Help with Exalted? (pretty please)

[Lexious]

So on a whim, I got Exalted 2nd edition at my 'local' shop, deciding that I'm quite fond of that sort of anime wuxia aesthetic. The book is rather big though, and uses a somewhat unfamiliar terminology (I've played DnD 3.5, 4th edition and Pathfinder before) so I'm having trouble with it. I'll probably end up being DM because I'm always DM (or storyteller), but i want to figure thing's out from the ground up, of course, starting with player perspective; I figure that if I can work out character creation, the rest should be a bit easier to understand. So, excuse the long-winder ranting, I'll cut to the chase:

Can you guys give me a step by step guide on character generation in Exalted and, if you're feeling really generous, boil down the combat to it's basic elements for my puny brain-meats? Thank you!

[DeadManSleeping]

Hee hee. "Simplify" Exalted. Yeah, fun fact: that doesn't tend to work out well. Anyway, here's the basics, in easy language.

You've got your 9 attributes, in 3 categories. These are like D&D's "ability scores". Each represents your characters capacity in its description ("Strength" is about how much power your muscles produce, and how well, for example). You get 3 sets of points, and you pick which category gets which set. Each attribute starts at one. They go up to five. Assign points.

Next you have 25 abilities, in 5 categories (for MOST Exalt types, but let's start you on Solars). These are like D&D's "skills". Each represents your character's training in activities that fall under it ("Archery" covers identifying projectile launchers[i.e. bows, flamethrowers], maintaining them, and of course firing them). The book has stuff that tells you what Ability you use for something. Most rolls you make in the game will be based off the "Attribute+Ability" construct. We'll talk rolling later. For your Abilities, you have "Caste" abilities and "Favored" abilities. These are the same thing, except Caste abilities are chosen by your Caste (hopefully you ran into that just looking through the book. Castes serve as categories for skills), and "Favored" abilities are chosen freely. While you choose them at this stage, it should be noted that your Caste and your choice of Favored abilities don't matter until later stages, except for the fact that you MUST put at least one point in each ability you select to be Favored. You get twenty eight points to distribute, and each ability goes up to five. The book provides general rating guidelines. Make sure to ask your ST about Craft rules if you're interested in that (if you're a newbie, just don't be interested in it).
-Specialties come next. Specialties are focuses in Abilities where you can add to your rating. They can go up to 3. These are generally very specific. For instance, you might have a 1-dot specialty under Melee for "Swords". This means your Melee is treated as 1 higher when you are using a sword for that roll. No other pools get this benefit, and Melee does not get this benefit if your sword does not apply (for whatever reason). You get four of these to start (the book does not tell you this: I will explain later). You can stack them up (i.e. 3 dots in Melee [Sword] and 1 dot in Performance ).

Next, Backgrounds. You get seven points for these. They go up to five, but you can't increase them above three (yet). The book describes them all.

Willpower. This is 5. It goes up to 10. You can't increase it yet. Willpower has a static rating, but it also provides points equal to its static rating, which increase and decrease a lot. The book refers to these as "permanent willpower" and "temporary willpower". As a general rule, temporary willpower can't go above permanent willpower.

Virtues. You have four of these. They describe themselves well. They each start at 1 and go up to 5. You get 5 points among the 4 of them. The Virtue you make your highest (or one of them that you make your highest) is your Primary Virtue, which none of your other virtues can ever go above. It's also tied to your limit break/virtue flaw. Pick a limit break/virtue flaw that is entered under your primary virtue in the virtue section of Chapter 4.

Essence. You have permanent Essence and temporary Essence (kinda like Willpower). Your Permanent Essence is 2. It goes up to 10. Your temporary Essence is divided into Personal and Peripheral. Peripheral Essence makes you glow, and Personal Essence doesn't. The book provides calculation formulas.

Now, the fun part.

Do your numbers look low? Or, at least, lower than you'd like? Of course they do! You want all the numbers, don't you? Well, you're in luck, because now you get to get MORE NUMBERS. Welcome to Bonus Points! You get 18 bonus points (again, not 15 as the book describes). Every single category I described above can be increased with bonus points. The book tells you how many bonus points it is to increase any given number by 1. The maximums still apply.
-Willpower and Virtues both cost 1 bonus point to increase by 1, unlike what the book says.

Look how big your numbers are now! I hope you have a couple 5's. You should. Now comes a really big part.

Charms. These are your magic powers. All Charms have prerequisites, which are the numbers on your sheet (and often other Charms). You can't buy a Charm without having its prerequisite. Look at what the Charms do, and see if you meet the prerequisite. If you see a Charm you want, but don't meet the prerequisite, then maybe you should change your numbers.
You get 10 Charms. You can buy more if you still have a lot of bonus points left over (like the table says).
Of note are Excellencies. Excellencies are low-prerequisite Charms that basically say "if you pay essence, you temporarily increase your number in this Ability". You want these, because you can almost always use them. Realistically, about half your starting Charms should probably be Excellencies. Don't take the Third Excellency in anything. Ask your ST about extra Excellencies for the group.

You may have noticed I said stuff contrary to the book in some places (because I kept pointing it out). There is a neat thing called the Scroll of Errata, which contains a ton of fixes for everything. They made new character creation guidelines. I guided you through those. Find the SoE here (http://forums.white-wolf.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1095794).

[B]How to play Exalted

You have a die pool for everything. That tells you how many 10-sided dice (or d10s) you roll. These are the only dice in the game, so I will just call them "dice" from now on. Whenever a die comes up 7, 8, 9, or 0, that's a "success". For many instances (such as whenever a PC or any NPC with any magic rolls), a 0 will actually be 2 successes. When you've rolled all the dice from the pool, you compare the successes to the difficulty. If it equals or exceeds the difficulty, the roll has succeeded. If it does not, the roll has failed. Any successes in excess of the difficulty are your "threshold" successes.

How to hit things

Combat in Exalted is insanely convoluted. Here are basic basics that don't cover much, but are really important.

Initiative is determined by a timeline. Join Battle determines where everyone starts on the timeline (anywhere from 0 to 6). Then people take actions. Actions have a Speed. When someone has finished an action, you move them the Speed forward on the timeline. For example, if you were on 4, and you took a speed 5 action, you would then be on 9. You can't take actions until your spot on the timeline comes up (except for Reflexive actions). Whenever your spot on the timeline comes up, your "DV" refreshes.

Attacking anyone is a Difficulty 1 action. Yes, that's right. Difficulty 1. However, everything that moves has a "DV", which is calculated from Attributes, Abilities, and all manner of wacky things. The book describes it, and I don't have time to. In any case, when you attack anything with a DV, you subtract its DV from your successes (not your die pool) before comparing them to the difficulty (again, 1). This is called an external penalty. There are other external penalties, but DV is the biggest one.

Whenever you take an action, it has a DV rating (always negative). When you take that action, your DV decreases by that amount until it refreshes.

DV refreshing is also important to Charm use. Once you use a Charm, you cannot use any Charm with a different name until your DV refreshes, unless you've done a Combo.

------------------------------

Them's the basics. Notice that the rulebook is some 400 pages long (more like 300 if you ignore the flavor). That's because it's all a lot more complicated than this. I recommend you play an Exalted game or five before you try running. Look around the forums here. One starts up every couple weeks or so, and you'll generally get more consideration if you're new (we like to bring new people in).

Let us know if you have any specific questions (and I know you do, but you just didn't know where to start).

[Lexious]

Right... Jesus Christ. I guess I'm not DMing this for a LONG time. I'm having enough trouble teaching one of my more lazy players basic DnD and thought i'd get their attention with this anime-style thing. the game still seems interesting though, so I'll look around for a game. Thank you so much for the info, you've been (and will continue to be until I internalize all that) a big help! I will of course be using that as a reference after all so that my head doesn't pop off my shoulders.

[DeadManSleeping]

If you want anime style high action but DON'T want to break your head open with convoluted rules, here are some suggestions.

Big Eyes Small Mouth, an RPG that's obviously intended to reproduce anime of any genre. The system relies on having players who are out to have a fun game, not to "win" (there are a LOT of ways to break the game), but the system can reproduce just about anything, and it's pretty unified.

Strands of Fate is a generic system based around FATE, which has Exalted's philosophy of "good flavor = better numbers". While it can be used to do low-power, most of the rulebook is dedicated to high-power stuff. In fact, if you like Exalted's setting, there is a Strands of Fate: Exalted in progress (I'll hunt it down for you later). If you like FATE but not Strands of Fate (this does happen), there is also a super-simple FATE Exalted. I personally find that one so oversimplified that it's bad, but other people like it. I'll hunt down that one for you too.

If you want a complexity that you might find more familiar, GURPS can certainly reproduce Exalted's high power. I don't like it, though.

You might notice that all these recommendations are for generic, modular systems. This is no accident. Part of Exalted's problem is that it has a design philosophy based around something other than balance and inclusion. Because of this, new things keep getting their own, new rules, and there's a horrendous power creep. Exalted: Second Edition was made in the middle of this, so you end up with a mix of 'fixes' to rules that were broken that you never heard of, totally new rules that were introduced to cover oversights that would have been covered differently if the current ruleset had been around first, holdovers from back when the power level was WAY lower, and so on and so forth.

Unified systems are, as a rule, easier to use. If you're going to be forced to GM, and you have to pick up a new system to do what you want, go for one of the ones I mentioned. I'm not saying they're easy, but they're at least possible to run with only a first-encounter experience level.

[Kyeudo]

It is not as scary as it looks. I played all of one game of 1st Edition Exalted and one game of 2nd Edition Exalted before I started running Exalted myself. The rules aren't as complex as everyone makes out except for combat, but even then its fairly straight forward. OPTIMIZEd combat, on the other hand, is very complicated and you should avoid it, especially since it is unnecessary to the game.

More often than not, you roll a number of dice equal to whatever Attribute you'd think is appropriate plus the Ability that seems most relevant, count successes, and see if you have more than a certain number. Most often, that number is 5 or less, so you almost always succeed on anything you can scrounge up 10 dice or more on.

A lot of people who get into Exalted enjoy that its easy to homebrew for. The power level is high enough that you have fewer worries about breaking the game wide open and there are lots of places where you can houserule the game to your hearts content.

[Lexious]

House ruling you say? Hmm.. I never quite got a balanced homebrew for the Devil Fruit users a la One Piece for my DnD game. Exalted might be a little more useful for that then... Hm..

As for the suggested systems, I see what you mean about Exalted's kind of odd design philosophy. The game kind of seems all over the place from what i gleamed. And once again, the recommendation for GURPS agitates me as it remind some that not only is my book lost, possibly to HADES fro all I care for it is beyond my knowledge or reach, but when i got my Exalted book, I got it as a toss-up between that and a replacement GURPS book that I finally found. Eh, I'll make the most of Exalted for now _ spent good money getting it and it does seem interesting. I've encountered BESM before though. I think I had a pdf or something, or someone lent me a book. I remember it being kind of like GURPS in its character generation, but with specialisation in, what else, anime cliche.

Hmm... i think as soon as I see a game in progress I'll figure it out. I'm in the sort of course where teh key principal is to pick up the most abstract and illogical yet irrevocably binding things from the simplest example, so I've developed a bit of a skill for incredibly convoluted things. Next to Chemical Physics, how bad could Exalted be? (Then again, counting my first year in secondary school onwards, I've had about 7 years of study invested in that sort of topic).

DeadManSleeping, I believe you offered to Storytell in that PBP game I was signing up for. Would you care to guide me through there, then? I'd be most thankful. I learn by doing after all.

[Hiro Protagonest]

House ruling you say? Hmm.. I never quite got a balanced homebrew for the Devil Fruit users a la One Piece for my DnD game. Exalted might be a little more useful for that then... Hm..

Please tell me this is only a coincidence. :smalleek::smalltongue:


Exalted posters? Well then, I have a job for you homebrewers out there!
Make something for devil fruit powers! But there are so... many...

http://i.imgur.com/I0PCn.jpg

Of course, some of it's already been made.
http://i.imgur.com/0wsxe.jpg

Great minds think alike. :smallwink:

[Lexious]

Please tell me this is only a coincidence. :smalleek::smalltongue:



Great minds think alike. :smallwink:

Tee hee, well One Piece was a great story back in the day (I didn't really like the seperation arc - any arc that gives more screentime to Mr.3 and the Rocky Horror Picture Show from Krypton than Usopp, Nami, Robin and Zoro combined can't be great). It's an exciting adventure of exploration on the high seas, finding new and exciting adventures with a lot of creative fights and intrigue-laden conflict across many cultures, of friendship that binds people together to work togetehr towards the ultimate goal of greatness, and glory. That's a classic RPG right there - there really needs to be more One Piece stuff for everything. Exalted, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, whatever, it could benefit from One Piece homebrew.

[lightningcat]

Since my internet crashed once, here I go again.
Combat in Exalted is not that much more complicated than in other systems, but it is different. No Combat Rounds

You might want to check out pages 118 to 125 of the core book for some of the game terms you'll be running across. Pages 84 and 85 are your best friends when it come to character creation.

And remember that difficulty is how many successes you need on your dice pool roll. And a success is a 7 or higher on the d10.

As for initiative, Exalted has my favorite initiative system that I have run across. I prefer the Dice method mentioned on page 140. It means that your players have to pay some attention if they ever want a turn.