This may be a misunderstanding on my part, but I thought you could only convert ambrosia meant for Incarnae into their respective magical material. Even if each of the Maidens gets a thousand times the income of their subordinates, that still makes it fairly rare, and gives it heavy consequences to obtaining it.
I
believe that you can convert ambrosia into Jade by default, any Ambrosia, and that ambrosia dedicated to a specific god can become Relevant magical material. You may be right that it
is limited to the seven Incarnae, but the UCS doesn't actually sleep on a big pile of ambrosia- he pretty much subsidizes the entire economy of Heaven with his incidental 'thank god' prayers. You can derive how the budgets of the five bureaus of destiny work if you like, or any number of reasons.
The metatextual point though is that getting any magical material with any method is meant to generate
plot. If it's not generating good plot, it needs to be rethought as a mechanic. If it's not generating
any plot because people refuse to engage with it, you either need to redesign the game or tell people to man the fuck up and accept that you are not entitled to quick easy access to a rare material.
I'd definitely be interested.
Okay... so this sort of builds on the above and more of a general thing.
In some... spheres of game design, the core thought, mission statement of all decisions and mechanics is this: "Does this make my players do what I want?" If you are not asking that question and attempting to answer it, your design is going to be extremely scattershot and unfocused. A rule or mechanic exists to govern behavior, to establish accepted modes of play. TTRPGs use implicit rules or social constraints like roleplaying and the division of IC and OOC knowledge to help maintain its own internal consistency. Implied or not, a rule or mechanic exists and thus describes viable play.
To speak of Exotic Components, the purpose is manyfold- attempting to solve numerous systemic challenges like players camping out in fortressess churning out magical gear. These mechanics and descriptions exist to inspire the player, to make them buy into the aesthetic as opposed to the reduced objective formula of game resources being transformed from one state to another.
This hasn't really
worked in context of Exalted due to poor tutorialization of campaign design and a host of other factors, but that's the basics.
The best definition if
play I have encountered is just that- play; wiggle room, maneuverability. It's why you can't make work fun easily, because work has to be done a specific way with specific means and there's no room to jazz it up or more importantly optimize it. When working, you are discouraged from deviation because your role is carefully selected for you.
Play grabs us as humans because we
like wiggle room. We want to explore it, see where it takes us. And wiggle-room is where an abstract structure like a game shines. Let's take a tangent to videogames and the competitive scene. You've probably heard the old smash brothers meme of 'No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination', right? The point of that is to reduce variables until the only meaningful distinction between each player is their relative skill, because the value of the playspace is in creating an environment in which a skill can be honed and demonstrated with objective clarity.
Why is paranoia combat unfun? Because once it becomes symmetrical and saturated, the amount of 'play' in the combat is reduced to an unsatisfying procedural slog. Opportunities to make decisions are pruned until only the most critical ones remain... and those are the most boring because they force the game into a very narrow set of viable actions. Why are exotic components un-fun? Because they are a wildly incoherent imposition on a player, a 'gotcha' that is revealed too late in the process of making an artifact that in turn forces an unreasonable tangent away from forward progress.
Hmm. Ran out of steam again. May continue this later. Sorry Rook!
