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Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)

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BoredMan said:
You brought up a post from June during November during a Plan Turn Vote. Not because she was brought up recently into the narrative.
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The person who brought it up was just reading to catch up to the thread and commented then you commented on his comment and then I do that thing that I do (Not to put word in x's mouth) and give air to it and then it's spiraled from there it was just a conversation about a chapter that Boo600 had just read.

I didn't disagree with his point and there was a conversation going on so I got in.
 
Yog said:
And here we go again. It's not a strawman. That I am unable to make you see this is my failing.
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Okay. Not sure where the misunderstanding is, because I'm being completely honest when I say that I think you're attributing the wrong motive to my argument.

"Only I am good enough to be god-king"

Is fundamentally different from:

"Very few people can be trusted with that sort of unchecked power, you should avoid handing it out because more likely than not it will end poorly"

Which is just true; there's a reason Cincinnatus is famous and it's not because leaders of the Roman Republic were commonly great at handling the role of dictator.


Yog said:
I have disproven the "heroism in the classical sense" argument on multiple occasions already, both in the sense of what "heroism in the classical sense" is, and in the sense that "exaltations look for heroism in the classical sense". I won't be reengaging with it.
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You didn't, or I certainly don't recall it that way. What you did was argue against Wikipedia on a foundational bit of literary analysis:

A hero (feminine: heroine) is a real person or fictional character who, in the face of danger, combats adversity through feats of ingenuity, courage, or strength. The original hero type of classical epics did such things for the sake of glory and honor. Post-classical and modern heroes, on the other hand, perform great deeds or selfless acts for the common good instead of the classical goal of wealth, pride, and fame.
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Yog said:
Nobody is owed anything. Believe me, I know. But we should try to get it anyway.
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Trying to improve people's lives doesn't mean trying to improve them this way is a great plan.


Yog said:
Since I am unable to come up with any qualitatively new arguments, I frankly, don't see how to continue this argument in a meaningful way.
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Fair enough, but for the record; the specific thing that killed your argument for me was the Bull of the North. To my eye claiming him to be anything but the kind of classical hero you and Wikipedia disagree on the existence of is ridiculous.

I mean, your own citations described him as a racist old man who thought the southerners were entirely too rich for how soft they were. Which he took as permission to conquer himself up an empire and generally be an asshole to people who'd done nothing to him.

He was the good guy to his people because he made them rich and because he fucked up people from an ethnic group they didn't like. If that can be heroic then anything can be and the term has no moral weight.
Degorium said:
It's definitively this one. Bronze tongue on every occasion assumes complete hostility from whoever is exalted. Assumes hostility for the world they exist in for the civilization that are part of for the country they're a part of for the world as a whole. Assumes for some reason that people living in the Modern world are stuck in a Bronze Age mentality where carving out their own kingdom literally using armies and violence is the best course of actions or something along those lines
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I'd appreciate you not putting words in my mouth.

One of my issues with the discussion on releasing exaltations is that the potential for harm is minimized or ignored. They won't be universally hostile, but risk analysis is all about how likely a bad outcome is and how damaging it would be if they occurred. The greater the harm, the less likely it needs to be to be very risky to undertake.

This whole argument on statistically being okay in the end strikes me as bloodless and actuarial in a way that I'm honestly surprised you and Yog are okay with.

Let's make this more immediate. Four exaltations got out. We didn't mean to do it and have to deal with the outcome, but it still happened. Let's say they're dramatically more predisposed to "good" than "evil" by the standard set by the Bull of the North.

How much human cost are you willing to make other people pay and still call that a desirable outcome?

If one pops up in a war torn region and we end up with a Dusk who will help us fight the outside as long as we don't stop them from subjugating their neighbors is that fine? If a crime lord like Marcone has some standards that make crime less bad, but still totally extorts innocents and murders with impunity is that okay?

Perhaps I'm taking this a tad too seriously for a game, but I think one of the most common failures of leadership people make is in not imagining what it would be like to sit down in a room with the human cost of your decisions and explain yourself.

There will always be negative side effects of major actions, and that conversation would always be hard, but some versions of it are much easier than others. Sure if you compare it to death almost anything can be justified, but the standard is what else you could have done instead.
 
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