#RPGaday topic 24: Most Complicated RPG Owned

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

I don't understand the artistic allusions. Do you mean the rules of Exalted are like a mashup of several WoD books?

I had gathered that Exalted characters were the same sort of minor deities that I associate with Nobilis.

I wouldn't call them that. They seem to be more like epic or legendary heroes or ascended masters: Mortals who have attained great power through enlightenment. Nobilis characters are rather more like the angels and demons of In Nomine with their various affinities, especially the archangels and demon princes with their Words. But they have something of a postmodern and even absurdist sensibility that allows game mechanics to turn on conceptual jokes, which I cannot imagine happening in Exalted.

"Mashup" isn't quite what I had in mind. It's more like the way physicists now think that the universe used to exist in a higher energy state where the weak, electromagnetic, and strong forces were all manifestations of the same underlying force, which acted with unlimited range the way electromagnetism still does. What I think of when I say "baroque" or "rococo" is insanely overelaborated art that delights in complexity for its own sake. (That's not actually a fair description of those eras in painting or music, but it's part of the popular meaning of those words.)

Bill Stoddard

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

I had gathered that Exalted characters were the same sort of minor deities that I associate with Nobilis.

Noblis is theology and urban fantasy. Exalted is hero myth and anime/wuxia.

[Parody]

Disclaimer: I've only read Exalted, never actually played it, but here's my impressions from reading two editions of the main book and a bunch of splatbooks:

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

I don't understand the artistic allusions. Do you mean the rules of Exalted are like a mashup of several WoD books?

It uses the same sort of system as the other oWoD games and draws on bits and pieces of the big three. (I imagine it draws from the others as well, but I've never read the ones past Mage and I don't know off the top of my head when it was published relative to the other games.)

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

I had gathered that Exalted characters were the same sort of minor deities that I associate with Nobilis.

I don't think it's like Nobilis at all. It's anime-style high powered martial arts powers, with the excuse that "you were chosen at birth to be a great champion of (insert faction here)".

[PK]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

I don't know much about it, but the scuttlebutt makes it sound something like Nobilis. Fair comparison?

Gods no.

Exalted is over-the-top wuxia masters with dozens of miscellaneous magical abilities (charms) who start with modest dice pools (usually 6-10 dice) but then use combos of these charms -- cheesed like crazy, because the game intends for you to munchkin the synergy between them -- to turn that into pools in the 20s, 40s, or we've actually seen pools get into the 100s. In our last game, once PC literally had to roll 1010 dice. We used a dice rolling program. While the standard character sheet is 2 pages long, the ones that are actually useful are 6-11 pages long. Combat is a 10-step resolution process for each attack, each step of which can be interrupted by someone else's charm use, at which point you recurse into a 10-step resolution for that counterattack or whatever it is.

Nobilis is mortals who've been given godlike powers to defend creation. You have four attributes that govern what kind of miracles you can invoke, plus about 3-6 bonds, afflictions, and gifts which either improve your miracle use or give you minor benefits. The system is diceless; you have a pool of miracle points for each attribute. If you want to cast a Lesser Enchantment miracle (level 4) and your Persona is only level 2, it'll cost you 2 miracle points to make up the difference. The character sheet is (and only needs) one page, though I like to have the players make up a double-sided second sheet that lists what sort of cool miracles they can invoke for each level. Conflict is resolved by comparing miracle levels, modified by any applicable bond; that's it.

Seriously, the only comparison I can make between the two systems is that the characters have a lot of power in the form of supernatural abilities. But that's a broad brush.

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by PK

Exalted is over-the-top wuxia masters with dozens of miscellaneous magical abilities (charms) who start with modest dice pools (usually 6-10 dice) but then use combos of these charms -- cheesed like crazy, because the game intends for you to munchkin the synergy between them -- to turn that into pools in the 20s, 40s, or we've actually seen pools get into the 100s. In our last game, once PC literally had to roll 1010 dice. We used a dice rolling program. While the standard character sheet is 2 pages long, the ones that are actually useful are 6-11 pages long. Combat is a 10-step resolution process for each attack, each step of which can be interrupted by someone else's charm use, at which point you recurse into a 10-step resolution for that counterattack or whatever it is.

Nobilis is mortals who've been given godlike powers to defend creation. You have four attributes that govern what kind of miracles you can invoke, plus about 3-6 bonds, afflictions, and gifts which either improve your miracle use or give you minor benefits. The system is diceless; you have a pool of miracle points for each attribute. If you want to cast a Lesser Enchantment miracle (level 4) and your Persona is only level 2, it'll cost you 2 miracle points to make up the difference. The character sheet is (and only needs) one page, though I like to have the players make up a double-sided second sheet that lists what sort of cool miracles they can invoke for each level. Conflict is resolved by comparing miracle levels, modified by any applicable bond; that's it.

Seriously, the only comparison I can make between the two systems is that the characters have a lot of power in the form of supernatural abilities. But that's a broad brush.

I don't know the rules of Exalted at all (and have a very limited understanding of those in Nobilis). All I was thinking about was thematic similarities. Your post makes Exalted sound more like another game which I have a limited familiarity with, Feng Shui. If it's like that, then I can kind of grasp the distinction being drawn between it and Nobilis.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

I don't know the rules of Exalted at all (and have a very limited understanding of those in Nobilis). All I was thinking about was thematic similarities. Your post makes Exalted sound more like another game which I have a limited familiarity with, Feng Shui. If it's like that, then I can kind of grasp the distinction being drawn between it and Nobilis.

To my taste, Exalted is even less like Feng Shui. I read Feng Shui, years ago, and totally bounced, because it had a setting built in that was deliberately created as only a bunch of stage sets for martial arts ***kicking, and that was thinner than tissue paper. Exalted has a deep, rich background with lots of mythology and mythlike history that was built up for its own sake. Exalted is mythopoeic and Feng Shui is cinematic. I could happily run an Exalted campaign; I don't think I could endure even a pickup session of Feng Shui.

Bill Stoddard

[Parody]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

I don't know the rules of Exalted at all (and have a very limited understanding of those in Nobilis). All I was thinking about was thematic similarities. Your post makes Exalted sound more like another game which I have a limited familiarity with, Feng Shui. If it's like that, then I can kind of grasp the distinction being drawn between it and Nobilis.

Feng Shui is the right idea. Exalted scales the power way up, almost to where a Feng Shui character is a skilled normal and an Exalted character is a superhero.

Originally Posted by whswhs

To my taste, Exalted is even less like Feng Shui. I read Feng Shui, years ago, and totally bounced, because it had a setting built in that was deliberately created as only a bunch of stage sets for martial arts ***kicking, and that was thinner than tissue paper.

That's something I liked about it in our rotating-GMs Feng Shui campaign, as we didn't have to worry about shelf-feet of backstory and love martial arts ***kicking. Sometimes you're in the mood for simpler stories and action movie insanity! :)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Parody

That's something I liked about it in our rotating-GMs Feng Shui campaign, as we didn't have to worry about shelf-feet of backstory and love martial arts ***kicking. Sometimes you're in the mood for simpler stories and action movie insanity!

But you can't tell me that Feng Shui didn't have a complicated backstory! Its backstory had time traveling wuxia bouncing between three different historical eras. It just made no sense whatever. I could see a martial arts campaign with a minimal backstory—my French swordplay campaign was like that—but not one with an elaborate and completely implausible one.

This was a big step on my way to concluding that Robin Laws and I have utterly different sensibilities about RPGs.

Bill Stoddard

[Parody]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But you can't tell me that Feng Shui didn't have a complicated backstory! Its backstory had time traveling wuxia bouncing between three different historical eras. It just made no sense whatever.

I agree that it's out there, but it fits in with a bunch of action movies I've seen and RPGs I've played. Our own campaign tended to focus on the modern era, with plots run in secret by the various factions.

Originally Posted by whswhs

This was a big step on my way to concluding that Robin Laws and I have utterly different sensibilities about RPGs.

Having read various other threads on here over the years, I'm pretty sure you and I don't match up well. ::shrug::

Thankfully, there's plenty of room for everyone. :)

[PK]

Originally Posted by Not another shrubbery

I don't know the rules of Exalted at all (and have a very limited understanding of those in Nobilis). All I was thinking about was thematic similarities.

Ah. This thread is about Most Complicated RPG, though, which generally refers to the rules or possibly the setting -- "thematic" would be sort of a different axis altogether.

Your post makes Exalted sound more like another game which I have a limited familiarity with, Feng Shui. If it's like that, then I can kind of grasp the distinction being drawn between it and Nobilis.

I don't know Feng Shui, so I can't comment on that.

The only similarity between Exalted and Nobilis is "high power level," but that's a similarity also shared by most superhero games, many cinematic action games, etc. So I feel comfortable saying that, no, there's no real similarity between the two. I'd hazard a wild guess that those telling you otherwise are just used to playing lower-powered games, so they see all high-powered games as being similar and lump them together.