#exalted 2e

Sorcery, martial arts, magitech all rolled into one crazy package.

Ooh, what a fun question:

1st edition was built with only world of darkness technology, and so its ambitious mechanics really, really got away from them. It actually had a .5 d&d-style update which… kinda helped? It made combat a little spicier, but I don’t remember it really addressing all the issues.

Storywise it’s almost perfect. Its world is huge, and unlike most settings that claim a dangerous world where the mystical and the mundane intermingle, Exalted really delivers on that. On the other hand, I think, in the world we live in now, the idea of “the legitimate god kings of the universe have come back to reclaim what is rightfully theirs” reads weird. So weird, in fact, that (as I recall) it’s why Gubat Banwa is even a thing.

I had a blast playing and running first edition, and it was formative both for my playing and GMing style.

2nd edition got serious, possibly too serious. They took the mechanics and solidified/codified them. Some people complain about the 150 steps of combat resolution, but honestly that’s good because it allowed charms to work exactly in the way they were intended without prompting endless spirit-of-the-law vs. RAW debates. This is also the edition that turned Excellencies into their own thing. A slight flavor reduction for a very functional improvement. This edition’s biggest mechanical sin, in my opinion, is that they really had the opportunity to perfect 1e’s combat system, but instead they came up with an interesting, but very different system; So a lot of the mechanical improvements fell by the wayside because they were being applied to an untested system… basically back to square 1. This edition also does the whole “social combat” thing for social conflict resolution. I have yet to play a game where that works.

Storywise, Ex2 had the same approach, and so, this is the edition that codified a lot of the lore, especially (and famously) a lot of the ancient lore; so we learn how super-horny first gen dragonblooded were, and that the first age had AI surveillance and shopping malls. It did a lot to shrink the world, which isn’t great. That said, this edition introduced the idea of Nox as a Sidereal wrinkle, which I like; and my favorite post-1e addition: Forbidden Gods.

I also greatly enjoyed running 2e (this was after I left college, my forever dm era), it’s honestly a great example of an edition side-grade. It just functions very different from 1e and so the lessons of 1e don’t always apply.

3rd edition is… its own thing. This edition is massive. The core book is huge, with subsystems for almost every ability. this team really said “every ability is just as important as every other ability” and so now you have to learn the war minigame, and the crafting minigame and the sail minigame. Fun fact, I ran it for like 6 years..? And I never learned the sail rules. BTW I’m not saying this was bad, we definitely had a lot of fun with most of these systems. This edition was tumultuous, it is my understanding that it took forever to come out because the team came up with a combat system they liked better, and had to rewrite every combat-facing charm (and there are a lot of those). Then after the book came out (or possibly right before) the team got canned, and so most supplements are by a different team off of the original team’s notes. There were also some allegations, but I never looked into them. This edition is so ambitious, written by people who love exalted and saw its enormous potential. Possibly the worst thing about this edition is how little the supplements have lived up to the promise of the corebook. Especially with the biggest addition to the lore: Exigents.

This edition fully tears off the fivefold symmetry off the lore and system, a bold move that really pays off. turns out you can have 27 abilities instead of 25 and cover everything you need. Storywise this edition introduces the idea that there were and are lots of different kinds of exalted, including The Exigents, unique exalts who are the chosen of gods who are only strong enough to empower one or two guys. My players spent some time tracking a black market exaltation, only to find it was used by a forbidden god to create a very disturbing exigent. It was rad.

Ex3 really worked hard to undo some of the codification 2nd edition built, trying to return the world to a more mysterious state, one where the pcs might run into something new and wondrous that didn’t fit into established categories.

3e miiight be my favorite edition, if for no other reason that it works very hard to be fun and interesting. It’s not perfect. for one, it once again nukes the previous combat system and starts over, but it feels like it was better playtested.

Pretend this is a an Exalted-Style Sidebar:

The Lunars

No edition of Exalted ever finds a good place for the Lunars. In 1e they were meant to be exclusively antagonists, but player response pushed them into PC territory, so they were somewhat shoehorned. 2e tried to address this, but in a pretty weak way, making them into slightly worse sidereals. 3rd edition probably did the best job of it by carving out big chunks of the world for the lunars to stomp around in, promising Lunar-exclusive situations and antagonists… but by the time the Lunars supplement came out it seemed these things were really not a priority. Poor Lunars.

However.

Courtesy of the Wayback Machine and some minor skullduggery, I've pulled the list of words used to populate that generator. You'll find them, unedited except for formatting**, below the cut. Scroll around and you're sure to find some nouns, adjectives, and verbs that'll make your character or charm name feel sufficiently Exalted-y.

*I am in no way associated with the original creator. I did not make this list; I only seek to preserve it.

**Original spelling has been preserved, because it is possible that (in some cases) archaic spellings were included intentionally. If something looks weird, look it up, use your judgement, blame it on Old Realm.

edit: hell maybe something not d20, I mean some sort of classic fantasy dungeon game

still probably not super easy, would screw with the action economy unless you're careful

I mean like the system in Exalted 2e

actions have a speed rating, that's how long the action takes in ticks, a "round" is 10 ticks long (usually represented by a tick wheel), weapons have a speed rating, attacks with weapons take that weapon's speed

so at the start of combat, everyone rolls initiative (Join Battle in ex2), determining on what tick of the first round they act, on your turn, you do what you're going to do, then you add up how many ticks that took,

you act again after that many ticks have passed (moving around the tick wheel)

if that means you act more than once in a round, then that's what you do

people acting on the same tick, act simultaneously

I honestly can't remember how EX2 handled multi-attacks (at least as far as speed goes), but I know it had them