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, except Solar Charms, which are at Gayo/AnotherExaltedCharmsSolarFundamental and the Martial Arts stuff, which is at Gayo/AnotherExaltedMartialArts.

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, Appeal, Bureaucracy, 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. "Appeal" 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: Appeal, Athletics, 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, Appeal, Craft, 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, broaden their use, and 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. The amount of time it takes consequences to heal is different for Exalted and mundane creatures.

Ordinary Healing: 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.

Exalted Healing: A Minor consequence lasts (at most) 12 hours or until you next sleep. A Serious consequence lasts for three days, and a Critical consequence lasts for two weeks. 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.

Additional Combat Rules

INITIATIVE:

Your base Initiative is equal to your Wits + Awareness. At the beginning of combat time, everyone performs a regular 5dF roll which then determines their Initiative for the rest of the encounter (unless it's altered by their actions). This is in every way a normal roll, and it can be enhanced with Aspects or charms, reduced to a chance roll, etc.

If your base initiative changes during combat, that changes your position in the roster by an equivalent amount. There are also a variety of ways for you to adjust your own initiative:

• You can voluntarily delay your action until later in the turn, in which case the initiative on which you finally act becomes your new position in the roster.
• If you hold your action past the end of the turn, you lose the chance to act, but shift to the front of the initiative roster, one point ahead of the previous fastest person. This allows you to act first on the following turn.

MOBILITY, RANGE, AND POSITIONING

I'm sure that there are some people out there who play Exalted on a miniatures table and use a ruler to measure how many yards apart things are, but frankly, if you're one of those people, you aren't likely to be interested in this system variant. The way I've always played Exalted is that everyone has a vague mental picture of what the area looks like and some notion of who is near who else, and on the rare occasion that you need a specific distance, you ask. With that in mind, I've made combat mobility much more abstract. It seems pointless to try to define exactly where Exalted are during a fight, because unless they're trapped or guarding a particular spot, the bastards hop around like fleas.

Characters have a Mobility trait, which is generally equal to their Dexterity + Athletics for humanoid characters. This represents the amount of ground they can cover in a turn, but we'll seldom be concerned with precise values. For the rare cases when you need a hard figure, assume that someone can move a number of yards equal to their Mobility each turn (every 3 seconds). A character who is staying in one spot has an effective Mobility of 0.

An agile character is hard to hit as long as they keep their distance. Normally, an assailant with lower Mobility than their target suffers a avoidance penalty equal to the difference. For instance, someone with Mobility 4 takes a -3 avoidance penalty against someone with Mobility 7. Note that this is one-way -- the person with the higher mobility doesn't get a bonus.

Avoidance penalties are fairly severe, but there are ways to work around them.

• If either character's previous action brought them into the vicinity of the other, avoidance penalties don't apply. You should rely on your intuitive understanding of who's near whom in deciding this -- if it gets unclear, you can have players declare where their characters are.
• The environment may constrain movement, reducing or capping avoidance penalties. Even if the environment isn't naturally confining, characters can place temporary Aspects that limit their enemies' movement.
• Ranged weapons reduce an attacker's avoidance penalty, depending on their range.
  • Short-range weapons can travel a small distance (between 5 and 10 yards). Things not designed for ranged combat usually fall into this category, as do firewands and some heavy thrown weapons. A short-range weapon reduces avoidance penalties by 3.
  • Medium-range weapons can travel pretty far (between 15 and 50 yards). Weapons designed for throwing generally fall into this category, as do particularly short-ranged ballistic weapons. A medium-range weapon reduces avoidance penalties by 6.
  • Long-range weapons cover a very wide area (more than 75 yards). Projectile weapons are generally long-range. A long-range weapon completely negates avoidance penalties.

Because distance is largely cinematic, avoidance penalties are more about dancing around to stay out of reach than they are about actually being far away. In the rare cases where distance is a real issue, like sniping or ship-to-ship combat, use common sense or cinematic license to decide who is "in range" and whether distance should impose additional penalties. If a hand-to-hand attacker is charging a ranged attacker from very far away, just decide how many turns it'll be before they're close enough to strike.

There are a couple of other minor considerations with regards to mobility.

• Dash: Dashing is an action that either brings you close to another combatant (allowing you to attack them without penalty on your next action) or moves you away from another combatant (causing him to take a penalty if he attacks you). When distance matters, assume that dashing doubles the ground you can cover. Of course, the terrain may limit your ability to get close to or away from an enemy.
• Flight: A character capable of maneuvering freely in midair has a doubled Mobility. This doesn't mean they move faster, just that it's easier for them to elude attackers. A flying character may also pull out of way of a grounded character's hand-to-hand attacks. but I'll leave that to common-sense adjudication.
• Knocked down: A character who has been knocked down or forced to crawl has a maximum Mobility of 1.

DEFENSE:

As before, you have two defensive options against physical attacks: dodge and parry. Dodging uses Dexterity + Athletics (no Essence bonus), while parrying uses Dexterity + (Brawl or Melee) + (Weapon accuracy). You need to be able to move around in order to dodge, and you can't parry lethal or aggravated attacks with your body alone.

Defense is not penalized by actions, but there are a variety of penalties that do apply to it:

• Onslaught penalty: Each time you apply your defense to an attack during a single turn, it's reduced by 1 for the remainder of the turn. This applies regardless of which form of defense you use, even if you alternate. For example, if you're attacked three times, you have no onslaught penalty against the first attack, -1 against the second, and -2 against the third. You can choose not to use your defense against an attack in order to avoid increasing the onslaught penalty, if you anticipate much stronger attacks later on.
• Off-balance penalty: If you are attacked before acting in a given turn, you are at a -2 penalty to defend against the attack. Thus a character with a higher Initiative is at a slight advantage. This penalty applies even if you had a chance to act but are delaying.
• Coordinated attack: I'll describe how coordination works later, but anyhow, a coordinated attack involves a bunch of dudes attacking someone all at once. This uses the normal onslaught penalty rules, except the onslaught penalty for the final person's attack also applies to all the others. For instance, say you're already at a -1 onslaught penalty and 3 people coordinate an attack against you. You'll suffer a -3 onslaught penalty on every one of their attacks, because that's the penalty the third guy would have imposed if they'd attacked without coordination.
• Knocked down: A character who is knocked down suffers a -3 penalty to defense.

Under some circumstances a character may be unable to defend (due to ambush or immobilization), or may choose not to defend, or may have no applicable means of defense. For mortals and ordinary animals, this gives them an effective defense value of 0. However, unless they are unconscious or utterly immobilized, Essence-users always have a defense of at least their Essence against any physical attack. This applies regardless of skill level, penalties, or inapplicability of defense. However, if you want to improve defense beyond this point, all the usual limitations apply. The character isn't really dodging or parrying -- their enlightened will warps reality to protect them.

Fortunately, there are also ways for a character to temporarily increase his defense.

• Guarding: A character can choose to Guard, giving him a +3 bonus to physical defense for the rest of the turn. This counts as the character's action for the turn, but unlike most actions, it can be declared before his place in the combat order.
• Cover: Cover and shields increase defense by...some amount. I'll need to crunch some numbers on that.