OSSR: Exalted: The Infernals

[CaptainComics]

If you ask me to choose between getting a million dollars and being punched in the face, you can predict with 100% certainty what the outcome will be, because I am not sufficiently rich that a million dollars would not be a life-changing amount of money, nor so much of a masochist that I would prefer to experience the pleasure of the pain. I choose without coercion or constraint, yet anyone could win a bet on the outcome of my decision. Other people might choose differently, based on their personality and experiences, but they will make a single choice and it is possible to tell what that will be if you know the position and velocity of every atom in the universe.

In a free will paradigm, there's no point to punishment. Nothing you can do will alter someone's ability to choose to do evil again. However, when you realize that experience and new information, learning and conditioning, can and does change the behavior of individuals, you will realize that this is because of the determined nature of the universe.

[GnomeWorks]

If you actually read what I wrote, we aren't talking about the boundary conditions of the universe, dumbass, we mean that the critical factor that led to you missing your kid's baseball game was you.

There is no fucking "you" in this context. You're not an agent making decisions, you just have conscious experience of events happening. Hard determinism is basically solipsism taken to 11 and breaking the knob off.

We as a society have absolutely no reason, moral or pragmatic, to care whether or not "you" is a result of quantum unpredictability or if "you" are a mechanistic entity reacting to external stimulus. We do not care about the boundary conditions of the universe. They aren't relevant. You can't get anywhere by declaring over and over again that things were pre-determined, because when we say "you had a choice" we are not referring to quantum randomness at all. Nobody is. The idea that the key factor in whether or not someone "had a choice" is how predictable in advance their actions were is simply false. All of your proclamations on the subject are completely irrelevant, because it has nothing to do with why people hold others responsible for their actions. It doesn't matter. How many different ways do I have to rephrase this before it sinks in?

In a hard deterministic scenario, there are no choices! That is the entire goddamn premise, that literally everything is predetermined. There are no actors making decisions. The concept of "you" doesn't exist.

People don't act like this is the case because we have subjective conscious experience of thinking going on, are convinced that the thinking we perceive is under our control, and assume that others have similar subjective conscious experience despite having no access to their inner mental lives. Most folk, I imagine, don't question what's going on in their own heads all that much, and take their conscious experience at face value.

Indeed, most people assume the universe is deterministic. Like, that's the default opinion of our culture, to the point where most time travel stories rely on it as a premise, a premise which is so thoroughly accepted that most people do not even think to question the possibility that things could be any other way. That is how embedded into our culture this "stunning revelation" of yours is.

Obviously physics is deterministic, ignoring quantum stuff for the moment. The problem comes from our conscious experiences, and how that relates to our actions.

The hard determinist line is that we have no control over what we do, everything is predetermined. A proponent of free will would argue that we do, and the friction there comes from the fact that everything else looks pretty damn deterministic, so how can you justify the idea that we can somehow have control over our actions when our minds are the product of physical brains that obey physical laws.

If people behaved like they were hard determinists, you wouldn't be held responsible for your actions. You would be treated as the product of your environment with literally no control over what you do, because that's what hard determinism means. People not behaving in this way isn't an argument for or against determinism, though, because people don't necessarily hold beliefs consistent with how things actually work, either through ignorance, willful disbelief, or ... I'm sure there's other valid reasons.

Virtually everyone agrees that the past will be altered only if you take actions to alter it, and either it is possible to travel back in time without causing significant alterations (in some cases that it is impossible to cause significant alterations because everything you've done has already happened) or else the butterfly effect will cause significant alterations no mater what you do, but in the latter case only because of unpredictable chains of cause and effect that are nevertheless initiated by external stimulus, not quantum unpredictability.

None of this is relevant to the conversation.

When you declare that a conversation between Alice and Bob would only ever end one way, you are not transmitting new information to anybody. Everyone already knows that. It's the premise of pop sci-fi adventure movies that regularly gain traction in mainstream audiences, one trilogy of which has gone on to be an enduring cultural touchstone recognizable even decades after its release. Indeed, the suggestion that people would be more culpable if their actions were detached from stimulus and instead determined in some part by total randomization is extraordinary and requires extraordinary defense. Defining "free will" as "taking actions that are not caused by external stimulus" is to define free will as "taking actions induced by cosmic madness," and people generally consider the insane to be less, not more, culpable for their actions.

That's a nice strawman there.

The argument is not that the conversation between Alice and Bob can only ever end one way. The argument is that in a hard deterministic universe, not only can that conversation end in only one way, the conversation is inevitable, as are all the actions that lead to it and all the consequences of it.

This is not about probability. You can keep bitching about how I keep going back to the start of time, but that's how hard determinism fucking works. You can't examine events in a vacuum, you have to take the entire causal chain into account, because otherwise you start running the risk of assigning choices or decision-points to non-existent actors.

[hyzmarca]

If you actually read what I wrote, we aren't talking about the boundary conditions of the universe, dumbass, we mean that the critical factor that led to you missing your kid's baseball game was you.

There is no fucking "you" in this context. You're not an agent making decisions, you just have conscious experience of events happening. Hard determinism is basically solipsism taken to 11 and breaking the knob off.

We as a society have absolutely no reason, moral or pragmatic, to care whether or not "you" is a result of quantum unpredictability or if "you" are a mechanistic entity reacting to external stimulus. We do not care about the boundary conditions of the universe. They aren't relevant. You can't get anywhere by declaring over and over again that things were pre-determined, because when we say "you had a choice" we are not referring to quantum randomness at all. Nobody is. The idea that the key factor in whether or not someone "had a choice" is how predictable in advance their actions were is simply false. All of your proclamations on the subject are completely irrelevant, because it has nothing to do with why people hold others responsible for their actions. It doesn't matter. How many different ways do I have to rephrase this before it sinks in?

In a hard deterministic scenario, there are no choices! That is the entire goddamn premise, that literally everything is predetermined. There are no actors making decisions. The concept of "you" doesn't exist.

People don't act like this is the case because we have subjective conscious experience of thinking going on, are convinced that the thinking we perceive is under our control, and assume that others have similar subjective conscious experience despite having no access to their inner mental lives. Most folk, I imagine, don't question what's going on in their own heads all that much, and take their conscious experience at face value.

Indeed, most people assume the universe is deterministic. Like, that's the default opinion of our culture, to the point where most time travel stories rely on it as a premise, a premise which is so thoroughly accepted that most people do not even think to question the possibility that things could be any other way. That is how embedded into our culture this "stunning revelation" of yours is.

Obviously physics is deterministic, ignoring quantum stuff for the moment. The problem comes from our conscious experiences, and how that relates to our actions.

The hard determinist line is that we have no control over what we do, everything is predetermined. A proponent of free will would argue that we do, and the friction there comes from the fact that everything else looks pretty damn deterministic, so how can you justify the idea that we can somehow have control over our actions when our minds are the product of physical brains that obey physical laws.

If people behaved like they were hard determinists, you wouldn't be held responsible for your actions. You would be treated as the product of your environment with literally no control over what you do, because that's what hard determinism means. People not behaving in this way isn't an argument for or against determinism, though, because people don't necessarily hold beliefs consistent with how things actually work, either through ignorance, willful disbelief, or ... I'm sure there's other valid reasons.

Virtually everyone agrees that the past will be altered only if you take actions to alter it, and either it is possible to travel back in time without causing significant alterations (in some cases that it is impossible to cause significant alterations because everything you've done has already happened) or else the butterfly effect will cause significant alterations no mater what you do, but in the latter case only because of unpredictable chains of cause and effect that are nevertheless initiated by external stimulus, not quantum unpredictability.

None of this is relevant to the conversation.

When you declare that a conversation between Alice and Bob would only ever end one way, you are not transmitting new information to anybody. Everyone already knows that. It's the premise of pop sci-fi adventure movies that regularly gain traction in mainstream audiences, one trilogy of which has gone on to be an enduring cultural touchstone recognizable even decades after its release. Indeed, the suggestion that people would be more culpable if their actions were detached from stimulus and instead determined in some part by total randomization is extraordinary and requires extraordinary defense. Defining "free will" as "taking actions that are not caused by external stimulus" is to define free will as "taking actions induced by cosmic madness," and people generally consider the insane to be less, not more, culpable for their actions.

That's a nice strawman there.

The argument is not that the conversation between Alice and Bob can only ever end one way. The argument is that in a hard deterministic universe, not only can that conversation end in only one way, the conversation is inevitable, as are all the actions that lead to it and all the consequences of it.

This is not about probability. You can keep bitching about how I keep going back to the start of time, but that's how hard determinism fucking works. You can't examine events in a vacuum, you have to take the entire causal chain into account, because otherwise you start running the risk of assigning choices or decision-points to non-existent actors.

I think I see the problem. Everyone is using the words choice and decision in different ways that mean different things.


And you're using it in a high level metaphysical way that isn't actually useful. While others are using the terms in in a more concrete, physical way.

And from the low-level, physical perspective, determinism doesn't take away choice, it merely explains why a choice was made.

[Username17]

Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals

Chapter Two: Servants of the Yozis


This isn't us making fun of this book, this book is aspiring to be this.

Frank

Coming in at 18 pages, the Servants of the Yozis chapter could mostly have been just more stuff in the previous chapter. This chapter doesn't even have a lead-in paragraph, and just jumps into telling you about Akuma. And by “telling you about Akuma” I mean mostly not telling you about Akuma and instead telling you stories about the Primordial War that you don't care about. But considering that the Green Sun Princes chapter was mostly also not about Green Sun Princes but were instead TL;DR history lessons about Primordials – so just continuing that would have been totally on-brand.

The basic concept is that the Primordials had Exalted working for them, but they screwed everything up by having those guys sign up to turn into magic slaves. Because the “no trying to escape” pact they signed at the end of the war applied also to their magic slaves and not to people who merely worked for them. This seems like a really dumb fucking problem, since they could just not do that.

A big problem here is that the whole backstory of the Yozi is, despite the anime trappings, basically just a lame mashup of the Titanomachy and Paradise Lost. Because honestly the people who wrote Exalted in the first place were not terrifically well read and could only really draw upon some very Western mythologies when making their epic shit epic. You'd think someone would have read the Bhagavad Gita at some point while brainstorming ideas for this shit. But no...we're basically at the level of the Gods rising up and overthrowing the Titans because of Greek Mythology and then the angels and gods banished to the underworld transforming into corrupted demonic forms because of Milton's rewriting of Christianity. That's really as far as it goes. The people infused with demon-jizz are called “Akuma” but they aren't meaningfully Japanese, they just have a Japanese name. And it's probably accurate to say that whoever wrote it into Exalted in the first place learned it from Street Fighter or L5R.


Basically this. Including the gratuitous butt crack.

But in a broader sense, the issue here is that none of this shit matters. The people who were still furiously writing semi-official Exalted books after White Wolf went bankrupt clearly enjoyed writing endless screeds about how shit went down over four thousand fucking years before the game starts.

K:

The pact made by the Yozi's is not that they can't ploy their escape to rebel, but that they have to follow a set of rules about when they or their component souils can leave Malfeas and when they have to leave Creation. If the akuma is a directly subservient to the Yozi, it belongs to the Yozi and can be asked to leave too when the gods tell them to take their shit with them too.

As a mythology goes, it certainly is no worse or better than anything else. All mythologies are ass-pulls with internal inconsistencies, and the myths of Exalted are no better or worse from being drawn from third-rate anime mostly designed to sell toys and amuse children rather than major religions.

Some people like this shit, and I don't care if they do.

Frank

Being remade by the Yozi involves the Yozi being able to sell off the dots on your character sheet and rebuy them from different lists. Considering that things in Exalted are bought with different piles of points at different exchange rates, I'm reasonably positive that there's some kind of way to cheese the hell out of this by buying and selling things at different rates and ending up with absolutely more than you started with. I point blank refuse to do all the algebra to see how much you can get out of this – because it's fucking obvious that the authors of this book didn't do it either.

Every Yozi gets to give a geas to anyone they remake, and here's where it's just blatantly obvious that the authors aren't nearly as clever as they think they are. The Yozis are under an unbreakable geas to not overthrow the gods who defeated them, so they give Akuma geases to overthrow the gods in their place. This is somehow not taking action against the gods, despite being an action whose literal stated purpose is to oppose the gods.

It would be one thing if they were handing out geases that were like “Throw a surprise party every year for She Who Lives In Her Name that will bring her joy but never tell her what you are going to do ahead of time” where there was actual plausible deniability baked into the cake. But there fucking isn't. One of the examples is giving someone the geas to “End the worship of Ahlat” as a way to get around a geas to never take action against Ahlat. It's stupid. Why not just rain some fucking meteors on the planet?

K:

It needs to be noted that the mechanics for akuma do something important, namely solving the NPC end of the problems with Exalted characters, this being that a world with fewer special people than my high school makes writing up compelling villains really hard, especially when they have a thematically tight power-set like the gods or most of the Exalted.

Akuma design is in-game reasoning for NPCs who come in whatever numbers or power levels you need with a tragic backstory pre-loaded, but are very killable because they are unredeemable. The farmer the PCs ruined in Act 1 can come back in Act 2 with an actually threatening (but limited) power-set because he has fixed number of Yozi and demon Charms bolted on, and you didn't have to deal at all with Exalted politics or try to come up with a reason for that guy to have Exalted in the last two weeks.

This tiny amount of variety adds a lot of storytelling potential and range of potential characters. Dragon-blooded can be given perfect defense Yozi charms to make them comparable to Solars and dung farmers can become powerful Infernal sorcerers, and that’s only good for the game overall.

That the writers couldn't figure out that PCs needed a similar overall mechanic, and that is why Exalted is ultimately a flawed product, but this one set of NPC antagonist options opens up Exalted as a game in a real way, though too little too late.

Frank

There are three flavors of Demon-Bloods: Yozi-Kin, Hell-Spawn, and Devil-Beasts. It is importantly possible for one Demon-Blood to be all three of those things and also possible to be only one of them. It has to do with your parents, like Werewolf: the Apocalypse. And like Werewolf, one of the options is “your mother raped dogs.”

each devil beast is the result of demonic bestiality, the product of a demon forcing himself on one of Creation’s animal life forms

Note that because of the way Lunars and Beastmen work, it's actually possible to have human, animal, and demon parentage at the same time, so yes you can tick all those boxes simultaneously. Because Exalted is horrible all the time and more horrible as soon as it gets to the bedroom stuff. And also because Exalted's take on Beastmen seems to have taken Runequest's Broo as a challenge to overcome.

In any case, having demonic blood running in your veins is a Background that costs 1 point per dot and is worth up to thirty points (plus the option to buy up to twenty more points for “looking weird”) if you spend all five. You literally just spend some points for the ability “you have more points” because even pretending to be remotely game balanced is for squares.

K:

The extra points are a Training effect, meaning that the character gets half XP until the experience debt for the points you got is paid off. It's just a loan on your future power, and mostly unimportant in Exalted because few people are playing a Demonblooded campaign in Exalted.

This is a bad mechanic, but Exalted in general really has a hard-on for letting you build mooks without really having a coherent system for doing so. Training montages and sifus and building armies of monsters and shit is way anime, but Exalted never landed on satisfying mechanic that didn't feel like they were trying to keep people from doing it.

As for the dog-fucking, I take the smallest comfort that these rules include an option to NOT have sex with dogs when you want to make demon dogs for your army. I'm not going to call it progress, but it's something.

Frank

That's all there is in the whole chapter. The final comic is completely incomprehensible. It's some line drawings of some elves wandering around a ship where everyone is dead. Then a guy bursts through the floorboards and one of the elves asks “What's going on? Who is that guy?” And that's the end. I have no idea what is supposed to be happening or what this has to do with the adjacent chapters or this book generally or what.

K:

It's hard to see, but I think it’s a GSP bursting out of a Chrysalis and not the floor.

We can't even find pictures of a real chrysalis that aren't like a million pixels, so just imagine a caterpillar here.

Chapter Three: Character Creation

Frank

It's a good thing that the previous chapter ended with like three different ways to cheat for more character building points or I might be tempted to actually work out how powerful these characters were supposed to be. That's really a load off my mind.

K:

All three methods only apply to mortals and NPCs like Akuma, so it's like cheating at traffic school; I mean, you saved some yourself some effort, but no one is impressed.

Frank

The first step for chargen for any White Wolf game is “concept,” which is just as dumb and wrong in this book as it is in all others. What you actually do of course is decide whether you want to be a bondage nun or a sex ninja and then pick a backstory for why your mortal life gave you the skills necessary to do whatever the hell it is that you need to contribute to the team as one of those things. This is a standing complaint for literally every White Wolf product, and it's no better or worse in this book than it is in Vampire or Aberrant. This book does have a better pitch for this than most, because you're an Infernal Exalt, it asks what your character's moral failure is, which is at least a better icebreaker than the normal Exalted question of “What did your character do in the fictional, semi-primitive economy that we haven't adequately described?”

Anyway, I am willing to grant that the descriptions of these character classes probably make more sense to the intended audience. Which is to say that much of the text is explaining how Slayers are corrupted Dawn Caste Solars and Malefactors are corrupted Zenith Caste Solars. And if you could remember what Zenith Caste Solars did, you might be able to extrapolate how that correlated to “Bondage Nun.” So I'm willing to grant that it probably makes more sense to the intended audience than it does to me.

Where I refuse to offer that philosophical charity is with the Air Pirates:

The cunning Scourges, corrupted Night Castes who ply the dark arts of espionage and assassination in order to work the twisted will of Adorjan.

No. The sample character is a fucking Air Pirate and they open the book by having them fly a giant airship around blasting other airships to pieces with a lost tech PPC. Subtlety isn't even on the same page as this. Like, they couldn't have made the Sex Ninja the cunning spy?

I assume that this is where the decision to go full dark reflection on the Solars really shits all over everything. Some sort of symmetry thing meant that they assigned the Rogue role to slot four, but the fourth character they actually wrote up was Vampire Captain Harlock. And here we are.

K:

Like I said before, I think Exalted games are supposed to be about you making a character and the gamemaster writing around what you picked.

At least for Infernals, skills don't matter a whole lot because their Excellencies and Charms don't interact with the skills very much. You can get the best Yozi Dodging charms without spending a lot of points in Dodge, so it doesn't really matter that it's not a Favored skill and you are going to pay standard XP rates for increasing Dodge. Solars have skills as prereqs, but the extra XP cost of them not being Favored is a tax on bad chargen.

Also, GSPs are different from Solars because half of a Solar's Charms must be from Favored or Caste abilities, making them very important to Solars. Instead, half a GSPs starting Charms must be from the Yozi patron of his Caste.

As for the Castes not fitting their theme, it’s a feature in Exalted. Even in the main Exalted book they talk about how Exalted don't have to follow the theme of their Caste.

Another note here is that while Solars can get a max Essence score of 5 at chargen, and Abyssals 4, the GSPs have no such limit. This means that getting more bonus points by using rules like those in the Scroll of Heroes could result in very powerful Essence of 6 in a starting character, something I'd call broken if it wasn't for the fact that overall the GSPs are slightly weaker than Solars and Abyssals.

Frank

Every exalt type has special tag abilities, which are skills that they specialize in for being that kind of Exalt. Honestly, I don't think that any of these assholes actually get the skills needed to be good at their nominal jobs. You get to select five more of your choice, but I suspect these aren't nearly as “free” as the book claims. The Slayer doesn't get Dodge, the Sex Ninja doesn't get Stealth. If you told me that every single “free pick” was actually pre-selected for most or all of the Exalt types, I would totally believe you. Hell, I'd believe that one or more of these assholes are unplayable (even grading on the incredibly generous curve of Exalted) on the basis of needing 6+ other tag skills to do their basic job.

It does not help that in Exalted, the act of not dying when people look at you funny – the passive act of not being rolled over when enemies take actions – is defined as a skill test. And there isn't one skill for this either. Dodge, Resistance, and Integrity are all called upon just for your character to stay alive. From the standpoint of minmaxxing this fucking game, Bondage Nuns actually aren't worse at stabbing fools than Slayers are – because starting with Integrity and Resistance and being forced to buy Melee and Martial Arts isn't putting you back compared to starting with Melee and Martial Arts and being forced to buy Integrity and Resistance.

K:

GSPs are actually slightly better designed that Solars in some ways, and that is because Yozi Excellencies are based on Essence and not skill. This means that while a Solar can add as many dice as his Attribute plus Ability to a roll enhanced by an Excellency, a GSP gets double his Essence. This means a Solar with a stat of 2 and skill of 2 gets four dice, and a GSP with Essence 2 gets four dice, and this breaks in the GSP's favor when they have high Essence and low skill.

GSP Excellencies also potentially apply to any roll, so while a Solar needs a wide range of skills and Excellencies to be good at all of things he needs to be good at, a GSP can just be an idiot savant. The only downside is that Yozi Excellencies only apply when the themes of the Yozi are in play, so it’s a real MTP shitshow trying to figure out when the gamemaster will let you use them. Does Dodging an arrow allow the Ebon Dragon's Excellency to activate through the principle of antagonism, or would Adorjan's principle of greatness convince the gamemaster?

For a GSP, the correct answer for the motes is probably to use a perfect dodge Charm and avoid the Excellencies.

Frank

The final comic is our Air Pirate preparing to shell a city from the sky and getting distracted by chopping a dude's head off. Probably just to rub it in how horribly mismatched the presentation of the Scourge character type in different parts of this book genuinely is.

K:

I mean, why didn't we get an air-pirate book? Was this whole sourcebook a Trojan horse advertisement for Exalted air-pirates?

Was Up going to be the next Cardinal Direction?

Frank

Next Up: Traits! Yes, there was a whole chapter that told you how much things cost that was separate from the chapter that told you what things are. It's a genuine problem that RPGs have, with the presentation of what you get and the presentation of what things are being necessarily separated. And Exalted handles this problem genuinely worse than the already strained presentation of D&D or Shadowrun.

[Chamomile]

There is no fucking "you" in this context.

Yes, there is. Every functional human being is capable of observing that human beings are discrete from one another and that patterns of behavior vary from one to another. That is all that "you" has to mean in this context.

In a hard deterministic scenario, there are no choices!

Yes, there are. Your loud and insistent declaration of your own inability to parse basic English does not change the fact that "choice" is not about pre-determination and never has been. It's not about whether the outcome was random. It's about which specific components of the universe caused it. Now I know you've got a very stupid rebuttal all ready to go about how no one can cause anything, but save yourself the trouble, because yes, obviously actions have effects. Whether or not those effects are the result of quantum improbability have absolutely no bearing on whether or not we can identify certain component parts of the universe as being responsible for certain actions or not, because obviously we can.

If people behaved like they were hard determinists, you wouldn't be held responsible for your actions.

You keep saying this, and you keep forgetting the part where literally our entire society are demonstrably hard determinists who accept hard determinism as the premise for nearly every time travel story without question and yet people continue to hold each other responsible for their actions. You proudly declare you are too stupid to grasp the relevance of this, and apparently think that makes you look better. Everyone in our entire society are hard determinists. That is the consensus position. You think this is impossible because they don't act the way you think hard determinists would act. Your mistake is that you are unable to grasp that you are totally wrong about the consequences of hard determinism. Everyone is a hard determinist. Nobody thinks this has any bearing on whether or not people are morally culpable. Yes, people's actions are entirely a product of 1) their environment and 2) their personality, and no, people do not get to choose their personality. This is not a revelation to anyone. Everyone understands this. People are still perfectly willing to hold others accountable for their personality.

None of this is relevant to the conversation.

Maybe try reading complete paragraphs all together.

You would be treated as the product of your environment with literally no control over what you do, because that's what hard determinism means.

No, it doesn't. "Your environment" is the pre-determined part of the universe that is external to you. "You" are the discrete, pre-determined part of the universe that literally everyone can recognize as distinct from other humans. Pretending to be too stupid to understand what people say when they refer to "you" is not an argument. Saying "there is no 'you' in this context!" is just you trying to claim that a failure to understand a concept grasped by toddlers is somehow profound. It is not. Whether or not "you" are subject to quantum randomness has absolutely no bearing on whether or not we can distinguish between the parts of the universe labeled "you" and the parts that are not.

That's a nice strawman there.

The argument is not that the conversation between Alice and Bob can only ever end one way. The argument is that in a hard deterministic universe, not only can that conversation end in only one way, the conversation is inevitable, as are all the actions that lead to it and all the consequences of it.

"That's a nice strawman there," he said, before reiterating the point which I rebutted. Yes, I know how hard determinism works. Yes, I know that Alice and Bob's conversation was pre-determined since the dawn of time. No, it does not make a difference, because "proximate cause" is still a perfectly coherent concept and your refusal to engage with it is still stupid, not profound.

This is not about probability.

Indeed, this is not about probability. This is why your constant insistence that things being certain to 100% degree of probability somehow affects things is stupid. Because the conversation isn't about probability. It's about culpability. I'm glad you're catching up.

You can keep bitching about how I keep going back to the start of time, but that's how hard determinism fucking works.

No it isn't. Just because things have knock-on effects in an ultimately perfectly predictable way does not mean that the concept of "proximate cause" stops being useful.

I think I see the problem. Everyone is using the words choice and decision in different ways that mean different things.

No, that's not the problem. Now, GnomeWorks is using the word "choice" in a way that is completely detached from what the word actually means, but he's also insisting that people's behaviors would be radically altered if they accepted a premise that everybody already accepts.

[Koumei]

This isn't us making fun of this book, this book is aspiring to be this.

I don't know what that is from, but heavily armed demon maids sounds like a good thing to aspire to generally.

Basically this. Including the gratuitous butt crack.

The longer you look at that picture, the stranger it is as you notice more details like the butterflies (one apparently existing to censor out a cock, ignoring the rest of the picture there), a magic staff, the guy staring right up at a man's taint, the ass-showing guy either ready to catch the upside down person or having just thrown him... it's remarkable and should be used for Where's Wally/Waldo/Walter/Vali/Vallu/Ubaldo/Willie/Fuckface? (depending on your country)

I'm reasonably positive that there's some kind of way to cheese the hell out of this by buying and selling things at different rates and ending up with absolutely more than you started with. I point blank refuse to do all the algebra to see how much you can get out of this – because it's fucking obvious that the authors of this book didn't do it either.

I didn't find anything on it by searching Exalted + Akuma + cheese (the closest was on gaining access to Sidereal Martial Arts), but pretty sure you can't really Difference Engine it and can only benefit in a small way for really narrow character builds (selling off your ratings in things that have 1-2 dots because "I had to spend some extra dots here in creation" to re-focus them into the things that matter for you). Other than the fact that now you can buy your Essence up to 6 (I suppose technically this lets you redirect points into Essence when normally you couldn't) and have maximum ratings of 7 from that and Excellencies going up to +12 dice / +6 automatic "successes". But then there are the bonuses from gaining the Demonic Inheritance.

But if your whole character is simply Strength, Dexterity, Wits, Awareness, Dodge, Melee (or Thrown, Archery or Martial Arts) and then Essence and Charms, then yeah, you can take the individual dots you had to put in other attributes and skills and grind them up into "putting that small collection of stuff at the maximum value". Because obviously they weren't encouraging building super-narrow "I do only one thing" characters enough. I mean, if you ask WW fans the biggest problem of the game, naturally they'll say how much it sucks that characters are competent at too many things and the way the game encourages you to grow into specialist roles rather than crank that at the start.

[erik]

Mebbe we could split off this stupid determinism tangent to not threadshit the review.

[Thaluikhain]

And like Werewolf, one of the options is “your mother raped dogs.”

So, not just Werewolf, beastiality is an important part of more than one WoD book?

Why? Why would you do that? Was there one or more writers who worked on both?

[Kaelik]

Hot Take: Gnome works is actually kind of correct in that the actions you take to reform or prevent future things or deter are all not technically punishments because they are those other things.

Gnomeworks is correct that only his free will virtue ethics can produce a moral duty to inflict suffering and torture on people on purpose because they are The Bad Ones who are disproportionately the underclass in society (and in the US that means disproportionately black).

But "my moral system is the only one that gives us a moral duty to torture black people" isn't as compelling a slam dunk as they think it is.

[Shrapnel]

Mebbe we could split off this stupid determinism tangent to not threadshit the review.

I second this. This ain't about Chrono Cross.

[Omegonthesane]

May also be relevant to the Infernals "design" "process" that as I recall the caste names Destroyer, Malefactor, Defiler, Scourge, and Fiend are the same as five of the seven classes from Demon the Fallen.

[DrPraetor]

Do they give an etymology to the term "Green Sun Princes"? It is a decent enough name for villains.

I recall that the various evil primordials were a huge disappointment, being malevolent dragons and pixies and shit rather than elder things (I liked the robot primordial; the Alchemical book is one of the few Exalted products I liked enough to skim through in a game store). If one of them is an evil green sun, that would be somewhat bonkers and cooler than who else you get.

[Mistborn]

Do they give an etymology to the term "Green Sun Princes"? It is a decent enough name for villains.

I recall that the various evil primordials were a huge disappointment, being malevolent dragons and pixies and shit rather than elder things (I liked the robot primordial; the Alchemical book is one of the few Exalted products I liked enough to skim through in a game store). If one of them is an evil green sun, that would be somewhat bonkers and cooler than who else you get.

IRC hell in exalted has it's own sun which is green, and also is the primordial kings head soul thingy. So its sort of logical their Corrupted Solars to keep the sun motif and just paint it green.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The ordinary Solar Exalted are the chosen of the Unconquered Sun, who serves as the sun of Creation. One of the most important demons in Malfeas is Ligier the Green Sun, who is literally the green sun of hell, and the Infernals are dedicated to him as a sort of mockery.

I thought most of the Yozis were pretty good eldritch abominations. One is the city-dimension of Hell, although that's him after being turned inside out and sewn up like a bag. One is 100,098 fires in crystal spheres that whisper to each other and if you hear the whisper its identity overwrites yours. One is a razor-sharp (and bloodstained) sound-smothering wind.

[DrPraetor]

So he is (according to the interwebs, anyway):
https://thirdexalt.fandom.com/wiki/Ligier

please don't explain what in fuck

FETICH SOUL OF MALFEAS

means.

[K]

So he is (according to the interwebs, anyway):
https://thirdexalt.fandom.com/wiki/Ligier

please don't explain what in fuck

FETICH SOUL OF MALFEAS

means.

The demons are all part of a respective Yozi as components of thier soul.

Think of the fetich soul as a lich's phylactery, except it's also a person, and specifically in the case of Ligier it's a guy who is also simultaneously the green sun in Malfeas and can exist in multiple incarnations at a time.

I hope that helps.

[FatR]

Evil Primordials were just fine, one of the best parts of the setting. Their original incarnation from Games of Divinity, that is. But most things in Exalted only were fine only while description remained vague enough. And that was particularly true of eldritch abominations, like the hivemind hell-city, who has dozens of separate souls, the first of which is his own sun. Infernals decided to explain their inner workings, results were predictably disastrous, particularly as very existence of Infernals as a splat, whether playable or antagonistic, demanded the possibility of Primordial escape, but Primordials had to be retarded enough to never even come close to turning this possibility into reality, because the whole setting is too small and fragile.

[hyzmarca]

Evil Primordials were just fine, one of the best parts of the setting. Their original incarnation from Games of Divinity, that is. But most things in Exalted only were fine only while description remained vague enough. And that was particularly true of eldritch abominations, like the hivemind hell-city, who has dozens of separate souls, the first of which is his own sun. Infernals decided to explain their inner workings, results were predictably disastrous, particularly as very existence of Infernals as a splat, whether playable or antagonistic, demanded the possibility of Primordial escape, but Primordials had to be retarded enough to never even come close to turning this possibility into reality, because the whole setting is too small and fragile.

Eh, it doesn't actaully require the possibility of Primordial escape, just that the Yozis are desperate enough to keep trying even though it's impossible. As antagonists, this is perfectly fine. Because dellusional people can still do horrible and destructive things while attempting the impossible. As a playable splat, this is also fine, as long as the story is about figuring out that this is impossible and deciding to do something else.
The long term heroic arc of the GSPs is about breaking away from the Yozis and using the power that they were given to become new Primordials. No one will ever play this arc, because it requires an absurd amount of XP and no campaign will ever last that long, but it is the arc pushed by later infernal supplements.

[FatR]

I can think of another reason no one will ever play this arc: people don't play villains so that they can have "heroic arcs". I understand that my own personal set of data is pretty limited, but in my experience people do not sign up to play characters from card-carrying, baby-eating bad guy factions like Sabbat, Chaos cultists, Sith or Dark Eldar because they are interested in redemption stories or some shit. Similarly, people in general do not sign up to play a faction with a particular worldview, just so that their characters can reject that worldview and go their own way. The same problem undercut the Abyssals too.

And considering Infernals purely as antagonists, fifty losers who are hated by everyone and their mom and literally have no chance of ever freeing heavy hitters of their faction are just not a significant threat compared to everything else. In fact, later supplements did include a viable plan for one of the Yozis to escape, just not the plan postulated in the Infernals' book, because fuck player agency, if a big NPC needs to do something, he will do it himself.

[K]

I can think of another reason no one will ever play this arc: people don't play villains so that they can have "heroic arcs"....

I disagree. Vampire: The Masquerade is literally that game and its very popular. Sure, most people play it as undead superheroes, but some people really did want to play villainous hero arcs.

As for whether the path outlined in Broken-winged Crane to turn a GSP into a psuedo-Primordial is possible, I figured out a path that would take about ten to twelve stories worth of XP, about a campaign worth, using minimal cheese.

The real question is whether anyone would play that campaign with you. Several of the Heretic Charms are a story triggers when you select them where the next story is dealing with the forces of Creation and Heaven who have been alerted that an emergent Primordial is on the rise.

[Username17]

Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals

Chapter Four: Traits


You mean like round peas or wrinkled peas?
No.

Frank

The Traits chapter is 25 pages long and includes a lot of stuff that probably should have been included in the character creation chapter. Broadly speaking, in Exalted speak a “trait” is “any facet of your character which is followed by a number represented by dots.” And despite that incredibly expansive definition, the book manages to include things in this chapter that don't even qualify. The book sets itself a comically low bar and then fails to clear it.

This chapter is where lots of weird newish mechanics go. Not where all the new mechanics go, because we had some of them in Chapter 2 and the Charm chapter is like... whoah. But a lot of the things which are fairly major overhauls hidden away in paragraphs not specifically noted as being that kind of thing. I mean, it's almost as if there are five different authors working at cross purposes!

It's important to realize with this sort of book that the reason that some of the options seem completely out of whack is that there are authors who are deliberately slipping overpowered options in here and there. Making a balanced product isn't particularly a goal of any of these people, but making sure that there are secret super-options actually is! On the flip side, there are also people who are trying to write “options” that won't affect anything because they are too terrible for a player to bother using.

But it's equally important to understand that even the authors didn't play this fucking game rules as written, so an option that was written to be good or bad was written in reference to a set of house rules that exists only in the mind of one of the book authors. If you get the option to sacrifice dice on one kind of roll for boosts to another kind of roll, there's no way to tell whether that trade was intended to be good or bad, because you don't know what kinds of die rolls were called for in the specific game tables that the author intended.

And then there's minor shit like the fact that Sailing is a tag skill for the people who are dispatched to the Center of Creation and not the people who are dispatched to the West where there's a honkin big ocean and you might actually use that skill (nor to the Air Pirates, for whom that skill might also have some relevance). Some of these choices are obviously made in the absence of serious choices or reflection altogether.

K:

Some of the options in here are kludge fixes to the rules in this very supplement. For example, Past Life is a way to get some extra dice for a roll, and as far as I can tell, it's for the time when you didn't win the argument with your gamemaster about whether your Infernal Excellencies apply to that critical roll.


No.

Frank

New Backgrounds are always a place for cheese in White Wolf games, because Backgrounds are very cheap. So if some weird new background with a totally made-up name like “Unwoven Coadjutor” happens to give concrete mechanical benefits that are strictly larger than the cost of the Background, so be it. Now there are so many “strictly better” Backgrounds that you can't have them all, and none of this shit is worth giving up however much Essence your MC will let you have. But it's just in general a place where various authors constantly write in powerups, and this book is not different in that regard.

It's also a place where various worthless things get written up to fill up space or have flavor or whatever. The Demonic Familiar is not actually better than the random sidekicks and mentors you are already allowed to have. This kind of thing is endemic to White Wolf Background pools, where you might have already included “wealth” as a background but the need for space filling content leads later authors in later books to write up new backgrounds that are like “cars” or “houses” or “income” or whatever the fuck that one might logically assume could have already been included in or just bought outright with Wealth in the first fucking place.

This is a song and dance that White Wolf has gone through many times because open ended Background lists are actually a kind of terrible idea.

K:

Some of the options are just flat better. Savant is potentially an amazing trait for the price, adding dice 
whenever the magitech of the First Age comes up (pretty common).


It's not that I always get more dice. It's that I get more dice when I'm rolling dice in a situation where I want to succeed.

I'd actually argue that Demonic Familiar is flat better. The basic Familiar trait gives you a smart dog or horse or someshit, while a DF with max points has two extra Charms chosen by the player. At worst, its a source of spirit Charms for Fiends to learn, and at best it's a Familiar with something game-breaking like All-Encompassing Shapechange or Empowerment.

Frank

White Wolf got big because of the smashing success of their first game: Vampire: The Masquerade. And they tried to replicate that lightning strike over and over again even after they went bankrupt twice. And while some of that is the simple insistence that they put fucking colons in all their book titles (this book is called “The Manual of Exalted Power Colon The Infernals”), some of that is the insistence on using tropes and concepts directly from their early World of Darkness titles in every fucking thing they ever did. And because Vampires and Werewolves have things that drive them into a frenzy where the MC can take control of your character, the Exalted came with one of those too.

In the case of Solar Exalted, this is a thing where they gradually build up points and eventually they go on a rampage and everyone is sad. Now there are various ways to get around this, and of course people who try to actually play this fucking game come up with keen ideas like blowing off their rampage in the fucking desert or handing over their magic sword to one of the other characters before they rage because Exalted Characters can't even dent each other's armor without their magic swords – but if you actually ran these things as presented they would be a hard cap on the fucking campaign where pretty soon the most combatty character on the team would go berserk and murder stab all the other players and then the fucking game is fucking over.


Without a fair amount of metagaming, this is how all attempts at Exalted campaigns immediately end.

So Infernals provides a solid subsystem by which characters can blow off steam. They get to do “Acts of Villainy” where they behave like Saturday morning cartoon villains and this reduces their unplayability meter. This is a genuinely solid idea, and is the first thing in this book that actually appears to be someone who worked on this book actually wanted to improve Exalted from something vaguely approaching the standpoint of this being a game you might actually play.

Now the Acts of Villainy are not remotely balanced. Some of them are really hard and give you relatively little Limit Reduction. Some are very easy, even trivially so and could presumably be repeated for credit if that's what you wanted to do. But the point is that it's a mechanic that does what it is intended to do: the villains give mad speeches to captured heroes after leaving them clues to find their hideout at the scenes of their crime – and we can go on acting as if the atrocious Exalted Limit mechanics didn't even exist. Double win!

This is a solid pieces of design with only a few more moving parts than it needs. And only a few more references to fridging ladies than I am comfortable with.

K:

I really do think this is a straight improvement of the Limit mechanic, both thematically and mechanically. Having Ophidean Urge guys flip out with contagious debauchery is pretty flavorful.

The only real flaw is that a Cecelyne Urge is the clear winner. Taking some damage when you flip out is not a real deal when you might have 30 health levels.

It should be noted that the Charms in the next chapter sometimes use Limit as a resource, so the GSPs have even more reasons to bleed off limit when they can.

Frank

The fact that the Acts of Villainy were pretty well designed means that the fact that the Urges are hot garbage basically doesn't matter. And I mean, they really don't matter, since the main “drawback” of not following your Urge is that you have to do more Acts of Villainy.

<Insert Riddler Joke>

K:

The Urges are kind of weird, but I think its a feature that a demony guy can rebel against even his demon orders. I mean, it certainly sounds fun to figure out how to do Acts of Villainy while accomplishing your own goals.

Frank

The Castes are for no particular reason in this chapter. Like, they aren't Traits, and this is the Trait chapter. I know that all the Urges and Acts of Villainy and shit weren't Traits either, but there were like numbers involved and shit. The Castes are just character classes. This all should have been in the Character Generation chapter, and some of it actually was! We had abbreviated descriptions of the classes last chapters, and the full ones in this chapter. But the “full” descriptions are only a page and a half long and followed by a shit tonne of white space. This totes could have been folded into the last chapter and we'd all be better off.

K:

As a fun note, the Caste Marks of almost all the Castes are very stupid. Slayers have crossed swords on their head. Two of the symbols are just black circles and I don't even care which is which.

Frank

The procedural nature of Exalted Caste divisions is pretty painfully on display here. And honestly I think they might have mixed up some of the characters and classes.

Every Exalted gets a glowing symbol on their head when they activate their powers like they were characters in Sailor Moon. For the Barbarian and Bondage Nun, this is probably just flavor. They were going to be swinging axes like a shonen hero or making mad speeches to armies of cultists anyway, so whether they have a giant green sign on their face that says “This person is a bad guy” on it is just a flavor thing. But the Sex Ninja is supposed to get up close to people and talk them into stuff, so having the bit “I'm a bad guy” symbol show up all the time is kind of a non-starter.


No one listens to the “social character” with the “team evil” symbol as a face tattoo!

So naturally there's a group who have the option of hiding their face symbol, and it's not the Sex Ninja. It's the Air Pirate. And reading the description of the Air Pirate it's all about them sneaking around. And the description of the Sex Ninja is all about how they make pacts and codes. Like... pirate codes maybe? And the Sex Ninjas even get Sailing, while the Air Pirates don't.

Fuck. I think the Sex Ninja and the Air Pirate were literally switched during book layout and no one noticed. Because the classes are that fucking mad libs and arbitrary that that could seriously happen.

K:

I'd buy that there was an art swap and no one noticed. Clearly, the editor popped off to the pub quite a bit.

As for the Caste Marks, they are only supposed to show up when you are burning lots of Essence, but at that point you are glowing actual radioactive green and making people sick, so I think the trust is gone anyway. Also it should be noted that the Infernals are supposed to be new and a secret, so no one knows what crossed swords or an hourglass on a forehead means.

The comic at the end of the chapter is about the crossed swords face guy getting crossed swords on his face, and I don't know what it means.

Frank

Next up: Charms

[Koumei]

I'm still not sure what Sex Ninjas have to do with stealth, but admittedly in all the hours of Shinobi games I played on the Mega Drive (Genesis), there were no Sex Ninjas, just the regular kind that wear red and white, throw hundreds of shuriken, and run up to kick people in the face (occasionally summoning pillars of fire). You know, normal ninja stuff. Even Karakuri Ninja Girl (about Sex Ninjas) had more acrobatics and magical power than stealth.

But if stealth only has to be as high as "There isn't a big warning sign over my head when I talk to people", then yeah, that's kind of an issue.

[maglag]

According to Naruto, ninjas dress in bright orange and wear headbands with their faction sign stamped on it while using such stealthy techniques as throwing huge balls of fire, summoning kaijus or even turning on kaijus themselves or cover yourself in bright lighting. Or if you suck at magic, you become a drunken brawler ninja.

So yes seems like having a warning sign over one's head is simply standard ninja behaviour.

[Longes]

When Frank and K talk about two different visions in Exalted: Infernals, that is literally true. The first half of the book was written by some guy working under assumption that he's writing an evil book of evil, featuring Infernals, which is why so much time is spent on the Yozi and why everyone's an asshat. The second half of the book was written by Ink Monkeys - a team of Exalted fans headed by Holden Shearer. Ink Monkeys went on to be writers of Exalted 3e, while Holden personally went on to be a giant asshat and have really bad political takes on twitter.

Bonus points:
Infernals were somewhat impressively fine tuned for the mechanics of Exalted 2e, with its many quirks. They were slightly weaker than Solars, but actually perfectly playable.

But immediately after Infernals came out a patch pack known as Exalted 2.5 which changed combat mechanics, introducing what will later be known as Chungian Combat. And it also completely crippled Infernals making them entirely unviable in combat. Chungian Combat is called so because it was invented by Jon Chung, an rpg.net poster with extensive knowledge of Exalted. Chung figured out exactly how Exalted 2.5 combat works, and it works by picking charms generating perfect layered defense with multiple decision points. The result being that doing any action other than basic attack is a waste of mana and the winner of any fight is a person with a bigger mana pool to spend on the defense.

Jon Chung then got banned from Exalted 3e threads by rpg.net moderator Holden Shearer when, during the development, Chung argued with Onyx Path writer Holden Shearer about Holden Shearer's design decision.

I'm still not sure what Sex Ninjas have to do with stealth, but admittedly in all the hours of Shinobi games I played on the Mega Drive (Genesis), there were no Sex Ninjas, just the regular kind that wear red and white, throw hundreds of shuriken, and run up to kick people in the face (occasionally summoning pillars of fire). You know, normal ninja stuff. Even Karakuri Ninja Girl (about Sex Ninjas) had more acrobatics and magical power than stealth.

But if stealth only has to be as high as "There isn't a big warning sign over my head when I talk to people", then yeah, that's kind of an issue.

I'm not sure what Frank and K refer to as sex ninjas. The Scourges are the nominal stealth class of the Infernals, and they are basically the Flash or Speed of Sound Sonic and gain invisibility by running very fast. The whatever Infernal Eclipses are called have sex, but are not ninjas, and they win by being Alex Jones and writing mind-controlling subversive literature.

[OgreBattle]

Oh so it was 2.5 that was about layered defenses

What was 2e combat like