What do you love about Exalted? [Positive Responses Only]

[Dex Davican]

As one of the freelance writers these days, I don't get too directly involved with the fan community, but Exalted has given me a lot of enjoyment and inspiration. I've seen "positive responses only" threads on other forums, and I think it'd be an interesting experiment for this one. Please join me in this experiment. I doubt we'll do it perfectly, but a good-faith effort would be appreciated. If it's been done already, well, the search function didn't reveal that to me, and also, who cares.

For me: I still love writing Charms (and I hope people enjoy what I recently wrote for Exigents). I love the mythic weight of the Exalted. As someone who started with D&D, I loved Exalted's willingness to address sex and sexuality, and love that we've been moving toward healthier ways to discuss those topics in the current edition.

[Penelope]

How epic in scope it is

Also the whole Solar-Lunar bond thing

[Sorcerous Overlord]

I really love the weird amount of artifacts and how interesting the different effects are.

on an unrelated note, I love Sword and Sorcery and the Bronze Age setting. I don't know how much is really Bronze Age in practice, but its cool anyway.

[Keelbreaker]

‘Nuff said.

Yup, I have a lunar character right now in a game who has massively disfiguring scars on his face, but only because I chose to have them inititally and chose to have them made worse by an injury in combat.

[Sith_Happens]

Scars left on players’ characters look cool rather than disfiguring, unless the player desires otherwise.

‘Nuff said.

[TheCountAlucard]

I love that one of my new players for a Lunar game asked if it was okay for their character to have a gang of sea-slug folk to scavenge the cargoes out of sunken wrecks near Chiaroscuro, something I never would have even imagined, but now has to be in my game.

For that matter, I friggin’ love the new Lunars book.

[Otto D'Fey]

I love writing Evocations, creating a legend with every item I introduce to the game. I love it all the more because I didn't expect to enjoy this facet of Ex3. "How many damn powers do they expect me to write?!"

I love the fact that my friends still quote lines and talk about scenes from our first game (back in 1st & 2nd Ed) 15+ years ago, and how such talk encouraged new players to brave the book and join into a new game.

[Moss Reynholm]

^ Seconding this. Lots of games have good settings. Exalted's is another level.

The Directions, the Underworld, Malfeas... you can tell so many different style of stories and it still feels part of the world.

[Aranfan]

I love the setting. I love it to bits. It's so in depth and it feels like a real place where real people live and act.

[TheCountAlucard]

I love reading Charms and imagining how different characters might express them differently.

[Sunder the Gold]

Not me, I'm still going to work.

Again, my condolences.

I love the Intimacy system. It's so nice that what a character cares about can make it easier or harder, or even impossible, to persuade them to take certain actions.

Yeah, it's great. A definite improvement on Second Edition's social traits.

[TheCountAlucard]

In the sense of literally staying at home... As is the current style of the times

Not me, I'm still going to work.

let's focus on the positive ITT!

Yes, let's.

I love the Intimacy system. It's so nice that what a character cares about can make it easier or harder, or even impossible, to persuade them to take certain actions.

[Lioness]

I'm going to draw a line under discussing the roles of the sexes in regard to Creation/Exaltation because it's off-topic and has the potential to make the experience of this thread rather negative.

It's a reasonable basis for discussion elsewhere but please, not here.

[Ghosthead]

Hmm... In the sense of literally staying at home*, well... Exalted Core is *kind* of unfriendly in its general 'tude to even scholars who want to stay in their library, compared to two-fisted action archaeologists and such. (Which I of course endorse as fully right and proper to portraying the right atmosphere of pulpy brio and "Savage Adventure"!). The old idea that in the world of Exalted, everyone should know some kung-fu etc.

But in the sense of "Broadly have the skills thought to be typical of", even if not literally staying at home. Yes, sure absolutely.

(And it is pretty cool to have such extensions of many suites of skills! It is also an oft pitfall of Exalted that it means gesturing for powers that not always plentifully in genre media can lead to writers coming up with some odd and wonky stuff, but let's focus on the positive ITT!).

* As is the current style of the times

[The Wizard of Oz]

It's rarely been common, but it has certainly happened many times.

Especially in sieges.

(I also think "traditional stay-at-home mothers" is a bit anachronistic because peasants for most of history were way too poor for anyone to not work... but also work was done largely in/from the home anyway.)

Actually, that's one thing I like about Exalted; by deliberately trying to big-up female and LGBT roles, it sometimes is actually more realistic than more "historical" settings. Not perfectly, because it's trying to be accessible rather than realistic. The presentation of LGBT people is more like modern views than the multiple, varied and complex (and often negative, but in a different way to modern homophobes) historical views of LGBT people, for example. But a lot of what people think is "historical" with regards to gender and societal roles is very much a simplification (and often based on projecting 17th century norms backwards into much less strict societies).