Hmmmm.
It's almost as if this were a problem that would be solved by breaking down the assumption of the "chargen Solar" as a weak, fumbling character fighting wolves and baking cakes - such as, for instance, giving them the potential to shape the course of the heavens and bring terrible disaster on the nations of their enemies.
As a side note, the killing of the titans was the first deed of the Exalted; it was not their most noteworthy. Though the beginning of history, it is not its climax. M-R-L did much greater and more famous things, once the makers were cast down. You might have chosen a better example.
> Aleph: "This is rather stupid; my Solar of a few dozen sessions who has spent most of that time setting up a baking empire spanning two or three countries can be higher-Essence and more mystically potent than the people who wrestled the Primordials and defeated the uncountable armies of demons and Primordial-loyal races who ruled Creation and had access to a Third-Circle-designed infrastructure which was probably on par with that of the First Age."
> Omicron: "No, see, they were
more awesome than that, and your chargen Solar
should start at that sort of level and rapidly rise to exceed them!"
> Aleph: "Oh right, well. That clears that right up. Much verisimilitude, very WSOD, so believability, wow."
See, you're fucking over your own point here. Firstly, my point is that my Solar Bob
can hit E5 after a few dozen sessions of making my fuckawesome baking empire, and yet I am expected to believe that he has reached heights that the Exalted of the First Age struggled to attain, even though they started out wrestling the Empyreal Chaos and
went up from there. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, even ignoring my hyperbole,
no matter what I have Solar Bob do, it is probably less awesome than what M-R-L did. Sure, I can fight gods and bring disaster on a country or two, but she and her comrades fought the things that forged Creation, defeated them
and then went on to greater things.
And sure, you can say that no, seriously, Bob's stuff is cooler and he's better than they were, but it falls flat. Because he isn't facing bigger challenges or more terrible threats than them, because if threats like that existed in the Age of Sorrows,
Creation would be a smoking ruin. The single most important event in the setting - the thing that killed off the Solars, the thing that apparently left Lunars as the angry Exalted who all harbour
burning rage in their hearts but totally aren't oWerewolves yo, the thing that shaped the course of both ages since; the Usurpation - it was the Fall of the First Age. And that's the thing.
It was a fall. The Sidereals chose to
diminish Creation rather than risk its destruction. By tearing down the First Age, they accepted a
lessened Age. And
maybe those lost heights will be achieved again, but the Age of Sorrows is a
tamer, lesser Age compared to the Time of Glory. You're contradicting your own canon by saying that there are challenges on par or exceeding those of ancient history in the world that the Vision of Bronze left us with, because the whole point of the Vision of Bronze is that there aren't anymore. It was a
loss that tore through the world to save it, and while there are fearsome things left in modern Creation, they are not as fierce or terrible as what your predecessors triumphed against.
...
On another note, no longer directed specifically at Omicron, I rather love the varied attempts to get me and those who are similarly unimpressed with 3e to stop saying so. Because you have some nerve saying that when I can toss it right back at you. I have
every fucking right to say that I'm disappointed and disdainful of what's been offered to us - I was as invested in Exalted as you before 3e, and I stood to gain as much from it as you did. And now it's come out, late and bloated, effectively forcing me to either keep playing the rife-with-flaws 2e or abandon the gameline, and you say "suck it up and find another RPG" like I'm supposed to just meekly accept the loss of my favourite game? Fuck you very much too, thank you! No, I'm not going to let sycophantic praise be the only feedback that the devs get, I am damn well going to call out flaws as I see them. Not necessarily because I hold out any hope that it will change anything in 3e, but because criticism and customer feedback
is actually pretty fucking important in design, and designers can never know if they are driving away a largeish chunk of their fanbase if that chunk "suck it up and deal", as Fenrir and Deations and others seem to want them to.
You
don't like that people are criticising the direction the new edition is going? Well, if I may paraphrase a quote from earlier... let me see... "
TOUGH. FUCKING. SHIT. Clearly, it's not the game they were hoping for. Some of us feel like 3rd Edition has fallen utterly flat on everything it promised and ruined the line. Plenty of us dislike the new directions. You are not fucking everybody. Not everybody wants what's been given to us. If you don't like the criticism,
too bad. Sucks for you." If you don't like the "negativity" being thrown around, then let me give you a long "d'awww" and a sympathetic cuddle, and suggest you go off to RPG.net or somewhere where opinion of 3e is higher than here. But, you know, this
is actually a thread for discussing Exalted, and so trying to, uh, stop people from discussing what they think of Exalted in it? Maybe not the best attitude for you to take.
I also like the rather transparent attempt to imply that the problems are only with these two Charms. Nice try, kids, but no. These are the problems that
the discussion is focused on at the moment, largely because people keep trying to defend them. If you
want us to move the conversation onto other topics, say so. Then we could, for instance, address the way that we were promised less Charm Bloat in the new edition and then given 600 Charms of more or less the same mechanic, and how "it lets you specialise your character at grappling" could have been better implemented with Charms that
give you new ways to grapple and
add capabilities that interact with and enhance the existing systems, rather than saying "you can use the same copy-pasted dice trick mechanics on
this part of the system with
this Charm, or
that part of the system with
that Charm, etc". I suppose we can at least see how they expect Exigent homebrew to be so easy - you just have 60-70% of the Charms as specialised dice trick mechanics and you're golden.
Oh, or maybe we can address how the "you should play an X if you want to Y" entries for Lunars and Exigents are largely stuff that you can already do with Solars! The pointless legacy code in motepools and chargen might come up, and how Holden is such an oWerewolf fanboy that despite all the other sacred calves they've slaughtered in the name of changing up the formula, they've kept the BP/XP divide and all the potential for insurmountable experience gaps it opens up for newbie players because he personally likes how it gives you a sense of growth, or something. Or we could tackle Evocations and Martial Arts, and how they spent around 18000 words describing the powers of just ten artifacts and another 24000 on eleven styles. We might move from there into how a lot of the decisions in this shining new edition seem to be made less from the perspective of writing a good game that's easy to build on, and more from the perspective of "lets make sure we can easily churn out future supplements full of more Martial Arts Styles and Evocations so that we can keep getting money out of our fanbase". We could debate the various ways that have already been proposed to break the craft system over one's knee, or the ridiculous difficulty involved in building antagonists with a probability curve that's designed from the ground up to be impossible to eyeball.
We could talk about how Solars - the human heroes whose themes are about excellence and unparalleled ability - have Charms that let them do things like literally possess someone by hiding inside their shadow, which I presume they used excellence and unparalleled ability to steal from the Ebon Dragon. Or how their Charm trees are top-heavy in the extreme, incentivising people to minmax in explicit contradiction to the devs statement that they don't
want people minmaxing (and failing to explicitly clarify it either way, meaning it's another newbie trap). We could discuss the way that the Project and Social Influence systems essentially boil down to "ST arbitration; throw a couple of obstacles in their way but let them succeed if they handle it personally", and take 12500 words to say so, or the way that the combat system - while apparently pretty good in general - reportedly runs into issues when you're not modelling 1v1 fights. Hell, we could even delve into the realm of pure opinion and try and get some idea of how many people like the new fluff and attitude of "fuck internal consistency and verisimilitude, we don't care if any of these Charms make the Usurpation impossible" versus how many people find that it blows their WSoD out of the water and shatters their immersion and investment in the setting.
So no, it's nothing even close to being just these two Charms, and I apologise if I've given you the impression it was. If you want to move off them and start on any of the above, then please, guys, say so and we'll begin. Don't let me be guilty of keeping us on this one minor topic. I'm quite happy to criticise the rest of the issues as I see them.
). And it's a game where a level 1 character can create the equivalent of a protoshinmaic vortex and destroy a region tens of miles wide (according to what another player told me - it's a level 1 spell in the Chaos Mage spell lists or something).
