So.. what's up with Exalted?

[Dusk Eclipse]

Ok, I'll bite, I have been reading Key-chain of Creation and got really, really interested in exalted. So I want to ask the playground what do they think about the system.

I have investigated a bit (read: using Wikipedia) and I have to say that I really like what I am reading, the story of creation and the exalted is quite good.

In all I am really interested in the game and I might want to try it sometime soon; but first I want to hear your opinions on the game.

[The Rose Dragon]

The setting, while often quite overhyped, is really really awesome. It has many different facets, and you're probably going to find one you are going to like if you look long enough.

The system is in a vegetative state. It is riddled with numerous crippling problems in its combat systems, a lack of mechanics for several aspects of the game and a schizophrenic mass of freelancers who fail to communicate with each other when working on the game.

That said, it is still my fourth favorite game, because it's a terrific read even if you never play.

[Fouredged Sword]

It is white wolf, so you need good comunication with ST and party OOC to make the system work. On the other hand it's white wolf, so the story tends to be awsome when you get through the rules.

[Tengu_temp]

The system is actually pretty good, as long as you don't play with people who try to break it and/or rules-lawyer their way through everything. Its balance is very fragile.

The books really need a better editor. The order of things is non-intuitive, and important information is often hard to find. On the plus side, they're very fun to read when you're not looking for a specific bit of rules.

Don't let the "dinosaurs that piss heroine" meme get to you. They're a very rare, minor part of one region of the whole world. Judging by how overused this meme is, one'd get the impression that they're running all over the place.

[golentan]

As a game system, it's meh. The mechanics are screwy and unbalanced at every turn. As a vehicle for the game, it's awesome. If you're playing plot and character driven games using the mechanics as a chassis, there are pitfalls but it works great. You can build almost any kind of character imaginable, and they will be playable and have utility: including the mechanics having a direct relationship with the fluff.

But it doesn't work if you come into it from a DnD or similar mindset, be warned.

[Fouredged Sword]

It can get.... wierd. Be prepared to suspend disbelief. Then punch somebody into a duck.

[Dusk Eclipse]

The setting, while often quite overhyped, is really really awesome. It has many different facets, and you're probably going to find one you are going to like if you look long enough.

The system is in a vegetative state. It is riddled with numerous crippling problems in its combat systems, a lack of mechanics for several aspects of the game and a schizophrenic mass of freelancers who fail to communicate with each other when working on the game.

That said, it is still my fourth favorite game, because it's a terrific read even if you never play.

Care to explain what do you mean by vegetative? also I am glad the books can be read just a fluff, that is part of what got me into RPGs

It is white wolf, so you need good comunication with ST and party OOC to make the system work. On the other hand it's white wolf, so the story tends to be awsome when you get through the rules.

Currently I am with a "bad" group, so I doubt it would work, based on what you said; but right now I am not sure if I want to play it, I was just curious because I just finished head to toe Key chain of creation.

The system is actually pretty good, as long as you don't play with people who try to break it and/or rules-lawyer their way through everything. Its balance is very fragile.

The books really need a better editor. The order of things is non-intuitive, and important information is often hard to find. On the plus side, they're very fun to read when you're not looking for a specific bit of rules.

Don't let the "dinosaurs that piss heroine" meme get to you. They're a very rare, minor part of one region of the whole world. Judging by how overused this meme is, one'd get the impression that they're running all over the place.

Ok fragile balance, I need to take that into account if I ever get to play it (self apointed min/maxer and rules layer of my group XD); never heard that meme about Dinosaur pissing heroine (I think I saw a de-motivator about dinosaurs on F-16... but that's it).

As a game system, it's meh. The mechanics are screwy and unbalanced at every turn. As a vehicle for the game, it's awesome. If you're playing plot and character driven games using the mechanics as a chassis, there are pitfalls but it works great. You can build almost any kind of character imaginable, and they will be playable and have utility: including the mechanics having a direct relationship with the fluff.

But it doesn't work if you come into it from a DnD or similar mindset, be warned.

I am more of a mechanic driven player; but I now a DM who is all about story telling, even when playing D&D.... he knows the ST system well so I might convince him to run Exalted in the future (when I get a more consistent group). And I might have to change my mindset..

It can get.... wierd. Be prepared to suspend disbelief. Then punch somebody into a duck.

errr do you mean punching people so hard they turn into ducks (which is awesome) or punching people with dusks. (less but still awesome)

In all it looks that purchasing the books (second edition for what I remember from wikipedia) will not be a bad idea, as the books seems worthwhile if just for the read; and maybe I can get a good game running.

Food for the though [/Illithihd].... ok I'll stop the bad puns...

[The Rose Dragon]

Care to explain what do you mean by vegetative? also I am glad the books can be read just a fluff, that is part of what got me into RPGs

Vegetative as in it's not dead, but it's pretty close.

[Kylarra]

errr do you mean punching people so hard they turn into ducks (which is awesome) or punching people with dusks. (less but still awesome)

there's a sidereal martial arts charm that allows you to change the shape of the person you hit. I'm not actually sure where the duck part came in.

[pffh]

"dinosaurs that piss heroine"

Wait, what? I now feel like I must get this system.

[Xefas]

I have investigated a bit (read: using Wikipedia) and I have to say that I really like what I am reading, the story of creation and the exalted is quite good.

I found this to be more informative than the wikipedia article. Or, at the best least, it's a nice information supplement. The setting and style is where Exalted shines, and why it drew me in, personally. It's probably my favorite setting for any roleplaying game (even more than Planescape, which is hard for me to say). Reading the books brings me back to the old 2nd edition D&D Monster Manual and Planescape stuff, where I'd read them just because they were awesome, even before I ever found a group to play with.

As a roleplaying game, it's pretty good. Not the best, but pretty good. Its stunt system gets everyone involved and thinking about their character. Sure, you can just say "I stab the guy", but the game offers mechanical incentive to do better than that. You're rewarded for being interesting and keeping the rest of the table engaged.

Virtues and The Other Thing (Virtue Flaw/Clarity/Resonance/Torment/etc) are nice ways to bridge the gap between mechanics and roleplay. You can say your character is a caring, loving soul, and sure, they might be, but that doesn't mean jack. If you spend some points and say "I am Compassion 5. I have am a ****ing caring soul." then you can actually use that Compassion in play to give you bonuses on helping others and being selfless and loving. Conversely, your character is going to have a hard time murdering every helpless Joe you find and looting his corpse D&D style (although this is helped by the fact that you'll almost never care about loot that anyone drops - money isn't measured in individual pieces, and no one but the strongest dudes in Creation have any magic items worthy of note). If you want to do something vicious, you'd have to roll your Compassion to see if your character can bring himself to do it.

The Other Thing each Exalt type has just kinda enforces that your character be like the setting says your character should be. Abyssals stab babies and don't save babies from fires. The game gives you mechanical incentive to act this way, by hitting you with Resonance if you save babies instead of stabbing them. You're welcome to fight this archetype, but the game says that Abyssals must struggle and fight for redemption - and that it's friggin' hard for them to do so. And, yes, the game makes it hard for you to do so by making you explode with Resonance after you save a certain amount of babies in lieu of stabbing them.

Then there's Motivations (which I don't like) and Intimacies (which I do), but I could go on about those for a while, and I don't want this post to be too much longer than it already is.

As far as roleplaying games go, my scale is probably:
Burning Wheel
Mouse Guard
Shock: Social Science Fiction
Exalted
<Everything Else I've Ever Played>
The various D&Ds

As a skirmish-based fighting/war game, it's...hard to say. It has a vast amount of good ideas, but a few key ones weren't executed terribly well. Combat still takes balls longer than it should, and it suffers from a few binary problems once you get up to Essence 4ish and start fighting Old Testament God and what-not. He'll try to Shape you into a pillar of salt or hit the country you're in with a tower of brimstone or something, and the only defense is a Perfect Defense. Perfect Defenses are cool...but not all the time.

It's kind of ironic, but I think I'd put 4th Edition D&D pretty close to the top of the pile as far as skirmish-based tactical fighting games go. Above Exalted, certainly.

[Drascin]

there's a sidereal martial arts charm that allows you to change the shape of the person you hit. I'm not actually sure where the duck part came in.

Ducks are just inherently funny animals. If you can change the shape of someone by punching them really hard in the face, why not into a duck?

Anyway, as to OP's question: More or less what the others said. The setting is pretty good - it has its idiocies, but on average it's a really good read. The mechanics are really bad and contradictory in dozens of places, several of its systems barely work at all (poor Mass Combat...), and characters are made of tissue paper (don't let all the fluff about being awesome-invincible and Exalts not bleeding and such get to you. People die easily when they do get hit in this game), and I'd says that whoever edits the books is drunk, except I'm not sure they actually have an editor, given how randomly everything seems to be placed .

Still worth a try, though. Make sure to buy a lot of d10s.

[Reynard]

Ducks are just inherently funny animals. If you can change the shape of someone by punching them really hard in the face, why not into a duck?

Same charm also lets you punch someone out of existence. I don't know why people focus on it's shape-shifting option.

Still worth a try, though. Make sure to buy a lot of d10s.

Or use this.

But yes, Setting > Crunch. Exalted's crunch can be... irritating a lot of times, and there are still things in the Core book that haven't been Errata'd despite glaring mistakes. Phantom-Conjuring Performance is just one of the more stupidly obvious ones.

[Drascin]

Same charm also lets you punch someone out of existence. I don't know why people focus on it's shape-shifting option.

Because, again, ducks are funnier than just erasing someone from reality - besides, killing people so hard they dissappear is pretty usual in fantasy, but turning them into ducks with a haymaker isn't .

[Warlawk]

It can get.... wierd. Be prepared to suspend disbelief. Then punch somebody into a duck.

That is quite possibly one of the most epic single statement reviews for an RPG I have ever seen. Sigworthy even.

Have a duck.

[SurlySeraph]

Note that at high levels, there's a trick that could let you punch every person in the world so hard they turn into a duck simultaneously. It's known as the Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick.

The fluff is totally awesome, the crunch... yeah. I'm new to the system, but there are some bad elements that are glaringly obvious. As far as I can tell, the root of it is that characters aren't actually particularly tough. You run a noticeable risk of being one-shotted with a fairly cheap weapon at pretty much any experience level. There's an easy way around it, which is to use Perfect Defenses all the time. It's usually pretty easy to negate the things that would theoretically counter perfect defenses (i.e. surprise attacks, flurries of attacks so that using a perfect defense against each gets prohibitively expensive, using social skills instead of fighting). Optimized builds are all pretty similar. They just use a stack of defensive abilities that nothing can get through each turn, while making attacks that don't cost anything and are potentially devastating so their opponent is forced to do the same thing, and wait to see who runs out of power first.

Outside of optimized play, the system seems convoluted but mostly fine. The detailed rules around social skills and motivations seem really good, though apparently they suffer from the same perfect defense issues as physical combat.

[Yuki Akuma]

Here, have some quotes.

Exalted not only jumped the shark, it jumped the whole damned ocean. The force of the leap was so great that water and hapless sharks alike were pulled along in Exalted's wake, scattering the sunlight into a million rainbow shards and ominous pelagic silhouettes. Just before landing, Exalted turned around and started running back along the backs of the sharks as they flew, razor teeth foremost, directly into the camp of Those Other Games, who were caught napping and consumed.

Its enemies defeated or awestruck, Exalted then proceeded to engage in an epic kung fu battle against a convenient local mountain range, merely as an encore.

The Fonz "heyed", for at long last the phrase for lameness he had unwittingly inspired was so thoroughly subverted by Exalted's action that The Fonz was cool again merely by association.

Exalted is a game where one of your main antagonists is Death, Creator of the Underworld. Except there's several of him, probably six or seven. Oh, and he's got 13 dread henchmen, one of whom was probably you at some point in time. Also, Hell has a personal grudge against you this time. Did I mention Magical America regularly trains and sends ninjas out for you personally? Ninjas specially trained in ass-kicking? Which, if they won't work, they keep giant robotic suits of armor on reserve for. Oh, and the Transformers have united under Omicron, and are invading. The Jedi have corrupted Heaven and usurped your rightful place as the Masters of Everything. Your ex-wife just dropped by, and she's a two thousand year old shape-changing man-eating monster now, interested in maybe going on a date next Thursday. Your best friend from your last life and while growing up now seeks to cover all the lands of Middle Earth in darkness, if he can just find this damn ring. And your God has the world's biggest crack habit, and needs some serious rehab.

Any sufficiently advanced kung-fu is indistinguishable from magic.

Yeah, it's that sort of game.

[Reluctance]

Pretty much what everybody else is saying. The core book is worth the price even if you never play the game, simply for the ability to cannibalize it for ideas for other systems.

[Arbane]

Oh, one thing - while Exalted's setting is something of a Fantasy Kitchen Sink, it's a kitchen sink with all the usual Tolkienisms/D&Disms carefully removed. The setting's alternately Bronze Age and Post-Apocalyptic with very little pseudo-Medieval Europe, humans are the only usual playable race (except maybe Fair Folk, and they're technically not "people"), and you start out pretty much at the top of the mundane foodchain, but you have to work your way UP from there.

[wadledo]

And finally, the crunch is currently undergoing a massive revamp, meaning that some (but admittedly not all) of the problems with the system have been at least modified, if not fixed.

People will say otherwise, but people also say that Eclipses shouldn't have anima powers at all.