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General Exalted Thread

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hls said:
I'm not commenting on the wider OTP debate there. I'm just saying your one building block you're using there doesn't work.

That is a coded message. Your attempts to extrapolate a particularly bounded bit of magic into an all-knowing computational panopticon notwithstanding, that's... that's a coded message. "X actually means Y, and only a highly-select group will know this" is the simplest kind of code there is.
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I think we're caught up on semantics here. This is not a coded message. The message is not encoded in the text and cannot be extrapolated from the text. Such a message should not be "decodable" by this charm, because there's nothing to decode.

hls said:
Defining an OTP as "go get info out of a box" is broadly disingenuous, incidentally, as that's almost never how they work, because that makes them hideously vulnerable to interception. If the "pad" is a plaintext message you're just waiting to be told when and where to retrieve, anyone who stumbles on the thing prematurely can get your message. That's not vulnerable to decryption, granted, since it's not encrypted, but it is vulnerable to like, the maid knocking shit off a shelf.
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Whether the maid can knock it off the shelf and read it has nothing to do with the question of whether this charm can read the info out of the box, where the info in the box is not in the message telling you to go look in the box and cannot be constructed from the message telling you to go look in the box.

hls said:
Generally speaking, something like that Charm is going to make short work of a OTP if you've got the coordinate instructions. The Solar intuits their meaning, because magic. The pad itself is usually fairly useless because the attempt at communication doesn't live there, just the means to turn the code into something understandable. The code sheet is an attempt to convey info; the pad translates it, because it is a sheet of obscured communication. A computer can't crack this, but magic isn't a computer. The attempt to covertly convey a message renders the sheet vulnerable. That Charm can read the real meaning of the Yagyu Letter from Lone Wolf and Cub without any silkworms to hand, too. It's magic that brushes away all obfuscation of meaning, not a super-codebreaking algorithm you run in your head.
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Does it suddenly stop working if the original sender of the message gets some schmuck know-nothing secretary extra to write a "routine memo" instead as a cut-out? If you're actually reading this as "magically divine the intent of the sender's communication", that would block it out immediately, as the sender is clueless. If that doesn't work, how many hops up the chain of causation do you get?

As for magic being able to do anything, sure, magic can do anything, but nothing in this charm tells me it should spit out the contents of an Imperial Revenue tax records shelf when I use it on a memo from Accountant Alex to Accountant Bob telling Bob that he should go to a specific shelf and read the records there because they would be collectively be useful for his audit. The meaning of that message is "go read this set of records, they would be useful for your audit", and even if the charm would be perfectly able to get that even if the memo was written in a dead language, ciphered with a strong algorithm, then cut to pieces and dunked in paint, that's all that it should get.

hls said:
Letter Within a Letter is generally a lot safer because at a glance it looks perfectly harmless. When dealing with Exalted counterespionage on the Solar level, you generally have two primary means of defense, because "encrypt the thing so well it can't possibly be broken" isn't really an option. The first means is to just make sure your communications are never intercepted, which is why the most sensitive messages in the Realm are generally never committed to paper or courier at all and instead get sent direct to the recipient's ear via Infallible Messenger. The second is to try to avoid rousing suspicions about the communication so that nobody thinks it's worth their time to burn motes scrutinizing it for shady bullshit.
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If sending someone instructions to go read a letter in a box doesn't work and the charm can legitimately pull the information out of the box, this is vastly too strong for an Essence 2 charm and it should be nerfed into the ground if that is in fact what it is intended to do. I don't buy that remote information access is what this thing is intended to do, or does by RAW.

Note that everything in the list of examples given by the Charm (cipher, weather damage, message-in-a-message) fits with the "if the information is in the text or can be reconstructed or extrapolated from the text, it works" heuristic, but none of them require the remote-viewing/omniscience capability. If it's actually meant to do that, given how campaign breaking that potentially gets, why is that not an explicitly stated capability or explicitly presented example?
 
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Phigment said:
Is any of this coming up in anyone's actual game? Or is this all arguing for the joy of arguing?
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It's all memes down here. Just go with the flow.

Jokes aside, this is a leisure activity - arguing about bad rules in a decade old game nobody plays anymore is almost perfectly fitting in the "this is absolutely not worth doing objectively" category, so subjective pleasure is the only viable explanation.

Personally, this is super nostalgic. I have better things to do but I get lulz out of this, so why not?
 
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rogthnor said:
But that's not an attempt to hide information. Of the intent of the message is to hide "x did y" then it shouldn't matter how that info is hidden?
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The charm doesn't require intent to hide information, it'll work on a weather-damaged stone tablet inscription just as well as it works on Julius Caesar's ciphered mail.

edit: It actually probably can't work on messages in foreign languages, disregard that. Huh.

In my example, Accountant Alex's intent is for Steve to know the information contained in that shelf so he can complete his audit, so he sends Steve a message telling Steve to go to the records room so he can read those account ledgers. The account ledgers are not contained in his message. Solar Bob, Night Caste, uses his decoding charm on Accountant Alex's message. I think he should not get the account ledgers by using that charm, as that would be trying to give the charm powers it doesn't actually have.

Even if hidden in the account ledgers is a message telling Steve to stop pretending to be an accountant and do his other job as Ninja Killer Steve, and Alex the patsy was told to do that by his secret ninja accountant boss, kek.
 
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Jon Chung said:
The charm doesn't require intent to hide information, it'll work on a weather-damaged stone tablet inscription or a message written in a language you don't know just as well as it works on Julius Caesar's ciphered mail.

In my example, Accountant Alex's intent is for Steve to know the information contained in that shelf so he can complete his audit, so he sends Steve a message telling Steve to go to the records room so he can read those account ledgers. The account ledgers are not contained in his message. Solar Bob, Night Caste, uses his decoding charm on Accountant Alex's message. I think he should not get the account ledgers by using that charm, as that would be trying to give the charm powers it doesn't actually have.

Even if hidden in the account ledgers is a message telling Steve to stop pretending to be an accountant and do his other job as Ninja Killer Steve, and Alex the patsy was told to do that by his secret ninja accountant boss, kek.
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Doesn't require the intent to hide information, but that is none of the things it works on? It specifically calls out discovering hidden information

Like if the writer doesn't know what that info is besides "in the chest" then all you get is its "in the chest". But if the intent is "look into the chest because that us where j have hidden the imperial seal" then i feel the solar should know that, even if the encoded message just says look into the chest
 
rogthnor said:
Doesn't require the intent to hide information, but that is none of the things it works on? It specifically calls out discovering hidden information
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"The Solar heroes see through petty mysteries. 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, recognise 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."

rogthnor said:
Like if the writer doesn't know what that info is besides "in the chest" then all you get is its "in the chest". But if the intent is "look into the chest because that us where j have hidden the imperial seal" then i feel the solar should know that, even if the encoded message just says look into the chest
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I don't see that in the charm. If it was supposed to do that, it would say that. Like Sagacious Reading of Intent, which reads intent. Charms do only what they say they do.
 
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Jon Chung said:
"The Solar heroes see through petty mysteries. 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, recognise 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."



I don't see that in the charm. If it was supposed to do that, it would say that. Like Sagacious Reading of Intent, which reads intent. Charms do only what they say they do.
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My read is that "I have hidden the imperial seal in the chest" is a hidden communication
 
Jon Chung said:
If what you want is information that's not actually hidden in the message you are reading, the charm text does not contain anything telling me I should let you have it.
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But it is? It's just not written down? Like if I tell my brother "remember the time you punched me in the face" and I am actually referring to the time he punched me and chipped my tooth (which he will know because that's the only time worth referencing) then I am hiding that information by referring to it obliquely
 
Jon, in my mind, pretty clearly has the right of it here because the alternative is silly. Let's say you've got a manual of military advice—a twenty volume treatise listing tactics for every conceivable situation. If I send a general an encoded message saying "you should act according to the manual", does the charm-user automatically know the entire contents of the manual so that I can figure out what the message is "actually" saying? Does it let me know all the relevant bits of the manual: the eight hundred different scenarios that might be implicated here? Can I use this Charm as a kind of decompression algorithm that lets me learn huge quantities of information by reading a sentence or two?
 
Heh.

The funny thing is, if you follow his position to its logical conclusion, you get equally silly results. Solar codebreaking failing against ROT13 and the like.

The Charm in question here works through direct access to the meaning of a text; since in real life texts don't actually have meanings, acting as if they do has all sorts of crazy implications. I don't think there's any non-strange way to extrapolate the edge cases of the Charm.

PS: I still think most of this thread is overestimating how advanced / elaborate a OTP is. A ten-year-old can implement one by hand. Many "weaker" codes are much much harder to use.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
PS: I still think most of this thread is overestimating how advanced / elaborate a OTP is. A ten-year-old can implement one by hand. Many "weaker" codes are much much harder to use.
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The fact that it's not advanced math and is available to under-aged is not the point, the point it that it's impossible to read with any amount of computing power, ever. Think about it this way: division is one of four basic arithmetic operations. I don't think there should be [Glorious Solar] Divide by Zero Method in charmtech.

Now, one the flipside, if we have "extract meaning" charm this can be rationalized using other examples from Exalted. There is spell that allow you to stand in one place and see what was done there 5 year ago (ancient past something something?), and charm that let you perfectly discern intent of social communication. There is nothing preventing you from seeing past of given letter and intention of someone writing it and answering question "was there something intentionally coded into it?" But that more of Sidereal thing IMHO.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
PS: I still think most of this thread is overestimating how advanced / elaborate a OTP is. A ten-year-old can implement one by hand. Many "weaker" codes are much much harder to use.
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True randomness is really hard to get.

You could make an almost perfect OTP with a bunch of dice and some time, but Solar magic would be actually capable of decoding it, because dice have a bias, and a perfect effect charm can crack that.
 
Broken25 said:
True randomness is really hard to get.

You could make an almost perfect OTP with a bunch of dice and some time, but Solar magic would be actually capable of decoding it, because dice have a bias, and a perfect effect charm can crack that.
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As I've been saying, the way the Charm is written makes no distinctions based on the quality of the code. Perfect one time pad or basic cipher, it makes no difference. It's not a codebreaking Charm so much as a code-ignoring Charm; it just tells you what the message means.

And speaking about cryptography in general, beyond that one Charm, the imperfections of your dice cannot realistically render your attempt at a OTP breakable. Especially since nobody's gonna know which way your dice are biased.
 
Sanctaphrax said:
As I've been saying, the way the Charm is written makes no distinctions based on the quality of the code. Perfect one time pad or basic cipher, it makes no difference. It's not a codebreaking Charm so much as a code-ignoring Charm; it just tells you what the message means.

And speaking about cryptography in general, beyond that one Charm, the imperfections of your dice cannot realistically render your attempt at a OTP breakable. Especially since nobody's gonna know which way your dice are biased.
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You're assuming the charm has to be capable of pulling information out of nowhere and/or remote mind-reading, but nothing in the examples implies this. In fact, in the two quantifiable and unambiguous examples (damaged tablet, person with speech impediment), the information is there and in front of you and needs no external, additional sources to understand them. In fact, since DSE explicitly does not help you translate and understand languages you don't already know, there's even more circumstantial evidence that if you need an external source of information not contained in the document or communique itself, you're out of luck.

Furthermore, ROT13 is not equivalent to a onetime pad. The way you solve ROT13 or any simple substitution cipher is by targeting short words and substituting common phrases, checking your work, and repeating. In other words, there's an algorithmic weakness that can be used to decode the message without access to further information. For more complex 'classical' ciphers, like the ADFGVX cipher, you also can crack it via similar techniques of frequency analysis and a lot of pen and paper work. You cannot do this with a one-time pad, which is why one-time pads are information-theoretic secure. They're actually unsolvable without knowing both the key and the encrypted text, at which point you already know the message.

In all classic ciphers-i.e. the encryption techniques that Solars are most likely to encounter and probably closer to the actual intent of the Charm writer-you can solve them with nothing more than the encrypted text, a pen and paper, and some time.
 
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ROT13 is a one-time pad, just one with an all-N ciphertext. As I said a few posts back, "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."

Again, the Charm doesn't decode anything. It involves no frequency analysis and no algorithmic anything.

It lets you read ciphered messages as though they were not ciphered. Doesn't matter what the cipher is. There's not a lot of ambiguity in "browse ciphered manuscripts as if they were in their original language".

Incidentally, the damaged tablet example actually supports my side. If a big chunk of text is missing, it's missing, and no amount of logic will tell you what it said. But the Charm will.
 
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