The differences between 1st and second edition

[Seraphina]

I know that sounds like a huge question but its not or I don't mean it to be anyway. My question is did they change Abyssals and Sidereals as much as they did with Lunars?


Like Lunar shape change is huge now and has a whole new subsystem with knacks, anything like that for Abyssals for example? A yes or no is fine, of course your welcome to elaborate if you like.

 

[Plague of Hats]

No and yes, sort of, at the same time.


Abyssals largely changed as much as Solars did, because many of their Charms are identical or nearly so. They gain a few special effects with the Avatar and Taint keywords, and are meaner and nastier, but you can transplant a First Edition Abyssal into Second Edition with pretty much the same effort as transplanting a Solar. Story-wise, Abyssals became more respectably villainous and less twirling-mustache, maiden-on-the-train-tracks.


Sidereals theoretically have pretty much the same Charms, but they were rearranged and reformatted with an eye toward changing the ideas behind them, even if they have the same sort of effect and name. This was a bad decision in general, compounded by the fact that their Charms were just plain poorly rewritten. Story-wise, there was an attempt to play up more of the "I'm Agent 007 from Heaven" aspect of being a Sidereal, with varying degrees of success, but they didn't really drop or add anything truly substantial between editions in that regard.

 

[wordman]

Whit Wolf did themselves a slight disservice by making the Lunars book the first major rules release after the core. Lunars 2e was perceived as a vast improvement over Lunars 1e, and (wrongly, as it turned out) seemed to send a signal that 2E really was going to be radically new and improved. It seemed at the time that a lot more people got excited about 2E when the Lunars book was released.


A lot people had high hopes that the other new books would have as much thought and effort about addressing the problems of their 1e versions put into them, particularly the Sidereal and Fair Folk books. Then, most of the Sidereal changes were either mundane or baffling, as if they were made to solve problems that didn't actually exist in the 1e versions while ignoring the ones that did. The Fair Folk book was even worse, with almost no real changes whatsoever. This was especially disturbing because the obvious (and much discussed) flaw of Fair Folk 1e was that, while it told you how to run an all-Raksha game (and, IMO, was pretty neatly designed), it had very little useful to say about what most people wanted it for: mixing Raksha and Creation. Again, this wouldn't have been such a let down if the Lunar book hadn't set the bar so high.


From where I sit, there seems to be a growing indifference to Exalted, and I wonder: if the Lunars book hadn't been so good, would this have started sooner? Or is it worse now, because of the hightening of expectations it caused? I think if you look around at the people who excited about Exalted right now, they are either just starting, or had their lust for the game re-ignited by the Infernals book (and perhaps the Scarlet Empress book and, to a lesser extent, the Alchemicals book). I don't think that is an accident. There are a lot of ways White Wolf could have screwed up Infernals, but the book showed much of the deep thought, decent game design, attention to fixing past problems and general coolness that made the Lunars book good.


Unfortunately, it just made the other books that much more disappointing.

 

[Seraphina]

Thanks for even though that was sort of depressing. Yeah I just starting reading the new abyssal book today and its good but not as good as the lunar book was.

 

[Virjigorm]

I think the most important changes made in 2e are the massive system overhauls in both combat and social interaction. The charm rewrites to convert everything have been occasionally lacking, but the game contains literally hundreds of charms. If they made a few mistakes( most of which have been errata-ed since), I'm not going to complain. MoEP: Sidereals is the exception to this, as many of those charms do not make sense. The point though, is that the tick-based combat system and the relatively detailed rules for resolving social situations were huge changes. The Mass Combat system and Mandate of Heaven rules are another addition that added a whole dimension to the game. All the altered charms and artifacts represent a lot of published material, but they are still only secondary to the massive sweeping changes made to the system.

 

[wordman]

The differences between 1e and 2e were a bit more involved than some edition changes in other games I can think of (say, Shadowrun 1e to 2e) but I don't know about "massive sweeping changes". Yes, they changed the to the tick system. Yes they gave everyone passive defense (and, I'd argue, this is really significant, because it totally changes the charm strategy the character types follow away from having to chase persistent defenses). Yes they added social combat. And yes, this caused them to have to rewrite and tinker with a bunch of charm text. But they really didn't change the core of the game that much. Compare, say changing from Shadowrun 3 to Shadowrun 4. Or d20 to D&D 4e (those two aren't even the same type of game). Both of those transitions were "massive sweeping changes to the system". Exalted 1e to 2e, not so much.


If, for example, Exalted 2 had reworked itself to, say, somehow place Virtues at the center of the core mechanics of the game, involved in everything you do in the system, rather than a sort of fringey subsystem that a many don't bother using, that would be a good start at "massive sweeping".

 

[Teln]

If, for example, Exalted 2 had reworked itself to, say, somehow place Virtues at the center of the core mechanics of the game, involved in everything you do in the system, rather than a sort of fringey subsystem that a many don't bother using, that would be a good start at "massive sweeping".

Wait, you mean there are people who ignore Virtues? The interplay of Virtues/Limit Break and Motivation/Intimacies makes for the best (okay, the only) mechanical way to flesh out characters I've ever seen.

 

[Virjigorm]

Obviously they didn't create an entirely different game and arbitrarily call it the same thing, but that's not what I meant to suggest. What they did was change it a lot. No, they didn't alter the setting much if at all, but nonetheless, the mechanical changes were big. In my opinion, changes that make older supplements incompatible with newer ones without major reworking by the ST qualify as massive. An example of relatively small changes, again, in my opinion, would be DnD 3e to 3.5, Earthdawn 1e to 2e, West End Games Star Wars 1e to 2e, or the old World of Darkness 1e to 2e. Exalted receives small changes often through errata, which is good and fair to the fans. Some of the games I mention were changed in less significant ways than the exalted errata changes, but their publishers released entirely new editions in the hope (I assume) of making money by selling the same books again with a different number on their cover.


What I'm really trying to clarify is that I feel the differences between the editions of Exalted were large enough to make first edition largely obsolete and that 2e is better enough to justify buying the books. I think White Wolf approached 1e as an experiment; when it worked, they tried to expand it, but ran into contradictions and limitations they didn't foresee in the original game. When they reworked the game into 2e, they made meaningful improvements and took a broader-based and farther-sighted approach, which has mostly paid off in the really good material produced for 2e. White Wolf took a similar attitude and approach to the new World of Darkness and I think they are putting out better material for it.


The argument is moot, but I would rank the changes as massive by my purely subjective standards.

 

[wordman]

The interplay of Virtues/Limit Break and Motivation/Intimacies makes for the best (okay, the only) mechanical way to flesh out characters I've ever seen.

For others, take a look at, say, the simple but powerful mechanic at play in Lady Blackbird, or pretty much everything about In a Wicked Age... (which, like Exalted, is primarily inspired by Tanith Lee), or even something like Mouse Guard. Actually, even the aspects of Spirit of the Century "flesh out characters" better than anything Exalted does (not that porting them to Exalted helped at all).

 

[cyl]

Exalted 1e to 2e, not so much.

Sad but true.


They just pimped bits and pieces of the system, but the core remains the same.


It's not that bad, but it's still a lot better than d20 systems in my opinion (the D20 clouds everything ! :evil: ), but it's still not as simple and easy as a L5R or a Qin.