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General Exalted Thread

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notthepenguins said:
Sidereals may be arguably the weakest combatants among the Celestials, but remember that a) they outnumber Infernals twice over, and b) they have numerous Elders using Scroll of the Monk SMA.
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They also have training and gear and know each other. They also possess Target Number fuckery and Charms that go "lolno get fucked" in ways that are really, really hard to counter because their Charms are so sideways.

Also: lol VBoS.
 
To be fair, when RotSE says "Akuma" it isn't strictly speaking about 50 Green Sun Princes, but also about unspecified yet vast numbers of Dragon-Blooded and Celestial Akuma, including Sidereal traitors revealing themselves as the last minute, including also, I think, Anys Syn due to that clause in One-Handed Fury. So the odds aren't that bad for them.

Wait, did I start that sentence with "to be fair"? That seems wrong.
 
ManusDomine said:
Infernals + Akuma attack:

Infernals THE NEFARIOUS FORCES OF EVIL: "WE ARE ATTACKING YOU!"

Sidereals: "No you're not. Duck Fate, Avoidance Kata."

TNFOE: "BUT WE HAVE A SPELL THAT BREAKS PRIMACY OF DEFENSE OVER IT'S KNEE NEENER NEENER!"

You can totally do a situation where the Infernals murder some Sidereals, but the Sidereals possess a Charmset that make them incredibly good at being shadowy masters and leaders of conspiracies, making them really good at running away to approach a problem from another side. If you want to fight the Sidereals, you'll need to whittle them down and hurt them by hurting their assets in Creation instead of trying for badly written dramatic irony that doesn't actually work.


I believe that @Aleph and @EarthScorpion have made very long posts about this before.
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That means they can't make a spell that beats a charm that "drawns or locks in enemies" like say a summoning spell. Or dark lockout or freeze you in place and etc. They walked into a trap and got ganked. Happens to ALL the Exalted.
 
ManusDomine said:
the Sidereals possess a Charmset that make them incredibly good at being shadowy masters and leaders of conspiracies, making them really good at running away to approach a problem from another side.
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This depends heavily on what bits of their Charmset are thrown out for being uncounterable overpowered bullshit, though. Like, here's an example, can they use the charm that lets them push a button to accomplish arbitrary goals at the cost of some price set by the GM? It's a great "shadowy master of the world" style charm effect, but put that in a PvP context and your game just ended.

Every time people talk about what Sidereals can do, it seems to be necessary to bring this up. What can they actually do? What a by-the-book 1E Sidereal can do on paper and what a GM would leave them after taking the nerfbat to them for use as NPCs, for example, are very different animals. Like, are we discussing "Sidereals If Chung Took A Razor To The Charmset", or "Sidereals Theoretically Redesigned To Not Break Other Splats' Games" or "1E RAW Book Sidereals", or "2E Scroll of the Monk Sidereals", or what?
 
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Jon Chung said:
This depends heavily on what bits of their Charmset are thrown out for being uncounterable overpowered bullshit, though. Like, here's an example, can they use the charm that lets them push a button to accomplish arbitrary goals at the cost of some price set by the GM? It's a great "shadowy master of the world" style charm effect, but put that in a PvP context and your game just ended.

Every time people talk about what Sidereals can do, it seems to be necessary to bring this up. What can they actually do? What a by-the-book 1E Sidereal can do on paper and what a GM would leave them after taking the nerfbat to them for use as NPCs, for example, are very different animals.
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Um... the necessary assumptions are right there in the quoted post man.

Avoidance Kata and Duck Fate.
 
notthepenguins said:
Um... the necessary assumptions are right there in the quoted post man.

Avoidance Kata and Duck Fate.
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Sure, that's true. However, I'm not talking about that specific setup, but this sort of post as illustrated here:

ManusDomine said:
They also have training and gear and know each other. They also possess Target Number fuckery and Charms that go "lolno get fucked" in ways that are really, really hard to counter because their Charms are so sideways.

Also: lol VBoS.
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Which charms, does that include 1E's Transcendent Hatchet of Fate? What version of VBoS, can I do the Joy in Adversity mote reactor? There's no similar uncertainty when discussing Infernal capabilities, yes? Because there is consensus on what Infernals are able to do, as we only have one source and it wasn't full of weird broken stuff.
 
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Darmani said:
That means they can't make a spell that beats a charm that "drawns or locks in enemies" like say a summoning spell. Or dark lockout or freeze you in place and etc. They walked into a trap and got ganked. Happens to ALL the Exalted.
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Man, good thing I decided to leave the meeting 10 minutes before they locked the doors, right?
 
linkhyrule5 said:
Clearly, the proper defense against bad writing is to throw even worse writing at it.

*cough* Student and Sifu Unity *cough*
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Mutually Assured Game Destruction is the best sort of game balance.

Darmani said:
That means they can't make a spell that beats a charm that "drawns or locks in enemies" like say a summoning spell. Or dark lockout or freeze you in place and etc. They walked into a trap and got ganked. Happens to ALL the Exalted.
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The only time something like this happened was the First Age, where basically everyone cooperated to get rid of the Solars, and it was a pretty hard fought battle. And pretty much a desperate saving throw of "shit if this doesn't work we're fucked" which involved permanently breaking the world to make it happen.

If you want to nuke all the Sidereals they shouldn't go down like chumps.
 
Darmani said:
That means they can't make a spell that beats a charm that "drawns or locks in enemies" like say a summoning spell. Or dark lockout or freeze you in place and etc. They walked into a trap and got ganked. Happens to ALL the Exalted.
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They have a literally omni-applicable perfect defense, and a retcon-self-out-of-the-scene Charm. There is not actually a way you can prevent the Sidereal Exalted from retreating from a fight they don't want to have, except by convincing them to commit to it in the first place (or they fail the Duck Fate activation roll, but that's a long bet).
 
I really like the idea of a Shattered Heaven shard, where the Sidereals are adrift of their base of operations, unable to trust each other, and basically have to go all Mission Impossible/Burn Notice/Spy Thriller instead of dealing with paperwork. A good chunk would still be alive, but who knows if that Sidereal is working for the Enemy or not?
 
Omicron said:
To be fair, when RotSE says "Akuma" it isn't strictly speaking about 50 Green Sun Princes, but also about unspecified yet vast numbers of Dragon-Blooded and Celestial Akuma, including Sidereal traitors revealing themselves as the last minute, including also, I think, Anys Syn due to that clause in One-Handed Fury.
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Yes. That clause in One Hand Fury.

The one that falls under the "undesired physical, social, mental and spiritual influence" category.

I think that runs into something which rhymes with "Fuck Date". :p
 
azoicennead said:
Man, good thing I decided to leave the meeting 10 minutes before they locked the doors, right?
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Incredible how every single Sidereal happened to be absent, by almost a comedy of errors including poorly-parked gondolas, smoke breaks, misreading floor directions, running to fetch necessary paperwork, and even one facing sudden and unprovoked stomach distress and was forced to excuse himself to the Little Secrets Room.

Leaving the Infernals to ambush an empty, securely locked room thinking, "Damn it all, we should have thought to leave a table of really complicated snacks or something!"
 
Dif said:
Incredible how every single Sidereal happened to be absent, by almost a comedy of errors including poorly-parked gondolas, smoke breaks, misreading floor directions, running to fetch necessary paperwork, and even one facing sudden and unprovoked stomach distress and was forced to excuse himself to the Little Secrets Room.

Leaving the Infernals to ambush an empty, securely locked room thinking, "Damn it all, we should have thought to leave a table of really complicated snacks or something!"
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Nah. Infernals are Outside of Fate, so they kick down the door and every Sidereal present vanishes with a faint popping noise - and the Infernals remember that.

It makes their annoyance at the idiotic plans of their bosses even more acute, especially when everyone else and traitor-gods and the like is insisting that the Sidereals were never there all along.
 
Darmani said:
That means they can't make a spell that beats a charm that "drawns or locks in enemies" like say a summoning spell. Or dark lockout or freeze you in place and etc. They walked into a trap and got ganked. Happens to ALL the Exalted.
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Right.

A trap.

In the middle of Heaven filled with Gods that might sypathize with the Sidereals and the elders using SMAs from Scroll of The Monk and the Celestial Lions and the stashes of Artifacts that the Sidereals possess.

You want to kill the Sidereals? Whittle them down instead of making up a spell that breaks Primacy of Defense.
 
ManusDomine said:
You want to kill the Sidereals? Whittle them down instead of making up a spell that breaks Primacy of Defense.
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Nah, forget "primacy of defence".

It's that, bluntly, any wide-area broad anti-Shaping effect [1] is fucking awful and should die in a fire. Because Shaping is not consistently used as a keyword. The shitty spell in RotSE is even worse than the Abyssal Dream Slaying Defence, because it was a badly written effect [2] trying to contrive a badly written plot point (especially since it doesn't work on Sidereals because they can Duck Fate it). Wide-area anti-Shaping causes lots and lots of issues with the effects which are unnecessarily tagged with Shaping, because people gave them the keyword as "Shaping is reality manipulation, so anything which alters reality is Shaping, right?".

Especially since, hilariously enough, by RAW that also shuts down SWLIHN and TED's perfects. And large swathes of the Infernal Charmset which were also unnecessarily tagged with Shaping.

[1] Wide-area anti-Wyld stuff, by contrast, is fine. That's there to make safe-bubbles in the Wyld or defence lines.

[2] "Tee hee hee, aren't I clever to make it really hard to dispel, and to ignore the kind of prep time you should need to cast that kind of massive spell," said the author.
 
To be fair (much as I hate to start any sentence discussing RotSE with those words) the spell does not, as far as I can tell, shut down all shaping. The word shaping doesn't even appear in its text It just shuts down any teleportation and anything sending information into or out of the area which, on first glance at least, appears totally within the bounds of what Adamant Circle Sorcery should be able to do somehow. Or is there a different write-up of the spell I'm not aware of?

Though yes, needing to target the exact centre of the effect to dispel it when the centre is basically impossible to locate is just stupid.
 
ManusDomine said:
Yes, I am aware of them being impotent and limited in 1e, what I was referring to was the scene where the Empress murdered the Deliberative which I believe wasn't a thing in 1e.

Not that I care because I think that scene was retarded and that she should have been deposed a long time ago and the Realm fallen with her if she actually acted like that.
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'twas a thing in 1e, unless my eyes do deceive me. See page 69 of Exalted: the Dragon-Blooded.

In the spring of the Realm Year 643, the Deliberative took the unprecedented step of overturning the Empress' veto no fewer than three times within the space of a week. She was exceedingly disturbed by this display of solidarity and independence on the part of her Senators, and so, she resolved to dissolve the Deliberative.

She did so by stationing an entire legion outside the Palace of the Deliberative. When the day's session was well underway, she gave the fateful order, and the troops rushed forward, slaughtering the entire Lesser Chamber and most of the Greater. The few survivors were exiled, and a new Greater Chamber was chosen in due time.

The new Senators, unsurprisingly, were more cooperative than their predecessors.
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EarthScorpion said:
Nah, forget "primacy of defence".

It's that, bluntly, any wide-area broad anti-Shaping effect [1] is fucking awful and should die in a fire. Because Shaping is not consistently used as a keyword. The shitty spell in RotSE is even worse than the Abyssal Dream Slaying Defence, because it was a badly written effect [2] trying to contrive a badly written plot point (especially since it doesn't work on Sidereals because they can Duck Fate it). Wide-area anti-Shaping causes lots and lots of issues with the effects which are unnecessarily tagged with Shaping, because people gave them the keyword as "Shaping is reality manipulation, so anything which alters reality is Shaping, right?".

Especially since, hilariously enough, by RAW that also shuts down SWLIHN and TED's perfects. And large swathes of the Infernal Charmset which were also unnecessarily tagged with Shaping.

[1] Wide-area anti-Wyld stuff, by contrast, is fine. That's there to make safe-bubbles in the Wyld or defence lines.

[2] "Tee hee hee, aren't I clever to make it really hard to dispel, and to ignore the kind of prep time you should need to cast that kind of massive spell," said the author.
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It gets even better when the actual spell doesn't really do anything because the Sidereals can still go Duck Fate + Avoidance Kata and never have been there.
 
The new Senators, unsurprisingly, were more cooperative than their predecessors.
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That's actually entirely surprising, considering the historical results of various attempts by would-be absolute monarchs to wipe out or dissolve uncooperative advisory bodies. In fact, that's one of the major things that started the English Civil War - Charles' attempt to arrest five members of Parliament.

Such an action would, in a setting where the Empress lacks Solar-level Charms... wait, no, fuck that. Even if she was a Solar, that would be a day of infamy that would utterly poison all institutional legitimacy she has, and basically burn all her social capital. She literally murdered members of the Deliberative who hadn't voted to block her stuff. Such an action is the action of a hard-pressed absolute tyrant who's trying to maintain control - and failing, thus resorting to massive over-reactions in the name of trying to avoid compromise.

"Murdering the entire Lower Deliberative and most of the Greater Deliberative" indicates that she's basically entirely ruling from base military force, and lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the Great Houses - and can't be trusted to bargain in good faith.

The author of that section seems to think it makes the Empress look powerful, but it actually makes the Houses look utterly pathetic and unworthy of the Terrestrial title, and it makes the Empress look so weak that she believes such actions are needed. It's "the Realm Civil War actually started in the 600s" Shard background, clearly.
 
EarthScorpion said:
Such an action would, in a setting where the Empress lacks Solar-level Charms... wait, no, fuck that. Even if she was a Solar, that would be a day of infamy that would utterly poison all institutional legitimacy she has, and basically burn all her social capital. She literally murdered members of the Deliberative who hadn't voted to block her stuff.
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no it wouldnt cant u read

the auther sais it dosnt

faq ur stupid :V

(That the Realm Civil War started in 600 RY and everyone has been busy telling themselves that it is only starting now is a concept I find incredibly amusing.)
 
I feel like all this talk about what Sidereals can or can't do misses the point. The Lotus Massacre would be a crappy plot twist even if it was 100% plausible rules-wise.
 
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