Reducing the scale of Manses from a useless 1-5 that didn't actually mean much, to a simpler Lesser/Greater is not a very good critique as far as things go. Anyways, a book for manses and demesnes is actually on the release schedule, so I'm not really sure what you're complaining about.
Vance just pasted it without thinking, only realized the issue later. Mistakes happen!
That explains everything.
Being knocked back by a massive explosion, along the same vector as some surrounding rocks, then falling into the biggest nearby intact gravity well, somehow strains disbelief, but you'd be fine with someone using a stunt to retroactively sneak a weapon past a security checkpoint with no roll? That's... damn, just like bardic Inspire Competence for Move Silently, that's literally the one example the book gives for what isn't possible. Page 123: "Players cannot generally use a stunt to draw a "hidden" weapon from nowhere, although some assassins might well have shuriken or throwing needles hidden all over their person, leaving exact placement vague until a good stunt opportunity arises." Seriously, do your research before making these claims!
If space travel explicitly works at the speed of plot, I'm still not seeing the problem with solar athletics overland-travel charms being developed to match, or at least approach, that same scale. It doesn't need to have the same range as an actual voidfighter. This isn't an interstellar trip, or even interplanetary, it's basically translunar - and downhill, besides. Look at the EVA stunt Leia pulls in The Last Jedi, does that really seem like it needs to be Essence 4?
Ehhh... No, in an abstracted scene where somebody's previous location hasn't yet been defined, I'd say stunting yourself to be on the right hemisphere would be valid. Like, if you're playing a game with the Death Star, your exact location on a planet is probably not that important. Past that point, most of what they're talking about is how Charms interact with an exploding planet, and they do seem to be on track. You're right that it's pretty gonzo, but, well, Exalted is pretty gonzo at times. There's no mileage in pretending otherwise. Late 2e's problems were about making it gonzo too often, not about opening the door to stuff that shouldn't exist.
It's specifically the chargen part, and the fact that basic Solar athletics just does not go that fast. It's designed to be fast on the human level, not the stellar level. Like, for sure, Essence 5 Solars, or even Essence 3 in Heaven's Reach or whatever, should be able to pull off flash stepping around in orbit. But it's not the default of the Exalted experience, that's my argument. The default level of play is Bleach, not DBZ, ya know?
I mean, Solar Athletics doesn't go that fast, sure, but debris from an exploding planet probably does, and Solar Athletics would let you ride it, which I believe was their argument.
I could possibly see D&D 5e being used in an Exalted Conversion though it'd take some work. I'd envision Classes as doing most of the work being the Archetypes that a player would choose containing all the "Essentials" with Sub-classes to further differentiate them later on. Charms... Charms would probably best be described as a list of secondary pseudo-Feats containing Passive Abilities, Active Ablities, and all that stuff that an individual can choose from every so often to further specialize your character. Meanwhile Essence and/or Willpower would just be another resource mechanic that'd you'd have to juggle.
Alright, then, let's say Alderaan is a city-state rather than a planet, Emperor Palpatine is one of those four unspecified deathlords, and the Death Star is some necrotech equivalent of a Titan-class Aerial Citadel. Vader's pretty much an abyssal exalt already, and Grand Moff Tarkin fits a little bit too well as an ancient ghost now that he's appeared in a movie which started production years after Peter Cushing died. Any objection then to having someone with appropriate Essence 3 Athletics charms (Monkey Leap Technique, for one) climb up there over the course of something like the missile barrage scene from Project A-Ko?
Yes? Like...obviously? This is well within the capacity of their Charms, even at a glance.
Yeah. Weren't the exalted meant to scale up to whatever threat or setting they were in?
They don't automatically scale, no. They're just really, really, really strong. If you write a sci-fi setting for Exalted, you would up the scale of their powers depending on what you wanted them to do, exactly. But that isn't a foundation part of the Exalted being Exalted, it just means you want them to have the same impact on a much wider scale. As it stands, they have sufficient power to still be a driving force in a setting like Star Wars, even in the gonzo bits of EU, they just...won't necessarily contribute to a space battle like they would a naval battle using just melee charms.
No, like. A Solar with Athletics+Melee, at chargen, could fairly easily go ship to ship to ship, slashing crippling holes in each one and personally sinking the entire fleet. Scale that up to a space battle, and the distances are so extreme that the same Solar just cannot cross the distances in time, and so are relagated to commanding the ships and boosting them as a captain or whatever.
Exalted strength does scale, in a sense. From a design perspective, they're heroes capable of overthrowing the titanic creators of the world while still being vulnerable to personal-scale confrontation with other heroic figures, or being blindsided by canny underdogs. "Lessers overcoming the mighty" is a recurring element of Exalted, and the power of the Exalted is part of it. 2e mechanised that with the ubiquity of effects like perfect defences that allowed an Exalt to block an exploding supernova with the same effort as a thrown boulder, but that was an attempt to express one of the underlying principles of the game and the setting, not a 2e-specific principle. The power of the Exalted is such that they are, and are expressly intended to be, best suited to taking on things that you would expect to be out of their weight class.
No, I know, but it's not an intrinsic part of them, is what I meant. Like, in universe, there is not a reactive "I grow stronger in proportion to the threat I face" effect. And yeah, in an actual Star Wars-style game, I wouldn't bat an eye at that ruling. But it isn't how I would pitch Exalted, because it gives a false impression of how you look when you first start playing. That the rules don't explicitly act to prevent this sort of thing isn't the same as "Exalts can do asteroid and space ship to space ship leaps at chargen as an assumed baseline thing", you know? It paints the picture of jumping across the planet and that just isn't what it looks like from the word go unless you change up how to play it to enable that interpretation.
True, but that's an issue of framing, because there is a certain intrinsic, "I treat all challenges beyond X level of difficulty as being X" effect, and even a certain amount of "I find it easier to succeed at challenges beyond X level of difficulty," as witnessed by things like how Heavenly Guardian Defence has an easier time parrying the uncountable damage of a supernova than a big rock tossed by a buck ogre. The reason an Exalt can't do starship-to-starship leaps as an assumed baseline thing is... because they're not faced with starship battles as a baseline thing, basically. They can totally fight while bounding heroically between opponents, and they never really stop being able to do that, at least potentially.
I think we basically agree on this, but I care about the framing a lot more than you do, is basically what's going on.
Question. Since in the demon city, there aren't any ships or vacuum of space.... so what do we do?
you, a fool: "Everyone knows Single Point Style is overpowered, but it gets even worse when you combine it with the sheer defensive power of Solar Melee, and throw in some Solar Resistance on top of it for when an enemy manages to pass through your wall of blades."
