Quote from: Cranewings;457822Its not broken, at all. Its just a story telling game and the dice barely matter.

Your characters, in my opinion, are barely suppose to be challenged. They are the Solar Exalted, the most powerful godlike breed. If you figure out how to break the system, one of the 20 ways our group managed it, that just means you are playing the game right. It's not D&D. The challenge is RPing the right social decisions, not dealing damage in combat.

That said, I don't like rolling that many dice. More than once I'd roll 8 dice for initiative and tie someone, or roll 22 dice to strike, 15 to damage, and only deal 1 point due to powers or armor. It is a little silly, and it is meant to be silly. Its making fun of itself.

Was it originally designed as a spoof or parody type game?  Did the designers ever mention this on the record?

Quote from: ggroy;457824Was it originally designed as a spoof or parody type game?  Did the designers ever mention this on the record?

I'm not sure about that. I've just heard it a lot. It makes perfect sense though.

Its not parody in the story or art, but its just WAY over the top power gaming, and it isn't mistakable.

My character had a power called, "Perfect Dodge" or something. Invoking it made the enemy miss, no matter what. People don't put stuff like that in a game if they are trying to develop a balanced grind.

The key to making a "good character" is to have a Perfect Attack and a Perfect Defense, then invent a trick to stack your attack and damage rolls. It isn't hard. Its a dead give away what they are catering to.

Quote from: Cranewings;457822Its not broken, at all. Its just a story telling game and the dice barely matter.

That's a really interesting way of putting it, and probably true for the most part.  In Exalted, combat is pretty binary: the PCs can either win a fight or they have no chance, and it becomes pretty apparent which outcome will happen pretty quickly.  As you say, the dice barely matter; rolling seems like a formality.

The real problem with the game is that it isn't honest about this.  It's written in such a way as to make you think that this is a game of high-action and perilous outcomes, but in reality the end game is pretty much written into the way the game works.

Quote from: Cranewings;457823You could, for the most part, emulate everything done in an Exalted game by making 5th level D&D characters, level them only to 10th, and not let NPCs have ANY LEVELS AT ALL unless they to are some kind of Exalted.

I'm not so sure; 5th levels characters in 4e can't do half the stuff a beginning Exalted Solar can.

Quote from: Cranewings;457823You could, for the most part, emulate everything done in an Exalted game by making 5th level D&D characters, level them only to 10th, and not let NPCs have ANY LEVELS AT ALL unless they to are some kind of Exalted.

Even easier:  make all NPCs into 4E D&D style minions.

Quote from: Benoist;457819D&D 4e = d20 Exalted.

Hmmm ....

Wonder if any of 4E D&D's designers + developers were huge fans of Exalted.  :rolleyes:

(ie. Mearls, Heinsoo, Wyatt, Baker, Bonner, Noonan, etc ...).

Well for starters there's the fact that most of the time people who are writing the sourcebooks have no fucking clue how the system works. (See: Sidereals.)

Then you have a clunky as hell dicepool mechanic in which you end up rolling 45 d10s and counting successes and counting automatic successes and counting exploding dice and throwing rerolls then counting the enemys defense values and GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGRH.

Also the Charms are sometimes written in such a way that you cant understand what the fuck it is that they are supposed to do. Million keywords, can you combo this charm with this, when can you use this charm, how much does it cost to use this charm, do you get successes or additional dice or re-rolls or an automatic parry or some other flavor of weeaboo fightan magicks or BLARGH.

I still play the game, mostly for the setting which I happen to like quite a lot.

Quote from: misterguignol;457827I'm not so sure; 5th levels characters in 4e can't do half the stuff a beginning Exalted Solar can.

Sorry, I ment 3.x / Pathfinder. Lightning bolt does far more damage to a group of mooks than Obsidian Butterflies and Force Missile is better than the attack spell vs. one enemy my caster of the Second Circle or whatever had (been awhile).

On top of that, want to talk about a greater cleaving, jumping, power attacking barbarian in Pathfinder vs. a Solar Exalted? I'm not sure its even a contest. Considering the kinds of monsters each one can bring down respectively in their own games, the Pathfinder Barbarian has him beat. Neither can be defeated by almost any number of mooks. Just how many 0 level warriors do you think it would take to cut down a 6th level barbarian with an AC of 20, two attacks, and a minimal damage that will kill anyone?

Quote from: ggroy;457828Even easier:  make all NPCs into 4E D&D style minions.

Absolutely.

Though how the GM runs it matters. Ours didn't care about combat because he knew it was win or lose and how to pick stuff we couldn't beat, but he wasn't comfortable with the social powers. There was one magical day where we were broke heroes in a new town and the guy with half of the Presence powers couldn't talk down the price of a new set of clothing. (;

The second edition core book is mechanically fine. It's actually pretty unique and awesome with not much broken about it. The later major splat books (from lunars on)are where it broke. It's obviously un-play tested or vetted for compliance with other mechanics in the game. It's just a smorgasbord of freelancers ideas and mechanics.

I still like the game, it just sucks there is no shorthand for NPCs so creating them can be pretty time consuming.

First off, the audience for exalted isn't the same as wod ... so its not the same style of play. Players are meant to be challenged, and in fact most of the truly big bads aren't even beatable if you go by corebook alone. Thus isn't a case of bad storytelling cling or whatever, the system ia just plain borked. Which is a shame, because the setting does have interesting bits and some of the mechanical concepts around combat are pretty cool, it's just all the crap layered on top that destroys it.

Oh, and the power level and feel is totally different than 4e in play. Simultaneously more gritty and higher powered.

If there is one good overall thing about the system, it's that everything on your character sheet has an in game analogue, and the detail behind the powers and how they relate to the games cosmology is well done. I haven't played a game where the mechanics mapped so well to the game world, broken as they are.

I enjoy playing around with character creation and tinkering with the rules and looking at bits of setting here and there - I like creating entire Exalted campaigns in my head, but I've never been tempted to actually run a table, nor have I heard of anyone else doing so.

Quote from: Esgaldil;457888I enjoy playing around with character creation and tinkering with the rules and looking at bits of setting here and there - I like creating entire Exalted campaigns in my head, but I've never been tempted to actually run a table, nor have I heard of anyone else doing so.

Ran a 3 year campaign. But that was when I had a habit of running really fast and loose, so I doubt the system had anything to do with our fun. When I did finally get around to knowing the ins and outs, it became a burden in play.

Unfortunately I love the setting as its presented in the corebook, but the system has severe limitations on playability in some areas.

If you want a detailed look at the mechanical problems with Exalted you can check this thread out: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=50260.

Over a series of posts FatR just takes the system apart.  He explains why the dice pool system which works okay with 1 to 10 dice, but really breaks down with Exalted 10+ or 20+ for simple actions.  Then he goes on to explain the power creep that someone up thread describe as "paranoia" where since every single power can kill you instantly the smart build is make your defense untouchable.  I've never played Exalted, but I found his take-down of it fascinating.

One of the biggest problems with it is that they never set out to explain the convoluted mess that the mechanics are - and someone else mentioned stuff like Perfect Attack and Perfect Defense, and I think now I understand why we don't have clear charts and tables and so forth: they're trying to hide the fact.

Of course, WW did so extremely poorly: the designers hate D&D, they flat out say in the introduction they hate western fantasy.  Indeed one of the last promotions of note WW did for the game said "Destroy a D&D book and send us the remains and we'll send you a copy of Exalted"

Anyway...

That aside, there's your first hurdle: the rules are buried in page after page of Naruto fanfic and next to impossible to find.  Second, once you do find the rules, if you spread out beyond the core book, you run in to supplement designers who themselves didn't know how the core rules work.  Third you've got the piling on of charm after charm and those wonky rules.

So this is what I have to say about Eggs-salted: If you're that hard to play gods, either have everyone roll up 20th level (or higher for later versions) D&D characters and go from there, or do what our group did and use Hero System with 500+ point character builds and ignore trying to emulate Charms mechanics entirely.