No. The game is "Exalted" not "Heroic Mortals: The Mortaling."
This shit needs to stop, right here. Not just you, but this entire line of argument.
That stale "WHAT'S THE NAME ON THE COVER, HUH"
bon-mot has done more to damage the game than anything else in print, because it assumes that Exalts, by their own nature, are a topic in dire need of elaboration that the books have, until now, not done adequate justice towards. And that's patently not the case, in every way we have seen. From the broken system getting regularly patched with Charms under the mistaken impression "Combat is only for Exalts fighting Exalts anyway," to reams of material being rendered unplayable by thoroughly salting it with Essence 6+ shitheels of every stripe who have seemingly never done anything worthwhile with their time until PCs came along, I guess. ALL of it stems from that half-hearted "Gotcha!" convincing people that YEAH, that sure IS the name on the cover, now ain't it.
Here's some hard truths: The Exalted, as presented conceptually as "supernatural hyper-competent people," are
not interesting enough to support the entire gameline across them as some kind of grandly universal selling point. Spin that in any theme or visual style you care too, an entire world of superpowerful goobers getting into fistfights until the sky caves in is still not enough Meaning to hang a hat on, and only serves to deflect away from the myriad places Exalted
actually shines as a fantasy setting. "You can win/you can be powerful" is not, in of itself, that engaging a hook when used as a
premise for Exalted rather than a descriptor of what Exalted
entails. "Exalt" is not and has never been an actionable character type in any seriously meaningful way, its best used as a Context that states the place of the character within the world, and without that context you have
fuck-all. People assuming that's all there is to it is the whole reason why so many homebrew attempts exist in other systems, the very idea "playing Exalted means the numbers are big and you Fight Good."
Do you even know
why it says "Exalted" on the cover? Because Exalts are the
narrative lens that players are meant to initially view Creation from, one where they are not subject to the worst of its trials and tragedies, and gives players a "looking down" vantage point to help spur simple changes in complicated circumstances, rather than needing to work from the ground up in unfamiliar territory. That's it, that's all its there for, "these are the guys you play First, to dip your toes into the place and get familiar with things." Can you keep playing Exalts despite that, even several kinds of them across a series of heavily detailed books? Sure as hell can, but they still exist alongside shit like gods, demons, beasts and behemoths intended to give these adventures more texture than just to fill time between exhausting and tiresome punch-downs with another asshole with dumb hair and a silly lightshow aura. Not some kind of vast overstatement of their mechanical and narrative superiority against all other potential options, or higher-editiorial mandate "everything must come back to the Exalted as the First, Best and Only, one way or another."
Because we already
saw that shit in action, and it was the absolute
nadir of 2e whenever the books decided that we hadn't heard enough about How Fucking Great the Exalted are. That was the entire reason we had Elders suddenly taking center-stage as though we were supposed to Care about their awful backstories and half-formed millenia-spanning schemes, why the "All Solar Charms" template from the Corebook got taken literally and the Deathlords simply became End Boss Mega-Abyssals to seem threatening, why Dragonblooded were presented as second-class bootlicks to The Better Ones, why every plot had to scale upwards into a world-ending catastrophe to be seen as a suitable challenge to "a half-dozen people who can do literally anything effortlessly," why Alchemicals had their fluff bent and twisted so they could be Real Exalted After All, why time and again we had to deal with the latest chapter of Desus Is An Irredeemable Monster getting paraded out instead of interesting setting hooks, why people made continually awful cold-reads of the setting trying to puzzle out who had The Splat Charms Which End Reality and why they haven't used them yet, and why an infinite number of potentially useful offhand details were explained away as the meddling of some random Exalt or another instead of standing by themselves as a Weird Thing Which Exists. I could seriously go On.
All because "BUT EXALTS THO" took precedence over
everything else to the point that, yes, people quickly became sick of it. And for good fucking reason! By dint of being classes so archetypal in nature, No One playing Exalted truly
gives a shit about any other Exalts mucking about but those in the game
they are invested in. No one bought the book with the expectation of reading z-tier comic book plots with even less charismatic characters, they bought it to make their Own and surpass what little was there. And that... you brought most of it in with you. The toys didn't come with that sandbox, it just set up the boards holding it in.
Like most other old White Wolf joints and their similar love affairs with huffing their own farts, Exalted as a gameline has always been at its
weakest when it tries to actually sell the Exalted as some kind of fundamental pillar of the setting, some kind of "you get the Big Dice Sloppy Protagonist Blowjob" UNSEEN MASTERSTROKE in RPG development without which there is apparently No Game, rather than billing Creation as a place where Exalts happen to be and therefore interact with a wider variety of supernatural creatures and themes. At the end-results of this is where you get things like Return of The Scarlet Empress, where everything is Exalts Fighting Exalts Scheming Against Exalts
ad nauseam, and the Daystar writeup which existed to be as outlandish as it possibly could to appeal to "what do you give to the Exalt players who already have Seen/Done Everything?" Then they printed entire BOOKS on the misguided impression that it was the Setting trappings holding Exalted back after all, and that what people were
really looking for all along was playing the same busted-ass 2e Charm system in a poorly-articulated WoD knockoff, or IN SPACE or some shit. Meanwhile, you can look over at the slow evolution of the nWoD books, where they had already Learned these lessons, and made a deliberate effort to cultivate something more tangible to its audience than "its Vampire Game, you play the vampires and everyone who matters is vampires."
No, I didn't mean the actual rules, I mean the fandom reaction.
And this, yet again, is the real root of the problem. Where you think the fandom informs the setting or something, and feel it necessary that the book must come down and Deny those Playing The Game Wrong, and if not that, it falls to you to forcefully wave them off with airs of non-canonicity and being unnecessarily abrasive as hell about it. Frankly, your impressions of the game seen from this thread are legitimately just as obnoxious and derived out of equally bad memes and fanon-as-fact as the ones from folks like Accelerator you take so such issue with in the first place. You've spent the past dozen pages of both threads here going around hitting people over the head with the new corebook while talking about shit which has never been true as though it were printed yesterday, and willfully ignore or deflect any information to the contrary simply on the basis nothing in-text has contradicted you
yet and that somehow gives you justification to lord it over others that you have The True Vision.
You need to come off it already, because this song and dance is getting super tiresome.
