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General Exalted Thread

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Kaiya said:
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.
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Exalted is a post apocalyptic setting as much as anything else.

This speaks against the idea that things should be irreprodicible and impossible to understand because in that case "lost knowledge" is no longer meaningful.

I want a Twilight scholar to discover fragments of treatises of those who came before and weep because she realizes that in the lost age their understanding of the universe was so much greater than hers, that she, a divine scholar, can only scrabble in the dirt and rediscover and apply a fraction of the understanding of that age.

I want the Realm to have shelves and shelves of books on magic that go untouched because in this fallen age the Shogunate equivalent of electrical engineering and computer science textbooks are no longer possible to use, the things they teach intended for a world that isn't one where water/fire duality engines are considered expensive and valuable artifacts rather than things made even by mortal hands.

I want a world where lost knowledge is meaningful because the world is explicable and the tragedy of the Usurpation is that this understanding of the world may never be recovered.

I don't want a world where all lost knowledge means is a couple of rarer-colored loot drops.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
Exalted is a post apocalyptic setting as much as anything else.

This speaks against the idea that things should be irreprodicible and impossible to understand because in that case "lost knowledge" is no longer meaningful.

I want a Twilight scholar to discover fragments of treatises of those who came before and weep because she realizes that in the lost age their understanding of the universe was so much greater than hers, that she, a divine scholar, can only scrabble in the dirt and rediscover and apply a fraction of the understanding of that age.

I want the Realm to have shelves and shelves of books on magic that go untouched because in this fallen age the Shogunate equivalent of electrical engineering and computer science textbooks are no longer possible to use, the things they teach intended for a world that isn't one where water/fire duality engines are considered expensive and valuable artifacts rather than things made even by mortal hands.

I want a world where lost knowledge is meaningful because the world is explicable and the tragedy of the Usurpation is that this understanding of the world may never be recovered.

I don't want a world where all lost knowledge means is a couple of rarer-colored loot drops.
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I don't disagree with any of this.
 
Kaiya said:
I don't disagree with any of this.
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And this requires that the rules underlying the world are explicable and understandable.

"You don't have the tools and time to understand something" is not the same thing as "you can't understand something."

As an example I suspect only a tiny fraction of this board really understand how laws and legal systems work to any extent. Yet they are not unknowable and inexplicable because someone with the education and tools can understand them.

The same should go with a lot of things in Exalted-at least common things like sorcery, thaumaturgy, and to some extent artifact construction. Maybe people in this fallen age only follow vague guidelines without deeper knowledge but that's a symptom of this fallen age, not a result of inherent unknowability.
 
Kaiya said:
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?
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Why do I think that it's okay to call people out on dropping stories as soon as an m/m couple appears?

Why do I think it's okay to advocate for more heroic minorities, more protagonist minorities, in fiction?

-- These are all the same question. Our preferences in fiction have effects on the world. They help people, they hurt people. They raise people up, they bring them down.

So long as that's true, I don't just have a right, I have the responsibility to try - as best as my fallible, imperfect human mind can - to try and explain and understand those effects; to guess the consequences and decide if I like them. (Hey, look, there's the old "it's okay to not try to understand things" problem coming back to haunt us. This is precisely why it annoys me.) And I decidedly do not like the effects of "ineffable mystery" on our society, any more than I like the effects of "whitewashed protagonists" or "nonbinary erasure".

There's nothing special about science, and there's nothing special about elfgames. If we were going to draw a bright line principle, it'd be all the way back at "beliefs you encourage in fiction," and that immediately and obviously generates nonsense.
 
linkhyrule5 said:
Why do I think that it's okay to call people out on dropping stories as soon as an m/m couple appears?

Why do I think it's okay to advocate for more heroic minorities, more protagonist minorities, in fiction?

-- These are all the same question. Our preferences in fiction have effects on the world. They help people, they hurt people. They raise people up, they bring them down.

So long as that's true, I don't just have a right, I have the responsibility to try - as best as my fallible, imperfect human mind can - to try and explain and understand those effects; to guess the consequences and decide if I like them. And I decidedly do not like the effects of "ineffable mystery" on our society, any more than I like the effects of "whitewashed protagonists" or "nonbinary erasure".

There's nothing special about science, and there's nothing special about elfgames. If we were going to draw a bright line principle, it'd be all the way back at "beliefs you encourage in fiction," and that immediately and obviously generates nonsense.
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Jesus Christ, do you hear yourself? You are comparing people who disagree with you about how to handle magic to homophobes.
 
linkhyrule5 said:
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.
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Absolutely, but I got the impression that Kaiya believes that it doesn't need to be explained, rather than it being fundamentally wrong to explain it, and that it isn't so much that things shouldn't be inherently unexplainable as inherently...hmm, parsable, maybe? Which seem perfectly fine to me and within the scope of Exalted canon, because no matter how mighty or incredible an Exalt you are, you aren't going to be able to create an Exaltation, or really understand what Lytek does when he's cleaning the Exaltations. Those two examples are canonical things that First Age Solars slammed their heads against trying to figure out, to no avail.

And if you are going to go ahead and do those things anyway, then I'd say that doing so should be the major focus of your character arc, if not the entire campaign.

MJ12 Commando said:
Exalted is a post apocalyptic setting as much as anything else.

This speaks against the idea that things should be irreprodicible and impossible to understand because in that case "lost knowledge" is no longer meaningful.

I want a Twilight scholar to discover fragments of treatises of those who came before and weep because she realizes that in the lost age their understanding of the universe was so much greater than hers, that she, a divine scholar, can only scrabble in the dirt and rediscover and apply a fraction of the understanding of that age.

I want the Realm to have shelves and shelves of books on magic that go untouched because in this fallen age the Shogunate equivalent of electrical engineering and computer science textbooks are no longer possible to use, the things they teach intended for a world that isn't one where water/fire duality engines are considered expensive and valuable artifacts rather than things made even by mortal hands.

I want a world where lost knowledge is meaningful because the world is explicable and the tragedy of the Usurpation is that this understanding of the world may never be recovered.

I don't want a world where all lost knowledge means is a couple of rarer-colored loot drops.
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I cannot like this enough times.

However, to give my specific perspective on this, I want my scholars to uncover an ancient treatise on alchemy or the like, only to discover that half of it is utterly useless, because so many of the plant and animal species that it drew reagents from went extinct due to the Contagion. I'd like for them to search for a recipe for a rare and valuable potion, only to discover that its something that is actually commonplace in the modern day, because the rare species whose reagents acted as the bottleneck for production went through a population boom after most of its natural competitors died out. I'd like for ancient maps to be only starting points instead of guides because geography has changed so drastically.

I would like a world where knowledge is not only lost, but gets changed. Where sufficient context to loss is given that said loss matters beyond being collateral damage to the collapse of a golden age.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
And this requires that the rules underlying the world are explicable and understandable.

"You don't have the tools and time to understand something" is not the same thing as "you can't understand something."

As an example I suspect only a tiny fraction of this board really understand how laws and legal systems work to any extent. Yet they are not unknowable and inexplicable because someone with the education and tools can understand them.

The same should go with a lot of things in Exalted-at least common things like sorcery, thaumaturgy, and to some extent artifact construction. Maybe people in this fallen age only follow vague guidelines without deeper knowledge but that's a symptom of this fallen age, not a result of inherent unknowability.
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I think where everything falls apart is the transition we make from "the world should be understandable and explicable" to "our understandings and explications should result in a world that is full of the reproducible and industrial".

Everybody loves the idea of 2e Thaumaturgy because it makes perfect sense. It is magical science, magical scholarship, and magical engineering.

The controversial contrast to this is...well, Motonic Physics, Least Gods, and Factory Cathedrals. It's the urge to take an explicitly fantastic, animistic setting, and use it to retell stories and aesthetics that we already get from a hundred different sources. Perhaps most importantly, it's the urge to ignore that The Simple Rules of Magic exist for the sake of the story, and are exploited in the story. When the story becomes about how obviously the underlying rules of the Rules are thus and everybody who did it before is badwrongdumb, the Rules have stopped serving the story and have become the story.

And that's not a bad story, but basically the whole argument thus far is that those stories aren't actually something some people find interesting or thematic in Exalted.
Prince of Brass said:
Well what else can you expect of a thread tagged "Hubris is a coward's word"?
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That's actually a fairly popular tag around these parts. Says a lot about us as a board.
 
There's an enormous space between "Creation's laws are, in theory, explicable" and "motonic physics is a good term to use in setting lore".

I think some people are not really engaging properly with the fallibility of human (and, Exalted) scientific processes, independent of the philosophical or metaphysical questions; with the idea that the Exalted of the First Age may have had other priorities besides constructing some Grand Unified Theory; with the degree to which "scientific" knowledge can be entangled with a particular economic, political, or other context, and almost unusable outside that context; or with the limits a character in the default setting (RY 768) would face in trying to understand or apply scientific knowledge from thousands of years ago.

All of these militate against presenting a Canonical Correct Science in setting material.

Most importantly, I think people are not engaging with the idea that presentation matters; that the way setting elements are introduced can have enormous effects on what players focus on, even when that focus may not be appropriate from a strictly logical standpoint. The primary goal of the game is to let you play the returning god-kings, or the elemental warriors who are scions of the world's greatest empire, etc. Presentation that helps you get into that mood is good.

(Also I think the idea that you're ever going to, like, draw a free-body diagram showing how the Solar used Heavenly Guardian Defense to parry that mountain kind of silly.)
 
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Like, is the argument that "in real life some things can't be explained right now and that's okay" or is it "in this fantasy game written by people, we should/should not accept lackadaisical writing that sort of throws ideas against the wall and whatever sticks sticks, regardless of how it interacts with the established metaphysics and lore of the game, because some people are grongards about that sort of thing and they shouldn't have a stranglehold over the lore"?
 
Kuciwalker said:
(Also I think the idea that you're ever going to, like, draw a free-body diagram showing how the Solar used Heavenly Guardian Defense to parry that mountain kind of silly.)
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On the other hand this is exactly the sort of nonsense that I'd expect an obsessive First Age scholar to attempt.
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And "MUST...EXPLAIN/UNDERSTAND/KNOW...EVERYTHING!!!" actually sounds like it could be a pretty decent Limit Break.
 
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Kaiya said:
Jesus Christ, do you hear yourself? You are comparing people who disagree with you about how to handle magic to homophobes.
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You can make anything sound ridiculous if you phrase it well enough, yes.
ichypa said:
Absolutely, but I got the impression that Kaiya believes that it doesn't need to be explained, rather than it being fundamentally wrong to explain it, and that it isn't so much that things shouldn't be inherently unexplainable as inherently...hmm, parsable, maybe? Which seem perfectly fine to me and within the scope of Exalted canon, because no matter how mighty or incredible an Exalt you are, you aren't going to be able to create an Exaltation, or really understand what Lytek does when he's cleaning the Exaltations. Those two examples are canonical things that First Age Solars slammed their heads against trying to figure out, to no avail.
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If that's true, then I have no disagreement. There can be things that the Exalted have not yet managed to learn - the Seal of Eight Divinities comes to mind, as well as the examples you mentioned. There can be things that your Exalted will never manage to learn, because the First Age is gone.

But that isn't the picture I'm getting from her. Remember that this discussion started because she didn't want me to try and understand why Sidereal Charms worked when everyone involved can casually defy destiny - that she was fine with there not being an answer in the first place to a very obvious, very fundamental question about the world - and worse, one which would be asked on a regular basis by both the allies and the enemies of the single most powerful group, largest collection of Celestial Exalts, and greatest repository of lost Lore still extant.
 
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If people are capable of responsibly consuming action films and patriarchy-reinforcing pornography then I think we can stand to go "nobody knows how this shit works lmao" on occasion in our fiction, the actual quality of that choice in the context of Exalted nonwhistanding. It's not a big deal.
 
Kuciwalker said:
There's an enormous space between "Creation's laws are, in theory, explicable" and "motonic physics is a good term to use in setting lore".

I think some people are not really engaging properly with the fallibility of human (and, Exalted) scientific processes, independent of the philosophical or metaphysical questions; with the idea that the Exalted of the First Age may have had other priorities besides constructing some Grand Unified Theory; with the degree to which "scientific" knowledge can be entangled with a particular economic, political, or other context, and almost unusable outside that context; or with the limits a character in the default setting (RY 768) would face in trying to understand or apply scientific knowledge from thousands of years ago.

All of these militate against presenting a Canonical Correct Science in setting material.

Most importantly, I think people are not engaging with the idea that presentation matters; that the way setting elements are introduced can have enormous effects on what players focus on, even when that focus may not be appropriate from a strictly logical standpoint. The primary goal of the game is to let you play the returning god-kings, or the elemental warriors who are scions of the world's greatest empire, etc. Presentation that helps you get into that mood is good.

(Also I think the idea that you're ever going to, like, draw a free-body diagram showing how the Solar used Heavenly Guardian Defense to parry that mountain kind of silly.)
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I think the explanation of how the Solar parries the falling mountain should be super simple, and also frustrating for someone trying to explain exactly why in relation to a more real-world physics system.

"The Essence of the Unconquered Sun is capable of arbitrarily matching challenges."
"Okay, but, how exactly"
"It's what the Unconquered Sun does"
"What's the exact mechanism?"
"We have no idea. We've tested a billion times. It just works. It's a Solar, it's the Sun. They can do magical stuff."
"I am not satisfied with this answer."
"Neither are we."

This is how I want attempts to fine-test Exalted magic to go. "Where does the energy come from?"
"From them"
"Why doesn't it vary based on what they're blocking?"
"No clue. It's magic."
"Okay, but-"
"We've been at this for three thousand years. I'd like to move on to something else."

linkhyrule5 said:
You can make anything sound ridiculous if you phrase it well enough, yes.


If that's true, then I have no disagreement. There can be things that the Exalted have not yet managed to learn - the Seal of Eight Divinities comes to mind, as well as the examples you mentioned. There can be things that your Exalted will never manage to learn, because the First Age is gone.

But that isn't the picture I'm getting from her. Remember that this discussion started because she didn't want me to try and understand why Sidereal Charms worked when everyone involved can casually defy destiny - that she was fine with there not being an answer in the first place to a very obvious, very fundamental question about the world.

(And don't say Rule 0.)
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It's Sidereal magic. It works. It's not reliant on the other forms of Destiny that are beaten. It's Exalted magic. It works. No one can pinpoint how or why. Attempts to do so inevitably hit brick walls sooner or later. You cannot map out the exact miracle of Exaltation. It won't work. It will never work. The people who made the things can't do it. It's a miracle, and it defies perfect understanding, it defies replication.

Also, yes, you are literally comparing me to homophobes and anti-vaxxers. If you dislike how utterly ridiculous that makes you look, then stop fucking doing it.
 
Violation of Rule 3 and 4 - A screaming argument is not civil, and disrupts the thread. As does directly comparing them to anti-vaxxers and the like. And strict enforcement is in effect, per the posted banner.
Kaiya said:
It's Sidereal magic. It works. It's not reliant on the other forms of Destiny that are beaten. It's Exalted magic. It works. No one can pinpoint how or why. Attempts to do so inevitably hit brick walls sooner or later. You cannot map out the exact miracle of Exaltation. It won't work. It will never work. The people who made the things can't do it. It's a miracle, and it defies perfect understanding, it defies replication.

Also, yes, you are literally comparing me to homophobes and anti-vaxxers. If you dislike how utterly ridiculous that makes you look, then stop fucking doing it.
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I acknowledge that I am comparing you to homophobes and anti-vaxxers. I think that that only sounds ridiculous because of the way you've phrased it. If I say, instead, "I judge people based on the effects of their beliefs on the world," I sound much more reasonable.

"Ridiculousness" is a poor heuristic.

And that's all very well and good, but the ST had better have some idea of how the things work purely as a practical concern, because otherwise he's going to be very sad when a Solar decide to defy a Sidereal prophecy in the middle of a dramatic scene and he has to suddenly decide who wins and why on a basis other than "plot fiat."

And if you introduce structure - such as, say, any amount of mechanics whatsoever - you can start making inductions and inferences. And if your players notice that the implications are inconsistent before you do, that's a plot hole, and there goes your narrative satisfaction.
 
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linkhyrule5 said:
I acknowledge that I am comparing you to homophobes and anti-vaxxers. I think that that only sounds ridiculous because of the way you've phrased it. If I say, instead, "I judge people based on the effects of their beliefs on the world," I sound much more reasonable.

"Ridiculousness" is a poor heuristic.

And that's all very well and good, but the ST had better have some idea of how the things work purely as a practical concern, because otherwise he's going to be very sad when a Solar decide to defy a Sidereal prophecy in the middle of a dramatic scene and he has to suddenly decide who wins and why on a basis other than "plot fiat."
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No. You're judging people for not liking their fantasy to be sufficiently hard sci-fi. You're wrapping it up in big condescending moral speeches. But that's all it is. Your taste in fiction isn't a moral issue. No matter how much you protest otherwise, all you're doing is calling people immoral for not liking your favorite fiction.
 
If you don't start recognizing the difference between "X is unknown" and "X is unknowable" and stop comparing people to anti-vaxxers and homophobes, then I will literally laugh at you. This entire argument is the dumbest I've ever seen in this thread; it beats even the like, five pages about one-time pads or that one argument about...

...Okay wait no maybe no the dumbest but definitely very dumb.
 
ManusDomine said:
If you don't start recognizing the difference between "X is unknown" and "X is unknowable" and stop comparing people to anti-vaxxers and homophobes, then I will literally laugh at you. This entire argument is the dumbest I've ever seen in this thread; it beats even the like, five pages about one-time pads or that one argument about...

...Okay wait no maybe no the dumbest but definitely very dumb.
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*shrug*

Is that, in fact, what @Kaiya is saying?

Kaiya said:
It's Sidereal magic. It works. It's not reliant on the other forms of Destiny that are beaten. It's Exalted magic. It works. No one can pinpoint how or why. Attempts to do so inevitably hit brick walls sooner or later. You cannot map out the exact miracle of Exaltation. It won't work. It will never work. The people who made the things can't do it. It's a miracle, and it defies perfect understanding, it defies replication.
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Because this sure sounds like "X is unknowable" to me.
 
Stop: ONCE AGAIN, OUR HARMONY IS DISRUPTED
  • Staff Post
    • once again our harmony is disrupted Or to put it in less Exalted language: A screaming argument is not civil, and disrupts the thread. And strict enforcement is in effect, per the posted banner.
    Kaiya went from 'stop having fun' to
    Kaiya said:
    Jesus Christ, do you hear yourself? You are comparing people who disagree with you about how to handle magic to homophobes.
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    Kaiya said:
    Also, yes, you are literally comparing me to homophobes and anti-vaxxers. If you dislike how utterly ridiculous that makes you look, then stop fucking doing it.
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    Don't do this. This argument did not need this sort of hair-trigger screaming escalation.
    linkhyrule5 said:
    I acknowledge that I am comparing you to homophobes and anti-vaxxers. I think that that only sounds ridiculous because of the way you've phrased it.
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    And this is not terribly polite, despite being superficially civil. If you really needed to get into it this much, use PMs. The thread did not need you two shouting at each other like this, nor the 'yes, I'm comparing you to homophobes and anti-vaxxers'.

    So, for carrying on in a decidedly not calm and civil tone, Kaiya and linkhyrule5 are both getting 25 points and a week out of the thread.

    Thread reopened. Play nice.
     
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