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BEFORE THE REVIEW
White Wolf is a company that generates a lot of passions, both positive and negative. I have no personal bias for or against the company. In fact, I own none of its other games, basically for a lack of interest in their settings. I waited for their fantasy delivery to get a glimpse into the Storyteller world. It finally came into being with Exalted. For several weeks I’ve been mentioning that I would review this game. I also provide clues about what I thought about the game. Finally here is the review at your disposal.
You should be aware that not long ago I participated actively in a forum that compared Exalted with RuneQuest. I hadn’t written the present review of Exalted at the time. You can go and see it for yourself by linking into http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=c5a9c5ea3036c0a0bf9da3efa6c2f2f0&threadid=22513
STYLE
Exalted is a big and solid, hard-bounded book of 352 pages. Text is presented in two columns in a variant of Times 10 type. The book is black & white except for the external cover and maps in the inside covers that are in colour.
The text is not typos free, far from that, but I recorded none that would be too compromising.
A thing that really put me off was how pretentious the writing can be at times. This has a lot to do with the setting itself (I’ll get back at this in a moment) but also with the attitude of the designers. For instance, they keep saying that it is your game, so you do as you please (ok, it can be said once but Exalted keeps saying it until you want to shout at them “I heard it, stop repeating the same mantra”), but at the same time the designers think they can qualify some of the people that indulge in playing their game as “chowderheads” for playing this or that way the designers don’t subscribe to. Nice, no?
And then there are useless, stupid and patronizing calls like “Exalted is not really the secret history of the world”, or “Combat in Exalted should be cool”, or even that the rules for diseases “should not replace formal medical advice or treatment”.
All of this is just pretentious idiocy that the authors of the book should have avoided in the first place.
The art varies between the average (most of it) the occasionally good (say, pp. 34-35 or p. 102), and plenty of mediocre pieces thrown into the lot (like the cover or pp. 62-63). On the plus side art is strongly connected to the text, thus serving the purpose of illustrating it. This should always be the case with RPG books but unfortunately it is not necessarily the norm.
Other illustrative materials include fiction (that I could live without in most cases) and examples (that I could live with more).
For referencing purposes the book has the obligatory table of contents at the beginning and a three pages index in the end. Somewhere inside there’s a glossary. All right pages mention at the top the chapter and what’s its content.
The book has a clear and logical structure. This is not to say that it is well structured. First, you need to understand that this is an omnibus book meaning that it aims at including everything need to allow a game to steam up. In other words, it includes both the data for GM plus players and data for GMs only, both data on the system and data on the setting. I personally prefer to have the player’s book and the GM book separated, but I perfectly accept an omnibus book if it is structured like a game book. This is not the case with Exalted, though.
A game book must focus on driving the reader to the game. In RPGs that usually means to place you as soon as possible in the toes of a character and to provide a basic understanding of the setting and the system so that you can play right away. If a book forces you to go through pages and pages of setting data or useless fiction (useless in the sense that it is not connected with playing – remember, I’m talking about game books); if it presents the system linearly, without a breakup that facilitates learning; if it lacks enough in-game examples; if it mixes GM data with player data; it means it is not well structured. All of this happens in Exalted.
352 pages. Even if we take away all the art and the tables, it still makes for a hell lot of text. The book could have exactly the same content but distributed in a different way so that the focus would be in turning the reader into a gamer, not turning a gamer into a reader. This is a faulty structure.
352 pages. One of the reasons why this book is so long is because it has its good share of useless blurb (for instance, do you really need to be told that “sharing dice between players is perfectly acceptable, but it can slow things at times”?) and because the authors write too much for what they have to say (like taking 5 long paragraphs to say two things: First, that you need to know the rules, and second that you have to prepare your game).
Summing it up, Exalted falls somewhere between 3 and 4 on what concerns style. I’ll be lenient and give it a 4.
SUBSTANCE I – SETTING
I read Exalted once. I read it twice. I did it even before warming for this review. There was something strange. It seemed not to register. No more than a couple of hours after going through the book and I couldn’t remember what it was all about. The same happened even in the process of reviewing the game. Heck, even now that the review is done I fail to register a clear picture of the world of Exalted. And I read the book four or five times. Why this inability to remember what Exalted is all about? That’s a question that says a lot about Exalted’s setting.
The first thing I realised is that the setting is to a great extent a repackaging of ideas that have been done to death. Don’t believe me? Let’s see:
For a start we have geography. You have a coast. To the west of a continent. For which you don’t know the exact boundaries to the east, north or south. Like, say, in Europe? Middle Earth? And how many other look-a-likes?
Second we have the mythical cycles. We are in the second age (it actually could be the third age, it depends on how we look at the past). The first age was a Golden Age. That imploded. Like Greek mythology. Like Middle Earth. Like. Glorantha. Like etc., etc., etc.
At the core of the game world there’s an Empire. Corrupt. With legions and senators. And we are in Rome. And we are in any of the countless empires that plague fantasy and sci-fi.
I could go on. To be fair, one can develop interesting settings based on well trodden ground. Wharhammer comes to my mind right now. But it can only happen if the designers avoid what comes next.
The second reason to the why Exalted is so uninteresting is the bubblegum approach to “make it different” . For instance, take the Indian and East Asian inspiration. How cool. True, not many games have castes, sutras (but with no kama, hellas), Chinese-like ideograms – or whatever they are called – in each page, etc. The problem is that it does not go past the level of depth you can get from your Rough Guide to Asia or your Travel magazines. But… hey, it’s there, no? It makes different. It makes cool. Sure.
Oh, did you notice how different dwarves and elves are, how unique, how… you get the idea. Ann Rice would be proud to remark that the designers were able to do to dwarves and elves what she did to vampires. Great.
The third reason why the setting is so bland and uninspiring is because it is so superficial and stereotyped. One just needs to look at the lack of detail in the map to sense there is something wrong with this game. But there is much worst. You see, to quote Steve Darlington, RPGs live on characters. Exalted made me value this treasure of a thought. Because… there are no characters in Exalted! All you can find are anonymous stereotypes. You have gods, heroes, Solar Exalted, other Sidereal Exalted, Terrestrial Exalted, Dragons, etc., etc., etc. But none are characters. None has something that’s unique and individual. They are all prototypes. Faceless. Nameless. With no individual history, with no personality, mo motives, no purposes.
I think about other settings. Greco-Roman mythology with its Achiles, Hercules, et all. Glorantha with its Red Godess, Orlanth, Garrath, etc. Middle Earth. Stormbringer. Earthsea. The Book of the New Sun. Yes, Steve is right. RPGs need characters, strong characters, inspiring characters. There is not a single one in Exalted that could provide some hope that this setting is going somewhere.
The forth reason is the exact complementary of the previous ones. Exalted suffers of a quantity over quality syndrome. You have 11 houses in the Empire. Plenty of cities with populations above 1 million. Dozens of cultures. Everything is grand, “over-the-top” (an expression the game designers seem to love given how frequently they like to point to it), extreme. If only the game designers had opted to loose less time in collecting “cool” ideas, and to spend more time developing in depth just a selected few.
All of this leads to an inconsistent setting where there is no visible purpose to play: You are to be a Solar Exalted, a super-human like those that lead the world in the Golden Age only to be wiped out for the next age(s) (one or two, depends on how you look at it). Now, there’s nothing to connect you to that distant past. You turned into a Solar Exalted by a choice of the gods when you reached puberty meaning that you get cool powers but don’t know why you received that gift, specially since most likely you ignore everything about the long gone age when Solars ruled. Furthermore, since Solars pop up here and there randomly like mushrooms, you may find no one to tutor you on what’s happening. Despite all of this, Solars are supposed to get together under a common purpose to revive the Golden Age. The question is, how and why? There’s no consistent rational for it.
Finally there’s no introductory scenario. The book has none – something that is a serious faux pas in an omnibus game book. Such a scenario could be the clue that would provide the answer to the shortcomings just listed. Since there is none… To a certain extent this demonstrates that this book is more something of a fashion statement than a real game book.
On a lighter note, there is a couple of sections relating to the setting that actually make sense and offer some substance to chew. I’m talking about the last two chapters, Antagonists and Wonders and Equipment.
The antagonists provided by Exalted are reasonably good. You have the usual fare of normal citizens and animals (beasts in Exalted). You also have specific categories that relate to the setting. (Notice that none of these are subject to an in-depth treatment. What we have is the minimum data to start up a game. Each is to be subject to a developed presentation in other books.)
Wyld creatures live in or close to the chaotic outskirts of the game world. It has been done in other settings and games but that’s ok. The book briefly presents the Wyld barbarians and beastmen and one Wyld beast.
Fair folk are, well, fair folk. The basics come directly from their European folklore inspiration. At the core they are a twisted, chaotic version of elves. We are also provided with a type of their servants, the hobgoblins, and a beast, the gryphon.
Spirits and Elementals also have a good treatment but – like for the other categories – we only get a minimal sample on them. Oddly enough spirits are more similar to the demons of other settings than to what we would usually associate with spirits. Nothing wrong with this. I actually liked Erymanthus, the Blood-Ape. I’m not sure if I liked it because I liked its drawing or because of the narrative description, though. The same sketchy presentation is reserved to the Dead. Once more, this is good stuff.
An equally basic coverage is reserved to the Exalted. It serves its purpose of providing examples that can be used to start off a game.
A surprising but interesting option has been to include diseases with the antagonists. What you get are real world sicknesses like cholera or the plague.
Well, without being outstanding this is a nice chapter. It provides the GM with some useful data to stuff his game. It’s on par with what you find in any other good game. Of course, if you want a developed treatment of Exalted’s antagonists you have to look to other books in the game line.
I also liked the wonders and equipment chapter. First, it’s short. Most of it is about weapons plus some listings on the cost of equipment in the Exalted resources meter, and magical or uncommon goods (wonders in Exalted’s parlance). Nice stuff.
Summing up on setting, “Exalted is a game of imagination, but it’s by no means shallow”, says Geofrey C. Grabowski in p. 347. Ah, ah. Exalted is a gem. A shining, bright, colourful gem. It’s just a pity that it is a fake gem.
I’m in a good mood so I’ll not be too harsh. I give Exalted’s setting a 2 because by the end of the book there is some interesting data.
SUBSTANCE II – SYSTEM
After 85 boring pages on an uninspired setting we reach the core of any roleplaying game: the rules. Let’s look at it.
For a start there’s a thankfully short section on the system. The mechanical basics, I’m told, is the White Wolf Storyteller system. It is just a rip off of the Prince Valiant Storytelling system (check my review referenced at the end of this page): Roll a dice-pool that combines one attribute with a skill plus modifiers; pick successes and disregards failures. So far so good, but the devil is in the details.
WWS discards PV’s coin-pool in favour of a real dice-pool composed of d10s. You succeed in a roll of 7 to 10 (in other words, 40% of the time while in PV you succeed 50% of the time). Add to this a ruling according to which if you roll a 10 you get 2 successes, another that if you register all failures and at least one of them is a 1 you get a botch, a further one that the harder the action the more successes you may need, or another according to which in sub-optimal conditions you suffer penalties into your dice-pool… and statistics are sent havoc (I’ll not explain why, there are plenty of forums in RPGnet that have done it before). Yes, statistics are not everything there is to a game but the problem is that the accumulation of these cases breaks up the simplicity and coherence of the basic mechanic and it turns a simple and straightforward rule into a moderately complex set.
There are several other variants to cover situations that you find in most games like successive attempts to succeed at an action, confrontations (called resisted actions in Exalted), multiple actions in a round, teamwork, etc. As I said, most of this can be found in any system. The problem once more is that the basic mechanic in Exalted is not the best to handle this level of complexity. All of this may work but it is stressing the basis too much.
Yet, the really nasty bits are not there. They are basically two, by order of increasing importance:
First, Exalted has 3 secs rounds. That’s it, three seconds, you didn’t misread. Now, in each round you can do AT LEAST one complete action like an attack, preparing a weapon, etc. This is not fast, this is super fast. But there’s worst: You may do multiple actions in a round. You can split your dice pool and do multiple actions. Say, two, three, four attacks. In three seconds. Ok, the rational is that Exalted characters are super-heroes. But the rules apply even for humble and unexalted human beings like you and me. When will game designers understand that 3 secs rounds in fantasy is a completely idiocy?
Still worst: The dice-pools. They can grow. And grow. And grow. You can have dice-pools with dozens of dice. Can you thing of something more gamist? This is simply unmanageable. Yes, there are hundreds of people that will say they love to play that way. More power to them. Stupid designs tend to be very popular in any walk of life. But do your math: Three moderately powerful PCs can have dice-pools of 20 to 30 dice each. That makes 60 dice for a start if the players want to roll all at the same time and don’t want to share dice. Pit against them some four low power NPCs with dice-pools of 8 dice each and one powerful NPC with a dice pool of 25 dice and the GM has 57 dice to manage. In the unlikely situation where everybody wanted to roll at the same time, there would be above 100 dice rolling. Yes, most people will roll one at each time, but even then there will be some 20 to 40 dice around the table. And remember, dice-pools can be a lot bigger than what I describe above, there can be more PCs and NPCs, etc.
To compound insult with injury there’s a rule that allows you to simplify the dice-pool… by discarding 7 dice for one automatic success. You, see, it is in moments like this that one starts to understand why statistics matter. If you roll a two dice dice-pool, your average result is 7.15. In other words, on average you only need to roll two dice to get a success, and this not even counting the fact that a 10 means an extra success. Discarding 7 dice for this purpose is plainly ludicrous. If there’s a place where Exalted excels at crappy system design it’s here.
By now we are in page 96. Huff. Let’s have a rest. Finally we are getting into something worth the time spent reading and the money spent buying: Character creation. Characters in Exalted have attributes, abilities (skills) and virtues. Further to this there are Backgrounds (gear, social connections, etc.), charms (Exalted’s magic) and the usual personal resources (willpower, health and essence).
Now, I’ll describe character creation the way it came to me, not necessarily the way it is handled in the game. I was reading the book when I stopped at attributes (step 2 in character creation) and something just clicked. You see, there are nine attributes in Exalted broken up into three categories: Physical (Strength, Dexterity, Stamina), Social (Charisma, Manipulation, Appearance) and Mental (Perception, Intelligence, Wits). When creating a character you prioritise the three categories and next distribute points through the three attributes in each category. Needless to say, the number of points you have available for each category depends on the priority assigned to it. Now, the moment I read this the idea crossed my mind: I want three characters, a Brute Barbarian (first category physical, last category social), a Wicked Wizard (first category mental, last category physical) and a Mischievous Merchant (first category social, last category mental). Before you say something let me point that I don’t care if this does not fit Exalted’s setting since you already know that the last thing that interests me in Exalted is the setting.
The nice thing is that this provided me with three concepts of characters (Brute Barbarian, Wicked Wizard and Mischievous Merchant), thus providing the answer to the first step in character creation: Concept.
Step 1.5 is to choose the caste of Exalted for the character. You see, you are supposed to play a Solar Exalted and these are divided into five castes (I hate to call it castes but that’s what’s in the book – pseudo-creativity always puts me off). There are five castes (Dawn that focuses in combat, Night that deals with non-fighting physical activity, Zenith that is based on the ability to adapt to the environment, Eclipse that concentrates on social abilities and Twilight that is directed at intellectual and do-it-yourself activities). Each caste relates to five abilities. That means that you have 25 abilities in Exalted. Each can be broken up into specialities. That said, it was obvious that my BB had to be a Dawny, my WW a Twilightian and my MM an Eclipser.
Next step is to choose abilities. Of course, a character has a special drive for his caste abilities but he also has 5 Favored (sic.) Abilities that are chosen by the player and represent the character’s personal interests. After choosing the favored abilities for my three alter-egos it was time to distribute 25 points by all the abilities keeping in mind that at least 10 would have to go to caste or favored abilities. I’m not going into the details but I was able to locate abilities that would fit my concept in all three cases.
After that I had to choose backgrounds (mostly stuff or social relations), charms (the spells of Exalted, broken up by cast – more on this latter), and virtues and a virtue flaw. There are four virtues: Compassion, temperance, conviction and valor. It was obvious that my BB would be high on valor and low on temperance, that the WW would be high on conviction and low on valor and that MM would had to be high on temperance and low on compassion. I cannot explain why without going into too much detail, though. To round it out, I had to decide on a flaw for the highest virtue. BB had Bersek Anger, WW Deliberate cruelty and MM Ascetic drive. At the start I was a little worried about this virtues thing but in the end it worked out very well.
The final steps were to record essence (the magic using stat) and essence pools (the usable essence), willpower (a stat I could live without, mostly useful in some cases of magic usage) and health levels. To finish it up I had 15 bonus points to spend wherever I wanted.
All in all I liked a lot Exalted’s character creation. I had three character concepts and was able to base my choices in each step based on those concepts, thus creating the characters I envisioned through the rules. Whenever something crossed my mind and I though, “can I do this?” I was able to do it. And it didn’t take long. I’m confident I can create a character in less than half-an-hour, maybe less than 15m. Of course, I had three rather stereotyped concepts, but the system is flexible enough to accommodate other types. Notice that my concepts are not directly related to Exalted’s setting, they’re just three plain fantasy vanilla, D&D-like character types.
Since this series of reviews is specifically about fantasy roleplaying, I can only say that character creation in Exalted is excellent and really deserves a 5.
The 36 pages Chapter 4 presents an in depth description of the different traits. Mostly good stuff except for the caste cosmetics that, frankly speaking, leave me cold. This is where the game gets its Anime colouring.
Chapter 5 is the longest in the book (72 pages) but is also one of the sections I really loved. Here you get all the data on charms and sorcery, the magic of Exalted.
Charms are connected to the abilities (which means that they are also connected to the castes). They expand on the possibilities offered by the ability they are connected to. Each ability has a certain number of charms and these are organized into a tree of increased power where to get a more powerful charm the character must first acquire less powerful ones. To do a charm a character must spend essence. He may also combine different charms into combos that allow for powerful effects. This is costly but may be very effective.
Besides charms there’s sorcery, a more powerful form of magic that allows the Exalted to change “the very fabric of reality”. Of course, its requirements are more stringent than those of charms.
I like this system. It reminds me of the difference between battle/spirit magic and divine magic in RuneQuest but is different enough to have its own character. It’s also one of the other places where the game designers took seriously their anime/ Eastern fantasy inspiration. This is reflected to a great extent in the name of the charms and spells but also in their content and the way they branch out.
The next chapter (drama, one a little too pretentious name for something you find in any rpg) handles non magic and non combat hazards and other activities. Like in the case of magic, it is broken up by caste since these reflect different abilities. It’s easy to see that the game designers have done their homework. The chapter covers most of the things that you can find in similar sections in gamebooks for other fantasy games. Let’s see…
It starts with the Dawn caste, in other words, with combat-related activities. Here you get the bad, the mediocre and the standard. The bad is a direct result of two things I mentioned above when discussing the system: The excessively short rounds and the excessively big dice-pools. Starting with the first point, you can use bows for two shots a turn. Since turns are 3 secs, you can technically dispatch 40 arrows a minute. This is not a bow, this is a machine gun. Or take the example in page 236 where someone does three melee attacks per turn, meaning one attack per second. Keep doing this turn after turn and you don’t have a man, you have a steam hammer. On the other hand, since multiple actions are based in split dice-pools, if one is to do anything of consequence in each action one needs gigantic dice-pools.
I also place in the “bad rules” set the handling of extras (grunts, secondary npcs) where they are turned into cannon fodder. I just hate this type of approach (even if I know that a lot of people love it). I can think from the top of my head about half-a-dozen explanations to why some npcs just can’t make it when it’s time for combat, other than to turn them into cardboard targets.
The mediocre are the damage rules that rely in a needlessly complicated system to record damage points. There are 30 years of damage in rpgs design. Most everything has been attempted. Why go for complicated designs when there are plenty of simpler alternatives that have proved to be as (if not more) effective?
The standard are the complications (like knockback and knockdown, mounted combat, terrain, combat in water or with poor visibility, etc.) and tactical alternatives (ambushes, called shots, attacking objects, etc.). I say this is standard because it can be found in many other games. In fact, when I was reading this section of the chapter I could not avoid thinking that this looked a lot like the similar sections in RQ3, both in terms of the ground covered and the nature of the solutions found.
I’ll skip on a detailed analysis of the abilities belonging to other castes since they cover what you would expect in non-combat abilities from athletics to sailing, from bureaucracy to riding, or from crafts to occult. The chapter specifies their usage. Once more, nothing ground breaking but what’s there is well done.
Storytelling is the chapter where you find the usual advice for GMs on how to run a game, organize a scenario or a campaign, etc. Most of it is unremarkable and does not go past average generalities. Yet, this the place where you can find another two pieces of crappy design: Stunts and awarding experience.
I mentioned stunts before (or didn’t I? maybe, after all this rambling I may be wrong). This is one of those pieces of crap that become fashionable some years ago and that are really a screen for poor game design and for poor role-playing (probably the reason why it became so popular). For a start, stunts are a contradiction in terms. They are there to reward creativity and “evocative, exciting … cinematic feel”… with something as mechanical, un-evocative and un-exciting as points and dice-rolls. A stunt is simply a device to cover any stupidity the player does on an impulse under the mantle of “wow”, in other terms, a cheap trick. Worst than that, they discriminate against players that are not good at inventing shining conman’s gimmicks.
What’s wrong with awarding experience in Exalted? Simply put, it does not reward the character, it rewards the player. You gain experience for being at the game session (even if you are as passive as am amoeba), for enduring the game session, and for stunts. Enough said.
It’s more than time to some final thoughts on Exalted’s system. How can I put it? The game attempts to cover a lot of ground. Most of it is not innovative neither should be expected to be: It has been done before and can be found in any hardcore fantasy rpg worth its salt. Yes, the designer did an excellent job in translating that stuff into Exalted. It just happens that no matter how excellent it may have been it was bound to fail. Because the designer of the game made an excellent job in trying to handle all the usual tropes of fantasy roleplaying with a basic mechanic that is obviously poorly adapted for that purpose (here I have to insist in a comparison between Exalted and Prince Valiant. You should check my review of that game since it brings the criticism of Exalted into perspective). The Storyteller’s dice-pool delivers… as long as things are kept simple and there are not too many variables to account for. This is not the case with Exalted. When we look at the rules one at a time they work and are well crafted. But when we put it all together we get an unmanageable mess. The most sacrilegious example is the outrageously overblown dice-pools. But there is also the whole range of “expansions” to the original concept inherited from Prince Valiant that make complex what was devised to be simple.
In any case, I am here to review the game, not the game design effort. The game has serious problems. Hence it does not deserve more than what those problems allow for: I’ll give it a 3 for system.
THE FUN FACTOR
Reading some 70% of this book was really boring. No fun factor, believe me. Yet, there is some 20% that prove to be really fun (character creation comes to mind). This begs the question: what would I like to do with Exalted in the future? Let’s see:
* Be an occasional player: I like character creation and most of the rules are ok. I guess that if I play from time to time I will not realize how unsubstantial the setting is. Even if I’m put off by the excessively large dice-pools, I suppose I can live with it once in a while. Let’s make it a 3.
* Be a campaign player: With that setting? With those dice-pools? 1.
* Be a game master either occasional or in a campaign: Ditto as for a campaign player. 1.
PREVIOUS REVIEWS IN THE SERIES
Hero Wars: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_3385.html (technically not part of the series, I’ve included it because the game falls into the scope of games I’m reviewing)
RuneQuest 2: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_7969.html
RuneQuest 3: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_8012.html
Basic D&D: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_8045.html
D&D 3E: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_8088.html
Prince Valiant: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/9/9189.phtml
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