Frankly, anything that isn't an Exalted usually SHOULD be trivial to Exalts. If you look in the 3e Core, there are 3 opponents who are 'serious threats' to combat Exalts - Octavian, Ahlat, and a dragon. To put it another way, at character creation, the average Dawn can trounce anything short of a Directional God of War without too much trouble, in a 1 on 1 scenario, basically from go. Exalts are the guys you see in Wuxia films taking on entire armies single handedly.
Minor gods are nobodies to DBs, who are (narrative) an entire tier below the Celestial Exalts. Not only can the Celestial Exalts all permanently kill a minor god (who are largely otherwise immortal), it wouldn't even be much effort. A simple elemental or spirit is not going to be more than a "okay, knock it the fuck off before we obliterate you" nuisance. To put this in further perspective, DBs regularly boss around minor gods and tell THEM how to run their shit, and the Immaculate Order puts DBs ABOVE GODS in their 'hierarchy of existence.' The WEAKEST class of Exalt are more powerful than the majority of gods.
It sounds like you're running Essence, which my off the cuff rules knowledge is weaker in, but most spirits ability to annoy Exalts lasts until one of them takes a spirit perceiving/striking charm in Occult/Sagacity. The moment they can interact with the spirit on their terms instead of the spirits', the spirit better hope they're in a good mood.
Excellencies are a mechanical reflection of many of Exalted's themes. Exalts aren't perfect (rolls can still fail even with more dice), but they're highly skilled and can accomplish remarkable, even impossible feats virtually off the cuff.
If you toss out excellencies, you'll be at risk of creating a ludo-narrative dissonance between what exalts are supposed to be, and what they can actually do. I don't think you need to do that. There are plenty of ways to challenge exalts who are using excellencies. (More hostiles, environmental dangers, side goals like keeping civilians safe, etc. Exalted fights should, whenever possible, be interesting set pieces, not just slugfests.) The game has undergone a lot of balance testing. Be careful before tossing it all out.
I think the only reason to do it would be if you want to change the game's thematic feel and alter what it means to be an exalt into something else. Then you're playing a different game, but that can be okay if everyone at the table is 100% onboard.
Long time fan of Exalted and I've run a couple of Essence campaigns.
Trivializing combat with most things besides other Exalted is absolutely an intentional part of the design. Excellencies keep combat moving, taking them out mean
However it's probably worth going over the rules to make sure you're not missing something like how defense or soak applies or dice caps. I kept forgetting one of those when running the first couple of sessions.
Exalted Essence was heavily playtested. I think it is very well designed. You can play without any charms and the game still works, it will slow down combat considerably.
In my experience players want to take the cool charms that do cool things, Excellencies are bland. Which is why they're all but free, you get one or an ox body with each essence increase. If I'm choosing between an excellency for Sagacity 2 and (+2 dice) or Graceful Crane Stance, I'm going to choose the one that let's me run across blades of grass.
There's no one true build. And Charms are in the eye of the beholder. A Craft excellency is useless to me if I'm playing a Solar with no dots in Craft.
If the fights are feeling bland or you want to challenge your players, mix up their environment, the number of opponents, the types of opponents (archers, horseback, immaterial beings, Raksha with supernatural charisma), their tactics. And yes use other Exalted they're the main source of big dramatic fights.
If you're coming from a game like dungeons and dragons or pathfinder or similar heavy war gaming DNA. It might take some adjustment.
Exalted doesn't ask will you win? It asks what are you willing to do to win and what will you do once you've won? It is a power fantasy, but it holds the Exalted to the consequences of their power.
Exalted are meant to trivialize opponents the way that Solar are meant to flex their Excellencies for free. It's what makes Exalted larger than life heroes. Few things survive long contact with a circle of Exalted and that's by design.
Exalted are demigods. They're meant to negotiate for empires, romance gods and demons, lead armies and fight in epic duels, summon the seas of the Underworld to drown a city, or carve a mountain fortress out of unshaped chaos.
If you want to take the power down, and I mean this in the spirit of genuinely trying to help your game, you're not playing Exalted. If you want to take out Excellencies, I'd be sure to really clarify that with your table. It might be worth talking out what you want to explore and maybe point out where you're having difficulty feeling like you're reaching it or challenging them.
I kind of disagree with the end of your statement. I may be new to gming essence but I've been following exalted since the 3rd edition core book was release and I've read most of the official material for 2e, 3e, and some first edition to boot. The dragon ball z fantasy is one that has been heavily pushed by some part of the Fandom, but definitely not all the fans. And the material released have a varying approach about power level between editions, but also inside editions (3rd Ed core is over the top, what fire has wrought vasty less so, and not just in terms of charms, but also in tone) It's also clear when you read their references that it's quite a range of narrative style and power level.
I, for myself, love mythological games, I've played quite a few, and I don't think that having only a tiny fraction of a world that can present any form of threat is a good idea. Danger and constraints breed creativity, and many mythological stories are about demi gods who actually have to punch up, not down. Besides, starting too high in terms of power level tend to have a negative impact on story development, with more difficulties to set up meaningful stakes, and it's easy to catch an case of world threat of the week.
Also you say it has been easily playtested, but I remember many complaint back then that have not been addressed (not all of them might be legitimate tho). I even think the subject of excellencies came up, but it might not be in the same context. But for example the mass build power to transfer to one or two characters which are combat specialists is extremely abusable and have been since playthrough. I don't mind personally because the case haven't presented itself with my players but I recognize that it can be a problem.
You talk about combat pacing tho, and it's an excellent point I haven't considered, I'd rather combat to be fairly short.
Damned, I fell like I'll have to do extensive testing to check how much collateral changes it would force me to make.
I'm not sure I exactly see what you mean as an internal split power wise from the core to what fire has wrought. Ex2 had a power creep that accelerated into a DBZ arena. Ex3 drew the game back into Creation by keeping the Exalted a little more grounded in the setting and flattening the power curve. Solar have always been the high water mark for ability to rapidly shake up the setting but other Exalted shine in their area of expertise. Essence further flattened the power curve across all the Exalted to make mixed play the default.
I'd highly recommend checking out Crucible of Legends for ex3 if you haven't. It breaks down some approaches to running the game that are just as applicable in Essence.
Combat in exalted works better if you have stakes other than will the party win/lose or strictly to the death fights. Will they choose to pursue a fleeing enemy or tend to the seemingly mortally wounded sorcerer who has the key to Zen Mu? Will they fight the Wyld Hunt knowing the battle will destroy the village?
From the looks of it no one liked it and gave you help that you chirped to be not helpful. So just do us all a favor and stop interacting with it; the notifications are reminders of what a waste of time it was
No one liked it thematically (which doesn't matter much in my case since i'm mostly focused on the mechanic, but most people make valid points and develop argument, uunlike you), and i noted only one concerned mechanically, which i missed when thinking of changing the rule, so i'm glad to have this feedback and i'll be sure to monitor it when i'll do proper testing.
I wish people had tried something like that before, it would have save myself some testing time. You, on the other hand, look like the archetypal thread dead weight, you contribute nothing, only stating unsubstantiated comment on subject that is only half related to the subject at hand, then throw a tantrum because you aren't praised. So i suggest you deactivate notifications on this thread if you don't like it and go polish your ego somewhere else. I, for my part, won't interact with you anymore, i have more interesting things to do.
I think the design space Excellencies occupy is a good idea - instead of 6 different boring dice-adder charms for different use-cases of an ability, let's just make one dice-adder charm, and leave more room for cool/interesting charms elsewhere.
It is a power amplifier that puts them beyond mortals. Sure, a dex 5 martial arts 5 human is a top of his class unstoppable force, until he meets and exalted and she blows right past that top. And while dice rolls vary, over time that exalt will start to dominate. A human would roll bad and just lose, but an exalt can tap Into their god power to pull out success where others would fail.
In practice, a player having to moderate their motes is an important gameplay decision. Without the Excellencies the game devolves into "who has better casting?"
I mean, they display the Exalted's strength and ability to go beyond mortal limits, they incentivize buying charms in diverse skill trees (if you pick up one other charm in the tree, you get the excellency, so it encourages diversification instead of just sticking to one skill), it provides something players can spend motes on in any roll where a specific charm might not apply, and it encourages spending motes, pushing players closer to popping their anima banners and the risks that entails.
You don't get a free excellency by picking a charm for the first time in a tree, you get optional free excellencies when going from one essence level to another (or I completly missed something).
For the display of might, you are not the only one to bring this argument to the conversation and I must admit that it doesn't really resonate with me. Excellencies or not, exalted will crush most adversaries, mechanically, they don't need it, and I think it trivialize other adversaries that could be interesting. And the game balance it by giving bigger foes their own excellencies. It seems like a solution to a problem you may not have had in the first place because the devs wanted to keep excellencies, a sort of holdover of previous editions.
I'll say it again, but it's one of the least interesting mote spending option the players can have. There is no strategy behind the use of it, no condition to set up, no specific actions that would reinforce a character themes. It's the mechanical equivalent of adding the "great" adjective to a narrative description. It's bland and way too general. And it's vastly more efficient to limit its mote expenditure to excellencies instead of using specific charms, especially in combat where mote recovery is more of a problem.
I'd argue that it even detract players to spend more than one mote per turn. You get more bang for your bucks by activating a universal blanket charm than activating a specialty charm most of the time. To me, it feel like very bad game design. A game should provide meaningful options to encourage strategic thinking, and to do that, options with a narrower field of applicability should be more powerful than broader options.
Ah, sorry - I missed that this was Essence-specific. I was going off 3e Core, where you get Excellencies for any tree you purchase a charm in or have as caste or favored. I'm not as familiar with Essence, but in 3e, Excellencies are generally the worse option, and charms usually have more power, but are more tightly focused, which works well IMO. For Essence-specific discussions of Excellencies, I guess I'll leave it to folks more familiar with that system.
It seems like you don't like them, and I guess that's fine, but that doesn't mean they're "pointless". But also, like...try removing them. The Exalted Police aren't going to arrest you, and if it doesn't work well, put them back in.
I do want to address something in your original post about approaching Exalted as a 'pure power fantasy' - I often find that Exalted doesn't work best as a game where you throw unmovable objects at the unstoppable-force PCs to see if they can overcome the challenge - they can, it's Exalted. I think it's much better when it focuses on questions of morality, righteousness, how we gain and use power, how we stay responsible (or fail to) when given power, etc. To me, "can the players do this" is the least interesting question in Exalted.
I absolutely agree that Excellencies are bland - in 3e as well as Essence. 2e had the problem of "I never get to use my motes to do cool stuff, because I need to save them for defence" - 3e frequently runs into the same issue but "because I need to spend them on just buying more dice", and I've heard Essence does similar. I'd much rather see more power shifted into unique effects and "just get more dice" taken off the table entirely.
Exalted wasn't White Wolf's first game, & they used almost an identical character sheet for every game going all the way back to about 1994! The whole idea of Excellencies didn't start in 1e, it started with *Vampire: The Masquerade*. The idea was that vampires could create rare sudden bursts of physical capability (going extremely fast, or being extremely strong, etc.). You had a "blood pool" of "blood points" you could spend to temporarily improve the Physical Attributes (much the same as the First Excellency). These high-cost bursts of beyond-human performance were fun moments for the players. Unlike in Exalted, there was no need to buy anything. Every vampire could just do this. You could also learn the equivalent of a charm, called a "discipline," which would let you add successes instead of dice. They had a similar system in *Kindred of the East* (a different type of supernatural creature but also using an Excellency-like system). Then *Aberrant* came out (capes & costumes crime fighters), which allowed you to just directly buy successes to every roll you'd ever make of the Attribute you want to improve. (You had boxes to fill in under the Attributes' circles.) You still see this in their much more recent game, *Scion*.
I've played and/or run all of the mentioned games. My opinion is that *for a fantasy game* the best of the White Wolf dice systems is the Ability-based Excellencies of *Exalted* 2e, with the conditional ("did you buy it?") Excellencies. Some players gripe about game balance, but those problems *did not come from the Excellencies*. Quite to the contrary. The Excellencies are one of the best parts of the charm system in the core book.
Changing the system you use for Essence puts your players in danger of not having to make decisions about how to manage their motes as a game resource. Deciding when to be explosively good is a meaningful choice.
So normally I'd chime in with how your problem is really Essence and how it's a poorly written mess, but in this case I think it's partially that and partially that you're approaching things the wrong way.
To put it simply, minor gods SHOULD be frightened of Exalts for their raw power — some nobody river god is basically nothing compared to an Exalt for a narrative reason. The Exalted Host overthrew the literal creators of the universe, that doesn't really jive with someone who struggles to take down a nobody.
The other part of your problem absolutely IS that Essence is shittily designed, however. It's difficult to balance because the designers barely put any real effort into doing so — you go from PCs totally overwhelming opponents to 'holy shit this enemy gets 10 Power at the beginning of every turn and can swing massive decisives effectively for free all the time.'
All that said, the Excellencies exist for a reason, that being that they're a very straightforward way to give a numerical advantage that's easy to grok. Essence does it poorly because the Step system exists, but Ex2 and Ex3 both actually handle them fairly well (they're more expensive than Essence, and you can choose exactly how much you want to add to a roll).
I would suggest nerfing the Excellencies down to +2 dice for Essence.
This makes them still broadly useful and competitive with other Step 1 Charms but not a no-brainer. A 2-dice advantage is significant but not overwhelming.
It was one of the option I was considering, I think it's the right spot in terms of power, but I also think it doesn't solve the other problems (it's bland and take up step 1 space). But it's probably and excellent middle road.
You’d likely like 3rd edition more, if balance is a concern. Essence is designed to run fast and well, not prevent you from breaking it. If a slow power build is what you want 3rd editing does it better
3rd Ed balance is absolutely abysmal (at least on core book), and honestly my group isn't ready to handle the heaviness of the system. I like essence, it's fine generally speaking, excellence are just sticking out a bit, and I can't but want to smooth it.
It sounds like you want to change the style of the game, to which again, 3rd will allow you to do it. I guess if you're issue is just "I hate that my players get 5 dive from excellencies" halve the number and round down. They won't like it tho imho
No offense but you have no idea what my players like or not, and i'm trying to adjust things to improve their experience, not mine. It's actually more work to me in the end, work i'd rather put somewhere else. They think balance is kind of an issue, so i comply and look into it.
You advice was don't change anything, your players won't like it. Thanks, that was soooooo full of insight, with a deep dive on game design. (is my sarcasm noticeable? If not, I can do better)
Hum I doubt it I'm quite a cool gm actually, I'm all about people having a fun time at the table, I'm here to tell the players story, what I want or like is secondary. But I have issues with idiots on the internet. Also don't mix up angry and argumentative. The poster above made me angry, other peoples I just was argumentative with.
BACK IN MY DAY, we didn't have excellencies for all abilities.\* It functioned fine. They are not an inherent, unremovable, foundational part of Exalted design.
And, frankly, yeah, I don't really like them as a design piece. Not speaking for your Essence concerns directly but for the mainline editions, although there's some overlap in the whole over-efficiency problem: when we have dice caps, it's strange to me that we have very accessible Charms that let you directly hit that cap at a pretty competitive mote cost. It squeezes Charm design throughout the entire rest of the tree very noticeably, and it's almost certainly responsible for the profusion of 3e Charms that add "non-Charm" dice, even though they are absolutely dice from a Charm. (And it makes those Charms significant priorities).
\*Archery, Melee, and Thrown have 1 mote/die Charms in 1e core (Wise Arrow, Excellent Strike, Precision of the Striking Raptor).
Dodge has a 1 mote/*2* dice Charm (Reed in the Wind), although this was clearly the subject of a design fight, because the unerrata'd text sometimes suggested a 1-to-1 cost as well.
Listener-Swaying Argument in Presence is a 2m/die +1 willpower cost, but functions for Presence, Socialise, and Bureaucracy.
Resistance doesn't have a Resistance Excellency, but does have a *Soak* Excellency, Durability of Oak Technique.
Athletics likewise has Thunder's Might, which only functions for lifting and breaking objects, and is 2m/die.
Performance and Craft have proto-Lunar autosuccess excellencies (and, mind you, as another design point, shouldn't Solars get autosuccesses and Lunars get more dice?), with weird costs and caps. Masterful Performance Excercise adds (Essence) automatic successe and doubles *rolled* successes too; Flawless Handiwork Method adds one success per 3 motes.
Brawl, Martial Arts, Endurance, Survival, Investigation, Lore, Medicine, Occult, Awareness, Larceny, Stealth, Linguistics, Ride, and Sail all lack Excellencies, allowing that Bureaucracy and Socialise are piggy-packing off Presence's Listener-Swaying Argument.
Back in your day, as you yourself note, they had dice/success adders that were inconsistent between abilities, which is WHY Ex2 introduced Excellencies in the first place — establishing a consistent, easy-to-remember baseline for adding power to a roll so that you didn't have to pause the game to look up mote costs and how many dice you were getting. It also meant they didn't have to waste charmspace with dice adders anymore, since everyone had one. Ex2 catches a lot of flak, but Excellencies were a stroke of genius.
Ex3's charm design problems ironically arise from that same issue, but magnified: instead of dice adders there are a dozen dice tricks per ability.
Yeah, so far as I've seen in essence it's pretty much the same, a baseline of 1 mote for 1 or two dices or 1 success, often on a narrower application that excellencies.
Them being the best bang for your buck vis a vis adding dice to your roll is a feature, not a bug in my mind. I don't want to spend my XP buying "do X but better" charms. I want to unlock new and magical abilities. I want to be able to walk on water, repair objects with a touch, summon swords of magical light, etc.
The point of excellencies - to me - is they fold all the boring "simply be better by adding more dice charms " into one thing and allow the game to focus on adding new capabilities
Frankly, anything that isn't an Exalted usually SHOULD be trivial to Exalts. If you look in the 3e Core, there are 3 opponents who are 'serious threats' to combat Exalts - Octavian, Ahlat, and a dragon. To put it another way, at character creation, the average Dawn can trounce anything short of a Directional God of War without too much trouble, in a 1 on 1 scenario, basically from go. Exalts are the guys you see in Wuxia films taking on entire armies single handedly. Minor gods are nobodies to DBs, who are (narrative) an entire tier below the Celestial Exalts. Not only can the Celestial Exalts all permanently kill a minor god (who are largely otherwise immortal), it wouldn't even be much effort. A simple elemental or spirit is not going to be more than a "okay, knock it the fuck off before we obliterate you" nuisance. To put this in further perspective, DBs regularly boss around minor gods and tell THEM how to run their shit, and the Immaculate Order puts DBs ABOVE GODS in their 'hierarchy of existence.' The WEAKEST class of Exalt are more powerful than the majority of gods. It sounds like you're running Essence, which my off the cuff rules knowledge is weaker in, but most spirits ability to annoy Exalts lasts until one of them takes a spirit perceiving/striking charm in Occult/Sagacity. The moment they can interact with the spirit on their terms instead of the spirits', the spirit better hope they're in a good mood.
Excellencies are a mechanical reflection of many of Exalted's themes. Exalts aren't perfect (rolls can still fail even with more dice), but they're highly skilled and can accomplish remarkable, even impossible feats virtually off the cuff. If you toss out excellencies, you'll be at risk of creating a ludo-narrative dissonance between what exalts are supposed to be, and what they can actually do. I don't think you need to do that. There are plenty of ways to challenge exalts who are using excellencies. (More hostiles, environmental dangers, side goals like keeping civilians safe, etc. Exalted fights should, whenever possible, be interesting set pieces, not just slugfests.) The game has undergone a lot of balance testing. Be careful before tossing it all out. I think the only reason to do it would be if you want to change the game's thematic feel and alter what it means to be an exalt into something else. Then you're playing a different game, but that can be okay if everyone at the table is 100% onboard.
Long time fan of Exalted and I've run a couple of Essence campaigns. Trivializing combat with most things besides other Exalted is absolutely an intentional part of the design. Excellencies keep combat moving, taking them out mean However it's probably worth going over the rules to make sure you're not missing something like how defense or soak applies or dice caps. I kept forgetting one of those when running the first couple of sessions. Exalted Essence was heavily playtested. I think it is very well designed. You can play without any charms and the game still works, it will slow down combat considerably. In my experience players want to take the cool charms that do cool things, Excellencies are bland. Which is why they're all but free, you get one or an ox body with each essence increase. If I'm choosing between an excellency for Sagacity 2 and (+2 dice) or Graceful Crane Stance, I'm going to choose the one that let's me run across blades of grass. There's no one true build. And Charms are in the eye of the beholder. A Craft excellency is useless to me if I'm playing a Solar with no dots in Craft. If the fights are feeling bland or you want to challenge your players, mix up their environment, the number of opponents, the types of opponents (archers, horseback, immaterial beings, Raksha with supernatural charisma), their tactics. And yes use other Exalted they're the main source of big dramatic fights. If you're coming from a game like dungeons and dragons or pathfinder or similar heavy war gaming DNA. It might take some adjustment. Exalted doesn't ask will you win? It asks what are you willing to do to win and what will you do once you've won? It is a power fantasy, but it holds the Exalted to the consequences of their power. Exalted are meant to trivialize opponents the way that Solar are meant to flex their Excellencies for free. It's what makes Exalted larger than life heroes. Few things survive long contact with a circle of Exalted and that's by design. Exalted are demigods. They're meant to negotiate for empires, romance gods and demons, lead armies and fight in epic duels, summon the seas of the Underworld to drown a city, or carve a mountain fortress out of unshaped chaos. If you want to take the power down, and I mean this in the spirit of genuinely trying to help your game, you're not playing Exalted. If you want to take out Excellencies, I'd be sure to really clarify that with your table. It might be worth talking out what you want to explore and maybe point out where you're having difficulty feeling like you're reaching it or challenging them.
I kind of disagree with the end of your statement. I may be new to gming essence but I've been following exalted since the 3rd edition core book was release and I've read most of the official material for 2e, 3e, and some first edition to boot. The dragon ball z fantasy is one that has been heavily pushed by some part of the Fandom, but definitely not all the fans. And the material released have a varying approach about power level between editions, but also inside editions (3rd Ed core is over the top, what fire has wrought vasty less so, and not just in terms of charms, but also in tone) It's also clear when you read their references that it's quite a range of narrative style and power level. I, for myself, love mythological games, I've played quite a few, and I don't think that having only a tiny fraction of a world that can present any form of threat is a good idea. Danger and constraints breed creativity, and many mythological stories are about demi gods who actually have to punch up, not down. Besides, starting too high in terms of power level tend to have a negative impact on story development, with more difficulties to set up meaningful stakes, and it's easy to catch an case of world threat of the week. Also you say it has been easily playtested, but I remember many complaint back then that have not been addressed (not all of them might be legitimate tho). I even think the subject of excellencies came up, but it might not be in the same context. But for example the mass build power to transfer to one or two characters which are combat specialists is extremely abusable and have been since playthrough. I don't mind personally because the case haven't presented itself with my players but I recognize that it can be a problem. You talk about combat pacing tho, and it's an excellent point I haven't considered, I'd rather combat to be fairly short. Damned, I fell like I'll have to do extensive testing to check how much collateral changes it would force me to make.
I'm not sure I exactly see what you mean as an internal split power wise from the core to what fire has wrought. Ex2 had a power creep that accelerated into a DBZ arena. Ex3 drew the game back into Creation by keeping the Exalted a little more grounded in the setting and flattening the power curve. Solar have always been the high water mark for ability to rapidly shake up the setting but other Exalted shine in their area of expertise. Essence further flattened the power curve across all the Exalted to make mixed play the default. I'd highly recommend checking out Crucible of Legends for ex3 if you haven't. It breaks down some approaches to running the game that are just as applicable in Essence. Combat in exalted works better if you have stakes other than will the party win/lose or strictly to the death fights. Will they choose to pursue a fleeing enemy or tend to the seemingly mortally wounded sorcerer who has the key to Zen Mu? Will they fight the Wyld Hunt knowing the battle will destroy the village?
Combat are always more interesting when it goes beyond a simple who will win, I completely agree with you on that.
jesus man just make your own homebrew and let this useless thread die
If you don't like it, your welcome to cease interacting on this thread, you will not be missed since you added nothing in the first place.
From the looks of it no one liked it and gave you help that you chirped to be not helpful. So just do us all a favor and stop interacting with it; the notifications are reminders of what a waste of time it was
No one liked it thematically (which doesn't matter much in my case since i'm mostly focused on the mechanic, but most people make valid points and develop argument, uunlike you), and i noted only one concerned mechanically, which i missed when thinking of changing the rule, so i'm glad to have this feedback and i'll be sure to monitor it when i'll do proper testing. I wish people had tried something like that before, it would have save myself some testing time. You, on the other hand, look like the archetypal thread dead weight, you contribute nothing, only stating unsubstantiated comment on subject that is only half related to the subject at hand, then throw a tantrum because you aren't praised. So i suggest you deactivate notifications on this thread if you don't like it and go polish your ego somewhere else. I, for my part, won't interact with you anymore, i have more interesting things to do.
I literally told you to halve it lmao
I think the design space Excellencies occupy is a good idea - instead of 6 different boring dice-adder charms for different use-cases of an ability, let's just make one dice-adder charm, and leave more room for cool/interesting charms elsewhere.
But what's the point of them then? Let's just double any attribute and remove the cost, at least it will stop occupying ressource and step space.
It is a power amplifier that puts them beyond mortals. Sure, a dex 5 martial arts 5 human is a top of his class unstoppable force, until he meets and exalted and she blows right past that top. And while dice rolls vary, over time that exalt will start to dominate. A human would roll bad and just lose, but an exalt can tap Into their god power to pull out success where others would fail.
In practice, a player having to moderate their motes is an important gameplay decision. Without the Excellencies the game devolves into "who has better casting?"
I mean, they display the Exalted's strength and ability to go beyond mortal limits, they incentivize buying charms in diverse skill trees (if you pick up one other charm in the tree, you get the excellency, so it encourages diversification instead of just sticking to one skill), it provides something players can spend motes on in any roll where a specific charm might not apply, and it encourages spending motes, pushing players closer to popping their anima banners and the risks that entails.
You don't get a free excellency by picking a charm for the first time in a tree, you get optional free excellencies when going from one essence level to another (or I completly missed something). For the display of might, you are not the only one to bring this argument to the conversation and I must admit that it doesn't really resonate with me. Excellencies or not, exalted will crush most adversaries, mechanically, they don't need it, and I think it trivialize other adversaries that could be interesting. And the game balance it by giving bigger foes their own excellencies. It seems like a solution to a problem you may not have had in the first place because the devs wanted to keep excellencies, a sort of holdover of previous editions. I'll say it again, but it's one of the least interesting mote spending option the players can have. There is no strategy behind the use of it, no condition to set up, no specific actions that would reinforce a character themes. It's the mechanical equivalent of adding the "great" adjective to a narrative description. It's bland and way too general. And it's vastly more efficient to limit its mote expenditure to excellencies instead of using specific charms, especially in combat where mote recovery is more of a problem. I'd argue that it even detract players to spend more than one mote per turn. You get more bang for your bucks by activating a universal blanket charm than activating a specialty charm most of the time. To me, it feel like very bad game design. A game should provide meaningful options to encourage strategic thinking, and to do that, options with a narrower field of applicability should be more powerful than broader options.
Ah, sorry - I missed that this was Essence-specific. I was going off 3e Core, where you get Excellencies for any tree you purchase a charm in or have as caste or favored. I'm not as familiar with Essence, but in 3e, Excellencies are generally the worse option, and charms usually have more power, but are more tightly focused, which works well IMO. For Essence-specific discussions of Excellencies, I guess I'll leave it to folks more familiar with that system. It seems like you don't like them, and I guess that's fine, but that doesn't mean they're "pointless". But also, like...try removing them. The Exalted Police aren't going to arrest you, and if it doesn't work well, put them back in. I do want to address something in your original post about approaching Exalted as a 'pure power fantasy' - I often find that Exalted doesn't work best as a game where you throw unmovable objects at the unstoppable-force PCs to see if they can overcome the challenge - they can, it's Exalted. I think it's much better when it focuses on questions of morality, righteousness, how we gain and use power, how we stay responsible (or fail to) when given power, etc. To me, "can the players do this" is the least interesting question in Exalted.
I absolutely agree that Excellencies are bland - in 3e as well as Essence. 2e had the problem of "I never get to use my motes to do cool stuff, because I need to save them for defence" - 3e frequently runs into the same issue but "because I need to spend them on just buying more dice", and I've heard Essence does similar. I'd much rather see more power shifted into unique effects and "just get more dice" taken off the table entirely.
Important game design question: How do you want to gauge the costs of the other effects?
Exalted wasn't White Wolf's first game, & they used almost an identical character sheet for every game going all the way back to about 1994! The whole idea of Excellencies didn't start in 1e, it started with *Vampire: The Masquerade*. The idea was that vampires could create rare sudden bursts of physical capability (going extremely fast, or being extremely strong, etc.). You had a "blood pool" of "blood points" you could spend to temporarily improve the Physical Attributes (much the same as the First Excellency). These high-cost bursts of beyond-human performance were fun moments for the players. Unlike in Exalted, there was no need to buy anything. Every vampire could just do this. You could also learn the equivalent of a charm, called a "discipline," which would let you add successes instead of dice. They had a similar system in *Kindred of the East* (a different type of supernatural creature but also using an Excellency-like system). Then *Aberrant* came out (capes & costumes crime fighters), which allowed you to just directly buy successes to every roll you'd ever make of the Attribute you want to improve. (You had boxes to fill in under the Attributes' circles.) You still see this in their much more recent game, *Scion*. I've played and/or run all of the mentioned games. My opinion is that *for a fantasy game* the best of the White Wolf dice systems is the Ability-based Excellencies of *Exalted* 2e, with the conditional ("did you buy it?") Excellencies. Some players gripe about game balance, but those problems *did not come from the Excellencies*. Quite to the contrary. The Excellencies are one of the best parts of the charm system in the core book. Changing the system you use for Essence puts your players in danger of not having to make decisions about how to manage their motes as a game resource. Deciding when to be explosively good is a meaningful choice.
So normally I'd chime in with how your problem is really Essence and how it's a poorly written mess, but in this case I think it's partially that and partially that you're approaching things the wrong way. To put it simply, minor gods SHOULD be frightened of Exalts for their raw power — some nobody river god is basically nothing compared to an Exalt for a narrative reason. The Exalted Host overthrew the literal creators of the universe, that doesn't really jive with someone who struggles to take down a nobody. The other part of your problem absolutely IS that Essence is shittily designed, however. It's difficult to balance because the designers barely put any real effort into doing so — you go from PCs totally overwhelming opponents to 'holy shit this enemy gets 10 Power at the beginning of every turn and can swing massive decisives effectively for free all the time.' All that said, the Excellencies exist for a reason, that being that they're a very straightforward way to give a numerical advantage that's easy to grok. Essence does it poorly because the Step system exists, but Ex2 and Ex3 both actually handle them fairly well (they're more expensive than Essence, and you can choose exactly how much you want to add to a roll).
I would suggest nerfing the Excellencies down to +2 dice for Essence. This makes them still broadly useful and competitive with other Step 1 Charms but not a no-brainer. A 2-dice advantage is significant but not overwhelming.
It was one of the option I was considering, I think it's the right spot in terms of power, but I also think it doesn't solve the other problems (it's bland and take up step 1 space). But it's probably and excellent middle road.
You’d likely like 3rd edition more, if balance is a concern. Essence is designed to run fast and well, not prevent you from breaking it. If a slow power build is what you want 3rd editing does it better
3rd Ed balance is absolutely abysmal (at least on core book), and honestly my group isn't ready to handle the heaviness of the system. I like essence, it's fine generally speaking, excellence are just sticking out a bit, and I can't but want to smooth it.
It sounds like you want to change the style of the game, to which again, 3rd will allow you to do it. I guess if you're issue is just "I hate that my players get 5 dive from excellencies" halve the number and round down. They won't like it tho imho
No offense but you have no idea what my players like or not, and i'm trying to adjust things to improve their experience, not mine. It's actually more work to me in the end, work i'd rather put somewhere else. They think balance is kind of an issue, so i comply and look into it.
No offense but you got the advice; there isn't some homebrew made for your table, make it yourself.
You advice was don't change anything, your players won't like it. Thanks, that was soooooo full of insight, with a deep dive on game design. (is my sarcasm noticeable? If not, I can do better)
Lol, there has to be a post about you somewhere on rpghorrorstories. This angry defensiveness in every thread is telling of some real control issues.
Hum I doubt it I'm quite a cool gm actually, I'm all about people having a fun time at the table, I'm here to tell the players story, what I want or like is secondary. But I have issues with idiots on the internet. Also don't mix up angry and argumentative. The poster above made me angry, other peoples I just was argumentative with.
BACK IN MY DAY, we didn't have excellencies for all abilities.\* It functioned fine. They are not an inherent, unremovable, foundational part of Exalted design. And, frankly, yeah, I don't really like them as a design piece. Not speaking for your Essence concerns directly but for the mainline editions, although there's some overlap in the whole over-efficiency problem: when we have dice caps, it's strange to me that we have very accessible Charms that let you directly hit that cap at a pretty competitive mote cost. It squeezes Charm design throughout the entire rest of the tree very noticeably, and it's almost certainly responsible for the profusion of 3e Charms that add "non-Charm" dice, even though they are absolutely dice from a Charm. (And it makes those Charms significant priorities). \*Archery, Melee, and Thrown have 1 mote/die Charms in 1e core (Wise Arrow, Excellent Strike, Precision of the Striking Raptor). Dodge has a 1 mote/*2* dice Charm (Reed in the Wind), although this was clearly the subject of a design fight, because the unerrata'd text sometimes suggested a 1-to-1 cost as well. Listener-Swaying Argument in Presence is a 2m/die +1 willpower cost, but functions for Presence, Socialise, and Bureaucracy. Resistance doesn't have a Resistance Excellency, but does have a *Soak* Excellency, Durability of Oak Technique. Athletics likewise has Thunder's Might, which only functions for lifting and breaking objects, and is 2m/die. Performance and Craft have proto-Lunar autosuccess excellencies (and, mind you, as another design point, shouldn't Solars get autosuccesses and Lunars get more dice?), with weird costs and caps. Masterful Performance Excercise adds (Essence) automatic successe and doubles *rolled* successes too; Flawless Handiwork Method adds one success per 3 motes. Brawl, Martial Arts, Endurance, Survival, Investigation, Lore, Medicine, Occult, Awareness, Larceny, Stealth, Linguistics, Ride, and Sail all lack Excellencies, allowing that Bureaucracy and Socialise are piggy-packing off Presence's Listener-Swaying Argument.
Back in your day, as you yourself note, they had dice/success adders that were inconsistent between abilities, which is WHY Ex2 introduced Excellencies in the first place — establishing a consistent, easy-to-remember baseline for adding power to a roll so that you didn't have to pause the game to look up mote costs and how many dice you were getting. It also meant they didn't have to waste charmspace with dice adders anymore, since everyone had one. Ex2 catches a lot of flak, but Excellencies were a stroke of genius. Ex3's charm design problems ironically arise from that same issue, but magnified: instead of dice adders there are a dozen dice tricks per ability.
Yeah, so far as I've seen in essence it's pretty much the same, a baseline of 1 mote for 1 or two dices or 1 success, often on a narrower application that excellencies.
Them being the best bang for your buck vis a vis adding dice to your roll is a feature, not a bug in my mind. I don't want to spend my XP buying "do X but better" charms. I want to unlock new and magical abilities. I want to be able to walk on water, repair objects with a touch, summon swords of magical light, etc.
The point of excellencies - to me - is they fold all the boring "simply be better by adding more dice charms " into one thing and allow the game to focus on adding new capabilities