Or we can not ruin everything cool about that exerpt, thanks.
General Exalted Thread
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Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Or, alternatively, we can let people like what they like without trying to make out that their take on a thing is badwrongfun, thanks.
To be fair, BOTH of you should probably stop that.
While I strongly disagree with Kaiya's stance, and its clear many other people in this thread do as well, what she likes isn't badwrongfun either.
Lealope
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I don't see it
Like, Exalted's animism is one of the ways it makes clear that Creation was intentionally designed by intelligent beings, which is one of the things I love about it, but this doesn't seem like a logical progression of that idea. If mimicking the form of something and adding Essence to it is enough to create working technology, I'd expect that to be thoroughly exploited by any and all factions with high numbers of enlightened beings.
It just doesn't work.
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RedV
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The whole "mimick form and add essence" seems to be how low level Artifacts are made - you find X flower and infuse it with your Essence and have a bunch of craft rolls to make something.
I have never played a crafter in exalted and never cared about the discipline though, so I might be wrong. But the way smithing is described, it certainly seems to be the case that you can create new stuff by doing that.
All those descriptions of demons being smelted into unliving armour probably are a repeatable process, for example, which was researched from that one off NA Warstrider thingy.
I have never played a crafter in exalted and never cared about the discipline though, so I might be wrong. But the way smithing is described, it certainly seems to be the case that you can create new stuff by doing that.
All those descriptions of demons being smelted into unliving armour probably are a repeatable process, for example, which was researched from that one off NA Warstrider thingy.
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She seems to just be chiming in about what she doesn't like whenever anyone tries to start conversation about it, rather than mentioning anything she actually likes.
Sez you.
But one of the series I have had way too much fun reading recently is Age of Scorpio by Gavin Smith and its sequels and it does exactly this and it is cool and does it well.
The book is set in three "eras" more or less-Ancient Ireland, modern Britain, and the far future.
And the main characters from the first are basically Exalted-humans empowered by the Gods with superhuman prowess wielding magics.
Except in the Modern and Future eras it is revealed that none of this is magic. Its replicable, mass-producing technology that in the future literally everyone has because it's necessary to survive in the fucked up future world. Because we do in fact outgrow and commodify and mass produce our legends. The epic stories of yesterday are the dime a dozen superhero merch of today. And that works fine and is incisive and it is "cool" because it ties the Lovecraftian influences into a coherent theme as well-the unknown yesterday is the known today.
The idea that what is considered magical does have a coherent and understandable structure to it is perfectly fine and doesn't "destroy wonder." It just creates a different tone which may or may not work for you.
mothematics
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you fools they are coming
RUN BEFORE THE MAGIC SYSTEMS GET YOU
RUN BEFORE THE MAGIC SYSTEMS GET YOU
Eh, tonally is it wondrous though? There is an air to finality and permanence that airs those ancient stories that the endless cycle of constant sequels turns into blase.
Except... it sorta is?
When you raise incomprehensibility on a pedastal, you encourage people to actively leave things unexplained. To say otherwise is precisely the same argument as trying to "leave politics out of writing".
No, it's not, actually. You're making a moral position out of your taste in fiction, and it's fucking obnoxious as shit.
You're misinterpreting what I said, which was that something being understood and explained doesn't make it less wondrous.
Especially when the talk about magitech and scientific understanding in Exalted is not just about leaving things vague to avoid infodumps but about rejecting the idea that these phenomena are understood in-universe in some replicable and mass-tutorable form.
It's an assertion that only fantasy can be wondrous because making it clear that these phenomena are understood and researched and reproducible in universe is anathema to "wonder" which I think is bullshit.
Honestly I don't actually believe that understanding universally ruins wonder. But I am very, very sick of a certain sort of sci-fi fan who insists that their tastes are elevated to a moral extreme. It's actually poisoned my enjoyment of sci-fi quite a bit, and moved me more and more in the direction of "No, explain nothing, magic serves the story, and should remain weird."
I think you can have cool stories about mastering a form of magic to the point that it's easily reproducible. I don't want Exalted to be one of them, because I like Creation being full of genuine mystery and all the lore and discoveries of the old world being lost. It's not actually inherently problematic.
But people like Kukla have poisoned my personal ability to enjoy it, and people like linkhyrule have been slowly poisoning my ability to enjoy science fiction for quite some time now.
There's something about "You have to like my style of story, it's morally right to do so" that reminds of, say, why I don't go to church.
@linkhyrule5.
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If a belief has observable effects on reality, it is valid to have a moral position on it. This is, again, why we have moral positions about things like representation and models in fiction.
Look around at the world, and tell me we don't have problems with people being hurt because they choose not to understand, or because they're convinced that scientists not only don't, but cannot have the full answer. Problems severely aggravated by the acceptance of, for all that it is thousands of years old, fundamentally just a series of particularly popular works of fiction, that tells its readers not to question and not to doubt.
The problem is that in Exalted, you have three hundred absurdly superintelligent scientists and loremasters, backed by an ancient guarantee that if you seek tutelage, you will find it.
Under those circumstances, it's rather SoD breaking to believe that the mechanisms of magic remains unexplained, unless it is unexplainable - which, again, brings is back to "that is actively hurting the world." I don't mind mystery. Mysteries are cool, mysteries are meant to be solved.
I do mind "holy mysteries," that aren't allowed to be solved.
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I think the big problem is that Exalted has as part of its inherited design the fact that you can literally go up to the people who made the magic of the world and ask them how and why they did that. More than that, you can punch them into submission and have magical lie detector powers if they feel like not answering you or attempt to mislead you. Maybe in the current age that sort of thing isn't really feasible anymore, but it should have been in the past, and thus the quest to recover that knowledge is perfectly valid story space. It is the sort of thing where the players have been given the tools to be able to successfully get answers, so at a certain point you go from "mystery" to "mystery box" (i.e. being deliberately obfuscating to hide the fact that you don't have an answer to important plot points).
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See, the problem is that when you want to make the magic in Exalted unexplained, you loose huge components of the setting. Explicable magic allows mortal thaumaturgy to achieve really cool things without dragging in spirits or Exalts. It means there is this hope that people can do small things to help the world, and that the world can be made better by lots of people doing what little they can, not just by the Exalted fixing everything. Comprehensible magic means you can get creative without forcing an ST to do an ocean of work, and allows for more structured interaction with spirits and all the really interesting variety they represent. The kind of low level magic it brings in is just so enriching to the setting, and lets so many more pieces interact freely means stories can bring in different sorts of elements that otherwise require an Exalt to do a bunch of heavy lifting.
The idea of mysteries being unsolvable also runs kind of opposite common sense in Exalted. Even leaving out Exalts, Gods are also solidly superhuman in their areas of competence. Am I supposed to believe Nara-o has no idea how his powers work, even though he's one of the most learned Gods, has access to any text he could wish for, a pile of superhuman subordinates, and an innate desire to collect knowledge, backed by the mandate of his position?
Exalted isn't telling you to mindlessly obey the man, nor am I. That would, in fact, be a problematic message. You know what isn't problematic?
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, no matter what you do, you will never, in a million years, understand why something is the way it is. Some things are too complicated, too obscure, too distant or simply by their nature unpredictable, and you will not understand them. You can try all you like! There's even honor and virtue in trying and failing to comprehend the incomprehensible!
The scientific method not being all powerful, some things being too strange for humans to grasp, no matter how mighty or wise they are, isn't something you can make a moral statement on. Some things can just be unexplainable. And that's not hurting the world, no matter how desperately you want to elevate your personal taste in fiction to a matter of morality and thus stamp out any conflicting takes.
I disagree. I think the statement that somethings are unexplainable in themselves is precisely the confusion that has led to such ridiculousness as antivaxxers and the anti-intellectual movement and so much of the US's problems today. It's nothing to do with mindlessly obeying the man, and precisely to do with thinking that an unexplainable effect can exist.
Certainly, there may be things that I will never understand, being born in the wrong era; and there may be things that humans as we define them today cannot understand, by dint of having too many moving parts to keep in one's brain at once. But to say something is unexplainable is to say that it has no internal meaning, has no internal causality, does what it does for no internal reason of its own -- and yes, I am saying that to believe that such thing can exist, that the universe is not fundamentally reducible, is problematic in itself: because it allows us as a society to give up, to say "it's not that we haven't found the right theory or the right approach, this thing is just innately ineffable for whatever reason" -- and then, because we are human, to dig in our heels into that belief, to then defy all comers who would explain our God the Mystery. This is precisely what has happened with religion, what changed an entirely respectable attempt to explain the world by the means of intelligent, powerful spirits into a desperate defense of ignorance.
And as the entire point of the Exalted are "those who rise above the gods, and challenge the Primordials not only in power but in insight and understanding", unlike in the real world we cannot just say "you just don't know." Not for long. Not when you can just go up and ask, as @Academia Nut mentions.
Sure, but I don't think leaving things unexplained is inherently badwrongfun. Sometimes it isn't necessary to explain everything to tell the story you want; its fine to shrug and say Fate works exactly how you want it to work if you're writing about glorious kung-fu.
You can't leave politics out of writing, but my allegory on immigration does not need to involve the nuances of the debate over vaccines. Am I making sense?
That is true. You don't have to explain it in the core text, and it might just be a waste of wordcount.
However, trying to say that it's inherently unexplainable, even by the Exalted -- that is an actual problem.
That isn't what they are saying, they have no problem with things being unexplained but do have a problem with things being unexplainable.
This is what drives me insane. As much as I hate your approach, I'd never compare you to fucking anti-vaxxers. What is wrong with you that you think this is okay? That you think calling people with different tastes anti-intellectual is remotely fucking acceptable?
OctarineShrike
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Are Godel and Tarski relevant here? If so, breaching those barriers may well require asking Oramus or perhaps Qaf and them being willing to answer.
Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia
Tarski's undefinability theorem - Wikipedia
Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia
Tarski's undefinability theorem - Wikipedia
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For the most part I agree with you, and Exalted as a setting certainly has a place for such things, but there is a question about the scale of such things.
Without the shadow of a doubt, the Whispers of the Neverborn are beyond true comprehension for any being that is not stuck in a fractal spiral of unending death and agony, and anything they influence should be tainted by their impossible horror.
It is the echo of an ancient sin, the decay of dead titans, that opposes reality.
The foolish necromancers who would harness their power should never be capable of truly understanding just what they are unleashing upon Creation.
The Beyond should - for the most part - be something that can only be approximated through the powers of Oramus and the Lunars and always carry the theme of some grand cosmic madness with it, constantly hinting that no matter how much you understand, there is something beyond it.
The insanity of the Wyld may be beyond understanding to some extent, but it is also fragile and pointless, and shatters before the might and purpose of the Chosen, Gods and Titans, as its incomprehensibility comes with an inherent lack of meaning.
These powers are, at least in my understanding, linked to cosmic horror, they must be beyond understanding, as that is their point.
The same should not be said for sorcery and the thaumaturgic workings of humans. Taking away the understanding form these parts of the setting is problematic, as Exalted is a setting in which Occultism is science, in which physics are constructed upon a base of magic by intelligent creators.
The problem with these parts of the setting all lie in the skills of an author. It would take me likely days to work out how to describe the workings of some Sorcery in a sufficiently evocative fashion, as not to, yes, shatter the feeling of wonder that it should evoke.
That said I am really sorry about the vitriol you have received about your preference in fiction, simply for not agreeing with the consensus.
mothematics
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Your weird antitheism is your own business but please don't give the thread an unasked-for deontological lecture in what's fundamentally a discussion of aesthetic druthers in a tabletop RPG, link.