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General Exalted Thread

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Mutton said:
The difference here is that his coconut based weaponry are going to get their asses handed to them by people using anywhere close to modern tech, but if the other guys only have coconuts to work with he'll win.
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Sure, Tony can MacGuyver just fine, but he's still limited by his materials and tools. If he's stuck on a tropical island, he can make some remarkable mechanisms out of tree bark and vines, but they won't include power armour. That's just stupid.

Notably, EarthScorpion doesn't deny this;
EarthScorpion said:
... if he uses Charms, he can use a campfire for his fire, a convenient nearby rock as an anvil, and the pommel of his sword as a hammer and patch up his damaged armour on the fly, but that's explicitly something he's doing because he doesn't have what he'd prefer to do and he'd do a better job if he actually had his forge to hand.
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EarthScorpion said:
Okay, uh, that's nice. Come back when you're going to actually be serious, 'mkay?

I discard vast swathes of the western comic book canon because they're the product of an incestuous and creatively sterile serialised medium that has decades of producing a lot of very, very dumb stuff. I don't give a shit if Tony Stark once made a suit of power armour using only a blacksmith's forge or whatever example you're going to dredge out of over half a century of serialised material, because that's as the French put it "Fucking retarded". Tony Stark's "power" is being a very clever engineering prodigy who's also super-rich, is amazing at developing new tools and is on the cutting edge of technological development. That's his thing. That's his schtick. Making power armour using the tools of a medieval blacksmith, on the other hand, is beyond him - it's out of theme and it's out of genre.

That's why the MCU is a better setting than mainstream comics. Because they cut out most of the crap and actually have a clear, mostly coherent vision of the characters.

And so, no, for all your... uh, interesting debating style it's got jack shit to do with the Asian-ness or lack thereof.

It's to do with the fact that, fuck it, I want my Solar blacksmith to be forced to use a forge and hammer on metal. Because he is a blacksmith. And a Solar blacksmith should damn well want to build himself a better, more efficient forge that uses less coal and then progresses to make deals with fire elementals who offer to live in his forge and bless his tools because they're impressed by his temperate, hard-working lifestyle and his devotion to his craft. And that should matter, because he now has a better forge - he shouldn't just shrug it off because lol CNNT. And if he uses Charms, he can use a campfire for his fire, a convenient nearby rock as an anvil, and the pommel of his sword as a hammer and patch up his damaged armour on the fly, but that's explicitly something he's doing because he doesn't have what he'd prefer to do and he'd do a better job if he actually had his forge to hand.
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Anything that qualifies for being 'over-the-top' can be discarded as 'lol stupid' by someone not willing to practice suspension of disbelief. My point about 'non-Asianness' may be following the wrong trail, but the issue stands: the game line explicitly admits that its main inspiration is over-the-top manga and animé, but apparently there is some reason you dismiss the portrayal of themes that can be traced to over-the-top comics (of the Western sort). Particularly when combined with the fact that 'bypass stuff petty mortals need to worry about' is very much a theme throughout the Solar charmset.
 
Imrix said:
Sure, Tony can MacGuyver just fine, but he's still limited by his materials and tools. If he's stuck on a tropical island, he can make some remarkable mechanisms out of tree bark and vines, but they won't include power armour. That's just stupid.

Notably, EarthScorpion doesn't deny this;
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He could probably also make coconut based bazookas as well. He might not be doing full power armor, but he should be pushing the tech level several levels beyond what us non-superheros could think of. That's his whole shtick.
 
Mutton said:
Tony Stark MacGuyvering together a set of power armor using nothing but scraps is very much within his theme. It wouldn't be a very good set of power armor but it would be work and be better than what anyone else made using those raw materials. He's the genius inventor who can build what is needed out of whatever is on hand. He's super rich so he gets to work at the cutting edge but that doesn't take away from his ability to engineer with whatever is at hand.

The difference here is that his coconut based weaponry are going to get their asses handed to them by people using anywhere close to modern tech, but if the other guys only have coconuts to work with he'll win.
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But his coconut-based weaponry will not be power armour. It'll be... like, some horrible improvised grenade made out of coconuts and something made from fermented crab and sea urchin that he found burns really well if you mix them together, possibly after getting inspired by eating the local cuisine. And maybe, yes, he'll have some kind of resilient jacket made from palm leaves reinforced with woven leaves, and he might have even found that the sap of a local plant allows him to make it fireproof which is just as well when he's throwing incendiary coconuts around.

He's eking everything he can from the local materials, but that's just not enough for some things. But it's enough to allow him to throw burning coconut grenades at a jeep filled with Hydra goons and get his hands on a radio, which he'll be able to rewire using the Swiss Army knife he got off one of them so he can call for help, etc etc.
 
Mutton said:
He could probably also make coconut based bazookas as well. He might not be doing full power armor, but he should be pushing the tech level several levels beyond what us non-superheros could think of. That's his whole shtick.
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That's funny. As I recall the last time Stark got stuck MacGuyvering on a tropical island (Back in Volume III, during the Living Armour arc) he ended up making a bow and arrow. So I'm going to have to say no, you're wrong, that's stupid.
 
Some really springy wood and vines to make an unpowered sort of 'power armor'?

Anyway, maybe CNNT (or whatever it'd be called) should be a general 'treat the tools you've got as being x steps higher' sort of thing. Not sure what that'd mean if there is no higher, but it works in the Age of Sorrows where nobody has High First Age type tools. So your bare hands are a barely functional set of basic tools. Really shitty basic tools turn out decent work they shouldn't really be able to. Decent tools act like they're expertly engineered and highly precise. And so on and so forth.
 
While I generally agree that infrastructure is going to make you do some things better than not having it, I think it's also important to not make Solars too reliant on objects. The core of their power is within themselves, it is in their skills, in what they can do with their body and mind, not their ability to use really good toys.

Like, let's drop crafts to take a more narrow and straightforward example. Melee. A Solar can be very, very good at Melee, but without a sword that is useless. Except... as a natural manifestation of their melee prowess, Solars can just manifest a legendary weapon, one on a scale comparable to the higher tiers of Artifact weaponry. If a Solar horseman finds himself without a mount, he can conjure an exceptional one out of his living essence. About the only part where that doesn't apply is armies - a Solar can't create a phantom army out of air and sunlight, though he can turn peasants into super-soldiers.

A Solar is going to do things better, faster and more efficiently if he has a legendary workshop designed to create true wonders. But he's still going to be able to make true wonders without this, because Solar power flows outwards. If they lack the tools and assets, they manifest these assets.

(provided you spent xp on it)
 
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NonSequtur said:
Some really springy wood and vines to make an unpowered sort of 'power armor'?

Anyway, maybe CNNT (or whatever it'd be called) should be a general 'treat the tools you've got as being x steps higher' sort of thing. Not sure what that'd mean if there is no higher, but it works in the Age of Sorrows where nobody has High First Age type tools. So your bare hands are a barely functional set of basic tools. Really shitty basic tools turn out decent work they shouldn't really be able to. Decent tools act like they're expertly engineered and highly precise. And so on and so forth.
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Which is basically what Tony Stark is. I agree with ES here

EarthScorpion said:
But his coconut-based weaponry will not be power armour. It'll be... like, some horrible improvised grenade made out of coconuts and something made from fermented crab and sea urchin that he found burns really well if you mix them together, possibly after getting inspired by eating the local cuisine. And maybe, yes, he'll have some kind of resilient jacket made from palm leaves reinforced with woven leaves, and he might have even found that the sap of a local plant allows him to make it fireproof which is just as well when he's throwing incendiary coconuts around.

He's eking everything he can from the local materials, but that's just not enough for some things. But it's enough to allow him to throw burning coconut grenades at a jeep filled with Hydra goons and get his hands on a radio, which he'll be able to rewire using the Swiss Army knife he got off one of them so he can call for help, etc etc.
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That he should be making stuff better than what others can. Making a bow and arrow as opposed to coconut bazooka reeks of an author trying to get clever in a dumb way.
 
EarthScorpion said:
And one of the little jokes I've woven into my version of Lilunu and the Conventicle is that the entire place is basically Hell in microcosm - it's just Lilunu is considerably nicer than the Yozis and so tries to make her "jail" a beautiful place, rather than... well, a place like Malfeas. The Marred Dragons are symbolic representations of the Yozis, which makes Lilunu into a symbolic meta-Yozi - ie, the "natural" patron of the GSP splat.
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ES an odd thought that came to me considering Lilunu and the Conventicle as Hell in microcosm

Each of the GSPs Mansions inside the Conventicle aren't just mere palaces constructed to delightful and uplift their owners.

Instead every Mansion is a part and parcel of how Lilunu interacts with and tethers the GSP Exhalations, a geomatic expression of her role. As such the longer a GSP survives and thrives the Mansions slowly alter themselves to reflect their owner and the relationship they have with Lilunu.

Of course the failures (in surviving) GSP Mansions remain rather unworked and unchanging, potential blank slates awaiting a true master artist.
 
Omicron said:
Like, let's drop crafts to take a more narrow and straightforward example. Melee.
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Which is a false equivalence. Melee is inherently a personal-scale thing. It's not something infrastructure can apply to. If you want a better comparison, look to Bureaucracy or Performance - in which case suddenly oh yes, infrastructure does matter again.
 
Aleph said:
Which is a false equivalence. Melee is inherently a personal-scale thing. It's not something infrastructure can apply to. If you want a better comparison, look to Bureaucracy or Performance - in which case suddenly oh yes, infrastructure does matter again.
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...Performance?
 
Omicron said:
...Performance?
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There's a big difference between preaching to thirty dudes in a field and Woodstock. If you want to get your message out to truly massive numbers of people in dense clusters; if you want to spread something across an entire Direction, you're going to need ways for them to get from where they are to wherever you're performing, both in terms of transport and in terms of roadbuilding. You're going to need to handle arrangements for where they'll stay en route, and what they'll eat and drink and so on. You're going to need to disperse the message about your rock concert or sermon or whatever far and wide - which means underlings and messengers who need to be coordinated. You may well need to make the venue; an empty field only goes so far.

Sure, you can go to them; a tour of the Scavenger Lands. But you still run into a bunch of the same problems. You still need to drum up interest and advertise and get people to come, and unless you intend to go round every house in the city that means people under you handing out flyers and so on. You still need a venue, ways for people in the area to get to where you're singing or hip-thrusting or ranting about the Realm and things to make it comfortable for them to be there. You're definitely going to need to be on friendly terms with the people in charge of wherever you're going, which means you're going to be doing politics at, oh look, the "nation-state ruler" level to arrange things.

And all of that? Is nation-scale/infrastructural play. Sure, you can be a wandering preacher without any of it. But it'll be much harder, and less effective, and your message won't reach nearly as far.
 
EarthScorpion said:
No. Second Age Tony Stark also needs his Shogunate welding torch to make a clean hot flame that doesn't contaminate the materials with uncontrolled fire essence, his budget Shogunate analytic machine to interface with the deistic engrams of the armour and chant the start-up mantras, and all those little products of modern civilisation that exist there. They are tools - tools that he needs, or needs to spend a lot of time making inferior substitutes that limit what he can do (like having to hand-compile his mantras rather than having an analytic machine). A Solar should be able to use those tools much better, yes - and push performance out of them that others couldn't get, but not bypass the requirements.

And even the gameline acknowledge it, with the attempts in Oadenal's to errata-nerf CNNT.

The workaround "Oh, the tools he needs are actually exotic components, not tools" is just an attempt to handle how awful CNNT is as an effect. The fact that you have to designate a class of tool that doesn't count as a tool so it can't be ignored by "doesn't need tools" indicates the problem is with "doesn't need tools".
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OK, so the answer is "yes", you are opposed to CNNT-as-written. Which is fine, I wasn't offering that as a challenge, but as a request for clarification.

I do think there needs to be something like CNNT, though. This isn't because I have any desire whatsoever to MacGuyver up power armor or whatever, but rather mundane stuff.

A couple examples from a 2E campaign I played:
  1. We were high up in a Chiaroscuro tower, there was a hole in the floor, for various reasons I wanted to build a (temporary) staircase down it. It didn't have to be a great staircase, but I didn't have any tools on me, just a bunch of furniture in the room. I think it was good that I was able to say "yep, I can use this furniture, my 8 dice for Craft Wood, my excellency, and CNNT and make a basic staircase".
  2. We were somewhere in the northeast and needed to make it to Lookshy fast. We had a Lunar with a bunch of speed boosts. I was able to make a "wagon" with enough suspension on the axles that he could pull us at high speeds, and make it smoothed enough that once we reached a river he could turn into an aquatic form and pull us behind him at something like a hundred miles an hour.
(The second example may sound pretty silly but we kind of enjoyed that.)

This is what I think of as MacGuyvering and something I'd like my crafting guy to be able to do.
 
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Aleph said:
There's a big difference between preaching to thirty dudes in a field and Woodstock. If you want to get your message out to truly massive numbers of people in dense clusters; if you want to spread something across an entire Direction, you're going to need ways for them to get from where they are to wherever you're performing, both in terms of transport and in terms of roadbuilding. You're going to need to handle arrangements for where they'll stay en route, and what they'll eat and drink and so on. You're going to need to disperse the message about your rock concert or sermon or whatever far and wide - which means underlings and messengers who need to be coordinated. You may well need to make the venue; an empty field only goes so far.

Sure, you can go to them; a tour of the Scavenger Lands. But you still run into a bunch of the same problems. You still need to drum up interest and advertise and get people to come, and unless you intend to go round every house in the city that means people under you handing out flyers and so on. You still need a venue, ways for people in the area to get to where you're singing or hip-thrusting or ranting about the Realm and things to make it comfortable for them to be there. You're definitely going to need to be on friendly terms with the people in charge of wherever you're going, which means you're going to be doing politics at, oh look, the "nation-state ruler" level to arrange things.

And all of that? Is nation-scale/infrastructural play. Sure, you can be a wandering preacher without any of it. But it'll be much harder, and less effective, and your message won't reach nearly as far.
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At the point where you're pointing at roads, carts and caravan management as the infrastructure of Performance, the terms have become meaningless; you might as well talk about roads and cities as necessary infrastructure to a wandering swordsman because without it it's harder to wander around. "The very concept of human civilization" is infrastructure for everything, but not in some interesting clever way that points to a greater underlying logic; it's just "well, duh."

A craftsman can't make a sword out of thin air either, "the very concept of human civilization" is also tremendously useful there. If nothing else, you need raw materials that often cannot be extracted by your own means. But there is a vast gulf of difference between "you need to have an actual organization for Bureaucracy to apply" or "your preaching carries better when you have people moving around to spread the word," and "you need our own brand of science-fantasy technology to unlock specific levels of technology one after the other."
 
Just for a second here let us drop the in-system/in-setting declarations for a moment and refocus on the root of all these complications:

Exalted is intended to be a Game and a piece of media, and as a result, it cannot model the infinite of all possibility. This has nothing to do with balance or themes or even storytelling, its just straight-up fact. It is always going to be about finite things, limited presentation options, narrow perceptions of writing/mechanical ability and whatever anyone happens to write which someone else thinks Works for the concept enough to try and implement to some degree or another.

Though RPGs try to paint themselves as being "as limitless as your imagination," they are still ultimately grounded in material things which cannot duplicate that imagination, no matter how large you make the number or elaborate on the storytelling tools. Its a treadmill and a moving target all in one. So arguing that Solars in potentia not only should but By Default encompass not only every possible game concept of a Hero from A to B, but every gameplay method of every possible game-type which any theoretical player can conceive of ever, from singular and transcendent murderhobo to nation-spanning prime-mover, is not only an impossible intention to put into practice, but an unreasonable goal which runs counter to attaching any kind of system or setting to model it at all.

The "omnipotent, omnicompetent, omniapplicable and universally-relevant Solar" is an ideal which occasionally makes for nice fluff and thought-exercises. Because its a product of imagination, not the realities that a game must inevitably be specifically about something. So attempting to broaden the Solar concept out to include "Playing RPGs: The Splatbook" or even "Manual of Exalted Power: All Heroic Media At Once" is not anything which actively enriches the game by its own imposed restrictions or promotes good practices when establishing setting or storytelling precedents. Because the concept, by its own admission, refutes the idea of any game which can fully contain it.

Eventually the one has to pull back and admit that yes, for however Excellent the Solars are intended to be and how capable they might be at achieving impossible things, they are still limited by the fact they must exist in Exalted, a gameline and commonly-shared perception of media pieces, and not as a theoretical debating abstract trying to define traits of "The Ultimate Player Character."
 
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Before organised transportation networks peiple rarely moved between regions outside of disasters due to the attrition rate being so high. So yeah wandering anything generally requires roads and other related things.
 
I agree with Aleph's point, but I think she miss-stepped by talking about infrastructure in terms of roads and caravan management, yes. Rather, I'd use things that are easily imaginable as equipment bonuses to a Performance roll. The difference between a garage band playing on the green and a Grateful Dead concert. There's a massive gap in talent there, but also props and trappings like the stage, speakers, set dressing, lighting, on and on. Cirque Du Soleil are impressive performers, but they wouldn't be nearly as impressive if they had to put on a show in the street with only rudimentary props.
 
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Omicron said:
...Performance?
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Songs, Plays, Movies, Operas are all under Preform.

If you want to preform a play you need actors, Back-ups, Servants, a Facility to preform in.

Say you want to Run a Traveling Show (GG, Master Pains Circus of Adventure). Just on the personal front you need Actors, Back-ups, Drovers, Cooks, Clowns, Stage hands, Guards, Crafters, and various other positions filled. Now some of your guys can do multiple jobs, but you still need lots of people.

I mean, Read the Circus arc of Girl Genius to see how much work is required to run a traveling show.

City Plays, and Operas would require much the same things, Actors, back-up actors, stage hands, and other things needed to run a Play (facilities for one).

Songs and Dance, umm, ask someone else.

I mean, Shakespeare's Plays at the Globe, Broadway Plays, think of the work that goes into them.
 
Omicron said:
At the point where you're pointing at roads, carts and caravan management as the infrastructure of Performance, the terms have become meaningless
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I'm not talking about pre-existing roads and carts, I'm talking about the logistics of moving large numbers of people and lots of equipment around and disseminating messages across extremely wide areas without Chinese Whispers distorting it - neither trivial affairs that are both made far easier with infrastructure, trained underlings, organisation and so on. High-end Craft also benefits from well-maintained, well-made road systems and regular, reliable, high-volume transport - neither of which are common in Creation outside the Realm; Travel is integral to anything that involves moving resources around, which is nearly everything.

I also note that you're ignoring the rather strong theme of "yeah, if you want to go FULL PERFORMANCE and preach a message, you're damn fucking well going to wind up playing at the nation-scale because nation leaders are going to start dealing with you - either killing you off, bargaining with you with offers of permission to speak on their land and/or demands that you speak in their favour".
 
EarthScorpion said:
It's to do with the fact that, fuck it, I want my Solar blacksmith to be forced to use a forge and hammer on metal. Because he is a blacksmith. And a Solar blacksmith should damn well want to build himself a better, more efficient forge that uses less coal and then progresses to make deals with fire elementals who offer to live in his forge and bless his tools because they're impressed by his temperate, hard-working lifestyle and his devotion to his craft. And that should matter, because he now has a better forge - he shouldn't just shrug it off because lol CNNT. And if he uses Charms, he can use a campfire for his fire, a convenient nearby rock as an anvil, and the pommel of his sword as a hammer and patch up his damaged armour on the fly, but that's explicitly something he's doing because he doesn't have what he'd prefer to do and he'd do a better job if he actually had his forge to hand.
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Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken.

—Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking God in the Eye"
 
As the great Jim Morrison said unto the prophet Wayne: "If you book them, they will come." This implies you need a place to book them at, lest they not come.
 
Imrix said:
I agree with Aleph's point, but I think she miss-stepped by talking about infrastructure in terms of roads and caravan management, yes. Rather, I'd use things that are easily imaginable as equipment bonuses to a Performance roll. The difference between a garage band playing on the green and a Grateful Dead concert. There's a massive gap in talent there, but also props and trappings like the stage, speakers, set dressing, lighting, on and on. Cirque Du Soleil are impressive performers, but they wouldn't be nearly as impressive if they had to put on a show in the street with only rudimentary props.
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On the one hand, I absolutely agree.

On the other hand, these are all things that can be provided by Performance Charms. Your voice can carry like you have speakers and do things no human voice can do, you can produce light and sound effects, you can even produce phantom backup dancers. Props aren't that far afield. Charms allow you to ignore the practicalities of putting on any given performance - or, rather than ignore them, they provide them for you. My argument is that Craft is no different (to a certain extent).
 
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