Long-time Player, New to Exalted 3rd Edition

[Isator Levi]

Plus, like... however Dodge's defensive capacity measures up against that of Melee, it's still going to be your best bet if you don't fight with a sword.

I think some of the argument that Charms to aid Parry are lacking some nuances, but I'd also say that even if after all of that Melee could be objectively measured to come out a bit ahead that's not a terrible thing if Melee requires the buy-in of defining what kind of weapon you can fight with to access that form of defence, and that if the Dodge options were enhanced then it might undermine the value of ever parrying in the first place.

And thus Heavenly Guardian Defence isn't just a matter of comparing defensive options but comparing entire combat Abilities. That Melee is good in an all-around way is part of what sets it apart from Archery, Brawl and Throne, each of which has its own merits that one may prefer over what Melee offers but includes the element of Dodge being a lot more helpful for rounding out one's defence. Not totally necessary, mind, Brawl still has a bit of power for getting by on that front and Archery and Thrown can circumstantially benefit without much Defence if one is attacking a target that is out of range for reprisal.

[pcontop]

On the other hand, a lot of people would not and would in fact be pretty mad if they were asked to pay for the privilege of receiving errata on a charm set that isn't up to snuff with the quality the rest of the line has. Why should Paradox/Onyx Path get our money twice for fixing a mistake they made in the original product? I'm not going to double dip and pay them twice for the same product, I am not made of money and able to just throw wads of cash away on my entertainment products.

The fact that the solar charmset is not up to par has much to do with the fact that it was developed along the system, and that it was the prototype for other charmsets. Incompatibilities were created, and systemic exploits were underdeveloped. It's still the best solar charm set compared to the other editions, IMO.

As long as we agree that the solar charms need a refresh and that OP won't publish it for free, you're welcome not to buy it on principles. You can expect them to change their business practices, or wait for a new edition and then buy everything all over again (solar charmset will probably not be perfect, though).

All I'm saying is that it would be much more fun for me to have such a vision. I don't have an issue with the developers being paid for doing so (as I want it to be well done), so I would pay for a revised solar charmset (as I've done in 2nd ed), and I suppose a lot of other players would.

[JohnDoe244]

2.5 was free.
Wizards of the Coast errata their games for free.
Piazo errata's for free.
Fantasy Flight errata's for free AND overhauled their flagship RPG with a new corebook v1.5 that fixed most of the buggy crap.

"Onyx Path won't errata for free!"

Why not? They should. It's literally the industry standard, and if they polished the game with a 3.5 release (paid to play or free), they would have more customers because they would have a better product.

Not providing errata is a bad business model because Jack T hates money.

[Blaque]

2.5 was free.
Wizards of the Coast errata their games for free.
Piazo errata's for free.
Fantasy Flight errata's for free AND overhauled their flagship RPG with a new corebook v1.5 that fixed most of the buggy crap.

"Onyx Path won't errata for free!"

Why not? They should. It's literally the industry standard, and if they polished the game with a 3.5 release (paid to play or free), they would have more customers because they would have a better product.

Not providing errata is a bad business model because Jack T hates money.

Because errata is writing and OPP doesn't, when possible, make authors write for free. That WotC doesn't charge us for it doens't mean it's not charged by authors to do so, and has entire budget for R&D.

2.5e did it more or less unpaid until DotFA's errata, which note, you had to pay for the PDF due to how extensive the Solar errata was. Arguably, the amount of time-to-hours put in is considered something current writers and devs are straight-up unwilling to do without getting paid for it.

Fantasy Flight is like WotC. It's a big company that honeslty probably can get away with it due to more folks on salary, rather htan most writers being freelance and again, paid by the word. LIke, take the overhaul fo the corebook. That required paying someon for layout. If not, they ripped someone off.

Simply put, errata is something that requires someone be giving their time. OPP doens't want folks working for it giving htier time for free. That other companies don't charge means the costs are offset elsewhere...or they are in effect taking from authors, which for companies like WotC or Fantasy Flight, woudl surprise no one.

[JohnDoe244]

So pay them?

The owners of Exalted are worth $2 billion. Billion. With a "b".

D&D 4th reprinted their corebooks halfway through the line, charged full price, and made a mint. D&D 3.5 was their flagship product before that, and probably the most iconic RPG ever.

Soft errata in the form of ST guides, and AT8D retconning the corebook, and kickstarter add ons not needing the MA merit, and Arms just straight printing errata, and Exigients telling you how Charms work, and the devs spending hours engaging with the community and talking about the game... is already there.

Exalted would sell more copies and make more money with Errata.

Paying writers for their work is an investment that will generate revenue.

And with how long books spend in layout and how long it takes new books to be approved, and how OPP has brought on new devs for Exalted, the talking points just don't make sense.

There is no small indie company that doesn't do Errata.

Brutal Games does errata.
Arc Dream Publishing does errata.
Sine Nomine Publishing does errata.
Green Ronin Publishing does errata.
Modiphius Entertainment does errata.
Dungeons The Dragoning got errata.

I know what the party line is. I've had conversations with the devs, where they have told me that they don't do errata because they are working on new books. I don't need to be told that folks should be compensated for their labor.

I am saying that the business decision to not invest in making the game playable, is short-sighted and profit limiting. It is not, by any stretch, standard practice in the industry. OPP is a weird outlier whose weird policy is hurting its bottom line.

If you can give me one, one other publisher that does not update its games, I will shut up and never mention errata on these forums again.

But I have a deluxe corebook. I have a POD corebook. I have a pdf corebook.

I would pay full price for a 3.5 corebook. Exalted Essence triple funded day one of its Kickstarter.

People want to buy a version of Exalted they can play.

We love Exalted!

Please take our money!

[Heavy Arms]

The owners of Exalted are worth $2 billion. Billion. With a "b".

There's your problem.

Paradox does not give a shit. They're not giving Onyx Path a cent to help make Exalted better. Exalted exists to generate passive income for Paradox to make the big red hole in their ledgers look less bad as they've failed to capitalize on their purchase of some of the old WW IPs.

If Paradox thought Exalted was going to cost them more money (even if less than what Onyx Path pays them to make books anyway), they'd just do what they're doing to Chronicles of Darkness and stop approving books to let it die. Even if it would be a smart investment that would make them even more money in the long run. Killing the CofD is costing them money since they can't get licensing fees for books that don't exist.

Scion 2e got a free errata doc.. but Onyx Path owns Scion completely.

Onyx Path is an outlier because their position is an outlier. Pretty much every example you're pointing to are companies that own the IPs they're working on, or haven't had their licensing partner just stop refusing to let them make books that were profitable for both sides because those books aren't the IP owner's pet favorite.

[AnubisXy]

2nd edition ended up getting extensive errata to the various Charmsets, but that was only after all of the splats were done being printed. In general it's simply going to be viewed as a better business decision to write new material for people to use, than to revamp old material for free. I mean personally, I'd much rather see Abyssals finally get printed rather than have them be put off for another year or two because the authors went back to do rewrites of older Charmsets.

[Tikor]

On the other hand, a lot of people would not and would in fact be pretty mad if they were asked to pay for the privilege of receiving errata on a charm set that isn't up to snuff with the quality the rest of the line has. Why should Paradox/Onyx Path get our money twice for fixing a mistake they made in the original product? I'm not going to double dip and pay them twice for the same product, I am not made of money and able to just throw wads of cash away on my entertainment products.

Wasn't the Scroll of Errata in 2nd edition free?

[Blaque]

Wasn't the Scroll of Errata in 2nd edition free?

It was also something writers have noted was thousands of words, and something they put a lot of time in. It was volunteer work. Hell, laying it out was volunteer work also. It was mostly a fan effort that was allowed since it was free. The same authors have since noted that it was a lot of time and man hours on something they didn't get paid for.

There's also a good chunk of htings that weren't free, like the updated Dreams of the First Age, which was basically a new PDF/PoD purchase.

Some of the other publishers kind of are also not quite teh same thing. Sine Nomine was mentioend but that's literally one person, doing most all the work and more or less not contracting anyone. Versus a company which seems to not want to have authors do work for free.

[HighPriest]

Scion 2e got a free errata doc.. but Onyx Path owns Scion completely.

Scion is a bad example for this because there wouldn't be an errata doc for it either if the wrong file hadn't been sent to print. If it hadn't been glaringly obvious that the final printed product backers got was a near-completion draft, it wouldn't exist.

Even then, the product still has significant issues that could be easily addressed by another update of the errata doc. It's definitely a case of Onyx Path doing the absolute minimum in an attempt to placate backers, not an example of them making good on supporting a product.

Onyx Path generally doesn't do errata or other post-release support. That's pretty obviously their policy. I don't think Paradox is doing a great job as the IP holder of most of the old White Wolf stuff, but they aren't the source of the current policy of neglecting the widespread industry standard of basic errata documents. Frankly, I don't think Paradox cares enough to bother declaring "No errata!"

[Heavy Arms]

The problem is that the industry standard of issuing errata looks a lot more like Scion 2e's one (aka a few pages with of single line corrections that only covers very specific mistakes and doesn't get into large in-depth changes) not "redo the whole Solar Charm set for free."

All those free errata that are "industry standard" are just as unsatisfactory to most of those games' fans as Onyx Path's "we get what we get during the backer edit/feedback cycle," because like Scion 2e's one, they're generally never going to cover a lot of things that actually require thought and deliberation from the designers over spelling errors/word swaps/stat block fixes/etc.

Paizo once had four such errata for the same book (though it should be noted each was released before a new print edition was being released, so it was basically just a free change-log for fixes in the new print run), and still ended up with a very substantial FAQ thread on their forums for all the stuff those little corrections didn't cover The "everyone else does free errata" looks way more like what Onyx Path does in end result than it looks like what Exalted 2e got.

[JohnDoe244]

I mean personally, I'd much rather see Abyssals finally get printed rather than have them be put off for another year or two because the authors went back to do rewrites of older Charmsets.

You'd really rather have playable Abyssals than playable Solars?

[Lioness]

I think a detailed fix to the Solar charmset would benefit from seeing Abyssals and/or Infernals.

[Tyzerg]

Hi Guys,

I see this thread has taken on a new direction, which is fine but I'd like to ask a couple of questions:

First, it would seem that some of the balancing points to HGD was that it was Decisive-only but it would appear that that was errata'd out, at least the unexpected part of it. Do you think that is a good errata or did you think the limiting factor of only being able to block unexpected attacks if they are decisive is a good balance to dodge charms?

Second, my player wants to know if he has to pay for Thunderbolt Attack Prana comboed with Iron Whirlwind Attack for each attack or is it just paid for once like Hungry Tiger Technique?

Third, can someone explain to me why Shower of Deadly Blades costs 6m, 1wp. It seems EXTREMELY underpowered for the cost and requirements. Am I just reading it incorrectly? How can 2 initiative per target that isn't the original target be worth all that? How does it "scatter" groups when the most it can do to a battle group is drop it by 2 initiative? Why does it warrant an ammunition check? All these downsides for 2 initiative that the Solar doesn't receive. Am I missing the point?

[HighPriest]

Hi Guys,

I see this thread has taken on a new direction, which is fine but I'd like to ask a couple of questions:

First, it would seem that some of the balancing points to HGD was that it was Decisive-only but it would appear that that was errata'd out, at least the unexpected part of it. Do you think that is a good errata or did you think the limiting factor of only being able to block unexpected attacks if they are decisive is a good balance to dodge charms?

Second, my player wants to know if he has to pay for Thunderbolt Attack Prana comboed with Iron Whirlwind Attack for each attack or is it just paid for once like Hungry Tiger Technique?

Third, can someone explain to me why Shower of Deadly Blades costs 6m, 1wp. It seems EXTREMELY underpowered for the cost and requirements. Am I just reading it incorrectly? How can 2 initiative per target that isn't the original target be worth all that? How does it "scatter" groups when the most it can do to a battle group is drop it by 2 initiative? Why does it warrant an ammunition check? All these downsides for 2 initiative that the Solar doesn't receive. Am I missing the point?

1. As far as I know, it wasn't errata'd out. The Decisive-only tag is still present, and I don't see anything about withering ambush attacks being an exception to the tag in the text of the Charm. Decisive attacks only.

2. I would say that Thunderbolt Attack Prana is an "attack-enhancing Charm", so only pay for it once.

3. I tend to agree that Shower of Deadly Blades is pretty weak for the cost. It's also poorly written - not given any consideration for Artifact throwing weapons, not giving any actual thought toward how it would interact with battle groups despite the fluff text indicating that's a big part of its purpose.

Two things you have wrong - first, it will scale from 1 to 5 initiative, based mostly on Essence. That can be a significant amount coming from a high Essence character, who could theoretically drop a cluster of foes into initiative crash. Whether the crash bonus would be awarded to the Solar is less clear-cut, though I'd argue that the intent of the charm seems to lean toward no.

Second, it wouldn't drop the battle group's initiative, as battle groups have inert initiative. I would argue that a battle group should take some amount of magnitude damage instead, but it doesn't have any actual rules included for how much and the normal rules uses pre-rolled initiative dice. Personally, I would say it does magnitude equal to initiative it would deal to a normal character, so 1-5. Half that rounded up would be a more conservative conversion. I would also say that if it prompted a rout check, it would include the +1 difficulty modifier as a supernatural area-of-affect attack.

I suppose it could also be used to apply some Supplemental Thrown effects on a group of clustered enemies, but at a cursory glance I'm not seeing a lot of withering supplemental thrown charms that would apply well here.

I'm not going to address the ammunition checks, as I don't like those rules at all - they just serve to serve as an annoyance to ranged combat characters, who then get to have the "fun" of sitting out for a combat for a round or two doing trivial scavenging rolls.

I still don't think that it's great for the cost, especially at low Essence, unless I'm also missing some sort of point.

You may or may not also try reading This Thread, in which people were talking about area of effect attacks and battle groups in general for a wider range of opinions on the topic. Unfortunately it breaks down pretty quickly, as the rules aren't great on the topic.