So, not surprising, White Wolf is doing a new version of Exalted and releasing it in 2 months. Â I always liked Exalted's setting but didn't care for how complicated the charm system is and how slow combat can be so the new version caught my attention in that it's supposed to "refine" these things. Â I guess we'll see, if my RPG group decides to play Exalted this summer I'll pick up the book. Â I'm not very familiar with it but I am sad that the 2 racial books (dragonblood and Abysmal) will be rendered obsolete by the 2nd edition (updated versions of both books have been announced). Â Anyway here are the known changes to the system, take from the WW forums.
http://forums.white-wolf.com/viewtopic.php?t=31546Charm trees are standardized. Every Skill in the game now gets three Charms called Excellencies -- one that adds dice, one that buys successes, and one that allows re-rolls. Presumably, the basic Charms that already allow things like this will be replaced, so we'll get First Melee Excellency instead of Excellent Strike (which will eliminate the need for Golden Essence Block, since the First Melee Excellency should let you add dice to all Melee rolls, attacks and parries both). Beyond the three Excellencies, however, the rest of the trees will still be individualized.
-The Resistance and Brawl Skills are gone. Resistance has been folded into Endurance, and Brawl has been folded into Martial Arts. In their place will be two new Skills -- Integrity and War.
-There will be a "social combat" system, so that you know just how many successes it takes on your Manipulation + Socialize roll to convince the Dragon-Blooded who's trying to kill you that he should sell you his daughter and then commit suicide. Integrity relates to this; it's the social defense Skill, like Dodge.
-There will be a mass combat system in the corebook, using the War ability.
-The new corebook will be 400 pages long, and full color.
-Combat no longer uses "turns." Instead, it uses something called ticks. Ticks, we think, start at 1 and go upwards, and each equals, IIRC, one second. Actions take a certain number of ticks to perform, and you can't act again until after that many ticks have passed.
-Defense is now a static number that removes dice from your enemy's dice pool or maybe it's how many successes are subtracted from their attack rolls, I dunno, but we do know that if it's impossible for an enemy to hit you, they just don't. Wading through armies of mooks will be a lot faster if the ST doesn't even have to bother to roll to see if they hit your character. Some Charms will let you roll your defense.
-Solar Charms will be better written. You may not know this, only having been exposed to the 1e corebook, but the other types of Exalted often have better-written Charm sets. By better-written I don't mean more powerful, I just mean more to-the-point, more evocative of the theme of that type of Exalt, and often with fewer useless speedbump Charms or finnicky bits. (Cases in point: Look at Salty Dog Method, the Sail Charm. Then look at Graceful Crane Stance, the Athletics Charm. Notice there is nothing Salty Dog Method does that Graceful Crane Stance doesn't do better. Now, look at Master Horseman's Eye, and notice that it doesn't do anything you shouldn't be able to accomplish with just three or so successes on a Perception + Ride roll.) The Solar charmset will be much more polished, this time being written by people with five years of experience writing Charm sets.
-The Charms of the other types of Exalted will, it looks like, already have been written up before the corebook is released, so the information on the other types of Exalted in the corebook will be more substantial, even if there's the same number of words dedicated to them, because the authors will know what they're talking about. It may take a while until these pre-written Charm sets are fully published, but at least the authors will be able to write knowing what they'll look like when they are, keeping things forwards-compatible.
