(As promised last Sunday.)
White Wolf Game Studios published Exalted in 1999, just a year before Magic-Users By The Water published Edition 3, and in that moment it looked like we had a real contender for the crown that TSR managed to fumble away due to the arrogance and incompetence of the Buck Rogers heiress running the company into the ground- paving the way for another resentful cunt to do to another superior creator about 25 years later.
By this time its flagship game and setting had become "Superheroes with fangs/claws/wands" and many (like me) took to this as "They're finally being honest with how the games really get played."
It didn't work out in the long term, in large part because they hit the window of opportunity made with TSR's failure too late, but until Edition 3 arrived a lot of us were not sold on the game's demise being all but certain.
I'd written about this game previous here and here, so I'm going to skip right to the point: what it takes to make it work.
It Should Have Been A Slam Dunk
The very nature of Exalted's premise means that there are different tiers of play. Celestial Exalts play on the big stage. They cannot help but to become the powers driving major institutions, and thus to see the personnel comprising those institutions as extensions of themselves. Terrestrial Exalted are the regional powerwielders, easily agents of greater powers (as seen in the First Age) and going down to the rank-and-file of the top-tier factions (displacing Mortals). The gods are akin to these Exalts, as are the Fae, and all such parties are capable of crafting servitors (i.e. Monster Manual entries) to fill out grunt-level personnel needs.
The game should have been structured so that what type of character you play determines the tier of game you're engaging with.
It was not, so we're here, and a lot of that has to do with how White Wolf became alergic to game design blueprints with objective measurement standards for time, distance, and so forth across the board.
What The Game Has
The elements for a proper fantastic adventure wargame are there. You have things that have costs in terms of time to do--travel, build, recover from harm, form groups (armies, guilds, etc.)--and you have some vague notion of a real economy on top of which the magical economy exists. What is wrong is that it remains inchoate; it's unrealized potential.
There's little in the way of objective measures to work with; the rest have to be drawn forth from inferrances and implications due to how vague the mechanics are due to White Wolf being notorious for being a company full of Theater Kids and Rule Zero Enjoyers.
Making It Work
Once you take the vagueness and beat it into shape by replacing vague psuedo-measurements with objective ones, everything falls into place.
Different tiers? Baked into the cake; different Exalts are, in setting, designed to operate at different scopes and scales. Scaling? Wonky, but present; going from Man to Man to Mass Battle should be as simple as it is in AD&D1e, but White Wolf pulled a Battlesystem more than once. Likewise, doing Diplomacy (and the entire turn order scheme from wargames from Kriegspiel forward) is there, but wonky.
Faction play is baked into the cake. Celestial Exalts are natural big faction leaders. Terrestrials are good for smaller factions. Their god/fae counterparts can slot into those same places.
While a lack of monsters is a pain in the ass, statting them up is easy; the trick is statting out special abilities as there is sweet fuck-all rubric for doing so because lazy designers are lazy.
Be prepared to spend a lot of time pouring over the manuals to get all of the objective measures that do exist, and to parse what is written carefully to tease out those hidden through inferrence or by implying them instead of just doing competent game design and assigning a number. You're going to be hunting down the latter two in the second and third-order mechanical interactions of the rules more often than not. Then you put that into a document for reference when running the campaign as the Referee, and referring others to it when they run sessions.
Running The Campaign
Assuming that you want to finish the designers' jobs for them, put in a lot of bitch work, and convince people that it's worthwhile will you get the promised experience? Yes.
The trick is that you have to tell them what that experience is, and it is not what AD&D gives you. It is an experience that, in AD&D terms, is playing Demigods (or, for you BECMI folks, Immortals). Only by playing Mortal characters do you get that low-powered fantasy experience of a Berserk, and Storyteller tends to break down there. You are playing, in contemporary parlance, a mid-to-high powered shonen series that claims pretensions to Chinese classics in addition to anime that people like this would not know of if they had to go out of their way to find it.
Conclusion
Could you? Yes, the potential is there. Is it worth it? For most, no; way too much bitchwork spent cleaning up the mess that is the rules to make it practical for proper campaign play with multiple referees running multiple active parties and a vibrant faction level of play ensuring that the setting remains in flux entirely by player actions- and never by Referee fiat.
But, for most, I think they would achieve the same result by just using Deites & Demigods in AD&D1e campaing play and having different Exaltations be different ways to become Demigods.
As for Exalted itself, there's a fantastic game in there. It just needs to be realized by people that comprehend what this hobby is, instead of frustrated novelists and Theater Kids trying to using a wrench to saw a log in half.
Your dates are off: Exalted was released in the summer of 2001, the year after 3rd Edition. I remember it because it was released just before White Wolf started publishing 3rd Edition Ravenloft, the only line of theirs I ever invested in.
ReplyDeleteI was intrigued by Exalted for a while, due largely to the hype on RPGNet, but over the years, I've become convinced I dodged a bullet by not buying into it.