Does it have one?

I've wondered if the setting is ultimately playable - or perhaps sustainable - given that the nature of the characters (ie the Exalted themselves) is so dynamic that the status quo of the setting must change drastically.

I've never played it as the mechanics are utterly hideous.

What do you mean by sustainable? As soon as a Circle of Solars hit's the ground, they are definately going to change the setting in a majr way. That's the default of play, the players drastically change Creation by their very natures..

That's why i'm asking the question.

In the way you are asking the question then yes but its one entirely dependant on the the wishes of the characters and GM. I suppose WW will at some point produce an end times supplement but at the best that might explore different options and what it means.

So is the setting playable? Yes, that open endedness and ability to make reality changing impacts is one of the appeals. Is it sustainable? My longest campaign as a player of nearly two years, one evening a week, was in Exalted and it stopped more because the GM suffered burn out for running one game too long (and also rules burn out - see later) Its possible within the setting to keep coming up with bigger and bigger baddies until you get to the primordials themselves and their wyld occupying counterparts, but even before that there are several checks on a party's power - other solars principally if you play it from the box.

The big issue I found is the system - it worked fine at low levels and actually very well for heroic mortals but I was discouraged by the increased amount of math, bonus calculation, the reduced impact of stunt dice over time and that the system tended toward having a single powerful big boss (who needed to be worn down) rather than a variety of foes (who were often easy to beat).

I have recently discovered someones work on converting Exalted to ORE which is trying to address some of those issues although have only had a brief read and obviously you need to like the ORE system

Having run Exalted for a campaign that took 3-4 years of on and off time to complete, my experience was similar to NiallS'. You can always work on a bigger fish to contest the PCs, but when it comes to Solar PCs, there is a challenge to make those baddies compete against players that at high levels of power can really prolong a fight. Combine that with the increasing numbers of dice and rules to juggle through charms and combat especially can be a huge drag to run (like two hours for a single fight long). At that level, I burned out, and though I love the setting and have no problems with the rules at smaller levels, I'll likely never run it again.

Now to actually answer the question, is there an endgame? Yes and IMO it's very similar to Japanese CRPGs, beat the super bad guy who is the final obstacle to your players changing the world in they way they want. Luckily that can be done at any power level.

The setting has been carefully written so that several endgames are likely to occur imminently. These include but are not limited to: the Locust Crusade, the Second Balorian Crusade, the return of the Scarlet Empress, the Realm Civil War,  the activation of one of several apocalyptic plans currently being laid by the Deathlords, the release of Kukala, or any other of a number of Creation spanning threats.

Quote from: Drew;278804The setting has been carefully written so that several endgames are likely to occur imminently.

Come now.  Really?  I'll allow that they generally developed the line with this in mind (having learned a lesson or two from the World o' Darkness line), but "carefully" isn't an adverb I'd apply to the development of Exalted.

!i!

As presented, the setting is frozen in time and space, like a fly in Amber. Thus there will never be a canon end game, supposedly.  As pointed out, there are, however a variety of end of the world apocalypic senarios on the horizion, similarly frozen in Amber.

The players and GM may naturally chose to fixate on any one of those, with a presumptive end game of defeating the uber-badass ulitmately behind that particular doom.  Of course, once that is stopped, there is no reason not to bring  up the next Doom and the Bad Guy behind that and so on.  Eventually, if you don't get tired of buying ever more d10s to keep up with your dice pools, you'll have run out of canon plots, and probably depopulated creation yourself, several times over...

Of course, I expect that by then, WW will have released a few more Doom's that we had yet to hear about that only the players can stop, but as pointed out earlier, by that point the players probably control Creation and all the anti-doomsday doomsday devices, making stopping these plots somewhat trivial...

... but at least you won't have to worry about WW releasing a book telling you that the Scarlet Empress suddenly manifested as a Solar and joined your circle or anything...

I think the idea was that the oWOD had an official end, so did Exalted oWOD have an end as well before being relaunched?

I'm sorry, I misunderstood the question. I was thinking of the MMO definition for endgame. MMO endgames are after the players have completely levelled up their character, is there still stuff to do? The answer to that is yes.
 
Is there an approaching endtime? Maybe, there's a bunch posited as the word is in turmoil. The Wyld could overun the land, the deathlords could take over, thegods could rebel, the Scarlett Empress could return, some douchebag could take over the Imperial Manse.
 
So...there you go.

Quote from: Lawbag;278919I think the idea was that the oWOD had an official end, so did Exalted oWOD have an end as well before being relaunched?

Sorry, but "Exalted oWOD"? While the original prepublication advertisements and some passages in the first edition corebook hinted vaguely that the game lines might be connected in a fairly obscure fashion, that notion was then abandoned almost as soon as Exalted was properly launched. It's never been one of the WoD RPGs.

From the outset the first edition of Exalted used the 'fly in Amber' model of publication. All current events were simultanious, all plots were on hold awaiting the arrival of PC's to set the action in motion.

Thus there was no reset between teh two editions that I am aware of.

Quote from: Spike;278955From the outset the first edition of Exalted used the 'fly in Amber' model of publication. All current events were simultanious, all plots were on hold awaiting the arrival of PC's to set the action in motion.

True enough. The official timeline doesn't advance at all; it's just that the background and history before that point has become increasingly intricate, with more and more suggestions about how things might go wrong in the future.

This is an idea that I have to say was, at the outset, very clever on WW's part. They had ample understanding of the disadvantages of "Metaplot" (shit, they should, they pretty well created the damnable thing), and understood that it was something that was as likely to be limiting as interesting, and that it was as likely to be a cause to STOP buying supplements as to keep buying supplements.

The problem is that over time, adding more and more complex backstory and "immanent threats" to a setting that never moves forward in time ends up having a set of problems all its own.

RPGPundit

I think thats only a problem if your client base are the sort of people who take a bunch of loosely interconnected stuff and obsessively demand that it fits into a coherent whole, so you can see where the model breaks down when it meets gamers.