If the Artifact is a rigged up Alchemical Charm, then basically anything goes, because a 5 dot Artifact based on Alchemical charms is an Essence 5 Alchemical Charm.
Here's the thing about the "Artifact X as Essence X Alchemical Charm," they're not comparable scales. Because any Artifact trying to map the specific drawbacks to an Alchemical Charm wouldn't have the same strength anymore. Because Alchemical Charms:
- Require implicit surgical installation to function.
- Require a slot to place them in, an artifact unto itself.
- Require the user to
be an Exalt in the first place, even forgoing the idea that you Must have a specific anatomical structure for some of them to even be possible.
- Require regular upkeep/are sustained entirely by the users life force, because they are about as durable as an organ or limb.
Take those drawbacks and apply them to say, an Artifact 3, and compare it to your average Ess3 Charm, let alone one of Alchemical design.
Well, that's a higher option infrastructure heavy inversion of what I'm looking for. What I'm looking for is taking a found artifact and rigging it into an Alchemical Charm on the spot, by having a separate Charm act as a dedicated socket for doing this.
Mechanically-speaking this is possible, but is very
not the intended workaround. Because Charm slots are
extremely valuable, and put an incredibly tight upper limit on base Alchemical strength before they start swapping around abilities to try and cover more bases, on the assumption you cannot have everything you want whenever you want it. While its possible to keep finding more and more 0m install Charms to fill more slots, the typical Alchie is never going to have more than 30, pushing the absolute maximum number of Personal motes they can possess. By contrast, the potential number of artifacts someone can carry around if they don't require hands to hold them is theoretically limitless.
To accomplish the idea you want, an Alchemical would need something like a universal rapid-attunement/commitment-reduction effect, which is already pretty sketchy mechanics territory because it risks creating a "katamari ball" gear-heavy focus, where at a given point other Charms suddenly become meaningless to advancement and your Alchemical is infinitely better served by paying for slots alone, finding/building and layering on as many artifacts as they can to achieve an exponentially-growing baseline competency, rather than something they have to regularly sustain via mote-spending.
