Then why not simulate this by having, you know, heroic characters have higher skills in the realms they're heroic in?
Like, what does Exalted 3E lose if Achilles, who was trained in music by Chieron himself, has Cha 4 Performance 4 instead of Cha 2 Performance 2? Like, does that take away from his legend somehow if he's also a brooding genius and musical miracle-worker as well as the kind of guy who is so good at fite that "fighting Achilles" instead of "being executed by Achilles" is an incredible deed in and of itself?
Because when you explicitly call out "average capability" as 4 dice, and then you go "except not really and we're not giving you any guides as to what that means" it makes it super-hard to actually eyeball a difficulty.
Like, under the 2E difficulty ratings, where 1 was 'basic' and 5 was 'heroic' and difficulties stayed consistent between heroes and non-heroes, and the difference was largely one of dice pools, you could eyeball the difficulty of something. Is it something most people with some ability in the field can succeed at? Difficulty 1.
Is it something you'd want a trained professional to do? Difficulty 2 or maybe 3 if the professional will need to redo it a few times, or is expected to fail often.
Is it something that's actually really hard? 4-5. This is much simpler than "a difficulty 1 task may not be a difficulty 1 task."
To be fair, the concept of stacking the deck was still there in 2e, in the form of better Stunt rules, double 10s, and freer Willpower use for Exalts/Heroes as opposed to Extras. I think one of the intents is to make heroes heroic even when they're pushed outside their comfort zones.
Clumsily executed in 3e? Sure, perhaps. I'm not going to argue against the execution being suboptimal.
Also, the issue with difficulties in Exalted is that they're a bit too granular. E.g. you don't want a novice pilot to crash even 1% of his landings, but if you set the difficulty of landing to 1, you still have the issue that a novice pilot with 3 dice will fail about 20% of the time, while an average-skilled one (4 dice) does it 12% of the time. The same issue applies to other fields.
The 'fail and try again' approach partially solves
that, but it also means that all tasks will need to be resolved using multiple rolls, which IME many people dislike.
Would I prefer difficulties to be handled
differently? Yes, but I don't think it's possible to arrive at a satisfactory outcome in the current dice system.
Okay, to make it less contentious by broadening things, I think this is the fundamental disagreement between Ex3E fans and people who dislike it.
The people who dislike it tend to be inclined to look at the SA/RPGnet "worst gaming experiences" threads and how long they are and go "we can't trust players to not be complete fuckups" while the fans are like "my group isn't made of complete fuckups, I'm going to be fine with this product, warts and all," or even more drastically, in the case of the devs, "we can't prevent all sorts of fuckupedness, so we might as well just put in the minimum to make sure our stance is clear."
Is this a mutually agreeable conclusion?
In broad terms, that seems to be a large part of what is colouring the division into these two camps. Though I find it a bit odd that people simultaneously believe that (a) f-ups are all over the place to the point that game design should be expected to prioritise changes intended to protect against f-ups and (b) that such changes will actually
work at protecting against complete f-ups.
Of the two most f'ed up stories about RPGs I heard, it was very clear that no amount of authorial finger-waving warnings would be of any help. (In general, I believe no amount of foolproofing will protect a complicated mechanism from being
deliberately damaged sooner or later; RPGs are similar to complicated mechanisms.)
