Post/Author/DateTime	Post
smoker 04-16-05, 03:58 PM	I'm trying to decide which one I want to play next. What do you think? smoker
Alisair Longreach II 04-16-05, 04:23 PM	Which system do you prefer? D20 or Storyteller? If you and your group really love and know the D&D rules then you should go for Eberron. The main difference I see between Eberron and Exalted is that Eberron is low-level, low magic with the atmosphere of the Indiana Jones movies but Exalted is highpowered and manga-like, a sort of dekiddyfied DragonBall Z.
Siduakal 04-16-05, 05:02 PM	Correction on the above. Eberron is low but WIDE magic. Not many STRONG magic users, but plenty of magewrights and such.
smoker 04-16-05, 05:14 PM	The folks I would be playing with know both systems and have been playing D&D since 88'. Do you think one is better than the other? I am asking this on both the White Wolf boards as well as here, so I can get both sides. When you're old (out of university), you don't have the time to buy every supplement and read every rule. You kinda just have to go with the flow. smoker
jesterjeff 04-16-05, 05:58 PM	Well, I've ran both D&D and Exalted, and here's a few points to take into account. How much 'Role playing' do your players do? Are they dice rollers or actors?...both eberron and exalted are more 'role play' intense, than standard D&D...if they like a more hack and slash, don't get either. Now if they love to go hog wild and dive into their performances, get either or depending on tastes. Eberron is more 'pulp noir mixed with urban fantasy', while the best description I can give for Exalted is, " Imagine Greek mythology, now tell me the story of Hercules using manga and anime themes and imagery." In Exalted, you play demigods, spirits, undead warlords, heroic mortals facing massively powerful foes, powerful sorcerers who know a few powerful spells that effect massive changes...While you can run several different campaigns in eberron and your C's would never know of each other, any Hero in Exalted forms the stuff of legends and any villian is the father of all nightmares. Basically it's the scope of the story you wish to tell, the ambition and the drive of your players, and their imaginations... so good luck. This is the best I can do.
smoker 04-16-05, 08:01 PM	Well, I've ran both D&D and Exalted, and here's a few points to take into account. How much 'Role playing' do your players do? Are they dice rollers or actors?...both eberron and exalted are more 'role play' intense, than standard D&D...if they like a more hack and slash, don't get either. My players LARP more then they play tabletop, so I would say they are more into roleplay then rolling dice. Both of the worlds seem very interesting to me. The Fairfolk book in Exalted is extremely interesting. How would you decide? smoker
Save-vs-DM 04-18-05, 05:07 AM	I've played both, and i think it really comes down to HOW over the top you want to go. Exalted is much more over the top than Eberron is, in many aspects. The power curve is also a lot higher level. Personally, I like Eberron better as I like the darker themes and I like having my players struggle (while this can certainly happen in Exalted, I find it easier to do in Eberron). Eberron also has that "same but different" feel that most folks find fun to play. It also depends on how much structure you want. White Wolf combat tends to be a lot more free form than DnD combat. If you like more guidelines, I'd go with Eberron. They're both good, and honestly, go with your gut. I'd put my vote in for Eberron, because frankly, It's really my favorite roleplaying setting out there right now. One other big concern is what game mechanics you like better? Do your players like class based systems or freeform systems? Hope this was helpful. Save vs DM
The White Sorcerer 04-18-05, 07:15 AM	Eberron is low but WIDE magic.Or people could just start calling it high magic because that's what it is. They've got magical trains and airships and street lights for the Flame's sake. To me, that's proof enough that Eberron is a high-magic setting.
Cloud Divider 04-26-05, 02:19 AM	My players LARP more then they play tabletop, so I would say they are more into roleplay then rolling dice. I've GM'd both Exalted and Eberron, and had great fun with both. I'd probably say that about 75% of my gaming purchases in the last 2 years have been for those two games/settings, and it's been fairly evenly divided between the two. Each has it's strengths and weaknesses. However, I'll forewarn you that I've got a major preference for "system light" games lately (e.g. BESM 1st, HeroQuest, Savage Worlds to a lesser degree), and it colors my opinion significantly. The system light games tend to be easier for me to run because there's less mechanical workload on the GM, which results in me getting to spend more of my very limited planning hours on the story aspects of the game. Generally, I'd say that Storyteller is a little bit more RP-friendly at the mechanical level. Trying to impress that barmaid? How are you doing it? Do you sweep in with your "heroic entrance" with your cloak billowing dramatically in the wind? Roll Appearance+Presence. Do you charm her with your razor wit? Then Wits+Presence. Do you want to do it all with some nifty purple-prose description? Groovy! Have a couple Stunt Dice. d20's not QUITE as good, because it's not quite as flexible. Impressing the barmaid basically boils down to a Diplomacy check. Whee. The DM can throw in a few ad hoc bonuses (+2 or whatever). You can kinda simulate Stunt Dice in Eberron via the Action Point mechanic, but that's total houserules territory. Want to be a warrior-diplomat that's really good with throwing knives and kung fu? Really easy in Exalted, from the get-go (buy up lots of dots in Thrown, Martial Arts, Performance and Presence). With d20, you're kinda stuck trying to figure out how to get a "square peg" concept to fit into the "round hole" class structure (Rogue/Monk multiclass? If you aren't after the Bardic powers, you're kinda stuck). That said, d20's a little bit better in the "balance" department. Exalted has an ugly, ugly problem with character disparity (an "Invincible Sword Princess" style build will almost always trump "Five Tigers Kung Fu"), especially if the Kung Fu guy doesn't optimize well (while it's trivially easy to build an Invincible Sword Princess). A Monk 4 is pretty comparable to a Fighter 4, even if you bring magic widgets to the party. They're both a bit bothersome to run from the GM's perspective, in my experience. They're both pretty mechanically intensive systems, though if you can find a way to pare down the Nine Billion Charms, Exalted gets MUCH easier to handle. I've adapted Exalted's ruleset to run a Romance of the Three Kingdoms via Dynasty Warriors kung-fu extravaganza, and it worked exceedingly well. Statting up the encounters in my Eberron game is quite a chore - the shortest list of the "key" characteristics of the typical minor encounter critter is still a few lines long (AC HP, HD, BAB, Attacks, Damage, SA's, SQ's, Saves, Skills, Feats, Gear, Spells, etc). At low levels, d20 is actually not all that difficult to run. The typical encounter doesn't usually involve wacky powers (and also tend not to have powers/abilities/attacks that insta-kill PCs). Furthermore, I had the epiphany one day while reading the ECS that Low Level NPC's are d20's answer to Exalted's Extras (ie "disposable opposition"). A 2nd level Warrior is a fairly reasonable threat, even to a 4th or 5th level PC...but he doesn't have any powers (or a massive list of spells) to memorize or become familiar with, and he'll only have maybe 10hp. Which easily puts him into the range of "one hit wipes him out" for your big scary fighter. Eberron's a fantastic setting. Exalted's Creation suffers from the "too much-itis" - you've got demon pirates on one side (the Lintha), and then Mighty Morphin' Dragon Blooded in Lookshy (with their essence-powered armor suits, giant mecha, energy cannons and GREAT KUNG FU). And gobs of other stuff in-between. It doesn't QUITE fit together. It's cool for coolness' sake (ie "we added it when we thought of it because we thought it was just too cool not to use"), and it ultimately suffers for it. In my opinion, natch. Which is very much unlike Eberron - while it has many similar concepts, they combine together in a much more coherent fashion. It works so well (and so well with d20's conceits), that I just didn't have the heart to try and adapt it. It works so well with d20/3.5/etc that I HAD to run it in the base system. But then again - Eberron's only really got the three "core" setting books at this point (ECS, Sharn:COT, and Races of Eberron); and I was still pretty hot on Exalted when it was just the corebook and The Dragon Blooded. It will be interesting to see where it goes over the next 3-4 years. Eberron grabbed my imagination and kidnapped it - shortly after acquiring Sharn:CoT for Christmas, I spent many many nights up coming up with a half-dozen campaign seeds. The Sharn book is probably one of the best individual setting sourcebooks I own. How would you decide? Honestly, I'd find out what kind of game my players were interested in. It's hard to beat Exalted when you're after the kung fu goodness. But if the players want to take a shot at this noir quasi-modern fantasy setting, where they can play a half-orcish Sam Spade with a snub-nosed wand of magic missile with his anthropomorphic Warforged "robot" sidekick and chase an elven war criminal on a speeding trans-continental elementally-powered train just in time to get ambushed by tribal halflings and their WAR DINOSAURS with a score to settle, Eberron might just be for you.
Kintara 04-26-05, 03:38 AM	The folks I would be playing with know both systems and have been playing D&D since 88'. Do you think one is better than the other? I am asking this on both the White Wolf boards as well as here, so I can get both sides. When you're old (out of university), you don't have the time to buy every supplement and read every rule. You kinda just have to go with the flow. smokerIf you want Exalted advice, don't go there. Go to the RPGnet forums (http://forum.rpg.net/index.php?s=). "Better" or "worse" is really hard to judge. They are really a lot different from eachother. Eberron is very much D&D, with "pulp-noir" influences. Exalted is a lot more difficult to peg down. Exalted does have a certain style recognizable as White Wolf. For example, Exalted undergo a radical transformation to become what they are, and were formally normal, but gifted, human beings. But Exalted is also very much about giving as many excuses as possible to the players to really change things in the setting in fundamental ways. It's perfectly reasonable for your Exalted PCs to topple kingdoms, kill gods, and end threats to the very fabric of Creation, all right from the get-go. Exalted is all about thinking big, and then having the players laugh at you as you start looking up even higher to see what they've actually done. It really is about scale, as was said earlier. Eberron uses its system as you'd expect. D&D sets a certain pace to the scale of a game, but I'd say that even high level characters tend not to do things quite as brazenly immense as PCs in Exalted often end up doing. Eberron has all the accoutrements of D&D. Let's face it, D&D has a certain challenge-reward model set up to it. Gold and XP rewards, and options for spending said resources, simply go with the territory. But Eberron does have a nice flavor to it that gives the D&D level machine a freshness that is often lacking in the other official settings.
Metatron777 04-26-05, 02:12 PM	Holy crap i didn't know you could do all that in Exalted.... Dude now i'm interested with playing Exalted now... That's it....Eberron and Exalted will be my main rpgs
midniteprism 04-26-05, 02:27 PM	Yeah, I DM Eberron but have been wanting to actually 'play' in a game of late. I stumbled upon Exalted at a game store and had never really given it much thought until the store worker started dropping some of the things about it and how its played. So I'm pretty sure that when I DO play another game as a PC, will probably be Exalted. I'll STILL run my Eberron game cause the players I have seem to show no interest in Exalted, but for ME, i'm all about Exalted for the time being as a player.
Kintara 04-26-05, 03:08 PM	Holy crap i didn't know you could do all that in Exalted.... Dude now i'm interested with playing Exalted now... That's it....Eberron and Exalted will be my main rpgsThink about it like this: the Solars, along with the other Exalted, killed or banished the Primordial gods that made Creation. Solars were designed to kill incomprehensibly powerful Primordial gods.
fizzbang 04-27-05, 12:47 PM	My players LARP more then they play tabletop, so I would say they are more into roleplay then rolling dice. Both of the worlds seem very interesting to me. The Fairfolk book in Exalted is extremely interesting. How would you decide? smoker Everyone else has really covered the differences in the systems quite well (especially Cloud Divider's excellent blow-by-blow comparison), so I haven't got much to add to this, except to say that the Fair Folk for Exalted is almost worth picking up just for the ideas in it, regardless of which system you end up using. It does an amazing job presenting characters that are incredibly alien in mindset, making it a very interesting resource to use for getting the feel of various aberrations, outsiders, or fae critters in d20. When the short descriptions of each type of Fair Folk includes a section explaining why they feel that they have to destroy all of creation, then you know you're dealing with some interesting worldviews!
LordofIllusions 04-27-05, 02:26 PM	Correction on the above. Eberron is low but WIDE magic. Not many STRONG magic users, but plenty of magewrights and such. Correct, the levels of the magic-users is low but magic is more present in Eberron--and used more often--than in any of the other D&D settings put together. ~~~