Rewriting Exalted

If you've ever been a serious Exalted fan, you've probably been gripped at some point with an urgent desire to rewrite the system. Relax, it's perfectly normal, happens to everyone ;)

Right now here's some ideas on how I'd do it. I won't, because I'm not insane, but I'm willing to waste some time thinking about it. Most of this involves ripping off D&D4, Guild Wars, Burning* etc

1. Classes and levels (kinda). Progression needs to be more structured than in the current game, so that everyone has at least a vague idea of what characters can do after a certain amount of play. D&D is the master of this, but you wouldn't need to go quite that far. "Class" could be built into charm trees, a finer-grained Essence scale could gate access to effects until the group crossed certain thresholds of play.

2. Forced multi-discipline competence (multiclass!). You have to be good at combat, and you have to be good at some significant non-combat thing. Exalted are anti-Primordial kung fu weapons and rulers of the mortal world, so it can be made to fit in setting while solving a bunch of balance and spotlight headaches. Since you get exactly two things to be really good at, you also can't screw yourself over by spreading yourself too thin.

3. You can only use a subset of your powers at any given time. Like memorised spells in D&D, or your 8 skills in Guild Wars, you might only have 6 or so charms accessible during an encounter, even if you know 30+. This puts a cap on synergy craziness, and allows you to have GMs and players playing by the same rules without the GM needing to care about an NPC's entire library. You might argue that at high skill levels most players do this already anyway by only ever using a couple of combos ^_^

4. Conflict resolution. Bake in the idea that success or failure doesn't involve killing everyone on the opposing side. Objectives, stakes, whatever. This shouldn't be too abstract (current Exalted gets around abstraction wherever it can, which is neat in its own way), but Invincible Sword Princess in combat makes more sense if you can beat her without killing her (which you CAN'T, she's INVINCIBLE, that's the POINT ^_^).

5. Speaking of which, we now have baseline competence for characters, a fair idea of what they're capable of at given points of progression, and a system for challenging them without killing them. Time for some great encounter design. Put in an encounter design system, preferably with player input on the fly (it's in-genre for powerful characters to bid up their troubles through hubris ^_^), and then stuff the book with examples. Your first Exalted GMing experience tends to suck because you put the players up against inappropriate opposition (even more fun when it's a moving target because inexpert players will probably spit out randomly capable PCs). That should be fixable.

6. Start new players at a sensible point on the learning curve. More experienced groups can skip past it, but teach the newbies one thing at a time.