Exalted's Sorcery and Martial Arts are, mechanically unique elements of the game. From a flavor perspective, in combination they spell out much of the game's mixed fantasy flavor: Sorcery is extremely powerful but highly specific in its effects, Martial Arts is an extraordinarily broad field with near limitless effects but requires practitioners to decide what they wish to focus on and build from there. Sorcery is a primarily mental discipline, Martial Arts are a primarily physical discipline. Both concepts are hard-coded into the nature of the Essence of Creation. Removing or discouraging players from involvement with either of them would dramatically weaken the setting.
So I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to make two extremely mechanically detailed systems work in a game with much less of the system to support them. Both have entire sourcebooks dedicated entirely to their premise and a couple hundred little chunks of them (either spells or charms).
Let's hit Sorcery first. The first Exalted character I played for any length of time was a Twilight Caste and I eventually learned Sorcery, though the only spells I ever made heavy use of were Infallible Messenger and Stormwind Rider (I should note that the other Terrestrial spell that I think is extremely powerful, Demon of the First Circle, wasn't made available to me). For the most part, combat Spells simply didn't do enough for their high costs and were at best inefficient or at worst ineffective against Exalted opponents. Combine this with the fact that I was constantly thinking "... or I could spend that experience on more Charms," and I felt that Sorcery was actually dramatically underpowered for its opportunity costs. In later games I ran I reduced the experience cost of Spells by half and this more or less ameliorated the opportunity cost problem, though not the combat potency problem. In truth, Sorcerers who aren't binding hordes of demons to their will just aren't that much more dangerous than they would be if they were just Exalts. The exception is to mortals: even Terrestrial Circle Sorcerers will totally wreck your mortal buddies. Between Death of Obsidian Butterflies, Flying Guillotine, Corrupted Words and Droning Suggestion, Sorcerers can pretty reliably physically or socially destroy mortals. This is, I'm pretty sure, deliberate. If you're playing an Exalt, getting just tooled around by Sorcery is kind of BS, but Mortals are kind of intended to be the putty in the hands of the Exalted.
Mechanically, each level of Sorcerous Initiation is an Asset. Spells must be learned from teachers or spellbooks, but have no further cost. Spells cost no less than 1 Essence per Circle and usually require Improbable Stunts to avoid (for Terrestrial circle spells) or Impossible Stunts to avoid (for Celestial and Solar circle spells), assuming avoidance is possible at all. In addition to the actual effects of the spell, which occur narratively, if the spell aids in a Conflict the Sorcerer is involved in, they gain +1 to their Skill per Circle of the spell. This can be stacked with Complications and Excellencies. Note that the spell must directly and narratively contribute to the Conflict. While Death of Obsidian Butterflies might win you an argument, it isn't actually actually adding to your side in the conflict, though Stormwind Rider would aid in a chase and Curse of Slavish Humility would aid in intimidation.
Due to the Demon Summoning spells' power, I've added a clause to them as well. Since 'battles of will' aren't actually particularly fun to narrate (they're mostly squinting and grunting) and we don't really have the stats for them, that part of these spells is changed to the following: Whenever you summon a demon with equal or lesser Essence, you must defeat the demon in a Conflict to prove your superiority. The conflict must be of a sort appropriate to the demon summoned.
Martial Arts, by contrast, are a bit better balanced in core. With a few glaring examples of poorly thought-through charms, the styles are mostly very interesting and coherent. The challenge in adapting these is that they were, in core, highly mechanical, being basically just open charm trees that anyone could buy into. Since our Assets are bigger than Charms, and charms are much less crunchy in their use, we need another way of incentivising players to use specific flavors of combat. There's another factor that always bothered me about Martial Arts in Exalted, and that's the complete extraneousness of Terrestrial Martial Arts in a Celestial-scale game.
My intent with Martial Arts mechanically is to make each Style a single Asset. They will generally have the overall format "While you fight with X weapons in Y style, you gain Z benefits." These benefits will usually not be mechanical, but rather replace Combat Charms, allowing Improbable or Impossible stunts. Martial Arts will also never require one's Anima Banner be up, though I may create Hero-Style expansion charms that do.
Terrestrial Martial Arts will usually allow for Improbable stunts or very specific Impossible stunts. Celestial Martial Arts will have a harsher style restriction, rather than just saying 'fight like this' they will say 'you can't fight like this', but will provide broad-strokes Impossible Stunts that can be performed. Sidereal Martial Arts will not only define weapon and movement styles, but will define mindsets and intentions that the character must match in order to make full use of the style's absurdly potent Impossible Stunts.
Terrestrial Martial Arts will usually have Essence Requirements of 1. Celestial Martial Arts will usually have Essence Requirements of 3, Sidereal Martial Arts will have Essence Requirements of 5 or higher. This should also make Terrestrial martial arts more appealing to starting Celestial Characters, especially ones not looking to invest in multiple combat charms and willing to limit themselves to a specific combat style.
I don't have any good examples up for you guys (despite having pretty much everything in the Core Book reworked), but I'll try to get to some soon. I also want to talk about Virtues a bit, which will be a bit less of reworking and a bit more of clarifying on my own interpretations. A bit less novel, but important for comprehending my interpretation of Virtues as Exalted's version of Disadvantages.
I'll also start working through the Dragon-Blooded book, trying to get a feel for what a game where Impossible Stunts are much more restrictive, as well what Charms look like when they're elementally aspected, I may be performing slightly more dramatic surgery on their Charm trees to make them more elementally aspected but cross-skill or less elementally aspected and skill-specific.
As always thanks for reading and feel free to leave questions or comments!
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