I dont think I agree.
We can cast out Outsiders or Fallen, but only 1 at a time and at a cost of a third of our Essence pool. We can cut down armies with Obsidian Butterflies, but they can defend against it by seeking cover. We can nuke a city with Rain of Spiders, but anyone who walks indoors or under a roof is protected.
Ancient Sorcery appears to be both significantly more expensive to pull off, and more limited in scope and/or duration.
I just took a brief look at the 1-5 dot tiers of disciplines available to kueijin, and unless Im missing something significant, no they cant. For that matter, I dont think Red Court vampires or Black Court vampires have any access to Disciplines that can do anything about that either. So they get dumpstered in open combat too.
I feel weird arguing that the Infernal needs...moderation in interpretation.
But if not, this interpretation would essentially trivialize most of the overt combat threats from the canon setting(s)and require the wholesale invention of new ones or major changes to the setting.
Not to mention that it poaches a bunch of the functions of at least 4 other charms in Molly's charmset:
- Breath of the Wicked City: 2 dots
- Sun Denying Spite: 3 dots
- All-Devouring Depths: 5 dots
- World-Grinding Devastation: 5 dots
My opinion is that this is a Rule Zero situation.
For reference, this is one of Molly's designated armykillers
Note that World-Grinding Devastation and All-Devouring Depths both have Signature effect, suggesting that the author didnt intend that shintai being used to modify the world would be able to obsolete them.
What's the number have to do with the point I was making? It's a broad and deep ability that causes serious harm to the opposition in a way that causes them to respond with greater force at different angles. Iku is here with his army because of SCE.
You didn't address my point on Mab either. This sort of ability isn't unprecedented or particularly unfair, it just has different limits.
Maybe with the vampires, I wound need to check again, but it doesn't really change much. Garden variety vampires using only their native powers aren't exactly supposed to be peers to the exalted. An elder who's learned nothing else in their very long life is an idiot anyway.
We paid enough for two ancient sorcery spells, a hell customization point, and our signature choice for this. You can credibly threaten to end the planet with stuff like CCG, so I don't see this as out of line. Other solaroids get always active effects that break fundamental parts of the system for less. Which, as you've pointed out, we won't be able to avoid interacting with forever.
It's also limited use. We can only rely on it once an arc, and squishies make maximum nonsense hard to arrange.
This incidentally should sound familiar, because it's describing the same fundamental dynamic as mote tapping and alternative challenges presented on the topic of exalts being really hard to kill:
I'm tearing my hair out as a Storyteller, these fucking things are just too strong. How do I kill my players?
Well, first of all, go back to Chapter Ten and reread that bit about this being a power fantasy and it not being
your job to fuck it up. But if you want to throw some speedbumps in front of The Infinite Human Ginsu Ma- chine, Chosen of the Dawn, I strongly recommend the following options: 1) Target stuff he cares about rath- er than the Exalt directly, and which is less invincible than he is. Not only will this get the story moving in a hurry, but players love defending their Intimacies, and in the case of fighty Exalts, they usually get Essence for doing it, too. 2) Target his areas of non-expertise. Use poison gas, emotional manipulation, that sort of thing. An Exalt can usually smash a vampire with Potence and Celerity flat, but may have more trouble dealing with high Presence or Obfuscate. Mages can get a lot of mile- age out of indirect attacks and debuffs. 3) Shapeshifters are really scary once you get past the tornado-of-claws aspect. A lot of Gifts either just work, or else target Will- power, which Exalts can't usually buff. Losing a couple of turns running and defending because of True Fear is a good way to break up an otherwise-unassailable battle pattern and get the Essence exhaustion ball rolling. The Chosen often have counters to these things, but those are either an investment on their own, or rely on your Intimacies kicking in to save you, which is at least an interesting stress point.
It doesn't trivialize the setting because other people don't have to fight us in a white room and we have to pick when we're going to burn it. This situation is about optimal for expressing our hell, but we're not going to have a free range setup every time we want to do so, or be able to afford to use it at every opportunity that presents itself.
I don't really understand your argument about other charms either; we have something like four that make bakemono and most of them only have variations in function. RVD steals teleporting from BME. Our various difficulty reducers do the same thing at different costs and under different conditions, but stack on each other.
The kit isn't designed to have one optimal tool for each individual application, but variations that have different flavors to them to pick from and play against one another in your build.
It should also be highlighted that this isn't undefeatable even faced head on. Unlike many supernal effects you can block what we're doing or survive it by other means.
For example; the FCF doesn't have geological activity. It's a hemisphere with impossible metal pillars jutting through it, not a normal planet. We can't do volcanoes or anything not in theme with what we built.
People like Mab and her elite Winter monsters wouldn't give a shit about the stunt I'm proposing, and many other things we could pull, as a result.
We could use the lightning ring, but we also can't survive that without using TLF ourselves*.
This is where the other AoEs could come in. For use when Shintai is exhausted, when we're fighting someone immune to what we're capable of apply, or to double down if we really need the damage. Which would be a lot, but maximum power would require a cumulative 47+ exp and various build slots to pull once an arc if we wanted to go that way.
*Which is really another hidden cost of this tactic: environmental protection charms. It's not like we're immune to the thing by RaW after all.
WHWH is the buy in for passive protection against cold, which requires concessions in the hell build to leverage, and anything else is TLF.
Bringing the buy in to 27 exp, design considerations in our hell including a customization point, and our signature slot.
