Ex 3 AND Essence working together? :)

[Pram]

Alright, I’ll confess… when I first learned of Exalted Essence I was deeply annoyed and had a knee jerk reaction to the whole situation. I completely left the community for a while and concentrated on other game systems to manage the angst of it all (Witcher came out… so it was good).

I’ve been playing Exalted since the 1^st Edition… got all the books. Went to the 2^nd Edition… didn’t like the tick system that much. Then bought in the 3^rd Edition and was excited. Then it came out late and well I still adopted the game’s mechanics even though they were difficult to wrap my mind around all of the combat system.

Then the slow pace of the products… anyways we all know how it’s slow, and since I want everything now (a character flaw I admit) when Essence came out… I got triggered because the 3^rd Edition wasn’t EVEN fully out yet! (I want my Abyssal Splat damn it!).

Alright since December 7^th 2019 I’ve been out of the loop and after posting a poste in the Forum (and with the very good information I got from the community) I started to look into Exalted Essence. I watched all the videos, and I found it interesting.

[I’ve been trying to adapt the combat system into a “momentum” type of play. A while back some people had did some homebrew and after a while I got discouraged and left it there.]

So after looking at the Ex Essence Q/A and document I found that the Withering = Power build up was exactly what I was looking for… and when I saw that the Hardness could be variable, now I got really excited.

Is it just me or could we (with some tweaking) have both 3^rd Edition and Essence work in tandem in games with some hombrew bridging between both systems?

I could get my Abyssal cake in game as NPCs now in my Ex 3 game? 😊

Is it an accurate feeling or am I doing to much of tasty Exalted Drugs Method?

Thanks,

[DrLoveMonkey]

Well Exalted Essence will launch with all 10 exalt splats playable right out of the corebook, but then will not be receiving much of any additional books after that. I mean, how many additional books could you even want? The whole point of it is that it’s a sleek system with fewer moving parts that you get all in one package.

It’s not like there’s two game lines now, one for Essence and one for the main line. It’s more like there’s the main line and this one-off side thing.

Also there will apparently be guidelines for adapting mainline content to Essence, so you should be able to do that without missing out on too much.

[Pram]

How about adapting from Essence to 3rd Edition?

[DrLoveMonkey]

I imagine if the guidelines exist one way they can just be reversed, like Essence has WAAY smaller mote pools, so a one mote Essence charm might be like a 5-10 mote normal charm or something. I’m not sure you’re going to be able to get too much from it, like the Essence corebook plus conversions guidelines won’t give you a very fleshed out mainline abyssal character compared to the splats already out, but you’ll get something. It just might be a bit generic.

[Pram]

You got a point... but it does beat not having an Abyssal character and you need to do some dev time to build out your own homebrew. Essence cost can be tweaked with Ex 3.

I have a feeling that I'll be able to fix my conodrum of the whole withering and decisive attacks that have been a complete turn off for some of my long playing friends.

I do like the fact that the initiative is different and that you can build power for decisive attacks with a variable hardness.

[DrLoveMonkey]

Yeah I’ve seen a lot of people be unable to get past that one. I get it, if it were just one level closer to abstraction more I wouldn’t like it myself.

[joshopotamus]

Can anyone explain wtf this exalted essence is? Supposedly a new corebook thats got stream lined rules?

[glamourweaver]

Can anyone explain wtf this exalted essence is? Supposedly a new corebook thats got stream lined rules?

It is an alternate more rules lite system, yes.

[DrLoveMonkey]

Can anyone explain wtf this exalted essence is? Supposedly a new corebook thats got stream lined rules?

From what I understand it’s a new book that has every type of exalt playable right from the same book, and also cuts down and streamlines things. For example you don’t have melee and brawl and fifty different martial arts abilities, you just have “close combat” and “ranged combat” as two abilities.

Among other things like that mote costs and pools are massively reduced, so you’re not tracking like 70 motes but instead 7. It also has a simplified combat system where instead of stealing momentum from foes with withering attacks you just build it up yourself.

Oh also charms are simplified, there are still some charms unique to some splats but there’s a lot of generic ones, like a generic damage added, generic soak booster, generic penalty negator, and if they’re different for different splats at all it’s just a little rider on the end being like “for Solars this effect lasts an entire action.”

Oh and speaking of the power curve has been flattened even more than in 3e. Basically to the point where it’s hard to tell if Solars are the most powerful and Dragonblooded are the weakest.

[Blaque]

... Is it just me or could we (with some tweaking) have both 3^rd Edition and Essence work in tandem in games with some hombrew bridging between both systems?

Some folks actually already have done some work in that route to be honest. I actually expect that there will be a good amount of folks running what I jokingly call ∃e or Ɛe since I kind of think there will be folks trying to get some more complex ideas form 3e to homebrew into Essence like artifacts and QCs, and I think some folks will be using mechancis from Essence in more mianline Exalted games.

An example is that there is if you look here someone did a Solar Close-Combat Charmset. Which is something that I can actually get behind as I find the merging fo the Ability list interesting. I also have seen folks alreadying doing "difficulty 3 is default you bother with", and I personallys ee myself using Essece's more to-the-pont (for me at least0 flat stunts versus main game.

Some ideas in Essence, note, might end up in the main line as optional ulres in Crucible of Legends. Namely things like apparently a more "all purpose" project system might be able to kidn of fit together Craft, sorcery, and projects. We'll have to see on that one I think. I kind of aslo suspect a lot of the NPC advice in Essence will have some sharing with NPC-construction in CoL. But Essence will in any case have a lot of useful stuff for 3e and creating NPCs. I can see using adaptations of its streamlined Charmset for Exalt QC creation for example.

This all said, remember thatn Essence isn't a new line. It's a standalone book currently, which is so far while confirmed ot be Kickstarted, has made no promises that it will have a Companion. (It is highly likely it will due to how OPP does Kickstarters, but keep that in mind). It is also going ot be pretty light on things like setting lore and stuff. It'll point you to the now-released Dragon-Blooded and Lunar books on them if you want more than what was in the 3e corebook ont hem lorewise, for instance. We won't get an Essnece version of What Fire Has Wrought. We'll get rules for Dragon-Blooded in Essence, and told to go there for the setting. There will not ben an Abyssals Essence Edition either. It just will assume that when it's out, you'll get Abyssals for the lore and maybe some unique Charms that were not in the original Essence document.

[Blaque]

Can anyone explain wtf this exalted essence is? Supposedly a new corebook thats got stream lined rules?

As noted, alternate corebook, not new. It is not planned to have any supplements, and assumes the Third Edition version of the setting in how it presents things and what sourcebooks it points you to.

More info can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...it?usp=sharing