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If you'd asked me a decade ago which contemporary tabletop RPG was most likely to do the AD&D-versus-BD&D "two versions of the same game being published simultaneously, one of which is ostensibly a stripped down version of the other, but in practice they're really two separate forks of the same core system that fundamentally disagree with each other about what kind of game that system should be" thing, I definitely wouldn't have guessed "Exalted", but in retrospect it seems almost inevitable.
In brief, there are currently two separate versions of Exalted in active publication: Exalted 3rd Edition, and Exalted: Essence. The latter's marketing kind of positions it as a lightweight or introductory version of the former, but in practice the two are just totally incompatible visions of what the game is supposed to be, and familiarity with one isn't necessarily transferable to the other. They even disagree with one another on the level of basic setting worldbuilding that has no implications for the game mechanics, which is actually kind of remarkable.
In theory, Exalted: Essence sort of positions itself as "Exalted, but friendlier." So, lighter rules, all the Exalt types are (in theory) mechanically balanced instead of Solars having a huge power advantage over everyone else (this is supposed to be a non-diegetic concession to play experience), but also the Essence setting has kind of... had a bunch of its edges sanded off. You are far less likely to encounter something that makes it clear that plagues happen in an Essence book, or that gender-based bigotry is normative in Creation even though it takes different form than it does on Earth. And this is confusing because it is ostensibly the same setting to the point where most of the setting books are written for Exalted 3rd Edition and Essence points you at the 3rd Edition books for more setting info.
I wouldn't even necessarily agree that Essence has lighter rules. Some of its individual subsystems are lighter than their 3E counterparts, yes, but other subsystems are substantially elaborated upon where Essence's authors seem to have felt 3E's are lacking – and some of those subsystems which have received greater elaboration are sitting right in the middle of core components, like action declaration timing.
You're right, but also, no, because Exalted: Essence lets you do full charm sets for every Exalt type out of one book. Next to cutting out six or seven extra hardcovers' worth of custom charm systems (several of which are at this point still hypothetical, I believe), more fiddly action declaration is not, on balance, more rules-heavy.
I've never found the argument from page count terribly persuasive. It feels like arguing that playing a wizard in Dungeons & Dragons is more complicated than playing a wizard in Ars Magica because if you include every published supplement, the D&D wizard has a longer spell list. Certainly, having a Charm list with less needless verbosity and more willingness to collapse obvious redundancies makes character creation much quicker, but I'm not convinced its impact on active play is sufficient to overwhelm every other factor put together.
I'm not really of the belief that a game having more finely elaborated systems makes it harder to teach, or learn - I think a fair few points have been made in many spaces in the RPG sphere that more open-ended TTRPG rules can end up substantially more complex, in practice, to run and play, and I'd hazard that's the position that Essence is taking.
Part of the system goals of Essence is also with an eye toward making it easier to GM, so more tightly-bounded systems is a fairly substantial part of that! (And I certainly know which game I've had an easier time teaching at cons.)
Now, if there was a divorce, it's probably not all that acrimonious, or my professional TTRPG-identity just got very confused. I feel like that might have come up in one or two of the meetings.
I don't think this should be the *sole* measure to judge the quality for a TTRPG, but I definitely think that between whether a mediocre newbie GM is able to run a fun session by following the rules and whether a "good" GM with 20 years of experience is able to construct a grand epic tearjerking experience by rule-zeroing half the mechanics to steer the narrative towards a conventional story that resolves everyone's character arcs, the former says a lot more than the latter about how good a game actually is.
GMing is a skill but if your game requires a skilled GM for everyone at the table to have a good time something's definitely amiss on the game design front.
It's important that a TTRPG's mechanics have all the tools for someone who's not a particularly good GM to run a satisfying session with it because I'm gonna be honest the vast majority of us who are not doing this professionally fall in the range of mediocre to slightly above average.
I think a lot of people spent their childhoods being very deliberately forced out of their comfort zones by parents / teachers / whomever in a way that was just deeply unpleasant and degrading and so, when they reach young adulthood and are finally allowed real control over their lives, become set on only doing things they know they're comfortable with forever. that's a really important thing to be able to do, especially if you're so used to having your boundaries routinely ignored that you aren't even certain what you like vs what you can bear, so I absolutely see why a person would have a negative reaction to being told that discomfort is good: it can very easily sound like being told that all that work they've been doing to prioritze their needs for the first time ever is Bad and Selfish, actually. and to that I will say two things:
one: as long as you aren't hurting or, like, being a dick to anyone, just staying in your comfort zone isn't an immoral action. if you just want to read one type of book (or just fanfiction), or just eat one type of food, or just watch one type of movie, or not go to new types of social events, you aren't being a bad person for that, and if people say that, they are soundly wrong and just trying to get a self-righteousness kick.
two: trying new things because you want to expand yourself feels a hell of a lot different than trying new things because you're being forced to. you'll feel better about trying new foods if you know you have a back up familiar one in case you can't stomach the new one, it's easier to read new books if you can experiment with audio versions or reading it in little five-page chunks by yourself, you can breathe a lot easier going somewhere new if you aren't chained there for three hours because your parent is your ride home, etc.
tl;dr: new things are good. I get why you might not want to try new things, and that's fine, but it's also more comfortable to try new things as an adult with your own agency so, yeah, what have you got to lose by trying a weird old art film?
one thing I’ll add: the secret hack for learning to do new things when you weren’t allowed to have boundaries as a kid is 1) always give yourself an out, and 2) practice using them LIBERALLY.
Trying a new food? You can stop at a single bite. Bored at the cinema? You can walk out mid-movie. Really want to go to a friend’s party but you’re also exhausted? You can plan on just going for 30 minutes, and you can leave even sooner if that ends up being too long.
The more you practice using outs liberally, the more you reinforce to your body that you are capable of protecting yourself.
I only started being able to go to weekly activites consistently once I started giving myself an out at every step. i.e:
- I’ve gotten ready and then not left the house
- I’ve driven there and then driven straight back
- I’ve left halfway through lessons
- I’ve modified or plain skipped the exercises that were flaring my POTS, or making me feel dysphoric, or that I just didn’t feel like doing that day.
The result? I’ve attended the most sessions out of any weekly hobby I’ve tried to do for the past several years. And it’s actually getting a little easier every week.
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Time to self-promo on what is undoubtedly the worst website for self-promo (but hoping this finds the right people). Presenting Exalted: Essence Storyteller’s Guide, on which I had the pleasure of working about six months ago with a really cool team of writers and a fantastic editor. My contributions included some alt-rules, some gm advice, and some of the antagonists. It was one of the best creative projects I’ve worked on, and only partly because I’ve been obsessed with Exalted for over a decade.
With that comes the obvious caveat
If you’ve never heard of Exalted before, don’t start with this book. Get Exalted Essence. This is a supplement, for GMs, to lighten the load and help you tweak, customize, and add cool scenarios and antagonists for your game.
I just found this, what is Exalted?
Glad you asked. Exalted is a post-apocalyptic (but not Earth post-apocalyptic) fantasy, wuxia, and pulp adventure game, originally made by White Wolf, the creators of Vampire the Masquerade, and now published by Onyx Path. You play the titular Exalted, accursed Chosen of the Gods, which possess superhuman powers. The game is geared toward dramatic combat, social intrigue, and epic scale adventure. It’s a moderately crunchy game, with heavy emphasis on giving characters impactful and cool powers, and alright for one-shots, but really shines in longer-running campaigns. It's also got probably my favorite social mechanics in a TTRPG, period.
Essence is the "newest" version, (published alongside the still-ongoing 3e, a "rules heavy" version.) It's “rules light” which to say it’s only moderately instead of very crunchy, and can be played from a single book. I've had a blast running it so far.
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I just finished The Three Musketeers, and this might be the best book I've ever read in my life, mostly because every single character is batshit insane and drunk for 90% of their Big Plot Decisions.
Lights up on d'Artagnan: he's new in town and he's already making enemies. He meets his three best friends by scheduling back to back duels with them, under the assumption that he won't have to fight the last two if he dies in the first one. He is twenty years old and has never even heard of a frontal cortex. This is made evident by every word he says.
Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are supposedly in their 20s-30s, but barely any better. The moment they have any money at all, they siphon it directly into their alcohol budget. They make enemies everywhere they go and get into almost as many duels as d'Artagnan. Also worth mentioning: they see this crazed 20-year-old and choose to devote their lives to him simply because he has good vibes.
We've got the cardinal, who seems only tangentially related to any kind of clergyhood. We've got the king, whose main personality trait is that he HATES his wife. We've got the queen, whose main personality trait is cheating on her husband. We've got the Duke of Buckingham, who is (unfortunately) English. We've got the Love of d'Artagnan's Life, aka somebody else's wife but he sucks so he can get cuckolded. And finally, we've got the prototype female manipulator, a character written with such intense feminism AND misogyny that I scarcely know what to say about her except "go off, queen" as well as the occasional "I don't support all women, some of you are stupid."
Do yourself a favor and commit 5-12 weeks to reading this book, if for no other reason than the part where d'Artagnan tells a guy "I'll spring you from jail, don't worry, it's all part of the plan!" and then immediately forgets him in prison and flirts with his wife.
Apparently it's a good idea to outright tell players how to investigate stuff in rpgs (especially in modern ones like Delta Green).
Some players tend to ask witnesses the right questions ("Who did you see? When was it? What did they do? Did you notice anyone new? Anything suspicious?"), others not so much ("Did you see X? No? Well, okay then, goodbye"). I feel like some players have very little clue about how investigations work. Maybe it depends on how many detective tv shows one has watched, I dunno.
Anyway, I'll try making a short "manual" about detective work for the next game. It will brief players on which questions to ask, how to gather evidence, how to conduct an arrest and when they have the right to use lethal force.
The difficult part is making it short and concise for the game's sake. Actual books about this stuff are 300+ pages long.
I want to duet this a little, because I think a big part of ttrpg design is secretly "figuring out how to create learning environments for the players." Yes, you can directly instruct play through primers. But it's so much easier if the play space naturally teaches the play.
Beyond The Fence Below The Grave is a supernatural horror investigative game set in old Scandinavia. A relationship between gods, creatures, and mortals has broken, and that broken relationship is causing the region to spiral into chaos, murder, and population collapse.
Beyond The Fence Below The Grave is also the smartest investigative ttrpg I've seen because of how reciprocal it is. You talk to the farmer. You ask a few questions. You don't suspect him of anything, and you don't know what to press him on, so you leave. That night he murders the baker ritualistically and flees into the woods. You find this out in the morning, and now you *know* he's involved. You start digging into him and the baker and asking better questions and from this little strand the mystery starts to unravel.
The thing is, mysteries in ttrpgs have a tendency to be key hunts. Go here, find this clue, use it here, unlock this clue, etc. It's functional but brittle. If the players miss a key and there isn't a backup the chain breaks.
In Delta Green, if the chain breaks the world usually ends.
Call Of Cthulhu is an early example of a mystery ttrpg, and Delta Green is very closely derived. It likes obfuscation. It likes red herrings. Its shotgun scenarios are often very very good because of how direct they are, but it can often struggle to re-track its investigators in longer stuff. Old CoC campaigns have this problem too (and Orient Express famously breaks if players take a simple, very logical action at any time outside of the final boss fight.)
In Dogs In The Vineyard, which is also a mystery rpg as well as a supernatural mormon western wuxia, the entire game structure is built around escalations. So when players investigate, something happens. When they fail to act on a clue, something happens. And this drives the game's tempo towards the satisfying part of the mystery: the reveal.
Think about it like playing with a cat. You might need to be really bold with moving the laser pointer the first time, but you can get more subtle with it as the cat acclimates. You can hide it behind furniture. And if the cat gets too confused, you can make it come back out. I'm not saying players are cats, but this is play at a basic level and the principles are scaleable.
Essentially, I do think a detective manual is cool and immersive (especially if written as an in-world object!) But I also think mysteries can run way way smoother if every time a player misses a clue, the next thing that happens is an adversary acts rashly and opens up a new avenue of investigation.
An investigative tabletop roleplaying game about Old Norse Magic
Please keep interacting with this post because when I come to tumblr to procrastinate, this shows up again in my notifications and guilts me into writing again
Any first-ish draft is going to be crap. (With the usual note: if it's not crap when you write it, it will be later. Or large parts of it will be. You'll look at what came out of you at white heat [or even just in an everyday piece of work and kinda lukewarm] in two or three days, and it'll be crap then. It's frankly kind of astonishing how quickly perceived perfection turns to crap. It's almost like there's, I don't know, some kind of Entropy thing running or something.)
And this is fine. Move on past it and edit what you wrote.
Then write some more crap.
My cousin in Thoth, this is how it goes. This is how it will always go. Even when you become a career writer—thirty, forty, fifty novels along—it will still be crap when it first comes out.
AND THIS IS OKAY. The essential imperfection of the Universe makes it impossible for your initial emission to be perfect either.
(And if you think it is... wait will your betas or your copyeditor get at it.) :)
So now go do more. Because otherwise, nothing gets done. ...And then where are we?!
It's absolutely crazy that intellectual labor can wipe you out. It seems like it shouldn't be a thing, like your stores of brain juice shouldn't be able to be depleted in that way.
I feel like a wizard that's out of spell slots, and to me that's a hackish mechanical limitation put in place to try to balance the classes.
#it's fucked and it's bad design
#i should be able to write and edit for 20 hours a day
#i'm just sitting there how are we even using energy
#feels made up (via @softest-punk, emphasis mine)
Your brain is an incredibly energy-intensive organ. It makes up approximately 2% of your total body mass, but at rest it's using 22% of your total energy intake. The only thing that uses the same percentage of energy is all of your skeletal muscle (which is about 40% of your total body mass), with the liver (about 2.6% of your total mass) close behind at 21% (Aragon et al, 2017).
And that's how much energy it's using at rest.
That's the baseline.
So if you're doing lots of intellectual labour, your brain - which already has disproportionately huge energy demand - is going to use even more energy to keep up with the work. That's why you feel so wiped/drained/like you're out of spell slots after high intellectual demand - because your brain is an organ, and you've just done a lot of high-energy work with a high-energy organ.
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It's absolutely crazy that intellectual labor can wipe you out. It seems like it shouldn't be a thing, like your stores of brain juice shouldn't be able to be depleted in that way.
I feel like a wizard that's out of spell slots, and to me that's a hackish mechanical limitation put in place to try to balance the classes.
#it's fucked and it's bad design
#i should be able to write and edit for 20 hours a day
#i'm just sitting there how are we even using energy
#feels made up (via @softest-punk, emphasis mine)
Your brain is an incredibly energy-intensive organ. It makes up approximately 2% of your total body mass, but at rest it's using 22% of your total energy intake. The only thing that uses the same percentage of energy is all of your skeletal muscle (which is about 40% of your total body mass), with the liver (about 2.6% of your total mass) close behind at 21% (Aragon et al, 2017).
And that's how much energy it's using at rest.
That's the baseline.
So if you're doing lots of intellectual labour, your brain - which already has disproportionately huge energy demand - is going to use even more energy to keep up with the work. That's why you feel so wiped/drained/like you're out of spell slots after high intellectual demand - because your brain is an organ, and you've just done a lot of high-energy work with a high-energy organ.
No, you see, I wish to be an author. Not in marketing. Or an influencer. I wish to tell my stories, be told I did a fantastic job, and then go back to my hovel to scribble some more. I am delicate of constitution and awkward in crowds.
You can’t just call the “don’t stop me now” essay writing method the second worst essay method you’ve heard of and not tell us the story of the worst one 👀
i know a guy whose patented essay writing method is to, on the eve of the due date, set an alarm so early it should count as an atrocity, open an empty word doc on his computer and then placing it on his bed,
he then goes to sleep, presumably after drinking a full can of coke, as his immunity to caffeine, adderall, and the general life choices about to be described prove that (1) this man almost certainly is a colossal case of adhd and (2) that is the least of what’s wrong with him
when the alarm goes off he immediately starts typing into the word document whilst in a sleep adjacent fugue state. once he hits the required word count, he turns over and goes back to sleep, without ever having fully woken up
he awakens in the morning with however many pages of essay typed up and ready to submit, with no memory of what content is actually contained, as if he’d been visited by santa or a mystical essay delivering fairy or a demon that engaged in a brief bout of possession and then peaced out after rightfully deducing that inhabitation of this particular body and its life was a task said demon was not equal to, nor would continuation of this possession constitute as a desirable state
all of this so that he can have the benefits of an essay, whilst completely avoiding a mental state in which he is at any point fully present in experiencing the pain of writing an essay.
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just saw a post talking about the misogynistic phenomenon of men frequently offloading household tasks to women & expecting us to do them... and describing it as "learned helplessness"
Learned helplessness is the behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive stimuli beyond their control. In humans, learned helplessness is related to the concept of self-efficacy, the individual's belief in their innate ability to achieve goals.
literal first paragraph of the wikipedia article for learned helplessness. this is a depression symptom. it is frequently caused by lifelong abuse from controlling authority figures. it is the exact OPPOSITE of an abuse tactic and would most likely be displayed by the WOMEN in that kind of scenario!!
the actual relevant term for what the man is doing is probably "weaponized incompetence" which is an abuse tactic. please for the love of fuck do not conflate the two
There is a common-ish situation where "learned helplessness" and not doing housework as an adult go together, which is someone who grew up in an abusive household where they were always punished for being "messy" or "dirty" regardless of how well they tidied: So the Learned Helplessness is that they have learnt that they are unable to change the outcome of this - No matter how well they clean, it isn't "enough" and they'll be punished - so then as an adult it's hard to begin to tidy, because of that fear of "If I tidy, I am going to be punished." The "helplessness" is being unable to do anything to change the outcome of the punishment.
And it looks the same from the outside (someone who lives in a messy house and who shuts down and refuses to tidy, even when both they and their housemates are really suffering from the mess) but frommthe inside it's a whole different issue - And, further punishing the one who is suffering from the Learned Helplessness, is just going to make the issue worse.
You should never be afraid to ask tabletop RPG authors dumb questions about their games because that's literally how we tell whether or not what we wrote is working.
You'd be surprised how much of effective technical writing boils down to just talking to people and going "okay, that's the daftest thing I've ever heard, but I can see how a very particular interpretation of the text as written would get you there – let's see if I can fix that".
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