Regardless of the quality, that's what's in the books. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of arguing that the core rule book of a system doesn't follow or demonstrate the intent of the system, feel free, but I'm not going to be following you.

Nah, I'm arguing that the entire thing is so inconsistent and badly constructed that trying to make any practical use of writer intent for anything other than pointing and laughing at how bad the actual system ended up being is probably futile.
 
Nah, I'm arguing that the entire thing is so inconsistent and badly constructed that trying to make any practical use of writer intent for anything other than pointing and laughing at how bad the actual system ended up being is probably futile.
The use of charms from the books is consistent over multiple books and editions, Jon.
 
The use of charms from the books is consistent over multiple books and editions, Jon.

That is not in dispute. What I'm trying to point out here is that whether any particular writeup having a particular set of charms or abilities or whatever the writer decided to give them is not useful information - that writer could have been deliberately and carefully putting together what they think is a properly constructed challenge for a Solar Circle of a given experience level, picking stuff randomly out of the book that sounds cool or throwing darts at a board with charm tree photocopies stuck to it, and the result would be (as we see, kek) indistinguishable to us.
 
We got paranoia combat out of the core books. We know paranoia combat is not the intent of the system. The devs said as much outright.
But couldn't they just have added the condition that it only changes when its an improvement?
Why would your hypothetical 'they' be able to do that? Exaltations weren't designed.
 
That is not in dispute. What I'm trying to point out here is that whether any particular writeup having a particular set of charms or abilities or whatever the writer decided to give them is not useful information - that writer could have been deliberately and carefully putting together what they think is a properly constructed challenge for a Solar Circle of a given experience level, picking stuff randomly out of the book that sounds cool or throwing darts at a board with charm tree photocopies stuck to it, and the result would be (as we see, kek) indistinguishable to us.
... Then I'm just going to point you back to this:
Regardless of the quality, that's what's in the books. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of arguing that the core rule book of a system doesn't follow or demonstrate the intent of the system, feel free, but I'm not going to be following you.
Because that's basically what you're arguing. Unless you actually make a different point, I'm done with this.
 
Weren't they designed and built by Autochthon?
No. Exaltations were made by the Celestial Incarnae, with help from Autochthon. There was no deliberate design. The only people who sat down and wrote Charmsets were the authors, not in-universe characters. To birth Exaltation at all was a wonder - to define the details of them was beyond anybody.

(in b4 omicron says exaltation was discovered, not made, go away 3e)
 
Last edited:
Easier answer to this whole "upgrade / tainted blessing / etc" question: the Great Curse is, you know, a curse, and it's just that it takes something immensely powerful like the death curse of a Primordial to ~permanently affect an Exaltation.
 
Easier answer to this whole "upgrade / tainted blessing / etc" question: the Great Curse is, you know, a curse, and it's just that it takes something immensely powerful like the death curse of a Primordial to ~permanently affect an Exaltation.

Yes, but the reason I like "tainted blessing" is that it deliberately and intentionally kicks the stupid "Oh, it was all the fault of the Great Curse that everything went bad" bit of white-washing that people often engage in. No. It's the fault of the Exalted, 100%. No one forced them to embrace the power of murdered titans that was tossed their way like you might throw poisoned meat to a rabid wolf. They fundamentally have no one else to blame but themselves. The power of the Great Curse is seductive, but the Exalted were willingly seduced. They always had a choice.

Preferably, Limit wouldn't be a stick - it'd be a carrot. You're not forced to go and sulk in a corner because people used UMI on you or whatever - you go throw an Achilles-like wobbly because you get rewarded for it. If you don't reach for that power, you're always playing with a hand tied behind your back. Between an equal pair of Exalts where one uses Cursed power and the other doesn't, the Cursed one should win most of the time.

Being good should be hard. If you want to be a hero in the modern sense, rather than Achilles sulking in his tent, then you're going to have to fight for it and struggle with your choice, oh Chosen.
 
Yes, but the reason I like "tainted blessing" is that it deliberately and intentionally kicks the stupid "Oh, it was all the fault of the Great Curse that everything went bad" bit of white-washing that people often engage in. No. It's the fault of the Exalted, 100%. No one forced them to embrace the power of murdered titans that was tossed their way like you might throw poisoned meat to a rabid wolf. They fundamentally have no one else to blame but themselves. The power of the Great Curse is seductive, but the Exalted were willingly seduced. They always had a choice.

Preferably, Limit wouldn't be a stick - it'd be a carrot. You're not forced to go and sulk in a corner because people used UMI on you or whatever - you go throw an Achilles-like wobbly because you get rewarded for it. If you don't reach for that power, you're always playing with a hand tied behind your back. Between an equal pair of Exalts where one uses Cursed power and the other doesn't, the Cursed one should win most of the time.

Being good should be hard. If you want to be a hero in the modern sense, rather than Achilles sulking in his tent, then you're going to have to fight for it and struggle with your choice, oh Chosen.

I don't like Limit in any of the incarnations I've seen it, so if I were going to go this route I would delete both the Great Curse and Limit and just attribute the Usurpation and its causes to ordinary hubris multiplied by Exalted levels of power. (It's not like this is particularly implausible.) But Exalted seems to be really into having some sort of Limit mechanic, so, meh.

edit: actually, I would keep the Great Curse, but only as a fiction invented by Exalts to try to explain and excuse their atrocities
 
Last edited:
I don't like Limit in any of the incarnations I've seen it, so if I were going to go this route I would delete both the Great Curse and Limit and just attribute the Usurpation and its causes to ordinary hubris multiplied by Exalted levels of power. (It's not like this is particularly implausible.) But Exalted seems to be really into having some sort of Limit mechanic, so, meh.
...more like whitewolf in general.

I think.
 
I've really enjoyed how Limit has shaped the behavior of the characters in my 3e game, but I think it helps if one tries to change the way they conceptualize it from being a stick to a carrot for dramatic character moments. I don't know how I'd fix it for the hacks people seem to use around here, but it generally seems like Permanent Limit and fixed Virtue Flaws are part of the problem, and maybe shifting the things that cause Limit beyond the Limit Trigger into things that you want to happen/are interested in having happen to your character that also maybe provide some benefit to you are good ways to have the system add to play rather than detract from it.

I found that in a lot of older white wolf stuff, it felt really punishing on both a player and character level to play through these systems, but Onyx Path has generally been good at making them be things I want to deal with instead of things I want to avoid.

Like, to me it seems like the question of whether the Usurpation was caused by the Great Curse or by Solar's hubris is sort of an academic point, because is there really a way to easily parse 'what comes from where' in a situation like this? It's hard enough in real life to answer questions about personal responsibility with regards to conditions people suffer from, and it seems to me like it's too entangled to make an interesting statement out of treating it like a yes/no question.
 
Last edited:
Preferably, Limit wouldn't be a stick - it'd be a carrot. You're not forced to go and sulk in a corner because people used UMI on you or whatever - you go throw an Achilles-like wobbly because you get rewarded for it. If you don't reach for that power, you're always playing with a hand tied behind your back. Between an equal pair of Exalts where one uses Cursed power and the other doesn't, the Cursed one should win most of the time.

Oooh! In the set of houserules we use for Chiming Minaretgame, Limit is like this; it's a bit like Frenzy in Vampire: The Requiem where you have some personalized Limit Triggers, a way it manifests and the ability to "ride the wave", so to say. Essentially; when you encounter your Limit Triggers, you make a roll to resist Limit and even a basic success lets you resist, whereas an exceptional success lets you recover a point of Willpower, failure sends you into Partial Control and dramatic failure sends you into full limit, though it can be moved to Partial Control with the expenditure of a point of Willpower.

In Limit, you are stuck acting according to specific parameters sat by your Limit Condition(s, we are unsure of whether it might be wise to give more than one Limit Condition out). But if you don't want to go out and search for some sad orphans or maidens in need or whatever, you can also just focus and draw on your cursed power to drink deep of the well of the Great Curse. In Limit Break you gain a bunch of bonuses to acting as according to your Frenzy Condition and all your Limit-OK Charms are suddenly useable for something. Of course, even when you are doing this and acting inside a controlled version of the Curse, you are still subject to your Limit Conditions but you get the benefit of setting the goal of your Limit Break instead of instantly going "I MUST BECOME ORPHAN-MAN, SAVER OF ORPHANS" or "FRENCH REVOLUTION MOTHERFUCKERS".
 
Oooh! In the set of houserules we use for Chiming Minaretgame, Limit is like this; it's a bit like Frenzy in Vampire: The Requiem where you have some personalized Limit Triggers, a way it manifests and the ability to "ride the wave", so to say. Essentially; when you encounter your Limit Triggers, you make a roll to resist Limit and even a basic success lets you resist, whereas an exceptional success lets you recover a point of Willpower, failure sends you into Partial Control and dramatic failure sends you into full limit, though it can be moved to Partial Control with the expenditure of a point of Willpower.

In Limit, you are stuck acting according to specific parameters sat by your Limit Condition(s, we are unsure of whether it might be wise to give more than one Limit Condition out). But if you don't want to go out and search for some sad orphans or maidens in need or whatever, you can also just focus and draw on your cursed power to drink deep of the well of the Great Curse. In Limit Break you gain a bunch of bonuses to acting as according to your Frenzy Condition and all your Limit-OK Charms are suddenly useable for something. Of course, even when you are doing this and acting inside a controlled version of the Curse, you are still subject to your Limit Conditions but you get the benefit of setting the goal of your Limit Break instead of instantly going "I MUST BECOME ORPHAN-MAN, SAVER OF ORPHANS" or "FRENCH REVOLUTION MOTHERFUCKERS".

"THE ONLY WAY TO MAXIMIZE THE NUMBER OF ORPHANS I SAVED WAS TO KILL EVERY ADULT IN THE CITY. I HAD TO DO IT!"
 
Last edited:
edit: actually, I would keep the Great Curse, but only as a fiction invented by Exalts to try to explain and excuse their atrocities

Proper Exalts wouldn't try to explain or excuse their atrocities - there's entire branches of social fu that revolve around making atrocities seem like the best and utmost right thing to do.

They fundamentally have no one else to blame but themselves. The power of the Great Curse is seductive, but the Exalted were willingly seduced. They always had a choice.

The problem with this is who'd seduce them? The dead or defeated Titans? Eh... Exalted may be filled with hubris but accepting stuff from their defeated enemies without worrying about the consequences seems like a big stretch.
 
This actually brings to mind a question, can anybody explain to me how Dragon-Blooded Limit has worked previously? For some reason I'm just have a difficult time grokking it from their 2e book.
 
Last edited:
Proper Exalts wouldn't try to explain or excuse their atrocities - there's entire branches of social fu that revolve around making atrocities seem like the best and utmost right thing to do.



The problem with this is who'd seduce them? The dead or defeated Titans? Eh... Exalted may be filled with hubris but accepting stuff from their defeated enemies without worrying about the consequences seems like a big stretch.


Huuuubrrisss!
 
TLDR; It didn't.
IIRC it had no mechanical support and you were just supposed to act in-character when it happened.

Well, that's sort of a bummer. I know how Solars are set up to be the BIG MOOD Achilles and Hercules types, but I got the sense that Dragon-Blooded were very emotional people, and Limit seems like a great tool to help highlight that. Has anybody ever come up with any interesting hacks to deal with it?
 
Well, that's sort of a bummer. I know how Solars are set up to be the BIG MOOD Achilles and Hercules types, but I got the sense that Dragon-Blooded were very emotional people, and Limit seems like a great tool to help highlight that. Has anybody ever come up with any interesting hacks to deal with it?
I think that Dragonblood Limit was designed with the thought of "The Storyteller has to handle these as NPCs, so it has to be relatively simple for them to have loads of these guys limit breaking at the same time without slowing down the game.".
 
The problem with this is who'd seduce them? The dead or defeated Titans? Eh... Exalted may be filled with hubris but accepting stuff from their defeated enemies without worrying about the consequences seems like a big stretch.

When I say "they always had a choice", I'm talking at more a "You brought this on yourself" level.

When a dying titan whispers "Take my power and may it bring you all it brought me" with infinite hate and bitterness, it isn't a poisoned blessing that you need to explicitly accept. It's there. It's been given. But whether you choose to use it is up to you. It's always up to you. The Solars didn't need do to so much of what they did. They didn't need to revel in indulgence, or casually break reality, or do so much of what they did. But they did. And they drew on the poisoned gift of the dead titans to do so. There was no need to do it, not when their base power had been enough to overthrow and murder the makers of the world.

But the Exalted have never been good at moderation. They put everything they could into their terrible passions, never asking "Should I be doing this?". And that was the terrible genius of the spite of dying Primordials - they turned the brilliant fire and power of their foes against them, by giving them polluted fuel knowing that they could not resist consuming it.
 
The Black Nadir Concordat says hi.

The Black Nadir Concordat didn't accept gifts - they made the Neverborn their bitch.

When a dying titan whispers "Take my power and may it bring you all it brought me" with infinite hate and bitterness, it isn't a poisoned blessing that you need to explicitly accept. It's there. It's been given. But whether you choose to use it is up to you. It's always up to you. The Solars didn't need do to so much of what they did. They didn't need to revel in indulgence, or casually break reality, or do so much of what they did. But they did. And they drew on the poisoned gift of the dead titans to do so. There was no need to do it, not when their base power had been enough to overthrow and murder the makers of the world.

In a way that's kind of the point. If ones power is enough to overthrow and murder half the titans and chain the other half, forcing their souls to serve at the whims of the victors it seems pretty damn unlikely that the arrogant, brilliant Exalted would be both desperate for power (they just won the war) and so genere blind that they'd willingly accept a clearly poisoned gift from a dying foe.

Being a Solar (or any kind of Exalt really, but especially Solars) is all about having nearly unlimited potential. What could a titan's ghost offer to people blessed with the power of always surpassing their limits and for whom doing the impossible is yesterday?

For such a gift to be attractive it would have to significantly contribute to or complement the Solar Exaltation - and since those Exaltations are distilled awesomeness powerful enough to deal with the titans in the first place... let's just say they'd be hard to match.

Like, in many ways the Curse isn't really needed narratively. The Exalted could be brought down by their own flaws just like the Unconquered Sun is making himself vulnerable by indulging in the Games.
 
Back
Top