can get that money, it'd require a degree of business incompetence unusual even in the RPG industry to not take that money. You won't get significantly greater sales by chopping prices below the customary-and-usual, you'll just make your product look like the PERPGP wastelands of $2 Pathfinder classes and $1 homebrew campaign settings exported from MS Word. There are only so many people who are interested in the stuff we sell, and if you leave their money on the table, you won't make it up on volume.