All of the mass destruction Sorcery spells cannot be accomplished in a balanced fashion without broken combos like Creation Slaying Oblivion Kick.
So no Third Circle Demon, no high Essence war god, no elemental of storms, no hekathonkire, no Raksha lord can
possibly inflict damage on the scale of Sorcery.
Heck:
Dragonblooded, can do the same thing as most Sorcery spells.
Your argument is already failing.
And then we get into stuff like World Scarring Solar Glory and other high Essence Solar Charms which make meager Sorcery Charms utterly and completely pointless.
Unless you're assuming homebrew, your statement basically falls apart on large scales.
Since I'm talking about removing Sorcery, yes, I'm talking about homebrew.
Also, as I recall there are no actual demon-summoning charms that are available to non-Infernals, which is a minor issue when you have demon summoning being an important part of the game.
Thaumaturgy and Social Charms.
Moreover, the game has handled sorcery just fine since 1e-it can't be used for face to face fighting, sure, but sorcery was never useful for face to face fighting in Conan or in wuxia. Martial arts has never been handled particularly well in the idea that each style is a self-contained tree of charms.
Invulnerable Skin of Bronze, Virtuous Guardian of Flame, Unbreakable Bones of Stone and the list goes on. There are a hell of a lot of extremely useful direct combat spells. Heck, I've seen more PCs take out Dragonblooded with Thunder Wolf's Howl than with Peony Blossom Attack.
And furthermore, your argument doesn't actually contradict my point, which is that if you want enlightened mortals to have cool tricks, why not have generically available weak charms that anyone can access that let them be better at fighting, or at bureaucracy, or at being swole... incidentally 'generic charms that anyone can access that do something other than let you punch mans' would describe the variety of sorcerous spells just fine.
Because generic Bureaucracy-fu is not as important to the game as generic kung fu. Witness wordcount devoted to combat over social engineering. Further 'generic' is the kind of thing you want to avoid.
I have no problems with generic charm availability. I have a problem with having 20 different martial arts styles, all of which are basically "this is a themed set of charms which often do the same thing (add damage, increase accuracy, provide defenses, make you better at fite)."
I have no problem with it if I plan to have more than twenty fights in my campaign.
We have non-generic Charms because
they are interesting.
If I wanted to have generic effects, I'd play either Mutants and Masterminds or FATE. Both are immensely better balanced for generic effects than Exalted would ever be.
Except that doesn't solve the problem, because you can still combo martial arts between styles, and in fact makes the problem worse because now every martial art has to have viable offensive and defensive options, lest martial arts become useless and this means that a martial arts style with weak defensive charms because it has strong offensive charms now has to be balanced with the understanding that someone might pick up a strong defensive style to back it up.
The exact same argument can be made about Thrown, Melee and Dodge.
If the "strong defensive Charm" is buried eight Charms into another style and you're aiming to pick up a strong offensive Charm eight Charms into another style...
Well, go ahead and buy 16 Charms to accomplish what you could with probably six Melee or Brawl Charms.
Remember, in my conception
martial arts is always weaker than native Charms. You'll be spending massive resources to do what a non Martial Artist can do natively for cheaper and better.
Martial Arts exist to give an all-in-one package, a simple step-by-step guide to fighting for players who don't want to invest in five other combat abilities.
The artifact rules fail once you try to actually do anything involving one-shot effects with them (despite the fact that most large-scale magical workings are one-shot things that are one and done) and the crafting rules suck worse than the sorcery rules. If anything, this is an argument for removing the artifact crafting rules and replacing them with sorcerous rituals, not the other way around.
No they don't. One shot artifacts are not inconceiveable outside context problems. And frankly, I think that a system which allow you to build a manse without
one dot in Craft is kind of ridiculously broken and needs to go. If a player wants to defeat an Army, he picks up
WAR CHARMS. You want to travel to Gem? You grab Ride or Sail or Athletics.
Why should I be allowed to travel faster, safer and more reliably with my Twilight than my Eclipse? Why should my Twilight be faster than my Night? Why should my Twilight have tougher skin than my Zenith? Why should we be looking to my Twilight to kill an army rather than my Dawn?
Sorcery runs around tromping all over the design space of other Abilities all over the place. It's frequently used to overshadow other concepts and remove a lot of interesting options from the game because they're just weak.
If I want to burn my enemies city to the ground I can either recruit some fire elementals/dragonblooded/train a bunch of elite mortal saboteurs... or cast a single spell. Why is that more interesting?
Imagine an Exalted where instead of wiggling your fingers and chanting words your Twilight studied the habits of fire elementals, captured and broke their will and bound them in elaborate agreements and then called on their powers to unleash conflagarations on your foes. Or I suppose you could learn a single spell. *yawn*
Stating your conclusion as fact does not actually make it factual. It just makes you look like a prat.
Pot. Kettle.
Further, I'm just pointing out that your logic, when applied to other parts of the game, renders them superfluous.
