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General Exalted Thread

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MJ12 Commando said:
I don't deny that I'm making a presumption. My argument is that this presumption is more sensible because reading charms in this fashion doesn't lead to Heavenly Guardian Defense allowing you to parry a recession. If a charm doesn't say it lets you do something that would be impossible, it doesn't let you do the impossible. You can't parry a mountain unless the charm says you can parry something that's unparryable-but even so you can't parry a social attack, or a robbery.
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Then stop insisting you're correct in rules as written at the very least. If you want to say the rules are bad that's fine. If you want to say that Shyft's reading is wrong, it is clearly not.

Personally, I would allow it to break any encoding, even a one time pad, because Exalted isn't a game where mortals with a fancy math trick can outsmart a Solar with one Charm. Just like the most sophisticated and unbreakable lock in all Creation can be bypassed with a touch. If you want to lock out/in a Solar develop "Unbreakable Lock Securing Technique" and hope you win the roll off.

Nor does allowing a Solar to break any code (that isn't backed by Charms/magic) break the game. Because Exalted is a game about What You Choose To Do, not a game about Can You Do It.

Okay, so you pat down your head cook who has been your loyal friend for years and find a note on him and when you use DSE on it it says "We launch the attack at midnight."

Well, what the fuck do you do then? Kill your friend? Use mind rape to force him to tell you everything then more mind rape to turn him absolutely loyal to you? Wander off into the wilderness crying you eyes out because your last loyal friend has betrayed you like everyone else?

I honestly don't care about the one time pad thing. It's flavor text. You activate the Charm and its solved. Bam. Now the interesting part of the session starts.
 
Breaking it down into rules terms:
  • Correctly-generated one-time pads are, in the strict rules sense, a perfect defence against determining the meaning of the message if correctly used (never use the same segment of the pad to encrypt more than one message) and the message thus encrypted is thus immune to the charm under discussion.
  • In Creation, a machine that generates functioning OTP material would almost certainly qualify as an Artifact that requires a mote commitment to operate.
Any complaints?
 
Aaron Peori said:
Yes, but people are saying that it's beyond impractical. It's beyond improbable. It is flat out mathematically impossible on the realm of A = !A impossible.




So if I randomly selected one of those possible answer than there is 0% chance of me getting the correct one? Not merely a incredibly imporbable one. Not merely a impractical one. A logically impossible chance of me selecting the correct answer at random?


The claim by people here is that it is mathematically impossible. So far, it doesn't seem that way to me. Which is strange, because everyone is so insistent that solving a one time pad generated message back to its plaintext would be equivalent to violating the law of noncontradiction.
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Let's look at how one time pads/running key encryption work.

Imagine I have a message: Happy Days

I can translate these message to numbers using the following scheme (for the sake of simplicity, assume we can tell the difference between a 1 and a 2 and a 12. In real life this would all be binary anyway).

* 0 A 1 B 2 C 3 D 4 E 5 F 6 G 7 H 8 I 9 J 10 K 11 L 12 M 13 N 14 O 15 P 16 Q 17 R 18 S 19 T20 U 21 V 22 W 23 X 24 Y 25 Z 26 Space 27

Our message becomes 8-1-16-16-25-27-4-1-25-19

Now anyone knowing the above code can turn this message back into English and even if you don't know the code, you can figure it out because English has exploitable patterns. For a message of a large size, for example, the most common letter will be e.

So we want to protect this. To do this we use a running key - our one time pad. This is a message of randomly chosen letters the same length as out message. Let's go with: JSYJMS DGJ

In numbers this is 10-19-25-10-13-19-27-4-7-10

Now to encrypt our message using this one time mad, we add them together using modulo 27 arithmetic

08-01-16-16-25-27-04-01-25-19
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
10-19-25-10-13-19-27-04-07-10
==========================
18-20-14-26-11-19-04-05-05-02

To get our message back, we just do the opposite

18-20-14-26-11-19-04-05-05-02
-----------------------------------------
10-19-25-10-13-19-27-04-07-10
=========================
08-01-16-16-25-27-04-01-25-19

Happy Days

If you know the one time pad you can get the message back. That's a basic law of cryptography: if you put the correct key in, the correct message comes back. It has been broken. With most encryption schemes and messages of sufficient length (cardinality of English I think; It's been a while since I took this exam so I'm a little rusty), you know you have the correct key because the message suddenly starts reading as English.

This is not the case with a running key. By trying different random strings, you can get any message out. Some will be English, some won't be. One will be the true message but you have no way of telling which.

Say for example, I decide my one time pad was 12-26-00-26-09-18-19-20-17-9.

Using the process above I do the following

18-20-14-26-11-19-04-05-05-02
-----------------------------------------
12-26-00-26-09-18-19-20-17-9
=========================
06-21-14-27-02-01-12-12-15-20

This translates to Fun ballot.

As you see, I can have two running keys, both produce valid messages and I (Eve the attacker of course) have no way to tell which the real message is.

Now, there are some ways you can attack a onetime pad in SFF. Time travel is a big one (so don't go relying on your one time pad in the Xeelee Sequence). If you can record one copy of a message encrypted with the one time pad, jump back in time to after the one time pad was selected but before it was used to encrypt a message, act such that the message being sent is changed and record that second message, you can break the pad by comparing the two copies. You can do the same thing if you can view branching parallel universes and so on. Of course that's not very relevant to Exalted.

To break a one time pad in Exalted, we have to assume that the charm can somehow know the 'correct' message from among all the other equally valid messages.

MJ12 Commando said:
So Flawless Diagnosis Technique is mathematically impossible now? Look, if I had a phone line to all possible futures, I could not decode a one time pad without somehow getting my hands on both components at some point. If I had the same phone line, I could diagnose the patient by simply killing him again and again in those possible futures until I got the correct information.
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You could if you were calling from after the one time pad was created but before it was used to encrypt a message by examining two futures where the same pad was used to encryption different results (Lunars Attacked my Mansion vs Flood destroyed my crops say). Or, if you could do it by calling up the future when the use the pad a second time for some reason.
 
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grommile said:
Breaking it down into rules terms:
  • Correctly-generated one-time pads are, in the strict rules sense, a perfect defence against determining the meaning of the message if correctly used (never use the same segment of the pad to encrypt more than one message) and the message thus encrypted is thus immune to the charm under discussion.
  • In Creation, a machine that generates functioning OTP material would almost certainly qualify as an Artifact that requires a mote commitment to operate.
Any complaints?
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If the OTP was explicitly created using magic, sure.
 
Serafina said:
A very simplistic representation:

You send your agent the message: "Execute Plan Ascending Dragon Three".
The message is clearly communication, with hidden meaning. It's meaning is clear to the recipient, who either carries the plan in his head or has it written down somewhere. It's arguably a form of code.
Now, the communication gets intercepted by a Solar with Discerning Savants Eye. Does the Solar now know all the details of Plan Ascending Dragon Three?

The answer should obviously be "No". The Solar has no way of knowing what the plan entails, since the charm does not allow the solar to magically read the document it refers to or read the participants mind.
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THIS.
 
linkhyrule5 said:
When you send... whatever you want to call it, the thing that you use to turn random gibberish into a message, you are sending a communication. The communication exists.
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Yeah? But the total information in that communication is "here are some instructions for what to do to another thing that you don't have." DSE can totally read that, but it's useless information to a Solar cryptologist that doesn't tell you anything meaningful. Nothing about DSE says or implies that it lets you perfectly understand information that isn't there. It doesn't follow sympathetic links to drag up all relevant contextual information, it just allows you to clearly understand the thing you are looking at. That's useless when studying communications sent via a one-time pad system.

Chloe Sullivan said:
As in understand it, a OTP is set up such that I have already given you a magic envelope with an infinite number of written pages in it, covering all conceivable messages I may want you to receive. Instead of sending you the message, I just send you a note indicating which page to pull - in fact, it's a magic note, because the envelope won't release any papers without a magic note. Therefore, anyone intercepting my note can't figure out what I mean to convey to you... unless they have access to a duplicate envelope. (I've actually given you hundreds of magic envelopes because each is only used once.)
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This, exactly.

Serafina also has it exactly.
 
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So this is what happens when you fuse together a Lunar and a Solar.
Cool stuff. I have also have a new Discordian charm to write in the future. Thanks everybody!

Also, you should all expect, in the not far future, to read the roughly equivalent of what Shyft is doing, except for the discordians and probably for the third edition.
We will have fun together!
 
Giygas said:
So this is what happens when you fuse together a Lunar and a Solar.
Cool stuff. I have also have a new Discordian charm to write in the future. Thanks everybody!

Also, you should all expect, in the not far future, to read the roughly equivalent of what Shyft is doing, except for the discordians and probably for the third edition.
We will have fun together!
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Ahh, regarding 3rd edition- they explicitly went out of their way to remove any kind of Borgstromantic reading of charms and mechanics. One of the major design goals of Ex3 was being able to make whatever they wanted and insist it never interacts with any other part (fluff or crunch) unless they specifically said so and only in the ways they said so.
 
Shyft said:
Ahh, regarding 3rd edition- they explicitly went out of their way to remove any kind of Borgstromantic reading of charms and mechanics. One of the major design goals of Ex3 was being able to make whatever they wanted and insist it never interacts with any other part (fluff or crunch) unless they specifically said so and only in the ways they said so.
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Boy did I wish they were explicit about that with 3.5e of D&D. Would have saved me about 24334234 headaches.

I kinda miss the borgstromancy, because it was part of the coolness of Exalted, but since Jenna isn't on the team, I guess they couldn't continue that with the same quality she had.
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
Boy did I wish they were explicit about that with 3.5e of D&D. Would have saved me about 24334234 headaches.

I kinda miss the borgstromancy, because it was part of the coolness of Exalted, but since Jenna isn't on the team, I guess they couldn't continue that with the same quality she had.
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It's simpler than that- they want to run people like ES and I out of the fandom. It has nothing to do with 'Can they do Borgstromancy' and everything to do with 'we don't want to be criticized'.
 
Shyft said:
It's simpler than that- they want to run people like ES and I out of the fandom. It has nothing to do with 'Can they do Borgstromancy' and everything to do with 'we don't want to be criticized'.
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Well, at least they haven't started banning everyone who voices the least bit of criticism the way Pathfailure does yet...
 
Shyft said:
We don't hang around the Onyx Path Forums, is the thing, or the other big concentrations where they have their kickstarter backers and the like.
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Like rpg.net, which by now has something ridiculous like a third of the moderation staff being Onyx Path employees, freelancers, or otherwise having personal ties to aforementioned.

When you have people being threadbanned on quite thin grounds for criticising Exalted (Exalted line dev is a moderator) and Beast (Beast line dev is a moderator)... well, it begins to look like there might be something rotten in the state of Denmark. And even if there isn't anything direct going on, it says concerning things about the recruitment pool and institutional attitudes in place that so much of the staff is made up of people with a financial interest in the success of one industry player.
 
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EarthScorpion said:
Like rpg.net, which by now has something ridiculous like a third of the moderation staff being Onyx Path employees, freelancers, or otherwise having personal ties to aforementioned.

When you have people being threadbanned on quite thin grounds for criticising Exalted (Exalted line dev is a moderator) and Beast (Beast line dev is a moderator)... well, it begins to look like there might be something rotten in the state of Denmark. And even if there isn't anything direct going on, it says concerning things about the recruitment pool and institutional attitudes in place that so much of the staff is made up of people with a financial interest in the success of one industry player.
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There is a reason I left that forum.
 
vali said:
Dinosaurs piss heroin.
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Yes, well done, that's a great and original example of how Exalted does impossible things all the time. Wow, a bioengineered lifeform designed by human scientists to produce a high-demand drug through internal processes. Truly, we've never seen anything of the sort.

Oh wait.

I really hate people who wave "heroin-pissing dinosaurs!!!11!eleven!" around like it's some sort of crazy-awesome impossible shit, because like many things in Exalted it's basically just a reference to real-world science covered over with a thin lens of "mythic". In this case, GMO drug production. Cecelyne is a relativity pun. Malfeas is a Dyson Sphere. The Maidens being chained to samsara is a nod to temporal paradox. These are the cool bits of Exalted, ffs; the way that you can squint for a minute and realise that your giant crossbow that launches a cradle of a thousand embryonic fire elementals that are born furious and free at the apex of its flight and rain down on your enemies is actually a fragmentation missile pretending to be magic is in large part what distinguished Exalted so much from other RPGs of its time.

Now people are pointing to those exact things and using them as an excuse to ignore real-world science and justify things with "it's just magic, lawl". There should totally be a place for an "it's actually a one-time-pad dressed up in magic trappings" expy in Exalted (in, yes, First Age ruins and possibly the more advanced bits of Malfeas). Which, yes, shouldn't just fall over when faced with magic.

And to those people who are saying that a "fancy maths trick" shouldn't help mortals overcome a Solar, then I humbly suggest that you replace all Solar Charms of this sort with the words "I Just Win Against Mortals", since apparently your opinion is that even with the most advanced techniques that can be developed behind them, they pose no threat or challenge whatsoever to a Solar who has taken even minimal investment into their area at chargen.
 
If you want a one-time pad dressed up a magic, there's already a trope like that:
A map (or other document) that only reveals it's information when viewed through a special lens.
The map is the ciphertext, the lens is the one-time pad.

Okay, that doesn't necessarily follow the mathematics of a one-time pad, you'd have to get more descriptive like that. Have both be made from Wyld-stuff or something. Maybe a function of Protoshinmaic Vortices - you freeze it at a specific moment in time and imprint a copy of it into two spheres of polished moonsilver (the key text). You send one to your agent and when you want to send a message, you use your own to generate the key - maybe you wrap your own moonsilver sphere with a sheet of orichalcum with the message on it and expose it to sunlight focussed by orichalcum mirrors. You then send the orichalcum sheet (the ciphertext) to your agent, and using the reverse process (wrap foil around sphere, expose to moonlight or maybe wyld energies) he can receive the message.
 
Serafina said:
If you want a one-time pad dressed up a magic, there's already a trope like that:
A map (or other document) that only reveals it's information when viewed through a special lens.
The map is the ciphertext, the lens is the one-time pad.

Okay, that doesn't necessarily follow the mathematics of a one-time pad, you'd have to get more descriptive like that. Have both be made from Wyld-stuff or something. Maybe a function of Protoshinmaic Vortices - you freeze it at a specific moment in time and imprint a copy of it into two spheres of polished moonsilver (the key text). You send one to your agent and when you want to send a message, you use your own to generate the key - maybe you wrap your own moonsilver sphere with a sheet of orichalcum with the message on it and expose it to sunlight focussed by orichalcum mirrors. You then send the orichalcum sheet (the ciphertext) to your agent, and using the reverse process (wrap foil around sphere, expose to moonlight or maybe wyld energies) he can receive the message.
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Part of all this arguing about OTPs comes down to system definitions, and there are some questions you need to answer:

1.) Does any part of an OTP message contain meaningful plain text information, as opposed to an infinite multiple potentials? If true, DSE renders it clear, bypassing encryption as if it were not present.*
2.) If the above is true, is an OTP a Perfect Effect? If Perfect , DSE forces Charm Roll off.
3.) If the first statement is not true, then the OTP doesn't follow under the normal logical terms of 'Read obfuscated text'. Borgstromantically, it's splitting everything up until you need all parts to successfully interpret the message.

* The 'safety valve' here, preventing a message from being updated over and over and over again using different keys, boils down to something like 'A message was used, and therefore you are locked into seeing the first-and-only apparent message'. I'm not 100% on the logic, but it sounds reasonable to me.

Summary: As long as document in hand has both text and code, DSE will bypass the code and show you the text.
 
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Ah. So on the other exalted forums criticism isn't accepted?
Pity. I will do probably something like Shyft for the Discordian, but i admit that the Exalted 3 part was going to be probably warped into more of a recension/conversion study/MASSIVE CHARM REWRITE(i like the basis of the Third Edition, but they could have done so much better if they listened to something other than themselves)(For the MASSIVE CHARM REWRITE i am waiting to see if the leak we have is the last thing, or if the will axe/fix something in the relased version)(I hope they will simplify craft, but i am ready to slightly simplify it myself if they don't do it).

Well, everything here is going to be posted anyway.(i need to start from the last caste division[Discordian have different terminology, because they can], because the first of them has Sail for Divisional ability(Its like the caste ones, except the discordian have the chance of chosing only three of them instead of having all of them as standard) and the second one Ride, which are exactly the two abilties that Shyft still have to do. Which means that, without a comparison with the powers of the Solars, i would feel my work incomplete.)
 
Amidst all these categorical denials, it might help people to consider One-Time Pad encryptions as being equivalent to chopping a message into multiple pieces, none of which can possibly make any sense whatsoever without the others, and sending them separately. Claiming you can "break" a One-Time Pad is like saying you can "break" that code after finding one of those message-pieces.

Let's say there's a messenger carrying a letter that reads "Dragon Elephant Child Wheat Yeddim Grace Tower", and there's another, separate messenger carrying a letter that includes one hundred different, possibly mutually exclusive orders, each associated with a number, and the recipient has a chart connecting one hundred nouns to one hundred numbers, allowing him to associate the seven nouns in the first letter with seven of the orders in the second.

If a Solar chases down one of those messengers, can Discerning Savant's Eye detect what orders are being conveyed? What if she chases down both messengers? I'd say not. It would involve drawing information from nowhere, information that is not included, even subtextually or secretly or implicitly, in the message she is considering. At best, she has acquired a list of one hundred possible orders and knowledge that her enemy probably intends to issue seven of them, assuming none of the words in the first message correspond to multiple numbers.

Now, she could "break" the code by acquiring her own copy of the chart, or secretly reading the messages and recording subsequent patterns in the behaviour of the recipient. Certainly, that's the expected method in an ancient setting like Exalted, where instant data-transfer is limited to Sorcery (and if you've got Infallible Messenger, why are you not just using that, for god's sake). In a modern setting, though, that's the purpose of a "one-time" pad - you use each number-noun chart and each set of orders just once.

At that point, the only way to "break" the code is to cheat - either by beating up/brainwashing/tricking the recipient or sender into telling you what you want to know, or by developing Essence 5+ magic that cheerfully tells logic to go fuck itself and DRAWS THE SUPERNAL TRUTH from any form of communication the Solar has time to non-casually study.
 
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See, my interpretation is that this is meant to be the 'logic can go fuck itself Charm' you're referring to.

And to make it clear, I don't think this is good design for it to be such a low Essence.
 
AmineHsu said:
Perhaps Exalted SHOULD care about such things, but the game system as written does not seem to care any more about encryption than it does locksmithing. Both are things you buy a single charm to perfectly circumvent and never look back.

Not saying that is a good thing, but that seems to be how the system is written.
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Uh, no. I get the feeling you don't know what a one time pad is.

Okay, here's a super simple comparison. Let's take the matter of lockpicking, since you already brought that up. You can use a perfect lockpicking Charm to open any lock, sure. However, if what you're trying to open is a solid metal wall, your perfect lockpicking charm does absolutely nothing. There is no lock to pick, no portal to be opened, no secret mechanism: it's a wall. Anyone trying to argue that you can lockpick a solid metal wall is retarded. It doesn't matter how perfect your lockpicking charm is, there's no lock.

Similarly, applying a perfect decoding charm to a message done with a proper one-time pad (that is - you used a truly random key, your key is at least as long as your string, it is never reused and only you and the intended recipient know it) doesn't work because it does not make sense if you know what a one-time pad is. There's nothing to decode. You might be able to get every possible valid message should you have every possible key, but this is of, heh, questionable utility.

If you want to read that message, you need to do something like, say, find the intended recipient of the message and brainfuck him, find the original sender of the message and brainfuck him, use Solar Stealth to hide in the room while the recipient helpfully provides the info you need to read the message or somehow look backwards in time to when the original sender of the message was writing the message... etc, etc. This is much like, say, deciding to knock down the wall in the above example rather than futilely attempt to pick a lock that isn't there.
 
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horngeek said:
See, my interpretation is that this is meant to be the 'logic can go fuck itself Charm' you're referring to.

And to make it clear, I don't think this is good design for it to be such a low Essence.
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I don't think that can possibly be the case, because if it were, it would also - directly, without any particular stretching - allow the Solar in question to capture a messenger carrying a letter that simply reads "Execute Plan Falling Emerald Blossom" and immediately intuit every detail of the plan in question. This is clearly insane, and not the intended use.
 
Jon Chung said:
Similarly, applying a perfect decoding charm to a message done with a proper one-time pad (that is - you used a truly random key, your key is at least as long as your string, it is never reused and only you and the intended recipient know it) doesn't work because it does not make sense if you know what a one-time pad is. There's nothing to decode. You might be able to get every possible valid message should you have every possible key, but this is of, heh, questionable utility.
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DSE does not decode.
 
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