Quote from: Holden;613290Incorrect. Best-seller is proportional within a timeframe, but metal levels are non-proportional and track lifetime sales. Although if metal levels were proportional, that would be even more impressive, as it would make them harder to earn as the number of items on the site grew.

Sorry, furry, I don't want to take your platinum-crown away from you.

I don't think there's any big mystery why Exalted was so popular on RPG.net for a time:

1. It was not D&D.
2. It was done by White Wolf.

For quite a while, RPG.net was inundated with the old-school Swine, the White Wolf Swine (of course, at the start of the period we're talking about, the Forge didn't even exist yet).  It was always full of a considerable number of people who were actively hostile to D&D.
It became, in fact, a kind of a refuge for these people; first against the success of D&D 3.0 and its dethroning of White Wolf's position as the ideological vanguard of the hobby, and then later to a certain extent against the Forge Swine themselves, and the fact that even getting to pretend to be the hobby's "avant garde" had been taken away from them.

It stopped being so popular because you can only keep up that kind of reality bubble for so long.  Gradually there came to be more and more Forge Swine displacing the old-guard White Wolf Swine on the forum, and while White Wolf-style Swine capos like Bruce Baugh or Borgstrom/Moran are still respected over there, the specific value or fashionability of holding up Exalted as the majestic "alternative" to D&D is not relevant anymore.

RPGPundit

The mindset of Exalted's design is really interesting to me, especially how it dovetails into the swinyness (as it were).  In AD&D the method for dealing with powerful characters is to send them tougher opponents.  In Exalted the baked-in rules for dealing with powerful characters is to - whether the players want it or not - make them do horrible horrible things even if they don't want to.  A co-worker of mine was explaining Exalted to me and I posited that the "limit break" would be like an AD&D paladin doing so much good for the poor that he realizes that they'd all be better off in heaven, so he kills them all.  To which said co-worker said (enthusiastically) "Right, yeah, essentially!"

Ugh.

Do not want.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;613806A co-worker of mine was explaining Exalted to me and I posited that the "limit break" would be like an AD&D paladin doing so much good for the poor that he realizes that they'd all be better off in heaven, so he kills them all.  To which said co-worker said (enthusiastically) "Right, yeah, essentially!"

Remind me not to play with that coworker, especially as a GM.

  That's really not how it's supposed to work. For Solars, Limit is gained by :
- Suppressing your Primary Virtue.
- Encountering your Limit Break Condition.
- Believing something, and then repressing that, such as by resisting the effect of mental influence.
- Being subject to an attack that increases limit (rare, not terribly effective).

It's not about some sort of problem with virtues -- there are other systems to point out that Compassion doesn't necessarily mean compassionate to humans any more than it means compassionate to leaves of grass -- as that acting in opposition to what you really want isn't easy.

So you could create, say, a high-Compassion Character whose limit break of Red Ring Of Tears compels them to destroy when in batshit crazy mode.  But you'd never hit that limit break by simply help the sick.  You'd have to resist the urge to help the sick, or see a lot of sick people that you could not help, or be attacked by a Primordial.  And even then, it's supposed to involve attacking causes of the sickness or suffering, or uninvolved things, in preference to killing the sick.  Valor's the one toward killing for the sake of killing, if I remember correctly.

((In theory, limit break's also supposed to be a reasonably rare thing.  If your Solar is constantly a monster, that's not just because of the Great Curse, but because he or she has drastically different values from normal humanity.  Limit Break can be a part of that, since your character is supposed to rationalize his or her behavior under limit break and that can affect values, but even if you don't want to roleplay, the Usurpation still makes sense with Solars only being monsters once-a-century, when you consider what damage even a middling Essence-5 Solar can do in a scene.))

EDIT: That's for Solars.  The Lunar (seeing the full moon) and especially Infernals (Abyssic plates at 0 willpower, wtf) occur slightly more often.

EDIT2: It's also largely independent from level or experience: your Essence doesn't determine limit break (excepting to the degree that you're more dangerous the higher-Essence you are).  There are really powerful enemies for the GM to throw at you, and while many are poorly written, that's because those enemies are cthulhu monsters, or were shitty people before they Exalted or became gods or whatever.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;613806The mindset of Exalted's design is really interesting to me, especially how it dovetails into the swinyness (as it were).  In AD&D the method for dealing with powerful characters is to send them tougher opponents.  In Exalted the baked-in rules for dealing with powerful characters is to - whether the players want it or not - make them do horrible horrible things even if they don't want to.  A co-worker of mine was explaining Exalted to me and I posited that the "limit break" would be like an AD&D paladin doing so much good for the poor that he realizes that they'd all be better off in heaven, so he kills them all.  To which said co-worker said (enthusiastically) "Right, yeah, essentially!"

Ugh.

Do not want.

Why does that remind me of Warcraft with Prince Arthas in Stratholme?
Talk about destroying the city in order to save it.

JG

Quote from: James Gillen;614112Why does that remind me of Warcraft with Prince Arthas in Stratholme?
Talk about destroying the city in order to save it.

Reminds me of Kult actually.

Although, to be honest, it's more of an Abyssal solution, not a Solar one.

The old saw about two US soldiers walking out of the bombed-out ruins of a town in western France : "We sure liberated the hell out of that place, didn't we?"

Quote from: Benoist;612136Not indy forgey enough, probably. 'Needs moar metagame edgy mechanics, dude.'

I'm a long time veteran of the Exalted wars over at rpgnet.  No, the main reason that Exalted gets so much play there is because a large number of RPGNet dwellers and mods are White Wolf fans and devs, is all.

And the whole storygame thing has never come up.  Generally, WW sucks ass in terms of developing mechanics, and it costs money to pay writers to actually develop and playtest rules systems.  So, Exalted has this grotesquely cool S&S meets manga setting that is not emulated at all by the exception based mechanics.

Exalted is one of those games people desperately want to play but can't because the crap systems won't let them.

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;616022I'm a long time veteran of the Exalted wars over at rpgnet.  No, the main reason that Exalted gets so much play there is because a large number of RPGNet dwellers and mods are White Wolf fans and devs, is all.

Which came first: the interest in Exalted or the lots-of-people-there-being-WW-employees?

Quote from: RPGPundit;613785It stopped being so popular because you can only keep up that kind of reality bubble for so long.  Gradually there came to be more and more Forge Swine displacing the old-guard White Wolf Swine on the forum, and while White Wolf-style Swine capos like Bruce Baugh or Borgstrom/Moran are still respected over there, the specific value or fashionability of holding up Exalted as the majestic "alternative" to D&D is not relevant anymore.

RPGPundit

Fact time -

It actually still is hella popular, because it's WW's fantasy game (and therefore more approachable than their horror RPGs) and it actually has a pretty damned awesomely written setting.  Also, it's as traddy as traddy can be, except for it's stunt system (which is actually represented as an in-setting thing.) It's only real failing is that it's mechanics are uniformly awful in it's published second edition.  As one of the fans, I hold that Exalted needs it's own house system and should dump Storyteller, but my opinion is neither here nor there, as the current team is moving forward.

Also, it wallops the hell sales wise out of anything except D&D(in which I include PF but not the most OSR and clones, which are IMO indy games in terms of market.)  Dollars talk.

Quote from: Zak S;616026Which came first: the interest in Exalted or the lots-of-people-there-being-WW-employees?

I think the latter.  RPGNet has always had a strong WW staffer presence amongst users and mods AFAIK.

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;616028Also, it wallops the hell sales wise out of anything except D&D

Do you know if it's outperforming the Warhammer 40k-based RPGs? Whenever I go to a hobby shop I just see mostly that, D&D and Path

Quote from: Zak S;616055Do you know if it's outperforming the Warhammer 40k-based RPGs? Whenever I go to a hobby shop I just see mostly that, D&D and Path

Anectdotally, A pal of mine who runs a hobby shop in northern NJ tells me that sales for the 40K cores run at about 80% of the level Exalted did when the 1E and 2E cores were released.  Also, Exalted products are regularly gold and silver best sellers on DTRPG.

Quote from: Zak S;616055Do you know if it's outperforming the Warhammer 40k-based RPGs? Whenever I go to a hobby shop I just see mostly that, D&D and Path

Part of the issue is that WW sells exclusively online or via POD, and doesn't use the hobby store channel anymore.

At the largest game store around here Great Escape Games, 40k RPGs are a huge seller, but that place has a ginormous gameroom and hosts a ton of official 40k tournaments (Magic too).  As a result, there's crossover for 40k players who like the fluff and stuff in the RPG books.