Well duh, being in a combat surrounded by five opponents generally does result in getting speared somewhere uncomfortable. Logically, from the least-watched participant.
But making it such that the player designates which participant is least-watched is a thing, but the character has no idea which participant is least-watched by her is . . . some sort of weird agency bypass.
The character isn't deciding which of the participants is least watched, rather, the character is trying to watch all of them. What happens is that the expectation is that at minimum one participant will do something sufficiently unanticipated that the defenses of the character are compromised to the extent that the attack said participant attempts benefits from the 'unexpected attack' rule.
That doesn't mean the attacker can't screw up (rolling no successes or performing a botch is a possibility).
What happens is that, perhaps as a courtesy to the player, the player decides which of the attackers gets this benefit.
What I mean is that if it's possible to keep a watch on four opponents and no watch on the fifth, then it should logically not be harder to keep a watch on four opponents and no watch on the ally. Because the ally isn't trying to flank you nor trying to unbalance you by a shove nor anything like that. And you aren't actively trying to interfere with the ally either. (Also there's the option to substitute 'neutral' for 'ally'.)
I would
hope that you are watching your ally, as when you are in confines that close you need to keep an eye out for them or end up fouling each other. You are actively attempting to ensure you don't interfere with their defense.
Also, it's not a vote IMHO, because it's the surrounded hero needing to prioritise defences against different directions. But again, I see why you consider this logic inapplicable.
When there's a dozen people saying 'I stab you' and you saying 'nuh uh,' I'd say there's a voting process going on
I didn't mean the fully-functional pattern. More like whatever shards remained of it. Someone finding a First-Age ruin and getting just a bit of use out of it seems to be a theme that exists in Exalted. All it takes is keeping it sufficiently secret/inaccessible to outsiders.
When it's a mortal against an Exalt, the mortal will eventually lose. This is as true in combat as it's in subterfuge.
And I thought 'there is this ancient thing that nobody used in millenia, and now we need to find it' the sort of theme that is common to epic stories? There also can be reasons why the supernaturally empowered might not be the best candidates for doing all that. (LotR is a possible example, though I wouldn't want anyone to steal LotR's ideas wholecloth into Exalted.)
The supernaturally empowered are
always the best candidates for that, on account of them having the biggest dicepools to manage it. The only exception would be something
deliberately designed to be inoperable to the supernaturally empowered, and that's just not something that fits the history of the setting.
I don't care about some of those things. For instance, I'm quite indifferent regarding whether crossbows are available, whether outside Haslanti or at all. I don't have a Trireme in the regatta of the Realm's ships . . . but apparently for some people Triremes are one of the icons of Exalted, and they preferred to keep them.
Triremes are actually pretty good ships, if you want to engage in litoral trade or combat operations, but they need a lot of maintenance and have weak hulls.
The Inner Sea and
especially the West are not places with conditions that support trireme based operations, and the game likes to pretend it is.
I know little about Sidereals, but it seems like 'closed charmset' is a thing people wanted to retain, and SMAs as a concept are seen as the way a splat with a closed charmset would do some weird stuff (I do agree that the Monky ones are ridiculously broken).
The problem with a closed charmset is that homebrewing Charms is impossible, and when Martial Arts are the only way you can get more or better Charms than Sidereals already have it's an experience tax on every Sidereal that doesn't favour MA.
I kinda welcome banning spells that allow one to travel faster than GracefulCraneStancing on a peregrine hawk Familiar with the Speed-Sustaining Technique).
Really rapid travel spells and Charms are actually not a problem in and off themselves. It
becomes a problem when any given halfway wealthy person can dump some money at the nearest sorcerous bus station and be whisked across the length and breadth of Creation in days. Travel is
supposed to be difficult and involved, and even the best magic users
in game must expend major resources to move a small group of people very quickly (for example, the teleportation spell (the Celestial Circle Spell Travel Without Distance) moves an (Essence IIRC) amount of people 50*Essence miles at a time, and every casting if it's multiple people is about 20 minutes long, and is not a trivial expense with 2 Willpower and a lot of motes.
There are even spells that make it possible to move large groups of people very quickly, or large amounts of cargo. But each of these are Celestial or Solar Circle Spells, which means that you only have a very limited pool of people that could do it, all of which are probably going to be doing much more important things than acting as your personal ferry.
I'm kinda indifferent to nuking the Eclipse Trainability right now, but apparently other people though the concept is neat enough that it was worthy of adding the Eclipse keyword to many Charms (note: I generally think Eclipse Trainability would be OK if Charms didn't have ridiculously complicated synergies that result in brokenness when combined unexpectedly . . . but I come from GURPS).
This is the general opinion of players as well. It's not that the Eclipse Charmshare ability is a bad concept. It's that the synergy made possible by being able to pick and choose your Charms across
every splat possible causes idiotic results unless every splat's Charms are exhaustively tested with every other splat's Charms, rather than merely requiring they are internally functional.
For instance, the Guild allows one to not worry (much) about different coinages between faraway regions, and provides a universal banking network to avoid worrying about portable wealth (much);
Universal banking is... actually a pretty complicated invention that requires a lot of political stability. The game's economic system also doesn't require a lot of explaining of the nitty gritty of every possible currency. The Realm's Jade and Script system are important because it's part of the socio economic control system, and a cursory explanation will do. Likewise can the Treshold's currency system be handled with a simple 'this is an example currency that the book uses to handle all economic activity in the Treshold. Actual currency in use may differ, but this isn't relevant to the players and abstracted away for ease of play.'
make it much easier for the Realm to just choke dissenting city-states economically, since now the world becomes economically monopolar.
This is a thing that happens, although the Realm is actually not able to project its martial and economic might sufficiently to choke out everything. That said, yes, they basically rule most of the coastal regions, as that's where they can send their power.
The Realm as a decadent, fading, crumbling-on-the-inside-but-scary-from-the-outside corrupt evil empire that can't decide whether fighting Solars or fighting for power is more important - this is very much a theme in Exalted, it seems (and yes, some empires do look like that - we have one to the northeast).
Although corrupt and decadent, prior to the Empress' disappearance it was ably enough led to force the Lunars to lie low and avoid making too many waves in places they'd be noticed (which is most of the economically productive regions of Creation).
The looming threat from Abyssals and Infernals seem like neat things to include in a campaign sooner or later - in our case, it's primarily Walker in Scavenger Lands, it seems. Removing Lookshy-the-way-it-is will result either in Scavenger Lands becoming occupied by the Realm, or needing to change either SLs or the Realm.
Well, yes that's working as intended...
But the idea that the player says 'hey character, out of these five combatants, it is safest to expose your back to this one, and the character doesn't make an equivalent decision but does perform the action - that is a very alien concept for me. That's Player Decision->Character Action somehow skipping Character Decision.
But the thing is that I don't presume the character makes the decision to expose their back to one combatants. I presume that events that were abstracted away for ease of play led to the situation.
In the case of getting ganged up upon, it's the character's decisions going, 'need to parry that one, and that one, and that one and... crap, too slow/out of position to parry that one and no room to dodge.'
Uh, I agree with you, which is why I find
@Hazard's PoV on the five-enemies issue so alien. Which is why I find the idea of the player decision bing X but the character's decision or lack therof apparently being
distinct from the player's, and
not due to UMI/NMI/Virtues/etc.,
to be weird. Particularly in a situation where the character
performs an action in accordance with the player's decision.
But the thing is, the character
doesn't make the same decisions as the player. If the player decides 'I'm going to play a song in an attempt to sooth any flaring tempers, and roll some dice to determine the effect' the character isn't going to decide that. The character is going to go 'tempers are running high, I might be able to calm them down by playing a song, but what song? Right, that song. Let's hope it works.'
Likewise, if a player decides to have the character write a book the player only has to decide what he wants to do with it. The character has to decide on everything else on top of that.
