Lucky? You don't think he did things as he did because he had such a reason? And for all we know he might have thought of a few more yet. Which will just keeping eating up time, while poor Amu having no real social ability keeps getting the short end of conversations.
Amu should wait patiently until Midorin the Best shows up to school her on Craft:Reality.
Presence Charms, inside of a couple of days we could be leading his entire organization if we actually tried... actually, inside of a day if we split the training with Su or Dia.
Possibly, but I'm not sure if its his bad social/attitude or whatever, but I keep getting the distinct impression that he's just dropping stuff right in front of us and shooing us along. Furthermore he's the pragmatic sort, to an extreme, and we're an anomaly.
We can school ourself on that, Chara change with Dia and just spend some time meditating on it or using it.
...You're really underestimating the lengths Hotsuin would go to in the face of that kind of escalation.
I'm not sure what your imagining here. A Presence Excellency and (optionally) Irresistible Salesmen Spirit shouldn't be detectable from the outside and can subvert Hotsuin just as easily as anyone else.
That doesn't mean we know what to do with it. Midorin has a Plan.
Which is the mistake. Hotsuin didn't get handed this power. He started off not being taken seriously and experimented on for his ability to control demons.
Yuuuup
So he gained control based on personal power, rather that political? That makes it much harder to get rid of him non-lethally.
I was afraid it would be something like this. Solars don't have any way to change Heroic Motivations, so we're limited in how much we can convince him to allow. What exactly is his Motivation? We still stand a good chance of convincing him to do something that doesn't oppose his Motivation, how much lee-way does that give us?
That's false.
...and even if we weren't actually Chara Changed with Dia in that scene, we should be able to uprank Presence pretty easily. With more Presence, Amu should be able to present things in a way that Hotsuin would be more likely to agree with, so spending some of Amu's experience on that (and getting as much as we can from Dia) would be rather useful. 2 hours spent learning, 4xp to get it to 3. We should also try boosting Dia's Integrity, both because Presence is the only 'normal' Ability she has over Amu at the moment and because it's useful for social defenses.
Exactly
Reset the world into his ideal of a meritocracy, only reviving those he considers worthy of surviving in the new age.
Hotsuin is still bound by mortal limits, at most he's a Heroic Mortal. Which he probably is really, but that just means he can use WillPower to ignore our arguments. In the end he'd still be a Mortal trying to match an Exalt. We would win, even if e had to break out some of the nastier Presence Charms.
Both of those things he does in ignorance of the context. Ordinarily, he'd already be parlaying Amu's Solar tendencies into something more useful rather than trying to stonewall her when convenient. And honestly, why even bring up the argument about who would win in a fight if you're not trying to put it on the table?
It's called politics.
So?
Would using Presence Charms to try to convince him to work with us suffice for this?
Dia already has Charisma 5 and Appearance isn't worth the XP, since it's never rolled with anything.
He'd recognize it for what it is, most likely, so probably.
Depends on the charm. Excellency+ISS should just look like her normal hyper-competence when she's not flaring her Anima.
No, in Exalted you can get Sorcery at Essence 3. You just need to undertake the Sorcerous Trials, which are really just a spiritual journey to warp your own mind to the point you can properly comprehend sorcery, not something enforced by outside influence. Then you need to repeat said trials on a larger scale to unlock the next circle. Just completing one set of trials can take years, so we don't really have time to unlock all three circles.
Seems a bit odd, given Exalted sorcery is flat-out reality warping. I can see having to modify it to work on Magatsuchi(sp?) instead of Essence or whatever the local universe is made of, but it should still work if the Exaltation does.
Disagree, when in social combat, the difference between the two persons appearance is subtracted from the dice pool of the person with lower appearance. It's never rolled with anything, but if you have a high appearance, your opponent can have much less to roll.
It's not that you can't do that, it's that the Salinian Working is missing. This is more of a road bump than a roadblock.
It's subtracted from their Mental Defence Value, not their dice pool, so one dot of Appearance would cost 16 XP for the equivalent of one auto-success. Because we can easily beat mortal MDVs with just an Excellency the effect of an extra auto-success is that resisting costs 1/3 of a point of willpower more, which is horribly inefficient compared to Charms.
Oooh, duh. For those who don't know, the Salinian working was a hack made to the Loom of Fate by a Solar Sorcerer named Salina that made it so that anyone could learn Sorcery without a teacher just by observing nature. Now that the Loom's busted, it's obviously not working anymore, so we'd either have to check our past lives (don't think there's much there) check Exa's records (unreliable) or work it out from first principles (Primordial tier effort. Literally, the original Solars needed the Primordials to teach it to them.)
Why do people keep assuming this will happen?
Dawn Anima. Having a -1 external penalty caused by fear is not a very good thing for a mortal, heroic or not.
I get that, but I would think that someone at Hotsuin's level of power would be difficult to classify as just a heroic mortal.
Doesn't his power come from demon summoning? I don't think he gets super-human dice pools for anything.
No, he's an extremely powerful spellcaster in his own right. The Demon Summoning is, if anything, a side effect of his talent more than anything.
