I just felt the need to complain.
Not long ago, I wrote a article on my friend’s blog to the effect that Game Balance is a bad concept, poorly used at that, and generally needs to be ignored in favor of making games which don’t require really good balance to be fun, playable, and where most any given character is useful.
I’ve also recently been going through White Wolf’s Exalted line of game books.
Well, everything I said in the article is true, and yet WW managed to completely shame me for ever having said it. You will rarely, if ever, find a more fantastic setting, filled with danger and excitement. it is also a totally and complete mess form one end to the other. The assortment is edited as if by a blind, retarded man who never played any RPG’s and hates the very concept. The line editor has some weird ideas that make higher-level play almost impossible as a practical matter, and in true WW style they managed to cock up .
Perhaps the oddest note is that the world is one of the grimmest settings this side of Warhammer 40K. There is hardly one spot of goodness and decency in the entire game world. It’s so bad that handing things over the demonic nightmare army or letting the Fae tear the cosmos into madness might actually be one of the more positive outcomes. I’ll grant the player characters are powerful, but damn. The setting is perfectly defined by saying, “Evil made good, and everything halfway-decent since then is only a temporary victory.” Characters who aren’t total dicks are almost always ruled by those who are, and any decent person has no power. In fact, that’s pretty much built into the setting, as any player character is either horribly evil or merely destined to go mad and wreck up the place. Even the everyday gods who protect heart and home are greedy, selfish jerks - when they’re not raging psychotics. It’s like if you took the worst aspects of every totalitarian dictatorship ever and merged them into one schizophrenic whole.
At some point, you’ve got to imagine the people at WW have some serious depression issues. I felt so bad reading the books that I went out and started writing up improbable characters designed to do nothing to make the setting happier. This is a setting where the characters can be heroes, all right - because everything they do up to and including massacring whole cities is still no worse than expected!
But it’s the rules which really mess things up. Apart from being scattered all over Creation (pun intended) a la the later days of d20, they often make no sense. Perfect Dodge/Block charms get so thick on the ground that you can’t expect to survive without one, and the Martial Arts get so cheesy it’s disgusting. Basically, a high-level martial art is automatic death unless your enemies are immune, so you can’t expect to fight anyone with one unless they can’t do anything to you. But they will have much the same powers, so combat mostly comes down to sitting around waiting for the scene to end, at which point everyone does it again and again. Whoever runs out of magic juice first loses, because fighting literally cannot end in another way!
of course, it actually gets worse outside of combat. It’s perilously easy to utterly shatter the power curve, because they rarely considered what might happen if you used all that magic juice outside of fighting. it’s not that the PC’s can alter the fate of the world I mind, but that it’s downright easy. No thought involved. It’s kind like playing Amber, but substituting huge piles of dice for cunning schemes.