And you have a chance to make it right.Įxalted will always win me over for epicness of its setting, a scale almost unimaginable in your average D&D game-massive battles everywhere, intense intrigue and diplomacy akimbo, where characters shake the pillars of Creation. And now you’ve reincarnated, several thousand years later, with the descendants of your killers in control of your old toys-magitech and powerful artifacts. Your viziers foresaw you going insane and destroying creation, so they had your footsoldiers rise up against you. You’re playing bronze-age fantasy painted in broad anime strokes, where you’re the reincarnation of one of the god-kings of old. It has some of the most epic scope you can ever imagine. I wanted a little more Fate or Cortex+ in my Exalted, dammit it needed streamlining, not more bloat.īut there is just so damn much about the setting to LOVE. This is a game where the subsystems for “fight a battle on land” and “fight a battle on sea or in air” were different and incompatible, where the “bloated” tick-and-battle-wheel initiative system was replaced by even more byzantine rules. pdf, but when I did I realized that Ex3 wasn’t the Exalted I was expecting-this wasn’t the game I wanted, but is what the designers were ready to build. I’ve only skimmed part of the pre-release. Then there were the Ink Monkeys, and the Exalted 3rd Kickstarter, which promised a highly-playtested game that was mere months away when I backed it, back in the summer of 2013. 1st Edition was its own mess, and while 2nd polished up the rules and added some cool new stuff, it was still imperfect. Editorial insight at the time of Exalted 2nd Edition was focused elsewhere, and writers would come up with whatever cool-yet-contradictory shit that they wanted. Exalted fans take the Scroll for granted. I could go on, but I think the fact that the game has over 200 pages of clarifications and revisions-the Scroll of Errata, aka Exalted 2.5-should be enough to point out how many things were screwed up about this game. Social combat is an exploitable mess made out of the normal combat rules, a good way for one attacker to whittle away at others’ willpower without much fear of retribution. Lunars and Sidereals never really seemed playable out of the box, even though we tried. Sorcery had a high buy-in cost without a whole lot of immediate reward… until you’re throwing Flying Guillotines around and decapitating people. That’s pretty standard for Exalted fans, the 2-3 pages full of bonuses and balance fixes, because while much of the game “worked” (if you squint), a lot of it falls apart under heavy scrutiny. On the other hand, it’s like coming home to find that your childhood bedroom was kept perfectly intact, still full of your old toys and racecar bed and various other crap you’ve either forgotten or outgrown.Įxalted was never really a “complete” game, as my three pages of house rules would attest to. Unlike them, though, we could only wish for a CCG property based on our RPG of choice, and made due with the War for the Throne… a boardgame that was a lot like like Risk, if Risk was Exalted-based, and the board consisted only of Australia, and the rules were kind of sucky and stuff. My group played it obsessively, almost obsessively as the inbred L5R group played their Asian-themed CCG and RPG. It was an odd thing, especially as it was the glorious heydey of White Wolf, the one product line that was rumored to outsell all their other lines combined. Exalted was the RPG I lived and breathed in college.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |