Of the more clearly-remembered local examples, I would mention the exchanges between
@Omicron and
@Jon Chung (and maybe others), where the former defended triremes as part of the deliberate æsthetic choice of Exalted and its authors, while the latter attacked them as unacceptable for the setting due to clashing with their vision of the setting's realism considerations.
Ah, well, that was basically along the lines of "Triremes look cool, therefore they should be in the game!" vs "Triremes don't work on a giant blue water ocean, so they should have been replaced by something does and is equally cool. Because the fact that I know triremes don't work on a giant blue water ocean makes triremes uncool, therefore ruining the point of including them. We can have cool ships that also make sense
at the same time."
Since the knowledge that triremes don't work on blue water doesn't ruin them for him, I can see where he's coming from, but the fact that I know that ruins them for me so I push for junks instead. If you want to have them in your game, I am certainly not going to try and stop you, only argue that in general principle of game design, the presence of things that cause this spoiler effect should be minimized.
It seems that what I value has been not quite obvious. 'Mass' is not actually something I value, and something WW has plenty of all the time. I'll try to explain.
Things I normally value in a setting:
- Variety, so that I can pick something I'm willing to play, some factions I'm willing to join, philosophies it would be interesting to follow etc. This is something Exalted is good at.
- Detail level. I don't want list of vague cities of vagueness. I want to know what the languages are like, what makes cultures different, what characters of this or that region care about in their everyday lives that sets them apart from the region five miles to the north of them, what kind of people are in charge, what kind of local events I can write into the history of my character, what kind of things are a rule in most of the setting but have an exception in this here region etc. This is something that 1e seems to be notable worse at than 2e, judging by Scavenger Sons (a small book that tries to contain the amount of locations that barely fit in the five CoTDs).
- Good information-to-text ratio, good organisation of info, good indices. This is something that White Wolf is very bad at, across the board. So in this case I have to lower my expectations.
- Consistency/compatibility of in-setting phenomena with the definitional premises, with consequences that logically follow from the definitional elements of the setting. For instance, if a Mote is defined as a unit known to scholars, then I damn well expect some characters to talk about it in-character, and if none are mentioned, then I still assume they are, off-screen (hint: turns out there is in fact such a monologue). This is where things get complicated. The way I see it, Exalted mostly doesn't officially publish its definitional premises, but rather works by precedent-and-example. Which means that instead of studying the 'laws of nature of the setting' in the corebook, one has to do it the hard way like in the real world: seek examples and make conclusions based on those examples and precedents.
This is also complicated by the fact that, as far as I see, authors across all the three editions seem to care more about their conceptual and/or æsthetical choices than about posting hard-sci rules and writing up consequences logically out of them. Thus here I too have to lower expectations, say hey, it's White Wolf - do not expect them to handle that one, for that way lies eternal suffering (well, for our gaming party, anyway - I see others have a better experience with that).
So the way I see it, 2e may have a higher
percentile value of mishandled stuff, but it does seem to have a higher
absolute value of good stuff too.
Okay, that's fair. I can say, regarding:
1. Yes, given.
2. Part of the problem with lack of quality control here. Often, the details make no sense. For example, some books treat small polities that are on the actual geography of the map about as far apart as Vladivostok is from Paris as next-door neighbours that have border skirmishes and local trade wars. Since this
actively irritates me, I prefer the broad-strokes approach of Scavenger Sons since that produces less of these. As a GM, I have no issues generating details that satisfy my desire that things make sense, and I would rather do that than have to excise bits that don't.
3. Yeah, they can't do a decent one to save their lives.
4. See point 2. This is massively complicated by the quality control problem, because it's impossible to build a consistent model with such a high ratio of bad mechanics. You're basically limited to primary sources whenever possible (eg, 1E Exalted: Sidereals written by Moran/RSB who knows what she's doing, as opposed to 2E Manual: Sidereals which was badly and lazily ported by an idiot) / original conceptual underpinning and looking at the bits written by the people who are known to be good at it in order to build this model. This is an issue because there's no way to actually know what bits are broken and what bits are not (eg, Obsidian Shards of Infinity) as a fresh player or GM.
Example, it is not unreasonable for someone reading Scroll of the Monk to come away with the bad mechanics derived setting data points "it is possible for powerful enough entities to penetrate perfect defenses and kill anything in one hit with no possible defense or counter" and "it is possible to achieve unlimited essence, motes are a non-factor in combat", both of which would be
completely wrong and if taken as true would probably have pronounced bad effects on the game, but if they started there they wouldn't know that.
I guess one of the factors is that I generally see it as '2e', and you see it as 'pre-Holden 2e' and 'post-Holden 2e' (and maybe a separate '2½e-and-after'). Another factor is the somewhat antagonistic stance towards the Ink Monkey Blog and the 2½e Errata around here. It seems that even the somewhat RAI-oriented Shyft is a 2.0 purist. (This probably is also relevant to the posts of
@Imrix and
@Dark Lord Bob.)
Well, it's not Holden I'm looking at, it's John Chambers.
Well, I guess I haven't said this before (or not clearly enough, but probably just outright didn't):
I am thankful for pointing out potentially pitfal'ish bits of the system, even though I get the impression that accidental one-shot kills are not as trivial as before after one gets a couple of Resistance Charms. I suppose I have a higher expectation of the GM's ability to see potentially too deadly abilities like the Duck Punch.
That's fair, but note that a lot of the gotchas are gotchas, where it is likely that you (the GM) don't notice until you've done something seemingly reasonable and then your entire party is dead.
That's certainly a solution. But what about e.g. the solution that is (IIRC) attributed to Jenna Moran personally, when asked about sidereals using übercool abilities against PC, and the answer was something like 'these were not written with this sort of intent in the first place; if it gives no chance to the PCs, then do not use it in a campaign'? Because that seems to be the approach to which the GM is inclined (I can't say for sure, but it seems consistent with his other statements, notably "If I wanted to kill you, I would do it by now; and I did not, so the NPCs did not come up with an idea/method/etc. of effectively killing you").
If your GM is explicitly doing that and it works for your group, that's fine, lethality defused / elder problem solved / etc. Problem comes when they a) don't do that, but play like I do instead where the NPCs act according to their in-character agendas using the tools they in-character have or b) misjudge the nerf and deploy something that is murderously effective by accident because system interactions are non-obvious.
My position here is that it is infinitely superior if no such broken stuff existed in the first place, then your GM, me and the hypothetical unlucky guy here are all doing fine by RAW.
Actually, I don't consider you Sidereal'd. I think your post is different in tone and flavour (kinda more mellow, I guess?) and message from the previous one. Notably, the bit about the difficulty of conveying the consensus due to having internalised it is insightful. The aggressiveness of the push - uh, yeah, it's there. And yes, I was kinda trying to defend against the aggressive push, to try and calm down the pushy thread, because it's kinda uncomfortable to get into a setting, learn about it, and then be told that it's not the way you learned even when you can see a bunch of confirmations that it's the way you think it is.
Right now I'm trying to find a way to calmly and constructively discuss the canon-as-written version of Exalted without having (provoking?) hahahas and insults thrown the moment something gets mentioned. Because despite being rather stubborn (and occasionally clueless), I'd still prefer to avoid actual flamewars and dismissals while discussing the setting.
Unfortunately, that's probably impossible to entirely avoid, given how much bad stuff there actually is in there. However, at least you didn't try something like defend the existence of Scroll of the Monk's infinite essence effects or transperfect attacks and insist that discussion proceed with the assumption that these existed and are supposed to exist. That would have been, uh, a considerably more thorough response.
