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General Exalted Thread

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Amidatelion said:
Well, of course. But I argue that the framing of the comic ultimately wants us to root for the solars, not be skeptical of them. Ketchup isn't portrayed as blustering or clearly full of shit, but instead as a cynical old man, set in his ways.
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Maybe we don't actually disagree, then?

The game clearly isn't anti-Solar. Your Solar PC can be a real hero. You can save the world!

But the frightening implications that BossFight was talking about are there. The Bronze Faction has a legitimate point. Your Solar PC can also be a villain, if you choose to make them one. You can create horrors beyond imagining.

Maybe we're all on the same page after all?
 
Sanctaphrax said:
Maybe we're all on the same page after all?
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...I guess? :confused:

To rephrase myself, I agree the game certainly wants us to consider the possibility that our glorious solar heroes will become golden tyrants. But the corebook's narrative is optimistic - it wants your protagonists to prove themselves and win glory and be the guys Carjack doesn't think you can be.

Skepticism isn't absent, but crowded out. The corebook's narrative hews close to the "glorious returner" theme, and though other books have complicated that reading, it's still their thematic throughline.
 
Imrix said:
The game has traditionally been somewhat cynical of Solar power, but generally only by implication around the edges. Stuff like the flavour text of certain charms - like, the idea that a locked door is unrighteous for trying to bar a Solar's path is pretty clearly not meant to be taken on its face.
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The most barefacedly cynical take about Solars I've ever found comes from the Forest Witches chapter in 1e's The Outcaste.

Which like... everybody who wants to play Exalted should read anyways because it's a god-damn masterpiece. But that aside, it lays on the cynical view of the First Age Solars very thickly.
 
Chehrazad said:
Alright, I'll stop being insufferable: You are creating a distinction that does not exist. Charms to persuade are inherently also Charms to rule. Charms to foster and create bureaucratic institutions are not necessarily Charms to rule "super good". Your assertion was that Solars, in possessing Charms directed towards persuading and using persona charisma, did not have Charms for ruling super good. When challenged on this, you instead switched to saying that actually they could rule well but rather that they had a lot of Charms for being charismatic as opposed to being bureaucratic.

My point is this:
  1. The assertion that Solars do not have Charms for ruling "super good" is false; the ability to be charismatic and to persuade is a vital aspect of rulership.
  2. The implicit assumption that bureaucratic rule is foundational for establishing good life betrays a deeply modernist assumption that good rule is only brought about through large-scale bureaucratic projects.
  3. The lack of Solar bureaucratic Charms tells us nothing about the setting, because there has not been a bureaucratic subsystem for them to hook into for three editions that hasn't sucked and/or been an afterthought.
In 1e, Solar War was grouped under Performance. Does this tell us that Solars are poor generals, but excellent dancers and singers. Is it perhaps, "telling" of the setting that the greatest ruler of the First Age had such supernal skill at pole-dancing, yet no independent skill at war? You are making an inference about the setting from a systemic triviality; the answer to "why do Solars lack Bureaucracy Charms?" is not, "because they were meant to rule by charisma and persuasion". It is because no one saw fit to write a system for this that didn't suck ass. @Sanctaphrax mentioned this a few pages ago, I believe.


None of this is wrong, but the answer is not right for my question. I recommend reading my earlier questions again.
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1. Being persuasive make you good at *building consensus* but does not help you rule better (except in so far as it's easier to rule when people obey). Persuasive powers do not make the people in your organization more effective at their job, it does not help you write laws which work without unintended side effects, it does not allow your workers to forgoe the need for sleep or allow your decrees to be heard and understood throughout the land. The Solars *do not have* charms for leading organizations (i.e. ruling).

You can call that a system triviality if you want, but the mechanics are the story of exalted and it's telling that Solars have charms for leading troops into battle and making people obey them, but no charms for leading them in peace.

2. I'm not assuming shit. You don't need that to live a good life, but when the Solars built the deliberative they did so as a large scale bureaucratic nation. And they didn't rule that nation based on their skills at bureaucracy. They ruled it because their glorious solar bullshit meant that nobody could tell them no.

3. Again, the mechanics are the story. Exalted made a choice not to include a good bureaucracy system and that's going to inform the setting and the idea that it wouldn't is just absolutely baffling to me. By that logic I could say that Solars were actually meant to be able to fart rainbow and the only reason that this isn't listed as one of their abilities is because... Well I guess they forgot? Like I'm baffled by the idea that we can can just...ignore what the text says (or in this case doesn't say) when examining it.

Chehrazad said:
I apologize, that part was sarcasm. I was not trying to be insufferable, I was asking Socratic questions, which is often insufferable to participate in, but not out of intent.
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Apology accepted.
 
BossFight said:
1. Being persuasive make you good at *building consensus* but does not help you rule better (except in so far as it's easier to rule when people obey). Persuasive powers do not make the people in your organization more effective at their job, it does not help you write laws which work without unintended side effects, it does not allow your workers to forgoe the need for sleep or allow your decrees to be heard and understood throughout the land. The Solars *do not have* charms for leading organizations (i.e. ruling).

You can call that a system triviality if you want, but the mechanics are the story of exalted and it's telling that Solars have charms for leading troops into battle and making people obey them, but no charms for leading them in peace.

2. I'm not assuming shit. You don't need that to live a good life, but when the Solars built the deliberative they did so as a large scale bureaucratic nation. And they didn't rule that nation based on their skills at bureaucracy. They ruled it because their glorious solar bullshit meant that nobody could tell them no.

3. Again, the mechanics are the story. Exalted made a choice not to include a good bureaucracy system and that's going to inform the setting and the idea that it wouldn't is just absolutely baffling to me. By that logic I could say that Solars were actually meant to be able to fart rainbow and the only reason that this isn't listed as one of their abilities is because... Well I guess they forgot? Like I'm baffled by the idea that we can can just...ignore what the text says (or in this case doesn't say) when examining it.
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Solars do not have Charms for leading organizations? May I ask what Speed the Wheels, Bureau-Rectifying Method, Heavenly Mandate Marking and Halo of Ministerial Dominion are supposed to be used for? I am only using examples from 2e here. Again, without the ability to persuade or convincingly talk to anyone, you cannot actually rule anything more than the land beneath your feet. Building consensus is in fact a vital part of rulership—more so than the ability to write individual laws—and you will find evidence of as much in every Mirror for Princes or similar genre written from premodernity to now.
 
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mantovani said:
So there's no difference between the incarna and the Ancients/Primordials now, both care the same amount for humanity.
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This is a very baffling take to me. The Incarnae and heaven more broadly abdicated authority over Creation to the Exalted Host. The Unconquered Sun, along with Luna and the Maidens, effectively promised not to fuck around with Creation or its people directly, and they all empowered Exalted champions who have licence to defend Creation under normal circumstances. And the thing is, the Exalted Host did stop the Fairfolk Invasion, when the Empress reactivated the Sword of Creation. The Sun also does not have direct command of the Aerial Legions -- deploying them is a decision for the Celestial Bureaucracy, and if not deploying them during the Fairfolk invasion was a dereliction of duty for anyone, it was people way further down the chain than the Incarnae.

Shifune is a situation in which we're talking purely about the internal legal mechanisms of heaven, in which the UCS acted within the scope of his official duties by granting a Spark of Exigence when requested, and the Celestial Bureaucracy used it as a unique and unusual punishment. It is presented as a unique and isolated incident that generates a cool background for a specific bespoke Exigent. I don't want to tell you you're reading TTRPG content wrong, but the way you're doing it strikes me as both joyless and not really engaging with the Foxbinder as a setting element on its own terms.
 
mantovani said:
Just like the primordials delegated to gods?
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No? They absolutely did not do that in any depiction of the Divine Revolution I'm aware of, the whole thing was that they would just fuck around with Creation purely according to their own whims. The gods absolutely did not have the Creation Ruling Mandate prior to the Revolution the way the Exalted Host does.
 
mantovani said:
Gods were in charge of maintaining Creation, while the primordials were busy with the games of divinity.
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You understand that being tasked with maintaining Creation for your creators who still hold full authority over it and you, and sometimes just fuck with it in unpredictable ways, is not the same thing as abdicating rule over Creation and giving it over to someone else, yes? That there is a literal, factual difference between abdicating control over something to someone else and delegating tasks to a servant?

You are neither making sense nor laying out a compelling case for this subject you yourself brought up.
 
mantovani said:
Just like the primordials delegated to gods? Also the Unconquered Sun could have just not answered that plea.
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It sounds to me you're looking for an excuse to kill the Unconquered Sun in a game. In which case you're entitled to that course of action. Its probably a conversation that'd be better served bringing it up with your group and your ST.
 
Idk, if you are a) persuasive enough to gain consensus over your direct rule-e and/or important big people, and b) capable enough to run the bureaucracy efficiently in whatever ruling system you're in, I think it's pretty fair to say 'you can rule well'.
 
mantovani said:
It isn't a excuse for kill him, just find some parts of his characterization weird, like how he choices each Solar but not really.
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Not really sure what makes you think that.

He's a God of Gods, he's perfectly capable of partitioning his awareness between the Games of Divinity(whatever they may be in 3e) and the rest of the world. He may not be omniscient but I doubt clairvoyance is beyond him
 
The way I take it it's less he personally choose every Solar Exalted, more if someone is Exalted they is someone that he would choose to be Exalted.
 
mantovani said:
So he a extremely callous being, only interfering to punish a case of petty corruption.
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Sure if you wanna run him like that. Others may have different opinions. As it stands we have very little official information on his characterization and personal circumstances as of 3e, and previous editions presented differing characterizations even within the same edition.
 
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mantovani said:
So he a extremely callous being, only interfering to punish a case of petty corruption.
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I always read it as UCS is done with the Creation.

He is... well, think of it as he's a monarch in Constitutional Monarchy, i suppose. Important things are done in his name, but he only has limited set of actual duty. This is also true in First Age, but he's more active at organizing Heaven and directing resource and all that; After Solars done goofed he turned away, and we're on Time of Tumult.

But, like.

He's done.

He's given his duty to (other) Gods and Exalted. It's up to them to manage it well.
 
He is also, if i'm reading "Turned His Face" correctly, only just now emerging from a prolonged depressive episode
 
mantovani said:
So he a extremely callous being, only interfering to punish a case of petty corruption.
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Once again, the thing with Shifune was not interference, it was him doing his job by saying yes or no to petitions to grant Exigence to a god who asks. Even if it were interference, it was an internal matter within Heaven's legal system of a god committing crimes against heaven. It had nothing to do with Creation directly. The connection you seem to think is here eludes me.

If you would like an actual example of the UCS interfering in something outside his official duties, it's mentioned in the Sidereals manuscript that he interceded to protect a demonstration by enslaved minor spirits within heaven, because he happened to be there to see it. This is, again, an internal matter within Yu-Shan that has nothing to do with Creation, but it suggests much more that he's just not paying attention to the minutiae of governance or heavenly politics than that he's callous.
 
Chehrazad said:
Solars do not have Charms for leading organizations? May I ask what Speed the Wheels, Bureau-Rectifying Method, Heavenly Mandate Marking and Halo of Ministerial Dominion are supposed to be used for? I am only using examples from 2e here. Again, without the ability to persuade or convincingly talk to anyone, you cannot actually rule anything more than the land beneath your feet. Building consensus is in fact a vital part of rulership—more so than the ability to write individual laws—and you will find evidence of as much in every Mirror for Princes or similar genre written from premodernity to now.
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It's getting very frustrating that you continuously refuse to engage with the point I'm making.

I am well aware that you need to be able to get people to do things to rule. That is not the point and your continuous decision to talk down to me.and hammer in this unrelated point is making this conversation very frustrating.

Because getting people to do what you say is required to rule them, but and this is the key thematic point you seem to be willfully ignoring, it doesn't mean that they *should* listen to you. A solar rules because they are the most charismatic, not because their ideas or good or because they make the state apparatus more effective.

And yes, I am also aware that theu have bureaucracy charms. But there are far less charms which aid in this them there are charms for controlling people's minds.

And you can call this a triviality of the game, but that is how the game is written. And that makes a statement whether the creators wanted to make one or not.

The statement being "Solars are in charge not because of any divine right to rule or inherent superiority at directing the apparatus of state, but because they are the most persuasive of the exalted."
 
If you can direct the apparatus of state (via being extra-persuasive or otherwise) better than non-Exalt wouldn't that means you are already superior at directing the apparatus of state
 
BossFight said:
And yes, I am also aware that theu have bureaucracy charms. But there are far less charms which aid in this them there are charms for controlling people's minds.
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I don't think this is true without an incredibly broad definition of mind control!

Charisma and mind control are not directly equivalent. Equating them implies a lot of weird things about social interaction. Is Bill Clinton a mind controller because he's really charismatic? Is James Bond? Is Magneto? There are actual hypnosis powers but that's different than being really charming!

This is not a trivial detail, this is a fundamental claim of your argument that does not make sense to me. At a minimum it seems unnecessarily extreme. The line can have a clear skepticism about power without all power being definitively coercive and corrosive. It can say that you are not a wiser ruler for being exalted without saying that exalted have no advantages as rulers. These all seem like reasonable statements! I do not understand why this has to be flanderized into a mind control tragedy, much less why Hearteaters detract from it.
 
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It'd probably help if you defined 'good rule' and 'ruling', too, because for many definitions 'is incredibly charismatic and gets people to go with what they say' is good rule.
 
As I understand it the problem with (Solar) Exalted ruling is their sheer charisma and prowess means whatever they do will work regardless whether the system of governance viable or not. Want to run society where machines takes-up drudgery of works so everyone can do whatever they want? Sure! You'll somehow know how to pick the right person for the job and make the right selection for the citizens.

And this extends to every other society you could create, even if it's the most oppressive, most joyless regime (but you probably do this because of good reason, like joylessness is something to aim for in hostile Creation, idk)
 
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