Deep Fried Puppies

More on this. Shut up, you. I’m bored and stuck in country, so I’m going to blather on about it.

Exalted is one of those games where non-mechanically inclined people created it. As such the ideas behind it are awesome, but the application leaves something to be desired. Really, it’s a lot like the GURPS problems, where each action of combat requires a dozen or more rolls. Body language, movement, attack, parry, damage, moral, constipation check because your enemy knocked the crap out of you, etc. Now each of these ideas is good. The issue that arises is that while in real combat, everything happens at once with great relentlessness, in a game things are slowed down to a crawl. Everything has to be resolved piecemeal. Also, a lot of it becomes meaningless once things get to anything close to Exalted level. You bleed out over the course of minutes. Honestly, does that even matter? Knockdown is irrelevant once you hit any kind of reasonable stat level, because you’ll nearly automatically succeed.

Anyway, what it does lend itself to is hyper techincal combat. This technical and it gets much worse. Or better, if you will. See, very few powers become permanent, or at least few should, and you wind up playing them like cards. Clearly at some level they’re trying to emulate a CCgame. Not a bad idea, but the mechanics aren’t there yet.

The other big difficulty is that it’s made by whitewolf. Moral ambiguity is rammed down your throat. Some of the supplements get kind of torrid too. Lillun for one. Really, guys? Was that anywhere close to being necessary? But bah.

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