Gayo/AnotherExaltedOverview

Another Exalted

What is this?

Hi, I'm [Gayo] and I'm using this as a notepad for my crazy-ambitious reworking of Exalted's system. This is a radical teardown of virtually all the system's structure, with a number of substantial changes in setting "fluff" as well, since system and setting are so closely intertwined in Exalted. In short, it's a nightmarish fusion of Exalted, FATE, and the new World of Darkness, plus some crazy bullshit I made up.

Right now this page is scrappy and badly-written since I'm just brainstorming, but eventually one of two things will happen: either I'll tidy it up and format it in a friendly format for use by others, or I'll get distracted by more pressing concerns and abandon it forever.

Information on Charms is located at Gayo/AnotherExaltedCharms.

Fundamentals

This is just a loosely-organized infodump right now. Contingent on divine intention and the status of the crick, it may one day be more.

The Central Mechanic

Attribute + Ability (renamed "Skill") is used as the basis, as with normal Exalted, and both go from 0 to 5 as usual. However, the scale is compacted a bit, so that 5s are rare even for young Exalted. This helps prevent you from slamming into the Essence cap right away, and helps make the dice system work. The challenge mechanic is to add 5dF to your Attribute + Skill total. You can translate traditional difficulties into TNs for this system by doubling them, roughly speaking, but the 5dF system is less variable -- most results will land between -2 and +2 of your base, fuckery notwithstanding. All modifiers are unified -- no internal/external distinction.

So about that fuckery!

• Stunts give you +3 per level of the stunt. Since this is a flat bonus, it can be applied after the roll, to speed things up in IRC play. A literal translation would be +2 per level, but I'm trying to increase the importance of stunts.
• The First Excellency, which is the only one all types of Essence-user share, gives a +1 bonus per mote spent. Sidereals can use this Excellency after the roll, to compensate for their low caps. I'll talk about excellencies more in the charms document.
• The game has FP and Aspects, like Fate. FP are called "Agency", however. After a roll, you can spend a point of Agency to trigger an Aspect, which lets you change one of your dice to a +. Each type of Exalted has a Permanent charm (or something, I dunno) permitting them to instead get a flat +3 bonus when invoking Aspects of appropriate flavour.
• Channelling a virtue costs 1 Agency and nets you a bonus equal to the virtue's rating. You can only do this once per Virtue per chapter, because I don't want to make virtues a de facto "metered stat."
• Defense values aren't rolled (they serve as the TN for the attacker), but invoking Aspects defensively gives you a +2 bonus. This is a little better than the normal method.

Botching is opt-in now. If you fail a roll (or otherwise aren't happy with your result), you can choose to make a "chance roll," similar to nWoD's equivalent mechanic. This is a 2dF roll. If both dice come up as +, you act like you rolled a +5. If both dice come up as -, you botch. Otherwise you fail. This can be done for an unrolled defense, too. Mechanics for modifying normal rolls (Aspect invoking, etc) don't work on chance rolls, but some Charms are designed specifically for chance rolls.

It'll go back to a turn-based system, because it's a hell of a lot easier to handle. There are no multiple actions except as enabled by charms or merits, BUT you can break this rule with stunts. Successive attacks against the same target during the same turn reduce his defense by 1 each time, as in nWoD. This is a fairly minor penalty, though.

Attributes and Abilities

ATTRIBUTES: The nWoD Attributes are used in place of the Exalted Attributes. Strength is used for close-range attacks and clinches, though certain fighting styles will permit the use of Dexterity in select cases. Large or unusually powerful creatures get a scaling factor applied to their Strength and Stamina for some situations, rather than actually having unusually high Attributes.

ABILITIES These have been radically changed, as is almost inevitable for a serious restructuring.

• DAWN: Brawl, Intimidation, Melee, Missile, War
• ZENITH: Discipline, Exertion, Expression, Persuasion, Survival
• TWILIGHT: Craft, Lore, Investigation, Medicine, Science
• NIGHT: Athletics, Awareness, Larceny, Stealth, Subterfuge
• ECLIPSE: Animals, Bureaucracy, Charm, Insight, Travel

In Dawn, "Intimidation" is what it sounds like, and can also be used for interrogation. "Missile" unifies Archery and Thrown to cover all ranged attacks. In Zenith, "Discipline" is a sort of fusion of Integrity and Temperance, but with a more "learned" flavour to emphasize its skill-ness. "Exertion" takes over the brawny weightlifter side of Athletics, as well as duplicating Resistance/Endurance. "Expression" is just Performance with a more appropriate name. "Persuasion" is used for attempts to coerce or persuade someone. Survival cedes the animal-handling side of things to the Animals skill. In Twilight, Lore now covers only the arts and humanities, as well as general lore like "what does this god like to get as a gift" or "what is this region known for". To the extent that Linguistics was ever actually about linguistics, that functionality has been absorbed by Lore. "Science" combines both practical Occult (thaumaturgy, knowing how the world works, etc) and "real" science. In Night, Athletics is now primarily based on agility and grace, and is not used for feats of strength or endurance (which go to Exertion). Dodge's functionality has been folded into Athletics. This means everyone will be good at dodging, but I'm not doing that "+Ess to evasion" nonsense. "Subterfuge" covers both deception and disguise. In Eclipse, "Animals" is for dealing with animals and things of animal-like intelligence. "Charm" represents the mingling and good-impressions aspect of Socialize, and is also used to improve people's opinion of you in a general sense (for when you just want to come off well, rather than get people to do something specific). "Insight" is works like Socialize does in 2e, to help you understand the workings of societies and social groups. It also functions like Streetwise in nWoD and is used to guess at people's motivations or detect lies. "Travel" combines Ride and Sail.

Other exalts' breakdowns, tentatively:

• AIR: Lore, Science, Stealth, Missile, Subterfuge
• EARTH: Awareness, Brawl, Craft, Discipline, Exertion
• FIRE: Athletics, Charm, Intimidation, Persuasion, Melee
• WATER: Bureaucracy, Investigation, Larceny, Travel, War
• WOOD: Animals, Expression, Insight, Medicine, Survival

• BATTLES: Exertion, Intimidation, Melee, Persuasion, War
• ENDINGS: Awareness, Brawl, Bureaucracy, Insight, Medicine
• JOURNEYS: Athletics, Discipline, Missile, Travel, Survival
• SECRETS: Investigation, Larceny, Science, Subterfuge, Stealth
• SERENITY: Animals, Craft, Charm, Expression, Lore

...I'm not totally happy with that setup, but I doubt I could come up with anything that would completely "work."

Other Traits

In brief, changes to other fundamental traits are as follows:

• SPECIALTIES: They work like you'd expect: up to 3, +1 to the base value per applicable specialty. Dragon-Blooded can treat (Skill + Specialties) as their Skill minimum when designing custom charms, but only if the charms are limited to situations where the specialties always apply.
• ESSENCE: Essence is the same, and the Essence pools are calculated in the same way.
• VIRTUES: The Virtues are mostly the same, but I'm tweaking them a bit to help set them apart from the other Traits and to reinforce the "good but with downsides" quality. Temperance becomes Prudence, Compassion becomes Empathy. The functions change a bit too, but I assume the names are clear on how so.
• INTIMACIES: Do not exist. Rendered largely irrelevant by the use of FATE-style Aspects.
• MOTIVATION: I think I'm tossing this, though I'll probably include mechanics for "boosting" a goal-based Aspect into a Motivation. I still think it's good for Exalted to have epic vision, but I think the hand-holding is too constraining and reductionist.

Stunts

I'm changing the stunt rubric to be more about doing things that are cool, though the current one isn't too bad. As stated, stunts are worth a +3 bonus per level of stunt. I think I'm going to reinstate the 1e stunt rewards: motes equal to the level of the stunt, not double. This emphasizes that stunts are their own reward, not something you do to "recharge." Rather than regaining a point of WP, a two- or three-point stunt can alternatively give you a point of Agency.

Heroic mortals can stunt at the same level as Exalted. For those who wish to have a 2e-style penalty for stunting mortals, the stunt bonus should be reduced to +2 per level rather than +3 per level.

Health and Damage

This is a bit complicated and experimental, but once I get the kinks tested out it should work pretty well. Your ability to sustain damage is divided into three different types of stats:

• Health is, as ever, a set of boxes that get checked off, though they don't get checked in different ways by damage and there are no wound-level tiers or anything. Unlike in Storyteller, in this game Health only represents trivial damage -- it's a sort of "ping tolerance," the number of ping hits you can take before they start to actually hurt you. Unless increased by Merits or Charms, all human-sized beings have Health equal to their (Stamina + 1).
• Consequence Thresholds define how successful an attack has to be in order to hurt you seriously. There are 12 thresholds: each of the three damage types has a set of four, increasing in size based on the severity of the consequence. The three types of consequence are Minor, Serious, and Critical, and then there's a final threshold for Taken Out (killed or otherwise vanquished).
• Soak reduces damage by a certain amount before checking it against thresholds. However, a successful hit will always at least reduce Health, even if soak reduces it below 0. This is why soak is applied after the hit roll rather than being added to defense directly. Generally, soak does not differentiate between damage types -- there's only one soak value that applies to all three varieties. Some natural-soak enhancers might not work against aggravated, though.

The base consequence thresholds for a human-sized being look like this:

              B   L   A
  Minor.......6   3   0
  Serious.....9   6   3
  Critical....12  9   6
  Taken Out...15  12  9

When someone attacks you, they make a roll based on their attack rating and compare the result to your defense rating. If, after all the stunting and charms and aspect invoking is over, the attacker has a higher number than the defender, the attack hits. The magnitude of success (how much higher their number was) determines the strength of the hit. The final damage value is (success magnitude) + (weapon's damage rating) - (your soak). This is the value that is ultimately compared to your consequence thresholds.

You take a consequence of the worst kind whose threshold the damage equals or exceeds, using the thresholds for the appropriate damage type. If you already have a consequence of that type, you take the type after that, unless you already have a consequence of that type too, in which case you take the type after that, and so on. If the attack's damage falls short of your lowest threshold, you check one box of Health instead. If this happens when all your Health is checked, you instead take a Minor consequence, which will as usual be upgraded to a more severe type if you already have a Minor consequence.

Healing

Your Health is completely restored at the end of every scene. A Minor consequence lasts (at most) 24 hours or until you next sleep. A Serious consequence lasts for a week, and a Critical consequence lasts for a month. Taken Out represents an arbitrary level of severity -- it could be death or permanent injury, at the attacker's discretion.

Only the lowest "level" of consequence can heal at a time, however. If you have both a Minor and a Serious consequence, the Serious consequence's week of healing doesn't begin until the Minor one is gone. Some characters can take multiple consequences of particular types -- in this case, they heal one at a time, in an order chosen by the character's player.