General Exalted Thread

[FaeGlade Plural]

<Fina>

This is IMO where "Exalted is a game about consequences", which is how I always thought about it, can come in quite strongly.

There's the tactical (and also operational) level of how you win a given conflicts - but for the Exalted, especially if they get to pick their conflicts, this is often quite easy. Whether you choose to fight directly, or use one of the skills you (or your circle, in which case it'll be many more skills) are supernaturally good at, you can just overwhelm most obstacles.
This need of course not be the case - a game or story may contain conflicts with opponents you can not overwhelm like that. But that hints at what @Aleph said - at some point, you'd have to sprinkle such strong opponents everywhere that it would get kinda weird, especially in Celestial games.

But that is where the strategic layer comes in. Your actual plans.
You want to get something out of any given conflict. So one simple way to make a game more interesting for the players, or a story for the readers, is to connect the consequences of how they solve a conflict to their objective.
Because whatever skills you may have with which you can win overwhelmingly may not always get you what you desire, at least if applied without finesse. For example, just taking a city by brute force my easily be within your means, but it may drive away it's wealthy merchants and thus deprive you of much of it's value.

And of course, even if that all works, you can always have follow-up consequences to deal with. A city conquered needs to be ruled. A rival seduced to your own side may have enemies on their own, now also yours.

These should not undo the players actions - if the players succeed, they succeed at the thing they set out to do. They're setbacks, as a consequence of hasty applications of overwhelming force. Or merely new story unfolding on account of how the players shape the world.



I would say that this does tie into the "interesting and narratively appropriate opposition" that @Aleph mentioned.
Opponents do not need to beat you at your own game. Those weaker do not typically win by doing the same thing as a stronger opponent. A mortal is not going to protect their interests by directly opposing one of the Exalted. But there is always indirect opposition.

The merchants of a conquered city leaving. A god who could never oppose a circle of Solars calling in century-old favors from their neighbours, so as to strengthen the opposition against them. Farmers hiding resistance fighters and guiding enemy armies. That can all be interesting, and it is narratively appropriate if you just approach things with a sledgehammer, whatever yours may be.

But what if a player group of Exalts has so many skills between them that they can handle any of that? Then I would say it should still matter how they approach it. How you handle resistance fighters, or discontent farmers, or an economic crisis, or any other thing, should always have interesting consequences, no matter how skilled your character is at it.

 

[SunnySprings]

One of Autocthon's Deva, that was sealed away and couldn't be retrieved before he left.

Due to Infernal Sabotage, its currently setting off multiple demon alarms.

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While that would be a good false flag kind of scenario, I'm not sure where the Infernals come into play. I want to avoid them altogether since I'm more focused on the Lover and her sworn deathknights being the primary antagonists (and because, until Essence drops fully, the manuscript Infernals are just no fun). Could be interesting if the spirit that Autochthon left behind was corrupted by necromancy in some way, though.

Speaking of the Lover, I'm trying to do a different take than the dumb 1e/2e thing of, "Ahhhhh this woman is doing weird sex stuff! I'm going crazy!" So far, she's not been too prominent, but my concept is that she's someone who was, in her previous incarnation as a Twilight Caste Solar, a genuinely upstanding person, but was broken of any concept of trust after her betrayal and murder by her subjects, simply because they feared death at the hands of the Sidereals. As she stands now, she's a bizarre fairy-tale witch living in a spire of ice that, occasionally, emerges to find someone who is morally upstanding or otherwise optimistic, and she then sets to work breaking them in some way. While this can take the form of an insanely toxic romance, it has also taken the form of her offering patronage to artists (only to then make them paint bleaker and bleaker subject matter at a faster and faster pace), showing up in peasant hamlets as a humble itinerant miracle-worker (to subtly tear their community apart by showing favoritism towards some families over others), or so on. The Lover aims to either ruin them completely or, if they prove resilient, convert them to her way of thinking (that everyone is, fundamentally, an awful person and deserves anything bad they get) and offer them a spot at her court.

On the macro-level, her goal is somewhat similar to the Bishop's; like him, she's a loyalist to the Neverborn and wants to end Creation. Where she differs from him is on ethics. The Bishop believes no one really deserves Creation being inflicted on them, while the Lover believes sapient life is fundamentally avaricious and cruel, and that what she's doing is a form of punishment for their wickedness. While the Bishop attempts to convert everyone to his philosophy and would be quite upset if someone were to be condemned to Oblivion without wanting it, the Lover is content with getting together a vanguard of like-minded individuals and setting them to work on flaying Creation apart, bit by bit, and doesn't really give a single damn about anyone else's consent in the matter. Her antagonism towards the players, who are Alchemicals of the nation of Jarish, and the other Autochthonians entering Creation comes from both a personal level (she hates that they're a bunch of optimistic mortal-loving scum) and from the sense that, if she allows them to go unchecked, they'll wind up strengthening her rivals (and they're already working with a Sidereal who has a chair on the Convention of the Dead, so there's more than ample reason to be suspicious of that).

 

[The Phoenixian]

I think that using Demons for the "Actions have consequences" teaching is a bit....well.

Demon summoning is something that gets a lot of play throughout fiction and when it shows up, people expect consequences. They expect the demons to be perfectly happy to turn on their summoner if they ever get the chance, they expect demons to pay a lot of attention to the letter of their commands and only pay the spirit heed to subvert it, and they expect a dire price to be paid to this malicious entity.

The metaphorical devil is in the details, of course, with different works having different rules for demons, deals, etc.

In Exalted, the summoning of a demon is dangerous, yes but mostly if you fail to bind or banish them. Once you've bound the demon to service, they're bound. They won't look for loop holes or malicious readings of your instructions. They're going to approach it as a thing they want to do, filtered of course, through the perspective of "I'm a Demon of Malfeas."

If you summon a Blood Ape and tell it to guard a child, for whatever kooky reason you as a sorcerer have, they are gonna guard that child with their life! They're probably going to do so by brutally killing or maiming anything that they think may pose a threat to them, loom ominously, and probably exterminate the local cat population. If you summon Lucien to guard them, he's going to go through a list of everyone who knows about the child's location and starting checking off those names with his knives so people can't leak that information(save, maybe, for your allies) and start producing a horde of demon assassins or conscript a cult of mortal assassins to help him in keeping watch for any signs that someone knows about them and ruthlessly suppressing that information when it shows up all the while training the child into one of deadliest assassins Creation has ever known. Etc.

There's no malice there. They have weird priorities because they're demons with different needs and desires from humans and further they're often terrible because Malfeas is a terrible place.

Someone new to Exalted though, is probably expecting both malice and consequences because of how demon summoning usually rolls and they're okay with that or they wouldn't be summoning demons to begin with.

Click to shrink...

On reading this I'm struck by what is, checking some logs, an old and occasionally commented on realization:

Not a Faustian demon but a computing daemon: You call it up; establish that yes, you in fact do have the permissions to order them around; they'll happily do their thing in the background; and then any moment of realization of how it all went wrong is not about the daemon being too literal or malicious, but a consequence of either using the wrong daemon for the job or else failing to navigate the daemon's quirks and foibles.

 

[Sucal]

While that would be a good false flag kind of scenario, I'm not sure where the Infernals come into play. I want to avoid them altogether since I'm more focused on the Lover and her sworn deathknights being the primary antagonists (and because, until Essence drops fully, the manuscript Infernals are just no fun). Could be interesting if the spirit that Autochthon left behind was corrupted by necromancy in some way, though.

Click to shrink...

Oh the Infernals part was basically me trying to come up with a definite pressure point that would cause conflict. Rather then everyone letting the strange spirit be talen by the Autocthon

 

[horngeek]

A homebrew Shahan-ya for people! This is actually coming from the backstory for my character from a Sidereals game that's starting in a couple of days- the character in question is the third character in the Adherents section.

Basically, I came up with this Shahan-ya, thought of a few fun plot hooks, then realised I had a writeup that could be used by others. Golshan is particularly suited to be a shared mentor of a mixed-Exalt Circle, or to be partially behind characters meeting if you can't figure out other ways.

Finally, she's rather intertwined with @EarthScorpion's Taira writeup, found here. This writeup assumes a slightly different location than the 2e location of Taira, and locates it along the northern shore of the Dreaming Sea. I'd like to thank EarthScorpion for the writeup, and for the suggestion regarding Golshan actually being the mother of the old witch-queen of Pershwa.

Golshan Farseeker

No Moon Shahan-Ya

Golshan Farseeker resides in the far east of Creation, on the northern shore of the Dreaming Sea. Born in the area that is now Taira shortly after the Contagion and the formation of the Realm, she is a pivotal- if not well-known- figure in Tairan history, for it is she who mothered the witch-queen of Pershwa- and lost that daughter to a demon Golshan had summoned herself, Lucien having slipped his bonds in the series of events that led to the conquest of Pershwa. Since then, Golshan has largely turned her focus elsewhere on the Dreaming Sea, traveling throughout the region and its rivers both in human form and in her spirit shape of an otter- although recent events in Taira draw her gaze back to the region.

Golshan bears no personal grudge against the Realm as a whole, her opposition to the Immaculate Philosophy and the Dragon-Blooded empire at Creation's core being a largely practical one rather than a philosophical one or one born from hatred. They wish to slay her; she sees no reason to cooperate. Golshan instead seeks to spread her philosophy among the Silver Pact and beyond- one of strength borne from diversity of cultures, of viewpoints, and of abilities. She points to the Pact itself as the greatest example of this, in fact. She would even apply this to the Realm itself- she would see it reduced but its culture preserved, for she sees much to admire about the Immaculate Philosophy's tenets of Exalted responsibility.

A centuries-old idealist, Golshan has somehow kept her idealism through rejection by others, through the rise and fall of empires, and through personal tragedies- and now, in the current age with the return of the Solar Exalted, she views new opportunities to incorporate new followers into her philosophies and teachings. Indeed, unknown to many among the Pact, her own daughter, the Sidereal Exalted Delara Moon-Child, carries her teachings and philosophies for the benefit of Fate and Heaven, and Golshan eagerly looks for opportunities to spread her teachings to even more strange students.

That said, not all is well with her- the Empire of Prasad spreads to the Dreaming Sea, and Golshan Farseeker views its conquest and consumption of other cultures into its caste system as an active insult to her philosophies. At least as far as Prasad is concerned, she has switched her political stance from one of fortification to more direct- if still asymmetrical- warfare, and encourages her adherents who are available to take increasingly blatant action against the Dragon-Blooded empire.

Pact Relations

Golshan's view applying even to the Realm itself is an unpopular one among the Silver Pact to say the least- some say that if she could find an Immaculate Monk who would accept her teachings, she would gladly take him on as a pupil. In truth, they're not entirely wrong.

That said, she does have some allies. Amatha Kinslayer, while actually more opposed to the Realm than Golshan, doesn't reject Golshan's offers of friendship- for Golshan is willing to back her against all who reject Amantha's right to stand among the teachers of the Silver Pact. Blood Nail is an unexpected ally, their friendship mostly forged by their mutual opposition towards the empire of Prasad.

On the other hand, Golshan is staunch enemies of any Shahan-ya whose goals towards the Realm are explicitly genocidal. She doesn't know the goals of Ul the Burning Eye, but his isolation concerns her greatly- and were she to find out his plans, she would likely ally with whoever would listen to her in order to slay him. Raksi, once Golshan's own teacher, views her as soft at best, while Golshan is disquieted by her old teacher's autarchic ambitions.

Mentorship

There are those who say that Golshan would teach an Immaculate Monk if she found one willing to learn from a Lunar Anathema; they are, in fact, entirely correct in such an accusation, and she has in fact extended the offer to more than one Immaculate Monk; if one were to accept, she would be cautious but would still teach him both her philosophies and impart some of her sorcerous knowledge.

In the meanwhile, young Lunars- or other students- can gain much from Golshan. While she is not the most martially skilled Lunar in the Silver Pact by any means, she has mastered several forms of martial arts during her several centuries of life and can pass them down to prospective students- but where her teachings truly excel are in the two areas of sorcerous lore and diplomacy.

In sorcerous lore, Golshan might not be capable of meeting the sheer breadth of Raksi's knowledge, but she still has a wide breadth of lore on the ways of spirits, and sometimes her lore includes knowledge of obscure demons or elementals that others may have completely overlooked in the areas of summoning.

In diplomacy, Golshan has long experience with speaking to those of varying cultures; and she's willing to pass this onto any student. She can also pass down her considerable experience in dealing with tensions and looking out for unexpected surprises in diplomatic meetings.

But perhaps the true benefit of Golshan as a teacher is the breadth of non-Lunar connections that she can provide to her students- Golshan's philosophies have lead her to accept many students from outside of the pact, and she counts among her allies several Exigents, a Dragon-Blooded Outcaste family, and (as of recently) her daughter, a Sidereal Chosen of Secrets. Golshan is willing to make introductions with any of those as a favor to her adherents- or even to other, older Lunars, although she vets these meetings more carefully and insists on being present.

As a teacher, Golshan insists on expanding the horizons of her students, often taking them on journeys throughout the Dreaming Sea and beyond. Students of hers will be expected to interact with and respect many different cultures and understand the strengths they bring- and almost every student of hers will be expected to peacefully observe the customs and faiths of those they hate and resent at least once. She does not exclude herself from this, often returning to Taira to walk among the people of Zamash, who conquered her people of birth so long ago.

Adherents

The Prophetess of Pershwa, who advises the Naib of Pershwa in his war against the Shahbanu for the throne of Taira, is in truth a Lunar Exalted herself- and one of Golshan's pupils. She does not speak of her past even to Golshan's fellow pupils, although she does not react with violence when they ask. Only Golshan knows who she was before- a young peasant girl of Pershwa, who Exalted during the earliest outbreaks of civil war after the death of the royal family of Taira, her family one of the first casualties of pogroms against the moon-worshippers of Pershwa. Golshan took her in, taught her, and now supports her, both Exalted seeing a chance to carve out an equal status for Pershwa within Taira… but also, the Prophetess has heard reports from the demons she has summoned regarding Sabah II, and honestly believes that the Infant Shahbanu cannot be allowed to come to rule.

Fauja was born to the Katora Jati of Prasad- and her deep resentment of Prasad's caste system plays a large role in her shadow war against the empire of Prasad. Golshan taught her patience and diplomacy, and the Changing Moon owes a debt of gratitude to her mentor, even if they don't have the chance to talk much. Fauja often supplies information to Blood Nail's forces, as well as provoking internal strife within the Empire, acting as both spy and a thorn in Prasad's side. She doesn't have much loyalty to her own people; in her view, the Katora too easily accepted their removal from their home and their subjugation.

Delara Moon-Child is not a Lunar Exalted at all- she is Golshan's biological daughter, her father one of the wolfmen of the Bankal tribes, who reside in the regions east of Taira and northeast of Volivat. Her first child in centuries, Golshan didn't intend anything more for her daughter than to raise her well- but Delara's fate as a Chosen of Secrets revealed itself a year ago. While Delara has traveled to Heaven to begin working for the Bureau of Destiny, she still keeps in contact with Golshan, a connection that the elder Lunar is putting considerable effort into keeping safe from the attrition of Arcane Fate.

SIDEBAR: The Children of Exalted
Delara Moon-Child is a child of an Exalted who has Exalted herself- while past editions have discouraged this at best, it is a story that I personally think has a great deal of potential (Delara's also the reason this writeup exists- she's a Sidereal PC of mine who Golshan was written for). That being said, she isn't vital to the wider writeup of Golshan Farseeker, and STs who would prefer to take Golshan as merely a Shahan-ya with a great deal of potential to act as a group mentor for a mixed circle may do so.

 

[The Phoenixian]

There's a paraphrase of a famous Ghandi quote that comes to mind when I read Golshan Farseeker's opinions on the Realm, the Immaculate Faith, and the prospect of taking students from it.
"I quite like your Immaculate Faith, but I do not like your Immaculates."

I also quite like the amazing "yes, and your point?" energy of her being accused of taking students from outside the Silver Pact.

 

[MiracleGrow]

Very good idea, would def use her if my groups ever end up in that area.

I've also been tinkering with a Shahan-ya idea. But the twist is that they are not a Lunar exalted at all. But rather a behemoth sized flounder that lives at the deepest ocean floors of creation. Who was once close friends with a Lunar who perished in the usurpation.

 

[Blaque]

Interesting. I always saw that aspect of Exalted as one of its most Western traits - that, as opposed to cultivation of qi or ascendancy through hard work, the highest echelons of power are reserved for the destined few that are elevated, not by their own efforts, but the grace of the gods.

Click to shrink...

It's a mix. You need to do things that catch the eyes of the gods to be gods. To be come Exalted requires you do a bunch of the stuff that probably would have made youa cultivation character in effect.

It's also kind of at the same time anti-Western in the sense that like....it doesnt' assume that it's fair or that failing to live-up is some flaw about you. There's a bit of a mixed message in the West from Aristotle to the Protestant Wrok Ethic that if you fail, while it's obviosuly circumstnace, you still failed because you suck. Which note, does depend on the part of history (Western stuff on this is big and long time). I think in general Exalted also kind of does assume that meritocracy is a sham, which is kind of more post-modern than antyhing anti-Western or emulation of mythology.

 

[horngeek]

Very good idea, would def use her if my groups ever end up in that area.

I've also been tinkering with a Shahan-ya idea. But the twist is that they are not a Lunar exalted at all. But rather a behemoth sized flounder that lives at the deepest ocean floors of creation. Who was once close friends with a Lunar who perished in the usurpation.

Click to shrink...

So, the main question to ask is 'why do the Silver Pact treat this behemoth as one of their number instead of an ally'.

I wouldn't necessarily say 'no', but it's something to consider.

 

[Shyft]

It's a mix. You need to do things that catch the eyes of the gods to be gods. To be come Exalted requires you do a bunch of the stuff that probably would have made youa cultivation character in effect.

It's also kind of at the same time anti-Western in the sense that like....it doesnt' assume that it's fair or that failing to live-up is some flaw about you. There's a bit of a mixed message in the West from Aristotle to the Protestant Wrok Ethic that if you fail, while it's obviosuly circumstnace, you still failed because you suck. Which note, does depend on the part of history (Western stuff on this is big and long time). I think in general Exalted also kind of does assume that meritocracy is a sham, which is kind of more post-modern than antyhing anti-Western or emulation of mythology.

Click to shrink...

Also for @Syz since this is relevant- part of one of my earlier recent posts in this topic was also how people frame the game experience versus the lore experience and how those domains overlap along with others. There's this huge nesting venn diagram of desires and objectives on both the developer's side as well as the player's side.

The player wants to play a game that is Engaging if not challenging. They want their decisions to matter, and they want fair and balanced systems, stakes and premises to engage with.

The frustration lies then in, as an example. If I'm playing my current Solar, I can judge based on her charm choices and dot-ratings that she's 'This Good' at one of the 'games' of Exalted. Combat, Social, etc. This is exacerbated because the densest, most verbose and applicable system in the game is the combat system. Any edition.

So with that premise in mind, we pick our Solar, and in my case despite having extensive 2e system mastery, I pointedly avoided min-maxing or even going straight for the oft-maligned 2/7 filter and other necessary tools. Which are themselves a maturation and mutation of system mastery and insight into how 2e as a game worked. Compare/contrast to 3e's balance at your leisure.

If I had optimized far more than I presently have, or otherwise focused on conventional advantages (high pools, infinite mastery if it hadn't been removed by houserule, 2/7 filter)-

The result is that my character would be functionally unassailable until she ran out of motes, and suddenly the amount of viable opponents that my ST could deploy against me shrinks rapidly to 'Other Exalted' or 'Other Celestials', who in turn must brush up against the same paranoia-suite of combat abilities in order to survive long enough to offer pretense of a threat or stakes.

That in of itself is an important concept to understand. Lots of people come into these games, and Exalted, with the intention or belief that the game should itself be satisfying to play. When Exalted, as a WW/OP product, has across all editions cared much more about the theming and aesthetics of its world than the base system it runs on.

So you have this disconnect, where a group of people knowingly or not want a 'satisfying game experience', which is more akin to the tightly balanced and scheduled tactical map scrum of Dungeons and Dragons. (That's not an indictment or criticism mind you!).

They would enjoy the ability to play a shonen fight scene that doesn't devolve into fudging dice or results.

Where was I- Okay, mortals, encounter design, etc. A refrain I remember coining years ago in the midst of 2e was 'Scale starts at Abyssal', because for a lot of new Storytellers, the only logical antagonist for a circle of Solars was a rival circle of Abyssals! This was due in part to poor conveyance on the part of the corebooks and the line in general- where the Abyssals were intended to have something of a head start in time or infrastructure, compared to the returning/reincarnating Solars. Thus, you'd balance the encounter around 1-2 Abyssals and then lots of ghostly/dead minions, instead of a perfect mirror match of Dawn vs Dusk, Zenith vs Midnight and so on.

There's a camp that, purely for game balance reasons, wants the Exalted to be much 'weaker' for lack of a better term, in order to make a wider range of antagonists possible. Both in the combat game and the kingmaking games Exalted was sold on. The latter is easier to handle, due in part and despite the lack of useful kingdom-scope mechanics.

Overlapping with that group are the X-boosters, who for various reasons want [splat] or [class of being] to be more powerful or otherwise more able, especially in context of the Better Than You Boring Solar Exalted. This is where you get folks who want the ideal ratio of DBs vs Solars in a pure combat whiteroom environment, as well as the folks who want to exaggerate the socio-economic advantages of the Dynasts over the returning Solars and so on.

And of course the folks who want Mortals to matter much more than they presently do- but the arena they choose to make them matter is the combat arena, because again it is the one that has the most systemic and aesthetic development. Our media has for the past 15 or so years celebrated the gritty, plucky rough-and-tumble action hero, and we've forgotten that the Exalted are those action heroes. Like people think Jason Bourne or John Wick is supposed to map to a Mortal, when modeled in Exalted.

We also saw this exhaustively among the various fans of the Lunar Exalted, who time and again kept getting thematically sidelined or short-changed until 3rd edition.

To @Aleph 's point in her post, the local lord doesn't need to be able to defend against the daiklave attack. The lord's various power structures, loyalties and alliances are protection in and of themselves. Killing the lord isn't supposed to be difficult in Exalted. Dealing with the consequences of such is the actual meat of the gameplay.

But, a lot of people read and read into the game and its systems, wanting everyone to be competent everywhere. Which is not unreasonable, and partly an outgrowth of how splat-coding got in the way of good design. Nobody else needs kingdom mechanics- the only kings are Solars!

 

[Sucal]

Hey

Heart Eaters make for excellent kings. They are really good at making unified governments.

 

[ichypa]

Hey

Heart Eaters make for excellent kings. They are really good at making unified governments.

Click to shrink...

TFW the evil king was being literal when he said "I am the state"

 

[wrecksalot]

Hey

Heart Eaters make for excellent kings. They are really good at making unified governments.

Click to shrink...

Very clear line of succession too, no chance of the realm splintering when the king dies.

Diplomatic problems? Easy, just have them talk to the king a while.

Do your coffers run empty? No problem, have the king talk to a few merchant's or his peers among your neighboring kingdoms and you will be surprised how generous they could be.

Do you, a member of the Exalted Host, wish that your mortal buddies had a lifespan resembling yours? No need to break into Yu Shan every few decades, just break into a hearteater tomb once per friend, boom, your lifespan problems are solved.

 

[Blaque]

...

There's a camp that, purely for game balance reasons, wants the Exalted to be much 'weaker' for lack of a better term, in order to make a wider range of antagonists possible. Both in the combat game and the kingmaking games Exalted was sold on. The latter is easier to handle, due in part and despite the lack of useful kingdom-scope mechanics.

Click to shrink...

I'm kind of in this camp myself, actually. I think the issue that Exalted has as a bit of self-inflcited annoyance is that it kind of at a point decided mortal = extra without stating it and kept racking-up win-more effects against folks without Charms.

It even showed a bit in 3e's development, here I remember a bit asked on one of the old devs whether it would be fine to have things that let mortals compete with Exalts, but which were not available to PCs. It is somewhat a result of this idea that Exalted players want whatever mortal can have, to be able to be avaialbe to Exalts. That if a "mere mortal can do it" an Exalt should have equal access to it.

Versus I dunno, just syaing that the Merits on an NPC aren't diagetic and are there to make PC life more interesting, not increase their catalog of options. But that sadly wasn't what was went with until I think the current devs with their QC philosophy.

I think also to an extent, the way Exalted came about in the early 00s and some particular anime being glued to it when it was not originally intending to emulate being an anime game, did that. The "Abyssals starting" thing is in that vibe. To me it's a waste of setting to have so much not really a challegen to Solars, but folks I think who like their bullshit OP shounen protagonists wanted Exalted to be that to an extent, for better or ill and the game kind of placated it over time.

I will say oddly on this, I don't think the lack of a kingodm management thing is a bad thing myself. But I think that honeslty the issue is over time IT hink kingdom management implies things about singular powerful people I like...don't agree with and seems to be the stance of the past and current devs a bit. There's a bit of again, to be post-modern, critique of Great Man History in some of how the current devs think. WHere indivduals are important, and do shape history...they aren't synonymous with it. Kingdom managemnt, especially as 2e did it, kin dof falls into annoying seeing like a state traps antithetical to what he devs wanna do. What's proably more useful woudl be a book like Crown and Sword proposd by the prior devs that just goes ove rhow folks rule, what to consider, and some support for projects, without it being full on micromanging. Essays, not mechanics, basically.

Overlapping with that group are the X-boosters, who for various reasons want [splat] or [class of being] to be more powerful or otherwise more able, especially in context of the Better Than You Boring Solar Exalted. This is where you get folks who want the ideal ratio of DBs vs Solars in a pure combat whiteroom environment, as well as the folks who want to exaggerate the socio-economic advantages of the Dynasts over the returning Solars and so on.

Click to shrink...

This interestingly creates other issues. DBs were made super common with an assumtpion in 1e they'd probably be weaker than Solars and how weak mortals were. As the floor of Exalts has risen, the abilty of non-Exalts in the world to compete with so many DBs has become harder. It's kind of a weird example of balancing multiple plates in this kind of adding-up to annoying consequences.

And of course the folks who want Mortals to matter much more than they presently do- but the arena they choose to make them matter is the combat arena, because again it is the one that has the most systemic and aesthetic development. Our media has for the past 15 or so years celebrated the gritty, plucky rough-and-tumble action hero, and we've forgotten that the Exalted are those action heroes. Like people think Jason Bourne or John Wick is supposed to map to a Mortal, when modeled in Exalted.
...

Click to shrink...

This isn't unique to Exalted either. I remember in Trinity Continuum some folks ubset that in Aberrant, you can have Talents dodging omega beams. Becuase while Batman (more a Talent than a nova) can do it.....well, he's "Just a Talent" and that means he should be spalttered, rather htan you know, a PC who wants to do cool shit.

To @Aleph 's point in her post, the local lord doesn't need to be able to defend against the daiklave attack. The lord's various power structures, loyalties and alliances are protection in and of themselves. Killing the lord isn't supposed to be difficult in Exalted. Dealing with the consequences of such is the actual meat of the gameplay.

But, a lot of people read and read into the game and its systems, wanting everyone to be competent everywhere. Which is not unreasonable, and partly an outgrowth of how splat-coding got in the way of good design. Nobody else needs kingdom mechanics- the only kings are Solars!

Click to shrink...

This I don't diagree with all told. I will say kingdom managemtn don't fix it though. WHat really is the issue is ab it on the earlier point. Exalts can be storng, but htey are often written so strong against folks without powers that it can at times be Win More. And I think that some more aligning Exalts power with the itnerests of the setting would have done a lot.

 

[Kymme]

I'll note that there's no Second Circle who can take five combat-specced Exalts, even Dragon-Blooded. They're pound for pound about as strong as a seriousface Solar in the one thing they do, maybe a bit weaker, depends on the Second Circle, but Solars have always been way stronger than Second Circles once they get going, at least in their areas of focus, and five seriousface DBs, especially Immaculate Martial Artists, can kill more or less anything they want that hasn't been designed with the DB Charmset and IMAs in mind to go "You need Celestial Charms to be involved for this."

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Okay, you're using the measure of 'strength' in the sense of capacity to inflict violence still, I feel. Second Circles might fall behind in the general skill department, but no Solar is ever gonna be the best at nightforged wonders, weaving voices, dances that shake the earth, etc.

As far as Second Circles rolling over when faced by groups of Exalts, this also matches my experience. I used a very beefy (fanmade, but very good quality) statblock for Octavian in an Exalted Essence game I ran and even with ExEss new boss tech that let him take [number of player characters] turns each round he still got taken out by a pack of Lunars and exploded back to Hell with a 'baba booey' sound (I was running the game for middle schoolers).

In a sense this is correct, but I'd personally phrase this from the other direction: we're talking about vulnerability.

It's not that mortals should somehow match the exalts in a capacity for violence and be threatening in that respect, but that exalts should always be vulnerable to violence such that they can never fully write-off any adversary, including mortals. (Except, perhaps, to their peril.)

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There's something about that that gets me. Idk what it is - maybe the fact that making Exalted vulnerable in this way means that, in some cases, your agency is expressly tied to the violence you can use to back up your actions. I feel like this can be a bit constraining! Lots of myths and stories that have gone to inspire Exalted feature protagonists who don't back up everything they do with the promise of violence, who participate in stories where they aren't even imperiled by violence at all. Orpheus, for example, is able to sway the heart of the god of the dead not with violence, but with heartfelt beauty. While a mean-spirited ST might respond to Solar Orpheus with "yeah yeah the god of the dead hears you and he tears up or whatever, but he's not gonna let you take back Lunar Eurydice. You're gonna have to Join Battle" I feel like that would be something of a failure state.

Maybe this is just because Exalted's old-school sensibilities make things like death and injury the only real consequences that can be leveled at player characters, so everything has to point back towards the combat system at some point. It has a tendency of rolling the rest of the game up around it in a little ball. Goodness knows I wish Exalted was the kind of game that let you take Wounds from Chuubos. Essence's dramatic injuries and Incapacitation rules are a little better in this regard, but it's still in not the most comfortable territory, for me. There should be more forms of peril than just having violence inflicted upon you, is I guess where I'm going with this.

I like Exalted 3e's social system a lot, in the way that it can depart from this at least a little bit. Even if I do find myself wishing it was maybe a bit more generous giving social actions hard outcomes.

To @Aleph 's point in her post, the local lord doesn't need to be able to defend against the daiklave attack. The lord's various power structures, loyalties and alliances are protection in and of themselves. Killing the lord isn't supposed to be difficult in Exalted. Dealing with the consequences of such is the actual meat of the gameplay.

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I'm about to make a somewhat frustrated and sarcastic aside. Please ignore this rant if you like the 3e core rulebook.

Spoiler: I'm sorry

This is, of course, why Exalted has an extensive and very complicated combat system with many moving parts that can take multiple hours to fully resolve. To model the aftermath and consequences of these session-devouring fights. You can really tell where the meat of the gameplay is in the way that the corebook dedicates a couple hundred words detailing combat statistics you could use for a mortal lord and their court of bodyguards, spymasters, etc, and a couple (0) words detailing how a Storyteller might *respond* to the death or deposition of a mortal ruler, how their court might react, providing adventure ideas or jumping off points that a Storyteller, perhaps blindsided by the ease with which Exalts can overcome most opposition, could use to maintain momentum, keep their game going smoothly, avoid headaches, etc. It's not that unlike the corebook explaining a little bit about the Wyld Hunt, providing several statblocks to use for Shikari, and then saying absolutely nothing about how an ST ought to use the Wyld Hunt as a story element in their game. That's really where the meat of the gameplay is: in the negative space. Did you know Dungeons and Dragons is a game about heroic fantasy drama and exploration?

Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places, of course. "No," many voices in the fandom say, "for advice on those things you've got to pick up Godbound, or Sixteen Sorrows, or read one of these eighteen books on Antiquity. You can't expect Exalted to explain how to run Exalted, can you?"

 

[SunnySprings]

On this topic, it is a little frustrating that people I talk with in the community never really have answers for things not directly related to mechanics or fluff. I could, for example, say something like, "I think it would be cool if there was something like a draco-lich in my game and I'm wondering what it could do to really drive conflicts both short-term and long-term," and I would probably get one person saying, "Use the lesser elemental dragon template plus that one ability from zombies where their corpse miasma grosses people out," (useful enough), and three people arguing if its even possible for a lesser elemental dragon to be undead (don't even answer this question, I'd be so annoyed to see this discussed here, I mean it) and if I should instead go with their fluff ideas. I'm rarely, if ever, going to find someone who is going to engage with the last part and tell me about things like how it might spread a supernatural disease that the party will continue to deal with after it dies, or how the military campaign to fight it could destabilize the region and make people fight their neighbors because its appearance was in the middle of harvest time and too many troops were diverted from that to fight it, and so on.

On some level, this has taught me self-reliance; I should just, when in doubt, ask myself what an appropriate author for said situation would do. For instance, in situations of Dynastic intrigue, I ask myself what GRRM might consider if he were into Exalted and usually that steers me some place useful; I just gotta ignore my mental construct of GRRM when it suggests, "You gotta give this noble a weird fetish of some kind that stems from a weird childhood trauma," or, "You should lavishly describe every dinner scene," and I'm good. But, ugh, I've had times where I get writer's block and want people to riff with, since I can't do that with my players, to break through it and get my plot rolling again, and its rarely given that same kind of earnest attention as yet another lore fight over, I dunno, whether or not the Incarnae can fit all of themselves upon the head of a pin. I try my best to engage with people who do respond, even if I'm not in love with their idea, but it sometimes gets to me that I have to be a lore-head or a homebrewer to feel like I'm valued in the community at all.

 

[Shane_357]

Nobody else needs kingdom mechanics- the only kings are Solars!

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Don't like this; prefer the potential for rulership of various styles for every Exalted. None of them exactly kings mind you, but it should be an option. The 3e Lunar Territory Charms are a really good example of what I want.

 

[Cetashwayo]

Every type of Exalt can be a king because every type of mortal has been a king in real life. There's no one mode for kingship that only Solars are good at. In fact in 3e at canon start there are who knows how many Lunar dominions.

 

[Estro]

Don't like this; prefer the potential for rulership of various styles for every Exalted. None of them exactly kings mind you, but it should be an option. The 3e Lunar Territory Charms are a really good example of what I want.

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That's shyfts point, I think. The splat coding emphasises, generally, "kingship" most strongly as a Solar trait (for obvious enough reasons I won't expound on them), compared to Abyssals or Lunars, or even Dragonblooded (who are generally presumed to be part of some form of collective institution). And this results in a de-emphasis on kingship rules, as it is unfairly seen as being only for "one splat". And even the territory rules, which are fun, aren't really rules for ruling in the same way that Shyft is talking about, which is probably partially why they don't really hook into any systems and mostly operate as their own self-contained ruleset.

 

[slybrarian]

"Kingship" is too specific, but certainly better rules for "interacting with organizations" would be really helpful. Running them would just be one possible facet. It could probably be built out of the Intimacies and Ventures systems to keep the mechanics consistent. Kevin Crawford's games (Stars With Number/Worlds Without Number) have some nice rules for this sort of thing, where Factions have a number of Issues that are things like "The city's grain supply is threatened by the Realm civil war" or "Chejak Kejop refuses to tell anyone where he gets those delicious pastries for department meetings". From a mechanical and narrative standpoint they provide clear problems to solve and consequences, positive or negative, from how they do it. It also has a bunch of quick generation tables for when the GM needs to sketch out a faction quickly. Something along those lines would be really helpful for Exalted.

 

[Lioness]

This I don't diagree with all told. I will say kingdom managemtn don't fix it though.

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I actually think most kingdom management mechanics I've seen for Exalted make it harder for an inexperienced Storyteller to adjudicate consequences because they invariably tie many of the more interesting challenges associated with trying to run a kingdom to failed dice rolls.

Essence's Act of Governance and Grassroots ventures benefit largely from a system that increases base difficulties, limits excellencies and provides antagonists with situational advantages if they're the recognised authority. Also not being like 12 pages long.

 

[The_Reptile_]

There is an issue with the gamifying organizationsl management where by necessity it takes the part of actually interacting with the levers of power in a bureacracy - the bribes, thd schmoozing up to the right people, knowing which red tape to cut - that everyone says they want represented and the just makes it a series of dice rolls. Sure you can RP it out in between such rolls, but part of the appeal of systemizing such things is to abstract it out to make it go by faster and so people who didn't take business/organizational management 101 or what not and so don't know what that actually looks like can actually interact with that space.

 

[Kingfisher]

There's something about that that gets me. Idk what it is - maybe the fact that making Exalted vulnerable in this way means that, in some cases, your agency is expressly tied to the violence you can use to back up your actions. I feel like this can be a bit constraining! Lots of myths and stories that have gone to inspire Exalted feature protagonists who don't back up everything they do with the promise of violence, who participate in stories where they aren't even imperiled by violence at all. Orpheus, for example, is able to sway the heart of the god of the dead not with violence, but with heartfelt beauty. While a mean-spirited ST might respond to Solar Orpheus with "yeah yeah the god of the dead hears you and he tears up or whatever, but he's not gonna let you take back Lunar Eurydice. You're gonna have to Join Battle" I feel like that would be something of a failure state.

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I think you're talking about a few different things here, and to be honest I'm not quite sure how they're connected.

As to (exalted) agency being tied to violence: well, yes. The original exalts were products of a titanomachy; they're super-agentic in large part because they can defend and assert their agency with violence. This doesn't necessarily mean that every exalted will or must rely on the threat of violence.

I suppose the fact that Exalted isn't designed to tell stories about nonthreatening humans could be seen as a constraint. It's true that the story of the mortal Orpheus melting the heart of the god of the dead is an awkward fit for the system. I don't think this is a problem, however, it's just a function of the setting and a limitation to keep in mind.

(A version of the myth localized for Exalted would have to keep the player's relative position of privilege in mind. For example, it might instead feature the Solar coming to Hades court as a formal diplomat or arbitrator.)

But all that aside, how would making characters less vulnerable to danger help? Would mean-spirited STs be less likely to insist on combat if Exalts were more powerful..? Orpheus's myth does end with him being torn to shreds by maenads.

 

[Lioness]

There is an issue with the gamifying organizationsl management where by necessity it takes the part of actually interacting with the levers of power in a bureacracy - the bribes, thd schmoozing up to the right people, knowing which red tape to cut - that everyone says they want represented and the just makes it a series of dice rolls. Sure you can RP it out in between such rolls, but part of the appeal of systemizing such things is to abstract it out to make it go by faster and so people who didn't take business/organizational management 101 or what not and so don't know what that actually looks like can actually interact with that space.

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My attempt at this was to make act of governance resemble social influence but with the organisation or culture having intimacies (principles representing cultural beliefs, while ties representing beloved figures, institutions and landmarks) to leverage and a limit track that starts filling up when you strengthen or weaken these intimacies until eventually society reacts.

I made it before Exalted Essence came out and while my players seem to like it, I think if I'd had the benefit of hindsight I'd have made something to plug into the Venture System.

 

[Nightdream]

There's a camp that, purely for game balance reasons, wants the Exalted to be much 'weaker' for lack of a better term, in order to make a wider range of antagonists possible. Both in the combat game and the kingmaking games Exalted was sold on. The latter is easier to handle, due in part and despite the lack of useful kingdom-scope mechanics.

Overlapping with that group are the X-boosters, who for various reasons want [splat] or [class of being] to be more powerful or otherwise more able, especially in context of the Better Than You Boring Solar Exalted. This is where you get folks who want the ideal ratio of DBs vs Solars in a pure combat whiteroom environment, as well as the folks who want to exaggerate the socio-economic advantages of the Dynasts over the returning Solars and so on.

And of course the folks who want Mortals to matter much more than they presently do- but the arena they choose to make them matter is the combat arena, because again it is the one that has the most systemic and aesthetic development. Our media has for the past 15 or so years celebrated the gritty, plucky rough-and-tumble action hero, and we've forgotten that the Exalted are those action heroes. Like people think Jason Bourne or John Wick is supposed to map to a Mortal, when modeled in Exalted.

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I have always been one of those people who prefer the Exalted setting as a whole to be incredibly powerful, so 3e was a bit disapointing with its lower power scale. I felt like the higher power was one of the things that set it apart from other games and settings.

One of the weird things about 3e to me is the power level was lowered, but then it seemed to double down on the Exalted being the only thing that matter by removing enlightened mortals and introducing new Exalted. I think a lot of this can be laid at the feet of Holden since most of the new Exalted he came up with were literally designed to be borderline unplayable antagonists.

I feel the ideal solution would have been to create more non-Exalted antagonists that are strong enough to pose a challenge. Liminals would have been fine as a playable non-Exalted splat. I am not necessarily against new Exalts either, I like the non-canon Heart-Eaters in Exigents for example.

Ignoring my power level perferences, I am feeling cautiously optimistic for the future of the series after seeing the Sidereal previews. It feels like the current developers have finally found there footing. Dragon-Blooded are pretty bad, and I feel like 3e Lunars are a mixed bag with a much better charmset (with a few changes I did not like), but with changes to the lore that do not actually fix any of the issues I have with it. With Sidereals, I feel like the changes were more positive than negative.