Exalted isn't the World of Darkness

No, this isn't a rant about Exalted - oWoD connections.

Many people coming to Exalted have played one of the original (pre-Time of Judgment) World of Darkness (oWoD) games and thus assume that the mechanics are going to be pretty much the same. Mostly they are correct. Unfortunately, there are a couple of places where things have been changed and they can bite you in play.

Ones don't subtract 

In most oWoD games I'm familiar with, every 1 you roll subtracts a success from your results and you can botch if you have a 1 left after canceling out all your successes. In Exalted rolling a 1 is no different than rolling any other number that isn't a success. Unless, of course, you roll no successes at all, then a 1 indicates a botch.

Soak isn't rolled. 

In Exalted, a character's bashing or lethal soak are subtracted from the damage dice, no rolling is involved. This streamlines combat a bit as well as makes the characters in Exalted a bit tougher than their counterparts in oWoD games.

Difficulty is the number of successes you have to roll to succeed. 

Your target number is seven (unless you're playing a Sidereal with a TN reducing charm) for every roll. Meaning that you get a success if you roll a 7, 8, or 9 and two successes if you roll a 10 (and, of course, there are exceptions - 10s don't double when rolling damage or for any roll extras make). Difficulty is addressed by increasing the number of successes you need to perform the action. Typical difficulties are set forth in the Character Creation section of the core book. If you need to penalize a player for some condition and raising the action's difficulty doesn't feel right for the circumstance, you can subtract dice from their dice pool. Since two dice will average one success, a -2 dice penalty is mechanically the same as raising the difficulty by one. On average.

More to come as people point them out to me.