Would you also apply that logic to something encoded with a book cipher?
Because book ciphers are crackable, unlike OTPs, but they have the same characteristics that you cite here as a defense against the Solar Charm.
Actually, even something like ROT13 does. After all, ROT13 is identical to a very specific OTP. (All Ns). If you can say with true confidence that a given piece of text was encoded with ROT13, you're somehow breaking an OTP and determining that the true cipher text is all Ns.
In real life, you can be fairly confident in your ROT13-breaking because the probability of something encoded differently just happening to be a coherent ROT13d message is so incredibly low. But the infallibility of the magic involved here makes probability-based arguments inapplicable.
The heuristic I'm using here as to allowing this to work is whether the information is actually contained inside the message, or whether a sufficiently powerful brute force computational approach could figure out the message from information contained inside the message or from information that you have in addition to this.
If it becomes necessary to pull information from sources that are not the message
which you don't have to understand the communication, the charm for reading coded, obscured or hidden messages should not work, because then it's not reading coded, obscured or hidden messages, it's a
perfect information search and retrieval charm and I can use it to
know anything.
Which is obviously not what it's supposed to do.
I'd give Bob the intended meaning.
Might rule differently if it wasn't a pre-arranged code.
Here's the difference, yes. I don't think any case where you need to pull information from elsewhere should work, and something that isn't a pre-arranged code should never work, because this is a decoding charm, not a charm for accessing any information that could theoretically exist as long as you have a communication-pointer towards it.
Like, If Regent Fokuf sent Secretary Steve a note telling him to study the fifth shelf from the top in the first bookcase in the Imperial tax records office, would your
decoding charm give you all of that if you used it on the note? Surely not? Or, take the Order 66 example with the sealed envelope, I think allowing the decoding charm to read the sealed order is clearly out of scope.
I don't think it's at all reasonable to stretch this charm that far. You need another charm to do that, as it's clearly a separate (much stronger) capability.
If you had a charm that was very specifically and explicitly just codebreaking and only codebreaking and very definitely nothing codebreaking-adjacent then maybe, maybe I'd tell the player "no dice".
Exalted 2 said:
This Charm lets the character understand encoded, obscured and hidden communication as if it were clear. For example, the Exalt can read weather-damaged stone tablets, recognize the signals in a coded exchange, browse ciphered manuscripts as if they were in their original language and make out the words of someone whose tongue has been cut in half.
The bolded bits you mark out here do not, to me, indicate that what this charm actually does is
allow you to access any information which anyone communicates with anyone else about, no matter how indirectly. If you allow someone to use this charm to get the content of documents in a sealed box which the communication you are reading instructs the recipient to open, that's functionally what you've got, yes?
If it's really only a dispute about the precise RAW limits of this one charm then: your example is definitely an obscured or hidden communication, and the Solar is recognizing coded signals. It's pretty clear this should work. And in general I would expect most "defeat coded messages" charms to be written broadly enough to encompass this stuff.
In this case, I'm not using a coded signal to tell you to kill the Jedi. I'm using a plaintext signal to tell you to open a box and read what's inside. If I encoded that signal with a cipher that requires First Age computation engines to brute force, then cut the note to little pieces, then dropped the pieces in a bucket of red paint, you would still be able to read "go execute Order 66" from the soggy pile of wreckage, but the charm doesn't have the ability to give you the content of Order 66.
But in that case it appears to have been readily conceded that all these "oh it's mathematically impossible paradox blah blah" objections are irrelevant and it's perfectly fine for a Solar charm to do this stuff.
I'm not the one claiming that. Solar Charms can obviously pull information out of nowhere, look at Perfect Mirror which explicitly does that. My problem here is that this charm does not explicitly do that, and reading it to allow arbitrary remote information access is out of scope.
Also, that arbitrary remote information access is a game-destroying power and should never be printed.
edit: there are plenty of 3E charms (Solar and otherwise) that do some form of "reflexive read intentions action that lets you discern implausibly specific details about a person's intimacies from a moment's observation" or similar, and these slide by just fine because it's understood that (1) people's expressions and body language are large side channels and (2) charms are magic and it's normal - expected - for them to push beyond "thing you could do if you were, like, really good". Getting implausibly specific details out of a written side channel is equally fine.
I'm perfectly fine with letting you reconstruct a code it would take longer than the lifespan of the universe to crack because of the writer's brush angle. I'm not fine with letting you remote-access stuff that isn't in the message or can be reconstructed from the message purely because the message is simply telling the recipient to read that stuff. Scrying is enough of a departure from the text of the charm that I would require you to use another charm. It would probably cost a lot more, given that arbitrary remote information access can break campaigns in half.
Like, if you allow the embezzlement prearranged signal to be understood without knowledge of the prearrangement and the content of sealed Order 66 to be read despite not having access to the order, can I write myself a note telling me to read whatever's in Chejop Kejak's desk drawer and obtain the information stored in Chejop Kejak's desk drawer this way? Surely you wouldn't allow a player to do that?
Setting aside all the other stuff being talked about, this isn't a good argument in and of itself. You're basically describing Letter-Within-a-Letter Technique here. And "This Charm lets the character [read/understand] coded, obscured, and hidden communication as if it were clear" 100% cracks (or at least goes to roll-off against, if we're talking 2e) Letter-Within-a-Letter.
Letter-within-a-Letter definitionally, uh, encodes the letter-within-a-letter inside the letter. Yes, that can be cracked. This argument is not about that, it is about not letting you use a charm for understanding coded messages to access arbitrary information anywhere just because someone told someone else to read it in a message.
"If I send you a letter saying 'let's meet at the sushi place,' it means 'it's time to kill the Green Lord of Moat Cailin'" is the most textbook-basic example of coded communication in the world.
No, that won't work, or again, I can use this charm to get arbitrary information from anywhere. That's not what the charm is for, it's for reading coded messages.
