Don't let the old lessons die

So I’m currently waiting for my kickstarted copy of EX3 to arrive (I haven’t got that confirmation email yet, but my hopes are high!) and as I do I’ve been pondering what I can hack and change and chop and add etc. to suit my table’s needs.

Since Kickstarting EX3, I’ve gotten really into ACKS and similar games with more of an old-school vibe. They’ve really scratched an itch I didn’t know I had. Gotten so far in to them, in fact, that I’m not sure I know what to do with EX3 now?

There is basically a completely alien way of roleplaying that I never knew about. The kind of crazy, super-oldschool “3D6 in order, no re-rolls” die from a poisoned doorknob kind of roleplaying that I heard horror stories about and avoided for my entire career in RPGs. I gravitated towards the character-centric, theme-conscious world of WoD and its many descendants and stayed there, eventually discovering EX2 and playing the hell out of it.

I ran my fair share of DnD, but it was 3.0 and onward: I never could fathom the dense, seemingly encrypted books of 2^nd ed and before. The world of Gygax and Arneson seemed sadistic, nitpicky, and primitive. Something, I assumed, that we as a gaming culture had “grown out of”. DnD to me was a game of optimization or failure; of pixelbitching, adversarial GMs, pointless minutia, and wildly unbalanced rules.

But then ACKS happened. I tossed in like, twenty dollars into the domains at war kickstarter to see if I could mine their war system for anything useful for my EX2 post-errata stuff. But then, I threw in $5.00, because you could get a PDF of the core game. A core game with the intriguing promise of a completely fleshed-out old-school DnD late game, complete with complex economy rules.

The core book was fascinating but obtuse. It frustrated me for weeks. Then, for months. And then… I just kept reading it. There was something about this thing, I could not stop reading and re-reading it. I didn’t get it, there was something missing.

So I searched into DnD blogs, finally finding the missing parts, the legendary and to me, unheard of “ur-game” of DnD. Here there were treasures the likes of which I hadn’t dreamt of. Here there was roleplaying like I had always failed to achieve, just sitting there in plain sight, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Here were rules for unlocking every fantastic inch of a map, a thing I’d struggled with for a decade. Here were rules for environmental interaction unrivaled in all of my experience.

On and on, the list of things I had always dreamt of getting from RPGs, sprawled out before me like gemstones casually tossed on a dungeon floor. And what was most amazing? These were not rules! These were things learned between rules; before them, above them. These were techniques and philosophy, distilled with care and craft from the baroque “save or die!” of the most ancient roleplaying.

Here I finally saw the brilliant dream of Gygax and Arneson; and oh it was a wonder to behold.

So now the scales have fallen from my eyes. I see a new world of roleplaying. And now… I don’t know what to do with EX3. Any WoD-like, for that matter.

I look at my PDFs for stuff like dungeon world and, although I admire the professionalism and the design, I smirk and shake my head and marvel that I once thought it was revolutionary. I see things like one of the designers of EX3 claiming that it’s the “best edition of D&D ever made” and I’m flabbergasted; how do they not know?

I feel like fucking Zarathustra here.

I just got done reading the hundreds of words on how money works in my EX3 PDF and it feels like it just misses the damn point. I don’t care what the breakdown of obol-to-dinar is; there’s no fucking system for it! There’s an entire caste of Exalt whose shtick is bureaucracy, and there is not a single system for anything remotely approaching commerce, or an economy, or travel, or logistics, or just anything.

I mean, it’s a bronze-age world: maybe make a note that literally every city is on a waterway. You are going to be using Sail to travel no matter where you are in Creation.

In so many places the design wants to contradict itself; it wants to tell you about how complex the economy is, casually tossing around “bonded” and “equity” and like terms, but never giving an example of how to do things with money.

Could I start a stock market in Nexus? If so, fucking how? Would that just be an abstracted roll?

The resource system has 5 tiers, and if you have enough knowledge of fiduciary systems to know what it means to have wealth “bonded” into currency, then you have to know that’s not a satisfactory model.

I wouldn’t raise these points, but bureaucracy is a fucking skill. Hundreds of words are devoted to denominations of currency, but there is no conversation about how to engage with it as a player or model it as a GM. We get a wholly inadequate abstraction which doesn’t even dovetail with the rules for playing the game.

Ignoring all that, even very basic questions are answered with frustrating vagueness. If you continually buy things at a rank of your resources, you apparently are going into debt? And this should be modeled with “a custom flaw”. There is no conversation of how this flaw would manifest. What happens when the players raid one of their first-age tombs and find a pile of plunder? Do they get… More resources? How much? Does it last? How long? What happens when someone has resources 5, then doubles their money with such a haul? (This last one happened in an old EX2 game that I ran. I modeled it with wealth from dreams of the first age).

Even things like “what if I want to invest money in something?” Page after page is dedicated to a subsystem for crafting that borders on a confession of OCD, but is a single word breathed about finance? Not beyond the authors demonstrating that they know stuff about it.

There are no travel rules in this game. At least, there are none in the index, under the ride entry, or under any of the ride charms. Boats have travel times based on their speeds, but there’s no real discussion of what sailing entails in the world, which is a problem because, apparently, this bronze age game has ships with just so much fucking rigging.

I keep coming back to things like that; things that betray this game as a game made by fans of pirates characters (from movies and books). Fans of commerce-themed anime (Spice and Wolf gets brought up a lot). Fans of fighting and kung-fu cartoons. But nothing has a root in actual reality; everything is designed to emulate some fiction or another, so that what you have isn’t a game about something, but rather about stories which were about something.

The creator(s) of ACKS (A particular shout out to Alexander Macris and his tireless effort to improve on perfection) were also fans of something; dungeons and dragons. But ACKS isn’t just a warmed-over set of abstractions and excuses for the “core experience” of DnD: it’s based on thought, and research, and the real actual world and its physical laws.

It puts roleplaying first the way thirty pages of esoteric social mechanics can’t: it fucking assumes that you are roleplaying and builds outward from there.

It relates the cost of things to their real-world (and actually researched) value. It makes commerce matter by allowing you to model it, and yes that does mean numbers and counting and math and why is that a bad thing? Why is Exalted so afraid of counting?

It makes travel matter by putting you in the wilderness and making you map it. It makes you take time and risk danger by doing things like hunting, or getting lost, or backtracking, or circumnavigating. It forces you to deal with the actual concerns people face while traveling in hostile, unexplored territory. I’ve played Eclipse characters that would have been brilliant at this exact thing if Exalted had ever bothered to give us a technique for using the damn map.

I look at the pictures of EX3 and it is enormous; easily the size of my entire ACKS library (core book, player’s companion, and Domains at War). And it’s a fucking paperweight. Why?

I’ll tell you why; because ACKS has zero content that I won’t use. Oh sure, I might make a dungeon with rooms that go unexplored, or hexes that players never crawl to, but the actual mechanics? Either me or my players will use every one of them. They create content, unlock potential, and add to the world and the experience. There’s not an ounce of fat on any of these books, they are lean and strong and brilliant.

But EX3 is nothing but flab. How many of those charms are going to hit my table? How many of the artifacts, or spells, or martial arts? 70%? Not likely, maybe 40% seems more reasonable.

The rest is content nobody at my table will care about; Solars are PC characters, not NPCs, so I can’t do anything with the unused charms.

I might, possibly, have a single PC interested in martial arts; aside from that, I won’t fucking use these things. I’ve got a world to run; how the hell am I going to keep track of NPCs with this many keywords?

Spells are the same way. There will be a handful of utility spells that get around the inconvenient sacred cows of the setting (long-distance communication and travel spring to mind) and the rest are just another kind of fucking charm, doomed to be replaced by vastly more appropriate splat-based charms.

PCs will pick up a signature artifact weapon, a signature “trick” artifact, and maybe 2 will have armor. The rest of these are stat bonuses for dragonblooded or abyssals.

Just on and on with this shit… Having an unexplored hex feels like opportunity, having this much unused and unusable content in a core book seem like suicide.

So okay, to sum this up; I have no idea why I would play EX3 now that I have ACKS. I don’t see that it offers me anything that ACKS doesn’t. I can be powerful and change the world and lead armies and wage economic warfare and make magic castles and weapons and armor in ACKS and it caps at level 14!

I’m not even disappointed, not really. I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed that the hobby has become populated with people more willing to mock the past than learn from it. I’m ashamed that we have forgotten things about our hobby and refuse to learn them again, endlessly chasing our own tails instead of just eating some humble pie and admitting the old guys got things right. I’m ashamed about paying over 100$ for what is essentially a pretty brick.

What brings me the greatest shame, though, is that EX3 is going to get tons of money thrown at it… And ACKS deserves it. So much more.

So go check it out. It costs you a pittance for what is a much better game. Back a kickstarter, read some blogs, learn something of value about the hobby you profess to love. Eat some crow, grow a little and you’ll be much happier for it. I am.