DanMcS said:
I wasn't responding to GJJJ, I was responding to thoughtbubble. The feel of exalted is powerful people doing legendary things, which can be simulated out-of-the-box with high level D&D. No tweaks needed. There is very little difference between a high-level D&D game and a starting exalted game, which makes me laugh when white-wolf lovers complain about D&D being for powergaming.
Thoughtbubble asked about those mechanics specifically, and said they couldn't be replicated in a d20 game, which is nonsense.
Excuse me for being less polite than I could have been, but it's been one heck of a rough day.
I hate when people call me silly, put words in my mouth, say there's an answer, and then gloss over the most difficult part of my questions. First. I never said that those mechanics couldn't be replicated in a d20 game. I see that it could look that way, but I meant those as examples of underlying portions of the system that would need to be brought across. Second. Parry
vs Dodge. Not "How do I make a D20 system compatible parry?" That's simple. Let me be explicit this time. How about "How do I meaningfully make a mechanical separation between parrying and dodging as defensive skills that signifignatly parallels the existing system while keeping both as explicit actions and maintaining the integrity of the hightest number of charms created for the game and/or best facilitating the creation of new charm trees with the fewest possible reprecussions across the rest of the system?" And yes, you can answer the question, but do you want to? How many questions do you want to answer? When does it stop being worth it? When is it easier just to pick up the exalted core book and use that? When is it easier to just tweak D&D to work with the portions of Exalted you like?
I said that I wasn't enthused, and that the game systems have distinctly different feels. Feats aren't quite "activate one variably scaling power drawing ability per turn". Sure, they could be, sure you can MAKE it work. But when does it cease becoming worth it?
And, I'm no D20 publisher, but I'm pretty sure BAB is INTEGRAL to conforming to the D20 stystem. Like, you can't not have it. It must be there. Along with the stats Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha, and no others...
Of course, looking online for said assumption just turned up nothing of the sort. So, If you can change those sorts of things, and still run something as D20, then it wouldn't be too bad (except converting all the altered charms, and the relationships therin, and now back to my initial point).
Seriously. The best way to do D20 exalted is to pick your favorite D&D game, give everyone tons of stat-points, max HP at every level, add virtues and will power and stunts, make judicious use of extras, and use the books as campaign source. Sure, you'd be building most of it yourself, and doing some seat of the pants DMing, but that'd exsist in any home port (in one fashion or another) anyway.
And if the problem is in changing from roll XD10 to 1D20+adds, I'd say try it and see how it goes. In that case, yeah, a conversion would be pretty easy. Though the exalted would probablly be numerically less tough.
In most cases though, I'd say don't bother converting at all, or steal the setting and concept and use your favorite rules with one or two small tweaks. Though if you'd like to talk about how to make D&D feel more like Exalted, I'm all up for that.
And finally, system does matter, but that's a different debate.
