A certified powerfantasy classic.
Have you played it before? Would you like to? Share your stories!
Hrere's what happened in a game I'm currently running, set in the modern world in a slightly alternate timeline.
>players come back from another dimension to find out their powers are suppressed
>they find out that the US has been building Mundus Wards
>one of them is in New York City
>they fly out to NYC and go to the Bronx Zoo, where the ward is located, disguised as a 5G tower
>one of the players uses a dominion action to release an alien mutagen gas in the zoo, causing all the animals to mutate and break out. They start eating people and cause chaos
>they destroy the tower and drive back to JFK international to fly back to their base
>the city is in chaos and is about to be quarantined because of the alien gas, one of my players, playing a mentally ill Korean shut-in who has the words of Dream and Moon, decides to use a dominion action to erase the memories of everyone in the city and replace them with his own, only to let them pass into the airport without hassle
>on the way out they are intercepted by fighter jets
>another player with the word of Artifice decides to use dominion to crash every other plane in a 50 mile radius causing a hyper-9/11 to get away
Now I'm left to pick up the pieces and figure out what happens now with NYC being basically erased from the world and replaced with millions of mental copies of a Korean lunatic
 CRIME Shirt $21.68 |
 DMT Has Friends For Me Shirt $21.68 |
CRIME Shirt $21.68 |
If I wanted to play Exalted, I'd play Exalted 1e
Japanese cartoon art just throws me off, what can I say.
How does Exalted compare actually? I heard it's similar but seems more convoluted. Also I like Godbound for its flexibility, I can put it in whatever setting and it just works, and I can ignore rules at will.
based & touristpilled
that's right.
They're remarkably similar. Make an overpowered god-being with all these cool powers and abilities, then find out that some dude with a sword can kill you because lol epic heroes. Shit's weird as hell.
Not really and that's what makes it great.
There's absolutely no way a mortal warrior could ever take out a combat-specced Solar Exalt, short of someone or something else doing most of the job for them. Godbound aren't nearly so invincible to mortals, though.
System wise:
Exalted 1ed/2ed is a lot of work just to realize the game is broken.
Exalted 3ed is a lot of work to realize even when the system works it isn't good.
Exalted Ess is less work to realize the working system isn't good.
Godbound is a little work to realize the system is broken.
Setting wise:
I'd say go with Exalted 2ed if you want a fleshed out world, Exalted 3ed if you want a sanitized version of the same, or Godbound if you want a "go fill in our blanks" setting.
Just use Quixalted. Once you get over the dogshit explanations the game works better than any other Exalted version.
I hear Exalted Demake's looking good, too.
seconding Quixalted and especially Quixalted Extended honestly, it's a very well realised game and ESL/Infernal XP aside it brings to life numerous Exalts. Also the charm/artefact creation system is great, I'd unironically even run Godbound in QE if I ever wanted to run Godbound again because it smokes it out of the water.
Also I'm have a hunch at least one or two of 3rd edition/Essence's changes have been inspired directly by this piece of work.
This is the only edition of Exalted that has ever made me excited to play a Lunar. I'd earnestly recommend this system.
Same, although Ex20 is also a contender.
How suited would quixalted be for Xianxia tier superpowered cultivators?
Significantly more so than any version of Exalted. The rules actually make it so you can cause mass destruction or have effects with miles and miles of reach and whatever. It makes standard Exalted feel pitifully small and weak in comparison.
Yeah, I had already read / played / ruled out godbound, exalted, mutants and masterminds, and besm.
When the frick is that guy releasing QE 2.2
from your complaints i advise you to just use exwod rules instead, they're simpler and work well
Exalted is street level shit, barely stronger than Vampires from VtM. Fanboys are deluded into thinking otherwise because the rules are awful and don't work as intended because no one has ever bothered to playtest any of this shit.
That's a great cover art, god damn. They really don't make them like this anymore.
I absolutely love/hate the self-insert parody of it from that Broodmother Skyfortress.
This game is nothing like Exalted. The only things which are actually similar are the "DLC" expansion options that were put in to appease Exalted fans. But in reality, in Godbound you play as a god and your main motivation is acquiring power over the world along with many worshipers, so you can shape it how you like.
In Exalted you play wuxia fighting people and your goal is to destroy Imperial China because you're a criminal in their eyes. You might get some spells but mostly your powers are just variations of kung fu, nobody is worshiping you (or if they are you get nothing from it) and you cannot do much to change the world.
The comparison between these games is clearly forced, and clearly moronic. Godbound is a god game, Exalted is a wuxia brawling game.
Huh? Have you even read the fricking books?
>nobody is worshiping you (or if they are you get nothing from it)
There are rules for getting extra essence if people worship you, and in fairly sure "Cult" is like a starting merit you can have.
>you cannot do much to change the world.
In Exalted games, forming your kingdoms, overthrowing the realm and generally stomping around Creation are regular occurences. The powers of an Exalt (especially a Solar) make it very easy to raise armies and nations overnight.
>The powers of an Exalt (especially a Solar)
Just gonna list some Solar War shit they can pull off
>Rout-Stemming Gesture (War 3 Ess 2) Reflexive
For 4m+1wp, a Solar can target up to [Essence] organized military units or [Essence x 100] individuals who can see or hear a signal he sends up. (hint, anima flare). This charm makes all those characters automatically pass valor rolls for one action which in Mass Combat, come often and at high difficulty.
Remember, Joe Mortal has at best a valor of 2, usually, and most MC Valor rolls are Diff 2. This charm basically removes the greatest weakness from mortal troops.
This charm can also offer re-rolls on just-failed valor checks, if activated immediately after the unit failed.
>Commanding the Ideal Celestial Army (War 4 Essence 2) Reflexive
This charm allows a Solar to, for 3 motes, send a 12-word message to any number of units he likes Within Ess x100 yards that is perfectly understood, and transmits instantaneously. The narrative benefits of this are immense.
When used just before a unit is checking against Hesitation, or needs to change Order (formation) rapidly, it makes the normally very difficult roll succeed automatically.
To give you an example, this is like Leonidas being able to tell his 300 spartans to immediately disengage from melee and raise their shields against incoming arrows before the arrows are drawn. They immediately switch formation.
>Mob-Dispersing Rebuke (War 3 Essence 2)
Like Rout-Stemming Gesture, this Charm forces a unit (Mass, Social, unruly mob) to immediately check for rout. Normally this is a Valor check at Difficulty 1 their Magnitude is higher than your Essence, or Diff 2 if you're higher than them.
One thing to remember is that Mortals don't get to spend willpower to autopass virtues baring amazing dramatic license. So you can basically force a Wyld Hunt's mortal auxiliaries (especially if they're cut off from DB support) to just break and run without even joining battle!
General of the All-Seeing Sun (War 5, Essence 4), Reflexive
This is a complicated charm, but it's absolutely devastatingly Solar.
For 1 mote, a Solar may become Reflexively aware of all units and non-extra solo characters under his command, allied with him or fighting toward the same cause as him, within [Essence x10 miles]. At ess 4 when you first buy this charm, that's forty miles.
That's bigger than some modern earthcountries. Like, as I write this, I checked google maps? Switzerland is about 100 miles across west to east. Assuming this charm is talking Radius and not Diameter, the Solar can become aware of everyone loyal to them in 80% of Switzerland.
If it' s just Diameter, that's still a respectable 40% or so. And I haven't even gotten to the rest of the charm. And it costs ONE MOTE.
Anyway, the rest of the charm: The character determines the strategic positions of all the above mentioned units- where they are located relative to each other and major terrain features like rivers, cities and mountains. Their status like Fatigue, standing formation, and current magnitude. The solar just knows this intuitively, but they can convert it into a mental map if it suits the character.
Lastly it gives the Solar knowledge of all major landmarks within 1 mile of a loyal unit. So you're not just detecting your loyal dudes within 40+ miles, you're detecting those loyal dudes AND any notable strategic features near THEM.
So if you run into Lookshy fighting Mask of Winters, and you're fighting Mask of Winters, you can go "Yes, I know all the battle knowledge."
Here's why this is important: A lot of the time? You're not going to be engaging on territory of a nation, you're going to be fighting a city-state like Nexus or Lookshy, and Nexus and Lookshy are nowhere near 40 miles across.
But what they Do have is suburbs, and small villages outside their border walls. Walking into the area of a city-state, the most common form of governance in the Second age, you can easily set up a huge net of small guerrilla cells who you are fully aware of at all times and can guide effortlessly around landmarks as well as if you had an RTS minimap in front of you.
>Heroism Encouraging Presence (War 4, Essence 3)
A much simpler charm compared to previous, but no less devastating. Heroism-Encouraging Presence allows you to enhance a unit the Solar leads, or every ally within [Essence x5] yards. This is a good example of what 'Small Unit Solar Magic' is.
The actual enhancement is this: For the remainder of the scene, the enhanced unit/characters no longer need to take Valor Rolls. At all. They are now immune to the fear-based Dawn Anima. Abyssal fear effects; mortal terror from being maimed. Charging into Primordial Armies. Etc.
Please note that the BIGGEST threat to armies in Creation is not sorcery or Charms. It's running scared because someone USED Sorcery or Charms on some poor frickers halfway across the battle.
In the most transparent sense, when your players bust out combos and level buildings? PEOPLE WILL ROLL AND FAIL VALOR.
>Tiger-Warrior Training Technique (War 4, Essence 3)
Tiger Warrior Training Technique ties into the Solar theme of Enriching and Enhancing your human resources. The Solar may train a unit with a Magnitude up to her [Essence], in a handful of abilities up to 4, or his current rating, whichever is lower, for 5 hours of training per dot. 1 dot per week. (So no 5 instances of the charm to train 5 dots at once.)
NPCs do not gain experience by RAW. Ever. Growth if ever is arbitrary, and encouraged to be very plodding compared to the whipfast advancement of Player Characters. Only the 'Ally background' really has a character 'level' with the party.
That's where Training effects come in. Here's some vital numbers:
It takes 3 weeks to go from Ability 0 to ability 1.
It takes [Current Ability Rating] days to go from your current dot to the next. And [Current rating x2] experience if you're bothering to track that.
Raising an attribute like Strength takes [Current Rating] months.
This is for PCs. NPCs don't even GET to raise their traits. Next vital number: Mortals have an average ability rating of 1, with 2s in their 'I'm good at this!' skill. Usually they have higher attributes on average. More 2s than 1s and 3s.
So that three weeks to go from 0 to 1? A solar can train up to 150 people at Essence 3, to 650 at ess 5. In those 3 weeks, they can take someone from War 0 to War 3. 5 hours a week. That's your LUNCH BREAK. This also means the Solar has the REST of their time free to do stuff like fight demons, evade the Wyld Hunt, and go on adventures!
Your Solar is Athletics 5? 3-4 weeks gets a hundred mortals going from "Asthmatic farmboys" to "GOT RIPPED" strongmen.
Of special note- you can train Valor with this charm. Valor. In a world where the average Valor is one.
>Legendary Warrior Curriculum (War 5, Essence 4)
This charm expands the abilities of Tiger Warrior Training, allowing the Solar to train in more fields, but still no higher than 4 dots.
More importantly, this charm lets you train willpower. Now Willpower and Virtues do not have training times, but the only other way to really get willpower gains in Creation, is if you're Heroic, or some friendly spirit blesses the hell out of you.
Or you're a Solar and just say "hey, I'm going to spend 3-4 weeks and get you up from WP 4 to WP 7."
Also of note? to qualify as Heroic, a Mortal needs to have a Heroic Motivation, Willpower 6+, and A Virtue at 3 or better- the same things that an Exalt starts chargen with, at minimum.
Lastly, this charm allows you to instill specific specialties in a unit, except it's role-based, not ability-based. The +2 bonus dice to "Silent Movement." applies to any action the unit takes which involves or could benefit from Silent Movement.
Ideal Battle Knowledge Prana (War 5, Essence 5)
This is a 10m+1wp Simple scene-long charm. All units directly or indirectly under the Solar's command within 50 miles (Essx5). It halves the number of relays needed to give orders to all affected units, and increases their Drill and Might by 1 each.
The 'Halves relay' effect of this charm ties into the fact that 'Send Signals' is a Speed 3, DV-0 action in Mass Combat, which means you're encouraged to flurry it I think; It also means you can send messages MUCH further.
So if I'm reading the mass rules right- you can give an order to a unit you're wearing easily enough, but the halves-relays needed effect essentially doubles how many units you can give orders to. (You can target up to [Sending Unit relays] mass units.)
Drill helps define Endurance; Endurance is [Stamina + Drill], for a unit and [Stamina + Resistance] for a solo unit. Units lose Endurance every action. If Endurance drops to 0, the unit suffers -2 dice to all actions as exhaustion sets in.
You also need Drill to satisfy 'Orders' requirements. If your drill isn't high enough, the mass unit can't change formations. Formations are a kind of rock/paper/scissors thing - if you can't switch smoothly or adapt, your unit will get caught out and crushed. There's a lot here I'm omitting for brevity- suffice to say that on the one hand, there's a lot of interesting crunch in Mass Combat. There's also a lot of REALLY poorly implemented ideas.
Might is the 'Magical Modifier' for Mass Combat, include at the very end as a general automatic success adder. On a setting level this is where you see all the magically equipped forces, Charm-enhanced armies, or automaton legions. They're Exotic! And usually making opponents Roll Valor, because whoadamn.
And that's about it. And this is just the War charms! When you take in the Lore charms, the Bureaucracy charms, the Socialize charms, the Craft charms... etc, etc. Solars are the Great Man meme.
I played a one shot as a solo game a while back. Would have continued but got tripped up in minutinae long enough that I lost the drive to continue. On the plus side, the realm I built for that Godbound game transformed into my biggest writing project so far, so I guess it was the seed of something neat.
What's wrong with Exalted?
Holy shit, no wonder the pdf is a page crasher
Bad optimization.
Bad editing. Look at the girth on that thing.
Despite the extremely impressive print volume, Ex3 is a dull mess that was killed by development hell and devs that really don't give a shit about the franchise. It's telling that the original corebook for all its problems is the least terrible book in the lineup. What's worse is that mechanically it's not even all that good or balanced, so it barely has that going for it compared to 2nd ed.
Ex2 is fantastic and on-point in terms of lore and art style but it's completely broken and just generally needs the group to be on the same page and respect all the house rules to avoid the game imploding.
I have never played Ex1 so I can't say anything about it.
SEX with archons
What the frick are you talking about, anon? Ex3 has been getting better since the core, and especially since the dev change. It hasn't gotten good, but being bound to the mess of the mechanics in the core is the biggest thing holding the edition back. Both the current and the previous devs were long-time and enthusiastic homebrewers before they got officially involved with Exalted, and before 3E they were writers for some cery well received late 2E books, like CoCD: Autochthonia. Whether you like them or not, it's prwtty clear that they do care about the game a whole lot.
>What's wrong with Exalted?
It's a super-hero system filled with powers that don't do anything better than modify dice or Exalted-specific rules, based around a die pool system where 5 successes is supposed to be a legendary feat and characters will regularly get 10+ successes. All of which might have been forgivable if the system was quick or easy to use, neither of which it is.
I love to look at a Exalted build and translate it into another system.
"What does this Charm do?"
"You spend some energy and you can improve your skill roll."
"So it's a limited use buff."
"Well, yeah, but you have to appreciate the synergy of different mote pools, and recharging them through Stunting, and-"
"Gotcha'. In Hero we'd just say it 'Costs END', in M&M you'd spend a Hero Point."
"Maybe, but the Charm is a mechanic that's also part of the setting! It's known by name and-"
"So? Are you really trying to say I can't just name it the same thing in another system?"
"..."
"Thought so."
Honestly though, the worst thing wrong with Exalted are the fans who can't accept just how un-precious the game is.
I just went through the Quixalted pdf to mine it for epic level ability ideas, and yeah pretty much came to the same conclusion as you. There’s nothing particularly special there, even mechanically.
Quixalted looks like what 3ed should have been. I still don't like it (Exalted needs a good effects-based, points-buy DIY system IMO), but it looks functional at least.
Oh, yeah it seemed perfectly functional. Just nothing much more OP or interesting as d&d
QE mainly fulfils the compromise between getting a good build a charm system and also still illustrating the setting of Exalted - it is important that different Exalted are good at different things. Exalted's strength is more so on the setting and implications of the mechanics than the mechanics themselves.
I have played and GMed Godbound a fair bit. The system's overall premise is very cool, but the internal balance between character options is extremely questionable (e.g. top-tier Words like Artifice/Engineering, Sun, or Dragon vs. low-tier Words like Fire), and on-screen adventuring does not feel very godly when the major opponents in the bestiary are all super-beings with multiple actions and titanic pools of Hit Dice.
Godbound has plenty and plenty of rough spots where the rules are janky or otherwise internally imbalanced. Ranged combat is flatly better than melee combat in a majority of respects (and Bow is superior to Sword), Sun's Purity of Brilliant Law is game-warpingly powerful (to the point wherein Kevin Crawford commented on it a few times), several other gifts are terribly written (Time's A Hand on the Balance is the most infamous example), the faction rules had to be completely rewritten for Worlds Without Number, and so on.
I think that Godbound is badly in need of a second edition, or some sort of major rules overhaul. (I use Nepene's Fallen Empire Words to try to patch up Word balance, but even that is often insufficient.)
The very fact that Word tier lists like this exist should tell you that the game's internal balance is not that good:
https://www.reddit.com/r/godbound/comments/c9to7r/an_extended_tier_list_for_godbound_words/
What did you find you could have improved on during the game?
Plenty. Plenty, plenty, plenty. Virtually every single subsystem of Godbound could use a good deal of polish, from the internal balance of Words, to faction mechanics, to the Dominion/Influence rules, to the way the bestiary makes Godbound look like total chumps compared to those NPCs with dozens of Hit Dice and extraordinary action economies.
The author just finished up Cities Without Number, so I maybe expect him to spin back around to Godbound or something here eventually.
He's said multiple times he's probably not going to do anymore Godbound books. They just didn't sell well enough to justify it.
That’s a shame. If he fixed the mechanics, I bet that it would be a great hit.
Animegay, you've been a part of Godbound threads since the beginning. I love your autism, you were theorycrafting this shitshow for years. I avoided the game simply after reading you shitting on it. Thanks for that.
Personally I treat Godbound more as a free form RP than a play by the rules game so I don't mind choosing words that are suboptimal, and I don't really care about the "balance" of things. A combat heavy Godbound campaign kinda misses the point in my view, but I'm not that experienced of a GM
Life is combat heavy. There's no escaping it.
Well, people have already started comparing Godbound and Exalted, but what about Scion, how does it compare to Godbound (and if there any other good games that you know of that revolve around playing as gods or similarly powerful entities, what about those, how do they compare?)?
How does Godbound compare to the creator’s other game, is a crossover campaign possible, and how might we get Crawford to make a Godbound 2e now that CWN is out?
Not happening.
Why not? It could make him a lot of money.
it wouldn't because the first one didn't.
Given that the CWN KS got close to ten times what he was looking for, and how many people here are hoping for a Godbound 2e that fixes the flaws, and all the people who like his other games, he could stand to make a killing with a new edition of the game.
What Words have you used and why, are there any you particularly like?
Kevin Crawford is a denthead. He has no idea how to make useful tables or books.
then why are his GM tables and faction stuff the best the industry has produced?
Really? Please post some of the better tables that aren’t game-specific so we can see for ourselves.
Too many people have found them useful for that assertion to hold up.
I hear that SWN's in particular are pretty great, do you have any you can post here?
It's literally free, go download it and check for yourself.
>It's free, download it.
I have.
>And read it.
I was hoping to determine whether it was worth the hours it will take to read the ~100 page document, before spending several hours reading it and determining it was once again a waste of my time and not suited for any kind of game I actually want to run. Hence the question. When you get older you'll also get tired of wasting their your time reading RPG books and discovering theyre more duds you won't have a use for, and will also look to filter them before deciding which one to read.
On mobile so I cannot post any, sorry. But most of them are free online so you can take a gander yourself. I found the sector generation rules quite useful for creating a local cluster of worlds based on my old Stellaris runs. It was a much busier, more developed sector, perhaps overcrowded with different alien races compared to the default aim of the mechanics, but they are flexible that way.
what is the appeal of these types of games for people who aren't self-indulgent autists? no trolling it feels like the type of shit for losers who are still mad at the the guys that bullied them in high school
you can have fun, grander than grand stories where you're the main political and social actor in the setting. it's a change of pace if you're used to stories where you're a victim of unseen faceless forces, magical or not.
Also let's be real, self indulgent autistry is endemic to quite literally every single TTRPG that has a following on /tg/.
There's something appealing about playing the kind of over-the-top heroes that myths are written about.
This is like godgays asking “what is the appeal of playing as someone with less than ridiculous power? What are you, some kind of cuck?”
What is your favorite Word to use in your PCs, homebrew or otherwise? You can probably guess mine.
Yeah, Dragon is a pretty powerful Word, completely agree.
Godzilla Minus One vibes.
>Godzilla Minus One vibes.
Never heard of that film before just now, since I've only watched the Monsterverse Godzilla films, so I'll take your word on it.
>only watched the Monsterverse Godzilla films
Shame, the Japanese ones are generally more fun than the Hollywood ones.
Really? Why is that exactly?
Love and passion for a cultural legacy and national icon vs focus-grouped corporate product designed to maximize income. The Monsterverse are the best of the American Godzilla movies, but that's a really low bar.
Again, I'll take your word for it. Speaking of, how would Minus One inspire a GB campaign with the Dragon Word?
What do you mean by dragon world? I’ve never heard of this before
That has Godzilla as evil. Seems like a bad example for PCs.
That's a shame, it's quite good. Was happy to have caught it in theaters.
>What is your favorite Word to use in your PCs, homebrew or otherwise? You can probably guess mine.
Artifice and Engineering. They're both hella fun.
What’s some of the cool shit that you’ve done with them?
>godbound
>A certified power fantasy classic.
Is it really that good and fun?
Sell me on it.
It isn't DnD 5e.
Cope. Everything I said is simply correct and can and has been applied in games. "Lore" is a homosexual's excuse.
Exalted is quite possibly the biggest concentration of nogames in the entire hobby.
People play Exalted. It's just that everybody who is playing is playing their own house-ruled/different system for it.
Exalted, more than any other RPG out there, is a game nobody plays RAW.
Demanding "feats" rather than "inane mechanical babbling" when we're talking about a damn game, where mechanics define what characters can do, isn't even autism, it's outright insanity.
Your "game" is insane shit that even the developers have never played. Seriously, stay the frick in your general.
>power fantasy god game but in OSR (worst possible system for this type of playstyle)
Ahahahaha... no.
The fact that it works so well is surprising. But then Kevin Crawford seems to know what he's doing.
Doesn’t GB have a lot of balance issues?
So does every game that aims for a high-powered niche.
And so does every game that doesn't.
I would say that games that don't aim for high-powered gameplay are generally better in the balance department. It's easier to balance low powered games, than the sort of thing where you're handing out a wide array of reality-bending powers left and right.
Regardless, I think Godbound, despite its flaws, does a better job than most.
You're both wrong. There are feats in lore, the rules are broken in combat, all of that War wank is nothing that isn't done better in other games (and a lot of it is headcanon: saying you know all the battle knowledge in a fight vs the Mask of Winters, who knows every Solar and Abyssal Charm, is a bit of a laugh), the power level exceeds street tier (see: several city-destroying spells), and War as-written is broken even worse than normal combat. You're also fricking up edition wars, because one of you is talking about 3e (where they do admittedly have more of a leg to stand on re: street tier power levels, but the lore is overstated if anybody ever bothered to read the half-assed drivel, double Exalted and all) and the other is talking about 2e (where War makes even less sense).
Unfortunately the developers did play that game. They did it so much they decided they hated it. That's how we got 3e.
The main difference between Exalted and Exalted translated into another system is that Exalted proper is a bullshit broken unbalanced piece of crap, but usually is unbalanced in the player's favor if only because min-maxing is obscenely strong and it's too much of a pain in the ass to do it for every character that should be at so-and-so level as a Storyteller. It lets you power fantasy in true wuxia protagonist style, plot armor to max. That this is the best selling point I can think of for the system is not a good thing.
Mechanically sound but written in a way that's hard to get people into. Exalted lives on hype so it's hard to play QE unless you already have diehard Exalted fans frustrated with the system sitting and ready to go, is my experience.
How does Scion compare to either game then?
What can you tell us about Scion? And how does it compare to either game? Thoughts?
Can't speak to 2nd edition other than one of the freelancers was proud of all the transgender stuff they managed to "sneak" in. Still, it looks playable at least.
1ed was a dumpster fire full of shit rolling down a hill made of shit so it could crash in an open sewer leaking methane and explode the surrounding countryside and rain flaming diarrhea down on everything. By which I mean it sounds like it might look kind of cool, but it's really just shit on top of shit.
From an organizational stance you had 3 books covering three tiers of power you character would advance through, but later books were still introducing things for earlier power tiers and the final tier amounted to a lot of handwavium story gaming. Which might have been fine if the entire system hadn't previously been built on a combat system, which itself was just continuing the problems of the Storyteller System (e.g. Dex for the win, App for the useless), but married to the wonky Mega-Attributes of Aberrant and an even wonkier version of the already wonky Exalted initiative system. And then GMs were expected to take the rough sketch of a setting and basically fill in all the gaps. Which wasn't particularly hard unless you wanted it to be ("you're a godling, monsters are running around now all of the sudden, so go over there and punch stuff and stop thinking too much") but it could still be a thing ("were monsters running around before, and who knew about it?" "Do you want to punch frost giants and coatl in Saint Louis or not?!?!").
>Have you played it before?
Ran a campaign of it into 5th level. Experience requirements really do take off there, and it was our first time playing and that was the point where the players first really sat down and went 'Wow, we really do only get 24 character points total, and I've already spent half of that on stuff that isn't so good compared to my friends' or 'Jeez, I've bought really good Gifts and optimized pretty well, and I'm pretty much capped out on my upward scaling because I gunned all the combat powers, but it's still not enough to trivially destroy all my enemies, so what am I supposed to do?'
Lv4-5 is where the levels stop coming in so fast and you should really be an established power in the game world, is what I found. I also found that the game would over and over against break down in one of two ways - bullshit scry-and-die, or everybody stacking up and wailing on each other to chew through hp as quickly as possible.
Scry-and-die did actually make for interesting fights and was a lot of fun for me, and even more fun when I said 'frick WoG you can have Line of Sight through scrying within reason', but it was very much a game of information advantage that my players described as playing like blind poker. Having the Bow/Bird guy on the horizon spotting everything and sniping from twenty miles away was a pretty good start because there was a lot of counterplay from burrowing/invisible/telepresence-ing foes, and then the meta was that other PCs (specifically, the Might guy) would go in closer to drive people out and scout, and then that got into some really cool knife-fights in the Bright Republic's tight alleys. Then I opened up scry-and-die otherwise and that meant every character with Apotheosis could suddenly be relevant from range... if their followers went ahead of them. The meta became follower vs follower with pantheon members telepresencing in for miracles, and stuck like that, feeling like god vs god.