...... Precisely how do you envision the average exalted progress in terms of skills and learning?
Green Flame Rising (Exalted vs Dresden Files)
- Thread starter DragonParadox
- Start date
- Crossover Fantasy
...... Precisely how do you envision the average exalted progress in terms of skills and learning?
My main problem with your approach is that you treat people like they're disconnected elements who will act out some ideal design eventually, and that that's all that matters.
People are integrated into their societies, and heavily informed by their backgrounds. They're also intensely tribal, it's just how human psychology works.
With the experience of centuries behind them they won't hold the same beliefs necessarily, but they hold them right now. What they do in the present sets the context for the future, and all of them come with baggage.
300 new god kings won't form a community of peers any more than Mab has one with the red king and Drakul. Immortality and a common, but not pressing, enemy don't automatically make you friends.
If anything, the world being roughly as stable as it is IC right now is an optimistic projection for the end of the first post-vault century. That's without getting into what every other supernatural faction does about it.
Edit:
He's exaggerating a fair bit, but technically the Yozi put a time limit of a century or something like that on reaching the essence 5 barrier before they pull the plug on the exalt. Which implies there's a reason to bother with the threat.
I think it's less Molly specifically being a genius so much as it is that all exalt PCs are unless the game uses huge time skips and minuscule exp drips to match some of the lore numbers.
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- Location
- washington
Very fast not all exalted ever even get to essence 3 though much less even higher.
This is not Exalted 2E. This is not Creation.
This is ExWoD. Exalted in ExWoD are vastly less powerful than in Ex2. Deliberately so.
Exalts do not regenerate Essence and WP in combat here, unlike in the main game.
They dont regen Essence every hour, unlike in the main game.
The bureaucracy and social charms are sharply limited.
Their combat charms are much weaker; scene-long Excellencies do not exist, and ranged damage spells are worse than the basic E3 melee charm Blazing Solar Bolt from Second Edition.
Celestial and Solar-tier Sorcery do not exist.
The total Essence pool of an E5 Solaroid in ExWoD is smaller than that of a starting Dragonblood in Exalted 2.
Its smaller than that of an E3 mortal.
These are not the same setting. The powers are not the same, and they're balanced different.
Stop pretending they are. It does a disservice to people who arent as familiar with the source material and are depending on other players not to misinform them.
Counter-counter argument:
The Denarians dont get to act unimpeded in the modern day, and some of them are people like Nicodemus who are literally mortals with free will who are gifted with power by their Fallen partners. The White God is not some algorithm who can be circumvented by One Weird Trick.
At least some Exalted(Abyssals) are programmed with the clear motivation of Destroy The World.
Others dont care, and are gonna do their own thing. Like pursue personal grudges and pet causes, or accumulate personal power and privilege, and woe betide whoever gets in their way.
No it is not implied that Exaltations listened to anyone. Even their maker couldnt give them instructions by design. Sidereals use destiny as a guide, but even they arent obliged to care; others dont even know destiny exists, and some, like the Lunars are rabidly anti-authority due to the shards preferred choice of Chosen.
There is a reason why opening the Black Vault was considered a desperation move in canon ExWoD.
Just having a bunch of active Celestials each with their own idea of how to go about things spells chaos.
Let alone when the Abyssals and Infernals come into play.
Exalts are Greek heroes, not comicbook heroes.
You are promised great and terrible deeds, not necessarily good or well considered ones.
I am obliged to point out there's a fair bit of faulty information here.
Solaroid Training charms here are capped by the skills of the tutor; you can only teach what you know. Legendary Scholars Curriculum? Capped by Solar's traits.Tiger Warrior Technique? Likewise. Hardened Killer Training Technique? Capped by Abyssal's traits. Chirality Prohibition Index? Capped by Infernal tutor's traits.
But fair enough. Agree to disagree.
PC characters get XP a lot faster than NPC Exalts.
This is by design, else any halfway competently-designed elder will utterly crush any noob who Exalted six months ago and then got into a fight with his elders.
If you look at the Exalted 2E Corebook rules for Elder Exalts pg 274-275, the rules tell you to assume that an NPC Exalt earns only 10XP a year up to 99 years of age, and that their XP gain drops further after that, with them earning 5XP per year until 249, 4XP until 499, and so on.
By comparison, a PC gets a recommended minimum of 4XP every play session which could be anything from hours to days IC, going up to 11XP or more.
I dont know who told you this, but it is utterly false.This was utterly false in Exalted 2E, it's false here.
In Exalted 2E, you canonically require Training Time for Attributes, Charms, unfavored Abilities and Essence>3.
And by Training Time, I mean weeks of eight hours a day, six days a week instruction with a qualified tutor. Else you would have to double training times. If you interrupted training time by more than a month, you'd have to start again from scratch.
This is explicitly stated in Ex2E page 273.
It happened to be a common house rule to ignore them, but they are in the corebook.
Furthermore, those rules were for PCs, whose rate of XP gain and advancement was deliberately accelerated for game purposes.
NPC Exalts dont advance that fast, and have limited time. Chejop Kejak, the world's oldest Sidereal with several thousand years under his belt, Essence 10 and all the resources of Yu-Shan, didnt have maxed out stat blocks in everything.
Exalted are pretty powerful in ExWoD relative to much of the rest of the ExWoD setting, but there is nothing that I have come across that supports your assertions of lol trivial polymath.
At least check the source material before making expansive claims about what Exalts can and cannot do.
Alright then, let's see how this goes.
- Location
- Germany
Okay, looking at the source-material and comparing Exalted to other WoD-people, it looks like they have at least an advantage in their caste-abilities.
Half XP-cost should mean roughly half as much time needed to get good at something.
A Solar with a focus on knowledges can definitly reach Academics and Science 5 very quickly compared to mortals. How fast exactly is propably an OOC weirdness of the XP-point system, but the principle stands.
And that Solar can definitly share those skills with the right training-charm at extreme speed.
And in addition to being good at things and having an excellent staff the Solar could use an Excellency to come up with some brilliant ideas beyond human abiltities, though realising them will take too much time and effort to really be enhanced by short excellencies.
And there are some supporting Charms, like Incalculable Flowing Mind allowing for rerolls and Heaven-Turning Calculation temporarily making the Solar a polymath outside his own preferred fields.
If he has also Speed the Weels to make it easier to get funding and support and Whirling Brush Method to do weeks of preliminary research in a single scene, then any personal projects would be even further accelerated.
While I don't think that a Solar, or even a small circle, can single-handedly overthrow our current world order, I definitly think getting some Twilights in academia should seriously accelerate whatever fields they are working in.
Winning Vote
Arc 3 Post 6: Of Elder Poisons
Of Elder Poisons
24st of July 2006 A.D.
"So. Pathway Pharmaceuticals." You try, and fail, to steal one of your dad's snacks. "There's an FDA office thirty minutes from Cleveland that we could visit and ask why it was closed. We could also go to the local city office and ask for public records dating back to 1953." Lydia makes a face at the last sentence, and you nod. "Yeah. Local government offices can be slow. Orrr.....local paper. Its been 53 years, so any reporter from that time would be in their 70s. And probably retired. But they would have personal knowledge. Whats it going to be first Dad?"
Dad nods and a few minutes later turns on the road towards Brunswick. The town looks more affluent than well planned, a snarl of nineteenth century roads still forming its backbone and yet still somehow more boring than affluent. Redbrick houses with identical trim remind you less of gingerbread houses and more of the little houses you use in Monopoly. As for the office of the FDA that has to be worth at least a thousand dollars in Monopoly money, a big squat building of sandstone and glass that is reaching for modernity with all the energy of someone in the early stages of Thanksgiving food coma reaching for the remote.
"I am certain you could do better Serene Smith of the Divine Ignition," Usum laughs as he flatters leaving you shaking your head, unsure if you should feel guilty or not.
As dad decides to stay in the car you and Lydia go in, already settled on a story to the receptionist. You make up a story about the school paper and how you are really interested in the early history of the FDA after the Durham–Humphrey Amendment. For all the uncanny powers you have gained this last month the ability to seem bubbly and downright fascinated about obscure regulatory action from the fifties might just take the cake.
Lost 1 Essence -> Essence now at 11/12
"That sounds very interesting dear, I'll call up Clive in Records," the lady at the desk finally agrees much to the annoyance of everyone else waiting in line.
The two of you duck out of the reception with Clive, a sandy haired man in his fifties who wears bright orange suspenders and glasses so thick you wonder if his nose hurts to carry them all day. He is as nice as the receptionist and a lot less busy. He helps you navigate the literal halls of Bureaucracy until you get to his cubicle, waving and smiling to people along the way.
Lydia gets him talking about the local geology of all things, which is apparently his hobby and she even promises to write an article in the hypothetical school paper about it, but first thing's first... the 'article' you had come here to research.
You do not even have to bug the computer. Clive looks up local enforcement cases and Pathways just pops right off the screen, it's not a very pleasant popping granted. The words 'psychotic episode' and 'catatonia' come up. From what you can discern Pathways was researching psychoactive drugs back in ye old days of psychology when everyone still thought Sigmund Freud was hot shit, according to Lydia he is really not. Anyway the idea Pathways seemed to be going with was that certain anxieties and neurosis were amplified by dreams when the Id could run rampant so they made a thing called Dreamless Sleep which was supposed to do the thing on the package and it did do that for most people. But there were side effects... ho boy there were side effects. Even reading a summary of a report Clive had pulled out of the archives you wince at the mention of some of that stuff. Some people just didn't wake up, but others got violent, mostly in the form of self harm, but in a handful cases they had attacked those around them with the worst being a man drowning drowning both his children and then shooting himself. There had been a huge uproar at the time and when the connecting factor had been discovered no amount of lawyers could save Pathways.
Unfortunately the documents do not have the names of any of the victims, but you are pretty sure you can work your way back thorough newspaper archives now that you have the dates. To keep up your cover Lydia keeps taking notes of other events at the time, but your own mind is already flying to what spooky things could cause someone to either go catatonic or violent.
Lost 1 Essence -> Essence now at 10/12
The first thing that comes to mind is what your own stupidity had done to Rosie and Nelson, but no, this was not carelessness, it was malice. Still you do not think the violence was the point, not with so few instances of it proportional to the number of pills handed out. Maybe the catatonia. That is a really nasty way to go and it is also pretty uncommon. If something was feeding on those people or just enjoyed that particular brand of misery... No, that still doesn't make sense. A lot of people went catatonic sure, thirty eight compared to only seven cases of psychosis, but proportional to the amount of Dreamless Sleep that was still a fraction of a fraction.
Am I missing the forest for the trees? You wonder suddenly. What if the point was to get people to forget their dreams? What was in those dreams?
That is alas not a question Clive can answer no matter how helpful he's been... probably more helpful than was strictly legal so it's for the best that you're not going to be writing any articles with this info.
What do you do next?
[] Find out who the people adversely affected by Dreamless Sleep were and see in any of their close family members are willing to talk
[] You have a supernatural thread to pull on, see if any of the local supernatural powers know anything about people mucking around with dreams
[] Time to take a look at what Pathways is doing at Soul's Reach
[] Write in
OOC: Welp you rolled right over the poor people at the FDA, especially poor Clive. The power of throwing social excellencies around.
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fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
They usually are the most dangerous power in the exalted toolkit.
- Location
- Germany
Holy shit that roll.
If we had only a little more knowledge to extrapolate from, I think we would have gotten the dream-affecting being down to the number of teeth with this roll.
Yeah I did a double take on that as well.
- Location
- Earth
Average on DC9 with 20 dice is two times 1-10, aka successes on 9 and 10 aka 6 succs, because 10 is double.
- Location
- Earth
1 of the successes on the site was due to an exploding roll, which we don't do.
So it cancels out.
We got 10 successes.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yikes, two Exalts running social Excellencies, anything vaguely mortal is going to be charmed by that. And quite a few things that aren't. Adding Lydia to our Circle has significantly upped the timetable of how long it's going to take to charm the socks off of the Chicago supernatural scene until the point where we're practically running the place.
Specifically, capped by solar's abilities. Not capped by solar's attributes. I checked. You can make someone more intelligent, perceptive and witty that you are. It takes 6 weeks to raise someone from Intelligence 1, Perception 1, Wits 1 to 5 dots in all those attributes, with 10 XP left over. And if you do the same with physical abilities via tigerwarrior training, the students get the ability to do stunts similar to exalts (and, honestly, this should also apply to Legendary Scholar's Curriculum), taking them past mortal boundaries. So, essentially, a solar who has Firearms 5, could raise Kincaid level snipers in two months, when starting from literally anyone. Or they could make new Newtons, Einsteins, etc.
Agree to disagree on everything else, but this one is a pedantic point of rules to me.
On the update: so, we are dealing with either some sort of dream eating creature here, in which case the point is to disguise the dreams themselves disappearing, regardless of what's in them, or the point is to make people forget contents of their dreams, in which case information is the point, not the process of dreams. That's two distinct possibilities. I checked and wasn't able to quickly find any sort of dream eating creature in folklore. The closest is the Spider Grandmother of native American tribes, the origin of dreamcatcher amulets, but she seemed benevolent (and in the mixed setting might or might not be some sort of surviving Pattern Spider ascended to godhood).
[X] Find out who the people adversely affected by Dreamless Sleep were and see in any of their close family members are willing to talk
-[X] Use the crown on the survivors, or their graves to see what the content of those missing dreams was.
- Location
- Earth
The Japanese Baku, aka the Dream Eater for starters is one.
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- Location
- Germany
Mare (folklore) - Wikipedia
Nightmares maybe?
Not quite a dream-eater, but it exists in skandinavian folklore (fits the language) and would propably have an easier time with people who won't remember them.
I think they are also associated with sleep-paralysis, which would explain the occasional case of catatonia.
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.......The only method which the White God can use to impede them without incurring a response for whatever action is taken by the God side is either using the Knights of the cross or do extreme actions such as Uriel did to intervene by literally give his grace to Michael which incurred the risk of Falling to help him and be able to actually effect the situation. The white God may not be some algorithm but he is extremely restricted even beyond Mother Summer and Winter who are restricted to be able to extremely little actions even at the potential destructions of the courts.
As for Nicodemus, until the modern day he was entirely capable of being completed unimpeded by the Knights of the cross namely due to him being outrun at speeds beyond their ability to catch up within the time frame of months at best or more likely years.
- Location
- Germany
[X] You have a supernatural thread to pull on, see if any of the local supernatural powers know anything about people mucking around with dreams
As someone mentioned before, 50 years is nothing to most non human folks.
As someone mentioned before, 50 years is nothing to most non human folks.