That's fine, I'll be your strawman.
Your argument is inane. However I'm in one of those rare moments where I actually have the willpower to go in-depths as to its mind-boggling stupidity, so let's (urgh) talk about it.
Characters do not interact with eachother directly in combat, they interact via Charms and weapon-stats with Initiative which is then used on other characters. Direct character traits do not matter for the purposes of generating Initiative either, not anymore than they do for causing threshold successes in 2e, because it is entirely the function of a die-pool drawn from any source capable of adding dice, be it high weapon Accuracy, additional Charm-dice (or those hilarious non-Charm dice caused by Charms themselves), or even straight-up tacking on Initiative gained from other causes like Crashing.
By this token, there is no game in the entire history of RPGs that has character-derived combat. After all, D&D attacks boil down to a d20+X, and whether the X is derived from Strength or a masterwork bonus or magic or Haste it's still just a number.
And WoD attacks are a dice pool of d10s, and it doesn't matter whether those d10s come from Strength, Firearms, an equipment bonus or circumstantial bonuses or Willpower or magic.
Games which roll dice use modifiers to determine your chance of success on a roll. Ultimately they all boil down to "how many modifiers you have" regardless of sources. This is not a problem because sane people are capable of deconstructing the roll in their mind, know that half their pool comes from Dexterity or whatever, and know that their character is fighting that way because they're one of the most agile person in the world while the guy in front of them is coasting on his magic weapon crutch.
A combat played out between two traitless, bland pools of 15 dice leveled at eachother and two sets of Melee Charms would resolve identically to that same kit wielded by two Dawn castes, because Initiative by itself is a pool of "advantage, positioning, relative poise" Nebulous Beneficial Bullshit and not a character-derived mechanic. It is at-best a middle-manager which exists solely to parse lethal-scales of weapon damage through into Health Levels, rather than rebuild the jumbled mess of EITHER previous edition into something more coherent.
A combat between two traitless, bland [D&D characters with a +5 to-hit modifier and a +3 damage modifier]/[WoD characters with pools of 9 dice and Fighting Style: Light Weapons 5]/[DFRPG characters with +4 attack, weapon:3 and two Fate Points in store] would resolve identically to a fight between [two D&D Fighters]/[two WoD expert swordsmen]/[two important and skilled fighters]. What's your point?
Initiative is a character-derived mechanics. It is determined by your attributes, skills, choice of weapons, what magic you've learned, and your tactical choices in battle. It does not exist to "parse lethal-scales of weapon damage," it exists because it allows extended cinematic fighting between two characters where there is a dynamic shifting of advantage without the immediate lethality most other WoD-legacy games share. It functions at this.
And then combat stops, and its weight on the system disappears entirely, and with it all the established mechanical precedence in the system created by its inclusion.Suddenly now Charms are costed differently, do different things (or no things!) and this is all Fine and Good because these are Abstractions and totally not an additional layer of obscuring mechanical complexity on this shambling mess. Despite the fact how when Exalted was originally drawn up, the impression Charms were created to give was no Combat/Noncombat separation, and that despite the tack of other presiding games at the time, you could use all your mountain-smiting powers in a courtroom as equally as a battlefield and Combat Turns existed simply to enforce a framework where one person starting a fight meant Everyone would want to be in on that fight.
You're vastly exagerating things. While it is true that "Charms are costed differently,"
most Charms with an Initiative cost that gets waived outside of battle
would not be activated outside of battle in the first place. The Initiative cost waiver is there to solve edge cases rather than as a wide system feature.
But yes, you can use your mountain-smiting powers in a courtroom. That hasn't changed.
Say what you will about 2e's combat, but when it generates numbers, they seem to come from somewhere, rather than randomly assigning a +5 here or a -3 penalty there, seemingly at the whim of the authors with no concrete basis underlying that save "we wrote it that way, so shut up."
This is ludicrous; 2e weapon stats had feeble consistency and were broken anyway, Charms were ridiculous, etc. Because your argument is just generally nonsensical, I have no idea what "randomly assigning a +5 here or a -3 penalty there" is even supposed to mean. There are no "random numbers."
In all honesty though I can't begrudge you the inanity of your argument. You have been keeping this up for
actual hundreds of pages. I certainly couldn't do the same without devolving into nonsense. We're all only humans.
