Gods, by and large have little to no empathy for mortals. There's a reason that Immaculates have to routinely beat the shit out of them to keep them behaving.
Humans are literally made in this place to be squishy prayer engines. Gods aren't adults in this analogy, they are the apathetic staff at a collapsing KFC franchise and humans are particularly bright factory farm chickens.
Setting aside canoncity for a second (because let's not pretend that canon isn't a fucking mess or that 90% of people aren't working off their own headspace):
A. Acting like everyone in setting has read the handbook is dumb as fuck and counterproductive to cultivating a, like, sense of mysticism and mystery about the world which is Important for something like Exalted that seems to pride itself
on shit like mysticism and mystery and getting to go dick around with both.
B. Acting like the Gods are weird sociopaths with no connection to human values is actively poisonous to doing anything with them ever.
Yeah yeah I'm gonna elaborate on both
. It's not me just dropping in for a hot take or w/e.
From a Watsonian perspective it's important to note that many, if not most Gods, are not going to be some super well informed spirit who was there at the very beginning for the Primordial War and Laughs At These Silly Peasant Superstitions. I mean for one, iirc, you can absolutely get Gods that follow the Immaculate line which kinda speaks for itself. For another Creation's been through multiple apocalypses and Heaven hasn't been exempt from
any of them. The War in Heaven likely had a monstrous death toll in terms of divine beings 'cause even if the Gods were bound by geas the Primordials were
not above venting frustration and anger on their unruly slaves. The Three Spheres Cataclysm (per Games of Divinity, y'know the superior one that doesn't have it as some weird continent destroying thing) fucked with the setting's fundamental metaphysics, making the strong stronger and the weak weaker and chaining the weak to the strong; burning a horrifically unknown amount of Stuff to ash in the process and removing it from all memory.
And the Twin Troubles are...well I mean you had gods getting butchered by rakshasa and rising dead and Gods contracting the plague and dying in such massive numbers that Heaven straight up shut its doors and enacted a quarantine of
Creation. Beyond that? The way the Jade Pleasure Dome itself works is that the more powerful, potent, and best
informed Gods are by and large also the ones jockeying the hardest for seats and increasingly indifferent to anything that doesn't serve that purpose 'cause divine addiction is no laughing matter yo.
Plenty of Gods aren't going to remember the Why of humanity and the original design docs aren't exactly around for anyone to take a peek at. Plenty of Gods are either Terrestrial and thus very plausibly have close ties with mankind (see: Forks or all the other cities where gods shouldn't be intervening on behalf of personal stakes but Absolutely Do) or Celestials who have a finite amount of brainspace and a limited window on their own world. Fuck, plenty of Gods should be drawn from the ranks of mortals themselves and god-blooded being welcomed in by a parent is a not-uncommon Thing 'cause yaaaay nepotism.
From a purely mechanical standpoint? In terms of writing mechanics I mean: it's damn hard to have an argument about the setting organically IC if you-the-GM-writer-whatever insist that everyone's read the same manual with maybe a different bit of flavor. Clashes of religion and cultural practices are
fantastic fodder for conflict and excising that is clunky as fuck, for god's sake give me the Immaculate being forced to deal with syncretism and blending religion as you move farther from their center of influence. Let there be IC
arguments over rites and ritual and relative importance. Similarly if you insist that your characters are so far above Conventional Morality that they can't be held accountable or interacted with in a meaningful manner besides rolling over and doing whatever the hell they want uh...
Shit why are they even there in the first place?
This is, ofc, setting aside the point that "A god fucked over my family, I'm going to
fuck his face" is a damn fine seed for a conflict/character/story in and of itself because...dunno what the argument you and others are making even is? "Assholes gonna asshole, remember kids don't stand up to the bullies because they're bigger than you".
The Primordials are nothing, they're irrelevant, they're a footnote. A footnote in a rotten old book that decayed mostly to dust a thousand years ago. They don't mean anything. Nothing they did means anything. They were assholes who thought they were above consequences.
Thaaat's...going a bit far I think. The Yozi work as the living relics of a ruined age, beautiful and awful, and while they themselves should never be able to break free, their 3CD's and below or their Deathlords (in the case of the Neverborn) do draw from them and should matter.
No, the Exalted matter. Regular mortals? They're at the bottom of the food chain and don't matter. The only thing notable about them is that they hold the potential for Exaltation and there's a very limited supply of those.
This is aggressively dumb and straight up that fucking...god Celestial Compass: Yu-Shan shit where "The gods would treat a
beggar more kindly than a DB because at least
they could get a
real Exaltation".
Come off it, like are you even sounding that out in your head. "I'm going to fill my setting with 99% people who don't matter and thus their desires and drives have no stakes and make the Entire Story about a handful of dudes whose sole reason for being is getting Swoler".
Isn't that Xianxia or w/e?
I think you've managed to make Exalted xianxia.
Yes, but when you get down to it, basically nothing within the Exalted universe could be considered moral. It is a slowly collapsing ant-heap of shitty decisions and perverse incentives where even the greatest sources of potential good are likely to routinely go insane and ruin everything.
"Yes but what if nothing matters" isn't an argument, it's basically acknowledging that you don't have anything else to put forward.
The most moral being in the universe turned away in disgust and surrendered to an eternity of solipsistic addiction and cosmic-self loathing over the shithole Creation became. And it's only gotten unambiguously worse since then.
since when is the Sun the most moral being in the universe was there not a discussion
ten pages ago about why that was a bad idea and didn't really work well
