Exalted 3E
In reply to Varsovian (msg # 1):
It seems that I may be in the minority, and I think it's important to preface this with the admission that I am kind of a hater when it comes to systems. However, in my opinion, Ex3 is a dumpster fire and should be avoided at nearly all costs. There are other games that have more nonsensical mechanics or are worse balanced. But however better Ex3 might be, it loses out by being hard. Ex3 demands investment from both the players and GM at every turn. It insists that you bury yourself in it's mechanics at every turn, and if you don't love every part, it's insufferable.
That's not to say that everything is the worst ever. The setting is definitely improved from 2E, with some shifted geography and re-calibrated threats and challenges. It really is a huge improvement, and if you want to use another system to play in the Exalted setting, definitely use the 3rd edition version.
Additionally, the new combat rules are pretty interesting, and would make playing heroic mortals actually fun I think. Sorcery is also much improved, being more interesting and easier to use. Also the new way they handle caste abilities and the addition of the supernal ability is neat too.
However, those improvements are completely destroyed by the monstrous failure of the charm chapter, among other things.
There are somewhere between two and three thousand charms in the book, not counting several charms that can/must be purchased more than once. That would be one thing if the majority of them were interesting and added to the game. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of them aren't worth the ink it took to print them. They have lots of flavorful text and meaningless description, but something like 80% of them boil down to "roll the dice for this thing slightly differently."
Another 10% leave you asking, "Why is this a charm?"
The last 10% are cool, but are almost universally buried under a dozen prerequisite charms that fall into one of the other two categories.
This would be less of a problem if the charms weren't basically the beating heart of the game. Everything comes back to charms. Every single character is expected to have dozens of them. But only dozens. Which means you have to pick your charms carefully, since you only get to choose a tiny fraction of whats available. But reading through the charms to try and pick out the best ones is like reading a dictionary. It's painfully boring.
And while you may not feel exactly the same way, I think it's pretty telling that there were 3-4 different community projects to completely rewrite the charms chapter within a week of the backer preview PDF coming out.
I could rant about Ex3 for a long ass time, so I'll cut it off here. In conclusion, Exalted 3rd edition is a game that reads like it has it's head stuck waaaay up it's own ass. It's just so constantly fascinated by it's own fiddly mechanical quirks and the different ways to play with them that it forgets to ever think about whether any of that stuff is actually any fun. If you aren't already really into Exalted, not only in terms of the setting but specifically in terms of it's mechanics and fiddling around with dice pools and tracking essence totals and XP points and stuff, you will probably not like it.
If you want to play the setting, or something similar in theme. Go play Godbound by Sin Nomine. It's absolutely fantastic.
PS - For those that like and have fun with Ex3, you keep doin you. The only right way to roleplay is the one you and your fellow players enjoy.
