The Culture: There's A Reason Exalted Failed

Black Lodge Games did a review of Exalted: Second Edition

The summary for why this game--the entire property--failed is because, like so many other Tabletop properties, they designed a product that promised a Braunstein based campaign gameplay model and failed to deliver everything necessary to make good on that promise.

There is one thing I want to point out that BLG missed, brushing up against it in passing: the failure of the manual and the game itself to impart upon the user that they are inherently Faction-tier actors out of the box.

From my own experiences, and the reports of others over the decades, we see that one of the most common failure modes for Exalted is the failure of comprehension by the players that they are not Zeroes hoping to become Heroes. This category error is due to the dominance of D&D's gameplay paradigm in the hobby.

It is for this reason that, back during 1st Edition, the game didn't really get traction until Dragon-Blooded hit the stands as it solved both issues: it provided info on the primary antagonists for all other Exalted and it provided the (kinda, sorta) Zeroes that hobbyists had become long accustomed to expect out of fantasy adventure gaming when just starting out. No, White Wolf did themselves and their target audience no favors by failing to know what the core gameplay loop for Exalts are and how to execute upon it- and, quite frankly, they still haven't.

The other problem is that White Wolf failed to comprehend that a game is defined by its rules and procedures; players correctly intuited that this game is about combat first and foremost because that's where the rules are. Mass Combat was absent until 1st Edition's Player's Guide, and formalized Social Combat was a 2nd Edition thing. The other thing is that White Wolf's infamous incompetence in game design bit them in the ass; the best Fighter Solar in the Twilight Caste due to its caste ability to LOLNO damage, and that is just the most obvious jank that had unintended consequences due to shit Quality Control.

Finally, this--like RIFTS--is a setting that compels and demands Braunstein play in the Total Non-Stop manner, meaning that Player-v-Player conflict is always on the table and thus the proper way to run the game is to hand off all the actors in the setting to players and let them go HAM in an all-against-all wargame campaign until someone wins or everyone loses. Yet White Wolf, being ignorant of how this hobby really works, failed to provide the structure and information necessary to make good on this promised fantasy of agency.

Blind leading the blind, and disbelieving when shown their errors. Result predictable.

Until the game unfucks all of this, Exalted cannot succeed. The irony is that in so doing, they will (a) reaffirm D&D's supremacy no matter what because (b) the only viable path to unfucking this property involves incorporating the core concepts of the property into D&D proper.