Same sense of “don’t learn another game” but at least the D&D guys know you’re using it as a modular engine.

Man I couldn't even play Exalted in Exalted

I remember once someone in the old bad days being like “why run Cyberpunk you can just set the game in Nexus and have the megacorps being Guild factions and introduce artifacts for the cyberware and boom now it’s better.”

To this day I am still unsure how that was supposed to be better.

Like people would just straight up go “hey how do I Exaltify this idea?” And the chat would spitball.

It was wild.

it still baffles me that ANYONE has that mindset. truly the human brain can get used to anything

My only theory is that because it is a really incoherent setting in so many ways that that made people want to read patterns into the static.

And 2e which had this design ethos of being intentionally very disparate and kind of whatever you want as long as it's not immediately western fantasy encouraged that.

Yeah, that was absolutely baffling.

I was deep into the Exalted fandom for awhile.

Like, taking stuff and going "I wonder if I could make an Exalted AU from this" was fun, but that's the fun of mashing stuff together to see what you make, not because it's inherently an easy fit.

And then infernals came out and I had one of the writers like, come wading into a corner of the fanbase to pick fights with people who didn't like it and get even madder that we called him unprofessional for it.

(If you ever stumble across this hi Morke you weird fucking sexpest who creeped on my partner, you've always been an asshole and the line's better for your absence.)