Do you at least know the bare basics?
If not; Exalted Lore Primer - YouTube
Seraaron has a lot of videos going over the lore.
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General Exalted Thread
If not; Exalted Lore Primer - YouTube
Seraaron has a lot of videos going over the lore.
- Location
- secret base
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Finished the first video. Well, actually, the sound of human voice makes me cranky, so I went straight to the actual article at 1d4chan
Kylar
In Training Forever
- Location
- Canada
Ho boy.
Alrighty, I'll take a stab at this- plenty of others will follow with their own say, I'm sure. And then we'll argue about those says, and the flames will consume all!
The fanbase is a tad passionate.
Exalted, as a system and world, is about being big mythic heroes, and then the consequences of that. It's a world of strange magic and relics of a bygone era. Of the ability to change the world, for good, ill, and the somewhere in-between.
That's the fundamental promise of Exalted- you are powerful, and you can shape the world around you. But there is always consequences of that. Or as the basic description that I've often seen thrown around is: "You have killed the evil lord and saved the kingdom. What now?"
Worldbuilding wise, Exalted has been pretty solid- the world is a gritty fantasy flat earth that is generally (yes, yes, I know) well researched and mixes in the magic of the setting in well at societal level. Also largely not 'standard European fantasy' (it's well known for explicitly attempting to avoid that). Net effect, you have some very weird and cool places to build with. And Creation is big- it's generally child play to slip a country or city of your design in where you need it.
And then we start getting into the specifics of all the neat and evocative stuff, but that would inflate this post beyond reason. And here we start to get into the reason the fanbase is passionate: there is a lot of stuff to like. A lot of us have our own niche of stuff- demons are really popular, the industrial world being of Autochthon is another, Dragon-Kings (reincarnating aztec dinosaur people), fae, etc.
So, after all that gushing, here's the downside. And it's a painful one: the quality of Exalted's books has been variable. At it's best, the books are fantastic. At it's worst, we try to ignore whole books or even just sections of them. The big one that will come up is the splat book for Infernals, because while the mechanics are well beloved and the Exalt type is pretty damn popular (particularly around these parts), the first chapters were written by people who didn't get the memo from the rest of the team, and feature things like your Exalt type getting gang raped by their patrons and expected to engage with sex with the magic corrupted child that is the holder of your power.
There is a reason we pretend it doesn't exist. Authors eventually got blacklisted, but to late: shit was in print.
The reason I bring this up is that there are books that are amazing and 100% worth buying, and ones that should be burned. But the net effect was the fanbase basically got used to making their own stuff up and ignoring chunks of the books, and not everyone agrees on which parts to focus on and what parts to ignore (aside from particular disasters like the first few chapters of Infernals and the Scroll of the Monk). As a result, debates get heated fast, and on a lot of topics.
Now, mechanics wise. Um. Well. 2e's system was so systemically riddled with problems that the fanbase basically collectively agreed to stop powergaming for the sake of player and GM sanity. The Errata document for the system was at 204 pages and there were still mass systemic anti-fun issues. It was a disaster of a system literally everyone agreed need to be burned down and rebuilt.
(OK, @Shyft is going to disagree with me here to an extent, at least as far as the Core goes, but seriously there were mass balance and playability issues and actual invulnerability is pretty boring in play.)
It's one redeeming feature: it wasn't 1e. Which says many things about 1e.
So moving on to 3e, which is by far and away the most playable. There are still issues (Craft is the big one) but you can run it out of the box and not worry much about landminds. It's not simple, but that's a matter of taste. At the very least, I've had a great deal of fun playing.
*Ducks behind flame proof wall.*
Sorry about the lack of specifics- Exalted is a big game, and I love it for that, but it makes diving in an investment. If I haven't scared you off, I advise grabbing the Ex3 Core- it's pretty broad overview, but it does that job well, and it has the system new material will be in going forward.
If you want to just look at the setting stuff, Scavenger Sons and Games of Divinity from 1e are the go to books (2e's setting books tend toward dry and dull, with the exceptions of Compass North, Malfeas and Autochthon).
Now, if you want to play something other then Solars... it's complicated, and this is getting long. Sufficient to say, there are plenty of us with experience here that can help guide you through the pit falls of 2e. Or if your an EarthScorpian grade homebrewer, rebuild the whole system.
If you have more specific questions about Exalt types and what not, feel free to fire them off- we're pretty used to them. Just be aware there are many and varied opinions in the fan base, and you may set off a blistering argument. As, well, the mod banners have probably hinted at.
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- secret base
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I want to buy the 3rd edition in PDF and work my way from there, so I feel a bit alarmed by you mentioning something not connected to that.
As for the setting... How hard it is to play a formerly-evil-but-now-good Abyssal Exalted that knows only how to fight and follows someone else with almost religious fervour? Just an idea I got from reading the quick overview.
As for the setting... How hard it is to play a formerly-evil-but-now-good Abyssal Exalted that knows only how to fight and follows someone else with almost religious fervour? Just an idea I got from reading the quick overview.
UrsaTempest
Don't Panic!
Doable, but I don't think there are Abyssal ruleset for 3e. Only Solar for now.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Don't buy Exalted, buy a much better product that won't leave you angry and betrayed 15 years later, like Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition or another good game.
If you are still interested in buying Exalted; buy the First Edition lore books; Scavenger Sons and Games of Divinity, which perfectly capture and portray the setting in a marvelous and evocative way. After that, buy the Third Edition Core, preferably in pdf form so that it does not have a cost comparable to the daily maintenance of the US Military Arsenal, after which you buy Arms of the Chosen, which greatly supplements and expands the materials in the Third Edition Core, also preferably in pdf form.
If you want to play anything but a Solar, you are out of luck, but you can probably convince your ST that you should be allowed to reskin all your Solar Charms as black, gothy and evil-looking as well as flavouring Tiger Warrior Training as spending weeks raising zombies, rather than training soldiers.
After all, that's about how much effort they put into the 2e Abyssals Charmset, so you'll be in good company.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
-EarthScorpion and ManusDomine teach game development.
- Location
- secret base
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Honestly, hearing about the game itself, I have more doubts about buying a copy. The settings sounds very interesting since I either gravitate towards very typical high fantasy or the complete opposite, but the system and the fact that it requires to buy more than just the core book is a real turn-off.
And I don't like Solar Exalted that much. For some reason, those guys sound boring.
And I don't like Solar Exalted that much. For some reason, those guys sound boring.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Exalted is very interesting, and I am thankful that I know of it, but I would be lying if I said that 90% of my time with it has been complaining about it. I like it, it was one of my first roleplaying games, and it is a dear, but the system is a clunky mess that requires a lot of buy-in to understand. If you have the money to buy the Third Edition Core and want to play the game, I would recommend that you do so; you don't need anything but it, but you'd be stuck with Solars only until Dragon-Blooded are finally released in the next year.
With regards to Solars, they can feel rather generic occasionally yes; some would tell you that this is the wrong perspective to take on them, but I would find myself in general agreement with you.
Sasha
Not the Leader
- Location
- The Ever After
While i respect your opinion, I don't think you're giving Exalted a fair shake if you think Solars (or an kind of Exalted) are boring. I haven't been playing Exalted for long, only 4 games (two of which were one-shots and one of which is still very early on), but not one of the characters I played would I consider boring.
There was:
- A disfigured, flame-pistol-slinging exorcist that worked for a court of fire elementals
- A demon-trained assassin/seductress that imposed her own brand of justice with a deadly combination of sorcery, martial arts, and sheer social acumen
- A schoolteacher turned invincible warrior-priest after escaping an agent of death that had been experimenting on her
- A devil-may-care nomadic horse rider the never really learned how to grow up and is now having to deal with issues she can't just murder away
To me, playing a Solar is about playing the hero of an epic poem and telling their legend.
At this point I'm kind of running out of steam (just woke up), but I hope I've conveyed my point that Solars are only boring if you make them boring. If you really don't like them that's fine, but if you like Exalted as a setting and want to try it out, I'd say at least give them a shot.
- Location
- Quezon City, Philippines
Solars are the standard by which all Exalted are compared, and that by necessity, Solars are the most practical of the bunch. It's not fancy, but they're solid, practical, and gets the job done.
Unless you go read @Shyft's Solar Essays on where she(?) waxes about how awesome solars are despite, or in spite of, being limited to human capability. The War Essay is a good example of showing this since a Solar General specced for War effectively grants unbreakable army morale (no retreat, no surrender, no fear), grant instant battlefield communications (radios), complete information control comparable to an RTS game (satellite cameras), effective training montages (standardized boot camps), and improved daily marching speed (fatigueless forced marches). In a game where it tries to simulate pre-modern armies and warfare, even having any one of these benefits of these were gamebreakers, and having them all turns you into a Korean Starcraft player.
- Location
- secret base
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm not sure I want to be practical, though. More of a style-over-substance player myself. But thanks all the same. I'll make sure to check those essays later.
@Shyft, thank you as well.
You're not the first person to get this impression, and honestly its largely a result of multiple factors where what things are truly distinctive and cool about the Solar Exalted are relentlessly downplayed and sidelined because they stand in the way of being The Corebook Hero. By which I mean they are saddled with the unfortunate confluence of PC demands where they must include the archetype for every possible blend of aspirant hero you could imagine, as everything to everyone, but also be the de-facto Strongest, Fastest, the Most-Deserving, Virtuous, Notable, and so on, even where these things only serve as a detriment to the underlying setting and its primary actors. The Solar Exalted, taken together, are shown as existing at the End of a meaningful character arc rather than the beginnings of one, with no future goal or meaning beyond that which you've put in the personal effort to assign on an individual level.
The game is obsessed with telling Solar players in no uncertain terms, despite a long list of historic failures and drawbacks, they will ultimately win and how there is no avoiding this outcome without refusing to play the game at all, whether this feels narratively-justified or not. It is you against the world, and this is portrayed as a fair fight. And that lack of implicit struggle can admittedly feel really confining, particularly when the setting sets up the Solar Condition as that of returning heroes and plucky underdogs, so any genuine success you can make feels as though it were a given, prescripted affair, or just handed to you on a platter for the sake of being the Biggest and Strongest. The worst of the excesses on Solar boosterism makes you wonder if you're not simply going through the motions when playing a Solar character, and the stops the ST is required to pull out to upgrade this to any legitimate challenge often results in huge jumps in threat-scale which can easily lose sight of the dirt-and-grit bedrock where all the most interesting and personable characterization happens. To meaningfully play a Solar, the culture around the game wants to pit your rebellious farmboy against Galactus and his Heralds, not the injustices plaguing his backwoods township.
But there are some good and workable parts to the Solar concept which don't require being everything to everyone or vindictively punching down at every other weight-class. Foremost is the Returning Hero aspect, which is usually folded away into the natural assumptions of "being a Celestial Exalt," but the real factor here is that the majority of the sympathetic memory gifted to Solars by their Exaltation is only that of a long-lost time when things where Better than now. Every Celestial Exalt has had something of a contiguous series of lives extending back to the First Age, but Solars don't, because their essences were locked away during the intervening time. They are the Old Souls who can stand against ancient forces because they knew them when they were yet still young, and without them the world has changed in ways that don't rightly correlate together.
A Lunar may be reborn with with memories of political intrigues a mere 30 years prior, but for a Solar this means jumping back behind two world-shattering apocalypses, to places and cultures blasted to dust which no mere mortal knows existed. Comparisons are inevitable between the ruined and disparate state of the Second Age and what glories they know the world once held, and what it yet could again, leading the average Solar to either embrace wild-eyed idealism and shoot for impossible goals to put things right again, or ultimately consign themselves to what Creation has become as unavoidable and irreparable, using the flaws of the world as an excuse to exercise personal vices and vendettas because everything sucks now and its not as though their efforts could make things worse. Either direction leads towards trying to take on too much, too quickly, which causes the setting to respond in kind. Hubris at undertaking these pursuits regularly destroys them, one way or another.
Which leads into the second part, where Solars are Wildcards. Recorded history has largely forgotten the Solar Exalted as anything save grandiose tyrants, golden demons and architects of misrule, while every other form of Exalt has their "place in the world" which they have either had built for themselves or personally carved out over the centuries. A new Solar has no comparable history to this, all of it having been destroyed or lost to time, and rather than being rootless and disconnected for the absence, calls directly back to the First Age for any who are either well-read or long-lived enough to recognize and make assumptions about her character. A living Solar is an example of the past coming back to haunt the present, and no one from that time can be entirely sure what form this will take.
Rather than being placed in context of the unruly Now, a Solar's actions are presented against that ancient backdrop of What A Solar Was Then, the imperious sorcerer-queens with demonic legions, unseen thieves who stole thunder from the clouds to till the earth, the bloody-handed generals seated on thrones sculpted from the teeth of a beast bigger than time. Whether the Solar will act in accordance with this, and reaffirm the legends everyone is certain to be true, or defy those expectations and strive to put that unwelcome past to rest is anyone's guess. They are heroes saddled with the reputations of monsters, and what they do with that is left entirely to chance.
There's more, but that's probably enough for now. The folks who articulate Solars as simply being a hollow expression of power to reskin with any available concept and nothing more are selling them incredibly short, and the books rarely give reason to think otherwise.
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- secret base
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- She/Her
That was very insightful. And beautiful.
I think I never looked at them this way, but the way you described the hardships, challenges and possible developments is great.
My initial dislike of them has a simple reason behind it: I don't like perfect characters, and Solar Exalted appeared to be similar enough. I prefer characters that stand at the beginning of their development, someone who is incompetent, or even unfit to be a hero.
I'm still torn, though. Maybe, I need some time to realize what I really want, and even then, whether I'll be able to play with someone else.
UrsaTempest
Don't Panic!
...you're playing Exalted. I don't think you can play incompetent very well.
I mean, short of deliberately gimping your character, like making Murderhobo and play it in social setting. Even then, your Solar is probably good enough to solo a good chunk of the settlement. ... depending how big it is, I guess.
I mean, short of deliberately gimping your character, like making Murderhobo and play it in social setting. Even then, your Solar is probably good enough to solo a good chunk of the settlement. ... depending how big it is, I guess.
- Location
- secret base
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well, I actually meant someone who is incompetent as a hero. Like, I can play someone incredibly good at fighting, but in the same time, I actually want to see them fail because of that. I like stories about people that sacrificed everything to become the best killer in existence slowly retain their humanity through social interactions, stories about someone unfit to lead an army slowly learning how to become someone they once looked up to. Do you catch my drift?
UrsaTempest
Don't Panic!
That is doable, I think.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
It's very easy to get hung up on the surface level view of the Solar Exalted, which is 'I Win, the Splat'. I've said before but the real truth is that they're the 'I Succeed' splat. Winning, victory, those have connotations as words and yes, Solars do that- all Exalts do that really, but Solars have at a mechanical level, the most effects and powers that let them push through mechanical challenges.
This is an important distinction, applied to Exalted as a whole and Solars in particular. If you go in expecting a game that asks you to make meaningful gameplay decisions like say Dungeons and Dragons or whatnot- things like 'how do I position myself in this combat scene to achieve the attack-from-behind bonus'; that kind of basic level gameplay? Solars aren't meant to do that.
Solars are meant to say 'I have a charm that lets automatically move as attacking from behind'. And then the actual gameplay is that you develop a reputation as a supernaturally competent, craven backstabber. There's no mechanic for that though. It's all dependent on you and your storyteller working together to determine the results of how you do things. Exalted is a game that expects you to remember not just what you did, but how you did it.
So in your example- you can totally play your hardened killer. You can Exalt because of that- because Exaltation is not meant to be a moral, ethical reward or mark of spiritual purity- it is a mark of you winning a cosmic lottery that you did not enter and suddenly being given a tool that makes you more than you were before.
Exalted gameplay, true Exalted gameplay in my opinion, is the act of making decisions and managing the consequences, both ones you see and ones you don't. A lot of people came into the game hoping it would be a crunchy combat game, but in reality it was supposed to actually only be a third of the focus, giving way to warfare and kingship mechanics that we never got. It's not to say that wanting a solid combat engine is bad, but Exalted has never had one, even if 3e has ostensibly the best one (I don't think it does, but 2e's engine is by no means superior).
You'll also have to be aware that a lot of people who like the game approach it from different camps. I lean just a bit more on the gameplay/mechanics side, but I like the fluff and theming as well. Other people have completely given up on on the crunch depending on the edition, but enjoy reading about the setting or things that happen there.
- Location
- Gladstone, OR
So I'm bored and I decided to mull on 2e's social combat system. It's generally accepted that it's a poor system- people don't like it, it creates nonsense results, and so on. These are all fair criticisms of the system.
But I think there's a fundamental issue with how people approach 2e's social combat system. There are two very important conceits that it focuses on: 2e social combat is primarily focused on advantaging players versus NPCs, and modeling the influence of causes and ideals on actors over the portrayal of real human interaction.
The first part ties into an element of Exalted's design even from 1e onward that is 'Low-trust' system. That is to say, it assumes that the ST does not have final veto power over a charm interaction assuming everyone agrees how it works. Perfect Defenses Defend, WP resists UMI, so on and so forth. This is why effects like Judge's Ear work the way they do, as they're intended to protect players from the kinds of stories that Exalted as a game/setting is not interested in telling.
Now, 2e social combat was from my assessment, not meant to model anything like ordinary human interaction. Players wanted to make it do that, to it's detriment I feel. To really demonstrate this, we have to look at the forms of Mental Influence- not mortal/supernatural, but the five main keywords; Compulsion, Illusion, Emotion, Servitude and Total Control.
I think the immediate issue with understanding of the rules is that people are focused on transitory or immediate results- which is totally fair because a lot of the game is based on that too. Physical combat is very immediate- you hit or you don't, you hit and how well do you hit, you roll damage. It's all very fast gratification with concrete results. Social combat is muddier, by default.
Take a closer look at the mental influence keywords. The one that gets used the most and is the most readily understood is Compulsion, because it is the simplest, most transactional and objectively concrete influence availible to players. It makes the target Do something or Not Do something. And, at the end of the day, a great deal of practical social interaction is rooted in these two states. Compulsions are not supposed to model relationships be they romantic or platonic.
Hold on for a second, because I think I'm going to blow your minds here- the point of all of the 2e style mental keywords is to articulate the idea that these motivate people. They are things that prompt action and changes in behavior. They are not in and of themselves results, but instead the conditions or statuses that create results.
Think about it for a second- an Illusion in context of 2e is a 'Belief or Ideal'. Not a 'I am seeing what isn't real optical delusion'. It's 'I believe I am a good person'. Or 'I believe that my king is the rightful heir'. They're not objective facts (though you can of course belief in objective facts). But, you are as a person meant to act on beliefs, to include them in your daily lives as part of how you view the world. They are the things that guide your personality and where you commit your time and energy.
A belief is a powerful thing, and 2e tried to make it clear that instilling them was a valuable tool- but one that was poorly conveyed.
Emotions are similar, and mythology is full of these great heroes and personages being driven by their moods- 2e's Virtue mechanics ostensibly handled some of that moreso than Emotions did, but we can accept that the Emotion keyword was heavily underused. Servitude is similar to an Illusion but more active- you are serving in the cause's best interest as far as you know. You will protect it, defend it, uphold it in the face of opposition. It is specific loyalty.
Total Control is the extreme outlier, in that it's function is to bluntly allow total control, suddenly the target is now an extension of the actor's will, and that underlines the core argument I'm trying to make. 2e's social combat system was not meant to model human interaction, but it was instead meant to arbitrate the imposition of a the player's will upon the world through NPCs.
Take Solar Socialize for a moment- setting aside that the time of their creation allowed for abusive behaviors, and focus more on the core of their mechanics. They let you make rapid and strong adjustments to social groups. To a lot of players and STs, this inherently feels cheap, disengaging, because there was no play involved in the manipulation. These people were expecting a High-Trust game of cooperative storytelling or at least more complex, meaningful mechanical experience- but that's not the point. The point of Solar Socialize was to rapidly create a social unit that adhered to the player's desires, and then create a conflict not out of that unit itself, but how it reacted with units the players had not influenced.
Pull it back down to the immediate level, the player characters influencing single persons- Hypnotic Tongue Technique and Husband Seducing Demon Dance are not meant to be punished implicitly or explicitly by clunky mechanics or overwrought, 'I must stack these dominos to achieve the goal'- they work, and the onus of gameplay is based on the results of their function, not getting into position to use them.
The big use-case, the one that i think everyone runs into and gets frustrated by- is the Rival Exalt. There's this impression that you should not or cannot use UMI on say Joe DB or Bob Abyssal, that you are not meant to use whole categories of powers because they are Exalted and just as important as you the player characters. I don't think that's true or accurate to the intent of social combat. You are, in my mind, supposed to be able to use Hypnotic Tongue Technique on a Dynast and convince them to listen to your argument that a Solar is not anathema. You should be able to use Enemy-Castigating Solar Judgement on an Abyssal to shame them into not killing the innocent. The mechanics don't always bear this out, but that leads into the failings of the 2e system.
Such failings include a lack of diagnostic effects and move/countermove- There's not a lot of base-system mechanics or even 'how to run NPC' guidelines for learning more about other characters and their motives. What mechanics we do have are anemic and quickly supplanted by Charms.
The other critical failure is that there was never a clear guideline of when and where an NPC would spend Willpower to resist mental influence, natural or otherwise. Without that guideline, we had the Rational Actor Problem of a character always opting to spend WP to resist mind control or defaulting to MDV fist. without this guideline or the time/effort taken to tease out a reasonable approach to modeling NPCs, we were given absurd results that marred the system forever more.
To summarize- the idea of the 2e system is that you are meant to instill causes and ideals in other characters that result in long-term effects and changes. To modify how a person thinks and acts which in turn has reasonably predictable consequences for the players and their goals. It failed, as people avoid using the system whenever possible, but that's what I feel it was meant to do.
But I think there's a fundamental issue with how people approach 2e's social combat system. There are two very important conceits that it focuses on: 2e social combat is primarily focused on advantaging players versus NPCs, and modeling the influence of causes and ideals on actors over the portrayal of real human interaction.
The first part ties into an element of Exalted's design even from 1e onward that is 'Low-trust' system. That is to say, it assumes that the ST does not have final veto power over a charm interaction assuming everyone agrees how it works. Perfect Defenses Defend, WP resists UMI, so on and so forth. This is why effects like Judge's Ear work the way they do, as they're intended to protect players from the kinds of stories that Exalted as a game/setting is not interested in telling.
Now, 2e social combat was from my assessment, not meant to model anything like ordinary human interaction. Players wanted to make it do that, to it's detriment I feel. To really demonstrate this, we have to look at the forms of Mental Influence- not mortal/supernatural, but the five main keywords; Compulsion, Illusion, Emotion, Servitude and Total Control.
I think the immediate issue with understanding of the rules is that people are focused on transitory or immediate results- which is totally fair because a lot of the game is based on that too. Physical combat is very immediate- you hit or you don't, you hit and how well do you hit, you roll damage. It's all very fast gratification with concrete results. Social combat is muddier, by default.
Take a closer look at the mental influence keywords. The one that gets used the most and is the most readily understood is Compulsion, because it is the simplest, most transactional and objectively concrete influence availible to players. It makes the target Do something or Not Do something. And, at the end of the day, a great deal of practical social interaction is rooted in these two states. Compulsions are not supposed to model relationships be they romantic or platonic.
Hold on for a second, because I think I'm going to blow your minds here- the point of all of the 2e style mental keywords is to articulate the idea that these motivate people. They are things that prompt action and changes in behavior. They are not in and of themselves results, but instead the conditions or statuses that create results.
Think about it for a second- an Illusion in context of 2e is a 'Belief or Ideal'. Not a 'I am seeing what isn't real optical delusion'. It's 'I believe I am a good person'. Or 'I believe that my king is the rightful heir'. They're not objective facts (though you can of course belief in objective facts). But, you are as a person meant to act on beliefs, to include them in your daily lives as part of how you view the world. They are the things that guide your personality and where you commit your time and energy.
A belief is a powerful thing, and 2e tried to make it clear that instilling them was a valuable tool- but one that was poorly conveyed.
Emotions are similar, and mythology is full of these great heroes and personages being driven by their moods- 2e's Virtue mechanics ostensibly handled some of that moreso than Emotions did, but we can accept that the Emotion keyword was heavily underused. Servitude is similar to an Illusion but more active- you are serving in the cause's best interest as far as you know. You will protect it, defend it, uphold it in the face of opposition. It is specific loyalty.
Total Control is the extreme outlier, in that it's function is to bluntly allow total control, suddenly the target is now an extension of the actor's will, and that underlines the core argument I'm trying to make. 2e's social combat system was not meant to model human interaction, but it was instead meant to arbitrate the imposition of a the player's will upon the world through NPCs.
Take Solar Socialize for a moment- setting aside that the time of their creation allowed for abusive behaviors, and focus more on the core of their mechanics. They let you make rapid and strong adjustments to social groups. To a lot of players and STs, this inherently feels cheap, disengaging, because there was no play involved in the manipulation. These people were expecting a High-Trust game of cooperative storytelling or at least more complex, meaningful mechanical experience- but that's not the point. The point of Solar Socialize was to rapidly create a social unit that adhered to the player's desires, and then create a conflict not out of that unit itself, but how it reacted with units the players had not influenced.
Pull it back down to the immediate level, the player characters influencing single persons- Hypnotic Tongue Technique and Husband Seducing Demon Dance are not meant to be punished implicitly or explicitly by clunky mechanics or overwrought, 'I must stack these dominos to achieve the goal'- they work, and the onus of gameplay is based on the results of their function, not getting into position to use them.
The big use-case, the one that i think everyone runs into and gets frustrated by- is the Rival Exalt. There's this impression that you should not or cannot use UMI on say Joe DB or Bob Abyssal, that you are not meant to use whole categories of powers because they are Exalted and just as important as you the player characters. I don't think that's true or accurate to the intent of social combat. You are, in my mind, supposed to be able to use Hypnotic Tongue Technique on a Dynast and convince them to listen to your argument that a Solar is not anathema. You should be able to use Enemy-Castigating Solar Judgement on an Abyssal to shame them into not killing the innocent. The mechanics don't always bear this out, but that leads into the failings of the 2e system.
Such failings include a lack of diagnostic effects and move/countermove- There's not a lot of base-system mechanics or even 'how to run NPC' guidelines for learning more about other characters and their motives. What mechanics we do have are anemic and quickly supplanted by Charms.
The other critical failure is that there was never a clear guideline of when and where an NPC would spend Willpower to resist mental influence, natural or otherwise. Without that guideline, we had the Rational Actor Problem of a character always opting to spend WP to resist mind control or defaulting to MDV fist. without this guideline or the time/effort taken to tease out a reasonable approach to modeling NPCs, we were given absurd results that marred the system forever more.
To summarize- the idea of the 2e system is that you are meant to instill causes and ideals in other characters that result in long-term effects and changes. To modify how a person thinks and acts which in turn has reasonably predictable consequences for the players and their goals. It failed, as people avoid using the system whenever possible, but that's what I feel it was meant to do.
No, the critical failure is you need to spend willpower at all to resist a wide range of things. The "No, fuck off" range of things is way too narrow, which means that people can talk you into doing almost anything or believing anything if you don't spend willpower to resist it. "Join my army and leave your family and your business behind!" By rules as written, with a five minute speech in the town square someone even minimally socially focussed can grab everyone in the crowd who doesn't spend willpower to resist (because Excellencies make a mockery of mortal DVs) - and thus the excessive power of basic social attacks forms and encourages resisting everything. And then the Combo mechanics in RAW force Join Battle as a social defence, because willpower is the main constraint on survivability in moderate-to-high end RAW 2e play.
The core of the excessive resistance is that there's a failure to provide passive resistance for most things and to make the attacker provide incentives and other such things to compel an action. The resistance phenomenon is a direct consequence of the excessive power given in the social system which makes social attacks a direct imposition on your character - and you don't even have a "health bar" or "soak" despite all the combat-like elements to it. The power of Illusions to create new beliefs in a character is precisely why people default to resistance - it's too easy to rewrite someone who doesn't resist.
It is a darkly amusing thing that I have to break out a modified version of @Jon Chung's old refrain; don't touch social defence until you've fixed social lethality.
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In my experience, people wanted to make social units that were all encompassing, often to bypass the conflict inherent in the assumed best practice of the charms. "I target the Realm" sort of things.
@EarthScorpion - I think @Shyft's point here is that that's the intent; that like the combat system, the social system was never meant to be used on PCs. The picture of Exalted 2e I'm getting from Shyft's posts is one of an almost antagonistic relationship between the player and the ST; it's a system meant to be run by a killer DM, that wants to let the players win anyway. (With the Primordials, to start mixing Metaverse logic in, standing in for the DM.)
As such, you're not meant to think about "what happens when an NPC uses this on me," because nobody but NPCs ever gets hit by social attacks. You're meant to think about "how can I defend my city against the world," and the world doesn't have UMI or Charms. (Or, uh, any explicit mechanics whatsoever. But that's Shyft's point - that the major failure is the absence of mechanics for the ST to use to run NPCs given that they apparently don't use the player's rules.)
As such, you're not meant to think about "what happens when an NPC uses this on me," because nobody but NPCs ever gets hit by social attacks. You're meant to think about "how can I defend my city against the world," and the world doesn't have UMI or Charms. (Or, uh, any explicit mechanics whatsoever. But that's Shyft's point - that the major failure is the absence of mechanics for the ST to use to run NPCs given that they apparently don't use the player's rules.)
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No, it doesn't matter.
The social system is far too powerful in what it can do to a character for minimal investment of time, so a GM practically speaking must default to "I spend willpower to resist" because there's a near total lack of "No, fuck off" default defences or things forcing the PC to actually meaningfully interact with the NPC. Remember, you don't have to stunt social attacks. All a PC has to do is say "I persuade him to believe I'm the rightful ruler of Creation", and that's a valid natural Illusion. Then the GM has to do a fuck tonne to handle all the consequences of this - or they can just spend WP, and not have to deal with all those problems.
Just to give a hypothetical example, if social attacks were split into Major and Minor, and all Major attacks had to play off the character's Motivation or an Intimacy or they auto-failed, that'd mean the GM could be way more casual about Minor attacks because there'd be a limit to what could be done, a layer of defence and a way to provide meaningful challenge for a PC that isn't made irrelevant by Excellencies. As it is, a social attack requires minimal player investment and a lot of GM investment and brain-power - spending willpower to resist equalises the workload and reduces the number of balls the GM has to juggle.
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@Unbanshee - that is an accurate summation of how people did use those Charms, and I've actually dug into the idea that if you assume the cap is Mag 10, you cannot actually target the realm. You instead are supposed to in theory target 'courts of courts'. Like, by actual-rules, to target a Mag 10 unit, the whole unit has to be present in the scene. It's far more practical to target the Mag 1-2 unit that leads the Mag 10 or several mag-10 units. But we had no concrete mechanics for this either.
@linkhyrule5 - @EarthScorpion is strictly correct in that I did not actually underline the WP cost failing strongly enough, (though I feel he's too strident in calling me out on that). Assuming mechanical symmetry is a fair and reasonable take for any game, especially Exalted because it really never told you that it wasn't supposed to do that.
The main point of my assessment was that part of the problem with 2e social combat was that people tried to make it do things it wasn't meant to do- nevermind that whatever it did, it functioned badly.
Like... okay. What I'm trying to get at, independent of how nuanced or not the actual resistant mechanics were, was that Social Combat was not supposed to be about basic human interaction. IT wasn't about convincing someone to buy you lunch or get laid or go to the movies. It was meant to be about modifying the kinds of root beliefs and causes that make people make history. I agree 100% that it's broken and we've gone on at length as to where it fails, but assessing and understanding its potential functions I feel is still important.
@linkhyrule5 - @EarthScorpion is strictly correct in that I did not actually underline the WP cost failing strongly enough, (though I feel he's too strident in calling me out on that). Assuming mechanical symmetry is a fair and reasonable take for any game, especially Exalted because it really never told you that it wasn't supposed to do that.
The main point of my assessment was that part of the problem with 2e social combat was that people tried to make it do things it wasn't meant to do- nevermind that whatever it did, it functioned badly.
Like... okay. What I'm trying to get at, independent of how nuanced or not the actual resistant mechanics were, was that Social Combat was not supposed to be about basic human interaction. IT wasn't about convincing someone to buy you lunch or get laid or go to the movies. It was meant to be about modifying the kinds of root beliefs and causes that make people make history. I agree 100% that it's broken and we've gone on at length as to where it fails, but assessing and understanding its potential functions I feel is still important.