Impervious Rules Meditation

Exalted is a complex RPG. In fact, it's amongst the most complex games out there because (like other systems of similar complexity) it has a building-block strategy to allow your characters to interact in a myriad of complex and differing ways depending on your charm use and combo construction. Further, it actively supports the generation of custom charms and artifacts. Also, unlike a lot of recent RPGs, it doesn't feature a section near the start of one of the main books where it explains the underlying design goals and concepts that are used by the game. Instead, you need to do some serious online reading to figure those out. On this page, we share insights into the way the rules work and how they are supposed to work.

Useful Links

 * Quotes from the Exalted Designers including Borgstrom, Nephilpal and Holden. Note that you sometimes have to be careful when reading the quotes, as many of them (mainly Neph) are directed at 1E and may not be true any longer. Of particular interest:
 * Social Combat, how it works and why it works. Very important read.
 * Perfect Defense vs Flawless Attack turns out SSE provides a perfect defense against Freelancers too!
 * Why the game world works, even if it looks like it doesn't.
 * How Borgstrom wants you to play Exalted, which is to throw together a half-assed Twink and rock out. It's the job of the rules and the setting to transform your character into something epic.
 * Stunting, and the fact that you can't pull the same stunt too many times.
 * Can I parry falling? Heh.
 * Heaven Won't Save the Day, but they might help the PCs do it. They also might kill a cat in a tree.
 * Demon Summoning is safe, reliable and well-documented.

The Exalted Resource Economy
Pretty much everything I have to say about balance is based on the assumption that you are fighting at least vaguely capable Celestial Exalts. This is not going to be common in this game, and in fact in most games it isn't common outside of boss fights. But it is crucially important for one reason: Everyone else is a scrub. For every 10 capable Celestial Exalts, there is maybe one non-Celestial being who is actually capable of having a fair fight with them. Technically speaking, a circle of 5 capable Solars might be defeatable by a group of 15 or so Dragon-Blooded, but the question quite quickly arises: Why aren't the Solars using the Mass Combat rules? What strange situation arose that caused them to be separated from the people that it is their destiny to lead? And for that matter, why does the Storyteller even think that such a battle wouldn't devolve into a snorefest due to sheer numbers? And if you use the Mass Combat rules, then (again) the non-Celestials will almost definitely lose. A low-level Celestial Exalt can be killed by a vast number of weak enemies, but this isn't really a situation that should come up at all frequently because it means that either the characters or the ST are probably doing it wrong. Outside of that corner case (which, btw, is easily winnable with use of Scene-long Defenses and Resistance PDs), other Celestials are the only things which seriously threaten Celestials. So they're the only case in which you can make interesting statements about the game's design, because all the other situations just result in "Celestials win, end of story." I'm not debating that this is a perfectly valid thing to actually happen in-game, just that it has no real relevance to rules discussion because it's blatantly and intentionally unbalanced in favour of the Celestials.

Willpower makes the world go round
Willpower is the most important resource in the game! To paraphrase Borgstrom, "a Willpower is all it takes for a Compassion 5 Solar with Heart of Tears to torture a puppy to death. If you think it's not a big deal, then you're probably missing the point of the game."

How Willpower actually works:

In Solo Combat, willpower is all-important, because it functions as a gauge of how interesting you are making the fight. If you're boring as shit, then you're going to lose all your willpower and die. If you're keeping things fun and exciting (ie scoring a 2 die stunt on a regular basis) then you can keep going for as long as you can keep things interesting. This is fully intentional and a very good thing, because it means that people who create overpowered builds can still be beaten by weaker characters, as long as the weaker character can describe the fight better. The idea of Willpower in Solo Combat is that it indicates the level of skill with which you are actually playing. Maybe your character will eventually get tired (that's what motes are for!) or make a mistake (like using a combo which doesn't contain defensive measures... I would expect this to be a standard trope whenever the BBEG uses his ultimate attack combo), but if neither of these happen then you can keep going on as long as you can keep things interesting. If you can't, you will have a hole in your defense that others can exploit. It's an interesting way of linking freeform roleplaying to a more solid rules-based system, because good roleplaying doesn't mean you automatically win and bad roleplaying doesn't mean you automatically lose but it does seriously tilt the scales.

Good building, bad roleplaying: You have (maximum) ten turns to pray that your enemy shows a serious weakness you can exploit, otherwise you lose. Worth noting that this category applies to everyone who doesn't have a resistance defence, if [|unfailable actions don't give rewards].

Bad building, good roleplaying: Assuming you have the basics of combat prepared (ie get a defensive combo), you will win. If the enemy is as good at roleplaying as you but has a mote reactor or other crazy powerful trick up their sleeve, you better figure out the counterpoint to their strategy quickly or be prepared to run away when your motes run low.

Good building, good roleplaying: It all comes down to roleplaying skill, the most interesting player wins.

In Social Combat, willpower is openly the focus of the entire matter. As with Solo combat, if you run out of willpower you lose. Your enemies are also attacking your willpower directly! On the other hand, you don't need to use combos every round to survive. Mass combat tends to be a lot more tactical than Solo combat because you aren't forced into pulling "generic combo #9" every round, instead you (mostly) choose one charm and use that. The fact that a lot of your more powerful attacks can actually cost you more willpower than you make the enemy spend means you have to be extra careful about Willpower. This is to some extent mitigated by the fact that most serious social combatants will have a posse of sycophantic followers, granting them a pool of "Loyalty" to use as health levels instead of allowing direct attacks to the willpower. On the other hand, those who have followers cannot use stunts to recharge their loyalty, and so have to be extra cautious about losing willpower to attacks. They also need to spend a lot of XP on Socialize to make this option useful.

In Mass Combat, willpower doesn't really matter! This is why we are having heavy mass combat rules, because it fixes the combo reliance that some people find annoying about Solo Combat. My reasoning behind this is that Solars aren't actually meant to fight in small battles, otherwise they'd have free reflexives like Dragon-Blooded. Instead of being reliant on Willpower, stunts determine whether or not you can even use a particular charm - you have to describe it convincingly, otherwise you cannot activate it. It is worth noting that Solars auto-win mass combat even harder than they do anything else, reinforcing my opinion that Mass Combat is the place where Solars are meant to be.

Motes tell you how long until your next tea break
Everyone and their mother is a mote reactor. Spirits and demons have an entire section on all the ways they can become mote reactors. Lunars are one charm away from having one of the best mote reactors in the game at chargen. Sidereals are two martial arts charms away from having a far better mote reactor than any Solar charm. Abyssals have an entire martial arts tree devoted to becoming a mote reactor.

Solars have two mote reactor charms, and they are shit. This does not mean that Twilight Essence Reactors are a glitch in the system, just that most non-Twilights will have to look to Martial Arts for their mote reactor charms.

Basically, early in the game motes are a limiting factor. Later in the game, they are not really, because anyone who is really serious about combat is going to wind up going not particularly far out of their way to pick up some way of regenerating motes. This causes them to have interesting and unique styles of fighting which have specific countermeasures, but in general simply hitting a high-essence Celestial until he runs out of motes is going to wind up not happening... ever. For this reason, motes are very much a second-tier economy. It's nice to think about mote efficiency and all that sort of shit but given enough XP nobody really cares anymore. For this reason, willpower is the only thing that seriously limits a battle between Celestials.

Virtue channels are made out of JUSTICE!
Virtue channels are a matter of life and death if you're a heroic mortal. If you're a Celestial, on the other hand, they're just another way of spending Willpower, and they're kinda sub-par compared to all the other things you can spend Willpower on. Epic Zeal changes this. Now (by taking severely limiting character defects/improvements) you can make Virtue Channeling super awesome, to the point where it's actually worth using on a regular basis! It also gives you enough virtue channels to make this a useful benefit, since one a day is a hell of a lot better than a maximum of 5 per story.

The virtue channel economy doesn't really matter all that much though. They're generally a bad way of using Willpower if you're in combat, and out of combat someone else they let you do something you normally couldn't. This is potentially a big deal if you get Phoenix Renewal Tactic, since it's pretty fucking abusable then. But with only one virtue channel per day it's pretty reasonable - once per day you get to do something you normally couldn't. Assuming nobody else could (a kind of hard assumption, given the ease of acquiring excellencies!) you may have made the day slightly or significantly easier. Woohoo! But you paid 8xp for that and took on weird mental changes that distance you from the rest of humanity. Can't say I find this overpowered.

Hm, and I seem to have rambled. Short version is: Virtue Channels are not very important, but they shouldn't be handed out like candy either because then they stop being special.

Health levels are not very important most of the time
Health levels are frustrating. They are set up to pose an interesting conundrum - should I buy less health levels so that I'm not effectively out of the fight if I get hit for minor damage, or should I buy more health levels with higher negatives so that I don't die if I get hit for major damage?

Unfortunately, this is not actually an interesting conundrum. It's a choice between paying tons of XP for being hit to be a bad idea and paying tons of XP for being hit to be a bad idea. The only winning choice is not to get hit.