From what I gather this was a case of the Great Houses wanting a compromise candidate.
If anything the No.1 priority of the Great Houses should be to recruit DB's from the patrician class (and from everywhere else really) whilst ambitious patrician houses would want to become as close to a Great House as possible.
I wouldn't necessarily say Great House Dragonblooded marrying into patrician houses makes zero sense and is verboten; but it should be the exception not the rule due to how the Terrestrial Exaltation works.
I don't really know what the first sentence about a compromise candidate relates to so I'll address the rest. No, it's not in the interests of Great Houses to randomly eat up patrician houses and recruit as many Dragon-Blooded as possible, because that means that while on one hand you might get some really prestigious patrician houses that you would just love to add to the bloodline, it also means you get "house of legitimized outcastes" and you would never want to introduce those. Remember that they are
nobility, not rational Dragon-Blooded generators, and they care about looking good to their peers. You don't look good by adding random patricians and outcastes, that makes you look like Nellens.
It's not the interests of the Great Houses to introduce random outcastes from everywhere else either because they're
random outcastes. They don't have in-born loyalty to the House, they have loyalty to useless things like "their own principles" or "the Throne" or other shitty things that you don't care about. This has been Great House politics 101 for three editions. The number one priority of Great Houses is to build prestige (unless you're Iselsi lol) and you don't get that by adding random outcastes or patricians to your bloodline, you get that from maintaining a nice family tree and ancestors to be proud of. No one wants to be the dynast who has to admit his grandmother was Liljenallike, the eastern hill-witch with not a drop of blood tied to the Realm. For a Great House to adopt a patrician or outcaste means something big is happening, that's an exception, not the rule.
I agree that dynasts marrying into patrician houses should be rare and have done so from the start. That way it can be a big aspiration for a patrician character and an interesting way to increase status.
Because even the 'humble' Terrestrial Exaltation at least triples your natural lifespan, makes one better physically, mentally and metaphysically from their mortal selves and grants awesome supernatural powers to boot? Also because Terrestrial Exaltations can be inherited thus paving the way for a hereditary ruling class that's ability based (or upper management class if we're talking about high First Age Creation).
What other factor can be more impactful than that?
It triples your lifespan and gives you the ability to heal more and
that's it. It doesn't give you shit beyond that. It's true that Exalts can
learn Charms, but not every character will have the perfect, ideal and optimal Charms to accomplish what they want - while the "not every character is optimized! think realistically!" defence is often useless with regards to player characters, the moment we go to believe that every single Dragon-Blood has whatever Charms they need or even as many as a player starts with (because there are clear indications that they don't, although those indications are different over 2e and 3e; in 3e it is explicit and in 2e it is implied from statblocks) the setting very quickly transforms into a very silly place.
Even then, this post doesn't even answer what I asked. When you said that:
There shouldn't be any factor that trumps Exaltation in terms of society shaping as far as I know - and that applies to any edition.
I asked you why, because this is a very curious statement to make, and you didn't answer it.
You gave me a list of a bunch of abilities that the Terrestrial Exaltation grants, which while very impressive and fearsome don't really explain anything! If you wanted it to be a better argument, you should have explained
how those things lead to what you describe, and preferably also address some of the potential biggest counterarguments in your post before the other guy (like me) makes them.
A person in plate armour and with an army of thousands can destroy a hundred castle walls and take any amount of beating on the battlefield, he is obviously more powerful than any who do not have a plate armour and an army of thousands, shall inheritance follow the plate-armoured line? No, obviously not. That would be ridiculous. You might make the argument that the difference that possessing plate armour and an army of thousands are both not intrinsic like Charms are to Dragon-Blooded, except we did in fact have a time in history when most of Europe was ruled by guys with plate armour and armies of thousands! And to go with that plate armour and armies of thousands, that class also had access to better education than the lower classes could ever dream of, greater social graces, better standards of living which allowed them to grow taller, more muscular, more attractive and far more skilled. While the plate armour and army of thousands aren't intrinsic - no more than artifacts are to the Exalted anyways - the other things
are and allowed them to both be shapers of culture and to stand head and shoulders over their fellow men. Of course, the situation isn't entirely the same as Exalted, because otherwise it wouldn't be fantasy and we would be playing a historical simulator game, which we obviously aren't, but similarities can be used to infer and make more educated guesses. This elite was often plagued by rules of succession and inheritance fucking them up because all those strengths and capabilities don't actually change much of what succession and inheritance are concerned. This is because communities and kinship (in the anthropological sense) don't take form out of what's most convenient and useful, they take form out of what seems most natural to your society. Nearly every society ever has decided women should somehow be subject or inferior to men, this was not convenient and many would have been better off had it not been the case, it happened as a result of traditions and belief. Likewise, the Realm can maintain that inheritance unconditionally follows the female line while also maintaining that a dynastic man is better than a patrician or - Dragons forgive my sinful tongue -
common woman. They do not contradict. But far more interestingly, there might be something that satisfies us both!
What's probably far more likely is that male dynasts just won't get married off to random mortals or indeed, patrician houses. Of course, even when inheritance is through the female line, I suspect it'll still turn out favourable enough for the dynasts for us both to get satisfied. After all, a mortal patrician doesn't live hundreds of years, and if they were to
die they surely would be unable to accept their inheritance, which would certainly be unfortunate for that patrician house. And even should it be a Dragon-Blooded patrician, maybe the Realm has something like the Pragmatic Sanction so that the Empress could declare inheritance to follow the male line if necessary. Of course currently, there is a regent on the throne... who is currently a rubber stamp for the Deliberative, which means Great House lobbying in the Deliberative! It means patrician houses complaining about legislative unfairness! It means jurists analyzing cases for the given rationale behind previous uses of the Pragmatic Sanction in order to give pro-patrician senators better arguments against arbitrary diktat!
But, Exalts aren't just the ultra-wealthy: they're the ultra-successful in pretty much any given field they choose to focus in. While there should be some exceptional epic mortals in the mix (along with some Gods, Demons, etc.), the best playwrights, painters, musicians, actors, etc. are going to be Exalts. The best tailors are Exalts, as are the best designers. The popular, official state religion is Exalt-controlled, its higher echelons made up of Exalts.
If an Exalt joins an organization or believes an ideology and pushes for it, they're going to take control of that movement in short order. They're more talented than the mortals. Their Exaltation opens doors that will be useful. They'll outlive the mortals, if nothing else.
The end result here is that you would expect, on the Blessed Isle, for "Exalts" to be in pretty convincing control of what society looks like. Terrestrials aren't a unified block so you would expect massive disagreements across society, culturally and otherwise, but those are still Exalt-driven or Exalt-led conflicts.
Jesus Christ, there was once when I admonished
@GardenerBriareus for comparing Dragon-Blooded to Übermensch and said that this was mistaken, but reading this made me feel outright uncomfortable.
That Dragon-Blooded are the main shapers of culture is not new to anyone here, this is almost taken as a given, but that Dragon-Blooded are ultra-successful in pretty much any given field they choose to focus in? No, that's ridiculous. Don't mistake the mechanics for a reality simulator, are we to also believe that the rules for jumping apply equally to all, so that it's a common thing to see mortals leap twenty feet into the air? No, obviously not, that'd be ridiculous. They'll plateau, they'll forget skills, they'll lack dedication, they won't care, they might have a bad arm, they'll be out of practice. They're
people. Player characters don't do that because the mechanics are not a reality simulator, but Dragon-Blooded Uncle Iroh who has to train himself up again is a classic staple of Dragon-Blooded NPCs. It's true that Dragon-Blooded can attain immense skill and be very impressive, but at the end of the day they're still people and don't actually have this degree of control that you seem to believe, their Charms have never given this degree of power, the setting has never been written under this assumption and the mechanics disagree. Normally I would ignore the mechanics if the setting said otherwise, and no one here is a stranger to changing either the mechanics or the setting, but when you've got literally the entire line disagreeing with you, I think we can fairly solidly establish that this is not in fact the way the line works or is supposed to work.
I think it could probably be "Yeah, no, you are nothing but a branch of my family now".
If inheritance follows the female line it doesn't matter shit if they're a Dragon-Blood or not, what matters is that the woman inherits. Although if a Dragon-Blooded man marries a woman and lives like 200 years after she's dead, the fact that she would have inherited probably doesn't matter that much lol. If it
doesn't follow the female line but just nonsensically passes to the Exalt, the end result is that no patrician house ever is interested in marrying a Great House because the end result is to see the end of their own house, and that is far more costly than the immediate prestige gain from marrying a dynast. Again, patrician houses are not random mortals, they can be pretty significant, and pretty proud. The holder of the imperial seal is a patrician. Don't dismiss them easily like this.
