Do you happen to have a link to that or know a few keywords I can use to search for that discussion?
Unfortunately, no.
But I can tell you why I think the working system shouldn't be used for artifacts. The rolls for workings are pretty easy; you can do a whole bunch of workings with just good stats and an excellency. The real cost attached to a working is not the difficulty, but the xp cost.
This conflicts with the goals of the Craft system. We want powerful artifacts to be difficult, not just costly. We want to have legendary masters of artifact construction, who can make things others can't. And we don't want an xp cost to discourage them from actually doing so.
3e definitely goes too far with the Artifact-making Charms. But cutting the whole Artifact-related charmset down to three circles of artifice would feel pretty bad to me.
Also, this might be a me thing, but I feel like it would make Craft seem like an inferior cousin to Sorcery.
It's an extant mechanical framework, including (among other useful features) rules for exactly how many full-time managers you need to keep a given mass of workers effectively organized, and what sort of problems you run into when somebody in an important position abruptly goes missing.
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I don't think we should reinvent the wheel if we don't have to. If you've got a credible alternative in mind, or anything else constructive to say, I'd be happy to hear it.
The 2e mass combat system is unfun, unrealistic, clunky as hell, and often just bizarre. It's terrible even for the purpose it was built for; it would be much worse for a system it wasn't built for. And its peculiarities make it particularly unsuited to organization management, since its core is assuming away the actual process of management.
My constructive suggestion is to do basically anything else. You shouldn't use a mass combat system for bureaucracy, but if you must, at least make it the 3e system and not the 2e one.
I mean these are all different things. It has always been possible to conquer a government with a sufficiently capable army, but that certainly does not translate into actually being able to rule the place after having conquered it. Moreover, being charismatic and being a good administrator are not at all the same thing, and - I would venture to say - people are not just "good at managing organizations" in some abstract way that lends itself to just slapping down some charms and walking away.
Indeed. The problems of having taken over should be a major focus of Exalted's bureaucracy system. I want to dig into the struggles of a conqueror who wants to change everything. I want to see games where running the kingdom is as difficult, and as character-skill-intensive, as acquiring the kingdom was in the first place.
One thing I'll say in Exalted's defense is that it actually does cover the difference between an effective conqueror / politician and an effective leader. Your Intelligence + Bureaucracy pool can be very different from your Charisma + War pool and your Manipulation + Socialize pool, after all. Obviously skills like Bureaucracy and Socialize are still much broader than real abilities, but that's an unavoidable abstraction.
I don't think that the consequences of adopting a Great Man style of Bureaucracy - i.e., essentially subverting what we think of as bureaucracy entirely in favor of a system that could better be described as Inspiration - are necessarily bad.
I think they are. Suppose you came up with a really well-made great-man-style bureaucracy system. A system for using people as sound as the system for using swords. What then?
Such a system would only support stories in which organizations are used like daiklaves. The actually-interesting stories would be left by the wayside. A game about the difficulties of being powerful shouldn't gloss over the "and then what" stage of taking over.
Each college of sidereal astrology has three resplendencies associated with it. Every college from the House of Serenity, and one from each of the other four Houses, includes a resplendency for "laying low" and avoiding official scrutiny for weeks at a time by assuming some archetypal cover identity based on the college's themes. Statistically you'd get stuck with Pattern Bite about twice a year if you tried to keep it up indefinitely... except for the Mask, which costs three times as much paradox but also comes with deeper concealment, broader entry criteria, and a scrying option.
And they all give you 7 hours per week to do stuff. Whether you're using Best Friend's Couch to become a perpetual houseguest or Frenzied Courtship Dodge to get deeply entangled in romantic nonsense, you have exactly seven hours of free time per week.
