>>92497874
>TQ
Every last one of then has ended in a battle or a fuck. Sometimes both.

>>92497290
You don't have to openly support one to use them though, many Great Houses save maybe the Cathaks and Ledaal would do that.

File: bafkreifs5ds2a37rx3hepnd6(...).jpg (266 KB, 2000x2000)

266 KB JPG

>>92491654
>Realm characters don't matter because the game quite literally is set up to ensure you never meet them outside of full retards like Deled, who would be in a Wyld Hunt trying to kill you and sperging out hard if he lost to you.
Doesn't the Realm cover the majority of Creation? The Scavenger Lands and the Southeast have their own Dragon-blooded polities, but the Realm itself covers pretty much any part of the map that touches the coast of the Inland Sea and has made much of the West's islands satrapies too.

Te6systst

>>92499736
not really
the blessed isle with some chunk of the western islands and some centimetres from the inland coast, with scattered pockets throughout the rest of the world

How come all conversations regarding combat in this game assumes a 1v1? I get that the rules are clunky in every edition, but it feels like people are very dismissive of NPCs in each edition not being hyper combat-optimized because they assume that the NPC will always be fighting alone.

>>92500037
Well, for 1e and 2e it's cause people tend to default to 1v1 fights when they think of comparing things
3e is that with the added issue of the system breaking a bit if you don't treat fights as multiple 1v1 matches

>>92499824
Not really.
>centimetres on the coast
you're forgetting all the other places it has inland, like in the near north, Harborhead, south east, a huge chunk of the south too.

>>92499736
The Realm covers the Blessed Isle and has satrapies in the Threshold. Everything past that is barbarians, Lunars and Raksha. A game in the threshold might involve the Realm, a game further out could entirely ignore it.

>>92495348
Excuse me?

>>92495604
It's because its "official". I've met several people, mostly online but some IRL, who think the official material is better because it passed some sort of rigorous QA check.

I honestly don't know what to say to these people. It's like having the talk about the tooth fairy or Santa Claus to a young kid.

>>92499736
The Realm has almost completely collapsed without the Scarlet Empress. Everywhere might "legally" belong to the Realm, but in practice, the Realm as an almighty power exists only on the Blessed Isle. Everywhere else just gets an occasional missionary of Immaculate priests passing through, whereupon they put tarps over all the shrines to the gods and mumble "hail the dragonblooded" a few times while waiting for them to leave.

Which version of Exalted has the best social rules: 3e, or Essence? What do you like about them?
Also, how easy are they to blatantly steal and put into a different setting?
Sorry for all of the questions, I'm just trying to get a feel for which system I should run a cool espionage system in.

File: 1713223844928815m.jpg (95 KB, 1024x724)

95 KB JPG

>>92501727
Sandact mate did you ever read the ad by that guy who DMs for pay and smugly mocks all home-brew as "sheer hubris!" And insists 5e d&d was made by a 'crack team of experts'?

>>92501727
>Excuse me?
There are a lot of people on the discord who just get really upset about rewrites even when they fix shit like the terrible solar charmset.

>>92501965
>Which version of Exalted has the best social rules: 3e, or Essence?
2.5e > Essence > 3e > 1e > 2e.

>What do you like about them?
2.5e: Your roll is has more than a yes/no impact, intimacies/motivation have impact. More successes makes your social action harder to resist. I don't like the sharp natural/unnatural mental influence divide, though.
Essence: Virtue+Intimacy was well implemented, despite that a lot of people hate virtues on principle. Hard bargain was a good idea and it can be used well by a good Storyteller, but in practice the expected use, as well as the ability to ignore social influence outright, fucks the system pretty hard.
3e: Intimacies are done best, here. On the downside, resisting social influence is a hard binary yes/no and one willpower does simultaneously too much and too little, leading to the expected social combat taking either way too long or getting shut down early - it's basically 2e's perfect defense rocket tag meta, but in social instead of physical combat, and with willpower instead of motes.
1e: Very simple and easy to use. No complexity. The Storyteller has to make most of it up as they go along.
2e: The worst parts of 3e (full resist is too easy, and it grinds awfully) without the upside of a non-basic intimacy system.

>how easy are they to blatantly steal and put into a different setting?
1e > 2.5e > Essence => 3e > 2e
With bigger being easier to insert. 1e's social rules were a very basic afterthought, though.

>which system I should run a cool espionage system in.
I would choose 3e or Essence for this, or a mix of 3e, 2.5e, and Essence. 3e really just needs to absorb hard bargains from Essence and extra successes making social actions harder to resist from 2.5e to be a superb divine system. Essence mostly just needs to untangle it's social defenses from Storyteller adjudication. 2.5e's social is robust rather than deep, so probably not best for social spy games.

>>92500156
Haven't really seen 3e break down in combat when I've outnumbered players in my games. Could you explain this for me?
>>92501965
Essence and 3e are good, I would not bother with the others since 2.5e makes things a binary between getting hit with a social charm that turns your character into a willing or unwilling slave of the other character or having enough Integrity charms that it doesn't happen to you. 3e's willpower rule is there for a reason, although people tend to assume that STs will use it for the most dishonest purposes.

File: At8D.png (2 MB, 816x1056)

2 MB PNG

I noticed something in the At8D book about the East. It feels like the book (and others, come to think of it) has divided the East into two different types. The first is your major locations or strong empire. Here is where you'd find places of importance like Halta, Nechara, Land-Under-Robe and Amaryllis.
Then you've got people, the small tribes outside of these big locations. Things like the Linowan, the people of Fade, the Marame Nation, those crocodile riders.

I'm not sure if I'm just seeing things but I feel like none of the other directions have this level of divide when talking about them.

This is probably dumb, but I'm looking at the rule where 10s count twice and noticing that each die is approximately worth half a success. Could you run the game with just d6s, where 5+ is a success and 6s count twice? It would still equal approximately half a success per die, but would certain aspects of the game fall apart? I ask because it's hard to get nerd dice in my country.

>>92503473
There's sets of charms that result in double 9s, double 8s, and even double 7s. These charms would need some really unconventional retooling to change the dice mechanics.

>>92503303
>Haven't really seen 3e break down in combat when I've outnumbered players in my games. Could you explain this for me?
Being able to initiative farm and unload decisive on a different character breaks the way they assumed 3e's combat would work. Decisive attacks making you hyper, super-duper, incredibly weak to a third party breaks the way they expected combat to work - the intended way that works is that it gives your opponent a chance to catch up after taking a lot of damage, so they can turn the tables if you whiffed your damage roll or whatever. Focus fire to work a target down and out is not intended and is extremely effective in a way that makes the system break. In general, once you get to 2+v1+ there are a bunch of tactics that fuck everything.

>>92503473
Yes, you could run it with d6s working exactly like that. The change is minor and can basically be summed up as having a lower standard deviation on rolls. 3e and Essence get bricked because they're full of dice-manipulating tricks, but 1e and 2e are almost fully functional. The 'almost' is because Sidereals and to a lesser extent Infernals get bricked, because they can change the target number of their rolls down from 7 on the d10, and lowering target number on d6s is obviously worth a lot more. Just not playing those splats means the game functions entirely as normal, and if you do want to play those splats it'd just take some minor homebrew to adjust costs.

Is there a cap on the essence level of Jadeborn? SoFR implies it to be 5 but Alchemicals mentions E5+ Jadeborn.

>>92503632
>Decisive attacks making you hyper, super-duper, incredibly weak to a third party breaks the way they expected combat to work
Seriously? I thought it was to put weight in a character actions.

Since it is common in fiction.

>>92502056
After seeing a video of a Tendie say that there are no good games on Steam/PC, I'm honestly not surprised. I can't tell if these people are genuinely ignorant, argue in bad faith, are paid shills, or a combination of all three (maybe not the paid shill part as some of them are Cirno tier stupid).

I think 5e made some good moves, but threw the baby out with the bathwater.

>>92502564
Oh yea I know. I've met quite a few of them. Not a single has been able to refute me or the issues I have with the systems, besides the "it works fine for us" or "that's just your opinion" fallacies. As if major mathematical issues in Sail or Craft vanish away with one's opinion, or how some people like the Pain Olympics as a matter of opinion.

I'm not angry at these people. Being angry with them is akin to being angry at a blind person for not being able to see. Unlike several others I know, I don't insist on people using my homebrew, but I at least like to warn people of glaring system faults and present them with possible alternatives made either by me or someone else.

>>92501965

I hate Essence's social system. With requiring a certain amount of successes to do something makes it feel game-y. Also virtues make we want to vomit. Resisting is also something that feels its done with kids gloves, but you're not paying for a very important meta resource.

2.5e has a good idea with needing more WP to resist depending on how well someone did, but it still had the issue of 2e: Draining WP which is a critical resource that's hard to regenerate. Paying 1WP to resist is annoying, but socialites can burn through WP quite rapidly.

I adore Ex3's social system regarding virtues, making it feel very organic and true compared to other social systems I've dealt with. The main issues I've had are that the system severely punishes those who don't do research ahead of time (read motivation for intimacies) and if you fail (reset conditions can be annoying at times, especially if you lose read motivation). WP is needed to resist, which is a meta resource that's vital, but the good news is it's cheap to resist and you immediately force someone's social action into a reset condition. The bad news is that it's cheap to resist and forces you into a reset condition.

This is why I made the alternative WP system, something that can let you lose and recover WP very quickly.

>>92501961
The Realm is heading towards collapse. It has not yet collapsed. Most satrapies are still firmly under the Realm's boot, for now.

>>92503466
I didn't get the feeling that 3E's take on the Linowan tribes was supposed to be smaller or weaker than Halta or Land-Under-Robe. I didn't really notice that divide when reading the boo, but sure, it might be the case now that you mentioned it.

>>92504551
>reset conditions can be annoying at times, especially if you lose read motivation
I've never understood why Read Motivation stopped working if you failed the roll. Social actions that target Resolve needing to reset with a changed or escalated argument I understand - the argument you've heard before stops having an effect - but with Read Motivation it's like, oh no, I can't tell if they care, guess I'd better stop trying.

Changing that and making threshold successes translate into extra willpower required in decision points are the first and second houserules I implement for social rules, before anything else.

>>92501727
>I honestly don't know what to say to these people. It's like having the talk about the tooth fairy or Santa Claus to a young kid.
It tends to work out better if your game actually has real playtesting done to it and isn't written like the authors hate the very idea of cohesive mechanics and understand what math is.

>>92504244
The most common tactic in 3e is to identify who isn't geared to fight, hit them for ten million fucking withering, and then insta-kill an actual threat.

>>92505261
Rather than most common, I'd call it most effective. More commonly everybody forgets they can do than and decides to play fair.

>>92504244
That's the idea, yes. The execution didn't take third parties into account; or rather, they thought it would be fine, and it wasn't.

>>92505293
I don't think I have ever once played a fair fight in Exalted. Every edition has been so broken and the game practically tells you to make a DBZ character so you can table flip the setting right from the start.

>>92505343
I think it depends on how strictly you judge a fight to be 'fair'. The games I play aren't usually the kind where anybody actually wants to fight fair as such, either. I've definitely been outnumbered five to one more times than I've been in a 1v1, and even in a 1v1 there's usually some kind of situational or information advantage at play from both sides trying to do prep work.

>>92505261
I've only ever seen that tactic talked about in Internet discussions, never used in an actual game.

>>92505261
>The most common tactic in 3e is to identify who isn't geared to fight, hit them for ten million fucking withering, and then insta-kill an actual threat.
Doesn't seem like that would work if the major threat has powerful defenses, has something powerful defending it, or it can counterattack with clashes and things of that nature.
>>92504244
Yeah, I like that decisive attacks make you vulnerable. My players tend to cover for each other after they decisive to make sure that the other player doesn't get hit while they're trying to build initiative back up.

>>92505545
>Doesn't seem like that would work if the major threat has powerful defenses, has something powerful defending it, or it can counterattack with clashes and things of that nature.
Literally nothing would work on them if you can't hit them in the first place. That isn't an argument that the tactic isn't powerful, it's an argument that sufficiently powerful individuals don't ever lose. Hitting a weakling for initiative just abridges all of the effects you would otherwise need to spend on decisive damage, trying to build up initiative against them, so on and so forth; it's not an instant win, it's a cheap way to skip half the combat system.

>>92505647
The way to handle someone with high defences is to keep trying, and to team up and get those onslaught penalties if possible. Ignoring the big threat to beat up on weaklings - who should be trivial opponents who give no Initiative if they are that weak, anyways - is not a smart strategy.

>>92501965
3e's social system is probably the best RPG social system ever written.

>>92505865
Given that we've already talked about how the plan is to beat on the people who aren't primarily combat specced... that doesn't mean trivial opponents. That means the guys who aren't the primary frontline fighters, sure, but this isn't a setting where you're either a Dawn or you're nothing, and the other people get to count.

Also, onslaught penalties? What world are you playing in if you think anybody with unhittable Defense has onslaught penalties?

>>92505984
>but this isn't a setting where you're either a Dawn or you're nothing
It is if you're playing 3E. In previous editions it's Twilight.

Literally the only thing 3E did right was make Dawn's the best warrior.

I don't know why Essence added virtues or pseudo virtues. I like Essence and all honestly kind of like hard bargains more than I do wp attrition but holy shit WHO ASKED FOR VIRTUES?

I would have been a-okay with it if it was a Solar/Abyssal only feature, like having a charm to declare one of your principles a Virtue or something.

>>92506034
I like them. Honestly, I think it's people who hate 1e/2e Virtues who hate Essence's virtues, rather than people who're approaching them for the first time. I have not had any of the people I introduced to the game through 3e or Essence dislike them, even after moving onto other systems or editions.

>>92506096
Defining Intimacies are just way more customizable and intuitive than how Essence does virtues.

>>92504111
What page in Alchemicals? Because I thought it was 5 too.

>>92506217
118 in the Mecha-Eclipse box.
>Enlightened Jadeborn with Essence 5+ also gain this potential, though they can install only those Charms with a minimum Essence of 3 or less.

>>92506128
Customizable, yes, and once you get used to them they're equally intuitive, but for a new player and especially one who's having trouble building a cohesive character, virtues are an easy way to get themes going and help them build a character. It pulls people out of the box of liking xyz or oaths and honor and starts them thinking about how a character acts, what their strengths and foibles might be. It's also not necessarily worse than 3e's fully customizable Intimacies once you get into it, and the way Essence combines virtues and intimacies gets deep in ways 3e's relatively shallow system of engaging with intimacies doesn't doesn't.

>>92506034
There is some sort of cosmic mandate any edition of Exalted must take two steps back for every half step forward, mechanically.

>>92505984
We're talking about someone with a high Defense, not unhittable one. Forcing the opponent to spend motes on onslaught negators is still better than not doing so, but more importantly, the way to beat high Defense is to just put in as many attacks as you can and rely on at least some of them hitting.

Finally gotten round to begin my reading of AT8D. While as usual it's fucking depressing to see how much boring bureaucratic bullshit 3e loves to drone on about and there is very clearly an effort to make the northern gangs' hardest leaders all women despite them not being Exalted, I actually like Fortitude's fucked up neighbors and the Syndics seemingly being rewritten from kindly but corrupt to outright otherworldly and mysterious.

Lmao at the Bull taking such massive Ls despite having more Solars on his side this time, though.

>>92506262
I don't think they're supposed to be able to, but maybe the author assumed they could hit 6 like Dragon Kings?

>>92507042
Weren't there hypothetical Essence 15 Alchemicals in 1e too?

>>92506989
>While as usual it's fucking depressing to see how much boring bureaucratic bullshit 3e loves to drone on about
I don't really get this complaint considering how write-ups of locations haven't really changed since the full write-ups of places like House of the Bull God, the Dragon-blooded groups in Exalted: The Outcaste, or Bastions of the North in 1e. You'll get the local culture, their government structure, cuisine, gender roles, foreign relations with neighboring city-states and countries, etc. in those books and the Terrestrial Compass books of 2e. Its your right to not like this kind of thing, but I don't really think its proper to single out 3e as being a radical departure from how other setting write-ups have been done.

>>92507042
Well they are supposed to be able to make 5 dot artifacts which is why I was curious. Without charms to reduce the difficulty that requires E7 Jadeborn.

>>92507252
I disagree. I'm too tired to do a paragraph by paragraph breakdown right now but the previous Compass books and the location books from 1e were more interesting than the 3e ones.

I mean there is absolutely nothing in 3e that holds a candle to Creatures of the Wyld and it's goofy shit like Battle-Cat straight up ported from He-Man.

File: sijan.png (1.31 MB, 1503x989)

1.31 MB PNG

>>92507294
I'm really not seeing that much of a difference between an AT8D write-up and things like this.

>>92507300
Looking back at it, I think I'm starting to understand my own revulsion at 3e a little more. Yeah, I think I'm off the mark in terms of WHAT the content is as opposed to HOW it's written.

It's not so much the factual content as...how it's presented? The flow of writing, how things fit together and the addition of minute details feels more natural. Like someone telling me a folk story, instead of cut and dried facts artificially divided and placed next to each other with a strict wordcount in mind. It feels organically developed. Whereas in 3e, when someone's done describing a bureaucracy or whatever they immediately jump to the outskirts of the region.

The pace of writing feels like a trickster fox or mysterious sorcerer could pop out at any minute. Whereas in AT8D it just feels like someone really wanted to talk about bureaucracy and was forced at gunpoint to include the Buried God or the Syndics and tried to avoid talking about them as much as possible-whereas here the writer(s) go into detail about how ghosts cooperate with Sijan's living officials instead of just leaving it numinous. 3e is creating the writing style equivalent of the uncanny valley.

>>92507294
A different anon, but I can't really agree with that. 1E's got the best presentation out of all three editions, but the substance of writeups isn't really different between 1E and 3E. As for 2E, At8D is mostly about the same quality as 2E's Compass books, with a couple of the best At8D wroteups being more interesting than 2E.

>>92507368
Again that's totally fair now I've had some time to actually process what's actually causing the ick factor for me in 3e. Honestly, I just wish Hundred Devils Parade and Adversaries of the Righteous was even half as interesting overall as Creatures of the Wyld.

>>92507368
I mean to some extent the substance of 1e was better because it's mechanics were more coherent and internally balanced prior to Power Combat. Something like Creatures of the Wyld, where creatures can be wild and interesting and powerful but also represented as that mechanically isn't something 3e's pulling off.

>>92507585
>1e's more coherent and internally balanced
>stacked persistents
lol. love how you had to add the "before power combat" now because you had zero clue what it was before since you never read or played 1e.

>>92508425
Stacked persistents were pretty consistent.

>>92506989
While it was a step down compared to the massive amounts of detail we got for a limited selection of locales in 2e, I thought 3e locations were great and were an upgrade over 2e's and even 1e's locales in every way.

>>92509505
>upgrade over 1e's locales
wouldn't go that far. I think most of the north/northeast/northwest/west are very plain jane. I'm glad we have them, if only because 1e had barely anything in those directions.


But seriously, Gapwood?

Do you guys have any cheat sheets for 1e?

>>92509561
The book definitely varies in quality. I found West the weakest part, not just because of the location writeups themselves, but because the writing style in that part struck me as weird and off-putting for some reason. East, Southeast, South and Southwest were pretty great though.

>>92509505
My opinion is, very slowly and very begrudgingly, improving despite still working through the northern sections. I will concede the North feels livelier and more dynamic than ever even if the bar is set only slightly higher than Lunar charm variance from 1e.

Honestly, so far my favourite consistent thing is the detail on local cuisine. It's a small thing and I'm totally going into the opposite end of nogames detail obsession from my usual fixation with Yozis/Primordials, but I do like to see dishes that sound like a culture living in northern climates would reasonably come up with.

>>92510034
I think the dishes stuff is interesting too, but they could serve to cut the wordcount on them at various points.

However, I'd negate that criticism if we got some actual real cookery charms.

>>92510115
>However, I'd negate that criticism if we got some actual real cookery charms.
Craftsman Needs No Tools

File: tumblr_8e70caa3d29cdb4041(...).jpg (300 KB, 1200x675)

300 KB JPG

>>92510556
I meant cooking charms that enhanced it, like the shit you see in MonHun or Genshin. What's the point in knowing about the various nuances of porridge in Clovina when I can't make some magically enhanced recipe of it representing the spirit of the local people?
>make an Exigent of Cooking
NO

>>92511724
They don't do it because potions are too D&D like.

>>92511724
How many dots is regenerating never spoiling loaf of bread artifact?

>>92511754
nta but it's literally just healing potions that they don't do it. the setting has lots of examples of things like drugs that give temporarily enhancement or medicines that cure diseases or poisons. hell, didn't someone a few threads ago point out that a big part of House Cynis' budget goes toward getting reagents necessary for some of their healing Charms? plus the Legion of Silence still continue to take drugs to keep up their bulk. things like a potion or a flame duck roast that give you enhanced mutations or another effect for a scene or day or more is totally within the spirit of the game.

>>92511724
I think magic cooking in Exalted shouldn't give straight bonuses to rolls
Could be a good way to incorporate die tricks or fun effects
Eating certain kinds of magic food makes you more amenable to certain spirits or beings for an amount of time, or drives them away from you
Eating a dish made by your local shaman before going diving let's you hold your breath longer
Wait, this is just Thaumaturgy

>>92511868
You could make it an artifact cook set that gives powers upon eating specific foods. You could make it an exigent charmset but it's a waste.

>>92513343
it could be a thing where it's like a recipe book.

>>92513343
>You could make it an exigent charmset but it's a waste.
Everybody cooks, so there's no reason for it the be an Exigent.

>>92513681
>Everybody cooks
I imagine there are plenty of Lunars who do not believe in cooking..

>>92511868
>Wait, this is just Thaumaturgy
Pretty much, yeah

>>92513937
Why did they change Thaumaturgy for 3E again?
Having small magics more widely accessible was cool

>>92514016
Maybe they thought it was redundant when Exalted have charms and Sorcery.
But I think Traumarurgy could been added in Mortal book.

>>92508425
Power Combat was broke ass garbage and was just 2e rocket tag before 2e was officially announced. The only people who liked it were the morons who knew Jack shit about mechanics in the first place.

>>92514377
What exactly does power combat change?

>>92514377
What WAS power combat anyway? A rewrite?

>>92514016
>>92514116
I don’t think they ever gave a reason, I know early on they wanted to get rid of it along with enlightened mortals, it might’ve been part of the initial push to make the setting less high fantasy but they’ve walked that back since then. Still no rules for it, which annoys me, it very clearly exist in the lore, but even some basic systems would be nice.

>>92513926
They are Lunars, they are chosen from outcastes.

>>92514468
>>92514476
It was essentially 2e Beta printed in the players guide to "fix" 1e combat being very hard to damage characters (and literally impossible to kill Twilights).
Imagine a shittier, less complete version of 2e and that's all it is.

File: __miao_ying_and_prince_im(...).jpg (2.84 MB, 2326x2318)

2.84 MB JPG

>>92497874
It just occurred to me that despite the revolutions Exalted doesn't really have a 'fading of the magic' that you see in settings like LOTR and Dominions.

>>92516297
>fading of the magic
The Solars being locked away and all the exclusive things they brought to the table disappearing or wearing away I think would count

>>92516297
It's overall trending lower yet wider, as the peak gets dragged down for lack of hyper-powerful beings to do it but new bullshit wells up in the gaps and the lower rungs figure out how to do more without them. This is a problem because the wider stuff doesn't really work for defending the boundaries of the cosmology intact, as well demonstrated with irreplaceable First Age treasures being vital to the Realm's defense on multiple occasions.

>>92516297
It sorta does, both the war against the Primrodials and the Usurpation ended with the world lessened from what it was. The world always does rise back up a bit, but it's a minor plot point that it doesn't quite rise up to it's old heights (the Solars made a safer, glorious world, but it wasn't quite as expansive as under the Primordials, the DBs could keep things safe and mostly prosperous, but not to the same level as under the Solars nor keep the former glories, etc). The return of the Solars is noted as something that might break the cycle, but (at least in 1E and 2E), it's sorta implied it's gonna keep getting lessened by default unless the PCs (or the ST's plot) change that

>>92516297
It happened between the first and second ages, and world of darkness magic is far more scarce.
Unless you bring mage, where indoor plumbing is a high form of linear sorcery craft.

>>92516475
It’s actually not, and might in fact be more prevalent. This is one of my eternal pieces of annoyance in how ExWoD is written. Even ignoring Mage, by most objective measures the Fifth Age isn’t noticeably less magical then the Second.

>>92516705
>Even ignoring Mage, by most objective measures the Fifth Age isn’t noticeably less magical then the Second.
There might be vampires in every major city and werecreatures in every major forest but that's a far cry from a god for every tree and road.

>>92516732
That’s kind of the point. The real differences are minute things like the fact most supernaturals have to get Essence through derivative forms, or aesthetic details about the spirit worlds. All the actually important metrics like the power ceiling of supernatural beings, the power and frequency of magic items, the demographics of supernatural beings, and so on are the same or trend WoD [mainly due to wider publishing history].

>>92516780
Fundamentally I cannot possibly agree. The gods are not just "aesthetic details", they are agents with power and they are everywhere.

>>92516475
World of Darkness canonically isn't the setting's future anymore tho

>>92516797
The spirit worlds in Exalted is composed of Yu Shan, Malfeas, the Wyld and the Underworld. In World of Darkness it’s the High Umbra, Middle Umbra, Low Umbra and the Dreaming. The population of both taken in aggregate is the same, ranging from billions to infinite depending on how loosely you define the word ‘population’. Their geographic extent likewise ranges from big to infinity depending on how pedantic you’re being. That of WoD is certainly more varied and expansive due to having far more books. The spiritual forces in Exalted are certainly more active, but that isn’t what I’m talking about. Creation is obviously much more fantastic a place then WoD Earth. But if you compare the entire cosmologies and compare the actual power and frequency of magic, it’s really not that different.

>>92516297
From that exalted thread in the OP

>The thing I liked most about Creation (and which has been increasingly de-emphasized as time went on) was the contrast between the fact that the world is, despite all its fantastic elements, really a very low-power world.

>Most of the setting is in the bronze age. Most of the people in it are farmers. There is trade and war, slavery and tribute, plague and drought and pestilence. Your average joe in Creation is more worried about the weather than he is about the disappearance of the Scarlet Empress because if the crops fail he starves, but the Realm is... some place... far way, that maybe the wandering immaculate who came through two season ago talked about briefly.

>The world of Creation is one that is very small and very huge at the same time. Very small because for something like 90% of the population the world consist of the things within a weeks walk of where he grew up. Very huge because you hear vague, contradictory rumors about fantastic things happening... somewhere else.

>Sure they know gods are real, but gods are just folks. Powerful folks, maybe a little weird but just folks. You sacrifice a lamb to the grain god in the spring and to the snow god in the winter, but its just like paying taxes. No big deal. Maybe you complain about it, but hey, whatya gonna do?

>And then layered on top of this world we have the Exalted and all the associated stuff. Vast sorceries, epic feats, heroic deeds... all fighting over this world of subsistence farmers and trade cities who think aqueducts and bronze swords are big fucking deals.

>It was the contrast that appealed to me. The sheer mundanity of Creation. How much everything made sense. Like if you swept all the Exalts and associated riff-raff away the world wouldn't even notice.

>>92516732
>from a god for every tree and road
I mean, IIRC, both Changling (in nWoD) and Werewolf (in oWoD) imply there are

File: 1508827327396.jpg (694 KB, 1629x1118)

694 KB JPG

>>92516343
Eh, the Solars are back though, that's the thing. Exalted isn't a world where the magic goes away, it just turns into different magic. That's why you'll never see an "Age of Mortals/Age of Man" like you see in other settings, the magic would have to fade for mortal-kind to ever take power and that's never going to happen.

>>92516857
The Penumbra has less spirits than the immaterial state in Exalted but it’s not really a noticeable difference since Werewolf has like twenty times the number of realms that Exalted does to make the difference up.

>>92516854
Low power and mundane is the wrong word but I also like this. It’s the fact Creation has an identity and logic to it and detailed political, religious and economic realities beyond the godlike forces at work in it. Without this grounding too many godlike games feel drab. There’s nothing upon which to work power. It’s pure creativity and therefore less interesting. Using power up manipulate a structure that exists I thought your power is much more interesting.

>>92516938
I absolutely agree with it. The verisimilitude of creation and the sense written into the setting makes a lot of it work and feel appealing.

>>92516938
This. It's the combination of insane shit like a cosmic construct in which galaxies are born in seconds and die out in minutes coexisting with the Halta-Linowan conflict that makes the setting more engaging than, say, D&D where every now and then gods fuck up and the edition resets but nothing ever really changes about civilisation.

>>92516877
Exalted isn't a typical western story where everything calms down at the end, it takes after eastern mythologies as well. While Jesus won't be back until the end of days, there can always be another avatar of Vishnu.

>>92517004
>cosmic construct in which galaxies are born in seconds and die out in minutes

What is this a reference to?

>>92517079
The Daystar's writeup in Ink Monkeys. Love that shit being right next to reindeer harvests, wish 3e didn't kill the former so much because I do believe the key to Exalted is for there to be a balance between gonzo and mundane, and right now the balance is tipped way too far towards mundane.

>>92517075
Hinduism as the kalpas, and there was generations of prophets before Jesus.

>>92517233
To be fair, in Exalted terms the prophets were thaumaturgy-practicing mortals at worst or Lintha-analogues at best while Jesus was the actual Exalt.

>>92517233
I think you mean the yugas. Like, yeah, the kali yuga is a shit deal compared to the satya yuga, but it's all cyclical anyway, the end of kali is the beginning of satya. Kalpas are merely the measurement of the lifespan of gods.

>>92517374
Christianity really doesn't slot into Exalted analogies.

>>92517403
Samson and a bunch of random Israelites from 2 Samuel were clearly engaging in mass combat.

File: 1694704255621190.jpg (205 KB, 1024x1022)

205 KB JPG

>>92517475
Exalted doesn't really "do" omnipotence. Or objective morality.

>>92517496
Something something iron chariots something foreskin

Is there a more structured list of all sidereal charms anywhere? Like an XML file, or database? I'm coding up a program to randomly generate a sidereal NPC but I'm not feeling up to the task of mindlessly typing in every charm they have.

>>92517681
I remember there's some old 2E character maker tool that has all the charms in XML files, think it's Ed's Exalted tools or something? Don't know about 1E or 3E though

>>92517092
I prefer 3e's return to what I liked about early 1e. The latter parts of 1e and 2e really alienated me from the setting because it got so silly and divorced from the mundane.

>>92516405
Incorrect on the not as expansive part. Creation was 4x bigger under Solar rule because they aggressively expanded it. C7rrent Creation is it's original size.

>>92517753
The size it was after the Spheres Cataclysm, I think

>>92517750
I'm the exact opposite, I would've never gotten into Exalted if it wasn't for those parts and people like you confuse me because it sounds like you're playing a totally different game.

>>92517753
The Three Spheres Cataclysm took out roughly 90% of Creation on a conceptual level, the stuff that got deleted can't be remade, and as the other anon noted, the Solars only made creation four times as bigger as it was post Cataclysm, it still never got to the size it was during the Primordial's reign

>>92517849
Same, I got into Exalted cause it had over the top gonzo shit side by side with mundane consequences. There are half a dozen D&D clones that do the early 1E and 3E tone far better, if I want to play a game like that I'd pull one of them out

>>92517750
Reminder that the locust crusade was in one of the first few books, and Authoctonia was originally planned to be in the core

>>92501965
If I'm being real, I have a little trouble understanding how the Essence system works.

So if I'm reading it correctly you count up EVERY relevant intimacy/virtue and get +/-2 (minor) or +/-3 (major) Resolve for each one. So if I have the minor intimacies: Anathema (disgust), House Tepet (Loyalty), The Empress (Devotion), Immaculate Philosophy (piety) and Badass Swordsmen (awe) and a cool Dawn Caste tries to convince me to join him after beating me in a duel I add +8, and -2 for a net of +6 to my say, base Resolve of 9. Beating that lets them convince me to do something minor for them, but not life-changing like actually joining them. For that they need to buy Persuade two more times, and since the Resolve modifier is positive, it applies to each additional persuade (since they cost 2 successes at base, it's 8 total per extra persuade for a total of 25 successes to just immediately flip me into a traitor).

I get how, with no Decision Point mechanic, it's helpful for intimacies to stack, but this feels like it encourages a laundry list of intimacies. Like, one for each circle mate, one for your circle overall, one that says circle-betrayers are scum, etc etc and it all feels excessive.

File: 1590039183256.png (249 KB, 713x767)

249 KB PNG

>>92518089
I don't really think that Autochthonia as presented in Times of Tumult really irritated me. It's high tech, but its very grounded in its endless resource scarcity, its focus on mortal society, and the level of tech available to the Autochthonians in general. Compare the equipment loadout of your standard Yugashite soldier in ToT to what the ashigaru in The Outcaste book are rocking two years down the line; the former has a leather buff jacket that's about the same as your standard Creation-born leather buff jacket and this crazy advanced thing called a "crossbow", and the latter is wearing First Age stealth suits with rebreathers and has an electrified artifact pike that can shoot a lightning bolt out to 50 yards.

I recall a quote from Holden during the production of 3e saying that 2e took Malfeas, this intimidating and unearthly being that encompassed an entire universe unto himself, and made him into something resembling one of those Homestuck trolls and that really sums up why I didn't like 2e at all. I don't agree with everything Holden says at all (his design choices for 3e core were astonishingly bad), but I really do think that he was right in regards to how 2e went so far away from what was good about the first edition and landed into very teenaged schlock.

Also, this is super petty but gonzo is such a silly word, it makes me think of that funny muppet instead of anything cool.

>>92518342
By the nature of the 3rd circles, the primordial couldn't be "companies", they must have personhood.

Mythology is full of impossible huge esoteric beings who have lesser aspects, but they are still persons.

>>92518342
I feel like 1e Yozis were too ill-defined to be interacted with in any meaningful way. Especially because they had that classic White Wolf "You Lose" energy attached to them. I also really don't get the Homestuck comparison.

>>92518342
>and unearthly being that encompassed an entire universe unto himself, and made him into something resembling one of those Homestuck trolls
I am going to need someone to explain that comparison to me, because I really do not get that impression at all unless the beginning and end of it is that both are capable of anger.

>this is super petty but gonzo is such a silly word, it makes me think of that funny muppet instead of anything cool.
Ironically, from what I can tell Gonzo the Muppet, and gonzo as a term to describe a genre, both arised independently on the same year.

>>92518558
>>92518517
He’s misquoting. Holden compared him to a particular Homestuck character with nuclear fire and green sun powers. Holden was lamenting Malfeas going from a creepy talking city to essentially a a Boss Enemy.

>>92518427
>By the nature of the 3rd circles, the primordial couldn't be "companies", they must have personhood
Yeah, this is where the argument they should not have personalities falls apart from me as well, their relationship with their 3CDs means they are going to have any personality/personhood, if only via the implication of what each represents. There is an argument to be made they should only exist by said implication I’ll admit, but to argue they shouldn’t exist is at odds with the lore on what their subsouls are and how other characters (the Incarna and Exalted) have been said to interact with them

File: quote.png (183 KB, 855x724)

183 KB PNG

>>92518427
The Yozis have observable traits and personalities in 1e; they're not incomprehensible Lovecraftian outer gods or anything like that. Its just that 2e reduced them and made them silly by making these personalities very cartoonish in their villainy.
>>92518517
>I feel like 1e Yozis were too ill-defined to be interacted with in any meaningful way
You are interacting with them; everything in Hell is them. You're just not interacting with their over-soul. Another thing in that Holden quote was that the Yozis came to overshadow their demons, which got much longer write-ups than their creators because obviously they're far more important to players and GMs than that which is largely beyond the capability of the system to even model.
>>92518571
>Holden compared him to a particular Homestuck character with nuclear fire and green sun powers
I'm not seeing any green sun powers on the Homestuck wiki page for Karkat, the character in question, so I'm guessing its in relation to his personality.

File: 1712884711094078.jpg (40 KB, 342x298)

40 KB JPG

>>92518669
>Yeah, this is where the argument they should not have personalities falls apart from me as well
Also I'm a little annoyed that people ITT read what I posted as "they should not have personalities" instead of "they should not be silly cartoon characters".

>>92518673
>than that which is largely beyond the capability of the system to even model.

Beyond the capability of the writers. Not the systems. It’s the typical White Wolf You Lose bullshit of not wanting to give their settings ceilings.

>>92518673
>You are interacting with them; everything in Hell is them. You're just not interacting with their over-soul. Another thing in that Holden quote was that the Yozis came to overshadow their demons, which got much longer write-ups than their creators because obviously they're far more important to players and GMs than that which is largely beyond the capability of the system to even model.
I definitely hate when the Yozis come off as too human. They should barely be able to interact with people on an interpersonal level and think people focus too much on them as people, but I still prefer 2e Yozis..

>>92518571
Ah, a bit more fair as Shards had a blatant shoutout to him in one of the incarnations of Malfeas
Only, it's not, as in Homestuck it was repeatedly shown treating him as a boss monster to fight instead of a walking avatar of soul killing armageddon to flee or cower in fear of was a bad, BAD idea that on multiple occasions got several major, named characters killed in a way they couldn't come back, and even after breaking the setting's rules repeatedly the only victory the surviving MCs managed to achieve was fleeing to a universe where the light of the Green Sun hopefully wouldn't reach for a long, LONG time
So yeah, the example Holden used is probably the perfect example of why treating Malfeas as a boss to defeat is a horrible idea

>>92518673
He's talking Lord English

>>92518695
Can't speak for other people, but I've never actually seen anyone on the "2E went too far with making them people" side explain how they want from them other than "Not something the PCs can interact with" or "Not something with a personality that could be understood by humans" (which given the ST and players are humans, is functionally the same thing as no personality) so I just assumed
That said, how would you prefer them to be?

>>92518673
>>92518571
>>92518844 again, nevermind, he is talking Karkat, typed everything up and only after read >>92518673's pic
That's, uh, not an interpretation of Malfeas I've seen in play or in the fandom, ever
Also makes me think he's never read Homestuck as that doesn't really describe Karkat at all

File: 1713254863970549.png (227 KB, 408x400)

227 KB PNG

>>92517403
This.

>>92516938
At its best yeah. As long as the details are interesting, not just wordswordswords. One goal I have in mind is a brief list of dishes and/or artworks native to each region in their writeups if I ever get my homebrew off the ground, with listed difficulties and effects for making each, with or without magic, and how certain ingredients effect them.

Like for a Himalayas based area I plan on having the cooking start with difficulty 1 crisp, fresh vegetable salad, difficulty 2 simple mountain berry gin, difficulty 3 crisp lager, up to difficulty 4 or so whole Yak head smoked with its mouth full of carefully chosen herbs, with the details being in where the herbs came from, what the yak ate, the wood it's smoked in etc.

>>92518673
>>92518734
I still consider their refusal to stat 3CDs as them being cowards
That said, I actually think existing almost wholly as a charm tree is the perfect level of stating up for a Yozi. Like existing as a collection of thematically linked powers, lore, and subbeings, with any physical body being one of said subbeings doing their own thing or a manifestation of one of their powers is pretty much how I always thought they should be

>>92518673
It forever amuses me that "Infernals were too good across the board" is a quote from the devs.

>>92519152
I just want final answers on how exactly they themselves fight, on if the Primordials themselves are mechanically environments or giant monsters and either way how they work.

>>92519224
> if the Primordials themselves are mechanically environments or giant monsters and either way how they work
My headcanon would have me say both... usually
I personally think a fight between or against Primordials would/should be a clash of terraforming charms/world joutens, monster joutens, subsouls, and regular charms. BUT not all of them have terraforming charms, world joutens, or giant monster style joutens, they all have subsouls and regular charms though
Mechanically I'd model it as terraforming charms causing environmental effects, with world joutens being more powerful charm style effects on top of those that can either be negligible or obscene depending on who you're facing, monster joutens being giant monsters with obscene stats and abilities (though again, what they are depends on who you're facing), subsouls/demons are as they are. All with joutens (and occasionally subsouls) tossing about the Primordials' regular charms which have their own effects and weird clauses depending on the Primordials
>Tl:dr, expect both a hostile environment, giant monsters, an army of smaller monsters, AND charm spam if you fight one, but each Primordial means a different degree and powers of each

>>92519152
I liked the Yozis being made of Charms too, but I dislike how people used that to simplify them down into weird robots.

>>92519307
That's how I figure it would be too. It'd be cool to see.

>>92519307
I did an outline awhile ago with the Primordial worldforms having two 'modes'. Genius Loci where they were places and therefore couldn't take actions except producing environmental hazards and Jouten where they were planet-sized statted enemies, with strict conditions under which they can change. Cosmic Exalted from Space has been selling me on the idea of worldform jouten not working quite right in Creation proper also though I've not put together how exactly I'd do it.

>>92518844
>That said, how would you prefer them to be?
They are forces of nature whose personalities are observable in the actions of their descendant demons and the broad physical changes in their observable bodies. You don't learn that Malfeas is bitter and eternally spiteful against the Exalted through him showing up and screaming at your Solar in joutenform, you learn that because Ligier and his other Third Circle souls enact plots that hurt and enslave Exalted to their will. Cecelyne's fixation on might makes right shouldn't be a legal code written by her directly but something imagined and enforced by her higher souls onto her lowest souls and the lowest souls of other Yozis. Adorjan's hatred of sound can be determined through the simple fact that quiet districts keep being slaughtered by her and loud districts are (mostly) avoided.

Also, I'm not sure what anyone means by the Yozis being usable. To my understanding, you are using them the second you step foot onto Cecelyne the Desert and cross into Malfeas the Demon City after five days of walking, you're using them when you get stuck in Szoreny the Quicksilver Forest, you're using them when you pay an agata to fly you somewhere else in the city, and you're using them when your Solar sorcerer draws forth Lucien to use him as a tracker. I'm not sure why direct communication needs to be a factor for them to be usable.

>>92519335
>I liked the Yozis being made of Charms too, but I dislike how people used that to simplify them down into weird robots.
If you're referring to the ability of Infernals to 'reprogram' them, I actually like the idea of creating new charms for them potentially causing them to change, but I also consider them very much the sum of their parts, if not more. There's more to them than just the charms and you can only add stuff, not remove things, so it's more pointing out a different option rather than reprograming them.
If you mean simplifying them down to just the charms or the like, well, they're more than just their charms, and I consider that more a reading comprehension or failure of the lore to explain things issue personally

>>92519346
I think I remember you posting that, it was neat, but I also felt like it's a bit too restricting, I mean, there are examples in the lore of Malfeas making directed attacks that aren't simply environmental hazards with his world body such as using a directed beam of his essence to snipe a Solar, though that could very easily be a charm application rather than an environmental effect

>>92519410
The second one. I like the Charm expansion stuff too.

>>92519374
>You don't learn...
Okay, this may be where my confusion comes from, cause that is pretty much how they're described in 2E as far as I, my group, and most other fans of 2E's version of them I've talked with understand?
There's a handful of exceptions (mostly the Isidoros, TED, and Adorjan) true, but those are noted in the lore as exceptions, and for the most part are still treated as giant natural disasters in the form of a giant black hole boar that mostly interacts with the world by crushing it or something that's going to murder you, and everything for several miles around you regardless if it looks like a red wind or a human female.
But yeah, when I hear someone say they shouldn't be like in 2E, it doesn't come off as 'The Brass Dancer shouldn't show up and scream at you', it comes off as 'Malfeas's opinion shouldn't be known cause he's a big, dumb, unthinking city and you are having badwrongfun if you present him as anything else'

>Also, I'm not sure what anyone means by the Yozis being usable...
In my experience? They mean things like defining Cecelyne's personality so you can define what sort of offering your PC can make to try and curry her favor for an uneventful crossing to use your example of crossing the her desert as well as knowing what may piss her off. There's no risk in deferring to someone weaker than you on moral grounds in a regular desert after all, but it might run the risk of kicking up a sandstorm in Cecelyne
Basically, by giving them a personality you can treat the environment as a character, one that probably won't directly notice the PCs unless they do something major (and likely extremely ill advised) but it's still something that can react to the PCs and more importantly, the PCs can interact with

>>92518695
Plenty of God's in mythology are silly ass motherfuckers, both in looks and personality.

>>92516877
So long as the fey exist and 2CD's can be summoned through gaps in hell (no matter how tiny) I don't see how mortals can survive on their own

>>92519224
I would say it depends on the primordial. Lunar Charms once referenced diving into the ocean body of a primordial to fight her heart, for example.

>>92519374
>>92519596 again, to be more specific on my first part, I mean how you described how they should be is how everyone I know interprets them
Had to trim a lot of my post down to fit in the post limit, and realize it might've been lost

>>92513926
there was a post once about the different sorts of cooking charms an Exalt could have, and the idea for Lunars was actually pretty fitting and badass ngl.

Not accusing anyone in this thread in particular of this, but in other parts of the fandom I see the sentiment often of "You should only be able to communicate to a Yozi through their souls, and if they speak to you, it's as impulses and not words" and I'm not sure what to think about that. Good 3CDs have use unrelated to their Yozi, like I'd want to speak to Orabillis about forbidden knowledge more than I would Cecelyne, or about Crafting to Ligier more than I would Malfeas. I always thought it was fairly unique, coming from WoD, that you could actually just meet a Yozi in a place. It was both sad, silly, tragic and utterly novel.

>>92520362
Yeah that idea is retarded. You can talk to the Titans.

>>92517681
>>92517749
2e (and I think an older 1e version existed) had Anathema chargen tool

>>92520362
Yeah that idea is retarded. You can't talk to the Titans.

>>92521148
>>92520415
whose right?

>>92521714
skub

File: __hoplite_original_drawn_(...).jpg (336 KB, 1578x1903)

336 KB JPG

>>92519659
Yeah, Exalted is very much written with an eastern POV in mind where the rulers were assumed to be divine.

>>92521763
>rulers were assumed to be divine.
This isn’t just an eastern thing, divine bloodlines existed around the globe.

last thread there was some talk that there aren't a lot of webcomics or stories coming out of the Exalted fandom.
Well I'll throw this question out there: what kind of story would you like to see? What type of characters would you like to see? What location?

>>92497874
Weekly Update
>Layout
Sidereals – Art approved. Starting layout
Essence Charm Cards – Progressing with Dixie
Exigents Screen
Essence Jumpstart – Getting Travis the paragraph styles for Essence stats
>Press
Essence – Printing
Essence Screen – At Studio 2
Exigents – Inputting XXs and index… then out putting PoD/Press files
bit of a dead week, probably because all the freelancers were doing taxes. exigents probably closer to june than may, maybe around the same time the printed shit gets going

File: 1687780346155396.png (543 KB, 959x960)

543 KB PNG

>>92522164
If you're seriously asking...

>A Realm High School, shenanigans aplenty - exchange students from Prasad, rivalries with other schools, looming politics, familial drama, can lead into a larger overarching plot
or
>A Sidereal and his/her mentor going around exploring different parts of the setting and nudging destiny in various ways. A great way to show all of the Exalted world's personages.

>>92522274
>Exigents – Inputting XXs and index… then out putting PoD/Press files
How long does this take? There are no hype links?

>>92522666
they can finish in weeks or drag their ass for a month or so, which they seem to be doing now. after this process is done, they get PoD proofs, upload the files to the store, and then it's available. it won't be next week because for years the last week of the month sees a "tasty bit" release, a small bit of 10- page content. i think the revised ashcan for At the Gates and the final of The Hedge will come out before exigents does, and possibly Trinity Continuum: Aether and Scion: God as well, and another tasty bit if it drags to july

Does 3e have errata? Do the core rules need errata? Is there anything I should know before running it?

>>92526168
there is a loose compilation of dev responses to questions that you can find in the op. you should know that people will bitch about the rules no matter what, so just go with what you personally find comfortable and understand

File: 1429668641533.jpg (332 KB, 780x2000)

332 KB JPG

>>92526168
>Does 3e have errata
basically nonexistant aside from small stuff littered across following books
>Do the core rules need errata
yes
>Is there anything I should know before running it
don't

>>92526168
>Does 3e have errata?
There is no official errata cause of management mandate and/or the devs not wanting to put in extra unpaid work depending on who you ask, there is an unofficial one in the OP though

>Do the core rules need errata?
Yes, there are a number of very blatant rules fuckups, any book that mentions 'alternate rules' is basically an attempt to provide a stealth errata that can hammer things into a more workable form

>Is there anything I should know before running it?
Get ready to homebrew stuff and/or check out a different edition as most of them are still fucked up, but in more functional ways

>>92526168
There are several homebrews you can use. Personally, I like sandact's but his rewrites a lot.

File: Forced_Laughter.png (151 KB, 474x311)

151 KB PNG

>>92526168
>Do the core rules need errata?

>>92529330
>>92528889
>>92526558
>>92526334
>>92526328
I'm glad that there's consensus on the game being broken and every edition has major issues. As someone coming from Shadowrun I feel right at home.

>>92498474
Any fuckbattles?

>>92506019
>at chargen
After you get some XP under your belt it all levels out

>>92529984
Has Shadownrun fixed the issue of 6e being complete shit or are they still having issues getting any decent writer to touch the series after it refused to pay writers.

>>92531706
Are you claiming that the Twilight anima power didn't make them better at combat at high XP in 2e, in comparison to other castes?

Or that in 3e Dawns are only better at chargen and high XP Twilights and Dawns are equally good at fighting?

These both sound asinine but idk what you actually mean.

>>92531968
The latter. Supernal just gets you to the peak of fighting sooner, but once you can naturally qualify for shit it's pointless. And non-Dawns get much more versatility to make up for not being able to stampede to ABV.

>>92531887
>any modern RPG company except the Unknown Armies guy, who dropped a mechanically decent new edition where the worst I can say about it is that it’s a little tame and I actually miss the schizo conspiracies and lite Godwalker politics, and then quietly bounced
>fixing anything
Say what you like about Onyx Path but at least it’s not trying to use Pinkerton legbreakers.

Honestly I feel like Dawns are boring, they should have just distributed all the fighting abilities around the castes like how Dragon-blooded Aspect abilities are allocated so that players don't get stuck playing a guy with 20 melee charms and no social charms.

>>92532540
They should just remove Castes, let players freely choose theor Abilities and Supernal, and maybe have some kind of a build-your-own-anima-power system.

>>92532609
I'm fine with castes but I do want ability restrictions to be removed in favor of something akin to 3e Sids' House charms, where you can buy things that lean into your caste's overall themes.

>>92532540
Yet another example of something ExWoD did better.

>>92532854
I think Essence also does something similar.

>>92533272
Essence just doesn't have Caste abilities.

>>92532540
I think the idea of the Dawn is good and interesting - certainly there are a lot of players interested in playing it, and the idea of a hero who fights is powerful - but I agree that having the main combat abilities artificially limited only to one caste feels mediocre. I only feel like it's artificially limited in that way in 3e though, because it's the edition where you've got the larger selection of caste abilities to pick through, and Zenith felt like it should have Brawl, and Night always feels like it should have Thrown at least, maybe even Archery. In 1e and 2e it feels pretty natural because caste abilities don't give you anything beyond what Favored does, but in 3e Supernal matters. Demake and ExWoD kind of feel this way to me as well, because they get bonuses to caste abilities that aren't replicated by charms / experience - if you're playing a caste with no combat abilities it feels kind of bad, like you're taking the hard stance that you aren't built for combat from step one and are committing to never stepping off that path. It's actually Sidereals in ExWoD that make that feeling clearest to me, since Journeys, Battles, and Endings have combat abilities while Serenities and Secrets don't.

>>92532455
Because they're too fucking cheap for it

>>92522164
Solar Brawler/MAist doing his best to Kenshiro the living shit out of everyone with hotblooded shonen power. The actual, true soul of Exalted.

>>92530656
Yes.

Mostly because it's a long running ERP game. And I mean long running. No, longer than that. Ancient.

>>92532251
What you're actually missing here is that it doesn't even out. You start out amazing at something, and then you further increase your power by grabbing things to further cement your absolute superiority.

A 500EXP Dawn is going to be 500EXP of "Kill everything that exists". A 500EXP Twilight, isn't. Because they will expected to have devoted some margin of that to Twilight things. Which include skills that aren't about outright murdering anything or surviving reality collapsing on your face without a scratch.

File: 1587603907181.jpg (349 KB, 1248x1600)

349 KB JPG

I've been running a No Moon, Twilight and Daybreak game and decided to bite the bullet and make Sorcery/Necromancy the same thing just to see what happens.
Here are some observations

>Daybreak are less inclined to use magical abilities based on healing anyway because of Chivalry of Death, but have the option to use it and incur Limit
>Twilight doesn't have the same restriction toward using undead and necromancy themed spells, however doesn't have the tech to really take a lot of advantage of it
>Daybreak does meanwhile
>No Moon is the MOST willing to mix and match spells that used to be Necromancy and Sorcery together creating their own unique aesthetic that's something like a shadow-party-host
>All three of their build styles are still fairly distinct from one another, but still mostly adhered to their Exalt type just because of the charms they had to combo with summons/spells
>The lack of distinction between Necromancy and Sorcery ended up being a pretty good piece of world building, since it potentially made every other sorcerer they encountered their own magical deviant.

I think the only thing that was innately reduced was that Necromancy is meant to have some sacrifice bonuses to workings, but that's mostly because I removed that. I might actually see if I can add back in next session, since it can still work with a lot of sorcery coded workings. Anyone else tried something like this?

>>92534506
where do I sign up?

>>92534527
You don't need 500XP to "kill everything that exists", though. Meanwhile the Twilight can still take shit like Lore (lol Flowing Mind Prana, Awaken the Sleeper, Dogstar Rumination), Craft (lol crafting), etc. The Solar can too, but at the high XP levels your shitkilling abilities / basic competencies is filled out and the rest is just whatever you want like chainbinding Legendary Form spirits and so on, which is something Twilights can actually do.

>>92534721
>You don't need 500XP to "kill everything that exists", though.
In a world where the mechanics are taken to their logical conclusions you probably do. 3e allows full custom charm creation, which means any character is theoretically capable of just homebrewing more and more bread and butter dicetrick bullshit. In a world where everybody have an equal 500 XP and run on the same ruleset, the characters investing 500XP in killing everything that exists kill everybody else if it comes down to an honest fight.

There are counters to honest combat, though. Just as a combat character can get better and better at combat indefinitely, exceeding the printed charmset by far, so can every other character. There is always another bullshit spell specifically made to target unusual ability+attribute combinations to shut down overspecialised characters. If a hypothetical Goku appeared in the world of 1e/2e, he would be stunlocked for approximately fifteen years by some random DB sorcerer casting Paralysing Contradiction within line of sight, requiring him to pass Difficulty 5+ Intelligence+Lore checks until he accrues enough threshold successes to solve the riddle. Similar spells can be developed in 3e, and Charms play the same game, or just be bullshit in ways that honorable combat doesn't beat. We have the ability to scry confirmed in 3e now with Visions of the Dead, which means it's entirely possible some sorcerer can be fortressed up in his infinitely deep pocket dimension manse, The Tower of Eternity, sending out minions to collect your leavings until he has an arcane link to huck lightning bolts down.

Exalted, even 3e, has the mechanics to run proper high fantasy fighting. It's just the setting that's saying people don't do that.

>>92534506
Heh. I with some friends are preparing for ERP in Shogunate era as Young upcoming warlords during equivalent of Sengoku Jidai.

>>92534568
I like Sorcery and Necromancy being different for fluff reasons, but Lunars being good at mixing them together makes a lot of sense and I bet that could be explored with Charms.

>>92534568
>Anyone else tried something like this?
Yes. I went a step further and folded astrology into sorcery too, and gave Sidereals astrology-only third circle access that could have spells that messed with the weather or fate/fortune (Rain of Doom counted). Mostly it just opened up astrological workings as an idea though.

It works. It's better than having everything split into it's own submechanic with replicated rules. I had a Lunar go pretty hard on both necromancy and astrology since they were folded in and they still ended up as a territorial swampy blood witch rather than anything that seemed Abyssal-coded or Sidereal-like.

>>92536102
I was thinking of astrology as charms but I don't know if I'd fold them in together with spells. Anything is better than what 3e did which is just lazy as fuck.

>>92534695
You don't.

>>92534721
If you think there is no difference in combat ability between a 500 exp Dawn going all in since the start and a Twilight, you are functionally retarded.

>>92533975
i doubt rich would union bust even if he could, he's just a dope who won't shell out enough for what the projects need and won't stop accepting every commission that comes to his door: he's miserly and short sighted, not an out and out corpo

>>92499243
This guy >>92497290 is exaggerating things a little.
There's a variety of cases where DBloods don't think Celestials are Anathema or intrinsically evil demons.
For one are all the VIPs who interact with Sidereals. Mnemon states that Kejak ended up telling her part of the truth because she asked the Empress why they didn't kill the Sidereals.
Another water aspect bureaucrat says he figured out that the immaculate faith was fake when he stumbled upon some forbidden documents from before the usurpation.
A lot of spirits were around before the usurpation, and those in the threshold don't have much incentive to support a religion that sucks off the DBloods.
And you could just have an attack of conscience from killing a kiddie exalt like that one-eyed fire aspect.
tldr DBloods can find out Celestials aren't demons.

>>92497874
How much skill does each dot in a skill represent?
My assumption is that 1 dot = you're above average/have training in that skill, 3 dots = peak human ability, and 5 dots = you're better than almost everyone else in Creation.

>>92540358
I've always seen it as 1 as amateur, 2 as competent, 3 as experienced, 4 as master, and 5 as grand master

>>92497874
>TQ encounters with Dynasts

I ran a couple 1e DragonBlooded games. The DB core book fleshed out The Realm very well.

I had no problem spinning stories or social scenarios. I look forward to running another

>>92540358
Book has laid it out each time between editors.

No dots is untrained. 1 is amateur, 2 is standard trained individual, 3 is an elite in their field, 4 is an Olympian level athlete or top of their field scientist, and 5 is once in a generation wunderkind.

I've always wondered, does Exalted have any qt goddesses whether in Creation or Yu-Shan?

>>92542283
Luna literally has Appearance 15.

>>92535324
If there's full custom Charm creation then nonDawns can just homebrew some Charm to support their combat competencies like Panoptic Fusion Discipline or Heart-Stopping Mien or whatever, while still having access to their core ability niche.

If we go by canon Charms alone, then multiple Abilities will not advance your competency in your main schtick for the most part (some things like Thunderclap Rush are explicitly compatible with multiple Abilities, etc. but most are redundant). So your advantage is mainly versatility (which is forced on you because 500xp will buy out any one Charm tree), but the more balanced nonDawn had that already.

But the real problem is that war and combat is simply a tool to solve problems just like social skills, Investigation and so on are, and too much of any one approach makes the game boring. In that respect, Dawns and their redundant skillset have a harder time diversifying.

>>92543544
The devs didn't notice that the players have to pay experience points for Charms.

I think it is one of the reasons for why 1e Lunars had such a screwed charmset.

>>92543648
What do you mean by this?

>>92543648
Lunars weren't supposed to be NPCs.

What are the restrictions on having mortal acquaintances for Sids?
If you can't directly lead countries, can you still create organizations that help you? Or have some mortal fetch coffee for you in Yu-Shan?
My Sid is a chosen of battles, he wants to form a border patrol army on the threshold to fight raksha, lunars and other shit from the border marches. He wasn't actually ordered to do anything like this, it's mostly a personal motivation because he exalted during a raksha raid.

>>92543844
The only restriction is arcane fate. If you aren't in a resplendent destiny you lose all your shit.

>>92543688
They don't really know how to make a generalists.
>Dawns are the masters of all forms of combat!!!
>PCs Dawns have to pay experience for each individual mastery.
>Other castes will just invest in the one they will use.

>>92543788
They were made to be PCs, their entire existence boils down to be a garou port..

>>92543940
>They were made to be PCs, their entire existence boils down to be a garou port..
And a poor one at that, they are the whole Fera splatline blended into a homogenous paste.

File: r20e.jpg (91 KB, 773x875)

91 KB JPG

plz

File: 1484308821522.jpg (714 KB, 1706x2560)

714 KB JPG

>>92540358
0 Untrained
1 Amateur
2 Professional
3 Elite
4 Master
5 The Hidden Grandmaster Living In The Mountains

So I accidentally bought the 1e Fair Folk book instead of the 2e one, but it's pretty dang cool so far. Did they keep the staff/ring/cup/sword combat in 2e or did that go the way of the thylacine?

>>92544578
The 2e fair folk book is completely unusable.

>>92544578
>>92544775
From what I understand the 2E version is one of those "If you and every member of your group can wrap your heads around it, it's good, otherwise, you'll just be confused if you try to use it" books

>>92544854
no. it's completely bullshit. You know we have all the 1e and 2e books you don't have to buy anything unless you have free money to spend.

>>92542283
You've always wondered that, but never quite enough to read the good and see whether there are any qt goddesses?

>>92544169
Just run it, bro. I've run several games of Exalted for my group because I determined that I wasn't going to get any kind of a game of Exalted going on otherwise.

>>92543844
>What are the restrictions on having mortal acquaintances for Sids?
Acquaintances is a very specific word for Sidereals, meaning friends and people you actually regularly talk to outside of a Resplendent Destiny. On some level it's intended to measure your connection to humanity, how far removed you are from the human perspective, and how little empathy you feel for the common man. It's why it's a very bad background to hold onto; it's a huge time waste in play, it takes merit/background dots you could be putting into something incredible like Salary or Celestial Manse or Artifact, and it doesn't really get you anything that's mechanically meaningful in play. Your Acquaintances aren't really meant to be a stand-in for Contacts or Followers or Allies or Command, which you can see by how they're always phrased as friends who know you, rather than in terms of any kind of loyalty or useful position they hold. They're supposed to be people who know the real you, that you can talk to for second opinions, and who drag you out of the Sidereal arrogance Great Curse effect.

You can lead countries, create organisations, have helpers fetch coffee for you, form border patrol armies to fight enemies to Creation, and all that sort of interaction with mortals very easily as a Sidereal. You just have to put on a Resplendent Destiny, and fake being someone you're not. That could be to a greater or lesser extent, but even Chejop Kejack donning the Sorcerer and pretending to be a Sidereal Exalt named Chejop Kejack isn't presenting his real face, he's presenting the best picture he can paint of himself, and acting 'out of character' still pings him with Paradox (in 1e/2e) or gives people the opportunity to pierce his facade (in 3e) if he does something that doesn't match how he normally acts.

So, basically, don The Banner and go ham.

>>92545173
Ah, okay. Thanks for the explanation.

>>92545173
You can also learn a pretty deep Linguistics charm to never have to worry about social merits again. It honestly shouldn't be a linguistics merit but honestly it's the only thing that really makes linguistics stand out versus socialize.

>>92545073
It's Luna, I corrected my mistake

Okay I haven't been keeping up with Exalted for a bit and decided to check in, noticed that Across the 8 Directions was out, read it and are you fucking kidding me with what they fucking did to the Yurgen. I've been a general 3e apologist but the sheer level of vehement hatred the devs have of ANYTHING from previous editions is getting absolutely ridiculous at this point.

What dragon-dick-sucking person did this? Literally the entire thematic point of the Bull of the North is that he's a metaphor for Solars busting the door down and then bitch-slapping the bitch-ass dragons of the Realm like a xianxia novel protagonist. I can guarantee the general has gone over this before and I'm definitely gonna check out the archives of the threads when the book dropped but holy fuck. The idea that ANY Solar could be left basically bedridden from a single wound from anything smaller than a fucking primordial/yozi/3CD is actually insulting.

(I especially like how Samea is apparently too retarded to heal a single wound when mechanically Solars basically auto-win any problem they have. Genius writing.)

File: bandits are a threat.jpg (34 KB, 393x266)

34 KB JPG

>>92546152
On the one hand you're absolutely correct that Solars being left bedridden or crippled long-term is complete bullshit. The Bull of the North, if anyone, should have been able to solve the issue, and being left bedridden isn't a thing that is supposed to happen to Exalted at all, Solar or no. On the other hand you're not right that Solars only get significantly wounded by things on the Primordial/Yozi/3CD end of the scale. Solars span a ginormous breadth of ability, and it's crazy to think that everything should be built on the assumption that they're all on the highest end. Creation's shitflinging does actually kill people, even in 1e/2e. Picrel, lest we forget.

>>92546243
To clarify better, it's more that I think the idea of a Solar getting crippled for an extended period of time when they have a bunch of OTHER Solars and gods (as At8D explictly says Yurgen has) has working around the clock to fix the problem is absurd. I can buy a 3rd circle demon dealing a wound that requires an epic quest to treat, but a random DB (as far as we can tell) doing that is just unbelievable.

>>92546152
I never understood why people take things so personally and assume the devs hate the Solars by giving the Bull's empire actual problems to deal with. 1e and 2e Saltspire League were so boring and safe, which is not something I care to see in Exalted. I'd rather "random Essence 5 Deeb stabbed him with something equivalent to Gorgon or Stormcaller" than "well guess everything's smooth sailing from here, all the other Solars like and respect Yurgen and he's going to take a couple months to recharge his armies and start taking more territory".

Also
>xianxia
That shit sucks, wuxia is better.

>>92546152
The only problem with 3E version of Yurgen is that the devs once again half-assed their changes and kept him around. It's true that the Bull's point is to show the kind of impact Solars can do, but whether he's still active or even alive is irrelevant to that. It would've been fine if the Bull had died in the Battle of Futile Blood while still crushing the Tepet legions.

>>92546281
It'd be better if there was some actually properly detailed Artifact of great power involved.

>>92546281
Yeah, that's way more reasonable than what I thought you were saying. I still think it's possible that random Dragonblood could have slipped some parasitical vines into the wound, or bartered for some nasty poison out of Heaven or Hell, but the implication of the text is that they've just gone about taking his arm off with nothing special that's worth noting added on and that being a lasting wound is complete bullshit.

>>92543844
pretty sure in 3e if you have mortals in the Bureau of Destiny they're immune from arcane fate.

>>92547061
Pretty sure they're not since I just control-f'd through mentions of mortals in Ex3 Sidereals and found no mention of mortals in the Bureau of Destiny, and that the mortals that did exist in Yu Shan were doing well to become servants to already-minor spirits. It certainly doesn't say anything about them being immune to arcane fate.

>>92547061
It only works on gods. Mortals are pretty much property in the celestial bureaucracy.

>>92547061
That's a 2e only trick, relying on shady wording regarding members of the Bureau of Fate being immune. Some people took this to mean that if the Bureau recruited mortals they would remember Sidereals, expanded on this to say that this was a long-running practice, and forgot that the Bureau does not have any canon mortals involved, and that any mortals would be quickly ousted in Heaven's highly competitive job market, nepotism or no, and that the ban on gods ruling over mortals would mean that any mortals being recruited into one of the divisions would be an immediate breach of heavenly law for the division head.

>>92546152
I'm not really a fan of a lot of 3e's changes, but I will say that it is nice consolation that even though Yurgen and three other guys got to assfuck 150 Dragonblooded (MINIMUM BTW WHAT THE FUCK????) that one of those Dragonblooded had an Evocation that could wound his dog ass permanently. Evocations can be Solar tier, and Solar tier can easily be 3CD in certain applications.

>>92546152
The dev answer is that Samea isn't medicine supernal so she doesn't have the ability to heal him. Which makes sense if they're supposed to be a starting party.

>>92547468
which Solar Medicine charm would heal it

>>92547468
They're not a starting party, Samae has 2CD or 3CD I forget.

>>92547507
Wholeness-Restoring Meditation and a bunch of good Medicine rolls at minimum, which is Essence 3 with five prerequisites. You might also have to add plague- or venom- banishing charms on top of that, and/or some exorcism shit from Occult, depending on how bad it is.

>A starting Solar part was deemed too setting breaking.
Lel.

>>92547791
>They're not a starting party, Samae has 2CD or 3CD I forget
I think they retconed it, because some Solar players were butthurt about "a Solar rediscovering Solar sorcery before their characters".

>>92546326
No, I'd rather Essence 5 Deebs get put in their FUCKING place by an Essence 2 Solar instead of continue to give Realm fanboys delusions that their little weaboo empire can survive the return of the Solars.

>B-b-but the Usurpation happened-
3e went out of it's way to make clear the Dragonblooded and Sidereals had more help then than they can ever hope to regain. Cope.

The canon end of the Realm is it annihilated in golden fire, with the only survivors chained and escorted back to the breeding pens.

>>92549678
>Weeabo.
The Realm is Chinese coded, not Japanese.

>3e went out of it's way to make clear the Dragonblooded and Sidereals had more help then than they can ever hope to regain. Cope.
Weird how they made stuff worse while trying to give them more agency.

>The canon end of the Realm is it annihilated in golden fire, with the only survivors chained and escorted back to the breeding pens.
T. Lyta.

File: 1667893768049725.png (542 KB, 970x737)

542 KB PNG

>>92549678
Essence 5 Dragonblooded both narratively and mechanically have always been able to bitchslap Essence 3 or below Solaroids. Yes, even in 2e because of that One Charm. No one gives two shits about your retarded gay 1d4chan homebrew or you crying about it in the Discord you fungus.

>>92549792
Ilya is a violent, petty character shamelessly lobotomised for mass appeal. Also your argument is bad and you should feel bad, Immaculate cuck.

>>92550309
>no argument other than admitting he's afraid of the prisma
another win for Dragonchads.

>>92550341
>another win for ACK
3e nerfed the Goblinblooded so hard they needed the Solars' help to overthrow the Solars LMAO

>>92550341
Solar fans ITT are so thin-skinned that they think a Solar NPC having a problem to be resolved in a narrative is an attack on them. Dude probably cried when he read that one comic in which a Dragon-blood dodged so hard he made Demetheus punch another Solar to death.

>>92550422
It was to please Dragon-Blooded, Lunars and Solar fans.

The existence of Yurgen kills their fantasies of being the only Solars around.

>>92546243
>ohhh book they had to spend motes
Not even 1e was immune to bad writing.

Still doesn't make 3e's writing good though, it's retarded dog shit.

>>92550459
>It was to please Dragon-Blooded, Lunars and Solar fans.
The implication that its the Abyssal fans who want him around is killing me. "Oh, that Bull of the North fellow is a fine man, made a ton of shadowrealms fighting with the Realm, got nothing bad to say about the dude."

>>92543544
You don't really need to diversify. That's why the party is for. If you're a Dawn, you exist to literally fight hard enough to make up for the others. If you can't, you fucked up and picked the wrong case. They're the caste for people who only wake up when they hear "roll init".

>>92550422
>being hindered by DB's
>in a complete circle
>with an SCS sorceress no less
Nah, that's just shit writing. Any Celestial Exalt at that tier is effectively immune to DB's, mechanically, let alone one having an entire circle.

>>92550642
It's so boring every other exalt that has Dawn qualities have alternatives and because they don't have supernal they have to diversify to some extent. Solars are just done poorly and the supernal keyword makes it so that you have to throw out behemoths at start. It makes games fall apart so much faster then they should.

>>92550595
Abyssalfags are too busy complaining about being black Solars, their bullshit elders and Infernals.

The opening story of caste book Dawn is about Yurgen and Samea going around removing a shadowland, it was also mentioned that they go around cleaning Creation from wyld taint

File: 1713409344744618.gif (79 KB, 128x170)

79 KB GIF

>>92550673
>with a SCS sorceress no less
If I recall correctly, the 2e comic about her being able to do that gets contradicted by her stat sheet later on in the book having her be too low essence to learn the Solar Circle.

>>92550761
They made animal avatars Celestial sorcery.

File: 1707931765649364.jpg (24 KB, 563x562)

24 KB JPG

>>92550787
Ok, but she summons Jacint in the comic.

File: 1631079591742.gif (445 KB, 500x375)

445 KB GIF

>"I love how weird Lunar charms are now x3"
>most of the 'weird' lunar charms were prototypes for Abyssal or Sidereal charms and mostly more restricted.
>the weirdest thing they have that no one else has is making terrestrial sorcerer familiars and making Territories (even then)

>>92551216
who are you arguing with

>>92551216
Sidereals had some of those Charms first.

In-fact, Vance accidentally stated that he wanted Lunars to be second rate Sidereals.

>>92551310
>In-fact, Vance accidentally stated that he wanted Lunars to be second rate Sidereals.
[citation needed]

>>92551216
>the weirdest thing they have that no one else has is making terrestrial sorcerer familiars and making Territories
Sidereals can canonically get E3 familiars and then crank them to E5 giving them familiars that qualify naturally for Celestial sorcery.

>>92551340
One of the biggest influences for 3e!Lunars is seid, the Norse weaving fate magic.

>>92551516
a handful of charms at best, and then utterly eclipsed by Sidereals who take from the same source.

>>92551605
Exactly, despite Odin being listed as a major source of inspiration in the FatG, he is actually a chosen of endings.

it's weird, I actually have a bunch of ideas for Lunar charms, not even replacement ones, but I kind of dislike their charmset.

File: search.png (24 KB, 522x756)

24 KB PNG

>>92551516
I'm not seeing any mention of it by Vance. Odin's "pursuit of mystical knowledge of runes and seidr" is an inspiration cited in core, but the actual magic system of seidr doesn't appear to be an influence.

File: Night caste.png (293 KB, 598x401)

293 KB PNG

>>92551631
What are they like?

>>92550673
>Any Celestial Exalt at that tier is effectively immune to DB's, mechanically
They definitely shouldn't be, though, lorewise.

>>92551721
I'm slowly starting to come to the conclusion that just outright ignoring any and all claims made on /exg/ unless supporting evidence is provided unprompted is the way to go. It's almost unreal how often people here just say whatever shit that comes to their mind without offering anything whatsoever to support that shit, and still have other anons take their claims seriously.

File: F761E095-BC2A-45DC-A74A-A(...).jpg (35 KB, 300x300)

35 KB JPG

>>92552793
>>92550673
Dace’s Law: A Celestial Exalt can reasonably oppose a Circle of 3-5 Terrestial Exalts of equivalent Essence and combat investment using traditional tactics; or equally match a single Terrestial of much higher Essence or combat investment.

Dace’s Second Law: Almost all Exalts have holes in their Charmsets creating vulnerabilities to lesser foes. Ambush, poison, and sorcery are concerns for Exalts of any Essence lacking the appropriate Charms.

Dace’s Third Law: Any sufficiently lower Essence foe is indistinguishable from a mortal.

File: The Oracle.png (588 KB, 606x1307)

588 KB PNG

Why did 2e nerf Sidereals so hard? It wasn't JUST because they copy pasted and thus things were broken, but the keywords they added seemed to uniquely fuck over a lot of Sidereal charms that worked against Outsiders to Fate. Most Sidereal divination charms from 1e were meant to be able to predict Outsiders, and it was just the Loom that was a blindsight.

>>92553509
Because 2e was made by solar fanboys who hated sidereals so much for mogging their favorite splat in 1e.

What is a good way to make Dawns the 'combat' Solar?
Make them able to freely combine other combat Charms? Like being able to strike somebody far away with Archery Charms

>>92554679
2e had the dawn solution, but I think the problem is that Exalted has too many abilities.

>>92553509
It's not even just a mechanical nerf. The Fate keyword was designed to fuck over, but worse is shit like Oversight suddenly existing as the supreme ruler of Sidereals for, explicitly, no canon reason, the Great Curse making the Usurpation happen by somehow choosing to be biased towards supporting only one side of the Bronze vs Gold argument, or the absolute assblast that is how they were treated in Return of the Scarlet Empress. Anybody else remember that comic of dozens of Sidereal babies being collected by that one Dragonblood after the massacre?

>>92554679
You would have to balance the solar charmset to allow a dawn to switch between combat abilities but the problem is that there's just no incentive. You'd be better off moving one of the combat abilities to another caste

>>92554679
They literally just need an anima power relevant to high level combat, even if it's as small as adding one die or resetting at +1 initiative compared to other Exalted or reducing damage by one. They're definitely the combat Exalt in ExWoD and Demake for example, because they've got a dicetrick on their combat abilities that other Solars don't get. The only reason they've ever been overtaken as the combat Exalts is because Twilights had an anima power that was relevant in high level combat and Dawns didn't.

Note that they already have this in 3e and thus are, actually, the best combat Exalts for that edition.

>>92555330
>Oversight suddenly existing as the supreme ruler of Sidereals
Not really though?
It's noted in 2e's MoeP:Sids that Oversight's only real powers are the ability to hand out missions like any other Convention, the ability to form new Conventions, and the ability to assign a Sid to another Convention. Once they're in a Convention Oversight can't remove them from it or affect the orders from said Convention.
There's the rumor that it has the power to order hits on Sids, but it's also noted that no one can find a record or anyone who can remember it doing so ever. Oversight's pretty clearly just a toothless boogieman unless the ST doesn't want it to be

>>92555528
>hand out missions like any other Convention
If you are a Sidereal in a convention you have input on what happens in that convention. You don't have an input on what Oversight tells you to do. This removes player agency.

>the ability to form new Conventions
They are now the ONLY one who can form new conventions, rather than them existing as associations of Sidereals. You can no longer create sub-Conventions. This removes player agency.

>the ability to assign a Sid to another Convention
Sidereal were not assigned to a Convention in 1e. They joined Conventions. This is a massive change. It removes player agency.

>Once they're in a Convention Oversight can't remove them from it or affect the orders from said Convention.
Yes, they can. I direct you to these quotes:
>Chejop Kejak convinced the Convention on Oversight that the Capital Convention needed extra Viziers to cope with the large number of Essence users on the Blessed Isle. The sparsely populated West “donated” the largest number of Sidereals.
>Only missions assigned by faction leaders seem to avoid Oversight’s attention.
>Oversight may appoint any Sidereal to any field mis-sion, trumping all other authorities except the Maidens.
>Oversight seldom vetoes the missions assigned by the planning boards and senior gods,
(note that seldom is not never)
>Oversight governs the lines of communication between individual Sidereals and the various entities who would direct the Sidereals’ activities.

It's also explicitly a Storyteller stand-in.
>Oversight (i.e., the Storyteller)
pg. 83, in the sidebar.

>>92555528
Oh, also mission assignment from nebulous and unknown superiors had been expanded and broadened radically in 2e. In 1e, missions were a colloquial term for Twists of Fate, or when you had a mission from your faction. Being assigned missions from a superior when it came to twists of fate as opposed to discovering them yourself was something you opted into as an optional game style.

>>92555705
>Sidereal were not assigned to a Convention in 1e. They joined Conventions
I just cracked open 1e Sids and one of the first lines on Directional Conventions states Sids are assigned to them and Special Conventions also notes they commandeer what they need, with the line about staff implying that's also means staff
I'll also point out it notes membership in Special Conventions are reviewed by Maidens, I see nothing about Sids being able to form/join them at will

>>92555773
>In 1e, missions were a colloquial term for Twists of Fate, or when you had a mission from your faction. Being assigned missions from a superior when it came to twists of fate as opposed to discovering them yourself was something you opted into as an optional game style.
I'm also seeing it said that Sids are assigned missions to deal with Twists of Fate from the Bureau of Destiny, nothing about them seeking it out on their own under The Duties of the Chosen section
I'll fully admit I'm not as familiar with 1e as I am with the other editions so there could be something I'm missing, but a quick check of the relevant bits of their book makes it seem like most of what you're complaining about is just your headcanon

So are any of you guys actually in a game?

What's the dumbest thing your character has done when they weren't limit breaking?

>>92556009
>So are any of you guys actually in a game?
Currently it's 'on hold' due to scheduling for the past two months, but yes

>What's the dumbest thing your character has done when they weren't limit breaking?
My character has managed to avoid doing anything too stupid unless you count my tendency to forget NPC names. But I'd say the dumbest thing I've done is have him use Mind-Hand to try to help another PC (A Zenith) cheat in a duel against (what turned out to be) her older Lunar mate.
Thankfully he took it in good humor and proceeded to hand my Defiler his own ass before continuing with the duel

>>92556141
Anon, what's the point of playing a celestial exalted if you're going to avoid being stupid?

>>92556209
You make a persuasive argument, sadly I tend to be overtly cautious no matter what I play. I do plan for him to try and start dabbling with Craft(Genesis) sooner or later though, making diseases for fun and profit can't possibly go wrong, right?

>>92555863
>I'll also point out it notes membership in Special Conventions are reviewed by Maidens, I see nothing about Sids being able to form/join them at will
>Special Conventions also notes they commandeer what they need
While this is true, special conventions operate different between 1e and 2e. In 1e they are staffed by elders, who are appointed (presumably because they want or feel they need to be), and have no permanent assets or staff beyond their ability to commandeer as-needed, while in 2e special conventions are sprawling things that have lots of Sidereals and assets attached to them. Fresh Sidereals get attached to them by default.

>Directional Conventions states Sids are assigned to them
Different meaning of assigned, saying they have their job there, as opposed to them being actively put there as opposed to elsewhere. The difference is in the implication of a higher power doing the decision-making on where they go - like the difference between signing up to a company and being assigned wherever HR wants you to go, as opposed to signing up for a specific job where you would be assigned.

>I'm also seeing it said that Sids are assigned missions to deal with Twists of Fate from the Bureau of Destiny, nothing about them seeking it out on their own under The Duties of the Chosen section
Marching for Destiny down on pg. 254.

>>92556009
>So are any of you guys actually in a game?
I run one and am playing in another.

>What's the dumbest thing your character has done when they weren't limit breaking?
Commit to their half-assed cover as a travelling sorcerer from the middle of nowhere when a Dragonblood came around looking for mystical expertise. Possibly even more stupid was actually going to the meeting they set up to look into their problem, even when he'd stalked the DB with scrying and seen them talking to the Immaculates and bring their DB friends. For a triple stupid my character went in alone, just out of chargen. For pinnacle stupid, as a Solar his knife is inscribed with 'Glory to the Unconquered Sun' written in Old Realm.

>>92556305
>While this is true, special conventions operate different between 1e and 2e. In 1e they are staffed by elders, who are appointed (presumably because they want or feel they need to be), and have no permanent assets or staff beyond their ability to commandeer as-needed, while in 2e special conventions are sprawling things that have lots of Sidereals and assets attached to them. Fresh Sidereals get attached to them by default.
While that last bit is true, I'll still point out they're not formed by Sidreals on their own either way, but by a higher power and the PCs wouldn't really have a say on being in them or not

>The difference is in the implication of a higher power doing the decision-making on where they go - like the difference between signing up to a company and being assigned wherever HR wants you to go, as opposed to signing up for a specific job where you would be assigned.
Possibly, though I'm still not seeing anything that says new Sids are signing up for it, as opposed to being assigned, again, could be something I'm missing, but just from what I've read it looks like they're assigned by a higher power either way

>Marching for Destiny down on pg. 254.
That still says character are given assignments by their superiors though? Nothing about them actually searching for problems, they're told there's something wrong and to go fix it, and it may just be a Twist of Fate but it could also be something more. There isn't a single line there about them discovering them on their own. Unless you mean the first bit of that, which is about games about planning fate, not dealing with Twists of Fate in Creation

None of the things you said Oversight removed by it's existence seems to be there

>>92556361
It's good to see someone on here knows how to play this game

>>92556387
>None of the things you said Oversight removed by it's existence seems to be there
If nothing else, it means you can't talk to the people in charge anymore. They're completely occluded, rather than being people you talk to regularly and directly to get assignments.

>>92556464
I'll point out you can still do that with your regular Conventions who do still provide the vast majority of missions and PC interactions.
Also, I'm not actually sure you can't talk to them? There's references to people (usually Elders admittedly) talking to and convincing Oversight to do things, though I'll admit I'd assume baring ST plot that it'd be mostly through paperwork and missives or something to be honest, but there's still clearly avenues of communication with them

>>92556630
>I'll point out you can still do that with your regular Conventions who do still provide the vast majority of missions and PC interactions.
Except they're middle managers instead of project leads now. Oversight assigns missions and trumps all other authorities except the Maidens.

>There's references to people (usually Elders admittedly) talking to and convincing Oversight to do things
There's references to Chejop Kejak needing to negotiate with them to get Sidereals assigned to the Capital Convention, and his requests they form a sub-convention on the Bull of the North have been denied. However, there's no references to anybody else communicating with them. Righteous Tsunami, the Chair of the Convention of Water, has gone begging to Chejop Kejak rather than Oversight for more to be sent to her struggling convention, which strongly implies that even other Convention Chairs don't have a line to contact them and that Kejak's access is personal rather than being attached to his position. So far as I could find there are no references to anybody other than Kejak communicating or making requests of them.

>>92555528
>There's the rumor that it has the power to order hits on Sids, but it's also noted that no one can find a record or anyone who can remember it doing so ever. Oversight's pretty clearly just a toothless boogieman unless the ST doesn't want it to be
It's not just rumour that the Convention on Oversight kills Sidereals. Here's a quote that outright says they do it without ambiguity:
>The Chosen of Saturn watch constantly for threats both internal and external. When one of their fellow Exalted defies the will of the Maidens, the mysterious Convention on Oversighteventually sends a Reckoner to bring the offender to heel... or send his Exaltation on to a worthier host.
pg. 73.

>>92557037
>Except they're middle managers instead of project leads now. Oversight assigns missions and trumps all other authorities except the Maidens.
Actually, it looks to be the other way around, check pages 50-52 closely, they're one of the groups that can send missions, yes, but under Assigning Missions on page 51-52 it notes that the Bureau of Destiny, Maidens, Pattern Spiders, other Bureaus, and Oversight ALL can assign missions. And going by The Convention on Oversight (pg 50), the missions Oversight assigns agents are the ones that don't fall under any Bureau's purview yet comes from a Maiden or god in a Bureau, those are the missions they interfere with (or don't, if they're from a faction leader), not missions that fall under a Bureau's scope, those are left alone.
Or to put it tl:dr, other Conventions and Bureaus are still on top as the project leads, Oversight is the middle managers in charge of handling missions that fall outside the sending Bureau's scope

>So far as I could find there are no references to anybody other than Kejak communicating or making requests of them.
I could've been reading into the bits about them sending reports to other heads.... but pg 87 notes that they usually listen to requests Sid Elders send to them, so it's probably not just Kejak that can

>It's not just rumour that the Convention on Oversight kills Sidereals. Here's a quote that outright says they do it without ambiguity:
True, though the entry for the Convention on Oversight under, well, The Convention on Oversight under pg 87 also flat out calls it an unsubstantiated rumor. And the only lore example it gives of it getting close to using that power was threatening a Sid's mortal
acquaintances

>>92556009
My character was a Dragonblooded and in Thorns alongside another one. Then my character had the genius idea of suggesting they get a bunch of their mortals to pray to this one Sidereal that they remembered through Arcane Fate, so they could punch the mask into a duck. The logic was that the mortals would forget who they were praying to. The other DB they were with had to drag them away from Thorns afterward just in case my character had anymore suicidal ideas.

Another character of mine tried to sneak past the borders into a city using Everywhere and Nowhere Technique to hide in a wine bottle...which still had wine in it, and was being held at customs for the next ten hours.

File: 1664914708338062.jpg (473 KB, 1024x1449)

473 KB JPG

Is there like a resource/forum thread out there that's like "1001 Sidereal missions" and it has missions specific to each division? Coming up with ideas for them makes my brain hurty. Yes I am a hylic.

>>92552793
The lore of Exalted has always been a mess of contradictions. That's what you get with White Wolf shittery, lack of editing, and the property being passed around like a drugged out hooked. The lore has also always been at odds with the mechanics, but the mechanics have generally always shown Solars cock slap a DB's teeth right out of their mouth right from char-gen, no matter the DB Essence.

>>92553342
Date is the shittiest example of a Dawn in the setting. Has the motherfucker ever even won a fight in canon? Panther is a better Dawn than he is. Including in terms of background, too.

>>92554834
It definitely has that issue. Archery should be folded into Thrown for a generic "Ranged" skill. Brawl should be refolded back into fucking MA. Honestly, fold Melee into MA as well, Exalted is a Kung fu game, everything should be an MA of some kind.

Fold Dodge into Athletics. Craft is now just 5 skills (and no more oddball shit, if you wanna make a mecha, that's Fire, no FA craft bullshit), Occult is folded into Lore, Performance is folded into Persuasion. Manipulation and Charisma are just Charisma. App is just fucking removed, what a shjt and worthless Stat. Etc. Whole fucking game needs a rewrite and to be ripped away from the dog shit ST system holding it back with its dumb ass choices.

>>92557486
well, considering what you've just said isn't true in 1e, 2e or 3e I'm gonna have to guess you're a 1e quickstart purist. Or more accurately you're just a fucking moron who only knows this game from 1d4chan and ancient greentexts.

File: +_4b884cbe4ce479a6d87161d(...).jpg (97 KB, 960x869)

97 KB JPG

>>92557499
None of these are a good idea. The element crafts were dogshit. Magic and knowledge aren't the same thing. Performance and persuasion are not the same thing. Splitting social skills into Charisma, Appearance and Manipulation is one of the most important things exalted does. The game that collapses all three in favour of Charisma (d&d) is eternally plagued by arguments over whether said attribute represents look, cunning or affability, and constant complaints about every social scene coming down to one value. Appearance in particular is a constant, vital, intrinsic part of almost every piece of media Exalted draws from.

Elegance and laziness are not the same thing.

There is an argument to be made for dodge and athletics. But the problem is, if you put charms for both in to one ability you double its power. And there's plenty of precedent for mountains of muscle not being able to dodge good.

3 attributes each for social, mental and physical pursuits is fine and dandy. Hell, if anything were to get combined I'd vote linguistics and bureaucracy. But I don't vote for that. It's a meaningless change.

>>92557745
To expand, you can better play Baldwin from Kingdom of Heaven in Exalted. You can better play Milady De Winter in Exalted. You can better play Dracula in Exalted. All these characters are social powerhouses but in vastly different degrees and with vastly different builds independently of any powers.

Milady is flawlessly deceptive and beautiful, entrancing men even after they know she's evil. She has Manipulation and Appearance 5.

Everyone who knows her true self wants her dead and gone. No pity or warmth for her. Charisma 1.

Baldwin has more charisma with a hand gesture than most do in a speech. He speaks with total honesty on the most direct level and it earns him the respect of even his enemies. He has Charisma 5 and Manipulation 1.

He's also a deformed leper. Appearance 1 with a Flaw.

Dracula is charming and cunning, a delightful conversationalist, but strangely hairy and offputting- you get the point? In d&d all these characters would just have high charisma. Milady would be as lovable as Baldwin, who could get laid as easily as Milady.

File: Multimillion+fabulous+foo(...).jpg (77 KB, 750x720)

77 KB JPG

>>92549678
Essence 5 DBs stomp weaker sE1 solars with hilarious ease. Aang vs Ozai or Iroh is a death sentence for the kid in season 1. Read the actual rules.

File: __portgas_d_ace_and_marsh(...).jpg (183 KB, 850x1432)

183 KB JPG

>>92550642
Nta but let me put it this way. Socialize is poorly defined, but I know it has defensive value, and if I take charms in it, my character gets better social defence, but differently to integrity. Presence and Performance, Linguistics and bureaucracy, they're all social, but all advance a character in very different ways.

Some people feel that you really only need one of the combat abilities. Maybe 2. The rest is redundant. Like, sure, maybe focus melee and take a little archery or thrown for ranged options. But few people will go for brawl, melee, archery, war AND thrown.

Dragon Blooded don't have this issue, because every aspect has social AND combat abilities, and since an aspect isn't a caste, it's not odd in-setting to have an air aspect focused on melee, or a fire aspect horseman.

A dawn caste with mostly intellectual charms though? There are other castes for that. And nothing about them makes them do those things differently or better the way aspects do.

>>92557812
>Aang vs Ozai or Iroh is a death sentence for the kid in season 1. Read the actual rules.
You could even say Aang vs Azula, or Toph, equating to prodigal young Dragonblood who aren't on another supernatural level. Or someone like Combustion Man, who we'd present in Exalted as a more experienced gimmick fighter.

>>92557745
>Magic and knowledge aren't the same thing.
Unless they are. Occult as an Ability literally is just knowledge, as was thaumaturgy of the previous editions. It's a magical setting, and there's no real reason to have a sharp divide between magical knowledge and mundane knowledge. The kind of magic that isn't just knowledge is about using Essence, but the existence of Charms has nothing to do with how Abilities should be handled.

> Performance and persuasion are not the same thing.
Neither are dancing, acting, playing a flute and public speaking, all of which are currently Performance. There is going to be a whole lot of abstracting and simplifying things going on for the sake of convenience, no matter what.

>Appearance in particular is a constant, vital, intrinsic part of almost every piece of media Exalted draws from.
So have Appearance be a Merit, like nWoD does it. It works a lot better that way than as an Attribute.

File: 1680968053095504.jpg (23 KB, 540x407)

23 KB JPG

>>92557745
>>92557770
>Splitting social skills into Charisma, Appearance and Manipulation is one of the most important things exalted does
It has a lot of ramifications and none of it is good. You can gather this visually from just looking at Lunar charms without checking what attribute it is in, guaranteed half of your guesses will be completely wrong.
>Baldwin has more charisma with a hand gesture than most do in a speech. He speaks with total honesty on the most direct level and it earns him the respect of even his enemies. He has Charisma 5 and Manipulation 1.
Manipulation is not the lying stat and never has been.
>Appearance 1 with a flaw
Appearance is not how pretty you look, it's how you present yourself. So being an ugly leper has been a boon to him in the fiction, but the game will not be able to accurately depict that unless you bump up all the stats and then just arbitrarily decide when to reduce them depending on the situation.
>There is an argument to be made for dodge and athletics. But the problem is, if you put charms for both in to one ability you double its power
Parry exists in Melee/Brawl, Dodge has literally one thing going for it over Parry and that's evading Grapples, it could easily be put into a charmtree in Athletics without somehow making Athletics a god stat.
> And there's plenty of precedent for mountains of muscle not being able to dodge good.
Then they don't invest in those charms. There's also precedent for elite swordmasters not being able to use axes, maces and spears but the game isn't interested in taxing you extremely to fulfil that fantasy.

You have made an extremely poor case for keeping the Vampire era Social Attributes separation, especially considering Socialize and Presence exist that give an ACTUAL good separation between them. The only reason we still have Attributes is because Lunars is holding everyone hostage, every other Exalt would survive Attributes being changed.

if you are tracking someone, do you use Investigation, Awareness or Survival? describe the sorts of characters that would have 5 in one of them and 0 in the other in relation to tracking someone.

>>92558027
>Dodge has literally one thing going for it over Parry and that's evading Grapples, it could easily be put into a charmtree in Athletics without somehow making Athletics a god stat.
Demake literally does this and it is not a god stat. ExWoD folds Dodge, Athletics, Archery, and Thrown together and together they just about compete with Melee in popularity.

>>92558027
>>92558211
Doing it like ExWoD is a good idea. I'd still keep Charm trees (most would be very short except for Infernals), but have Charm discounts be based off of Caste.

>>92558593
And by that I mean grouped by Castes instead of Attribute/Ability in case that was unclear.

>>92557377
>Or to put it tl:dr, other Conventions and Bureaus are still on top as the project leads, Oversight is the middle managers in charge of handling missions that fall outside the sending Bureau's scope
If the middle managers outranked literally everybody but the CEO, maybe. They're one of many groups that can send missions and missions signed by them are usually outside the scope of Bureau business (don't forget that many missions are unsigned in 2e, and even if people believe that Oversight always signs that's not actually verifiable), but they still trump everybody but the Maidens on who gets assigned to what and which missions get approved to go through. They have the second highest order veto in the Bureau of Fate, beating even the division heads. Even if they usually aren't sending most of the orders, they still get to interfere directly with what goes through, and the conventions need to consider that any missions they assign can be bounced back if it doesn't meet Oversight's standards or vision.

The power to interfere doesn't necessarily mean the power to edit missions mid-way, or to go onto a convention and threaten people into doing what they want, though nothing says either of those things are beyond the powers of Oversight.

>>92558625
>and even if people believe that Oversight always signs that's not actually verifiable
The book flat out says they are always signed by Oversight, not believed to be always signed, explicitly out of universe always signed with no other statement to contradict that

>but they still trump everybody but the Maidens on who gets assigned to what and which missions get approved to go through
Nope, reread those bits I pointed out, they only handle missions that are outside of a sending Bureau's scope

>The power to interfere doesn't necessarily mean the power to edit missions mid-way, or to go onto a convention and threaten people into doing what they want, though nothing says either of those things are beyond the powers of Oversight.
True, but according to page 52.
>Furthermore, even when a mission is legitimate, division heads and elder Sidereals can both overrule the decision about which Sidereal agent gets the mission
So yeah, taken with the above, Oversight has the power to adjust illegitimate and semi-legitimate missions, but outright states any division head or elder Sid can override or reassign even legitimate missions, something which Oversight does not do

>>92558211
>>92558593
things like this always make me sceptical of guys who are like "If you do X Y and Z, it'll completely break the system/setting". Sometimes you just have to give these things an honest try to see how it works, like that one guy did last threads with sorcery.

>>92558747
I first tried making necromancy part of sorcery in 3e more than five years ago. We've said it worked for a long while.

>>92558211
>ExWoD folds Dodge, Athletics, Archery, and Thrown together and together they just about compete with Melee in popularity.
because of aesthetics and roleplaying, sure, but in the few games of exwod i played athletics was devastatingly strong compared to melee, brawl, and firearms, even if you bundled those three together under a single purchase athletics would still be far stronger than they are, it's ridiculous

brawl and melee give you offense and defense and they're only caste for dawns

firearms gives you only offense without defense, but it's got the upside that it's caste for both dawns and nights

athletics coverse offense, defense, and a ton of mobility and other non-combat utility, and it's caste for both dawns and nights

pretty much the only other issue that had a chance to resolve this was magical weapons, but athletics lends itself to throwing a magic grenade or kunai or something just as well as melee and firearms lend themselves to a magic sword or bullets

>>92558696
>Nope, reread those bits I pointed out, they only handle missions that are outside of a sending Bureau's scope
Your bits and my point aren't in conflict. What your bits point out is that missions are assigned from a number of other places when they're more directly relevant than Oversight. What my point was is that Oversight still handles those missions in transit (unless they're from Kejak or Ayesha Ura), and has the confirmed ability to veto them or redirect them to whichever agents they prefer. It's not confirmed whether they can edit/adjust them in transit, or even if they can get away with suggesting changes, or anything like that - the upper limits of their powers are extremely nebulous - but the floor is still at least including wide-ranging high level veto power, getting to peer into everybody's business, and choosing what missions go to who.

Broad veto power and ability to assign any Sidereal to any mission and that it trumps everybody on pg. 87, I gave the quote earlier. They also have any arbitrary spy power they want on the next page.

>>92558901
I think a solution is an acrobatics ability.
Athletics would be stuff like lifting and throwing.
While Acrobatics is running, jumping and dodging.

>>92558040
Depends if the character lives in a rural/pagan area or not.

>>92556009
Of course not

File: 1707061872718855.png (1.17 MB, 1920x1080)

1.17 MB PNG

Are there any Celestial Lion equivalent (in power level) categories of ghost out there?

>>92553342
aren't nearly all exalts all but immune to poison/disease that isn't divinely made?

>>92560092
Exalts are immune to death by mundane disease, but can still suffer from their effects
They are not immune to poison, though they are much more able to fight it off than mortals

>>92557610
Did you have a stroke anon? Nothing said there is inaccurate in the slightest. The lore in Exalted is a mess and frequently contradicts itself not just between editions, but in the same edition, all the time. Absolute idiot who never read a single thing in this game.

>>92557812
What alt universe are you from? Every edition a fresh from chargen Celestial of any stripe stomps them, no contest.

>>92557839
You've got favored and in 3e, caste picks as well. Accept that castes are literally what define you. DB's are so weak they're only defined by lack of definition and an elemental surcharge in some editions.

>>92560092
Disease yes, poison no. Poison in Exalted is a bit of a mechanic minefield because it either is going to completely shit on your Exalt, or you are immune to it because you invested into Charms and anti-poison Charms in most editions are usually a 1 stop shop to being immune to all poison forever in 1-2 Charm buys. So y9u either insta-die from massive dice penalties and constantly ticking damage, or you can eat yozi cum out of a medical waste dumpster and be totally fine.

>>92561098
LOL. Lmao even. No. 2e? Sure. 3e? Fuck no. People have run test combats snd beat dawns at Essence 2 with single minmaxed DBs. Hard as fuck but possible. SHOULDN'T be imo, but it is.

>>92558955
>What my point was is that Oversight still handles those missions in transit (unless they're from Kejak or Ayesha Ura), and has the confirmed ability to veto them or redirect them to whichever agents they prefer
And my point is that they're noted to only have this power over missions that are outside the scope of Bureau activity, or at least explicitly the latter

>but the floor is still at least including wide-ranging high level veto power, getting to peer into everybody's business, and choosing what missions go to who.
The former two are something rarely done, and as you yourself pointed out near the start of this, something only there for the ST to provide plot devices, and the last one is something that again, only applies to missions that are outside the scope of the Bureau and while Oversight's authority trumps it, elder Sids can also do so on a broader scale, being able to reassign missions that are within the scope of the Bureau's authority

Furthermore, regardless of all this, all this still doesn't change or limit player agency like you previously stated. Your initial complaints about Oversight and how their addition changed things from 1e to 2e

Got late, had to sleep

>>92561080
> but the mechanics have generally always shown Solars cock slap a DB's teeth right out of their mouth right from char-gen, no matter the DB Essence.
You said this, and this is blatantly wrong. It has only ever been true in the head of the unique brand of nogamers who also don't read the books. Please stop stealing oxygen from the rest of us.

>>92561694
Elias killed a dragon blooded right after he exalted.
And 1e opening fiction was about a novice Solar winning against 2 Dragon-Blooded, she did it by playing smart though.

>>92556009
Unironically become pregnant

Being an exalt mother is hard