Exalted 3e

just curious what people's thoughts about the newest edition of exalted. I used to run and play exalted hardcore and was just gifted a copy of the PDF. I haven't had a chance to read much but I heard the combat system is totally redone and wonky. How is it?

I'll let you know in a month. The guy who does the best Exalted 3e AP podcast, Swallows of the South is going to be running a trial game for our podcast network and I'm playing! If you haven't had a listen, I highly recommend it. It's a bit rough at first, but by episode 4 or 5 it starts coming together.

The mechanics read better than 1e—I missed 2e—and the difference between combat and social rules really seem to reinforce the theme of the type of conflict.

I think this sums up the game nicely..

I've read through the combat portion and it seems like any other classic oWoD combat, mostly. However, the difference between the Withering Attacks and the Decisive Attacks seems totally appropriate and I think it could be really fun in a game.

I'm also going to play in the game EldritchFire mentioned, so hopefully we can get some good discussion going after we experience it first-hand.

I'm GMing a game of 3e currently. I still love the setting and I think the rules are a vast improvement over previous editions. That's not to say it's without its flaws. It's a d10 system, more or less the same dice mechanic form the Storyteller system from World of Darkness

I think the narrative combat concept is great. The idea is that combatants trade withering attacks to build Initiative (a mix of combat advantage as well as combat order). You can then cash in that Initiative to land decisive blows that do actual damage.

The social influence system is really nice too. You determine a set of characters, ideals or...things that you're character cares about and that define the character's motivations. All social encounters revolve around determining the other characters intimacies and leveraging those to get what you want.

I think the biggest issue people have with the game is that there are about a million powers to choose from. Each one is tied to a given Ability and there's easily 20-30 charms per ability. And they're mechanics are all basically exceptions to the normal rules of the game that can only be used at specific times or on certain kinds of rolls. It can be tough to keep all that organized.

I've been running Exalted 3e, too. I really love the lore of this world, but that hasn't changed between editions. I missed 1e Exalted and read into 2e a bit, but never actually played it. Had a lot of friends that did, and they typically said good things about it, but I missed out on that. Like WarDomo said, it has cinematic combat of sparks flying as swords clash and ring off of armor when characters are doing this tug-o-war of Initiative, and then the fight comes to this great, climactic moment as someone with enough built up Initiative just rolls a pile of 20+ dice, killing their opponent instantly, often enough.

It does have its flaws, though. If your character is built like a tank---you've chosen Resistance as your strongest Ability, you've got all of the special powers and you've got the strongest armor---there isn't much keeping your enemies from building up Initiative on your squishier allies and then slamming you with a big Decisive attack. There's a note in the book that if an opponent is helpless, the GM should just have the next Withering attack kill him off so that players can't just farm Initiative off of it. But that little note doesn't seem to cover if the opponent (or the player) is still in fighting shape, but is just easier to hit than the tanky guy.

But there are some great things about it, such as the social system and the crafting system. I haven't seen either of them done quite as well in other games.

My players definitely find the Charms to be the hardest part about character creation, but I always thought it'd be fun to pick out those special abilities. They're all pretty interesting. Even some that let you create life and land.

I found this, though, and it seems to help a ton when dealing with charms: Charm Cascades