Quote from: James McMurrayDo the pdfs give a usable system for GMs to generate their own challenges, or is it more like (A)D&D's label of "This Adventure suitable for 4-6 characters of levels 5-7": a guideline for the adventure, but not as useful for homebrew material.

It's just labels at this point...

Seanchai

Quote from: MoriartyAs someone who's had a couple of the Exalted 1st fatsplats and is just about to get into Exalted 2nd (I'm awaiting the delivery as we speak), I have a question:

It seems there's two levels of Exalted powers -- the codified toys of Charms and what I call the real gamebreaking shit (I'm really talking about Solar Sorcery and Sidereal Astrology) that's ideally suited to a more freeform game.  A possible third may be all this magitech stuff that I have no exposure to outside of netspace.  How easy is it to say: "not in my game!"  I look at that gamebreaking shit and it really looks like some watered down variation of their Mage lines, and I enjoyed Mage in the day but I really don't want that stuff in my game today.

D&D for all its codification does have its own versions of freeform gamebreaking shit -- wishes, miracles and One Ring styled artifacts in particular -- but those elements are pretty miniscule so that they don't affect the Core Story.  I look at Exalted and I'm digging what it has to say, but then I get these tacked on freeform elements and I blanch and the incoherence of it all (in the dictionary sense, not the Forge sense).

Sorcery's difficult if not impossible to extract, because there's not much else to do with the Occult ability.  The Charm tree's kinda small, shored up by Sorcery.

Magitech is just the magic items you already have: artifacts.  There's just more of them and more different kinds, so keeping it reasonable means keeping what shows up in the game reasonable.

Of course there's sub-systems for Artifact construction and that's a whole other (complicated, dumb) ball of wax.

As to other stuff:  You'll find there's more dumb sub-systems in 2nd edition than in first.  Mass Combat and Social Combat are both their own rules system, and they're core now and tightly wedded into the game.  As I may've mentioned before, it's almost impossible to extract Social Combat if you don't like it, because any random Charm could call upon it.  The Stealth charm tree, for example, is now full of stuff like unnatural mental compulsions, which are handled by Social Combat.