From skimming the rules, it seems to be an overcomplicated mess of weeaboo fail.  Nevertheless, it intrigues me.  Thus, I would like to hear about it from people who have used the system.

The system sucks but the basic concept is solid. The problem with the game line is that as books came out, elements were introduced that undermined what was great.

Seriously, if you are going to play it, just grab the 1st edition rulebook. If, after a couple of games you want more, I recommend grabbing the 1st edition Storyteller's Companion, 1st edition Scavanger Lands, the Book of the 3 Circles, Games of Divinity, and Exalted: the Dragon-blooded. You seriously don't need more than that.

If you want a very comprehensive picture of the game's negatives, you can find a series of rants (seven total) by FatR in a thread here.

Rules-wise I think of it as medium to medium-high, complexity. The rules are based on characters that are essentially super-powered, so it takes the easy enough to grasp Storyteller dice pool rules and crams it with powers and abilities that can bend the rules in extreme ways.

Setting-wise, Exalted as a super-powered, kitchen-sink fantasy with strong anime overtones.

If you want to play crazy ass-kicking fantasy heroes in an anything-goes kind of setting backed up by comprehensive rules, you might like it.

You may not like it if you favor speedy rules, flashy over-the-top powers or are not an anime fan.

Note: Exalted is big enough as a setting to play more broadly than I've described, but the heart of the game favors what I've described above.

Weeaboo designates a want to be Japanese -- Exalted is more Chinese and Greek myth all rolled up into a mess.

Buy-in knowledge is a bit heavy, but once you get past that the system isn't nearly as difficult to learn as people make it to be (if you don't mind it being completely unbalanced and just plain broken on multiple levels).  

Combat is tactical without the requirement for miniatures, but combat is also heavily dependent upon the Perfect Defenses (think unstoppable force meets immovable object, but immovable object always wins) in order to function, and so it turns into an attrition battle between which combatant runs out of Willpower or Essence first.  When you do manage to break through someone's defenses, health-levels are meaningless when a single blow can land 16 raw damage + charm modifiers for a final total of...well...it'll be way past whatever number of health levels you have.

Social combat is also a bit wonky in that it uses Essence to function, making it suboptimal to physical combat, especially since an opponent who is less socially inclined can immediately end the social combat at any time and enter into a physical confrontation, and by then you've already wasted some of your combat resources (essence) making you more vulnerable.  So basically, unless your GM says "no weapons in this part, it'd be a bad idea to resort to violence, social combat only", then a lot of social combats could result in people defaulting to physical combat once they realize someone is trying to manipulate them magically.

The setting itself has many cool bits, and many shit bits.  The basic skeleton is pretty alright, but it's so fleshed out in the supplements and metaplot still creeps so much that it's not even worth dealing with most of the time.

So basically, neat idea and base setting, ruined by a crappy hack of the d10 system and White-Wolf's old supplement treadmill developing style.

Let me elaborate further by saying that I ran the game for an on and off 4 year campaign and had a great time doing it, and let me explain why.

Exalted dreams huge superheroic-action dreams in a big damn setting. In the attempt to give this huge dream some support, it's run by a set of rules that aren't as complicated as some say, but after a certain point pretty get weird and unwieldy. The link that Dead Uematsu had to FatR's critique about combat and social rules are accurate especially after the PCs have advanced past a certain point in the powers department.

So how did I craft a fun experience for myself and my friends? I embraced the crazy. Balance goes out the window and you let the rules get as crazy as they essentially want to be. Sure, it meant that once in a while either the PCs, or NPCs get stomped in a way you didn't expect, but you should try to embrace it as more a feature than a bug. Exalted runs best if you let your PCs play Supers with big-ass Swords, and if that means through some bizarre collection of circumstances the PCs devise a combat tactic of one player throwing another player like goddamn javelin at a villain and it works so well that the dice-pools for rolling the attack and the damage involve over 50 dice, divided up between the players for the sake of speed, then you let that shit happen.

I freely admit that's not for everyone, but we ended up having a ball.

Note #2: This also applies to how I successfully ran RIFTS for 5 years before I moved over to Exalted.

Exalted as a game is Storyteller stretched to it's absolute limits, and then some. big attacks feel big because you've got two handfuls of D10s that you need to roll twice. Small events feel small as you are using 4-5 d10s at a time. The level of power a Solar exalted has feels tactile and there's no system you could convert it to without losing that feeling.

Exalted 2nd edition is head and shoulders above first edition. Just excise the Social Combat rules (or make up your own that work). It's really not that complicated, and an Exalted tick wheel and some colored stones goes far in relieving any bookkeeping involved. The corebook and the earlier books in the series were very well put together. The later in the series it got, the ideas and the mechanics got really loosey goosey. White Wolf has an errata wiki project that's regularly updated even today, to try and fix many of the mistakes that came out in the middling books. The books released recently have been pretty good, not needing any major errata changes.

The setting is set somewhere between Greek/Roman/Chinese/Japanese/Native American mythlology/folklore and imperial China. It also pulls quite a bit of it's presentation from epic animes a la Dragonball Z or wire wu shu/kung fu movies. It's actually not very easy to wrap your head around, mostly because there's a ton of info and none of it will matter much as the PC's have the power to change the setting as a whole. The setting information as presented is pretty much supposed to be the zeropoint until your game starts and everything changes.

That's the hardest thing about Exalted is the scope. It's a fantasy setting unlike any other, and the PC's are unlike any other group of PC's in a game. You can't have a bunch of Solars meet in a bar and do a quest for a king (well, you COULD....). Solars are greater than kings, and united could be greater than gods. The PC's will change the setting completely. It's puts the GM/PC relationship on it's head a little bit as the GM has to react to what the players do moreso then the other way around.

Quote from: DeadUematsu;387233The system sucks but the basic concept is solid. The problem with the game line is that as books came out, elements were introduced that undermined what was great.

Seriously, if you are going to play it, just grab the 1st edition rulebook. If, after a couple of games you want more, I recommend grabbing the 1st edition Storyteller's Companion, 1st edition Scavanger Lands, the Book of the 3 Circles, Games of Divinity, and Exalted: the Dragon-blooded. You seriously don't need more than that.

If you want a very comprehensive picture of the game's negatives, you can find a series of rants (seven total) by FatR in a thread here.

I wholeheartedly agree with this post.

Exalted has some great concepts at its core, and the original core book is the best summation of the game's good qualities.

I got into the game with 2nd edition and couldn't figure out why the game didn't do what rpg.net assured me it would.  I think if I had started out with just the 1st edition core book and Scavenger Sons things might have gone very differently.  I'm too many dollars down the line for that to ever happen though...

For starters, 1st edition core plus Scavenger Sons is way way more open. 2E core literally tried to condense all of the setting information presented in the entire 1st edition game line into a single chapter and not only was that retarded, it narrowed what you could do with it. So, unlike D&D where the fluff tends to open up possibilities, Exalted's fluff kills stuff dead.

The 1st edition setting is far more playable, interesting and open to making Creation your own setting. Less of it is filled in, and it's still open to a wide variety of tones, instead of the more anime-centric focus of 2e.

The 2e system is far superior to 1e's. I'd recommend picking up the 2e core, ignoring the entirety of the setting depiction in it, and buying 1e materials like Scavenger Sons, Manacle and Coin, Houses of the Bull God & Games of Divinity. It might also be useful to pick up the DB hardback from 1e for Realm info.

Even in 1e though, you've got to be wary of most of the hardbacked splat books, since they were used as opportunities to pack the setting full of shit. Sidereals, Lunars and Autochtonians are particularly bad. Only Dragon-Blooded is really good.

The 1e system is really flawed, and requires the Player's Guide (which is a really fantastic book if you do go with the 1e system) + a fair bit of horse sense to really get best use of. 2e's system is cleaner, though not still not perfect. It's a little more logically organised, which helps new players get a feel for it more easily.

Overall, I'd give the system a 5/10 and the 1e setting an 8. The 2e version of the setting, which emphasises magitech, anime and goofy melodrama, a 4.5 / 10. The 2e system is a 7.5.

Quote from: B.T.;387229From skimming the rules, it seems to be an overcomplicated mess of weeaboo fail.  Nevertheless, it intrigues me.  Thus, I would like to hear about it from people who have used the system.

It is the worst Naruto fanfic ever written, by people who hate western fantasy and D&D like games in general.

If your group likes superhero games and likes fantasy / wushu, you'll probably like Exalted, at least the setting. If you like WoD rules, the system is close enough that you'll probably like Exalted (or at least be able to grind it into something you enjoy fairly easily). A few things to keep in mind if you play:

1) The various splats (Solars, Lunars, Dragon-Blooded, etc.) are not balanced against one another and are not meant to be. It's probably best, especially starting out, to just pick one and use that for all of the PCs.

2) The setting is very much a kitchen sink world. Everything it there, and if it's not in Creation it's somewhere in the Wyld. You can easily fit any kind of campaign you cant into the setting from Last Airbender-eque political struggles to "What if Superman was a Pirate?" You can also easily get overwhelmed and have a very disjointed campaign if you try to include everything. Again, its' best to pick one facet and stick with it (perhaps touching on one or two others just to emphasize how big Creation is).

3) The system is not balanced. It's not meant to be. For the most part it works well, but the assumption of perfect defenses drives a lot of the design. It's ok to have an attack that instantly makes your soul fall off, because the PCs are expected to be able to dodge it with no problems just by spending a few motes. However, if your players don't pick up perfect defenses (mine didn't for a long time), you'll have to be very careful with what you put them up against unless you don't mind wholesale slaughter.

We played a campaign for over a year and it was a blast. About the only things that garnered complaints were:

1) The social combat system. It works every once in a while, but don't use it for every single argument or the game bogs down fast.

2) Resource management. Tracking your mote pool, ongoing effects, and modifiers is a pain in the ass. There are some nice sheets out there to help, but you'll at least want a stack of post-its handy.

3) Mass combat. I enjoyed it, but the players didn't. It can definitely tend to drag out and it makes war feel like solo fights with a bunch of extras in the background rather than an epic battle between armies.

If you do decide to mix-and-match 1st and 2nd edition, don't bother trying to run any 1e adventures under 2e rules without massive changes. Those adventures (especially Time of Tumult, which I ran parts of) are not designed to handle the power level of actual Solars. IIRC they were written alongside the rulebooks and so didn't really understand how powerful characters were meant to be. So you end up with major cakewalks.

My advice: if you're interested in the game but not sure if it's for your group, White Wolf has a demo adventure with pregenerated characters and quick start rules at their site. It's about an evening's worth of gaming and gives a quick but comprehensive tour of the system and the setting. We played it first, decided we liked the game, and then used the plot hooks it leaves hanging to continue the campaign (though the players revamped their characters after reading the core rulebook).

Quote from: thedungeondelver;387271It is the worst Naruto fanfic ever written, by people who hate western fantasy and D&D like games in general.

That sounds like a great endorsement to me!

Quote from: James McMurray;387343My advice: if you're interested in the game but not sure if it's for your group, White Wolf has a demo adventure with pregenerated characters and quick start rules at their site.

How far could you stretch using JUST the quick-start rules? I've been reading them and they seem crunchy enough to me already...

Quote from: Simlasa;387369That sounds like a great endorsement to me!

Oh well let me try again then: Exalted is fucking garbage.  Better?

Quote from: thedungeondelver;387271It is the worst Naruto fanfic ever written, by people who hate western fantasy and D&D like games in general.

QuoteOh well let me try again then: Exalted is fucking garbage.  Better?    

That sounds like an incredibly informed opinion! Do tell me more.

You are such an awesome contributor to this thread. Every thread really.

Exalted is what the Cosmic Jesters will play when the universe collapses in on itself. It has become cyclopean in its complexity and ridiculousness. At first it was cool, but then more and more got added like some crazy city that never stops.