Is Exalted 1st Ed Playable?

[wayfare]

I ran a lot of 1st Ed Exalted back in the day. Solars and Lunars mostly, with a bit of Alchemical for flavor. Truth be told, I miss it.

Now, I am the first to admit that 1st ed Exalted is a horribly flawed game. No passive defense, confusing mechanics, no kind of action sequence...but i still miss it.

Maybe it's just me, but it seemed simpler and less powered. 2e has done some very necessary things, but...well, at some point it turned into Aberrant (don't get me wrong, Aberrant is a great game...if you are willing to spend weeks changing it), even more than 1st ed.

Is there any way to import the good stuff from 2e (Auto-Soak, DVs, etc) while keeping the core of the 1st ed system/charms. Or do people feel that 2nd ed is flat-out better than 1st ed?

[Tengu_temp]

There are two things first edition handled better: all perfect defenses costed willpower, and the game used an ordinary initiative system instead of ticks. Other than that, I got nothing.

[SurlySeraph]

Not having 1E, I can't say for sure, but taking the average number of successes to get a DV instead of rolling defense is definitely easy enough. I don't think houseruling useful changes into 1E would be too hard.

[Friv]

1e is certainly playable. It has its share of invincible builds and crazy setups, and I find it slightly less fun than 2e in many ways, but it's stable and solid. I tend to prefer Second. Exalts are a bit tougher without Charm use, especially Dragon-Bloods, Excellencies are awesome, and the additional mechanics for social interactions are very nice. I don't think powerful characters are as much stronger as you think they are, though. It's more that 1e didn't display very many Charms past Essence 4.

As far as importing goes...

You could probably import Excellencies without damaging anything. You can't import DVs effectively, because they'll mix with the systems' Charms in lots of weird ways, rendering several useless. You could probably build an unholy hybrid of the two systems, but at that point you're into heavy rules changes territory.