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General Exalted Thread

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In 3E that's actually how it works. In 3E, Solar Charm's aren't 'things' themselves, but are more codified examples of a Solar's supernatural skill, mainly for ease of game balance than an a 'a solar can do this and no other'.

Hmm, one option is that you could write up a charm that works as a stepping stone towards Flawless Impenetrable Disguise with more drawbacks and not quite as many strengths and have your Solar use that to show they are really good at it but not quite at the level where they can pull of the things you can do with FID.
 
Your fic shouldn't feel at all constrained by the written charmset at all, let alone minutiae like particular ability score requirements.

They are not deep statements about the setting; they are game mechanics.
 
Queshire said:
Sure, but it feels to me that with Solars if you do something enough you should start developing charms for it.
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I actually disagree there.

Especially in a story, a Solar should only get Charms within their "core concept". Outside of that core concept, a Solar should find it very hard to acquire supernatural arete, even if they do that task frequently. What do I mean by "core concept"? I mean essentially self-definition, "what kind of hero am I?"

If your Solar isn't meant to be the Man of a Thousand Faces or a Deep Cover Infiltrator, they shouldn't acquire Flawlessly Impenetrable Disguise even if they go around disguised. FID is a Charm to enable the perfect infiltrator, and if your concept isn't that of being a perfect infiltrator, you probably shouldn't have it. You should just make really good mundane disguises with an Excellency.

This is especially important for stories, because it helps avert the Legendary Super Solar who's good at everything and automatically overcomes all narrative problems by spending XP. If you are not a hero whose story means you are superhumanly good at hiding yourself, you should stick to Excellency-enhanced mundane disguises - which can be beaten or slip to produce a more interesting story because your character is doing something in an area outside-of-theme where they're narratively weaker.
 
I feel like that's what Ex3's Supernal mechanic is supposed to encourage. You get a line Charms where you get to ignore Essence requirements, making it much more attractive to invest in. Making it the Ability the Solar is known for - they can do other stuff - but the area they are truly magical in, is somewhat limited.

This may have been explicitly said by some developer or other, but I haven't looked into that.
 
Queshire said:
Sure, but it feels to me that with Solars if you do something enough you should start developing charms for it.
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An excellency is more than enough. I've watched some makeup tutorials on the YouTubes and they can do pretty amazing things with just mortal levels of skill. If your goal is "look different" and not "be a shape-changing infiltrator" you don't need disguise charms on top of the excellency.
 
Unbanshee said:
So! Dragonblooded get Elemental Signature Charms.

There any reason someone can't develop their own unique one? Not to break the limit, but to do something unique.
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I dont think anything particularly breaks if you develop your own unique signatures, as long as they're about as strong/useful as the others. At the end of the day, charms are expressions of your power, but they're not the end-all be-all.

For example, I'm really tempted to make an alternate Water Sig Sail charm, allowing you to create a wave out of your anima that your ship can sail on very quickly. Or make an Earth Sig Sail that allows your ship to sail on firm land for a short amount of time.
 
I've asked Vance about that, he said we're unlikely to see alternative Signatures in official material as it isn't a good use of wordcount, but there's nothing wrong with home-brewing one.
 
So I've been wandering around looking for fanmade Yozic Charmsets, and I found a thing.

For those unwilling to click the link, it's a thread dedicated to fleshing out a charmset for Sachaverell, and I'm interesting in seeing what people think. My own opinion is that it's decent-ish, in the same way that the Mardukth charmset is - there's definitely meat on those bones, but there's also definitely issues, especially with the ways it strays from the @Revlid/@EarthScorpion rubric for designing Yozis.

Of course, any Sachaverell charmset* faces the issue of "how the fuck did you start getting these Charms without either Orabilis murdering you or Sachaverell waking up?", which this one appears to answer by having them be "stolen" from Sachaverell by the other Yozis to further empower the Green Sun Princes.


* And there is at least one other that I know of, although it's so nightmarishly depressing that I'm not sure it's really usable? It's impossible to dip more than one or two Charms deep into that one before rapidly turning into a borderline-unplayable threat to all existence that any sane being would kill on sight - which is admittedly thematic but not exactly useful.

By the time you're actually starting to see significant returns on investment, you're an aggressively nihilistic asshole who shits samsara all over to make sure everyone (including you) are fucked for the rest of eternity, literally cannot have any form of pleasurable sensory experience, tears out your dead victims' souls so you can brainwash them and then stick them in a custom body so they're reincarnated as everything their previous self hated, and is gearing up for the point where Sachaverell just shoves his hand up your ass and puppets you into trying to turn the entire Infernal Althing into psychotically nihilistic Cybermen like yourself so that predestination can devour reality whole.
 
When you put it like that, Infernals ditching actual literal Yozi charms for appropriately themed Ability charms just keeps sounding better and better.
 
Unbanshee said:
I'd expect, based on what we saw in the dragon blooded charms, that the abyssal/infernal charm trees might have something like the elemental keywords but for deathlords/yozi

i never got why some people are horrified by samsara.
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Have you ever read the "Runaways" comic from Marvel? Do you know what Nico does to Gert's parents? I imagine it's kind of like that.
 
When one of the maidens looks at samsara to know what is gonna happen to some random mortal, they're unable to do shit to avert what they see. the mortal is unaffected because samsara doesn't hit him with mind control that turns him into a puppet in his own body.

Samsara is only a threat to weirdo gods and titans with esoteric outlooks.
 
No one's free will is being abrogated though. If a wizard on the other side of the world casts a spell that makes a book with my entire life's story in it from beginning to end, even if i read it, it's not messing with me in any way.
 
Unbanshee said:
No one's free will is being abrogated though. If a wizard on the other side of the world casts a spell that makes a book with my entire life's story in it from beginning to end, even if i read it, it's not messing with me in any way.
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You sure about that?

There is a school of thought that a Prophet is not a Seer so much as a Helmsman - they do not see your future, but chart it for you. Make it impossible for you to leave the Prophecy Train - even if they are the ones who forced upon you a destiny of misery.

Think of it as The Uncertainty Principle taken to macroscopic interactions in the time dimension, even. The act of observation of one's future collapses the superposition of possibilities into a single certainty.

In that school of thought (one Yozis and all others share, see Sacheverell and the consequences of its awakening), the act of defining one's destiny can probably be equated to enslaving someone to their destiny and/or the being/entity/force that defined said destiny. Free will might be technically untouched. But freedom to act is curtailed severely.
 
Unbanshee said:
No one's free will is being abrogated though. If a wizard on the other side of the world casts a spell that makes a book with my entire life's story in it from beginning to end, even if i read it, it's not messing with me in any way.
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By reading it, you can't change the course. The day you die in a car crash, bleeding out as the flames comes closer? You can't do anything to stop it. You just keep walking, inevitably, towards the foreseen ending.
 
Faraway-R said:
You sure about that?

There is a school of thought that a Prophet is not a Seer so much as a Helmsman - they do not see your future, but chart it for you. Make it impossible for you to leave the Prophecy Train - even if they are the ones who forced upon you a destiny of misery.

Think of it as The Uncertainty Principle taken to macroscopic interactions in the time dimension, even. The act of observation of one's future collapses the superposition of possibilities into a single certainty.

In that school of thought (one Yozis and all others share, see Sacheverell and the consequences of its awakening), the act of defining one's destiny can probably be equated to enslaving someone to their destiny and/or the being/entity/force that defined said destiny. Free will might be technically untouched. But freedom to act is curtailed severely.
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Taking Sacheverell charms to the point where you see everything is a Bad End charm, just like taking the "holy shit i'm crushed under my own weight because im a city now" charm in malfeas' tree. It would strip your character personally of any agency, but it wouldn't do jack shit to the meanest mortal fisherman.

Kaiya said:
By reading it, you can't change the course. The day you die in a car crash, bleeding out as the flames comes closer? You can't do anything to stop it. You just keep walking, inevitably, towards the foreseen ending.
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I mean I keep walking inevitably to my utility bill every month too. Eventually I'm gonna cut myself with a knife while cooking, or get a splinter when moving some furniture, or step in dogshit at 2am when my dog has an accident because it's raining and she's a pretty princess who refuses to go outside when there's the devil water coming from the sky. It's not an existential threat like people seem to play it up as.

Samsara may predetermine everything that happens, but that doesnt actually change the fact that my choices matter as much as they mattered a second ago. Samsara is also impossible to describe in character, because Samsara explicitly doesn't take away player agency. If anyone else but the Maidens and maybe the Yozi look into it and read "you will do XYZ now", they can just go nahhhhh and do whatever the fuck they want.
 
My train of throught re: Free Will tends to go as follows:
  1. Do I have Free Will? Yes.
  2. Do I know whether the universe is deterministic, or whether the universe is indeterministic BUT someone has cursed me to follow a particular path? No.
  3. That means that my Free Will cannot rely on the absence of determinism in my life.
It just seems strange for me to treat Free Will like health science media treats sugar. It's good for you! And now it isn't! But what if it is? Well it turns out it isn't! We were wrong!
I just don't conceive of Free Will in a way that would make flipping through physics journals to work out whether you have it, and changing your mind with each changing interpretation of quantum mechanics, something fruitful.
 
I mean, basically Samsara is the fingerprint of the ST due to the nature of the game as a shared storytelling exercise. It's the Maiden's breaking the fourth wall and asking the ST what happens next. A Sacheverell charm would have to have rules that say "you retire your character and replace the current ST as the new ST. The former ST can't to anything about this."
 
Unbanshee said:
I mean I keep walking inevitably to my utility bill every month too. Eventually I'm gonna cut myself with a knife while cooking, or get a splinter when moving some furniture, or step in dogshit at 2am when my dog has an accident because it's raining and she's a pretty princess who refuses to go outside when there's the devil water coming from the sky. It's not an existential threat like people seem to play it up as.
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Dark Lord Bob said:
I just don't conceive of Free Will in a way that would make flipping through physics journals to work out whether you have it, and changing your mind with each changing interpretation of quantum mechanics, something fruitful.
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Before we have a long and likely unproductive argument about this, I think @Kaiya interprets Sacheverell's viewing of Samsara to inform everyone as to exactly what he viewed without giving them the ability to change it, akin to Story of Your Life/Arrival.

In that case, it would be entirely natural to find it horrifying if you lacked the mental alterations found within those stories.
 
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