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Exalted 3rd Edition $24.99
Average Rating:4.3 / 5
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Exalted 3rd Edition
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Timothy W. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 07/15/2023 09:21:41

This game is fantastic. The setting is filled with detailed lore and an interesting premise. The game allows powerful characters from the start with the capability of growing yet more powerful, but it balances things in a way that even very powerful characters remain playable rather than totally game breaking.

Naturally, I have some quibbles. If you add on the expansions, the Solars feel generic while the other types become special. Also, there are too many charms to keep track of and many of those are less than inspiring.

Still, while it is not a perfect game, it is definitely highly enjoyable and I would personally recommend it for anyone that enjoys dramatic high fantasy.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Carter D. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 07/03/2022 22:15:11

I'm still in the process of digesting this mammoth tome, but I can certainly provide some first impressions. To start, on a purely aesthetic level this edition feels more like First Edition than Second. There's a lot more of a sense of the world being wide open and lively in the writing and art. The setting chapter provides write-ups for locations that are familiar, and breaks some new ground. The systems for combat and other things are evocative and meticulously balanced... which is good, because there are a LOT of them. This is a product that will take time to grock, but it will show itself to have been well spent.

In terms of major changes from the previous edition, let me provide some bullet points and my reflex reactions. The game is about 70% modified from the previous edition, and mostly in good ways.

Brawl makes its return, and Martial Arts has been slightly repositioned so that it requires a few prerequisites to access. The book also provides multiple Martial Arts styles. This does mean that there are now 26 abilities.

Caste abilities have been opened up so that you now choose five from a list of eight abilities. This does break the boilerplate of the First Edition character sheet, but it also lets you effectively opt out of Caste Abilities you would never use for a specific character, like an Archery-focused Dawn Caste who has no need for Thrown charms. They also introduce the concept of the Supernal ability.

Anima Abilities are more balanced, with each Caste having three. Of them, I only see one that I would consider 'bad'. It's a Twilight ability that isn't bad in itself, but could easily be abused by a player that just wants to get away from the table and go play videogames instead.

Social Combat has been replaced with the infinitely better 'Social Influence' system. Motivation has been ditched entirely, in favor of streamlining and detailing the Intimacy system, which interacts directly with the Social Influence system. Virtues are also out, although Virtue Flaws remain.

Backgrounds have become New WoD style Merits, and Flaws have become New WoD style Flaws. This allows a lot of the Backgrounds to work far better than they once did.

They include two extra exalt types in the fluff of the core book, just as the core rulebook has always talked about the other Exalts since First Edition. Of the two, Exigents are actually an interesting and worthwhile addition to the game, creating room for players who want to play something odd and unique to fit within the larger world. Liminal Exalted are an interesting niche case that is easily disregarded in stories that don't need them, and perform well in the kinds of pseudo-horror stories they're geared to.

I could keep going with this list, but I think I've hit the major highlights. If you're an exalted fan, or even just a fan of the things Exalted draws inspiration from, chances are good you'll like this game, if not love it. It has everything that made Exalted special from the outset, distilled and concentrated for added intensity.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Daniel D. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 04/15/2021 08:20:00

First, let me say that the Exalted setting is beautifully written. The worldbuilding is novel, fascinating, and well thought out, with a wonderful amount of attention paid to the implications of even minor setting details. The characterization is solid, and the potential plots are limitless. Considered as a work of fiction, this book is a masterpiece.

Unfortunately, considered as a game system, this system is almost literally unplayable. The combat system is built around a division between "withering" and "decisive" attacks that is both horrifically clunky and constantly pulls you out of the gaming experience to engage with a dissociated mechanical abstraction. The arbitrary "crafting XP" system makes crafting feel like a video-game grind rather than like being a master craftsman, and the use of Lore as a skill to rewrite the setting rather than to obtain information undermines any attempt to create the illusion of a internally consistent reality. The XP system fails to use the full advantages of an XP system, with XP primarily being handed out for completing sessions rather than any in-game accomplishment and with little to no provision for the GM to use XP to reward player success. The Attribute+Ability system is confusing, with several things being made Abilities that really should be passive effects and an Attribute system that is hard to follow.

This is all the more frustrating because Onyx Path had no need to use such atrocious mechanics. If they had simply built the EX3 game to run on the same combat engine, Ability+Skill system, Beat/XP mechanics, etc. that they already use for their Chronicles of Darkness system, this would be easily a 4-star product, possibly 5.

Though I will note one last caveat: I was very impressed with EX3's social influence system. The idea of teired Intimacies and the way they interact with social influence is one of the better ways I have seen of building a defined social influence system that gives social characters power without being horrifically broken, and this is one area where EX3's rules are better than those of the CoD system.

I hold out hope for a conversion of this setting to a more playable system, but I can confidently state that I will never play or run a game using these rules.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Jens T. J. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 02/08/2021 07:34:11

Let me start by saying I love the Exalted setting, and the setting work done in this version is outstanding. However, after having played two campaigns as the storyteller I've finally given up on third edition. The system is overwhelming. Not only does it have a very steep learning curve, but the sheer number of charm (comparable to spells or feats from other systems) and their complexity forced the storyteller into a constant state of information overload. They introduced a "quick" npc system, but the system failed to streamline npc charms in any useful way.

Secondly, the system introduced the concept of fluid initiative. Initiative not only serves to determine your turn order, but it is also both a sort of hit point and your damage dice pool... and it is very swingy. It is extremely hard to turn the tables on someone, once you are behind. Further more action economy hits very hard in this edition. While "realistic" the core mechanics favor superior numbers. This means that in order to challenge five players you need at least five NPCs of roughly the same power-level. Here the complexity of the game strikes again for running five NPCs of such power-level is extremely time-consuming. As such a battle can easily take around 5-10 hours in real time...

Thirdly, the quality of the charms vary wildly. Some of them seem very polished and integrate into the base system in fun ways, a lot of them are simply dice adders adding little to the actual story, and some seems to be wierdly out of sync with the base game. An example of the latter is the number of charms using what the game calls "defining intimacies". Defining intimacies are core values that your character would be willing to kill or die for, and realisticly a character should rarely have more than one or two of those. However, some charms seem to assume that you have a handful or more (integrity charm tree I'm looking at you), while other are capable of giving people a defining intimacy towards you with no resisted roll... We had one player in the group giving everyone else a defining intimacy of lust towards his character. That turned out quite anticlimatic because people had a hard time actually playing out the intimacy on a defining level. The charm in question would have been much more reasonable if it only gave a major intimacy. Also... the Craft rules... just don't go there. It is a dark place.

Speaking of intimacies they are at their core a very good idea, but the whole social conflict system can feel a bit artificial. Sure the gm can assign bonus and penalty dice based on the roleplaying performance (stunts) and the way PCs frame their requests, but for solars focused on social conflict it rarely matters. The excellency alone can give you such a big load of dice, that you can pretty much start building any intimacy you want in another character... if your suggestion isn't vetoed with a willpower point. So depending on your perspective it is either overpowered or completely useless.

In the end I would like to offer a piece of advice. If you want to play Exalted 3rd Edition I really recommend a small group. 1 to 3 players would probably work fine. Smaller numbers speed up combat, and make it way easier on the storyteller to construct challenging and credible encounters. Personally I will probably be using the Fate Core system the next time I want to run something in the Exalted universe... alternatively I will be waiting for the Exalted Essence edition, which Onyx Path has announce. It might be the Exalted Light that I've been wanting all along.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Ronald C. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/28/2020 14:51:05

It pains me to give EX3E a low rating.

I've been a Exalted fan since 1E, but as is fairly typical for White Wolf; great ideas, settings and themes, with poorly thought out mechanics that swiftly became excercises of abuse management or simply made no kind of sense. I won't wax on about the flaws in 1E/2E, other than to say I had a tragic love affair with the setting, but came to hate the sloppy rules and ultimately resorted to adapting the setting to other rule systems.

Despite OPP being (IMO) a better studio, 3E's big failure point is it's combat system, and it's a very significant failure. The system sounds great in the read, but in practice it becomes a drudgery that players and ST alike will become bored or overwhelmed by. It is rife with required resource management that expands progressively the more capable a character becomes. Added to this is a bloat to the charm trees granting only marginal improvements that are blatant taxes to slow down a character's power growth, causing players to go for maximum optimization similar in practice of what was pursued in 2E.

My table spent several months getting all the various parts down in the hope of making combat scenes as fun and exciting as we had hoped it would be, but we eventually concluded not only not worth the effort, but RAW actively robbed us of the desire to play the characters at all due to the sheer tedium of 3E's system. For a fantasy anime themed game, this was a critical failure for us. We attempted to house rule a number of elements to make it less tedious, but eventually gave up and used the setting and it's creative lore in another rule system's framework.

3E's other systems in contrast, work quite well and are a genuine pleasure to use, particularly Social Influence. Investigation, naval conflicts, nation building, and cooperative world building via inserting Facts through Lore are all done well and give players and ST's alike a set of clear tools and systems to pursue ideas and resolve them quickly and smoothly. Sorcery and Martial Arts were designed with a great deal more flavor and versatility, allowing for some very interesting MA concepts where their social assets were key components.

Sorcery in particular got a conceptual upgrade in the form of Workings and shaping rituals which govern how spells are powered and cast. Spells also have significant improvements if they're one a character declares as mastered. Workings are a form of ritual magic that characters can pursue with a fair degree of flexibility in performing and designing them, which is where the majority of what being a Sorcerer comes online. It does however, suffer from the same limitation as previous editions in that spells are treated as charms, with a lot fewer to choose from unless one translates 2E material.

3E also created a entire new region that is very creative and full of potential that extends the world map into the SE region, along with little creative rewrites of former setting lore (though the bulk of the setting's lore from previous editions is still present). The additional creative additions to the setting, and more attention to the variety of Exalted one can play, all make the 3E a significant improvement over previous editions material.

3E's crafting system is sadly, another significant failure point. If one stays with RAW, a Crafting Supernal can quickly become absurdly productive and overpower the setting with how quickly and to the sheer extent it can amplify a group's capabilities. Due to the drudgery of 3E's combat system and the (IMO) broken crafting system, I am compelled to rate the title at 2 stars overall.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Samuel S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/24/2019 15:32:30

Disappointing--Needed an aggressive editor from Day 1.

As a kickstarter backer, I was excited to get my hands on the manuscript. Exalted 2e was fun, but had some definite problems. However, as I read through the almost-finished product, my smile fell off. This was not the product I was hoping for.

As far as I can tell, Exalted 3e did not have an Editor. Sure, they probably had an "editor" that looked for typos and technical errors, but that is not what I meant---seemingly at no point during the development process did anyone go "Hang on, does this make sense to add in? Is there a different, more streamlined way we could do this?" Everything and the kitchin sink has been tossed in, making this a bloated, overly-complicated mess. Just look at the page count alone--the physical book could kill someone if it fell on them.

Charms, the core powers of a character, are completely all over the place. Some are so insanely specific that they will only be used once, and simply the difference in charm count from Ability to Ability (a character's specialization) is staggering. I have my high doubts that characters with the same amount of xp would be balanced at all with each other.

Martial Arts has perhaps one of the bizzarest learning path I have ever seen. Considering the setting, I would expect Martial Arts to be a core feature of the book and character progression. Instead, it feels like it has been kludged in at the last moment. Unlike every other ability, Martial Arts first requires spending experience in the seperate Brawl Ability and then purchasing a Merit in order to even start learning a Martial Art. I really want to hammer in the point of purchasing a Merit, and how it makes absolutely no sense. Merits, in a mechanical sense, are how you "Fine Tune" a character. They are ways to give flavorful, and sometimes very useful, bonuses to certain circumstances. And one of the core mechanics is locked behind one of the most expensive Merits, for no real good reason! "You need a teacher" well sure, but wouldn't I also need a teacher for things like Archery? Why does that get a mechanical waiver?

And now we get to one of the most devisive and talked-about portions of Exalted 3e: Craft. Hoooooo boy. Hoooo boy I hate Craft. Some people love it, but I am not one of them. Craft....Craft take five pages to explain? Let me remind you that Craft, one ability out of 25 (or 26, if you count MA), is the only ability to interact with this subsystem. It also adds 3 additional resources to keep track of! For 1/25th of the game, it nearly doubles the amount of "stuff" you have to keep track of!

Now, not only is Craft incredibly just.. bloated compared to the other abilities, it is completely different. The powers of other abilities essentially say "Here's a cool thing you can do with our system, and how it interacts nicely!" Craft's powers are "Alter this and that mechanic. And if you spend enough xp, your reward is that you can (essentially) ignore this part of the subsystem. Oh glory be, you can tell how great a subsystem is in that the more and more powerful you get, you are rewarded with the ability to not use the subsystem.

And the entire kicker? There's a perfectly good crafting system already in the book: Sorcerous Workings! Yes! Sorcery has a better and more complexity-appropriate crafting system than Craft.

The entire book is just....needlessly complicated. Every single mechanic, every single little thing feels like it went in, was mechanically polished to work, but at no point did anyone ask "Is this a good idea to put in at all?"

It's just a mess. Sure, the mechanics might technically work (at least at the start of the edition's lifespan), but they're still an absolute mess, like a jumble of wires and tubes sticking out in a factory that all technically still produces things.

Exalted 2e has its definitive problems. But at least I want to play in that system--as broken as it is. I have no desire to ever pick this book off the virtual bookshelf and actually use it.

Which is a shame, because it does have some good ideas.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Noelle H. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/05/2019 21:42:23

Welcome to Creation! Everyone is a bad guy, no one's motives are pure, and readers want everything from a single book!

Let me be clear--Exalted is a beast of a system. The book clocks in at just shy of 700 pages, and after my third full read of the tome I still wasn't sure I had a handle on all of it. The second edition had literally thousands of pages of different exalt types, lore, fluff, mass combat, naval combat, setting--you name it. This one massive book does not endeavor to do it all, because that would be foolish, but it does endeavor to feel like a full game and full world in only one book.

And it does that quite successfully. There's weeks and months and maybe years worth of story in just this book alone if that's your cup of tea. If not, they're always working on adding more stories and characters to the world.

What's new? Combat rid itself of the very complicated tick system. It now differentiates between attacks trying to get advantage (Withering) and attacks trying to kill your opponent (Decisive). The fluff of this can be a little confusing, but it also flows in really interesting ways once you get accustomed to it. Crafting nerfed pretty heavily, encouraging players to make regular people things before trying to make world-shaping artifacts. Sorcery has been streamlined in ways that make it easier to access, Martial Arts have been a little more differentiated (though of course the Sidereal ones don't exist yet). And, of course, the end of perfect parries and perfect dodges, which means combat has become more than "who runs out of motes first".

Overall, I'm in love. It's everything I wanted in an Exalted system, cleaned up and consumable in a way that second edition never was. The rules are more codified, the impacts of the magic more easily measured, social combat given better rules, mass combat tidied.

The downside? This is pretty firmly not a system for brand new gamers. Guys, it's huge. It's overwhelming. And if you're not accustomed to flavor surrounding every mechanic and learning to read past it, this book could be complete gibberish. But for old hands, or people interested in trying a more immersive world, I cannot reccommend Exalted more highly.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Ronald G. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 06/17/2019 23:08:17

Anyone who has played or owned the first two editions will feel this is both familiar and yet very different. I like the newest edition as I believe it surpasses the previous two by a large margin (I hated the previous 2). However, there is a lot more crunch and the rules take a lot of rereading to understand.

First his book is a hefty tome. 600 pages and I do not know how durable my print on demand copy is. If you purchase spend the 5 dollars to get an accompanying pdf copy. 240 pages are simply charms, spells and martial arts. I would like to say it should have been 2 or 3 books rather than 1. A players handbook and a GMs guide would have worked better I believe.

Character creation is straight forward if you ignore the charms and intimacies. Make sure you have a character concept first and then build accordingly else you will get lost with the sheer selection of merits, charms, etc. Expect it to take a few hours to build with charms, etc. Mortals might take 15-30 minutes. Merits are a combination of backgrounds and merits from the previous editions.

Combat has changed. Decisive and withering attacks allow epic monsters to feel epic. No longer are they purely health levels, but they feel like they are nigh invulnerable until you wear them down to the point you can do a critical strike. Monsters like the tyrant lizard feel like a real threat. This does mean a bit more bookkeeping on that end, yet the rules say to use mass combat (groups) if players face a group of bandits (size 1 or 2). It simplifies and allows low level threats to gang up for a larger threat without feeling like you are rolling dice forever (no dnd 50 rolls for 50 kobolds to attack). I like it even though it felt like an ice cold shower when you first see it. Range bands, initiative damage, hardness, soak, etc. Lot more complicated.

Social now requires ties or principles to motivate people. It allows for progression of your NPCs feelings and encourages your PCs to have ties as well. Again more work for the GM and it is not a simple roll and move on. Forces players to interact and find emotional weaknesses to exploit.

Artifacts feel like artifacts with their own personalities and powers. It is no longer a 3 dot artifact. Rather it is a artifact with its own history, focus and powers. They grow with the character (or rather the characters grows into the artifact). Now artifacts have their own charms players can learn.

Crafting is a confusing system that takes a lot of rereading and book keeping. Major, superior and legendary crafts. Slots, three different types of crafting experience, etc. I would like to say it is a mess, but unless your players are crafting items it is not too bad. If they are crafting artifacts then it gets messy. Though they can pop out 2 or 3 dot artifacts fairly quickly and 5 dot artifacts every decade or so.

Charms. Buy the charm cards, or pdf of the book, or go to madletters website and download his charm trees. The charm trees are not provided in the text. This makes it frustrating if you want to work towards a high level charm. Starting characters can get charms with a 5 essense prerequistite with essense 1 if they have a supernal ability (every solar has 1 supernal ability and only solars).

Martial arts. I have not looked much at the martial arts. It is now its own ability and now is more confined. It also separates between terrestrial exalt, lunars and solars/abyssals who learn the same charm (Mastery, terrestrial and everyone else).

Sorcery I think has improved. Players can now pick merits based on their background on how they learned sorcery. The first spell learned in each circle has additional powers for the practitioner (control spells). The system has workings if players want to create magic effects beyond spells (first age wonders). Spells now have distortion which alters the effects, but does not remove it. It feels more epic and

The antagonists are well developed, but fairly limited. Personal opinion is they should have used a system similar to IKRPGs monsternomican. A well developed backstory for each monster, but then have traits to add or subtract abilities. Also common powers should have been in a general form. Legendary size being a perfect one to save space rather than repeating the same text for several different monsters. This would have allowed a greater variety of opponents with minimal GM effort.

Overall, I like the system and world. The book is perfectly usable in its current state for beginning campaigns. Future supplements (ignoring the types of exalts) will need these things:

They need a bestiary for common threats with creature templates like IKRPG Monsternomicon. An example would be a starving juvenile ox dragon. or an alpha large tyrant lizard. They need better guidelines for charm creation especially for artifacts. General rules are given, but they are hard for a GM to make reasonable charms. Arms of the chosen is ok for premade artifacts, but not for custom one with charms. NPC Elementals, demons and god/spirits creation especially as players can summon and control first circle demons and I like more than the few presented. Behemoth creation Rules for size, recommendations for overcoming, etc.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by A customer [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 06/05/2019 17:13:12

Rather enjoyed everything about this book. Mechanics, lore, enemies, character creation, etc.

I think the lore section and mechanics section should be printed in two seperate books. There is soo much goodness and content in this that the bindings can not hold it. I have had to repair my bindings already and I expect to repair them again soon. Print quality from the Drive Thru is the biggest negative for me. But Onyx really came on strong with this book and because of that, I will be getting the rest of their product line.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by jb a. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/27/2019 12:21:30
4 stars, and if the passionate fan in me had his way, it would be a five. I'm gonna start with the great things. The setting is awesome, it's awesome in it's scale and in it's diversity. It's a world were the divine is everywhere, and yet most people cannot fathom the will of those divine being. Guess what you are not a normal human, exalted is a game of epic, it is not made to emulate the common man surviving in a gritty world, it was built for players to trick river gods, to fight titanic and nightmarish beasts, to walk in a whirlwind of intrigue. It's a system you could use to play Cuchulainn, the irish demi god with his magical spear, or to tell the story of Odysseus wandering for years upon the sea, or the journey to the west from chinese mythos. And for this the system work well, it's unique, it's unsettling at first, it can be be a bit crunchy, but when you get in the system my god does it flow well. One of the best part in combat is the gambit mechanic, made to allow the player to do pretty much any action not planned for by the devs in a simple fashion, it's also very good to create special boss mechanics. I've hear complaint about the social system and the craft system, the social system being to complex, which i do not agree with considering you are not obligated to use the full system for every interaction, and works very well in a game of intrigues, and for the craft...well i'm ok with it but understand why people don't like it, you have to generate "lesser" by doing menial tasks allowing you can spend to accomplish harder projet that will net you "greater" xp you can spend for trully awesome artefact or construct. IMO it mostly depend on how leniant the gm is and how interested in RP this kind of thing players are. If they aren't and just want to craft stuff that gives bonus, they gonna be bored quickly, if they like it, it's an heroes journey by itself (also you can find house rules online for alternative system, haven't used them tho).

Now we come to the problem the system poses. It is NOT a game quicly learned and played, you need to invest yourself in the game for it to run smoothly, and for GM you lack certains tools like a true bestiary, which is hard for a new GM to balance your foes. Its take on fights can be puzzling for player because it is so different. Most GM will have to change the way they describe fights. I had difficulties at first but now use this style of describing the ebbs and flow of a fight instead of describing hit or misse for every attacks for pretty much every system i run. In the end it made me a better storyteller, but it took time and effort. The fact they used kickstarter to finance some of additional content tend to stretch the time between books, and the pace for release is sloooooooow, and we still don't have a fucking bestiary (you can find homebrew tho), and if i'm not mistaken the terrestrial exalted is pretty much done but still not available for purchase for non backer, and the lunar exalted book is in beta for backer so who guess when customers will be able to buy it. Also the art of the book is meh, some arts are good some are barely acceptable (the cover is awesome tho).

To conclude, if you take the time, and you understand what kind of story it's made for, you'll find a unique and very good system. Me i've become an addict.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Jason S. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 12/29/2018 23:31:08

I love the game. and have run it for many years. the mechanics can be overwhelming. but in practice actually flow very well. I do not however like the range band system. and new content is taking way too long to come out. all in all I love the system so much I own every book released all the way back to first edition. keep in mind when you play it less rules. more imagination. promote your players being unique and adding to the world it will take so much off your plate.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Etienne O. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 12/15/2018 00:27:07

I really wanted to love this, but there are just so many choices made in this book that run counter to what I feel makes a good game. And that has disappointed me to no end. I backed it on kickstarter and waited patiently for the follow-up to the first RPG I ever really played. I had hoped for a lighter, more table-friendly game, with a good flow and rules that were more focused on the bigger picture than the details. What works for me: The setting is cool as all heck. Anything that touches the world of creation is awesome. There are little hints and rumors that aren't immediatly explainable, which function great as inspiration for stories and adventure. If anything, the setting part of this book is too short, and more pages should have been assigned to this. What doesn't work for me: The artwork, most of it is dull and uninspired, there is no "freedom" to the art styles, most of it locked by tracing after 3-d models. Some are great, the cover in particular is very cool. The system, There are too many subsystems. Rules are overly specific instead of being broad. The charms, there roughly 200 pages of charms, that do not have an easy overview. I completely understand that adding extra pages to this monster, in order to add charm-trees or something must have seemed like madness. The length: This book is almost vulgar in size, which isn't a problem as such in pdf, but with the print product it is pretty bad. it is pretty neat having a Big Book (tm), but it is nigh-unusable as whenever I open it I fear that the book will tear itself to pieces.

In summary: Great setting - really one of the best out there. Too long, and filled mostly with bad art and overly complex rules. I guess that it would be pretty great for some, but working full-time and having children this game has become a hard pass.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Phillip M. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 10/27/2018 07:44:42

I've been playing Exalted since the early months of first edition and this is, by far, the best edition yet. Yes, there's quite a bit of crunch, but with that crunch comes a great deal more clarity, far more functional and less ambiguous rules, and a ridiculous amount of additional content for Solar characters. I've been Running a third edition game since before it's release thanks to backer PDFs and I've never once looked back at prior editions and longed for something in the mechanics to return. Systems like combat seem daunting at first, but once you've got a few fights under you belt and the players have a hand on their characters, even the biggest throwdowns move at a pace far faster than any prior edition.

The book itself is a thing of beauty, the edition strikes an excellent balance between the mystery of the first edition and the specificity of the second, the expanded setting adds a ton of new variety, battlegroups are the best system I've ever encountered to deal with mobs of "lesser" enemies, and even the much reviled craft system is a ton of fun when you take the time to properly get to know and impliment it.

The one weakness is, of course, the current lack of content, but the new development team have been hard at work to turn that around and I couldn't be happier.

This is the best edition of the best RPG ever.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by A customer [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 06/16/2018 10:45:40

A dead game. Or rather, an insulting monument to one that they rolled out to profit off of those of us who remember it. This isn't me bagging on the edition. Some things they improved, others they messed up. Hard. (ahemCRAFTahem) This is me bagging on how this game is basically done and dead until they can scrape together the talent to Kickstart a 4th edition. Not that anyone would back it after this debacle. Yeah, they've been trickling out a more robust beastiary (that should have been included to begin with and probably got cut due to page count restrictions), and we'll probably eventually even see the 2 or 3 other books that got written along with the core years back. Eventually. The work's already done, why not profit from it? But make no mistake, the Exalted line is not a going concern for Onyx Path, just a cash cow. Accordingly, I will be boycotting their other products until they get their act together on this one. Which is to say, indefinitely. It's not like roleplaying hasn't moved on while they were sitting around, taking too long to do the same old thing.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
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Exalted 3rd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Justin L. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 06/01/2018 14:51:31

I really wanted to love this, but found myself filled with regret. I'll start by saying that I have been a massive Exalted fan since first edition. Third edition was just begging for me to purchase it and I went all out with the premium. So, where do I begin...

The good: Beutiful artwork throughout and the quality of the print on the page for Premium is top-notch! Exalted has also fully embraced their anime inspiration, which shows throughout this volume!

The bad: The system feels like it pulled a lot of inspiration from 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons, which I utterly despise. The new system feels bloated and unneccesary, washing away the fond memories of the 1st and 2nd eds. Sometimes, keeping it more simplified is the way to go. The flavor writing throughout is also abysmally bad.

The ugly: Absolutely horrible craftsmanship. My copy arrived at my door completely detached from the spine and held in place by two thin pieces of paper. The book will remain intact for a month tops with this poor quality of construction. For $120, you would think the printer could attach the pages to the spine with some care. That brings up another problem: the book itself is too large. 662 pages crammed into a single volume is not only user-unfriendly, but also very difficult to keep in any decent condition. This should have been two or three volumes, split into smaller books with better construction.

Final thoughts: I wanted to love this.... I really, really did. But all I feel is regret from my light wallet and poor quality product.



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
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