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General Exalted Thread

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ManusDomine said:
I would mock you for literally just calling her "a subspecies of wasp", but given my recent history with Second Circle Demon names, I don't think I'm in a secure position to mock someone. :V
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But I didn't call her that.

I called her the clade that contains wasps, bees and ants. And appropriate Latin names are entirely valid for demons - case in point, Octavian.

(the fact that this fluff implies that originally wasps, ants and bees in Creation were Kimberyian xenomorphs - because she's basically something that looks like a xenomorph queen - before SWLIHN went "No, That Is Not In Line With My Design" and made them into the creatures they are today is just the sort of thing that some creatures in Creation should have, because that's what happens when in place of evolution you have design by a committee of Olympian gods.)

(We see a microcosm of this in the way the Kerisland ecology is developing, where each demon prince has designed their own breed of horse as an argument over what a horse should be.)
 
EarthScorpion said:
And appropriate Latin names are entirely valid for demons - case in point, Octavian.
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mate

i have two demons

who are literally named

per aspera, ad astra

:V
EarthScorpion said:
(the fact that this fluff implies that originally wasps, ants and bees in Creation were Kimberyian xenomorphs - because she's basically something that looks like a xenomorph queen - before SWLIHN went "No, That Is Not In Line With My Design" and made them into the creatures they are today is just the sort of thing that some creatures in Creation should have, because that's what happens when in place of evolution you have design by a committee of Olympian gods.)
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Broken25 said:
Easy.

Just make it so that celestial Exaltations weren't created by the gods, but that ancient heroes stole their power from them.

You can keep everything else unchanged, even!
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You don't even need that, really. Just have it so that the other gods saw the work of the Elemental Dragons and, wanting to help out, created their own Exalted in imitation of the Dragon-Blooded. While initially seemingly superior, these Exalted possessed critical flaws that led to them accumulating demonic taint over time and going irrevocably mad.

What you do need is to change the cycle of reincarnation so that virtue is actually properly rewarded in the next life. It's a tiny change, really. Will hardly have any effect at all.
 
linkhyrule5 said:
... I said that I wasn't going to get too into this and then wrote a 600-word rant

what am I doing with my life.
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Lost control of your life? It was probably something demonic on this topic trying and succeding in making you an Akuma: please go to the nearest Immaculate Temple- failing to do that will result in a massive(?) demonic invasion.

... What do you mean real life doesn't have Immaculate Temples??? Shit, we are doomed.
ManusDomine said:
The sarcasm in this statement is so scathing that I felt my screen heating to goddamn volcanic temperatures.
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Throw a bit of water on it and it will be fiiinnnneee.

Be sute to not throw Kimberian water, though. It may be decisively not fine after that. You may not be fine after that. The fact that you somehow got Kimberian water is a bad sign all by itself.

When in doubt, curl in a foetal position and start playing Binding of Isaac. If you start hearing your name proununced creppily and resoundingly in real life then you are doomed.

... A bit off the current topic, but does anybody knows any other Zeal-like ancient ages, apocalipting ending included? I kinda got this need to write something about the ruins of a creation with such an high First age. (The shogunate still would exist, but there would be a greater distance from the standards of the high first age and the low first age.)
 
Giygas said:
... A bit off the current topic, but does anybody knows any other Zeal-like ancient ages, apocalipting ending included? I kinda got this need to write something about the ruins of a creation with such an high First age. (The shogunate still would exist, but there would be a greater distance from the standards of the high first age and the low first age.)
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The Orokin from Warframe. Al-Hazred/Ancient Belka in the Nanoha franchise. Alhambra and related nations from Princess: The Hopeful. The Ancient Giants and Ancient Qabalrin from Eberron. Godbound's equivalent to the Exalted First Age. Netheril from the Forgotten Realms. The Terran Mandate from Stars Without Number. Certain interpretations of Mage the Awakening's Atlantis. The Dark Age of Technology from WH40k. The Dwemer from the Elder Scrolls. Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence, though you'd have to invent the apocalypse.
 
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linkhyrule5 said:
I don't see why I should discard it just to keep a large Malfeas.
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Because the problem of Malfeas isn't the size. It's Malfeas. I mean, it is literally Malfeas. And Adorjan. And Kimbery. And all the rest of them. The problem of Malfeas is not the billions of demons, its the Yozi and has always been the Yozi.

You can save every demon in Malfeas. You just have to save the Yozi. If you remove every demon from Malfeas, the Yozi will just create more. Because they're massive assholes.

Size is not important to this moral calculus. There are 23 points of failure you need to address. Doing so either saves them, or doesn't.
 
Giygas said:
... A bit off the current topic, but does anybody knows any other Zeal-like ancient ages, apocalipting ending included? I kinda got this need to write something about the ruins of a creation with such an high First age. (The shogunate still would exist, but there would be a greater distance from the standards of the high first age and the low first age.)
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The Orokin from Warframe are amazing.

Look at this!



 
Bursting Eagerness Soul said:
Alright, but virtue? Or Virtue? Because the Dragon-blooded are pretty Virtuous by default.
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Of course they are. Immaculate Doctrine says that Dragonblooded are the highest state a mortal can reach through reincarnation, and the greatest rewards for the greatest Virtue. Therefore, in a system where the Immaculate Texts are accurate, and what you reincarnate as is actually determined by your life and virtue, those who become Exalted are heavily predisposed to being Virtuous by default.
 
...nah, what you do is set up a Solar Circe Sorcery ritual (doing jag all but looking impressive on a Creation Wide scale) and claim you have broken the link between virtues and reincarnation just to mess with Immaculates. The fact that there was no link is immaterial.

...and then run like hell, or find a First Age Teleport Gate, or jump realms to the Underworld/Malfeas/Yu-Shen because the Immaculate Faith are going to be really pissed at you (if they believe you, but surely they will if you get the right selection of charms/abilities).
 
Aaron Peori said:
Because the problem of Malfeas isn't the size. It's Malfeas.
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That's certainly a problem; it's the "How do I save every single demon?" problem.

But I don't think that's the problem anyone else is talking about. Most notably, it's an entirely different category of problem: folks are talking about the metagame problem of Giant Malfeas distracting from Creation, not the practical in-game problem of "How can I best make all of Hell a nice place to live?"

Solving the latter does, yes, require the all-but-impossible task of fixing the Yozi. No one's proposing trying to do that, because no one's trying to answer that question.
 
Irked said:
Most notably, it's an entirely different category of problem: folks are talking about the metagame problem of Giant Malfeas distracting from Creation, not the practical in-game problem of "How can I best make all of Hell a nice place to live?"
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Why does Malfeas size matter?

Again, if my Solar decides to save Gem does this mean I am required to save all of The East because it is more highly populated? Why is it a major metagame problem that random demons are dying in Malfeas but not that literally everyone in the Underworld is screwed beyond all meaning of the term? How does Malfeas being smaller solve this problem?

If Malfeas were one tenth the population of Creation you would still have tens of thousands of demons dying daily via means that your Solar could prevent. You'd still have Malfeas and Adorjan and Kimbery and Metagoas and Isidoros killing huge swaths and Erembour just inflicting them with a fate worse than death.

Why do only the number matter? By my thinking, it makes the problem worse from the moral calculus angle. The easier it is for my Solar to solve the intractable problem the more compelled I would be to solve it. If Malfeas is huge such that by deflecting a layer with Heavenly Guardian Defense is not only impractical but also won't even make a statistically significant difference in the number of demons that die that day I don't feel as if I would be making a difference there so its easier to focus on locations where I can. If saving demons, however, is simple and will have huge relative benefits... why should I not?

This idea that the size of Malfeas matters from a moral perspective is silly. Unless you are a naive Utilitarian like She Who Lives In Her Name than simply numbers does not make something better.
 
Aaron Peori said:
Why does Malfeas size matter?
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Look, as i already said, i don't even consider the moral issue the main problem. (Although it's certainly part of it).

The thing is.... look, i will just give a practical example.

Maugan Ra said:
"I presume there is some reason why the wealth remains in Heaven, as opposed to some enterprising merchant exploiting the system to solve all of humanity's material needs?"

"A combination of bureaucracy and the physical nature of prayer itself.
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Kuciwalker kindly offers us a translation:

Kuciwalker said:
Look, do you see how unconvincing this is? "Well, the reason that the magical wealth machine can't be used to help Creation's mortals is because... um... the rules."
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This kind of things kill my SoD. Inflating numbers without bound inevitably leads to inane conclusions. And sure, i can make up explanations, every time one of them comes up. (And they do come up. I know it by experience). But why should i bother. It's much, much simpler to just remove the root.

Ultimately, i want the setting be consistent, and magnitude inflation makes that harder. When the setting is consistent, the players going around asking cuestions and making experiments don't lead to stupid results.
 
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Aaron Peori said:
Why does Malfeas size matter?
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I mean, I think the answer to that question is the entire conversation to this point.

This idea that the size of Malfeas matters from a moral perspective is silly. Unless you are a naive Utilitarian like She Who Lives In Her Name than simply numbers does not make something better.
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Again, I'm not sure this is a moral calculus I precisely share, but I don't think it's a particularly naive or inhuman moral position to say that, given a choice between saving ten thousand lives and saving ten billion, the second is probably better. At the risk of being overly technical, some might describe it as, like, a lot better.
 
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Irked said:
Again, I'm not sure this is a moral calculus I precisely share, but I don't think it's a particularly naive or inhuman moral position to say that, given a choice between saving ten billion lives and saving ten thousand, the first is probably better. At the risk of being overly technical, some might describe it as, like, a lot better.
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When you remove every qualifier but the number of lives, sure. This is, of course, very simplistic moral philosophy that doesn't consider things like "the proportion of murderers in the ten billion lives is at least a magnitude greater than in the ten thousand lives" and "a lot of the ten billion lives aren't actually sapient beings, like all of the ten thousand lives".
 
azoicennead said:
When you remove every qualifier but the number of lives, sure. This is, of course, very simplistic moral philosophy that doesn't consider things like "the proportion of murderers in the ten billion lives is at least a magnitude greater than in the ten thousand lives" and "a lot of the ten billion lives aren't actually sapient beings, like all of the ten thousand lives".
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Sure, you can finagle things down. But doing so is a lot easier when the ratio is something like 10:1 instead of 1,000,000:1. So. You know. Why not make things easier?
 
*sigh*

Look, let's not get into this discussion or I'll start evangelizing for Singerian effective altruism again and nobody wants that. :V

The point is, people have different assumptions, and "it doesn't break my game" is not and has never been a valid reason to not fix a problem.

If it's something that inspires arguments like this and offends some large fraction of otherwise interested fans, it doesn't really matter if you personally agree with it, just change it so it's not an issue.
 
Kuciwalker said:
The one in the post directly above yours, that you quoted:

Tabletop - General Exalted Thread | Page 1341
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Oh, so ignoring my point despite quoting me.

e: For example, I pointed out that in the 10 billion lives of Malfeas we're using as an example, the ratio of murderer to non-murderer is massively higher. If we use the United States' modern murder rate (note: I am intentionally using statistics I know are absurdly low for the corresponding time in history) and ignore that the murder rate in Malfeas is going to be higher than in Creation (because it's culturally acceptable), you've saved 450,000 murderers.
You've saved a population of murderers larger than the other population.
This is without factoring in demons who aren't sapient.
 
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