Game Synopsis: Exalted

Exalted is a wonderful game that captivates the imagination. It combines the best aspects of anime, Greek myth, and high-action pulp fantasy into a cohesive model of magic, wonder, and power. Characters start as humans imbued by the gods with all the potential to become greater than the gods themselves, and it encourages a creative urge that lies beyond the simple hack-and-slash, “I hit him with my sword” model that tends to roll out of less inspired games.

The problem with all this inspiration is that it leads to, well, creative chaos. Exalted spans dozens of books, boasts pages and pages of errata and extra goodies, and yet has received precious little in the way of printed system updates. New players are generally unlikely to stumble into the game’s many pitfalls until the setting murders them mercilessly, up until which point the game is filled with drama and tension. The setting itself is a unique masterwork of ideas, from a rich cosmology to a number of twists that turns fantasy tropes on their ear, so it is a shame that the system fails so hard.

Why does it fail so hard? Well, adventurous reader, read on.

Ultra High Lethality: At low levels, Exalted is a game that deals primarily in real numbers and comprehensible status effects. Your character either dodges a big sword, or he doesn’t, and if he gets hit, he stumbles back a bit and gets back up, capable of handling a handful of such whacks. The magic powers of the Exalted – the chosen champions of the gods – might hinder your character’s stats or compel you to take some action, but it’s all standard fantasy give-and-take, even if it occurs with substantially more pizazz and special effects.

The trouble is, once your characters have been through perhaps 15-30 sessions, something changes. Appropriate level challenges suddenly kill your characters in one or two hits (if they hit) or render you unable to take an actions for the remainder of the combat. Some effects literally cause your soul to fall off, or turn you into a chicken, or whatever, and that’s it, new character.  Some attacks cause hundreds of damage, in a system where characters have somewhere between 7 and 20 health levels for their entire career. This is besides the fact that powerful NPCs can attack you a dozen times or completely ignore your attacks all the while. It’s a system that is extremely unforgiving.

Paranoia Combat: Of course, the game allows you to defend yourself from these deadly attacks. For (almost) every attack, there is an appropriate defense, and these defenses are, at the mid to upper end, all or nothing. You pay a pittance in the game’s power-currency (“essence”; a given character probably has around 100 “motes” of essence) and you completely ignore the attack, no matter how powerful or lethal. Of course, certain defenses only block certain things; you need a “Surprise Negator” to ignore a surprise attack,  you need a perfect Dodge defense to roll out of the way of an attack, you need a third defense to avoid being turned into a chicken, and so forth. At lower levels, these things are an awesome enhancement that can make your character immune to a single category of effects; but at higher levels, since, if you don’t block the effect you just die, they basically become a shell game. Do you have the right invulnerability for this bad guy? If you do, proceed to endless combat where two invincible opponents try to run each other out of essence. If not, you die. That’s it, end of game.

This means players with even marginal experience with the game will begin to develop defense suites that defend against any and all effects. And why wouldn’t they? A single hole in your armor can be the difference between invincibility and being turned into a chicken, having your character sheet burnt and then smelted into chicken feed. The difference in capabilities is staggering, and it requires an extremely diligent Storyteller to make sure that his players are challenged without being utterly destroyed. The need and tendency – even for new players who still haven’t mastered the system – to lean on these all-encompassing defense suites has been dubbed “Paranoia Combat” by the community (so-called because you need to be paranoid about the sorts of effects the ST is going to throw at you), and it is the destination of almost all games that exist beyond the first several months of play, due to the ultra high lethality problem. Players want to keep playing. So they try to become invincible to anything that might instantly kill them.

Hours Long Combat: So picture this: you have two equally invincible demigods taking whacks at each other until one of them either makes a fatal and unlikely mistake, or until one or the other runs out of some mystical currency (essence, in this case) and can no longer power her invulnerability, at which point she dies in about three seconds. While this is well documented in the source material (anime, for instance), it is incredibly boring to see in action, particularly if you have a party of five characters and they aren’t all involved or equally invulnerable.  Net result? Entire games dominated by go-nowhere combat sessions. It’s weird, because the game seems to encourage guitar-solo, mega-epic final showdowns, but the showdowns themselves are mechanically uninteresting. “Okay, he hits you with his death-combo, Jerry. What do you do? Oh, you activate your cheap, all encompassing invulnerability power, gotcha. Well, cool, it’s your turn.”

Multiple Player Discrepancies: Now, the above can actually be sort of neat if you shift the game away from personal confrontation and realize that, at this point, your game is now about what happens to the characters’ loved ones and friends, about collateral damage and world-changing motivations (though at that point you’ve essentially abandoned the system) than it is about one-on-one interaction, but there’s another problem. Rarely does the entire player group build their characters precisely the same way. This means that one character might be invincible and/or unstoppable in a given confrontation while the other players, should they dip their feet into that particular pool, have them sheered away by caustic acid (acid being a metaphor for deadly combat, in this case.) So all players must be guided to build their characters at a similar pace, or else all players must accept that one character is going to hog all the screen time in some situations. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that the game’s most grandiose confrontations can last for hours (see above); and the ones that require that the most invincible character participate tend to be the most grandiose.

Offensively Unnecessary Complexity: People dog on AD&D for being needlessly complex; about the mix of high target numbers (you want to roll high on Saving Throws and attack rolls, versus wanting to roll low on Ability checks, for instance), about the math (why is Armor Class a negative number? Why would you willingly use THAC0? Why is the most simple and frequent check in the game (seeing if you hit an opponent) derived through subtraction?), and a host of other supplemental material that was more confusing than helpful. But I gotta tell you, it doesn’t hold a candle to Exalted.

Exalted is like a duck trying to balance on a large sheet of plywood, which is in turn balancing on eggs that are covered in motor oil, without  crushing them or falling over. Making an attack roll is absurdly complex. Read the following at your own risk:

First, you add together your Attribute (a number between 1 and 5 that represents your innate talent, usually Dexterity) and your Ability  (another number between 1 and 5 that represents your trained skill; this would be a combat Ability, so Melee, Archery, Martial Arts or Thrown). This will generate a number between one and ten. Then you look at your weapon’s Accuracy bonus and add it to this roll. Then you roll this number of ten-sided dice, counting every 7, 8, or 9 as a success. 10’s count as 2 successes. If your total successes exceeds you’re opponent’s Defense Value, you have hit; otherwise, you miss. This is complicated by the fact that you can make multiple attacks in a single round, called a Flurry. To make a flurry, you figure out the total number of actions you’re taking in a round and subtract that from the initial dice pool, subtracting one further die from each successive roll. Your opponent suffers a -1 penalty to his Defense Value for each attack he is subject to in a flurry, due to a rule called Onslaught.

If you hit, you have to derive your Raw Damage. This is a total of your Strength, your weapon’s Damage Value, and any successes on the attack roll in excess of your opponent’s Defense Value. If this number is higher than the Hardness of your opponent’s armor, you will deal damage; if it is not, it is too puny of a blow to harm him. Then, you subtract your opponent’s Soak (a number derived from a combination of his Stamina and his armor) from your Raw Damage and roll that. If this number would be lower than your Essence trait, you roll your Essence Trait instead. If your original Raw Damage (your damage value before subtracting soak, remember) is lower than your Essence Trait, however, you roll the Raw Damage instead. Finally, after rolling damage, each success (7, 8, 9, or 10; 10’s don’t count twice on damage rolls) applies one level of damage to the opponent.

This is just for a fairly basic attack. You can coordinate attacks, get bonuses from Artifacts or from narrative descriptions (called “stunts” in the game’s cant). And this doesn’t even get into the fairly complicated timing rules.

Redundancy and Irrelevancy: There are a number of abilities that simply aren’t as cool or useful as attack powers (or social powers, but more on that in a second.) There are some abilities, for instance, that make you not need to eat food, or abilities that make you able to teach normal mortals Math at an accelerated pace. These things, while cool, are quickly dismissed as largely background flavor, but still something you need to pay in experience for. Some magical abilities (called Charms) simply aren’t balanced properly, either way too good (lacking a way to defend against them or avoid them) or way too bad (doing next to nothing, such as adding a single die in a game where typically you need a cup to properly roll all of your dice.)

There are other things of questionable value. In Exalted you might, for instance, have an Artifact whose magic exceeds the power of some major gods, which can reshape the way your character plays the game or the way the world responds to her. We are talking about an item so powerful, it exceeds Charms your character can reasonably acquire over the course of the game, outstripping all but similarly equipped foes. For the same price, your character can have a talking horse.

Internal Inconsistency: Exalted suffers from a lot of problems both in its setting and history, and in its systemic design, that simply aren’t accountable. For instance, Exalted uses a (again, needlessly complex) Mass Combat system designed to simulate the clash of armies. Now, let’s say we have a character who is impervious to the blows of normal mortals: you can whack him with swords all day and he’ll just sort of shrug and do his nails. One would think that, given Exalted’s epic scale, he’d shrug off the blows of any number of mortals – like say, I don’t know, 20 to 50 – right? Apparently, because of a quirk in the system, the moment we shift to the Mass Combat scale – for which there is no real cutoff, since 10 dudes can be modeled in either system – our invincible swordsman could realistically be killed. Or unrealistically, as it were. If superman was suddenly vulnerable to bullets in a movie, the moment we panned out to a massive one-man-versus-an-army battle, the audience would be very confused. The same thing happens here.

This is discounting the dozens of times one author mistakenly says one thing while a different author says another, resulting in a complete contradiction in the setting. These things are occasionally handled with errata, but just as often, some third author tries to concoct a bizarre reason why both of the original writers were actually correct. Consider this. Your friend Jim says that God is an almighty creature who is good at heart and watches over all of us. Consider that your friend Terry says that God is a goldfish who lives in a bowl and is named Scales. Stephanie tries to make them both right, saying that they were actually talking about two different creatures that are both called God. A certain amount of this is okay, but it’s really just frustrating, as you have to read at least two different books to figure out what the canon explanation is for something.

So why would anyone want to play this game? I highly recommend it if you enjoy a game that allows sky-is-the-limit PC protagonism. Your PCs want to overthrow God? Sure, in Exalted, they can do that, although he has four arms and is made of golden light. If you have the patience to make sure the things above don’t happen, to really wrangle the story, than do it, at least once. You will see these problems emerge. Every time someone says they don’t see these problems, I tell them to give it 6 months. Either the game dies, or they pop their ugly head right up into the game. Exalted has a setting that has to be seen to be believed, and that alone is worth a play. But I mean, the rules have already got dozens of pages of errata, and if you even want to run the game for any length of time, you’re almost guaranteed to come up with reams of your own. It is a semi-polished game with a lot of heart, and if you can wade through the rules, it can be a lot of fun. I warn to make sure all players are on the same page. If one character is vastly more competent, particularly in combat, then you either need to slow them down or speed everyone else up.

Exalted is fun. Just make sure you’re willing to do a lot of the work, because the book only meets you half way.

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