Exalted Hack

I'm afraid I don't understand your manifest essence move.

The basic move intent is to create tiers of power, and to represent that if you make a move against someone on a lower tier than you you will be much more effective.  I lifted the acting at an Advantage/Disadvantage from Monsterhearts to give some method of increasing your effectiveness fairly substantially without just making it more likely for you to hit your moves.

If you're not familiar with it, acting against an NPC who is at a Disadvantage will mean that your action will cost them resources/face/position in the fiction in addition to any other effects.

The list of consequences for making the move are to show that you have to display some supernatural power to use it, either making yourself more visible to potential enemies, or incurring some kind of cost on yourself from exerting yourself.

Does that clarify some of it, or are there specific portions you'd want explained more?

An ok, I see what you're going for and how it executes. I'm not so sure I see the need to codify the tiers. After all, DW doesn't make different tiers, but it differentiates power levels just fine. In fact, I would conjecture that RAW DW could capture the ambiance of eXalted pretty good, with appropriate adjustment to narrative.

That said, I'm still grinding into my hack. I took a queue from the splendid Daen sheet and I'm making Essence a stat. Also, I'm planning to make Followers synonymous with Henchmen, at least from a stat standpoint. So you can have a Henchman that's Warrior 3, or a group of 100 followers theatre Warrrior 3.

I like DW, although I feel some of the changes away from the base AW aren't necessarily for the best.  That said, I don't think it does really handle power tiers all that well, and I think that's kind of intentional.  It's a game where a Dragon is potentially just as valid an encounter for a starting group as it is for a level 6+ group.

You gain moves and some stat bonuses with levels, but you don't drastically change in power level, and 'tough' monsters don't generally have massively more hit points than middling ones, just scarier moves.  I think it works better for the average D&D game, but not as well for an Exalted in which you want to play up the Celestial types (Exalted and Divine) towering over the inhabitants, which is what I want for Myth World.

I'm not going for full-on gonzo straight off, but I'm more interested in including the high end than in supporting low-level activity.  Games like AW and even DW are good for that, I want to explore something a bit higher tier.