Exalted newbie

[Artanis]

I've just bought the Abyssals book, and I'm really interested in playing me some Exalted. The first step would undoubtedly be to make a character, already having a small group of friends who all have characters (who are all Solars, though) and I want to join them with a renegade Dusk caste.

The problems I'm having at this moment though, is what Primary, Secondary and Tertiary attributes are. Do I have a set amount according to my caste or do I pick 3 for myself?

The rest of the point distribution is a little clearer to me, but if I have any more questions I'll probably put them here.

If I understand what you're asking correctly...

The attributes are distributed into three sets of three: physical (strength, dexterity, and stamina), social (charisma, appearance, and manipulation), and mental (wits, perception, and intelligence). You choose one of Physical or Mental or Social as your Primary set, and you get 8 extra dots to distribute among the three stats in the set you chose. Chose a second as your Secondary, getting 6 dots to distribute among that set's three attributes, and the last set is your Tertiary, with 4 extra dots.


For example, Stabby McSolarGuy chooses Physical as primary, Mental as secondary, and Social as Tertiary. Each attribute automatically starts at 1. So he puts 8 more dots in his Physical attributes, and he decides to go with 4 (1+3) Strength, 4 (1+3) Dexterity, and 3 (1+2) Stamina. Then he takes six dots and adds them to his Mental scores, giving himself 3 (1+2) Perception, 2 (1+1) Intelligence, and 4 (1+3) Wits. Then he puts four dots into his Social attributes, buying 3 (1+2) Charisma, 2 (1+1) Manipulation, and 2 (1+1) Appearance.



Edit:

I think it's mostly second edition, but with a mixture of 1st since I'm using the Abyssals book from 1st edition. So far though I havn't seen any differences.

There's a few fairly significant differences in mechanics, but as far as I can tell, the fluff is effectively identical. It would be a pain to translate Abyssal mechanics (such as Charms) directly into second edition, BUT Abyssals have the advantage of being...well...being anti-Solars. So if all else fails, you can just build a Solar and rename everything to sound eeeeevil