Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Mmm... The thing is though, you said,
and, assuming I read this correctly as "they are axiomatically..." meaning "[the Dragonblooded] are axiomatically..." then I think that's true as far as it goes, but... it doesn't go very far.
Standard caveats vis-a-vis mechanics are an abstraction, the map is not the territory, but as Revlid once pointed out, an Int 2 Bureaucracy 2 (Trade 1) DB could fairly accurately be described as unexceptional, yes? Average intellect, basic professional training, some specific focus on trade. But if they have even a Bureaucracy Excellency, the absolute bog-basic ground floor of magical skill that simply represents a known capacity to derive flashes of brilliance from their heroic nature on a semi-consistent basis, then their dicepool for setting up a trading venture spikes to 8, and that rapidly closes on if not equals "smartest mortal in the Imperial City with notable management expertise" territory.
Now, there will absolutely be Dragonbloods who just don't have an aptitude for this skillset, people who are aggressively disinterested or flunked classes or have mental blocks. But when when the bar is that low, that the Dragonblooded equivalent of an unexceptional plodder can hold their own against a breakout luminary, I find the idea that there will be some Dragonbloods who have no aptitude for these skills to be, not impossible, just... insignificant?
That said, I think this is mainly a casualty of how this argument has been going on for four pages now, and a certain amount of rhetorical drift has happened. People would, I think, benefit from taking a moment to step back and see how much what they're arguing for now resembles where we started, which had an awful lot less to do with the relative talents of mortals and Dragonbloods, and an awful lot more to do with how just because you're a Dragonblood doesn't mean the entire cultural and social landscape of the Realm will support everything you do.
This should not be controversial, really. Consider what the Realm does with Lost Eggs; does it adopt them into the Great Houses on the basis that, well, they're a Dragonblooded after everything else? No! It offers them the razor or the coin, because it wants the power of having a plurality of the world's Dragonblooded's, but it doesn't necessarily want to dilute the breeding of the Great Houses with any muck-spattered unknown with a drop of the Dragon's blood. Clearly, "being a Dragonblood" is not sufficient to have everything your own way, even in Dynastic society where the state religion hypes up the Dragonblooded as living exemplars of all that is right and good.
I mean, even if you do look at that scenario from a perspective of Dragonblooded power being totally supreme... most of the Dragonbloods are in the Great Houses. That's where their power is (mostly, not entirely) concentrated. If I step away from that by marrying into a Patrician house, I am still an Exalt, but I've distanced myself from all the other Exalts, and the halls of power that they control. The idea that this suggests a loss of status really should not be such an out there notion.
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