I get that. He's certainly right if we're talking about mooshing 2e into three buckets. I don't think anyone's talking about doing that, though, and it's not yet knowable whether he's correct about 3e, let alone whatever other alternate hypothetical from-the-ground-up rebuilds are under discussion.
General Exalted Thread
- Location
- Singapore
What do you mean by beneficial? And would the Yozi accept the therapy? If not, then it's pointless.
If you get them to the state where they accept that they need to change...possibly? We know Primordials can change, after all. I think the issue would be that the changes would need to be massive enough and touch things so fundamental to their character that you'd need to go further. Which quickly gets very complicated logistically and morally (demons are people in their own rights, after all).
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- They/Them
They're too fucked up to be willing to go along with it.
Aaron Peori
Rest in Peace
Nowhere. @Morphic Tide has a... loose... conception of the setting material.
Which is why you don't target the Yozi. You target their Third Circles. They are also fucked up, but in ways that are much more easy to deal with than the Yozi overself.
Jon Chung
=][=
In what way does Ex3 fundamentally differ from Ex2 such that the assumption that different splats would have different contexts no longer holds? I mean, sure, Ex3 doesn't have any splats except Solars at the moment so I can't specifically point to any examples thereof, but as expectations go, this is a very reasonable assumption, since if that assumption no longer holds we've, uh, got bigger problems than martial arts, man.
Certainly, we don't know that yet. But, uh, we aren't specifically talking about 3E, so why are you attempting to use "3E doesn't have any splats yet to evaluate charmshare"?
Small mote pools. Intended to be a constraint on the use of high mote cost charms in a charmset which had no cheap spammable low-tier effects and no way to make custom charms, and was very reliant on expensive scenelongs on top. Classic 1E example: Impeding the Flow (3m) vs Dipping Swallow Defense (2m), Serenity in Blood (5m 1w) vs Heavenly Guardian Defense (3m 1w). Both parry charms are qualitatively superior to their Solar equivalents (DSD generated a full pool parry out of the ether, ItF parried any parriable attack. Serenity in Blood had a built-in surprise negator on top of being Heavenly Guardian, Heavenly Guardian was just Heavenly Guardian), but you had a tiny mote pool, so you'd generally lose by attrition even if you had outright better charms because they were so comparatively expensive.
Holden is a massive fan of 1E Sidereals. I'd be extremely surprised if he didn't try to do something along those lines, though probably less brittle, who knows. The point is to demonstrate that something balanced around this mote starvation (Joy in Adversity Stance), when moved to a context where this is not present (Solars), breaks, in order to show how contextual balance means pain when trying to deal with making stuff that works in all relevant contexts.
Fair.
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- Location
- Singapore
This is horrible.
this would have been a very interesting thing.
Though the discussion of thaumaturgy and such was interesting too.
Do you think that, over time, they would be able to reach the first age again, but using stuff like thaumaturgy?
Or are solar charm effects totally unique?
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- They/Them
The other difficulty is figuring out just how much demons respond to a human set of cognitive exercises. We know they cognate, of course, so there's something to work with there. Cognitive-Behavioral therapy would be rough though, because from what I've seen a lot of third circles have something surprisingly close to various forms of mental illnesses, or at least strange and unhealthy obssessions/etc.
Basically, you'd need to be powerful enough not to get stomped by them, and the progress you'd be making would be over years, or at least an extended period of time, and wouldn't be huge.
Of course, maybe Charms can speed that up somewhat, though there aren't any therapy charms, as far as I know.
Therapy actually does work, in the sense that studies have shown that on average it causes a moderate improvement in the subject, but it won't 'fix' them and it'll be a struggle every step of the way.
There's a reason it takes years of practice and tons of work to be a good Cognitive-therapist, and why it's often paired with medication to make it even more effective.
/Studied some about CBT for a fic of mine.
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
Hasnt E10 only been achieved by the primordials with all the exalted tending to die before they can reach it?
Enlightenment, not Essence. As an Infernal using that homebrew (and the game it originated for, so of course she is), her Enlightenment counts as five higher than what her Essence would be. This E10 is what we would recognize as E5.
- Location
- The sixth circle of Hell (second on weekends)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Enlightenment, not Essence. Kerisgame hack. Solaroid En10 = RAW Essence 5. Primordials are "lawl Enlightenment N/A".
Morphic Tide
Crazy Brainstormer, Munchkin and Wannabe Min-Maxer
- Location
- MI, USA
The alchemical making was mistaken, but the essence thing is basically canon. As far as I know, anyway...
notthepenguins
Neither Spherical Nor Frictionless
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
It definitely isn't.
I'm not sold on the reasonableness of this expectation, depending on what we have in mind with "contexts." I don't expect 3e to go the M&M route of "everything is just refluffing on the exact same powers," but...
Let me try to talk through this. So, the go-to examples for how things break in 2e are things like perfect defense interactions - which are not a thing in the same way, in 3e. Or, like, "I ignore all bashing damage, I convert all lethal to bashing, I punch everything within line of sight?" I'm not betting on seeing those recur, either.
And those are just specific examples - sure. But more broadly, I think 3e has fewer of what we might think of as game-changer powers: powers that fundamentally alter how you relate to the world at large, particularly in a way that's spammable. Its powers tend to be more, like... get a finite number of extra attacks. Roll a finite number of extra dice. Treat one of the faces of your dice differently. Make a counterattack under such-and-such conditions.
I'm not saying those can't break a game. But I am saying they're easier to, mm, box up, in a way that "How does this interact with a Solar's ability to ignore the next twenty attacks?" or "How does this interact with a Lunar's power to refuse to die?" or the general theme of 2e's WHOA MAN DID YOU SEE THAT CHARM powers were not. You can crack Magic wide open by abuse of +1/+1 counters, but it's going to be harder for that to sneak up on you if the prevalence of weird this-card-only textual descriptions has gone way down.
So when martial arts is mostly adding things of that form ("You get +1 Defense! It doesn't break caps" "You get double-7s in very narrow circumstances, which doesn't stack with your native Charms!"), I mean, that does feel kind of containable in a way 2e did not.
I get that this sounds like intuition and fuzzy handwaving, and that's because, as you note, we have no other splats; intuition and hand-waving are all I can possibly offer. I will not be shocked if this does not work for 3rd at all, and the whole thing's a terrible mess.
But surely that's not a logical necessity.
What are we specifically talking about? It surely isn't 2e. If it isn't specifically 3e, what is it? A hypothetical alterna-rebuild-from-first-principles?
Seems to be recurring.
I would not bet on this. I'll be surprised, given how Solars have gone, if Sids don't end up with, say, at least 3x as many Charms as their 1e sets, probably including some spammable low-cost things.
This is true.
This, who knows?
But that example doesn't work at all, anymore, because the Solar Charms have major weird restrictions. HGD isn't even (usually) a perfect defense, and even as a partial defense, it's hideously expensive. SSE is once per scene and high-priced. AST is usually just some Decisive soak. What does the Sidereal context look like, if that's the vanilla option?
If we evaluate the whole affair by the 3e Sidereal Excellency, Sid Charms are likely to be cheaper and more efficient than their Solar counterparts. That's probably a terrible metric, but we don't really have a good one right now. And that's all I'm really trying to say: there are varying, reasonable hypotheses about what happens next, and very different conclusions follow logically from them.
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- Location
- Denmark
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- She/Her
Yes. This is the shitty 2e Demiurges who are a cancer upon Autochthon.
they are weak
- Location
- Singapore
yeah.
I think he did it so a twilight can never make an alchemical or something.
Though I wonder what the setting would be like if a mortal could make a bargain basement exaltation.
Sucal
The Devil’s Cut
- Location
- Bottom of the barrel
That doesn't give any mechanical benefits, and purely exists to try and stop Solars making their own Alchemical minions, ignoring how much work they'd need to do so first.
notthepenguins
Neither Spherical Nor Frictionless
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- He/She/They
Yes, but that's not at all "mortals making bootleg Exaltations" and instead is Autochthon working through mortals.
Eh, it's not that bad.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
*backs down grumbling out of fear of restarting an old argument*
You win this time you dastardly villain!
Tangentially worth mentioning from this, but this was how it worked in 1e as well, and the "drawback" to installing a Perfected Lotus Matrix of it being a permanent fixture of the character was almost entirely rendered moot because once you had it there was never any point behind ever removing it when there were Always more Martial Arts charms to be learning for every possible situation. Hell, by the Style Availability lists in either book, Alchemicals had entry-level access to both Five Dragon Style and Violet Bier of Sorrows, meaning they could sidestep a bunch of their base combat kit for cheaper spot-utility and Blade of the fucking Battle Maiden, devoting the rest of their slots into persistent combat buffs and generally becoming an unkillable monster.
If anything the 2e book misunderstood this even worse by giving them things like Thousands Wounds Gear, which is a grudgefuck of a style to begin with, and taking Submodules from being "multiple options you can buy for Charms, like Essence Arrow" into "literally miniature Charm trees unto themselves." Which meant that you could kit your Alchemical with an overpowered MA, slot in a bunch of insanely powerful buffs (like math-inflating mutations/artifact templates which are called out as not being Charm-dice, explicitly-encouraged autosuccess-stacking, multiple-action penalty and tick Speed reductions, etc) and then never have to swap your Charms around ever again. Any visit to the Vats was simply spent towards making your buffs even moreso than before, and decking yourself out with "submod" effects which should have either been slotted repurchases of the same Charm or different Charms entirely to balance out their strength rather than attaching higher Essence and Attribute minimums.
All of this is (mostly) a complete sidebar to the Martial Arts discussion, but its almost amazing the ways the 2e Alchemicals undermines its own design principles.
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- Location
- Singapore
I got some weirdass idea... not sure if it can be used.
got it when that elder dragonblooded discussion started...
got it when that elder dragonblooded discussion started...
So anyway, I was thinking of exalted. The whole "lessers take down the greater"
Let's say...
The gods hatch a plan to take down the primordials, thus taking down the solars.
The solars then take down the gods. Probably because of the great curse.
The dragonblooded finally rebel in the usurpation, along with the sidereals. The solar and lunar exaltations are locked into the jade prisons, never to be released.
The mortals got tired of the dragonblooded's shit and then armies of heroic mortals take down the dragonblooded.
mortals get tired of sorcerer mortals abusing them, so....??
Dunno, rebel again.
Again and again, until the only thing left is normal humanity.
Let's say...
The gods hatch a plan to take down the primordials, thus taking down the solars.
The solars then take down the gods. Probably because of the great curse.
The dragonblooded finally rebel in the usurpation, along with the sidereals. The solar and lunar exaltations are locked into the jade prisons, never to be released.
The mortals got tired of the dragonblooded's shit and then armies of heroic mortals take down the dragonblooded.
mortals get tired of sorcerer mortals abusing them, so....??
Dunno, rebel again.
Again and again, until the only thing left is normal humanity.
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
Mortals making bootleg exaltations is easy you just need to sacrifice roughly a city of mortals to get enough off essence and souls to turn into the supermote and necromancy ritual to actually do anything then all that's needed is to ignore the evidence you just made a Greater dead necromantic horror.
Point of order:
Alchemicals are Celestials, at least as of 2E. Everything in their design philosophy and fluff that I've seen, from their near-Solaroid dicepools when specialized to the tiering of their Sorcery-analogue, makes it pretty damn clear that they are Celestials.
You may not believe it should be so, but let's not propagate head canon as fact.
- Location
- Singapore
which book?