Why? They're corebook obstacles, and the system doesn't call them out as especially dangerous. It's not like they're Octavian, who, for all the hype his writeup gives him, is a chump. Coral snake venom is Resources •. A handful of mortal soldiers is the kind of opposition Exalts are routinely portrayed as trouncing as a central conceit of the game. What possible reason would I, as a newbie ST, have to treat these things like live grenades?
This is the central problem, vicky. 2e is shit at communicating what makes for an effective challenge, in large part because the books don't understand what traits and effects are dangerous in actual play. As a result, the system is riddled with landmines whose dangers are hidden because their actual threat is far out of proportion to their apparent threat.
They don't have to be. They're enough. More to the point, it's a strawman because Chung mentioned 'damage-adder Charms', which you took to mean Solar-level magic when that was neither stated nor implied.
Umm, because I expect a corebook for a system about modern times to include grenades in the equipment section, but don't expect a GM to throw a half-dozen live grenades at heroic movie action heroes on the first session? Even in a WWII game, unless the GM knows exactly how dangerous or safe they are in system terms.
As for the conceit, this is why I mentioned the 'demigod of
what' angle. Exalted is pretty explicit that the only notable in-combat advantages Exalts have all the time are Lethal Soak and Double 10s (the Essence minimum dicecap seems to be mostly irrelevant). So anything else along the 'combat demigod' angle should come from Charms - it's the only logical way, since there's nothing else special about Exalts'
innate superiority in combat. And as I said, three Resistance Charms (2½e; not sure about 2.0e) seems to give a huge boost in survivability against groups non-élite soldiers, as compared to just relying on an unboosted DV and 2 dice of Soak.
I do have to agree that Exalted doesn't explain what defines a strong challenge, but I chalk that up to the reason that point-buy systems are difficult to challenge-balance 'on paper' in such a way that the GMs following the 'on paper' advice in actual play would produce exactly the predicted results. Are there landmines? There are some, like the dubious utility of Ox-Bodies, or the slight obscurity of the five-men rule. But other things tend to be
visibile. E.g. the killstick damage or the venom damage and penalty are things printed right in the open, and there's no way to not-see those numbers if you're browsing the book in search of desired-lethality-level weapon to use (which you of course do by comparing numbers). I think that while landmines exist, their ubiquity is somewhat overrated. (Now the BP/XP split is something of a non-obvious landmine, especially for newbies, but it's quite traditional for WW games, so at least many people know to look out for it; I still don't like split systems.)
Okay, I jumped to conclusions on the damage adders: I was thinking along the lines of Terrestrial ones being not much better than mundane weapons; for comparison, we've encountered a DB who could breathe fire for roughly killstick damage, and one of the PCs had Tiger Style with
actually huge damage dice pools as a result.
