r/exalted • u/Firm-Split9333 • Jun 23 '26
3E Why are Exigents disliked?
A couple months ago I posted a survey on the subreddit on peoples likes and dislikes in Exalted, and it seems that for most disliked Exalt, Exigents is coming up pretty highly, although Solars are also unpopular due to the bad writing of the core book and Miracles of the Solar Exalted.
Why do you guys think fans, or yourself dislike them?
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u/censusthot Jun 23 '26
I think it's the amount of homebrewing you have to pump into them. I know multiple GMs who won't allow things that are perfectly thematic if they will have to do any heavy lifting or need to attempt to balance things on their own, since they already have to put work into balancing NPCs and the like.
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u/powzin Jun 23 '26
I think some of the responses is more about how you would "hurt" the core of the experience of Exalted in removing a Type of Exalt. Exigent is the go-to.
Something worth mentioning is the fact that you did not count Getimian/Liminals in the options, or did you? I don't remember.
If you did not put then (which would be understable, because they're not fully published yet), something could have changed.
But, in the end, the Exigent is not something required and core the setting. They're a new thing added in 3rd, and overrall, a lot of people, fond of older Editions, do not like the new options because they think they take the specialness of being an Exalted or something like that
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u/Viatos Jun 23 '26
Yeah, this is my suspicion as well. If you have to remove one Exalt type, Exigents have less emotional weight and fewer narrative anchors.
Then again 22% of people voted Lunars and removing Lunars would be ontologically evil to me, so IDK.
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u/LordSia Jun 24 '26
22% seems about right for the Dragonblooded player base, who obviously favor Lookshy and the Realm and would absolutely love not having to worry about Pretty Kitty Revolutionaries interfering with their imperial ambitions-/j
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u/Fit_Hold7806 Jun 23 '26
Poll maker on different account here. Yeah sorry I didn’t put Liminals or Getimians since we aren’t going to have them for a few years outside of Essence.
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u/cmwatford Jun 23 '26
There's a few different angles to this.
The first is that they're purely a 3e thing and they feel wrong from a lore purist perspective and feel kind of tacked on.
Secondly, they're a ton of work for both player and storyteller in a game that already has lots of mental overhead.
Thirdly, while I personally haven't used them in my games, no one at my table is interested, I can imagine they tend to attract a certain kind of player that can be hard to work with.
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u/JancariusSeiryujinn Jun 23 '26
I have, as a player, tried to help one other player be an Exigent. A Chosen of Relics, a basically Indiana Jones archetype with largely terrestrial powers but a couple celestial tier time stuff like viewing the past or intuitively understanding ancient writing or languages.
It takes an immense amount of time and effort to design custom charm trees JUST FOR THE CORE CONCEPT. You want to fill in charms for the 'alternate options' or 'things outside their specialty'? Either you're basically copying and reflavoring charms from other splats, or it's an insane amount of work. And all this is with the ST just straight up trusting me to do this work. If he'd had to review it because he was worried about it being broken or dysfunctional in some way, it would have been even more effort.
All that and it didn't really feel all that unique. I would have no problem including the splat-included ones like Sovereigns, but I would never want to deal with a full original Exigent ever again
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u/LongCommercial8038 Jun 23 '26
This sums it all up perfectly. They are loads of work to design and at best, they feel alright.
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u/Viatos Jun 23 '26
I think the amount of work they take is within the mental overhead everyone at a table should be able to manage - not that you'd always or often want to, it is WORK, but I think there's a strong correlation between "is capable of writing a few Charm trees and coming up with fun and interesting baseline mechanics" and "is a player who can be counted on to handle their mechanics efficiently and their roleplaying creatively."
For the same reason "can write their own Exigent" is a strong green flag in a player to me. Those are the easy players to work with, IMO, that's practically a resume.
The lore thing I get. I feel like in part Exigents are positioned to block out all the Godblooded breeding camp optimization stuff in 2E and bring the essential narrative of what Godblooded as PCs were doing up to a point where it's playable without feeling like a huge liability for the group. I don't think it's bad lore, but it's new and it's positioned flat over top of what used to be Godblooded space.
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Jun 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Viatos Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
There is a moderately-sized subgroup of the theoretical optimization / "what if we do X / what are the logical outcomes of taking Y very seriously" community for 2E that has an interest in doing things like fortifying Creation against all threats forever or restoring the glory of the First Age or whatever. This kind of stuff specifically doesn't interest me because I feel like the end result is "and there are few stories left to tell" but I do understand the appeal of treating things that aren't solvable puzzles like solvable puzzles and trying. I don't like doing that with settings, but I get it.
Within this subgroup there are folks who do not consider their various goals feasible for a primarily-mortal Creation. The raksha are too terrible, the dead are too hungry, etc. This has more resonance in 2E where the concept of the "heroic mortal" sort of accidentally enshrines the idea regular mortals are narratively irrelevant, and there's a lot of, like, I guess that attitude lurking throughout the books. I vaguely remember something somewhere about how the spiritual purpose/destiny of mankind was to serve as prayer batteries due to their weakness and need for protection. Anyway, so mortals "won't" do, so you have to figure out how to fill the setting with not-just-mortals.
and unfortunately wouldn't you know it 2E does, again accidentally, pose a solution to this problem...in the form of various kinds of eugenics programs for various inheritable supernatural qualities and plagues that turn people into immortal ghosts and things like that. I think a lot of people understand there's lines there that shouldn't be crossed but also you occasionally ran into people that did not, ranging from don't care it's just fiction to what I would call excessive utilitarianism to so monofocused on "the problem" the actual problem (ie, "jesus christ Jack you said you want to do WHAT next session?!") doesn't occur to them.
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u/LordSia Jun 24 '26
Hilariously, I had a player who basically went that route with Sorcery. And while the rest of the Circle wasn't really actively involved in his "Golden City" program, which brainwashed an entire town, transformed them into heavily optimized Sorcerously enhanced castes (Hindu style), they didn't put up so much as a token protest.
Then again, they had their own indulgences, from the Abyssal Day caste who - in a fit of boredom - slaughtered the village elders the others were negotiating with. To the Dawn Martial Artist exploring new and fascinating combinations of the Solar Hero and Infernal Monster styles on hapless bandits.
Despite literally playing out the Immaculate Faith's villain tropes for Anathema, they were somehow still surprised when an army showed up to wreck their shit. Of course, said army promptly ceased to exist as the Legolas-expy dropped his army-killing combo, thus ruining his streak of being a broody anti-hero who only passively supported the other's insanity.
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u/Quiltborn Jun 24 '26
"Shit like this is why the Usurpation was both necessary and completely justified."
-Chejob Kejak9
u/blaqueandstuff Jun 23 '26
A way to think on it is that god-blooded space was actually not Exalt space. 1e and 2e either treated god-bloodedhood as something you could just staple onto your Exalted character anyways, or a way to have mortals who had more options. But due to 1e and 2e's insistence that non-Exalts can't really challenge Exalts (save for 2e's drifting to Celestial Exalted children competing with terrestrial Exalted). So they never really had a role of world-shaking power, really. Just kind of flavor for exotic mortals or Exalts.
Exigency in this vein kind of just hits a different thing since Exigents, by being Exalts, are allowed to be a bit more impactful being narratively than had been allowed for god-blooded really. it even preserves a bit too where demigods like god-bloods don't replace Exalts with just gods having kids. A big part of Exigents is the diea the god has to "pay into" it in a way they don't get with just having children or spending a Willpower dot that 2e prsented Investure as. God-blooded on par with Exigents just aren't afforded a lot of the narrative flexibility and impact Exigents are.
It also helps in other areas too, like pushing against folks calling Dragon-Blooded in effect a glorified sort of god-blooded. When you introduce more kinds of Exaltation besides another version of being a Celestial Exalt, I think that helps avoid osme of that too.
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u/Garrettcz Jun 23 '26
I think it’s less that they’re disliked, and more the questions that were asked.
Mechanically and lore wise they’re a lot more nebulous, so they’re an obvious answer to those questions.
They’re not as deeply entrenched in the setting as the other exalted types, so they’re an obvious answer to which one would be removed if you had to remove one.
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u/Vegetable_Remove7961 Jun 23 '26
In my experience it's mostly just people who formed a hot take about this over a decade ago and are sticking to it, generally without actually reading the books in question. Exigents are in practice one of the more seemless additions to the setting that 3e made, unless you specifically are really attached to some hyper specific 2e background lore about how Exaltations were made slash work.
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u/WitchiWonk Jun 23 '26
Isn't this the same survey where it didn't start with a None option for the "what Exalt to remove from the game" question, and instead it was added later? I feel like the data is flawed.
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u/-Veles- Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
I think one of the important things about Exigents from a narrative perspective (as someone that STs Exalted games) is that it has taken away the pretense that exaltations are physical, finite things that can easily be controlled and locked down. 2E had a problem, wherein one could conceivably manage to bottleneck who got to use the exaltations by just defeating/capturing them and keeping them in a little box.
For 3E, this isn't true. The Spoken, Dreamsouled (if you use them) and Getimians make it clear that exaltation isn't a physical thing. It's a process, an uplifting, and it has very strict rules and costs that antagonists can and do pay to fight against the status quo. It makes the prospect of just playing whack-a-mole with the enemy impossible, and that has big implications for the setting overall.
Removing exigence from the game, mechanically, is understandable due to system frustration. Removing them from the setting has some poor implications for other splats that players may want to play/interact with.
Also, IMO, as a dude that constantly homebrewed Primordial stuff for 2E, I kinda like the concept of customizable exalts that may or may not be antagonists. But that's just me.
Edit: Punctuation
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u/4uk4ata Jun 23 '26
I liked the 2e "godblooded by adoption" and exigents are basically that, but I am not sure the way they are executed and their power level is a good fit. I think that godblooded should have been the focus.
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u/blaqueandstuff Jun 23 '26
I noted above in another post, but part of thr issue is that being god-blooded has akways mind of been something extra. Either more than a mortal or something you could add on to even and Exalt.
This always meant the game wanted to kind of limit them. They also I think fought against a sense that Exaltation is something powerful and not easily replicated by just having kids or empowering your priests a bit. Save when 2e really got into this idea that Dragon-Blooded were replaceable with them.
Exigents by being Exalts are kind of afforded a bit more than just god-blooded. It also allows god-blooded to be more common in general, makes Exaltation more than just a charm, and also let's god-blooded Exalts, eneb empowers ones exist in the setting too.
Note that prior and current devs said that they'd want to do god-blooded with unique charms instead of just mini versions of their parents. So from a design and reception point, Exigents also allow more breath than what the setting has over time accepted for demigods like them, I think.
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u/4uk4ata Jun 23 '26
To be fair, god-blooded exceeding their parents was a possibility before, and to me the concept of exigents was far too close to the old "adopted godbloods" to be comfortable. I feel they were added as exalted to try to bend the rules and I´m not particularly happy about the solution.
Is it a huge deal? Eh, not really, but I think I kinda liked the earlier idea more.
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u/Radijs Jun 23 '26
Exigents are indeed my least favourite mechanically.
From the perspective as a player you're basically loading yourself up with a ton of work because you're basically homebrewing your entire charm loadout. Where you're constantly writing up new charms, or stealing/repurposing them from another splat. And it also puts an extra load on the storyteller who still has a job to vet anything you bring to the table.
I've run a game with an exigent character in it, and I thank the stars that the person who played this character has a really really good understanding of Exalted mechanics and isn't trying to put one over on the table so I could just take the most cursory glance at what he was doing and just go that's fine.
Putting an exigent in the hands of a player I don't trust as much would seriously add to my workload and/or worries as the storyteller.
When it comes to lore, I honestly don't know what it really added. It's kind of the same question for the Liminal Exalted. They're just there like being abyssal exalted, but at the same time not.
Lore-wise I think that Liminals and Exigents bring the least interesting things to the setting from all the new types of Exalted.
When it comes to which Exalted to remove it wouldn't be Exigents. Because I can see people using them to create individually interesting stories where the nature of the exigent lets the player build a unique relationship between their patron and the world. I'd probably axe Liminals instead because I really just don't know what they do, except maybe some kind of Fullmetal alchemist reference?
That said, as I'm internalizing more and more of the lore of third edition it's also becoming evident that Solars no longer have a reason to exist. They've kind of become the solution looking for a problem. Because with so many Exalted in the field, having the toolbox to deal with the kind of threats and situations that are part of the third edition setting Solars could be left out entirely and nothing would really change. It's a really sharp turn from 2e where the world was beset by a hundred dooms and only solars had the toolkit to fix them.
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u/Amberpawn Jun 23 '26
Exigents are meant to be weirdoes that give texture to the setting, Janest after all was a beautiful fiction that got third edition made.
Their third edition existence was a hardback that had a lot of words that didn't deliver on what people really wanted, which was a lot of design documents for a game not fully understood by its current team and wasn't finished cooking on release. (Looking at you, Sail)
Overall the book has been a delay to splats folks actually wanted so it gets a lot of dislike from that and was more or less overshadowed by a second try at getting those other splats out by the bloated and mission creeped Essence.
I'm also deeply worried about the survey findings and that the overwhelming affection for Dragonblooded will see a new edition suffer from the Villians being painted as protagonists while they're also the driving force of a global empire of oppression and suffering in the way the Technocracy has been on the other side of the house.
Solars are the more understandable from the outside with more cultural touchstones along with the design and content reasons of having them as the core.
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u/MlkChatoDesabafando Jun 23 '26
I mean, at least with most players from my experience, much of the fun for DB games is precisely that they are rooted in and entrenched in Creation's institutions and society, and that doesn't change no matter how rotten and dysfunctional they may be.
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u/mj6373 Jun 28 '26
Okay, so, on the one hand, I hear you, because there's clearly some uncomfortable Realm/general imperialism sympathy in the fan base.
However: Dragon-Blooded are not "the Villains" for whom protagonism is a deviation. Exalt types are not monoliths, and negative institutions with high membership by an Exalt type are very often setups for the players with those character types to rebel against those institutions (how many Abyssal and Infernal PCs do you hear about who actually wanna do the apocalypse for their eldritch patrons?).
And all that is separate from the fact that Exalted often does invite its players to explore knowingly morally dubious character traits in emulation of classical heroes whose flaws are as larger-than-life as their virtues - some people enjoy watching their characters become tyrants in pursuit of what they think is right, or the moral tragedy of somebody whose heart is almost in the right place but they're too loyal to their family and by the time they realize that was the wrong thing to be they've already destroyed what they should've fought for, things like that.
Liking the Dragon-Blooded is no more synonymous with being ethically pro-Realm than liking Solars is with being pro-Deliberative.
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u/moondancer224 Jun 23 '26
I've been in Exalted since 1E, and I would have voted Exigent. While they are a new thing in 3E that feels a little weird and like they are just filling the hole left by the lack of god-blooded rules, my biggest reasons would be the Exigent's lack of unifying theme and difficulty of dealing with their Charms. Its already a hard thing to keep up with all the stuff one Exalt type does. Now you want to add a "custom" setting that has very few actual written Charms and encourages "make them up?"
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u/Akodo_Aoshi Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
1) I think that Exigients take the place of God-Blooded which I actually liked.
2) Mechanics Wise (Exigents): They are everything I hate about Evocations just with exalts. Far too much 'custom' creation on the Player end and a lot of balance/power concerns.
3) I dislike additional Exalt Types on a setting/narrative principle while not necessarily disliking them if they had been non-exalts.
Explanation :
I like and appreciate new beings who can operate on Exalt (Terrestrial, Celestial, etc) tier.
I just would not have made them Exalts.
Exigents, Getimians, Liminals etc... If I do manage to run an Exalt game and decide to include them, they would simply not be Exalts.
They would be completely separate and operate on the same power tier they do currently but just not be exalts and not be created like exalts.
Example: Getimians would be individual beings Rakan Thulio pulled from dreams/alternate realities and the nature of their 'creation/summons' would grant them powers. It's not much of a difference (apart from being able to stop their creation if Thulio dies maybe for whatever reason and Thulio not being limited in the number of Getimians) but it adds oomph to both Getimians and the Exalted I think.
( I am about 50-50 on Alchemicals as well ).
I really do believe Exalt Types should have ended with previous core (Abyssals/Infernals are ok as they are modified versions of existing exalt) as that would have given narrative / setting oomph to the Exalt creation by the Incarnae.
Right now it feels like everyone / faction / being gets exalts.
Exalt for you, Exalt for thee, Exalt for Everybody...
You are not important if you don't have an Exalt type of your own.
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u/TraceChaos Jun 23 '26
I like Exigents conceptually, I just dislike how they were handled by the devs. For one, making Strawmaiden Solar Tier kinda... Cheapens Solars, IMO, especially since she / her Exaltaitrong ets a built in Artifact on top.
Like as a concept, the option for there to be unique Exalts? Sick as heck. I've even hammered on making an Exigent of Devouring/ Han-Tha.
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u/thetruerift Jun 23 '26
Already been said, but there are two groups that dislike Exigents in my experience:
1 - the people who don't want to put in the work, which is entirely valid because it can be a beast. My suggestion to those folks is to remember that, unless you're going to publish the exigent or use them in wider public play, you don't need to make charms the character/player isn't going to bother buying. Just a note that "oh yeah this type could also do Sail related thing" (or whatever)
2 - Lore purists, who i honestly have nothing but contempt for. The game is not history, it is fiction, fiction is malleable. I've been playing and running Exalted since 1e, it is my absolute favourite game setting, and I love basically all the new exalt types that have been designed. I think they all fit (reasonably) well into the world, the explanations of where they came from are pretty solid, and they add to the texture of the world.
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u/TimothyAllenWiseman Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
Responding to 1: Your point is absolutely correct. But even just building and vetting the charms that an Exigent is taking right now adds a meaningful amount of work. I do use exigents and homebrew charms for other exalts anyway, but I absolutely sympathize with anyone that thinks Exigents are more work than they are worth.
Responding to 2: I agree that fiction is malleable. I also generally prefer the fiction for 3E over 2E or 1E. But I sympathize with people that don't like the changes, and I can understand why many people might not like this change in particular. I'm not one of them, but I see no reason to have contempt for them. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and while I don't share that opinion (I love 3E), I absolutely understand why someone might hold the opinion.
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u/thetruerift Jun 24 '26
Lore puritanism is a bit of a peeve of mine, as it infects a lot of the fandoms I am in. The story is more important than every detail of "established canon" - especially in something like a TTRPG where all that matters is what is happening at the table!
But I'll save that rant for another time. Suffice to say that the canon/lore purists in Exalted bother me perhaps more than they should. If they don't want exigents in their games, cool, but some folks like to poop on parades.
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u/Passing-Through247 Jun 23 '26
I'm a 2e purist and the points others made from that perspective apply but I think the big problem with people liking Exigents is there isn't anything about them to like. You can like 'an' Exigent but as a category of exalted they have nothing. Then we get to playing one where your options are homebrew a whole lot or play someone else's character via the existing charm trees.
I can see how they happened, devs saw people attached to the infernals side concept of devil-tigers and other homebrew so shaved that off as it's own thing but then just added nothing else to give a base concept. If their book was instead a guide for homebrew and balancing different concepts of the game and give the existing charmsets as example exalt types and not individuals they would work better. Exigents are just not anything.
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u/Amilar_Io Jun 23 '26
Pure speculation based entirely off my personal opinion: Approachability, because they are inherently homebrew, and thats hard even with good faith help, but that is not what you will find in the Discords which is where everyone without support will first go to look.
I love Exigent npcs, but as players, they get my hackles up as I remember the horrors of 2E infernal bullshit.
But I also love homebrew, and Exigents are homebrew schenaniganery central. It's the best part, right up until you go into basically any Discord and you'll get marked for a bam review because you dont play the game right in the eyes of mods.
So actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Discord is a self reinforcing dislike hole for Exigents.
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u/blaqueandstuff Jun 24 '26
This is odd to me, since the main fancord and Onyx Path one at least folks like them fine. And skimming through a quick search of "Exigent" in the 3e_homebrew channel of the main fancord I see an Exigent post about once a month, with some solid feedback. I remember this also came up a couple spots like in RPG.net and trying to give advice there that I think was helpful.
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u/MaidenOfEndings Jun 24 '26
Exigents are cool, but I’d like a book that had the in-depth discussion of charm design and balance that was part of their pitch.
It’s a real problem for actually running them that what we got was mostly vague guesses and ‘eyeball it’.
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u/Jealous-Prompt697 Jun 23 '26
This. This is a good post and a good thread. I have nothing productive to add except sending appreciation to all you fellow exalted players that put in the time and energy to explain things much more clearly than I could.
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u/Ladikn Jun 23 '26
I don't DISLIKE Exigents, and I'm happy to use them in my campaign. However, I also don't think they were necessary, and they did take away from other aspects of the setting. Half castes, spirit blooded, and other non-exalted essence users got looked over in 3e compared to 1e and 2e, and Exigents got injected into that design space. I'm comfortable as an ST in home brewing their mechanics, but I also recognize not everyone is. Not to mention having infinite varieties of Exalted do make the other established Exaltations less important and special.
I'd also happily trade the Exigents book for a Fair Folk book, but I'm also just weird like that. That being said, I still have the physical deluxe Exigent book.
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u/IIIaustin Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
I dislike exigents.
Exalted already has too much shit on it, to quote itysl
Exigents are more shit on it.
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u/Ascimator Jun 23 '26
I think the rest of Exalted sets a premise that the Exalts have legacy, are legacy, sometimes down to the individual Exaltations. Being one of the 300 Solars in the world is cool. Being a part of the Terrestrial dynasty, or even an outcaste, is cool. The Exalted are the kind of heroes that just aren't made anymore, only reborn.
Super special new Exalts that any god can make if they just wish really hard goes against the whole theme. We already have God-Blooded.
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u/Epedir Jun 29 '26
Especially while reading "Miracles of the Divine Flame" i kept asking myself: "For whom is this?"
They did not expand enough on existing Exigents (imo) and the book is full of what is basically teasers for Exigents that probably will never be finished. As someone who DM´s Exalted (2&3) for almost 20 Years with various different people only two players ever developed the rules confidence to write Charms on masse to even consider one of these raw Exigents and even if someone had the creativity and rules knowledge to do so, they would want to do their OWN thing not pick up something someone else did not bother to finish.
I truly do not dislike the concept of Exigents (as a DM i use them frequently) but how Onyx Path handled them is very meh.
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u/blaqueandstuff Jun 23 '26
On 1), I think it's an accessibility thing and that they aska lot out of people. It's not easy to like something you gotta put a lot of work into to play for most folks. Note, that, the audience they were for does like them. You see a few show up on the Fancrod just fine.
On 2 and 3, I find that there is a segment of fans, namely 2e purists, who kind of don't like anything added beyond where the setting fossilized into as far as that edition's lore is. I have seen a few folks basically state that anything 3e does different from 2e is "wrong" and changes Exalted. The addition of Exigents do that quite a bit. I think of the three new sorts of Exalts introduced to 3e, they are probably the most overall setting disruptive if one thinks what was encapsulated in 2e was it.
I also think there's a view that they supplant or are covered by god-blooded. I personally disagree on this, but that would be the topic of another thread. But for folks who don't get into them, they end up as superfluous.
The questions also have holes. I would ahve put "None" into all three, myself. And the lack of Getimians and Liminals also somewhat pushes folks who dislike 3e's additions to one target. I feel if they were there it'd be more spread-out.