Games That Disappoint: Exalted
It Should Have Been A Lot Better Than This, But No Because White Wolf
In 1999 White Wolf Game Studio promised the world a fantasy adeventure game that was one part (then-current) anime, one part fantasy gaming, and one part classic literature- both East and West. That game was Exalted.
I ran a 1st Edition campaign for three years. What I had to do to make it approach that promise would get me a panel at the Game Developer’s Conference were this an article about videogames. It is not, so here it is instead.
I want to like this game. It has so many things I like, including mecha and beam swords, but in the end I just can’t play it—any edition of it—as it is because it is, fundamentally, a non-game. It does not work as intended, never has, and so long as you have Theater Kids in charge it never will.
Can you make Exalted work? Yes. Should you? No.
A proper game product is a proper product: it is sold to you, the end-user, in a turn-key state. You, the end-user, should be able to take that product home and immediately use it exactly as directed to achieve the results of play promised to you. That is not Exalted. That is not any White Wolf product ever made.1
What It Lacks
Any fantasy adventure game needs to have a solid baseline to define what a normal man, with normal capacities, can do. You would think that Exalted does this, but (in typical White Wolf fashion) this is half-assed.2
Instead, most of these things are defined as “Things You Can Ignore Because They Don’t Apply To Your Man” like healing rates or are overly-abstracted away like all things economic.
No, you don’t do that. You have to define what is the baseline for the individual first, and then you have to scale him up to the level of a group and then an institution. Why? Because Exalted has specific skills and powers that operate on individuals, groups, and institutions but because the substance of that interaction is lacking the result in practice is LOLSORANDOM.
It is only because most Exalted play runs under the norms of the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play that this is tolerated at all.
How long does it take to build (thing)? No idea. How long does it take to go from (X) to (Y)? No clue. Raise an army? Train it? Without specific powers in play, no one knows. Fund it? No one knows, even though logistics is said to be a concern for any competent leader.
When you’re the Get Along Gang doing everything together, it’s easy to ignore all of this. When other players are playing hostile parties gunning for you, suddenly this all matters a hell of a lot.
Which leads to the next issue.
A Setting Ideal For Braunstein, Without Using It
You want to know why I eventually ended this campaign? Burnout from handling all of the variables that ought to be affecting things for the players’ mans but no one else handled them for me. Given that this was over 20 years ago, you’ll excuse me for not calling up Jeffro Johnson to ask for his sage advice.
This game’s setup, by default, is ideal for running a multi-layered Braunstein game that drives the ongoing adventures of Exalts, Gods, and (otherwise normal but) Heroic Men alike. That means PVP, great and small, is on the table from the get-go and Exalted (in typical White Wolf style) has no tabletop rules or procedures for this outside of direct combat.34
There are no defined procedures, and therefore no tools, to generate adventure on the fly like we see with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition.5 “Make shit up, LOL” is bad design, especially for prospective users who have no prior experience doing so- and this was intended to be “Babby’s First Fantasy Game” so that is an unforgivable oversight.
All of the necessary info is spread out over not one fat tome, or three books, but a massive product line and you’ll need no less than 10 to have any realistic ability to run a campaign. This is what microtransactions looked like 20 years ago, and I am unable to not see this for what it is anymore: crippling your product deliberately to sell them the cut content as supplements. It’s crippleware repackaged as DLC; we don’t tolerate this for videogames, so why for tabletop?
Compare with AD&D1e. Three books and done. All else is, at best, a nice bonus; for a lot of them you are better off without.6 To get that with Exalted, you need the rulebook, all of the Exalted supplements, whatever the sorcery/martial arts book is for that edition, the bestiary for same, and the setting supplements. That’s already into triple digits at retail prices in US Dollars, several times what AD&D1e will cost; you can buy a PS5 Pro for that, and the PS5 actually has playable games.
What Needs To Be There?
Logistics, and thus actual economics. In short, it needs Alexander Macris to handle it.
This is not just a matter of a single man. It has to scale up to entire institutions manned by gods and monsters, but that foundation is that of mortal men doing ordinary things right out of reading about Rome, Persia, or China.
Why?
Because Exalted, ultimately is a game about war. War for the Empire. War for Creation. War for survival. War for dynastic power and prestige. War for freedom. War for its own sake. Find a cause, and there’s a war for it- and war is all about logistics, economics, and politics. War by lawfare, by assassination, by bureaucratic maneuvering, by sorcerous means, by throwing vast armies and navies at it, and by magically-augmented narrative manipulation- all of it is still warfare, and all of it is on the table in Exalted as all sort of actors play to win in pursuit of power, prestige, glory, and supreme dominance now and forever.
All of which Exalted is bad at handling, especially in a PVP environment. You are not able to recreate the very foundational lore events of the setting using the game as it is and that is not acceptable game design. You cannot fulfill the setting premise either, which is such a fundamental failure that people are still unable to accept that it is so because it is just that pants-on-head retarded.
The game is, at best, a mealy-mouthed half-assed fusion of 2D fighting game and a fanfic writing committee run by people who hate the very source materials drawn upon as inspiration.
Trying to smooth it over, patch it up, etc. ends up revealing that no edition of the game is fit for purpose. Valuing one’s time more than trying to salvage a lemon, it becomes inevitable to walk away from Exalted as one walks away from the Sandy Frank or Carl Macek hatchet jobs of good anime in favor of the real things. One can only work around disappointment for so long.
Which is unfortunate because there’s a great game in Exalted. It just needs someone competent to design and publish it, and I am not that man. I look forward to that blend of Rome, China, and Escaflowne (and other now classic) anime being achieved because White Wolf failed and so has its successors.7
That is, unfortunately, how far too many products for the tabletop adventure game hobby are made and sold and I am damn sick and tired of pretending that it is not.
Never half-ass. Whole-ass or not at all. Commit, dammit.
Starting with swording at each other, then warring at each other, and eventually adding shittalking at each other.
This, by the way, would also expose the absolutely fatal flaws in setting design to complete the failures of mechanical design that this game has.
Which means that, once again, you’ll want that DMG on hand for those valuable appendices because the tools therein can be used for this game too.
Deities & Demigods is a nice bonus, Fiend Folio is great to have but not needed, the rest is increasingly full of suck and blow- and yes, this includes Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures. You not only miss nothing by not going outside the three core rulebooks, you are more likely to get a decent experience.
Yes, Exalted has mecha. Warstriders are specifically modelled after the Guymelfs of Escaflowne.
It's refreshing to see someone call out White Wolf and its cult of Community Theater Kids for what they are in gaming.
White Wolf was always at its best in the Minds Eye Theatre books. Those games are not our type of games, but at least they are in fact games and fit for purpose.