So I'm dusting off this blag which I haven't written in in a couple of years to talk self-indulgently about a current side project of mine. A couple of days ago I saw a sign in the window of a music school that said "You don't have to practice every day, only the days when you eat." As someone whose work ethic falls somewhere between lazy and nonexistent, I found this quietly inspiring and have been trying to push myself to practice the skills I want to improve daily. One of those skills is game design, and so I've begun this little side project.
I love Exalted. Many gamers do. I have a long history with it, I picked up the first edition core book in the latter part of my senior year in high school when the only books you could buy for the game were the core book, the storyteller's guide and the Book of Three Circles. I immediately understood that there was something categorically different about it compared to most of the RPGs I was used to at the time (Revised edition old World of Darkness, 3rd Edition D&D, 3rd Edition Shadowrun, even 7th Sea), but it would be several years before I could fully articulate it: scope.
Exalted characters are so powerful within the setting that they have a sort of gravitational effect on the world around them. Their personalities force the world to change to fit them, and they are of such significance that they reshape Creation simply by taking action. The only other genre of game with characters of this scope is the Superhero RPG genre, and, unlike characters in Exalted, Superheroes tend to be forces of stasis, saviors and protectors of a world that is more or less fine the way it is, preventing negative changes, very much the opposite of the Age of Sorrows.
I think that this categorical difference of scope is a primary reason people get so attached to their Exalted characters, because the choices the player made when making their character and designing their personality matter so much to the world that character exists in. It's a magical thing, to get people so excited about these little creations of theirs, to make us remember exactly what they were like despite years of not playing them, no matter how much we may not have liked the way the game was run, or of the drama that broke the game up, we loved our characters because of what they could do.
But I've long known that Exalted's system is a very flawed thing. This is not the first, or even the second time I've set forth to try to gut and replace the Storyteller System with something more organic, more fitting to the world that was created, but I feel like this time I have a better starting point. Recently I had the epiphany that the real problem with Exalted is the dissonance between the game's intent and its mechanics. The game's intent is to be a massive-scope high-power savage fantasy, the mechanics it uses are extremely minutiae-driven. Put another way, Exalted wants to be about the choices characters make, but its system forces them to worry about the exactness of what the characters can do.
The system is also overburdened with complicated, mathy decisions. For any given dice action being taken, you must know your base dice pools, consider the possibility of spending willpower or channeling a virtue, understand any internal penalties you are under or external penalties that may apply, in addition to probably multiple relevant charms you could modify the dice pool with, limited by the maximum bonus dice from charms, and this is not even taking into account theoretical bonuses from artifacts, or, in the case of attacks, Speed, Rate, Damage (which might be Bashing, Lethal or Aggravated), the target's Soak, Multiple Action penalties, Onslaught penalties, your Yards per Tick movement and the ever-present math of essence mote costs. And then you were supposed to gain a dice bonus for the stunt, assuming your GM could even remember how you described what you were doing after doing all those calculations, and then whoever you were doing it to probably had to do the exact same thing.
The system was something that you worked through or around to get to the fun part of the game: describing the why and the how of what your character was doing, and chances are your GM understood that and let you succeed, except when you were facing things he had planned for you to fail against. In those cases, the sheer randomness and weight of dice that were being rolled often had to simply be ignored for the sake of the story. And a system that must regularly be ignored because it weakens the game, a system that many players will not understand the majority of and will turn to the handful of obsessives who bothered to plumb its secrets to tell them what they can do, a system that stands in the way of the fun rather than being the tray that the fun is carried around on is a bad system.
So, my project. A radical reworking of Exalted's system, trying to minimize change to the "fluff". While there are certainly things about the setting I would change if I could, I am forgoing those changes to focus on the mechanical work of creating a system that gives players the ability to play the same characters they do with the original game, but allows them to focus their time on describing what their character is doing, why it is awesome and what it means to them. My design goals are as follows:
1) Create mechanics that are simple and play fast, leaving as much time to focus on story as possible.
2) Create mechanics that encourage and support interesting narratives and meaningful character decisions.
3) Preserve the setting and style of canon Exalted.
I'll try to post more about this project every day or so, though most of what I write about will be several days past when I did it, to give me time to point out problems I come across with decisions I've made.
Thanks for reading, please feel free to ask questions or leave comments!
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