Exalted Essence (Roleplaying Game)
Aug. 3rd, 2024 07:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIn the Second Age of Creation, the Scarlet Empress has mysteriously disappeared and her empire is at the mercy of squabbling houses of Dragon-Blooded. But more importantly, the souls of the Solar Exalted have finally broken free and started to be reborn into the new age.
This is fundamentally a rulebook, which reminds me in a lot of ways of the D&D 4E rulebooks: It gives you a bunch of top-down knowledge of the world and the various factions, and a LOT of details on how to build a character and the rules and mechanics of the game. If you’re looking for detailed descriptions of various areas, NPCs with complex motivations, or deep lore for any of the 10 different types of Exalted? That’s not here. This keeps the story in shallow bursts in favor of cramming in all the rules and not having the book be 500 pages.
But that’s okay, because the “essence” of Exalted is that it’s a game where everybody needs to know the rules. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately, after many years of running a gaming table where I could generally assume half the people hadn’t ever picked up the rulebook and never would: There are games where the rules are so simple everyone just picks them up; there are games where the GM can pick up the slack for players not knowing the rules; and there are games that just can’t function unless everyone involved is putting in the effort. Exalted, with its complicated list of system (even simplified and stratified for this edition) and a third of the rulebook dedicated to listing the various unique skills and powers, is very much the latter.
That said, there are definitely some places where this edition smooths out issues from earlier ones. There’s a bunch of simplification from the Exalted 3rd Edition rules to this: Simplifying attributes, abilities and merits; condensing the powers list; streamlining a bunch of the mechanics. I was amused that in several places it bolds the fact that you can never take more that two simple actions in a turn, and that you can never use a counterattack in response to a counterattack. Earlier editions had real issues with the action economy turning into a stack of counter-responses where most of the group is sitting around bored.
I really like the distinction of “trivial” and “significant” characters in the mechanics, which in turn makes storytelling easier. I also quite like the idea behind the “wearying” attacks that let you build up advantage over your opponent and then strike critical blows, which allow for longer anime-esque fight scenes that imply more durability for the characters. (At least, the significant ones!)
And at every turn, the sideboards have notes about “When in doubt, err on the side of the player characters doing cool things.” In a lot of ways, the world of Exalted is very similar to Numenera; a fantasy world that plays by its own rules and tries to be distinct from standard D&D fantasy worlds while being filled with a kitchen sink of different cultures and items. But characters in Numenera are just cool humans. Exalted is distinct in that it emphasizes that whatever’s going on, your characters are magical superheroes with incredible powers. This rulebook includes Heaven in the locations and stats for various gods, because going to Heavan and punching God in the face isn’t even the culmination of the campaign; it might just be Tuesday.
Overall: I like this book a lot for emphasizing what you need to actually make Exalted playable and giving you all of it. Unless I fall into a gaming group with sharply different priorities than my current one I’m unlikely to ever use it.
This is fundamentally a rulebook, which reminds me in a lot of ways of the D&D 4E rulebooks: It gives you a bunch of top-down knowledge of the world and the various factions, and a LOT of details on how to build a character and the rules and mechanics of the game. If you’re looking for detailed descriptions of various areas, NPCs with complex motivations, or deep lore for any of the 10 different types of Exalted? That’s not here. This keeps the story in shallow bursts in favor of cramming in all the rules and not having the book be 500 pages.
But that’s okay, because the “essence” of Exalted is that it’s a game where everybody needs to know the rules. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately, after many years of running a gaming table where I could generally assume half the people hadn’t ever picked up the rulebook and never would: There are games where the rules are so simple everyone just picks them up; there are games where the GM can pick up the slack for players not knowing the rules; and there are games that just can’t function unless everyone involved is putting in the effort. Exalted, with its complicated list of system (even simplified and stratified for this edition) and a third of the rulebook dedicated to listing the various unique skills and powers, is very much the latter.
That said, there are definitely some places where this edition smooths out issues from earlier ones. There’s a bunch of simplification from the Exalted 3rd Edition rules to this: Simplifying attributes, abilities and merits; condensing the powers list; streamlining a bunch of the mechanics. I was amused that in several places it bolds the fact that you can never take more that two simple actions in a turn, and that you can never use a counterattack in response to a counterattack. Earlier editions had real issues with the action economy turning into a stack of counter-responses where most of the group is sitting around bored.
I really like the distinction of “trivial” and “significant” characters in the mechanics, which in turn makes storytelling easier. I also quite like the idea behind the “wearying” attacks that let you build up advantage over your opponent and then strike critical blows, which allow for longer anime-esque fight scenes that imply more durability for the characters. (At least, the significant ones!)
And at every turn, the sideboards have notes about “When in doubt, err on the side of the player characters doing cool things.” In a lot of ways, the world of Exalted is very similar to Numenera; a fantasy world that plays by its own rules and tries to be distinct from standard D&D fantasy worlds while being filled with a kitchen sink of different cultures and items. But characters in Numenera are just cool humans. Exalted is distinct in that it emphasizes that whatever’s going on, your characters are magical superheroes with incredible powers. This rulebook includes Heaven in the locations and stats for various gods, because going to Heavan and punching God in the face isn’t even the culmination of the campaign; it might just be Tuesday.
Overall: I like this book a lot for emphasizing what you need to actually make Exalted playable and giving you all of it. Unless I fall into a gaming group with sharply different priorities than my current one I’m unlikely to ever use it.
