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General Exalted Thread

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My read was that the problem of the ancient Solars was that they had built a system in which they were completely unaccountable by any systemic means. Even then its ambiguous the extent to which Solars were categorically a problem, from either godlike charisma, or simply having enough skill at Sorcery to move continents. 3e does not present this as an inevitability with the returned Solar Host, merely one of many possible outcomes.

I think that the subtle change in the Sidereals Splat reveals a lot: There was no Great Prophecy, no Immutable Future. A group of Sidereals came to believe that Creation would be safer without the Solars, and enough people sided with them, from either genuine agreement, or cynical self-interest, that the Usurpation came to pass. Clearly their rule was not absolute enough to prevent this.
 
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So, Choosing an Exalt, for the Incarna at least, has been compared to Falling In Love

Its not a conscious cognitive decision, it is a non-cognitive reflex. Whether or not you choose to believe this is up to you.
 
HamSandLich said:
So, Choosing an Exalt, for the Incarna at least, has been compared to Falling In Love

Its not a conscious cognitive decision, it is a non-cognitive reflex. Whether or not you choose to believe this is up to you.
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Huh, I see.

In that case I feel it's similar enough to my interpretation.
Kingfisher said:
To bring this conversation full circle, such a definition would make Hearteaters terrifically 'good' rulers.
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They don't get 'will this action actually achieve my goal' charms though, unless said goal is 'getting more Pawns' :V
 
My reading of the first age is that the Solars were so ludicrously powerful that from a purely practical standpoint only their will mattered. If a Solar wants something done, then it doesn't matter how many mortals or Deebs or whatever say no, it gets done unless another Solar says no.

Now, at first, the Solars were heroes and champions of humanity that had just thrown off a horrific oppressive rule by an uncaring set of Creators, so this was okay. So the Eclipse wants a palace and his Dawn wife wants a big military training camp on what we could've used as farmland, big deal, at least he's not a living hurricane walking over the crops, and they're going to help us increase the fertility of these areas anyway.

But as time went on and Creation moved on from the Primordial War and the Solars fell deeper into their curses... the efficacy of the world stopped being the main problem and the efficacy of the mortals became the issue. It doesn't matter how good your medical techniques are or how well you teach them, if your trained doctors screw up, people die.

So compassionate Solars started micro-managing their lesser's lives, and eventually just stopped letting them have lives. Valorous Solars started answering every problem with force, and eventually *excessive* force. Solars with conviction become stubborn at first and then just don't listen to opposing views at all. You get the picture.

And then it stopped just being mortals, but also Deebs. Sidereals. Exigents. Even Lunars. Everyone who wasn't a Solar stopped mattering because (in their mind) only Solars could get things done that mattered.

And Solars have so much power that there was really nothing anyone could do about any of this. If a Solar goes too far, then all anyone can really do is tell them, but then the Solar spends a willpower and nothing they heard matters. Which means that Creation was only as good as a Solar's whims would allow.

Right back where they started when the Primordials wrecked everything on a whim, except the Primordials at least could say their nature wrecked Creation wherever they went rather than their choices.

HamSandLich said:
So, Choosing an Exalt, for the Incarna at least, has been compared to Falling In Love

Its not a conscious cognitive decision, it is a non-cognitive reflex. Whether or not you choose to believe this is up to you.
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... I'd seen the comparison made to the sun shining (the sun doesn't CHOOSE to shine, it just DOES) but not in these terms before >.>
 
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I genuinely feel like attempting to find an explanation for what, precisely, went wrong with the First Age is both a bit of a doomed pursuit (I feel like it is strikingly unlikely that Ex3 will produce its own version of the Dreams of the First Age), and also actively misses the point of that Age, of the Usurpation, and of the Great Curse more broadly.

What we know is that the First Age fell, not if its fall was inevitable. The assumption that it was was precisely what gave rise to the Usurpation, but the Usurpation was ultimately a political decision that mantled itself in necessity. It didn't have to happen. This extends beyond the Usurpation itself, and touches on everything that remains of the First Age. What the return of the Solar host represents is, therefore, not necessarily a repeat of a history written into the very nature of their exaltations, and enforced by the Great Curse, but rather the return of the question of what, exactly, brought low the First Age.

At least in theory, Exalted as a game is all about this question; it is about inheriting awesome cosmic power, but also living in the long legacy of its misuse. To be Exalted - particularly as a Solar, but not only - is to be directly faced with that legacy. Sooner or later, a Solar ought to be forced to reckon with the First Age and with the Usurpation, and to be asked how do they intend on avoiding such failures, if they were failures at all.

If the fall of the First Age was inevitable because the Great Curse indelibly poisons any attempts at celestial rule; if Solars are by the nature of their power doomed to become sun-blessed tyrants who crush lives without intending to whenever they exert their might; if the definite answer to the Usurpation is that it was a sad necessity for the sake of all Creation, then the question is, of course, answered. But this makes the game lesser: instead of leaving the First Age as a problem and a challenge, it posits it as a model of what Solars really are, of what celestial rule must inevitably culminate in. This not only makes the Bronze Faction ultimately correct in their assessment, but strips Solars of one of the more interesting aspects of their fluff: the question of their own history.

And so it is preferable to not have a singular answer, but rather many smaller ones that various Solars - and other Exalts - have arrived at, and are acting on. Positions such as "Solar power yields itself to bad statecraft" or "the Great Curse forces the designs of Celestials to cause calamities" or even "the Bronze Faction is a bunch of cowards who refuse to recognize the true meaning of the Creation Ruling Mandate" are far more interesting as in-character statements, partial truths and individual theories that characters have to reckon with. To bring it to the example of the putative Solar mind control, making it the explicit meaning of Solar power is boring and limiting, but leaving it as a potential interpretation opens the game up for some interesting narratives. What if a Solar beggar-turned-prince finds himself constantly doubting his righteousness, because he feels like he should not be winning the hearts of his followers so easily? What, then, if he still lives in the shadow of Immaculate philosophy, and can't help but to have a part of his heart suggest that he is, indeed, a monster, even if he only speaks his truth? Or, conversely, what if a Solar bandit queen finds it so easy to kill men by dozens with her amazing, exalted swordfighting, that she grows callous to individual life and suffering, and justifies herself by saying that this is simply how the powerful must be, so far above the rabble as to perceive it as vermin?

To leave room for such questions - to keep posing power to Solars as a problem and a challenge, instead of a curse or a solution - is a rich and mostly untapped narrative vein. Untapped because, against its own promises, Exalted fluff surrounding Solars has tended to favour concrete answers over ambiguity, and to present the Solar relationship with their own history and legacy as relatively straightforward. But this can be done better, and even the existing canon supports it.
 
UrsaTempest said:
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
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Well, the issue is not that they aren't superior to exalts at directing the apparatus of state, but rather that they aren't not noticably superior compared to other exalts. Of Sidereals, Lunar's, Dragonblood and Solars, it was the Solars who ruled the deliberative. And they did so because they had the most potent social charms, not because they had the most potent bureaucracy charms.
Potato Anarchy said:
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 then 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. This 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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Given the vast scale and potency of the Solars social affects, I feel mind control is the correct term.

A solar using memory Reweaving disciple might be using his charisma to fabricate/erase memories, but i think "fabricating and erasing memories" is the relevant part of that statement not "used charisma".

And that's an extreme example but it's emblematic of their social charms. The sheer persuasive ability of a social solar means that the use of charms violates the ability of the other party to meaningfully consent
 
BossFight said:
Well, the issue is not that they aren't superior to exalts at directing the apparatus of state, but rather that they aren't not noticably superior compared to other exalts. Of Sidereals, Lunar's, Dragonblood and Solars, it was the Solars who ruled the deliberative. And they did so because they had the most potent social charms, not because they had the most potent bureaucracy charms.
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I think this is presupposing the nature and make-up of the Deliberative rather more than is warranted. We know that it had at least several incarnations and likely changed a lot over the course of the First Age, and the balance of political power between different parties and nations represented by the Deliberative would have varied across the centuries.
 
Casting aside arbitrary and ever-changing definitions of what constitutes mind control, the Psyche Keyword is generally what counts as outright psychic manipulation within the context of 3e's social system. A cursory keyword search on the native Solar charmset in Core reveals about maybe 10-ish charms with the Psyche keyword(surprisingly most of which are in Linguistics). By contrast, the core mechanic of Hearteaters, Pawn Taking, is a Psyche effect, and we can consider each of the Pawn charms listed in their writeup as modifying that to one degree or other. Those alone constitute around 24 Psyche Effects, or 24 variations on the single psyche effect. Expanding into the charms listed under the Social category adds 3 more with the explicit Psyche keyword.

I understand that you can believe whatever you want about the social system in 3e, but the canonical intent is that social influence, magically enabled or otherwise, is not mentally invasive unless it has the Psyche effect under a strict mechanical read. You can argue all you like to the contrary, but it is written with that original intent in mind, and will in all likelihood continue to be so for the foreseeable future. And most people will be going with that as their base, not whatever idiosyncratic definition any person may come up with independent of that.
 
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UrsaTempest said:
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
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I've seen enough playthroughs of games like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress to know that if your only goal is to efficiently achieve X goal of the state (with X in this case being decided by the Solar) then it leads to human rights violations.
 
UrsaTempest said:
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
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Just because you can make the government do things better doens't mean the things you want it to do are the right things. And the Exalts who are good at that stuff are not isomorphic with the ones who you know, make good decisions. As I noted before and has come up in thsi thread a bit in the Hearteater discussion: Just just becuase one culd potentially make a combo of effects to do a thing optimally, people and subsequently Exalts don't always have that skill set.

Over the course of history you sometimes get super competent rulers like Augustus who do have that skill set, do it well, and we get a nice bsis to see what n Exalt with supernatural of those would do. But for every of htem you might get I dunno, an Alexander. Who is relaly good at like, conquering shit and getting people to help him add to the empire...but not necessarily anything ot magning it. That's for His People to do and Solars aren't obligated to have the right stuff to do that in pwoer. To me this is the big thing is it feels like folks looking at the potential for Solars, see the optimal setup and think that that's what any Solar in a positon of power is like. WHen I see this and wonder how many folks are like Arthur in the Actual Stuff, or Marcus Aurelius being ag reat philosopher but an idiot on succession choices.
 
Alexander's actually a fairly interesting example in light of the overall premises of this argument, because while his empire did definitely fracture following his death that process ultimately took another generation to complete, really. And if we look at the particulars and the forces that cause that break-up, I would argue it is indeed very relevant to this discussion.

To start us off, and I think this point seems to be getting overlooked a bit, 'ruling well' or 'being good at performing rulership' are not static things. The answer to what that might look like is going to depend based on what cultural environment you're operating in as well as the times themselves. Returning to Alexander, the man himself left a huge impression on what constituted 'good kingship' for centuries after his death. When the Hellenistic successors were first getting going, indeed even before any of them had formally declared themselves kings, imitating Alexander, his style, his court, his accomplishments, was one very visible way that they themselves laid claim to royal dignity and built up their legitimacy. And Alexander himself innovated substantially on the traditional Macedonian norm, with lots of conscious Achaemenid influences, and choice events like the Susa weddings, so we cannot say that the man himself was utterly heedless of his presentation or how he was going to govern, even if some of those choices landed poorly with his followers.

Anyway, the point I'm languidly making my way towards is this: Alexander's ultimate failure to secure dynastic succession for his half-brother and as yet unborn son should not overly darken our assessments of his accomplishments. They remain remarkable. A Solar, likewise, can have notable gaps in their skillset and competencies, but returning to the point I raised about what constitutes 'good rulership', a Solar king with a modicum of investment in Presence is likely going to be able to convincingly answer that question with 'mine own example', no matter the particulars.
 
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Sanctaphrax said:
But Lunars are, well, Lunars. They work as Exalted. To me, making the Hearteaters Exalted feels like making hungry ghosts Exalted. And I say that as someone who really likes hungry ghosts.
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There's a reason I made that comparison.
A lot of discourse on Lunars starts breaking down when people assume that they're fully rational actors using their shapeshifting to its fullest extent rather than heroic characters whose powers derive from shapeshifting. Mind control has similar problems from its potential applications, but if anything it's even worse.
 
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I genuinely don't think I've ever heard a "this new kind of Exalt 3e added just doesn't feel like an Exalt to me" argument that felt even slightly persuasive, and at this point I've heard them for:

- Exigents
- Liminals
- Getimians
- Hearteaters

And I have actually heard people trying to unironically say this about Lunars as well, which is its own thing.

It's just always setting up rules for what an Exalt is post-hoc, usually in a way that's neither well thought out nor wholly consistent with previous material. Like, yeah, sure, Hearteaters, these magical beings who are humans Chosen by a Celestial Incarna, who have anima banners and excellencies and Exalt charms and who are thematically tied to a magical material and can do the various things that Exalts can generally do, are not Exalts. Right. This is definitely a coherent thing to just assert and not at all a massive waste of everyone's time.
 
Gazetteer said:
I genuinely don't think I've ever heard a "this new kind of Exalt 3e added just doesn't feel like an Exalt to me" argument that felt even slightly persuasive, and at this point I've heard them for:

- Exigents
- Liminals
- Getimians
- Hearteaters

And I have actually heard people trying to unironically say this about Lunars as well, which is its own thing.

It's just always setting up rules for what an Exalt is post-hoc, usually in a way that's neither well thought out nor wholly consistent with previous material. Like, yeah, sure, Hearteaters, these magical beings who are humans Chosen by a Celestial Incarna, who have anima banners and excellencies and Exalt charms and who are thematically tied to a magical material and can do the various things that Exalts can generally do, are not Exalts. Right. This is definitely a coherent thing to just assert and not at all a massive waste of everyone's time.
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Arguable 2e had the same take on Dragonblooded as well, and that bled out into the fandom for a while
 
Gazetteer said:
I genuinely don't think I've ever heard a "this new kind of Exalt 3e added just doesn't feel like an Exalt to me" argument that felt even slightly persuasive, and at this point I've heard them for:

- Exigents
- Liminals
- Getimians
- Hearteaters

And I have actually heard people trying to unironically say this about Lunars as well, which is its own thing.

It's just always setting up rules for what an Exalt is post-hoc, usually in a way that's neither well thought out nor wholly consistent with previous material. Like, yeah, sure, Hearteaters, these magical beings who are humans Chosen by a Celestial Incarna, who have anima banners and excellencies and Exalt charms and who are thematically tied to a magical material and can do the various things that Exalts can generally do, are not Exalts. Right. This is definitely a coherent thing to just assert and not at all a massive waste of everyone's time.
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You realize that in order for that argument to work you need to, yourself, have a definition of what an Exalt is?
 
HalfTangible said:
You realize that in order for that argument to work you need to, yourself, have a definition of what an Exalt is?
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No? Like, the Exalted gameline has given us a list of Exalts. This is a basic truth and fact of the game. This is the baseline, this is the null hypothesis, this is just the axiomatic truth of the setting. These are types of Exalts.

Gazetteer can state that she doesn't think that attempts to redefine what an Exalt is to exclude them are coherent without needing any definition beyond "here, this says it's an Exalt".
 
I think it's fair to note that in the history of the game line which splats were included in the list of Exalt types shared certain things in common that several of the newly introduced types of Exalt do not.

Whether you think this distinction is important or not is another matter.
 
Gazetteer said:
I don't, in fact, realise this. Hopefully that helps!
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VagueZ said:
No? Like, the Exalted gameline has given us a list of Exalts. This is a basic truth and fact of the game. This is the baseline, this is the null hypothesis, this is just the axiomatic truth of the setting. These are types of Exalts.

Gazetteer can state that she doesn't think that attempts to redefine what an Exalt is to exclude them are coherent without needing any definition beyond "here, this says it's an Exalt".
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Maybe I'm misunderstanding here.

You think that all that is required for something to fit in the setting is that the books tell you the thing exists? There is no thematic throughline, there is no set of rules as to what works and what doesn't, if the book says so, then it is, all else be damned? There is no circumstance where "I think this doesn't work" is a correct or even coherent point to make?
 
HalfTangible said:
You think that all that is required for something to fit in the setting is that the books tell you the thing exists?
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I think you responded to a post in which I laid out the general Exalt traits that Hearteaters possess with "well, you need to define what an Exalt is to say that someone else's argument is bad, actually". I hope that clears up your misunderstanding.
 
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