Quote from: Nexus;951625From the comments I've seen so far its more a decorative piece for most purchasers. Which I can fully understand. I wouldn't want a 350 buck book anywhere near a typical gaming session. :eek:

Doesn't look worth 350 bucks to me.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;951826Doesn't look worth 350 bucks to me.

Looks like a robbery.

That is an ugly looking book, can see what they were going for but they failed.

Agreed. The glyphs should have been stamped into the cover as separate objects. At the least, there ought to be some sort of enamelling to highlight the lines of the glyphs.

They literally glued a metal plate to the leather didn't they?  It's not even inset.

Yeah, the normal deluxe book is actually really nice. That black version with the plate is just gaudy. Seeing it just makes me that much happier that the Ex3 Kickstarter launch was delayed. I probably would have backed it for the ultra deluxe copy if things had gone off as planned, but thankfully I managed to dodge that bullet.

A side photo suggests that it may be inset as you can't see its edge on the cover, though it doesn't look so from the front.



And yes, that's the width of 3e compared to the already massive 2e.

Quote from: Brand55;951942Yeah, the normal deluxe book is actually really nice. That black version with the plate is just gaudy. Seeing it just makes me that much happier that the Ex3 Kickstarter launch was delayed. I probably would have backed it for the ultra deluxe copy if things had gone off as planned, but thankfully I managed to dodge that bullet.

I also like how the normal deluxe version matches the Exalted 1e limited edition, even down to the gold gilding on the pages.

Now that normal deluxe looks so much better.

Quote from: Snowman0147;951955Now that normal deluxe looks so much better.

Yeah, I do like a handsome book.

Too bad it's, you know, Exalted 3e.

Quote from: JamesV;952002Yeah, I do like a handsome book.

Too bad it's, you know, Exalted 3e.

And heavy enough to bludgeon a grown man to death with.

Quote from: JamesV;952002Yeah, I do like a handsome book.

Too bad it's, you know, Exalted 3e.

I never said it was perfect.

The third edition is starting to terrify me. I feel like it's going to come to my house, beat down my door, take all my money, and demand that I bow down and worship its mechanical magnificence and supreme inclusivity. :eek:


On a less neurotic and deranged Exalted note, I'm having trouble converting a Charm to my Godbound hack. It's a Survival Charm that lets you spend Essence to... forage for food for 25 people at the lowest prerequisite (Essence 2). This, I feel, is decidedly underwhelming. If I'm a master hunter folk hero, feeding a small logging camp should be something I can manage without magic! It goes up to 250 for the level my PCs are at the moment (Essence 4), but given that that level is supposed to be the level of angelic avatars of perfection, being able to feel a mid-sized village still feels a bit meh. At that level I feel like I should be able to just stand at the edge of a forest and yell at all the game animals in there to get their asses out here and get eaten.

Can anyone think of a way to make this one cool? I do like the idea of having super-feeding-people powers, and so would the one of the players who's got the most Survival chops. It just feels like it needs more epic. So, should I make it the ability to feed 1000 people? Would that be somehow overpowered in regards to the supposed thematic power level? Is there even a supposed thematic power level, or were they just making that shit up because it sounded good? (probably, to be honest ) Sometimes I'm just confused at what sort of playstyle these rules are even supposed to support.

Look at beast gifts and the beast gift example.  Those little green boxes are quite handy.

I've been growing increasingly frustrated with EX3 and its designers for awhile. I tried to write a reply which became a surprisingly introspective blog post instead. I post the relevant part here:

Here I finally saw the brilliant dream of Gygax and Arneson; and oh it was a wonder to behold.
So now the scales have fallen from my eyes. I see a new world of roleplaying. And now... I don't know what to do with EX3. Any WoD-like, for that matter.

I look at my PDFs for stuff like dungeon world and, although I admire the professionalism and the design, I smirk and shake my head and marvel that I once thought it was revolutionary. I see things like one of the designers of EX3 claiming that it's the "best edition of D&D ever made" and I'm flabbergasted; how do they not know?

I feel like fucking Zarathustra here.

I just got done reading the hundreds of words on how money works in my EX3 PDF and it feels like it just misses the damn point. I don't care what the breakdown of obol-to-dinar is; there's no fucking system for it! There's an entire caste of Exalt whose shtick is bureaucracy, and there is not a single system for anything remotely approaching commerce, or an economy, or travel, or logistics, or just anything.
I mean, it's a bronze-age world: maybe make a note that literally every city is on a waterway. You are going to be using Sail to travel no matter where you are in Creation.

In so many places the design wants to contradict itself; it wants to tell you about how complex the economy is, casually tossing around "bonded" and "equity" and like terms, but never giving an example of how to do things with money.

Could I start a stock market in Nexus? If so, fucking how? Would that just be an abstracted roll?
The resource system has 5 tiers, and if you have enough knowledge of fiduciary systems to know what it means to have wealth "bonded" into currency, then you have to know that's not a satisfactory model.

I wouldn't raise these points, but bureaucracy is a fucking skill. Hundreds of words are devoted to denominations of currency, but there is no conversation about how to engage with it as a player or model it as a GM. We get a wholly inadequate abstraction which doesn't even dovetail with the rules for playing the game.

Ignoring all that, even very basic questions are answered with frustrating vagueness. If you continually buy things at a rank of your resources, you apparently are going into debt? And this should be modeled with "a custom flaw". There is no conversation of how this flaw would manifest. What happens when the players raid one of their first-age tombs and find a pile of plunder? Do they get... More resources? How much? Does it last? How long? What happens when someone has resources 5, then doubles their money with such a haul? (This last one happened in an old EX2 game that I ran. I modeled it with wealth from dreams of the first age).

Even things like "what if I want to invest money in something?" Page after page is dedicated to a subsystem for crafting that borders on a confession of OCD, but is a single word breathed about finance? Not beyond the authors demonstrating that they know stuff about it.

There are no travel rules in this game. At least, there are none in the index, under the ride entry, or under any of the ride charms. Boats have travel times based on their speeds, but there's no real discussion of what sailing entails in the world, which is a problem because, apparently, this bronze age game has ships with just so much fucking rigging.

I keep coming back to things like that; things that betray this game as a game made by fans of pirates characters (from movies and books). Fans of commerce-themed anime (Spice and Wolf gets brought up a lot). Fans of fighting and kung-fu cartoons. But nothing has a root in actual reality; everything is designed to emulate some fiction or another, so that what you have isn't a game about something, but rather about stories which were about something.

The creator(s) of ACKS (A particular shout out to Alexander Macris and his tireless effort to improve on perfection) were also fans of something; dungeons and dragons. But ACKS isn't just a warmed-over set of abstractions and excuses for the "core experience" of DnD: it's based on thought, and research, and the real actual world and its physical laws.

It puts roleplaying first the way thirty pages of esoteric social mechanics can't: it fucking assumes that you are roleplaying and builds outward from there.

It relates the cost of things to their real-world (and actually researched) value. It makes commerce matter by allowing you to model it, and yes that does mean numbers and counting and math and why is that a bad thing? Why is Exalted so afraid of counting?

It makes travel matter by putting you in the wilderness and making you map it. It makes you take time and risk danger by doing things like hunting, or getting lost, or backtracking, or circumnavigating. It forces you to deal with the actual concerns people face while traveling in hostile, unexplored territory. I've played Eclipse characters that would have been brilliant at this exact thing if Exalted had ever bothered to give us a technique for using the damn map.

I look at the pictures of EX3 and it is enormous; easily the size of my entire ACKS library (core book, player's companion, and Domains at War). And it's a fucking paperweight. Why?

I'll tell you why; because ACKS has zero content that I won't use. Oh sure, I might make a dungeon with rooms that go unexplored, or hexes that players never crawl to, but the actual mechanics? Either me or my players will use every one of them. They create content, unlock potential, and add to the world and the experience. There's not an ounce of fat on any of these books, they are lean and strong and brilliant.

But EX3 is nothing but flab. How many of those charms are going to hit my table? How many of the artifacts, or spells, or martial arts? 70%? Not likely, maybe 40% seems more reasonable.
The rest is content nobody at my table will care about; Solars are PC characters, not NPCs, so I can't do anything with the unused charms.

I might, possibly, have a single PC interested in martial arts; aside from that, I won't fucking use these things. I've got a world to run; how the hell am I going to keep track of NPCs with this many keywords?

Spells are the same way. There will be a handful of utility spells that get around the inconvenient sacred cows of the setting (long-distance communication and travel spring to mind) and the rest are just another kind of fucking charm, doomed to be replaced by vastly more appropriate splat-based charms.

PCs will pick up a signature artifact weapon, a signature "trick" artifact, and maybe 2 will have armor. The rest of these are stat bonuses for dragonblooded or abyssals.

Just on and on with this shit... Having an unexplored hex feels like opportunity, having this much unused and unusable content in a core book seem like suicide.

So okay, to sum this up; I have no idea why I would play EX3 now that I have ACKS. I don't see that it offers me anything that ACKS doesn't. I can be powerful and change the world and lead armies and wage economic warfare and make magic castles and weapons and armor in ACKS and it caps at level 14!