Any suggestions on the third party stuff?

[NewK]

The Storypath nexus up for sale on DTRPG? I know there's one about Giain Terrestrials, and one about infernal alchemical, but what else have people seen. What is to buy and what is to avoid. Note, I'm not that concerned with art-- art is expensive and a lot of these are labors of love, so it's unfair to hold them to high standards for that.

[Tytalus]

I very much like the idea of the ST vault with Exalted material. I don't buy much though.

[Lioness]

There's some products I think could benefit from being essentially DLC content.

Basically anything that wants the players to figure out what's going on for themselves has less value if they accidently stumble into it, take for example the Glories write-up of The Unconquered Sun its basically built around the idea that the group interacting him doesn't already know virtues are his weakness but it was put in a pdf with a bunch of Solar charms that were considered essential purchases for their era. This lead to people treating him like a malfunctioning robot from the Star Trek TOS era who can be defeated by getting him to follow one of his directives through to the logical conclusion.

Another example would be the Republic of Chaya, both its original plot hook of "people go crazy this time of year" and Compass East's attempts to expand on why it's like that both benefit from a process of discovery on behalf of the players. It's a pretty standard sci-fi problem of the week but I'm sure if it was repackaged as an adventure module it would have its fans.

A price tag further reduces the risk of someone whose not really interested in running it having a peek ahead of time.

[Gayo]

I say less blown up and more akin to some of the bigger homebrewers being hired on. That and I'll agree with Lioness: A lot of people write their homebrew on Google docs these days rather than showing it on the wiki or the forums. Things we don't have because they were blown up in order to make space for spaceship raids (Literally the second time such a thing happened).

There's also a perception that because you charge for something it's better. This is not only sunk cost, but also that charging for something makes people think effort went into it to make it worth that price. Some cases that's true, but a trip to Amazon may show you how wrong that assumption is.

Personally, I say just because something is free doesn't mean it's shit. I mean I use Bitwarden. Such a thing is entirely free, yet really good as a password manager.

If people want to charge for something, then I'm not against them wanting money for something they worked on. If it's something good and useful I'll buy it. If it's something I could make better myself and for free without much time then I won't touch it. Ignore how much I've wrote, I think the statement still stands true.

I think the loss of spaces where people actively post and look for homebrew, and where things are organized in a way where doing this was convenient, is really huge -- the old wiki was well-organized and very active. Like, we have a wiki now, but almost nobody who makes homebrew puts it there, because there's an expectation that no one will see it if you do, which in turn makes people less likely to make new stuff; it's sort of a vicious cycle. How much stuff is only findable via some random thread on this forum or the subreddit, right now?

Unfortunately, it's hard to replicate what we had originally -- the original unofficial wiki was successful because it was made when Exalted was the #2 RPG in the industry, and the official replacement had the advantage of being official and emerging at a time when the line had a lot of momentum. It's hard to know how to replicate that nowadays.

[Sandact6]

I will say that one thing I'm saddened by with 3e is that in the past there were very lively hubs for homebrew and they all kind of got blown up, so it feels nowadays like you have a better chance of getting people to see and use your homebrew if you charge money for it than if you give it away for free, simply because all the places where people give homebrew away for free are ghost towns. That's a shame.

I say less blown up and more akin to some of the bigger homebrewers being hired on. That and I'll agree with Lioness: A lot of people write their homebrew on Google docs these days rather than showing it on the wiki or the forums. Things we don't have because they were blown up in order to make space for spaceship raids (Literally the second time such a thing happened).

There's also a perception that because you charge for something it's better. This is not only sunk cost, but also that charging for something makes people think effort went into it to make it worth that price. Some cases that's true, but a trip to Amazon may show you how wrong that assumption is.

Personally, I say just because something is free doesn't mean it's shit. I mean I use Bitwarden. Such a thing is entirely free, yet really good as a password manager.

If people want to charge for something, then I'm not against them wanting money for something they worked on. If it's something good and useful I'll buy it. If it's something I could make better myself and for free without much time then I won't touch it. Ignore how much I've wrote, I think the statement still stands true.

[Gayo]

In principle, sure, I agree. Especially if it's a Pay What You Want style dealie.

But speaking as an ST, if my choice is spend $35 on your beastfolk supplement, or use the published resources I already own and just use a Cadet House of DBs instead of a beastfolk tribe... those beastfolk ain't seeing play.

Now if my players want a game about beastfolk, and I want a game about beastfolk, and I see a five star beastfolk product on the Vault... then sure, I might buy it specifically for that game. But I'm not going to buy it just to have it. And I'm not going to recommend it unless someone specifically wants to use homebrew beastfolk instead of canon material for their game. Or unless it's so much better than the OPP books that I think people should be using it just in general.

Did you have any resources you wanted to recommend to OP? (I don't want to derail the topic too much.)

I mean, if someone is selling their beastfolk tribe supplement for $35, the problem there is definitely the pricing. I don't know if there are rules about how you're allowed to price things, but I can't imagine charging more than $15 for that even if it's 500 pages with art.

Practically speaking, the kind of supplement I'd consider "recommendable" outside of bespoke niche stuff is the sort that fills gaps in the game by providing high-value widgets of a type you need a lot of but don't want to make yourself, like themed QCs or artifacts. Those are the kinds of things that are useful to have as a toolbox to save prep time, assuming of course that they're well enough designed that you don't need to mess with them a lot before dropping them in.

I will say that one thing I'm saddened by with 3e is that in the past there were very lively hubs for homebrew and they all kind of got blown up, so it feels nowadays like you have a better chance of getting people to see and use your homebrew if you charge money for it than if you give it away for free, simply because all the places where people give homebrew away for free are ghost towns. That's a shame.

[BadassOverlord]

I wrote a bunch of stuff and share it for free like an idiot.

[Sandact6]

Performing low self-esteem is a terrible habit that many writers unfortunately have and it's awful for driving sales.

I make zero assumptions about my work. I let people make their own opinions after reading mine.

[Kyeudo]

If I understand the Storyteller's Vault rules correctly, I can't publish Dead But Not Gone on there until official ghost rules come out, but I think it came out well.

[Rand Brittain]

Arrogance? Or merely truth? I've found Thousand Sanctioned Beasts, at least, rather useful at my table.

If you want to make any money at all as an artist, even beer money, you've got to be prepared to hustle.

Performing low self-esteem is a terrible habit that many writers unfortunately have and it's awful for driving sales.

[Kerredai]

All my material is of unbelievably high quality.

Arrogance? Or merely truth? I've found Thousand Sanctioned Beasts, at least, rather useful at my table.

I've also drawn from Epee's Book of Laughing Serpents on at least one occasion I remember.

[Rand Brittain]

All my material is of unbelievably high quality.

This includes:

• The Thousand Sanctioned Beasts, a monster manual and bestiary for Exalted players and STs
• The Book of Wonders Wanted, a Charm collection
• These Pages Are Knives, a series of martial arts

[Sandact6]

The thing is no one knows how to balance Ex3 exactly. Anyone who says otherwise is lying (Yes, even the developers we currently have). This has literally been the case throughout not just Exalted's history, but pretty much anything White Wolf (including the properties OPP purchased).

This is not me shitting on people, but expecting a platonic deal of balance for such games is a fools errand. This isn't DnD 4e where it's "Use these values when PC's are X leveled for the best balanced experience, give or take a bit of leeway." The best thing we have now is a scale that goes between "Busted as shit" to "Worthless" that we try fit in between. Really the only clear winners in this are the people who have fun using such things without it being at the expense of others.

I have major problems with the antagonists in Ex3, well actually with chargen but I’m not going into that, but at least they’re pretty consistent with one another.

This isn't the topic for it but I'm curious, can you PM the reason why or make a thread on it?

[DrLoveMonkey]

Homebrew is usually a tough sell. Without it being official it can be hard to get everyone on board with it, and ex3 in particular is hard to balance for. Like I once talked to a guy that didn’t understand why an Essence 1 evocation of “reroll (Awareness) failed dice on a join battle roll for 1m” was too powerful. Plus there’s just a lot of conflicting ideas about what Exalted should be like, and I don’t want to grab something that’s making assumptions wildly different from what I expect or are massively incongruous with the rest of the material. I think I did buy a first circle demon once who was somewhere between a bloodape and Octavian in strength, which just made it way way stronger than any other demon out there.

I have major problems with the antagonists in Ex3, well actually with chargen but I’m not going into that, but at least they’re pretty consistent with one another.

I make a lot of stuff but I just post it for free for that reason.

[Sandact6]

I've written quite a bit of my own stuff in the signature.