Isn't "there is no way" a little strong? There actually are a number of ways, under tightly controlled conditions.
In the game as written, It's definitely possible for a Dragon-Blood character to carry his weight in a Solar-level team, provided that the Dragon-Blood is given a substantial pile of free XP and backgrounds, and the solars don't get past essence three or possibly even early four.
After all, Dragonbloods can learn Terrestrial Sorcery, which has a number of extremely useful effects even in higher-level games. If there's no solar sorcerer in the group, he can carry his weight JUST by summoning demons, scrying, dispelling sorcery and ferrying the group around. Even if there IS a Solar sorcerer you could just give the dragonblood enough XP to know way more spells. Give him enough contacts and allies and he'll be able to participate in "social" adventures even without solar mindraping charms. Make sure he gets initiated to celestial martial arts, too, and he can pick up some other weird utility powers.
All of these things miss the point. They are the exalted equivalent of handing out epic swords to fighters. The differance is that in exalted dragon bloods are supposed to be weaker than solars.
You are correct, if you let somebody play the venerable lord of a dragon blood house then he might be comparable to early solars.
However, there is no reason for exalted to support one person making a dragon blood to go adventure with a bunch of celestial exalts.
Look, I personally don't much care whether Solar/Dragonblood teams are supported. It's not up there on the list of campaigns I'm anxious to run.
That said there's no reason it shouldn't have been done and couldn't be done if we were departing enough from the original's mechanics. Do you remember the Sumeru project? Five thematically linked powersets which encompassed "fighter" "rogue" and "wizard" abilities united by a theme like "selfishness" or "analytics" Sound familiar?
Exalted is just like that -- you write up five powersets -- Moon, Sun, Planets, etc. -- and the powers even come sorted by level. Where they went wrong is in deciding that a Solar should be vastly more powerful than a Dragonblood of the same "level."
What SHOULD have happened is that Dragonbloods would have Essence 2 through Essence 5 charms, and Solars would have Essence 4 through Essence 7 or something. Then Dragonblood/Solar matchups would be acceptable for Essence 4-5 teams and not otherwise.
That would work mechanically, and be viable, however, it still seems to me like it would violate the essence of the game and the background.
Dragonbloods are in some ways the best group for players to play because their whole theme is that they work better as a group than as individuals. This is not really true for the celestial exalts as their powers are not really synergistic with each other.
They are the voltron exalts, They should have charms the activate as other dragonbloods use charms.
What I really liked about Exalted was the savvy handling of RPG conventions. For instance,
Class, Role, and Character I? I'm a Fighter. I... fight... things.
So Dungeons and Dragons sorted people in "classes." Those classes didn't meet Frank Trollman's definition of a class as something with strongly segregated ability lists, but the point is that it applied labels to characters.
Actually Exalted DOES have multiple classes in the way that Trollman defines them. "Solar" and "Sidereal" work EXACTLY like the "Red" and "Green" mana of Sumeru -- defining your characters relationship to his gameworld without specifying whether he uses a sword or a wand. I'd argue it's the best implementation of that kind of class system I personally have read. Which is sad because it's really not very good, but that's life. No, the part that's cool is the part of Exalted that's analogous to Dungeons and Dragons Classes: the Exalt Castes.
---
No one likes boring and stereotypical PCs. Experienced roleplayers across systems have long tried to help novices spice their character concepts up. In Dungeons and Dragons this generally means telling them "your class is a package of mechanical abilities. It doesn't define your identity. Your Rogue can be a burglar, a diplomat, or a Knight of the Realm who happens to fight dirty. Your Wizard isn't jut a fount of magic, he's a teacher, a politico, or a military man." Etc.
But the fact is people are lazy or people are uncreative and they look to their character class as a starting point in designing their characters. Young players often start AND stop with the character class, leading to the "Cleric who is about compassionate healing and evangelism," "wizard who doesn't understand real life and cares only about magical secrets" and "fighter on a tireless quest to become the NUMBER ONE BLADE CHAMPION."
Exalted does two interesting things with it: first, it makes the classes part of the game world that NPCs have a reason to care about. This means that a player who is a bad or inconsistent actor is saved. Instead of trying to play a fighter and failing, he is SUCCESSFULLY playing a character who is failing at playing a fighter.
Second, they defined the classes by actual roleplaying hooks. Having your classes be "Conqueror, Prophet, Scientist, Agent" sure beats "Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, Cleric."
Admittedly, there's an obvious mapping available: the fighting Dawn Caste, the magic-using Twilight, etc. But the mechanical incentives are so minor that there's really nothing stopping you from playing a Dawn as a sorcerer-general commanding a legion of demons, or a Twilight an Indian-Jones style weapon master/machinist.
souran wrote:That would work mechanically, and be viable, however, it still seems to me like it would violate the essence of the game and the background.
Dragonbloods are in some ways the best group for players to play because their whole theme is that they work better as a group than as individuals.
That's the idea, not the end result. Yes, they even worked somewhat like this in 1E. In 1E their ally-boosting Charms were also good enough to make a DB on all-Celestial team contribute something relevant (in particular, their ally boosters were one of the very few forms of low-Essence scene-long diceadding, that existed in 1E). However, in 2E, their teamwork and ally-buffing were massively nerfed, both directly, and through the metagame change, and now aren't worth shit, particularly by Celestial standards. In no case they are preferable to maxing out Water Dragon Style, so you will be able to survive battles where GM actually tries to challenge you.
They should be Voltron Exalted. They, unfortunately, aren't.
4. His power level is OVER 9000, or what White Wolves do when PCs don't suck quite enough balls in their game.
Well, you can see, that mechanics of Exalted are so full of fuckups, that they make DnD 3.X look like a flawless pinnacle of game design by comparison. But cannot we at least cut this game some slack for granting us the opportunity to play as a badass, world-changing hero of mythic proportions right from chargen? In fact, if you only hear about Exalted from certain fans, you might think, that Exalted enables and encourages over-the-top, epical heroics on almost Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann* level. Well, the problem is, Exalted only promises us such badassery, heroics and importance in cover blurbs, but if they ever were provided by the actual game, these times are long past. In reality, it is the same drivel as almost every White Wolf setting: you are given a bunch of seemingly kickass superpowers for your character, and then slammed facefirst into the hard, cold fact, that important NPCs have so much more and so much better superpowers, that your character can, at best, watch their exploits in awe and hope to remain too insignificant to draw their attention (WtA is the only exception I'm familiar with, there you might have a decent shot at practically any statted NPC or monster right after chargen, if you are willing to optimize - of course, the designers fixed that in WtF). Except, in Exalted you can't do either, because, no matter your splat, the majority of real movers and shakers of the setting either wishes to waste your character (yes, your character personally; no, negotiating with them is not possible, not all of them will even accept characters of certain splats as slaves), or intends to make him work for them, through manupulation or conversion. Also, their power is such, that it breaks the gameworld in half. Fucking literally.
So, how Exalted ended up like this? Well, first off, in reality, certain splats were not intended to offer you any possibility of being a hero, worthy of immortal legends, or even making key decisions for himself, from the beginning. By now that's pretty much includes every splat that is not Solar Exalted. That's seven splats by the way. They include six more types of Exalted - Dragon-Blooded, Sidereals, Lunars, Infernals, Abyssals, Alchemicals - and Fair Folk. Infernals and Abyssals, as you can figure from their names, are Team Evil. They are pretty much supposed to be bitches of their godlike patrons (Infernals get a fairly long leash, Abyssals don't). They also are massively mechanically inferior to Solars, despite supposedly being their equals, because their designers, as evidenced by discussions on rpg.net, apparently are too dumb to realise that leaving the sheer power the same, but substantially narrowing applicability, makes for substantially lesser potential. Same goes for Alchmemicals, except their patron is merely a dick, as opposed to something like a cosmic incarnation of tentacle rape. Sidereals are The Man. Except, PCs don't get to be The Man, elder Sidereals get to. PCs get to be, surprise, surprise, their bitches (in 2E they also are bitches of nearly any spirit of any importance in divine bureaucracy, because 2E fucking hates splats that are not Solars). Dragon-Blooded and Fair Folk are tier below everyone else, therefore too pathetic to matter individually, particularly in 2E, and particularly at XP levels above starting PCs level. Unless GM tacitly agrees to give the opposition a much lower level of optimization than that of PCs, of course. Lunars come closest to the Solars in power level and freedom. Except in 1E they are saddled with unforgivably horrible mechanics; in 2E mechanics are somewhat less horrible, but fluff saddles them with a completely pointless and ineffectual splat schtick (who gives a shit about social engineering that takes centuries, when we can expect the world destruction in 15 years?), and also makes abundantly clear, that they are meant to be bitches as well - to Solars (each Lunar even gets the fucking one-sided magical bond to one of Solars!).
In short, they might have as well renamed Exalted to "Solars" with second edition, because by second edition, only Solar Exalted are really supposed to even try being heroes, instead of zeroes. Noticed that I said "try"? That's because they are not going to succeed at that. You see, both Team Evil and The Man hate them for things their previous incarnations did and fear them for their potential. They want to eliminate or capture and corrupt Solars. Mechanics-wise, Solars, by 2E have absolutely no ability to resist top-tier antagonists, like some statted Sidereal elders, and most Deathlords. No, I don't mean "one in a million chance". I mean, that if you put every single Solar in the world against Silver Prince or Green Lady (who aren't even supposed to be the strongest Deathlord or Siddie respectively), they will be crushed and obliterated without ever having a chance to scratch the enemy**.
How this travesty came to be? At the dawn of 1E, the top antagonists were much tamer right? And while the example Deathlord from 1E corebook still was better than any single Solar PC could ever hope to be within a realistic campaign timeframe, and also required an attack by a plotdevicite weapon to be killed permanently, couldn't you at least plausibly kick his ghostly ass in combat with a circle of experienced Solars? Yeah, well, you could. But only because the authors had no real idea what optimized Exalted are capable of at the time (and by the way, that's not my speculations, that's exactly how an actual WW freelancer responded on rpg.net after I noted that antagonists weren't always as invulnerable as they are in 2E), as evidenced by a monster manual that was almost entirely filled with things practically incapable of being a threat to anything above heroic mortal level or adventures, that cast PCs in roles more suited to low-level DnD characters***. Once the designers realized that, well, PCs actually can, you know, be remotely dangerous to supposed god-tier NPCs, measures were taken to rectify that oversight.
The first step obviously was the introduction of high-Essence powers, which, for a long time, were entirely limited to Sidereal Martial Arts, which, in turn, are pretty much exclusive to Sidereal elders. Well, Solars and Abyssals techically could get them, but the setting obstacles to that were massive. Sidereal Martial Arts were Just Better than almost any Charm published before them even if we compare Charms of the same Essence levels. They also had high-Essence Charms, which power scaled geometrically with their Essence requirements. While original SMAs weren't the end-all in optimized 1E Exalted combat, they had unprecedented-so-far effects, which drastically changed assumptions about what high-Essence Charms can do - effects like attacking everyone you can see, that opened the gateway to insanity of Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick combo (which does exactly what it sounds like by combining said effect with Charms that greatly increase your line of sight); like slaying or remaking into whatever form want anyone your attack touches, no matter the stats; like temporarily raising your Essence. Solar Circle Sorcery, which was previously the benchmark for the top-end effects totally paled in comparison, due to being much more expensive and harder to use, often for inferior results. While 1E SMAs didn't made The Man totally invulnerable to pesky PCs yet, they certainly paved the way for that by laying the groundwork for NPCs that play Dragonball Z while the rest of the world plays Dynasty Warriors.
Time to build up on this groundwork came with 1E Player's Guide, which introduced age limits on raising your Essence and rules for downtime which automatically gave any Celestial Exalt elder/Deathlord thousands of XP to play with - the rules that were faithfully reproduced in 2E rulebook, despite major forum outcry against them. What age limit you say? Basically, you can't raise your Essence past 5 until you're Exalted for at least 100 years. Considering, that the world, again, is likely to be blown up much sooner than that, this rule, with combination of geometrical power growth with Essence, established by SMA, basically meant, that as soon as they are going publish high-Essence Charms, your PCs will officially lose ability to play with big boys forever, due to being one or several tiers lower. And yes, exactly that did happen with appearance of new SMAs and splat-specific high-Essence Charms in 2E. Even without new high-Essence Charms these rules made old sonofabitches that pretty much run everything interesting in the setting into incredibly tough customers.
Particularly because new statblocks for them tended to be in line with intent of these rules. Whenever new mechanical information about Deathlords and their peers was published, it gave them massive fucking upgrades. Mask of Winters, the 1E corebook Deathlord, was, for example, upgraded from Essence 7 to 10 in 2E corebook, with appropriate increases in other stats, and was given an arbitrary Fuck You ability that completely ignored existing guidelines for mental effects. As a result, even most ardent WW supporters on rpg.net just state outright that you pretty much need an Essence 5 full Solar circle, with five Lunars, all fully optimized for combat, other support and some massively favorable circumstances (in particular, the Deathord not actually retreating, once he figures out that the rate of Essence attrition does not allow him to kill all of his enemies in one battle) to beat the being that is supposed to be one of the weakest GMsticklords, even if he doesn't use Charms outside of the corebook and the Abyssal book Charms that are explicitly granted to him by his writeup (i.e, no SMAs or crazy high-Essence Charms from Dreams of the First Age). And there is strong evidence, that even with this most limited interpretation of his abilities, and even with this massively unfavorable setup, he still can totally fucking win such battle, and PCs need to really abuse various powers from outside of their books, if they want to prevail. They also still need plotdevicite to fuckung make this abomination of NPC design stay dead.
And even if Solar PCs in this setup can, in fact, prevail, over just one of 20+ BBEGs, and one far from the strongest among them, the problem is, a full Essence 5 circle of combat monster Solars, is, probably, not something you can see in actual game, run by RAW, unless your campaigns last for 2+ years. You see, unlike DnD, where your abilities are initially pathetic, but skyrocket as you gain levels, in Exalted you grow slowly. In 3.X you double in power every 4-5 decent sessions (at least that's how long gaining 2 levels takes in my experience). In Exalted, after the same number of sessions, you might add 2-3 Charms to your initial 10, and that's if you spend your XP on Charms only. You're also hampered by the incredibly long training times, that can slow the development of abilities to a glacial pace in any game, that does not allow generous downtimes often. And Exalted, with its mood of the great crisis happening NOW is not exactly suited for frequent downtimes. This could have been OK in a game, where you are competent enough to do whatever the game asks you to do from the beginning, but, as explained above, in Exalted you aren't.
But how about using various Solar-level gamebreakers against penis extension NPCs? Well, infinite Essence reactors are not allowed in any sane game, and they still are supposed be beaten by high-Essence Charms than were intended nullify their perfects (whether these Charms achieve that is another question). Moreover, Deathlords, at least, can also use at least one way of infinite Essence regeneration, and when neither side can hurt another, that still leaves them free to kill the rest of the world, which is their general goal. Uber-NPCs can do artifact-based exploits better than PCs, because they have more time and opportunity to stockpile artifacts. The summoning game is only relevant in confrontation with them once you get to Third Circle Demons (ones that uber-powerful Solars of the First Age were supposedly afraid of), which are unstatted - or having only the briefest and most general stat outlines - plot devices, therefore inherently unreliable, because needs of the plot, as perceived by GM, may vary. Also, their known special abilities got nothing on high-Essence Charms. About the only trick that might actually work is Sidereals' Greater Signs of the Maidens - uberpowers, one of which can temporarily turn a large area into a dead magic zone. Unfortunately, their activation eats permanent Essence dots, which is so fucking crippling, that you can only hope to convince an NPC to use a Greater Sign for you, unless you want to become useless.
But can't you simply eliminate uber-NPCs from the setting? Well, the problem is, that leaves you with very little in the way of meaningful opposition to PCs. Statted NPC Exalted - your supposed main opponents - tend to scale very poorly in this game. Either they are the above-described invulnerable abominations, or they are so weak and poorly built, that even Dragon-Bloods can take them down with little problems. There is also a distinct lack of useable monsters. Only spirits and demons have something resembling actual power curve among statted examples, at least in 2E. In 1E they were incapably weak and made poor opponents for anything stronger than Dragon-Blooded, 2E makes them much more similar to Exalted in abilities (and complexity). But also attempts to uplift the strongest of them to the level of uber-NPCs. Anyway, the problem is, they are not supposed to be the main antagonists or otherwise play a decisive role in the most types of games. This problem is particularly obvious for Solars, and particularly in 2E, as all of their Exalted opposition is inherently weaker****, and the celestial bureaucracy only waits a signal to rally behind them, so removing or radically downgrading uber-NPCs can leave them in the role of SWAT in kindergarten, unless GM is willing to write all opponents himself. This is quite a problem, unless you're willing to openly make NPCs play by different rules than PCs - otherwise, generating characters takes too damn much time.
*For those who aren't familiar with anime - that's a series where characters go from saving their village to Universe-shaking level of power in 27 episodes. It also has a good story between all the titanic explosions.
**Well, infinite Essence reactors can survive thanks to being broken, if their opponent does not use certain non-core high-Essence Charms or theoretical Charms.
***As an aside, Exalted writers still adamantly refuse to actually consider the fact PCs might possibly assume a more important and proactive role in the world than that of low-level DnD characters, as evidenced by their 2E adventures, which are fetch quests, sometimes filled to the brim with cooler-than-you NPCs. They just have a slightly better knowledge of power level, necessary to make Exalted PCs feel small in the pants.
****Sidereals are too few in numbers, have - again, particularly in 2E - inferior Charms, and are divided into hostile factions, one of which supports Solars; Dragon-Blooded are weaker enough to generally be a tier below celestial turtles, also, they are divided into hostile factions on the verge of open war; Lunars do not have a workable vision for the future of their own, and either are already willing to resume being Solars' lapdogs, or are doomed to sit on their asses, with about one or two exceptions; 2E Abyssals are massively gimped in the Creation, making them much less of a threat.
Last edited by FatR on Wed Sep 23, 2009 9:27 pm, edited 2 times in total.
If you could just take a moment to elaborate on the fucked-up morality of the setting which openly embraces the worst parts of predestination, divine right and oligarchy that would be just perfect.
The entire setting hinges on the idea that the Dragonborn aren't powerful and shiny enough to effectively rule Creation so they need new Exalts. The problem is that the people who are supposed to rule are arrogant sunovabitches who the last time they took control of the world initiated abuses that would make the Khmer Rouge feel a little guilty. This stems from the fact that Solars have a mental disorder that sometimes makes them flip out and kill people and other times completely disregard the feelings of others.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
I actually once had an awesome idea for Terrestrial Exalts.
Basically, Alchemical Exalts are slightly weaker than Celestials. But one of their advantages is Charm-swapping. My idea was more or less that Terrestrial Exalts who were working together could use another's Charms as well as their own. They would probably have to be specifically designated as such, though, as letting them share any and all Terrestrial Charms would be mildly silly.
Morality of the Exalted setting is a more complicated issue (although yes, by now it is fucked up). I'll write a post about it when I'll have time, although, unavoidably, it'll be more subjective, than previous sections.
I also gotta ask, FatR, can you link us to some of these threads where people complained about game balance and having their PCs forced to grovel to The Man and Deathlords and the WW staff pretty much going 'suck it I write the rules' or 'huh, did we really write that? Oh well'.
Speaking of which, just going by the core rulebook and the promotional comic you figure that Dragonbloods are supposed to be by and large the biggest threat to PCs.
How can this possibly be when the Scarlet Queen was supposed to be an essence 7 Exalt at the most and we have essence 10 deathlords running around? Why are there even essence 10 anything? I thought just being essence 7 puts you in the ranks of 'up there with Elminster and Szass Tam'. Are there even essence 10 charms printed? What gives?
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Thu Sep 24, 2009 6:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Lago PARANOIA wrote:Speaking of which, just going by the core rulebook and the promotional comic you figure that Dragonbloods are supposed to be by and large the biggest threat to PCs.
How can this possibly be when the Scarlet Queen was supposed to be an essence 7 Exalt at the most and we have essence 10 deathlords running around? Why are there even essence 10 anything? I thought just being essence 7 puts you in the ranks of 'up there with Elminster and Szass Tam'. Are there even essence 10 charms printed? What gives?
In the original design of the game Deathlords (and the Celestial Incarnae) were only Essence 8 or 9. Then a solitary one (the eldest of the Deathlords, First and Forsaken Lion) was given Essence 10. Then they buffed everyone else to parity. For no real reason. Wankery, I guess.
Also when they outlined the numbers, there were some 30,000 Dragon-Blooded in Creation, about 20,000 of them specifically hostile to you, only 13 Deathlords, and 100-200 Abyssals (and a little more in Solar count). So you're going to run into the Dragon-Blooded more and they're going to be more of a threat because they're 100 times more in number than even the second largest antagonist Exalted group.
The Deathlords, however, make more sense if you treat them as ghosts and not pseudo-Exalts, and assume that as ghosts they use Arcanoi and have approximately one hundred difficulties with entering Creation by daylight, including a few that say "impossible." They can keep the Void Circle Necromancy though.
Finally, the Scarlet Empress, when alive, commanded a forgotten superweapon that could turbonuke anything she pointed it at (range: anywhere in Creation). The only reason she allowed her enemies in the province of Lookshy to stay alive is because she didn't want to deal with the fallout of turbonuking them, and the Seventh Legion was more or less incapable of actually threatening the Realm, merely throwing it back again and again, so she figured she'd let it continue to do that to the Wyld threats coming from the East, while keeping lots of spy posts in that area.
Last edited by TavishArtair on Thu Sep 24, 2009 6:46 am, edited 2 times in total.
Damnit, FatR, that just cost me, what, a half-hour.
Your complaints about the setting more-or-less mirror my own and I've only managed to play Exalted via PbP in one game that lasted longer than a month.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
So, FatR, you gonna hook us up with the last part?
I'm going to keep reminding you until you do.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Man, people don't like it when you point out critical flaws in their system du jour, huh? That was a deluge of butthurt and differing opinions, as discussions like that tend to be.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote:
See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
Hi, FatR, I saw your name on the top of the thread list.
So I'm bumping this thread again. You know what to do.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Sorry, sorry for the delay. The job and Dark Hero Days ate all my time, and lack of tabletop gaming stifled the inspiration. But now the next part is mostly done and I intend to post it within a day or two.
5. What makes right or the true conflict of Exalted.
No, I'm not talking about the conflict between Solars and Dragon-Blooded or Abyssals or whatever, or even about the conflict between the setting and the mechanics. I'm talking about the great conflict between the two mutually incompatible visions of the setting that pretty much defined the development of Exalted from the very beginning. One of these visions defines the setting in the terms of the battle between Good and Evil, with divinely-ordained champions of Good smiting enemies of all that is alive and free, as well as corrupt usurpers. Other one removes objective morality (including, but not limited to, firmly and objectively defined Good and Evil) from the setting and portrays all factions as equally grey (or equally black, if you're not particularly willing to buy their self-justifications). Both of these visions were in the setting practically from the beginning, and their long, back-and-forth struggle lasted for the entire lifespan of 1E, but by the late 2E the first one achieved the complete and utter victory. And, while the schizophrenic setting* was bad, this turn of events, in my opinion, is worse.
As a side note, I actually like Good-vs-Evil conflicts. But, despite what many fantasy writers seem to think, they are not easy to portray convincingly. And Exalted confirms this. I'm against the domination of Exalted by the Good-vs-Evil theme because Exalted totally fucking fails to pull it off in a way that would make me emphatize with supposed good guys or think that they are interesting. Also, whenever I want to smite some Evil, I always can play DnD 3.X, which, despite all the flaws of its settings, is way better at actually making the process of smiting interesting, and, thanks to its massive crossover nature and wealth of supplements, offers much more flavors of Evil to smite. In other words, DnD has this niche well and truly cornered, and to interest me Exalted should offer something different.
To be fair, Exalted also started as a straightforward Good-vs-Evil game, although other splats carried the villain ball then. At the dawn of 1E, the Solar Exalted were the good guys, period, given the mandate to rule by the sun god, the boss of all gods, who, by virtue of his position, was always right. They also were the best in everything that might possibly matter. The Dragon-Blooded + Sidereals were the villains, also period. Lunars and Abyssals were practically the same - dangerous antagonists with ambitions of conquest, and other factions did not exist then. Yeah, I hadn't mistyped, until their splatbook the Abyssals were just another bunch of superpowered warlords, instead of Team Evil, because death and existence as a ghost wasn't revealed as anything more than transition to another realm (which wasn't even portrayed as particularly creepy, in 1E Core/Storytellers Companion). Sure, they still wanted to off everyone in the end, but in the light of tangible existence of afterlife this didn't look like an unquestioningly bad goal. The example Abyssal was actually less of an asshole than almost everyone else in 1E corebook character chapter. Anyway, the 1E corebook was pretty fucking boring, because the only sort of campaign it actually offered was "take over the world in the name of Unconquered Sun". And for that sort of game, it didn't provide much of either enemy statblocks (only Storytellers Companion, which, IIRC, wasn't released simultaneously with the core, did that) or plot hooks. Also, while Solar Exalted were supposed to be the most awesome beings in the setting since their patron invented the concept of awesomeness, they, like about 80% of WW protagonists were irremovably cursed*, and this Great Curse causes them to have tiny little character flaws, which force them to flip out and kill people or do other unpleasant things. Also, unlike the rest of WW games which add a considerable amount of suck as a side effect of your awesomeness, in Exalted you're not supposed to realize the fact that you're cursed (even though the effects of flipping out can be rather spectacular), and take any conscious measures to prevent your local equivalent of frenzying from activating. So, uh, Solars aren't the people you generally want to see in charge, even before the repercussions of Solar-level mindrape powers (to the mental and moral integrity of the user) sink in***. They even got ganked in the past, for becoming sufficiently evil to make Sauron blanch and gag. Yet, they still were supposed to be clearly in the right, despite all of this.
Exalted finally gained more than one dimension with the publication of the Dragon-Blooded splatbook, which was awesome. First off, it presented DBs' side of the story and tried to portray them as understandable and somewhat sympathetic, but without outright sugarcoating - they still were the sort of bastards that you can expect a priveleged minority, that managed to found and maintain a large empire, to be. It also at least made a shot at depicting said empire realistically (granted, like other attempts at realism in this setting, it didn't end up particularly convincing, but that's a tale for another day). It also was the first Exalted book that actually had enough useable setting information to make games out of it. So, it was this book that hooked me on Exalted in the first place. More importantly, it was one of the two most important landmarks of what seemed to be the clear switch to shades of gray in the setting. The second was Games of Divinity, which, in no uncertain terms, stated that patron gods of the Exalted were supremely selfish assholes (so, basically, any and all claims of righteousness, based on divine mandate, automatically became invalid - this also placed DB's religion on the same footing as worship of Unconquered Sun or whomever, as an construct, explicitly crafted to demand obedience and prayer, maybe useful, but with no actual moral authority on top), and portrayed motherfucking demons as partially sympathetic (well, they still wanted to crush humanity, but that was the sort of enmity you can expect from an enemy state which you kept subjugated and enslaved for several thousand years, not pure hatred of embodied malevolence). Also, there were Solar castebooks, which, despite generally portraying (or at least trying to portray) Solars as shiny-happy heroes, had one mandatory evil Solar per book. So, the setting developed in more-or-less interesting direction and all was cool with Exalted. Alas, these times didn't last that long.
It might be only my speculations and misperceptions, but, it seems, the turn back from grey-vs-grey setting in 1E began with the Lunar splatbook, or, maybe, with the backlash it caused. Fans, of course, had a good reason for backlash - this book sucked on all fronts****. Besides crap mechanics and lack of good plot hooks/adventuring ideas (unless one uses the Lunar society from this book as antagonists - they make good antagonists, but this means that large parts of the books are automatically useless for the player), it tried to push forward the "noble savage" archetype, but lost the "noble" part somewhere in the process, making the supposed protagonists too grimdark and, consequently, unsympathetic. Maybe it failed to repeat the success of the Dragon-Blooded happened because it is much harder to find anything positive about Genghis Khan, than about Julius Caesar. Or, maybe, authors just had too little sense of when to stop - seriously, when your faction tolerates things like making human babies a main course of your feast for honored guests (no, I'm not exaggerating even a little bit) from people at the top, any pretense of moral ambiguity goes right out of the fucking window. And attempts to present this faction as heroes begin to look like a mockery. People were not amused by that and the resulting shitstorm raged for years after the publication.
It seems, that the developers of the line took note of this when working on the Abyssal splatbook. But you would think that such reaction would prompt them to tone the grimdarkness down. Apparently, no, not at all. Instead they have decided to drop the pretense of moral justification altogether, and just write the next splat as balls-to-the-wall villains, so that Killfuck Soulshitter play mode can be default for the Abyssals without invoking moral dissonance. The Abyssal splatbook was, IMO, the turning point in the setting development. Never before a splat was presented as completely, fundamentally wrong from practically any viewpoint worth considering in its own book (the old justification of Abyssals was revoked by the revelation that their end goal is not simply to send everyone to the Underworld, but to annihilate everything everywhere) and never before Exalted were portrayed as someone's bitches (see the part 4 - if you are stupid enough to play an Abyssal, Deathlords are your direct superiors), as well as losers (you need to consciously accept the Abyssals' true goal in exchange for prolonging your own existence, to become one). Therefore Abyssals were forced to pick the villain ball quickly dropped by Dragon-Bloods, then it was made ten times bigger. They even got an aura of blight and devastation that automatically activated whenever they tried to be nice. While Abyssals' top bosses had at least a shadow of excuse for their desire to bring the universal oblivion, namely being in eternal agony and unable to cease to exist, before the Creation does - until losing it in 2E - Abyssals themselves now had none. In short they were a splat of designated NPC villains, and the only possible sane, non-cowardly and non-hypocritical goal for an Abyssal was trying to convert himself into a Solar*****. This pretty much sucked, because not only you had splat that was only playable by trying to subvert everything the splat stood for, you also could pretty much forget about the abscence of capital-E Evil factions from the setting - now we had the team of designated villains, that obviously threatened everyone else, and the threat they posed was of sufficient magnitude to warp the entire setting around itself. Warp by turning the main question of the game from "should we kick everyone's asses in the name of our splat, or try more diplomatic solutions?" to "how can we defeat the forces of Evil Overlords that threaten all?", because any solution but stabbing faces is just impossible with a faction whose fundamental goal and reason for existence is destroying everything, including you personally. Well, you can also try talking them to death, if your GM feels merciful, but that does not change the fact that the only solution is extermination.
It should be mentioned, that Infernals predictably joined Abyssals on Team Evil after getting their own writeups. While their splatbook tried to pretend that it was not so in the Storytelling chapter, 95% of its fluff assumed, once again, playing Killfuck Soulshitter, as well as being a bitch (to even worse - if not in the scale of their evil, then in its pettyness - entities) and a loser; and it is all that needs to be said. Shame, because Hell once was one of the coolest places in the setting. Fair Folk, however, somehow managed to avoid this, despite being soul-sucking amoebas, that reflexively mimic beings of the Creation. They are totally sociopathic, but you still can conceivably imagine both a situation in which negotiating and compromising with them is preferable (in the long term), and a situation in which one of them can adventure with Exalted, without either betraying them directly, undermining their final goals or rejecting the values of his own splat.
One might ask, whether the presence of Team Evil truly warped the setting to an extent where ambigiousness and grey areas in interactions between splats could not provide less black-and-white storylines? Well, while schemes of Deathlords, Yozi and whatever define the significant majority of plotlines relevant for Celestial Exalted, you probably could ignore them and still run a game where the right and wrong factions aren't clearly delineaded. Until White Wolves decided to remove said grey areas from the setting.
This happened somewhere in early phases of 2E, the edition, that, as I've mentioned above, happened to be treating non-Solar Exalted first and foremost as NPCs. Both mechanics- and fluff-wise. It is not that Solars are entirely whitewashed, it is that their opponents are consistently demonstrated as either evil or inherently incompetent, and overthrowing them is established as a mistake in no uncertain terms. While authors do not come out and say outright that Solars are right and others are wrong, they pretty clearly say, that Solars are made of awesome and others are made of fail (if we forget about what mechanics tell us about uber-elders). Sidereals are dumbfucks, their decision to move against Solars was wrong and curse-driven, and everyone who knows about them hates them, except for obviously corrupt sellouts. Dragon-Bloded are subhumans, given piddly-shit powers to serve as cannon fodder and held in utter contempt by Heaven and true Exalted. Both Siddies and DBs now have the Great Curse and Limit Breaks at the level close to that of Solars, while at 1E they had either no mechanical manifestations, or easily-avoided ones. Lunars are unworthy to be more than trained dogs and cannot think of any plan for the Creation that promises actual results to save their lives. They are less evil in 2E, but also completely incompetent. Abyssals and Infernals are, well, Team Evil, now with even less excuses. Solars are awesome and if any of them ever vent evil and corrupt, that was because of Great Curse, not because of the social structure, that gave 300 practically immortal overgods, chosen for their ambition, unlimited power. Most of them instantly repented after dying and arising as ghosts freed them from the Great Curse - note, that by the moment other Exalted said "enough" and ganked them, mass-torture and fleshcrafting were acceptable forms of entertainment among them, never mind casualties in billions******. These characterizations, I admit, accentuate the negative, by pointing solely at the most grating things introduced by 2E, but these grating things still are there. Note, that this approach subtly rules out any possibilities of a compromise solution, because, well, compromise between awesome and fail is sort of stupid, particularly when Team Evil is on your doorstep. The obvious implications is that the rest of the world should accept their Solar god-kings, bend down, relax and think of survival. There is also clear attempts to repaint the highest gods as transcedent moral authorities, thus, once again, putting objective moral backing behind Solars' mandate to rule. This is so incredibly grating, that I don't even fucking know how to write about 2E without sliding into Solar-bashing, bile-spewing ramblings and headdesking repeatedly. So I won't. Enough to say, that, IMO, by the current point the setting (if we look at the fluff alone) is very strongly geared towards righteous Solars righteously conquering the world in the name of righteousness. Except that they can be total rat-bastards, but their goal will remain righteous, because everyone else is officially lame and the only realistic long-term alternative to their rule is the victory of Team Evil, so Solars are once again supposed to be clearly in the right, despite everything that happened in the past. I guess, if you like the original presentation of Solars, as outlined above, there is nothing or little wrong with 2E. And if you don't, you're left to write rants like this.
*I'm well aware, that thematic diversity is a boon for a game. But not when a)its core themes are mutually exclusive and b)you cannot quietly brush this under the table, because PCs are supposed to play a major role in the world, so the question of how said world really works is going to be raised sooner or later.
**Well, in late 2E there is one way to remove the Great Curse from an Exalt, assuming he even knows that it exists, which almost nobody in the setting does. It is ass-backwards, never mind incredibly hard (arrange a conversion from a Solar to an Abyssal and then to a Solar again), it obviously doesn't work for other splats and it was introduced only in late 2E.
***IMO, they also are rather boring, in a way similar to a way in which many main shonen protagonists are the most boring characters in their series. "Teh speshul and better than u" is not a very fun schtick, in general (few characters pull it off without the story devolving into wank); and when one's specialness mainly lies in simply having the massive advantage in sheer power, speed and toughness - or, in the game, in mechanical hacks - as opposed to having cool special effects, in particular. And the Solars' schtick boils down to exactly that and has the exactly that flaw (particularly in 1E, 2E added some more SFX). Well, at least tries to, about the reality see the part 4. But that's IMO.
****As a side note, the 1E Lunar splatbook was the first sign, that Ethan Skemp cannot generate any decent fresh ideas to save his life. This was confirmed without doubt when he ran nWoD Werewolf line into the ground - well, not that the rest of nWoD is particularly successful, compared to the old one, but nWerewolf bombed hard even by nWoD standards and is practically dead (no new supplements for about a year now, IIRC), even though oWerewolf was the second most popular WoD game line.
*****At which point you have to remember, that Abyssals are bitches to the most powerful statted NPCs in the setting, who also keep their souls jars and can effortlessly terminate a rogue Abyssal if there is any indication that he can actually succeed on the massively hard redemption quest.
******Canonically, Solar Deliberative, for example, fed about 40 millions to above-mentioned soul-sucking amoebas, just to field-test its armies, even before its corruption became obvious to general public.
Last edited by FatR on Fri Oct 09, 2009 9:20 pm, edited 6 times in total.
FatR wrote: There is also clear attempts to repaint the highest gods as transcedent moral authorities, thus, once again, putting objective moral backing behind Solars' mandate to rule. This is so incredibly grating, that I don't even fucking know how to write about 2E without sliding into Solar-bashing, bile-spewing ramblings and headdesking repeatedly. So I won't.
Do it anyway, man! This is the kind of stuff the Gaming Den lives for, mang.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Resurrecting this thread in the hopes of getting FatR to rant again.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
IMO Sidereals is when Exalted started going to shit.
Storywise: HURRRR WE ARE SEKRIT MASTERS OF ZA WARUDO AND EVERYONE ELSE IS TROUBLEMAKING BITCH
Crunchwise: I use Creation-Slaying Oblivion Kick and kill the entire visible population of Creation in one action.
1E Sidereals marked a metaplot shift in the direction of huge overarching evils who are all going to rape you. It also concretely solidified the elder Sidereals as being untouchable badasses who can rape you without trying.
If your religion is worth killing for, please start with yourself.
To be honest, optimizers of that day quckly found that SMAs were far from unbeatable against Solar Charms. The three original SMAs included no new perfects and no other great out-of-the-box defences (synergies with the Charm that raised your Essence were great, but demanded ridiculous XP investments). Which probably (and unfortunately) reduced the initial backlash against this trend. Otherwise, you're correct. When authors themselves admit that Sidereals are like laser kill sats, well, you know that they are damn overpowered.
