Exalted Rework Part 7: Examples

So I've talked a lot about my vision for how the game 'could work,' I mean that's pretty much been what I've focused on doing is saying 'I think it should go like this,' and while that's more or less the job I set forth for myself, it's really about time I sat down to the somewhat challenging thought experiments of 'what do I imagine this will look like in practice?'

So today's update will be a couple of examples of Conflicts.  This is how I imagine players would use the tools I've made to play the game.  I'll have to use characters I created for former games and stories with made-up numbers because I haven't finalized character creation rules yet, but I think that'll be fine.

Example 1, a full Combat Conflict:

Korin Sun-Chaser is an Elk Totem Full Moon Lunar whose Motivation is to find, love and protect his Solar Mate.  Due to the whims of plot and story, however, Korin cannot recognize his mate on sight, instead he is simply trying to make friends with Solars.  Being a Full Moon, he's not incredibly subtle about it.  Ryoka is a Dawn Caste Solar justicar, trying to keep a low profile while she protects mortal cities from supernatural threats (this is her Motivation).  Korin has been chasing rumors of the Golden Children, and finally caught up with one, and, being kind of a meathead, has approached her on a bridge near sunset to ask her if she's the Demon of Vakarin, the title which she is known by for her purging of the corrupt leadership of her home city.
Ryoka responds by drawing her sword.
Out of Character, Ryoka's player says "I'm starting Conflict.  My Goal is to put you at my mercy in case you prove to be dangerous."
Korin and Ryoka's players both know that they're PCs and that in the end they'll be in the same party together, but this is their meeting and so it's far better to make it interesting.  Korin's player says, "Okay, I'll engage, my Goal is to have you listen to me.  They're not really contradictory Goals, are you sure we need to fight this out?"
Ryoka's player glances over her character's stats briefly.  "Ryoka resonates with Valor, if you're fighting back at all she's going to keep going until she wins or you do."  The GM leans back and smiles, not really having anything to do besides watch his players make a scene.
Korin's player nods.  "Okay, my Combat skill is 3."
Ryoka's player responds, "Mine's a 4 and I win ties 'cause of Sword of Heaven.  You get first Complication."
Korin's player nods.  "My first Complication is to allow your goal, putting me at 5.  I'll end up at your mercy, but you have to listen to me."
Ryoka's player looks to the GM, "Do I actually lose anything for having a lower total?"
The GM shakes his head.  "Nope, you both get your Goals, Korin's just making sure his gets through by accepting yours."
Ryoka's player nods and looks back to Korin's player.  "Okay, no more complications from me, so the fight's going to end with me listening to you while you talk with my sword at your throat?"
The GM cuts in, "Don't get ahead of yourselves, play it out."
Back In Character, Korin barely gets his sword halfway out of its sheath to parry the sudden wide draw-cut.  "No, wait, I just want to talk!" Ryoka pays his words no mind, pushing the barbarian back with a flurry of lightning-fast strikes.  His own counter attack is a heavy vertical swing, taking a chunk out of the boards of the bridge and sending splinters flying as the Dawn Caste rolls to the right out of the way.
"Messengers don't come bearing swords," the Solar hisses slamming her shoulder into the broad-shouldered barbarian, hoping to topple him over.  Korin is far too strong and stable for anything like that to work, even from a superior swordswoman.  He grabs her right wrist while she's close, hoping to prevent her from attacking further.
"We do when we're on the run, too!  Stop this, I'm not your enemy."  Ryoka, not that easily beaten, kicks the Lunar on the inside of the leg before slamming the heel of her free hand into his chin.  Korin stumbles back, slightly stunned, and has to roll backwards off the bridge onto the riverbank below to avoid the next arcing slash.  He lands heavily on his back with an 'oof' but rolls to his feet quickly.
Out of Character, the player of Inori, another Solar, is enjoying the scene but asks the GM if she can join in, too.  Inori is a Zenith Caste martial artist and faithful priestess of the Unconquered Sun with substantial memories from her past lives.  She has been traveling with Ryoka for a little while and still doesn't know her very well.  The GM shrugs, "You have to ask them, it's their Conflict.  I don't see why you can't be present for it, though."
Korin's player grins, "Save me from your violent circlemate?"
Ryoka's player laughs.  "Don't steal my thunder, I wanna finish beating him up."
Inori's player nods.  "Okay.  Korin, can you use some little, non-anima shapeshifting so I can recognize you as a Lunar with my First Age memories?"
Korin's player nods, "Yeah, sure, I'll do it right now, I think we ought to finish this soon."
Ryoka leaps down from the bridge, the impact of her attack cracking the earth where Korin stood a moment ago.  He had quickly dodged under the shadow of the bridge, where he could use some slightly more obvious powers without fear of being noticed.
Inori, wandering along the street above, slides down the steepness of the riverbank next to her circle-sister.  "What's going on?"
Ryoka replies, "Trouble," and throws herself at Korin once again.
Korin, exasperated, shouts back, "I'm not trouble!" and, manifesting fur and hide on his forearms, blocks the sharpened sword with his forearm, deflecting it and shoving his shoulder into the Dawn Caste to bowl her over.  Inori has enough time to see the shapeshifting and gasp.  The shoulder check work, but before she goes down, Ryoka grabs his arm and expertly twists in midair so that he is the one who impacts on the ground heavily, the Dawn Caste ending straddling him with her sword at his throat.  Korin lets his sword go and opens his hands in submission as Inori rushes over, eyes sparkling.
"Did you just shapeshift?"  The exciteable Zenith looks back and forth, to make sure they won't be overheard.  "Are you a Lunar?"  Korin finally has them listening to him, at least...

Example 2:  The Conflict System Avoids Conflict

Later on, Inori, Korin and Ryoka are dealing with a Mountain God who is withholding the snowmelt from a rivers, because the people of the village at his base have had no sons this year to gift to him.  Inori's motivation is to restore the Celestial Order, and so she cannot overlook such a blatant misuse of power.  Having marched up the tall, snow-capped peak, avoiding avalanches, rockslides and a few lesser god guards that Ryoka and Korin dispatched effortlessly they come to the Mountain God's throne at the summit.
His court consists of Echo Spirits, snowflake children, boulders and a single river goddess, chained to the side of his throne.  "Forgotten rulers," he says.  "I would have thought guards and travails sent to bar your way would have made it clear you are not welcome in my lands."  The chorus of Echo Spirits, in the shifting forms of beautiful, androgynous beings, repeat his words, My lands, my lands.
Inori, incensed, ignites her Anima Banner, and five golden pillars inscribed with the laws of Heaven in old realm script fan out behind her.  "Your lands?  By what right do you claim rulership?  It is the duty of Gods like yourselves to serve the land, not to rule."  The Echo Spirits repeat Inori's words as well, Not to rule, not to rule.
Out of Character the GM asks, "Inori, are you going to just try to argue him into submission?"
Inori's player smiles and nods.  "It's what I do best!"
The GM says, "Okay, Conflict.  His Goal is to retain his position as ruler of his court."
Inori's player raises an eyebrow.  "I don't care if he leads the court, I just want him to stop being a jerk to the mortals and acting like he owns the place."
The GM hmms.  "Well, Ryoka and Korin have done a good enough job kicking the asses of all his toughest warriors that he clearly doesn't really want to fight you... hm, let's keep playing it out."  Inori's player nods.
The Mountain God rises from his throne of stone, wrathful.  "You have been gone fifteen hundred years!  You abandoned us to the tyranny of the Dragon-Blooded, and then to the depredations of the Fair Folk!  My only recompense for that suffering, following an Age of loyal service, has been these past seven centuries, when I have cared for and protected your subjects in my domain.  Is the fault mine, if they chose to turn to me for protection in your absence?"  Absence, absence, sing the Echo Spirits.
Inori smiles gently.  "No.  I do not know by what power or for what reason we vanished, but we are returned, and I am grateful for your caring for of our people in the mean time.  When we retake our thrones, you and all those like you who serve honestly will be remembered."  She crosses her arms.  "But, there is still the matter of the river that the people depend on.  Is that loyal service, to punish them for being unable to provide a gift given in sincere thanks?  Is this how you mean to imitate our justice?"  Justice, justice.
The Mountain God is unable to meet the Zenith's accusation, and looks away.  "I do not have your strength of will, my lady.  I grew accustomed to the company of the sweet songs of the boys of the village, to the company of mortals.  The waters will flow once again."
The priestess bows.  "Then you are forgiven.  Care for the people of the village.  Tell your subjects, and those spirits who visit your court: the Lawgivers have returned, and we will not punish those who obey the old laws and show contrition for their failings.
Out of Character, the GM wonders for a moment if the entire outing, finding the village, scaling the mountain, talking down the Mountain God, would have felt more like a challenge if the players had been forced into Conflict more often, but decides that since they gave full credit to the threats presented to them that rewarding them sacrificing wasn't really necessary. Korin and Ryoka's fights with the boulder guardsmen left them battered, but victorious, by their own descriptions, and Inori acknowledged the Mountain God's points and debated with him fairly rather than pressuring him into breaking his intimacies or motivations.  Had the Mountain God been intended to be a truly corrupt individual, this likely would have involved the Solars defeating him and replacing him with one of his court, probably the River Goddess, but the GM decided that not all spirits or opponents worth facing should be unforgivable.

Okay that actually took me a long time to write so we'll get to example characters tomorrow.  Hopefully this gives a good sense of what the flow of the new system actually looks like, or what it looks like ideally in my head.

As always, questions and comments are completely welcome!

Exalted Rework Part 6: Exaltation

One thing that always bugged me about Exalted was the number of inherent, natural abilities that the Exalted had that, to even know they had, you had to dig through the depths of the book to find.  Things like stopping your own bleeding, soaking lethal damage with stamina (whatever that actually means from a role-play sense), resistance to diseases, things like that.

As part of the ongoing effort to make the game easier to pick up (which itself may be pointless because Exalted has reached a level of popularity where most people who would be interested in it already know it but don't discourage me too much), when a player decides what king of Exalt they will play, I have written out a short list of the supernatural abilities they get for that.  I call these Exaltation Powers, and the intent is to have them be the building blocks that Charms grow out of, much like how Knacks and Shapeshifting did for Lunars, a system I found to be quite elegant.

Here then, is my first-pass on the Solar Exalted.  Note that this is for being any Solar Exalt, not for having a specific Caste.  Castes also have Exaltation powers, but I'll explain some of those in a bit.

Solar Exaltation Powers:
Fortitude of Heaven: Solar Exalted are immune to nonmagical diseases, aging, infection and blood loss.  Solar Exalted heal rapidly, and will recover from minor injuries overnight, severe injuries in a few days and from death’s door in a week.
Solar Anima:  The character has an Anima Banner which they may ignite at will.  It fades at the end of the scene, or after fifteen minutes.  While ignited, the character’s divine power and Exalted nature is unmistakable to any who look on them.
Puissance of the Sun:  Solar Exalted may take Improbable Stunts while their Anima Banner is ignited.
Limit Break: One of your Resonant Virtues is Flawed by the Great Curse.  Determine what happens when this limit breaks and the conditions that cause it.  It should be self-destructive, harmful to the character’s motivation or the things they care about.  Solar Limits usually involve either taking the virtue too far, twisting it in some way, or reversing one’s attachment to it completely.  You gain limit whenever you act against your Flawed Virtue or your Limit Condition occurs.  You may also choose to gain Limit to throw off supernatural mental effects.

Yes, that is a dramatically improved rate of healing, because I felt the original-game charm "Body-Mending Meditation" was too good to not take, and therefore that I would just assume every Solar had it.  I said a lot about Limit Breaks, which could probably stand to be more concise, and requires some understanding of the Virtue System, so I'll work on the wording there, but I think I hit the points that describe the benefits and detriments (mostly detriments) of having a Limit Break.

While it's more unfinished, because Lunars will be project #3 after Solars and Dragon-Blooded, here's an early version of their Exaltation  Powers:

Lunar Exaltation Powers:
Fortitude of the Wild:  Lunar Exalted are immune to natural diseases, aging, infection and blood loss, and they heal rapidly, and will recover from minor injuries overnight, severe injuries in a few days and from death’s door in a week.
Lunar Anima:  The character has an Anima Banner which they may ignite at will.  It fades at the end of the scene, or after fifteen minutes.  While ignited, the character’s moon-graced power and Exalted nature is unmistakable to any who look on them.
Mutable Form:  All Lunar Exalted have two True Forms: their human form and a Totem Animal form, and changing between them can be performed reflexively.  Lunar Exalted may also take the form of any animal or mortal human they have hunted, slain and consumed alone, changing to these forms requires a moment’s concentration.  Lunars revert to one of their True Forms of their choice when their Anima Banner is ignited and may not shapeshift to any others while it remains ignited.
Limit Break: One of your Resonant Virtues is inherently Flawed by the Great Curse.  Determine what happens when this limit breaks and the conditions that cause it.  It should self-destructive, harmful to the character’s motivation or the things they care about.  Lunar Limits usually involve an atavistic regression to instincts, an animalistic corruption of Virtuous behavior.  You gain Limit when you act against your Flawed Virtue or when your Limit Condition occurs.  You may also voluntarily gain Limit to shake off supernatural mental effects.

While Fortitude of Heaven and Fortitude of the Wild are essentially identical, I prefer having them listed for a character who selects the Exalted type of their choice so that they can be written down in a place where players will remember even these most innate of powers.

For Caste powers, I wanted to provide, in addition to the traditional Anima Powers, an ability which reflected the old Caste Abilities, which were thrown out when the Skill system changed.  The Solar Castes therefore all have two powers granted by their Caste, a 'Glory power', which is the Anima Power, and one named for their '___ of Heaven' sobriquet which grants them extra power in the area their Exaltation was designed to shine.  A couple castes have additional abilities based on the unique 'extra effects' of certain Anima Powers.  Here are the Caste Exaltation Powers as written so far:

Dawn Caste:
Glory of the Dawn:  When the Dawn Caste’s anima banner is ignited, they appear mighty and terrifying.  All characters of lower Essence opposing them them suffer -1 to all combat Skills unless Valor is their Resonant Virtue.
Sword of Heaven:  Dawn Caste Solars win ties during Conflicts involving combat or war.

Zenith Caste:
Glory of the Zenith:  When a Zenith Caste’s anima banner is ignited, they are empowered with holy light.  All extra Creatures of Darkness must flee before them or be burned away, greater Creatures of Darkness suffer -1 to the rating of all Complications they make in conflicts opposing the Zenith Caste.
Hammer of Heaven:  Zenith Caste Solars win ties during Conflicts involving their physical, mental or spiritual fortitude or in conflicts involving overt social influence.
Fallen But Unconquered:  Zenith Caste Solars may, while their animas are on display, burn the bodies of the fallen with holy fire, preventing the corpse from rising as undead or the spirit from becoming a hungry ghost.

Twilight Caste:
Glory of the Twilight:  When a Twilight Caste’s Anima Banner is ignited, they become able to see flows and pools of essence.  While they cannot see a character’s essence score directly, they can identify and, with knowledge and skill, analyze Artifacts, Spirits, Sorcery and active Charms that are not masked by other magic, or were not designed with subtlety in mind.
Arrow of Heaven:  Twilight Caste Solars win ties in conflicts of knowledge, craftsmanship, sorcerous skill, investigation, research or learning.

Night Caste:
Glory of the Night:  When Night Caste’s Anima Banner is Ignited, they may choose to have it completely mask their identity.
Dagger of Heaven:  Night Caste Solars win ties in Conflicts of stealth, movement, spatial perception, criminal activities and avoidance of danger.
A Subtle Brilliance:  When a Night Caste Solar spends a point of Essence they may declare it is not readily apparent, unless the point they are spending is their last point of Essence.  This will not make a supernatural effect appear less supernatural.

Eclipse Caste:
Glory of the Eclipse:  When an Eclipse Caste is party to an oath sanctified by the grasping of hands, the Eclipse may sanctify the Oath if their Anima Banner is ignited, or they may reflexively ignite it when they sanctify the oath.  They must either be one of the parties shaking hands or must touch the hands of those making the oath to sanctify it.  Oathbreakers will have a modified Skill of 0 for a number of critical Conflicts they are part of equal to the Eclipse’s Essence at the time of sanctification.  These critical botches will appear to be caused by bad luck.
Quill of Heaven:  Eclipse Caste Solars win ties in Conflicts of social perception, travel, subtle social influence and organization.
Divine Ambassador:  Any party traveling with an Eclipse Caste Solar on legitimate business must be treated by the proper laws of hospitality by any Demons, Gods, Elementals or Fair Folk.  The laws of hospitality include nonagression, providing food and lodging and ensuring safety.  They are nullified if any hostile action is taken by the Eclipse or their party.

So let's talk about these briefly.  I'm actually pretty content with the Dawn Caste, though the mechanical crunch of just 'Opponents with lower essence take -1 to Combat stats and I win ties' is pretty brutal, but since it only really works on people the Dawn should be better than anyway, I don't think it's too far.  While I like the way Glory of the Zenith works (basically, Creatures of Darkness take extra damage and have trouble opposing you) I'm not happy with how I currently have "Hammer of Heaven" worded, I want to create a distinction between the Zenith's overt majesty and social 'force' compared to the Eclipse's subtlety but I'm not quite sure how to describe that distinction clearly.

Readers who recall the original Twilight Anima Power will notice that I have gone for a slightly different one instead.  Not only was the old 'magic shield' exceptionally powerful at higher Essence ratings, but it is essentially meaningless with the new Conflict System, so I've given them a lesser form of Essence Sight instead.  This feels more Twilight-y and will likely provide them more reason to raise their Banner in times when it might be a complication to do so.  The same readers who noticed the Twilight change will also probably note that the Night Caste Anima Power lost the ability to mask passage, this is because that particular effect never really made sense to me, in addition to being very mechanical.  If you want to know where it went, consider it to have been folded into Dagger of Heaven.

Today was a pretty crunchy update, talking a bit about what the reworked game will actually look like on character sheets.  Tomorrow we'll do some example Conflicts and maybe try to put together a starting character.  Thanks for reading, feel free to leave questions or comments below!

Exalted Rework Part 5: Charms

Charms are really where the fun part of Exalted happens.  They're the powers you get that let you do all the over the top, insane things that you get to do.  They're a big part of what makes Exalted Exalted, and so any redesign must do its best to preserve as much of the flavor of them as possible while trying to remove the problematic elements of them.

What are the problematic elements?  Well, number one, the sheer volume of them.  Nearly every sourcebook had new charms in it, and the Manuals of Exalted Power had literally hundreds.  If a new player wanted to make an effective character, they had to read through all of them, understand what they all did and remember which ones they wanted when they came out the other side of that.  The other major problem was imbalance.  I don't propose that I can eliminate mechanical imbalance, in fact, due to the comparative lack of system, charms will likely be equally unbalanced in terms of how much power they give in step 2 of Conflicts.

There are, broadly, two types of charms in Exalted.  The type of charm that makes you better at things you can do naturally and the type of charm that gives you entirely new miraculous abilities.  While the former type were usually more effective, the latter type were the fun ones.  Due to the relative lack of system that we have, there is comparatively less we can do with the former type, and due to the strong narrative focus of the game, I feel that focusing on the second type is a better idea.

Let me quickly sidestep into Stunts because they will be necessary to discuss a major element of new charm design.  In core Exalted, Stunts were a great idea with very poor execution.  First of all, they provided dice bonuses for descriptions, which unfortunately made them into an extremely subjective popularity-contest kind of mechanic.  Second, they required description before success or failure was established, meaning you often described yourself being inhumanly awesome before just doing nothing.  Our new Conflict system eliminates both of these problems by, rather than having them provide mechanical benefit, instead being the point of the game, and being described after we know who wins.

Stunts in our new game are simply the expression of what our characters are doing, both in and out of Conflicts.  Unlike before, players are directly limited from performing certain stunts if they lack the charms or power to perform them.  Stunts are now divided into three broad categories:  Skillful Stunts, Improbable Stunts and Impossible Stunts.  All characters can perform Skillful stunts, defined as acts of awesome that a sufficiently skilled human could reasonably expect to regularly perform.  Improbable Stunts are more limited, and are the kind of things that even a skilled human could not expect to happen with regularity. Impossible Stunts require magic and blatantly break physics, biology or logic.

In general, our Charms and Powers provide either a mechanical benefit, specific Impossible Stunts (such as wall-running or the ability to maintain one's balance on anything wider than a human hair) or general access to Improbable (or Impossible) stunts within a category, such as offensive speed and accuracy.

I should add, since I don't think I'll get to Exaltation Powers this post, Solar Exalted with ignited Anima Banners can perform Improbable Stunts as an natural part of their inherent perfection.

Here's a short list of charms I've reworked so far (All Solar Charms, I'm going to try to make Solars playable first before I work on Dragon-Blooded or Lunars):

General Charms:  (You may take these charms multiple times, each time you do, pick a different category the Excellency can be used with.  Example Categories:  Combat, Physical Prowess, Social Perception, Social Influence, Applied Knowledge, Sorcerous Power)
First Solar Excellency - Essence Overwhelming:  (Essence 1) Active:  Pick a general category of endeavor.  When you engage in Conflicts of that category, you may spend 1 Essence to add +2 to your Skill.

Second Solar Excellency - Essence Triumphant:  (Essence 1) Active:  Pick a general category of endeavor.  When you engage in Conflicts of that category, you may spend 1 Essence to guarantee that your goal occurs, even should you lose the Conflict.  You may not do this if your Goal is Overpowering (ie. killing or overwhelming Motivation).

These are first drafts of the Excellencies, general charms that provide highly mechanical benefits.  I'm not completely sold on the design of the Second Excellency, both balance wise and general utility wise.

Combat Charms:
Sandstorm-Wind Attack: (Essence 2)  Passive:  While your Anima Banner is ignited, you never run out of ammunition and your weapons never break.  You can create bolts or arcs of energy (with any sort of cosmetic effect you desire) with your weapons rather than striking normally, and you may throw melee weapons and have them return to your hand.
Flashing Vengeance Draw: (Essence 2)  Passive:  Your attack speed and precision is not restricted by reason, you may perform Improbable stunts of this type even when your Anima Banner is not ignited, and you may perform Impossible stunts when it is.  You can strike opponents on opposite sides of you simultaneously with a single weapon, or carve your initials in an your opponent’s flesh before he has time to bleed, or strike your opponent five times while he’s mid-blink, returning your sword to its sheath before he opens his eyes.
Iron Whirlwind Attack: (Essence 3, Flashing Vengeance Draw)  Active:  You may spend 1 Essence to defeat all Extras with any reasonable chance of engaging you in combat, in addition to forcing a Moderate Injury Complication on all Exalted or Heroic enemies in the area.

These show the general intent of modern charms.  Note how only one of them has any mechanical power, the others simply allow a character to further define their combat style.  Aside from the Excellencies, mechanically beneficial charms will usually require these power-description charms as prerequisites.

Physical Charms:

Graceful Crane Stance: (Essence 2) Passive: You are supernaturally graceful and can leap great distances.  Your gymnastic agility is no longer limited by reason.  You may now perform Improbable acts of agility while your Anima Banner is down and Impossible Acts while it is ignited.  You can walk tightropes on your hands, gracefully flip out of a wagon rattling down a mountainside land on your feet or roll smoothly back to your feet after being thrown by an ogre.  Additionally, your jumps carry you great distances, approximately five times your normal jumping distance.

Lightning Speed: (Essence 2) Passive:  Your mobility and agility surpasses the speed of mortal eyes.  You can move Improbably fast with your Anima Banner down and Impossibly fast with it up.  You can move so quickly as to appear to teleport, and you may travel at great speeds over modest distances.

Feather-Foot Style: (Essence 2) Passive:  Your effective weight and traction are no longer limited by reason.  You may perform Improbable Stunts of this type with your Anima Banner down and Impossible stunts with it up.  You can walk or run surely on snowflakes, falling raindrops, water, lava or a floor of writhing maggots as well as run on vertical surfaces or upside-down (though you cannot stand still on them, movement is key).  You are also capable of gaining traction on thin air, though only long enough to jump.

Racing Hare Method: (Essence 3, Graceful Crane Stance or Feather-Foot Style or Lightning Speed) Passive:  You can travel long distances quickly under your own power (how the travel occurs is up to the player, but it is not impeded by any obstacle short of the Great River).  Doing so is tiring, requiring a night’s rest after the travel is complete unless you spend 1 Essence.

The Athletics charm tree is near and dear to my heart, and I considered the original versions of Monkey Leap Technique and Graceful Crane Stance to be essentially must-pick charms.  I have tried to split these into very clearly different categories of physical agility and speed.

Thanks for reading once again, tomorrow we'll talk about Exaltation Powers and maybe try to write out an example Conflict.

Exalted Rework Part 4: Essence

I keep doing these kind of late at night, I should start doing them first thing in the morning so I'm not so tired when I do them.

Today we're talking about the much more coherent Essence System, as well as Anima Banners.  For readers who are unaware, in original Exalted, the equation for figuring out a character's Essence Pools were very mathy, ex: (Essence x 3 + Willpower) + (Essence x 7 + Willpower + Sum of all Virtues).  Essence was also split into "Personal Essence" and "Peripheral Essence".  Personal Essence was 'invisible', allowing Exalted to use their powers without fear of detection, where Peripheral Essence raised a character's Anima Banner, a glorious and terrifying expression of their supernatural might.

After playing Exalted several times, I've come to believe that the existence of Personal Essence and Peripheral Essence creates a very inappropriate expectation in players: namely, "So long as I restrict myself to only Personal Essence, I am safe from people knowing I am an Exalt."  The problems with this are threefold.  One, Exalted is not a game of self-restriction, it is one of doing what must be done.  Two, by allowing one to act magically without showing one's Anima Banner, it made showing one's banner a primarily negative thing, and therefore something that GMs would use to keep their players under control.  Finally, by creating an expectation that raising one's anima banner was a negative act, they downplayed the strong element of their own mechanic.

Our changes to Essence are, therefore, aimed at eliminating the twin problem of heavy math and inappropriate expectations of the in-character visibility of characters.  The former problem is simple, we decrease the size of a bite of essence from one 'mote', a very small amount, to a 'point', which for our purposes is approximately equal to 12-15 motes and probably Willpower as well.  Characters will have a number of points equal to their Essence Rating, with more traditional methods of essence regeneration providing the ability to regain Points of Essence when they run empty.

Anima Banners require a slightly more thorough reworking of the system.  The original game had a sliding scale of how brightly glowing the anima was, we will dispense with this necessary sliding scale.  Instead, Anima Banners have two states: 'down', in which they are invisible, and 'ignited', in which case the character is unmistakably an Exalt.  The exact level of the banner's flare can be left up to whatever is attractive to the story, the point is that nobody will mistake the character for an Exalted.  Spending Points of Essence will always ignite one's banner, but all Exalts can also ignite their banners as a reflexive action.  Like in canon, Ignited banners cannot be 'switched off', but they will usually go away at the end of a scene.

Now that we know the general states that Banners occur in, let's talk a little bit about why one would want to risk igniting theirs.  Since there is no longer such thing as 'tiny' essence expenditures, like one or two motes, any such expenditure is essentially now free.  This dramatically opens up Exalts' freedom to use their supernatural abilities.  In order to provide a sense of character growth, there must limiting factors.  I choose subtlety, in the form of lowered anima banners, to be one of these.

In short, characters with their Anima Banners ignited will often gain both stunting and mechanical benefits.  The Anima Banner, for our purposes, is your game face, taking off the training weights of appearing mortal, explaining that you weren't left handed.  An Exalted who wants to disguise their power can still do so and be effective, but in order to act at their maximum potential, they must reveal themselves in all their terrible glory, inviting the world to see them for what they are.

Intelligent GMs will adapt to this change by taking the more common route from late second edition Exalted that the Wyld Hunt is mostly powerless, and that most people outside the Realm and the near Threshold care more about the sincerity of the help being offered than who is offering the help.  Insisting on 100% perfect secrecy at all times means you're not really playing Exalted, anyway.

Next time we'll FINALLY get to talking about a few basic Charms, like the Excellencies, as well as the Core Powers of the Solar Exalted.

As always, feel free to leave questions or comments.  Thanks for reading!

Exalted Rework Part 3: Assets

So in canon Exalted there are a large number of character elements all of which serve to be non-dice based bonuses to combat power.  In general, these had the severe problem of imbalance, and nowhere was this more visible than in Backgrounds.  Two points of Contacts gave you two people who you could seek information from, assuming you treated them well and did favors for them occasionally and a 2-die bonus to find others like them.  Two points of Artifact gave you a magic sword that dramatically increased your combat potential.  These two were from a character point value perspective identical.

Artifact weapons are by far the most unbalancing part of original Exalted, but hardly the only one.  There was also the persistent problem that some Backgrounds were only worth taking if taken at 4 or 5 points, most notably Resources and Influence, though Followers was another problematic Background.

Part of the intent of a simplified system is to remove the complicated power-calculus of Bonus Points and reduce character customization to a more straightforward matter of what they can do and cannot do.  For this purpose, we now have a set of 'Asset Slots' that characters receive in the place of bonus points.

In 'old Exalted' terms, an Asset is worth about 7 Bonus Points.  Charms in this system cover the space of two or three original Charms, though I will be working toward rebalancing them, as some charms were straight up more useful or more effective than others.  Similarly, an Artifact Weapon will be a single Asset Slot with a near-permanent substantial bonus to combat.  For Background-based Assets, we will say that a barony or duchy which makes the character quite rich, provides access to a handful of Heroic Mortal lieutenants and functionaries and the temporal influence such power implies is worth about a single Asset.  Likewise significant position in a major city or organization would also qualify.

I haven't worked out the exactness of starting character balance, how many Assets a starting character should have access to.  My estimate is, in addition to the powers inherent to their Exaltation, Five Charms and two Bonus Assets, but I'll work on that later.

Since it's late I guess I'll get to Essence next time.  Thanks again for reading!

Exalted Rework Part 2: Core

Today (Tonight, I guess) I'm going to talk about the core conflict resolution I've developed, as well as justify a few decisions and talk a little bit about the parts that make up a character in our new system.

First I'm going to talk a lot about my biggest and probably most controversial decision.  Exalted has always been a game about powerful characters.  A starting Solar Exalt could expect to walk into a village and take over it by the end of the day.  Where in some RPGs a starting character might be afraid to wander out into the wilderness for fear an average wolf would just kill them, in Exalted a beginning character was very capable of taking over an entire city, solo.  Given this level of power, Exalted is very much a game about what characters choose to do rather than whether or not they can do it.  Even with the intense complexity of the original system, success was almost always a foregone conclusion unless the task was absurdly difficult or you were being opposed by an Exalted.

The cleverer among you will see where I'm going with this and will likely feel like they're about to hit a brick wall and try to bail out of the ride, but I'm seeing this through.  Exalted is not a game about luck, it's a game about choices, about will and virtue.  In short, it's a game that doesn't need dice.

That's a big decision with a lot of baggage, most notably that the game will need other mechanics to provide a sense of suspense and risk, but dice rolls almost universally allow random failure, and that especially feels awkward in Exalted, so ultimately I find dice as a mechanic ineffective for generating risk and suspense in a game like Exalted.

So what is our core mechanic?  How do we make conflicts meaningful and suspenseful?  Well, I could talk a lot about how I came up with it, but let's start by outlining it.  It's a four step system.

Step 1: Define the Conflict.  Who are the participants?  Maybe a Solar facing off with her Lunar Mate, or two Deathknights dueling for the favor of their master or a Dragon-Blooded monk engaged in mortal combat with an Anathema.  For now let's assume that conflicts occur between two individuals.  What are their Goals, that is, what do they get if they win?  And finally, how and where will the conflict be expressed?  Perhaps the Lunar and Solar are engaged in a fierce debate in their manse, the Deathknights are fighting using their supernatural martial arts in a ring of bones beneath the grey sky of the Underworld, and the Dragon-Blood and the Anathema are battling to the death atop a shattered glass tower above Chiaroscuro.

Step 2:  Compare relevant Skills:  We'll get into Skills later, but basically they represent Dice Pools from the original game.  Whoever has the higher is winning, but it's important that both sides know what number the other is dealing with for the third step.

Step 3:  Charms and Complications:  Starting with whoever's losing, characters trade off activating Charms or accepting Complications.  Charms and Complications provide bonuses to a character's skill.  Without getting into the numbers too much, if you're willing to accept setbacks, make sacrifices and penalize yourself, you do better than someone who isn't willing to.  Since you don't know what your opponent is willing to sacrifice to achieve their Goal (but you do know their goal and their base skill), there is a human unpredictability to the conflict system from this element.  When both sides are no longer willing to accept greater complications, whoever has the higher total wins the conflict and will achieve their goal, the other character will not.  If there is a tie, neither character will achieve their goal, the conflict will be a standstill, though other characters may intervene.  I haven't worked out that system yet.

Step 4:  Tell the Story:  We now know who wins and who loses, and what complications there are for both sides on the way.  Now for the fun part: telling the whole story, as a group.  This is Exalted, this is really the fun part.  Take as little or as long as you like, but this is the part where you get to do all your stunts and have all your fun.

It's a fairly basic system, but as I develop greater detail for what Charms and Complications add to Step 3, I think it has the potential to be a decent narrative game system.

Now, briefly, let's talk about the bits of the character sheet that we're keeping from the original version.

Name/Title:  Every Exalt deserves a badass title.
Concept:  Being able to sum yourself up in a few words is very handy.
Motivation:  I actually really like Motivation as a defining, semi-mechanical principle, especially in games that are so much about why someone does something, like Exalted.
Type/Caste:  Since we're keeping the canon Exalted, it's gotta be there
Anima Banner:  It's one of the most recognizable elements of the original game.  I'll be messing with it a little bit, but we'll talk about that when we get to Essence and Charms.
Permanent Essence:  Essence 'rating' is good.  Essence pools were annoying.
Intimacies ?:  Still undecided on if to thoroughly borrow the mechanic.  Definitely has some narrative value but might be too complex and list-y.  May just replace with 'things the character cares about'.
Skills:  Notably for our purposes, Skills represent dice pools used for things, and are character named to give both player and GM a greater sense of why the character has the skill and what they use it for.  A Dawn Caste might have "Iaido Badassery" as their combat skill, where a Night Caste might call theirs "Hail of Knives".  Their effects are basically the same, but each conveys something about the character and how they use their skill.  Skills will go from 0-3 for Heroic Mortals and God-Bloods, to 4 for Terrestrial Exalted and to 5 for Celestial Exalted, while otherwise being limited by Essence.
Assets:  These are the meat of the new system, including what were once Backgrounds, Advantages, Charms and Sorcery.  Many other, more general mechanics are treated like Assets, such as Anima powers and (in a uniquely negative way) Limit Breaks.
Resonant Virtue:  "Primary" virtue doesn't sound as good, so I used "Resonant."  The Four Virtues are actually very core to Exalted's setting (especially the Fair Folk, but several other elements as well) so I would feel odd removing them entirely.  However, they are being intentionally redesigned as primarily a method for encouraging heroic behavior and (in the case of Resonant Virtue) punishing one flavor of negative behavior.  May decide to allow characters to have multiple resonant virtues, for double the benefit and double the penalty, in which case you will have a Primary virtue that defines Limit Breaks but is also Resonant.

Next time I'll try to talk about Assets as a new mechanic, as well as Charms and Essence expenditure.

Exalted Rework Part 1: Intent

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!