Ferrinus posted:

It's really weird how boilerplate oWoD they are. God Machine Chronicle gives you a pool of points you can spend to request favors - you'd think the "lots of points of articulation for Charms" guys would try to give the basic, workhorse social merits some actual game mechanics.

Ferrinus posted:

You seem confused about two things:

1. We're not, the two of us, playing Exalted and roleplaying as two Exalted characters in an argument, so you don't have to keep accusing me of weaving self-serving propaganda.

quote:

2. "Heroism is the strongest force in Exalted" is not the same thing as the statement "In Exalted, being heroic makes you strong". Like I just told LGD, here are two bare facts of the Exalted setting:

* Solar magic is evocative of skill, heroism, virtue, and similar
* Solar magic is the strongest kind of magic

Within the setting, that both of these things are true is pretty arbitrary. The Unconquered Sun happened to be the strongest god, but it's not like he absolutely had to be - in another version of Exalted, you could've just "The Sun" and "The Unconquerable Moon" or whatever. Being determined and heroic doesn't literally give you a +5 deflection bonus to AC or whatever the hell. The universe doesn't, in any objective sense, care about about how much pluck you have.

However, that this arbitrary collection of facts is true (rather than some other arbitrary collection of facts) does allow us to read into the themes and implications of the Exalted setting as it stands. The Exalted setting as it stands is one in which completely mundane heroism is a powerful and always-relevant force, capable of toppling any foe given the time and will.

quote:

In counterfactual Exalted, in which the Lunars were the mightiest kind of Exalted and the Solars and Sidereals both served as their less powerful strategists and majordomos, I wouldn't be talking about the primacy of skill and virtue, I'd be talking about the awesome forces of nature which we humans can only gape at in awe. Exalted-where-Lunars-are-the-strongest would less resemble Romance of the Three Kingdoms than it would Godzilla or something.

quote:

See, now you're getting it. Exalted's got an individualistic streak. The werewolf beats the robot, but loses to the knight in shining armor - that has thematic implications. It doesn't have to be that way, it just happens to be, and since it is that way we can comment on and analyze it.

quote:

Actually, the reason they did that was because they were really bad at distinguishing between the themes of Exalted and the actual setting facts of Exalted. For instance, they might read the above and assume that in Exalted being heroic literally, rather than broadly and metaphorically, makes you stronger, and then complain that Lunars don't actually lose attack dice when they enter DBT or something.

KittyEmpress posted:

This is completely true. Exalted isn't a game of human empowerment, really. It's a game where you play formerly human Exalted, who got lucky. You can't bootstraps your way into power in Exalted. You can be the bravest, strongest, most amazing fucker in the world, and not be Exalted, because gently caress you, impassionate machine decides who gets what.

Edit: This will, also, be changed with the existence of Exigents. It will actually become a story of human power. Your character wont be chosen because they were awesome at the right time, they will be chosen because a god decided you exemplified whatthey wanted, and that you, yourself, were deserving. This is also why Exigents already sound like the best idea to me.

Ferrinus posted:

Why would anyone care what the writer intended? The book says what it says regardless of the what the writer thought they were putting down on the page.

quote:

Yes there is, and yes it is. You agreed with this yourself several posts up, acknowledging that e.g. really good aim is of a more mundane and human character than shapeshifting or retroactive timeline editing. Plenty of Solar magic also bolsters convictions, evokes numinous power that drives back creatures of darkness, and otherwise evokes holiness and sanctification. This isn't actually in dispute.

quote:

Solar magic - like all magic - is the manipulation of essence (magical power) to create otherwise-impossible effects. In the most trivial sense, Solar magic is the strongest kind of magic because it comes from the strongest magic-granting god. Pretty open and shut case, here.

Solar magic represents the power of arete, heroism, virtue, faith, skill, etc - colloquially-positive qualities demonstrated even by completely mundane, mortal heroes, such as the really-existing ones found on Earth. Therefore, the fact that Solar magic is the strongest kind of magic represents that heroism, skill, etc. are the strongest forces in the setting - they don't always triumph, but they inevitably triumph.

Even though the Primordials were more powerful than the gods, the arete of the gods allowed the gods to overthrow the Primordials.

Even though the Solars were more powerful than the Dragon-Blooded, the arete of the Dragon-Blooded allowed the Dragon-Blooded to overthrow the Solars.

Does this make sense? Like I said, it's one of the ironies of the setting that the objective, literal, magical power derived from arete - Solar magic - was ultimately trumped and overthrown by actual arete - the heroism, skill, and determination of the Dragon-Blooded and their Sidereal co-conspirators. So, not even the overt, literal manifestations of heroism are actually immune to heroism or exempt from the consequences of heroism. It's cool.

quote:

All the Exalted are equally human (besides, I guess, far-along Abyssals and Infernals or insane Lunar chimera or w/e, but you get what I'm saying). Like I said upthread, the basic formula behind every Exalt is the same: take one human, add one dose of supernatural power.

Just as Lunar power is bestial and Sidereal power is fateful, Solar power is heroic. That doesn't mean Solars are all heroic, or the most heroic - just that their magic partakes of and trades on the narrative power of heroism itself.

Because excellence isn't a cosmic principle entirely divorced from humanity, in Exalted. It is in fact the case that the Exalted whose magic most heavily deals in raw excellence are the most overtly human. Excellence predated humanity in the timeline of Creation, but it's tied to Creation's humanity (and to really-existing out-of-character Earth humanity) by its presentation.

quote:

Solars become louder and more archetypical examples of human heroism as they grow in power. Old Solars aren't actually consistently described as superpowered transhumans except in certain places, and even there it's just some of them who went all weird, not all of them. Desus wasn't an alien superintelligence. Merela wasn't an incomprehensible AI.

It's entirely appropriate for Solars to be able to cast their humanity aside, and delve into bizarre esoterica that seem wholly wrong and unnatural. The thing is, it's a choice, a deliberate work of artifice. IRL singularitarians might slaver at the thought of dissolving into grey goo and being uploaded to the internet, but none of them have the luxury of just sitting back, crossing their arms behind their heads, and allowing themselves to naturally transmute from flesh to nanomachines.

quote:

Did you... just not read what I said at all?

They don't contradict my entire premise because they're corrupted Solars. If they had nothing to do with Solars it'd be another story.

You're getting cause and effect backwards. Solar magic isn't the strongest because it's the most heroic. Solar magic is the strongest, and it's the most heroic, and this pair of not-contingent-on-each-other facts makes an implicit statement about the nature of human heroism vis-a-vis various other forces.

Mexcillent posted:

Yeah. I guess that there's a lot of work to be done and things fall to the wayside but it's kind of disappointing how copy and paste they are.

ErichZahn posted:

I love the GMC social system and am sad they didn't loot it like Orks.

Roadie posted:

The level of insularity given all the neat improvements in the WoD stuff is just weird.

MJ12 posted:

No, I'm saying that what you're writing is basically Solar propaganda that isn't really borne out by the rest of the setting, and hangs essentially on only two points of evidence.


You've already said that these facts are not, in fact, related. Yet, you then go and claim those facts are, in fact, related.

quote:

I've already told you that there's a simpler explanation which is better-supported by the facts. Solars, as the starting splat and thus the one which 100% of all Exalted players will be able to make, must be broad in scope and support a lot of stories (much like the core D&D classes have to do so). Because they didn't want an eternal supplement war of "I'm the strongest!" "No, I'm the strongest!" they made the starting splat explicitly the most powerful splat. This is all there is to it. It's not a message that heroism is the strongest kind of magic. No, if that was the message, they'd make Infernals and Abyssals explicitly weaker, instead of Solar-tier, because they might have the raw power of the Solar exaltation but they aren't heroic in the same humanistic way Solars are. If the setting was explicitly intended to endorse human virtue as the pinnacle of power, Infernals should have been weaker than Solars instead of on the same tier. It'd have been trivial to explain in-setting without seeming arbitrary, and would reinforce that conclusion.

quote:

Similarly, your rebuttal to LGD implies that 'transhumanism' must be beep boop emotionless robots, whereas it's just saying "attempt to exceed natural human limitations". The First Age Solars, as inhuman (or at least inhumane), larger-than-life figures with superhuman powers, were very much transhumans, or Greek gods, or whatever. They weren't, however, humans. They were inhuman might that happened to manifest itself in a superficially human form.

quote:

Yes, and you'd still be going to a very weird place. Why is it that the particular party who is the strongest says something about a core theme of the game? You're not even saying it's just a possible interpretation-you're saying it's the one true interpretation, and the latter is kind of not supported by either the intended scope of the game or the setting facts. It's literally based on two facts you mention are explicitly unrelated in-setting and out-of-setting can be explained with several alternative rationales, some of which I've already given.

quote:

Except it doesn't have the individualistic streak in the way you're thinking once you leave the white room. In fact, given how vital infrastructure and artifice and armies are (this isn't just mechanically, but in-setting!) it's a repudiation of that. The werewolf loses to the robot, because there's three of them for every one werewolf and all of them can load up to become combatants and powerful industry behind them. The Solar loses to the Shogunate, because the Shogunate has industry and infrastructure. Exalted is intended to repudiate the idea of the single wandering adventurer as someone who can change the world. That's why the game encourages you to set up an empire, control territory, raise armies, and build artifacts instead of wandering around murder-hoboing and looting stuff. Even for Solars and Lunars, two of the most individualistic splats, they benefit from subjects.

No, I don't think they were. I think that you're reading into Exalted a theme that isn't anything more than subconscious notion if at that, because it's so vague and so disconnected to everything else and it creates a statement that doesn't quite work with a lot of other statements. Like how Solars need allies, infrastructure, and all of that stuff to function at peak capacity. A vaguely-determined Solar (say, fighting for their Intimacy) with an army, friends, and a lot of swag is going to beat a Solar with none of those and more RAW DETERMINATION (fighting for their motivation).

quote:

Again, if this was a theme Exalted wanted to emphasize, why the existence of relatively cheap deprotagonizing attacks that Exalts (who, as we all know, are killing machines blessed by the power of gods) might have defenses against, but heroic mortals don't, for example? Again, most of these deprotagonizing Shaping attacks which existed in both 1E and 2E were useless against actual enemies. They only existed to make a statement. If they didn't exist, it'd strengthen your argument that heroism is the most powerful force. But they did. They were useless charms that people wrote and printed specifically to tell you "it doesn't matter if you're heroic or not. Do you have power? No? gently caress off and die."

quote:

And why the Primordial War? We don't actually know the kill-death ratio of the Primordial War, except that it was greatly in favor of the Primordials (assuming you only count Primordials and Exalted). Even ignoring the fanon "Exalted zerg rush kekekekeke" stuff the Primordials didn't lose because they were metaphorically trumped by human determination. They lost because they were surprise attacked due to not being able to comprehend the idea that their lessers might rise up against them and then buried under corpses. That doesn't sound like 'heroism and determination trump raw power/inhuman mutation' to me, that sounds like 'you can accomplish great things if you pave a road with corpses'.

NiciasTSOF posted:

Hold up. Back to this part. What?

I'm going to leave aside the semantic arguments over human/transhuman/inhuman/latinroot!human and just focus in on this idea that Exigents are chosen personally because of their personal excellence whereas Solars are chosen by an impassionate machine. I'm going to focus on it because it's just not right.

The solar exaltation is the UCS reaching down and saying that you exemplified what he wants, and that you, yourself, were deserving.

When a god uses the exigence they are just tapping into the UCS' toolchest for a day. They are doing almost exactly what he does, and it's only more personal because they exhaust themselves or die in the process, where as there's more of him. Meanwhile, there is not some big nested set of if/then statements running in loops somewhere directing solar exaltations around according to a divine calculus. You won't find that calculus hidden in some hunter-seeker module in the exaltation, either.

This happens at the same time as he's turned his back on Creation because he is a god, and more than one thing. Like how Jesus is the son of God and also God, and how Rama=Vishnu. This stopped happening while the Jade Prison was a thing, and got hijacked by various dissident Primordial types, because that aspect of him was stuck in the Jade Prison/stolen.

Saying that the Exigency is somehow any more about you being personally deserving or the god being personally involved is about fanon or old sour feelings about the Solars, not about how they've actually presented Solars and Exigents.

In fact, the major difference makes Exigency less about your personal worth, because a god can turn you into an exigent even before you've actually done anything significant. You only become a Solar after you've actually demonstrated worth and agency.

LGD posted:

Sure, and I've read those same words and I disagree with your conclusions. Your argument is also implicitly premised on the notion that a lot of 2E isn't "true" Exalted, and that you can somehow determine what "real" Exalted is based on your interpretation of early material- because if we take what other people later wrote about the setting into account your suggestion that we should interpret Solars as embodying Human Heroism rather than any external supernatural force becomes much less well supported. If your thematic analysis is as true and obvious as you claim, don't you think it's curious that a lot of that later material suggests a different interpretation of the setting? I mean I'm not a huge fan of all the 2E changes either, but it seems curious that most of the later line developers were largely garbage idiots who couldn't see the wisdom that you're dropping on us.

quote:

Really good aim is more mundane and human than shapeshifting or timeline editing. So is being strong/swift and having good fortune/arranging circumstance/cheating. Magically producing duplicate flaming arrows of sunlight from nowhere and killing a dozen men with a single pull of a bowstring isn't mundane at all. And that's a thing that Solars do and is pretty emblematic of the way they actually achieve their "excellence." Are Solars really evoking "mundane and human" powers of holiness and faith (in who or what?) when they blow up people on the Sun's personal poo poo-list with divine fire or blast balls of sunlight out of their swords? Please, that's utter nonsense and has nothing to do with Solars embodying either "heroism" or "humanity." The notion that Solar powers are "mundane" is disputed as all hell.

quote:

No, it doesn't. To the degree that Solar magic represents arete found in mundane, mortal heroes found on actual Earth, it also represents arete found in dinosaur men, cave goblins, and embodied concepts. There's nothing particularly "human" about it. It's also unclear that the arete Solars possess is actually the same thing, because again it allows them to be "excellent" in ways that totally diverge from the ways a mortal can be "excellent" in in both kind and degree (often to such an extent that it becomes kind again). It may be the strongest force in the setting but that doesn't make it a human force. You're also conflating different concepts- "heroism" isn't the same thing as "skill" isn't the same thing as "determination" in the setting, which is part of the reason that you're running into trouble with arete (or its synonyms) having different and contradictory meanings. I don't see any clever irony here- I see evidence that your suggested thematics involve the conflation of multiple different things and become muddled if applied to the setting as it's actually written. To me that doesn't suggest it's a great interpretation we should all be jumping on.

Solar power isn't rooted narrative power at all. It's rooted in excellence and perfection, which enables Solars to be heroic. But their power isn't rooted in perceptions or stories of heroism. And heroism isn't any sort of uniquely human or Solar thing.

quote:

Also, remember how I said your viewpoint would inevitably lead you down the path of deprotagonizing other Exalts by implicitly denying their heroism and humanity, but you'd try to weasel out of it? What is it you think you're doing here? "All Exalts are (or can be) heroic" (but Solars are powered by literal Heroism). "All Exalts are human" (but Solars are the most overtly human and are the only ones who retain it as they get powerful, all evidence to the contrary be damned). I mean you can be "heroic," but you'll never really compare to the guy whose shtick is literal Heroic Human. And again, it's only tied to Creation's humanity because you've more or less arbitrarily decided decided "Golden Sun Guy who flares with an icon of inhuman power that terrifies the peasants when he channels magic that lets him do wildly inhuman things like creation of objects ex nihilo from Sunlight and banishing and summoning objects from reality at will" is more "overtly" human than a guy who channels magic to make his very human-looking rear end extremely lucky. I don't think Solar excellence is particularly tied to humanity by presentation, and its existence before humanity and continued independent existence is part of the reason why.

Setting themes should be supported and reinforced by setting "facts."

quote:

Is their residual humanity the result of their growth into greater archetypes of heroism, or their failure to do so? Ancient Lunars and Sidereals don't become completely divorced from their basic humanity either, but they certainly don't become more human. Solars definitely become more powerful and "excellent" versions of themselves, but I don't think you can make any sort of convincing case they become more "heroic" or "human." And since you're arguing they embody Heroism (or Humanity- I'm a little unclear on which?) that seems like a problem for you.

quote:

But they're corrupted to the point that their power comes from somewhere else entirely. I mean you're arguing that the archetypes you've taken it upon yourself to assign are more important than setting facts (beyond power tier assignment), so isn't the fact that Solar magic isn't actually The Strongest when compared to an Infernal powered by forces beyond Creation that are very inimical to humanity a problem for you? What does that say to our narrative about heroism? Oh right, that it's everything is still fundamentally rooted in Human Heroism (except when it isn't because I don't like owning up to the implications this has for other Exalted, or when the setting contradicts this by having heroic humans overcome Heroic Humans [who in all other circumstances represent inhuman archetypes that Heroic Humans overcome, except in this circumstance because ???]). Also actual heroic humans don't figure into this at all, unless they've been externally empowered by the Sun God of Excellence. Yeah I can't imagine why I'm resisting accepting this interpretive paradigm.

Ferrinus posted:

That's wrong. If an Infernal's power actually came from somewhere else entirely, they wouldn't have had to be based on a Solar exaltation at all - Malfeas would've just made some, 'cause he felt like it. That the Yozis had to steal and corrupt a bunch of Solar Exaltations is actually very important.

KittyEmpress posted:

Actually, it's implied in the books that what kind of exaltation it was wouldn't really matter to the Yozi's, except for the narrative irony of turning the ones who defeated and sealed them into their greatest weapons.

It explicitly states that if Autochthon came back and, for some reason, allied with the Yozi, they'd get him to make more exaltations for Infernals, probably.

Edit: Also, the actual reason why the Solar Exaltations were chosen by the Yozi, and not say Lunars or whatever is, according to developers, because the Solar Exaltation was built to take more power, due to the Unconquered Sun being so powerful. And even the Solar Exaltation is too weak to hold the Yozi power for long, it's why if an Infernal wants to live beyond a few hundred years, it has to evolve past the need for an Exaltation.

Ferrinus posted:

Yeah, but that didn't happen. We got a world in which Solar exaltations were the linchpin and bottleneck allowing Abyssals/Infernals to exist at all, and in which Solars could, freely and of their own volition, switch sides and allow themselves to be transformed into Abyssals or Infernals if the fancy struck them, thereby retaining their incredible power but twisting that power to new ends.

KittyEmpress posted:

Actually, Solars can never become Infernals, and Infernals can never become Solars. The Yozi power is so much more and so different than Solar power that Infernals are irrevocably changed, and trying to do so (non-Akuma) to a real Solar would kill them.

Infernals and all Infernal shards are no longer Solar for nearly everything related to it. Even Autochton is stated to not be able to change them back, and he's the only one who can do poo poo like cleanse the Great Curse and poo poo like that.

Ferrinus posted:

Isn't there a dreams of the first age Charm whereby a Solar infernalizes themselves? Couldn't the yozis, given a willing Solar or captive Solar exaltation, forge it irreversibly into an Infernal? I'm almost positive that the first is true, if not the second. (Maybe the first just partially corrupts you and has you sprouting a limited selection of Infernal charms or something? Iirc it had solar circle sorcery as a prereq and couldn't ever be unbought)

KittyEmpress posted:

I'm not sure about the former, but the latter is provenly false. It explicitly states in the books that infernals can never change to solars and yozi cannot change living solars into infernals.

I'm not sure if Solars could do it themselves, a lot of stuff Dreams does was weird, but if they can, it's likely that it just let them use Yozi charms, instead of making you an actual Infernal.

Ferrinus posted:

Ah, so I guess the only way to mint an actual new Infernal would be to somehow get ahold of a Solar shard and do to that what you did to the first fifty? Like, raid Lytek's office at just the right moment, or something.

Nessus posted:

I also gather you can go Akuma and your exaltation would respawn normally (albeit with the possibility of your future incarnation having some bad memories from, you know, being the Yozis' special friend) but becoming an Infernal turns you inside out while Abyssal, apparently, just involves breaking off the Great Curse in the course of flipping the switch from "light" to "darque."

Ferrinus posted:

You know, that's not actually true. What I'm saying isn't actually at direct odds with 2E TvTropes mechanize-everything logic. Solar magic is the evocation and reification of human heroism... so Solars that get a lot of Solar magic basically curdle into weird aliens who infinitely and robotically play out overblown human heroic archetype behavior, because in late 2E every single Exalt, without fail, curdles into a weird alien that infinitely and robotically plays out the most overblown possible expression of the archetype their powers suggest.

That doesn't mean their powers don't suggest distinct archetypes, and that the assignation of various archetypes to various places on the Exalted totem pole isn't of any significance.

quote:

It's not, though. Solar feats of strength are different from Lunar feats of strength. Solar cheating is different from Sidereal cheating. They're all magical, as I've said, and they all produce blatantly supernatural effects completely outside the scope of human capability, as I've said, but you do yourself no favors in repeating it because you and I both know that's irrelevant to the issue. Solars magically evoke excellence, Lunars magically evoke monstrosity. Both magical, but each with entirely different implications and thematic associations.

quote:

Hey: dinosaur men, cave goblins, and embodied concepts aren't real. They don't exist. Solar magic doesn't represent any of those things, because when we talk about what Exalted represents (rather than what it actually contains as plot elements) we're talking about real-world concepts or events or ideologies.

This has been a source of constant confusion for you. You keep saying stuff like: but the dinosaur men are also skilled and heroic! Since both dinosaur men and humans can demonstrate heroism and skill, that means Solar magic is just as saurian as it is human!

But there are no dinosaur men for Solar magic to represent. There's just us.

quote:

See, this just reflects badly on you, making it look like your participation in this argument isn't driven by actual conviction in anything but instead a knee-jerk resistance to some kind of years old inter-splat warfare that you're having traumatic flashbacks of. Deprotagonized! Most human! Never compare! Whoooooo gives a poo poo.

quote:

Different kinds of Exalts are thematically distinct from each other, that's the whole point. Some of them are more monstrous than others.

quote:

Not really? Solars don't need to become increasingly "human" (what would that even mean) for what I'm saying to make sense. The problem here is on your end - I talk about one thing being more evocative of mundane human effort than another, and you're immediately conceiving of it in terms of Humanity scales that characters slide up and down along and gain various bonuses or penalties from.

quote:

That's wrong. If an Infernal's power actually came from somewhere else entirely, they wouldn't have had to be based on a Solar exaltation at all - Malfeas would've just made some, 'cause he felt like it. That the Yozis had to steal and corrupt a bunch of Solar Exaltations is actually very important.

Mendrian posted:

This reminds me of how much I hate the Jade Prison, Lytek, and the treating of 'shards' as physical things with properties you can talk about and make references to. Frankly I prefer to keep exaltations as mysterious spiritual things that can't really be interacted with or referenced in any useful manner, not by gods, not by Lytex, not by the Primordials.

It would require some rewriting of the lore, but it's just such a stupid kludge filled with contradictions and fanon.

KittyEmpress posted:

Also, just a note, design for Infernals suggested they should be stronger than normal Solars, but pay for that strength with becoming more and more transhuman, and more and more limited. I think this was changed by the time Broken Winged Crane came out, but Infernals were basically supposed to be "Hyper Specialized Solars. But better". They'd just slowly give up their ability to feel empathy, cover themselves in mutations, turn their arms ashen and black, view humans as food or playthings, etc as a side effect of this power.

MiltonSlavemasta posted:

Having Exaltations be these autonomous atomistic spheres floating around searching out people based on independent criteria is a pretty terrible setting element. "Chosen of X, except X didn't actually choose you" is not very mythic or interesting, and it implies personal qualities in the setting can be measured and detected by little beep-boop shards, which is ridiculous and reeks of both Virtue-Mechanics-As-Setting-Fact and Magitech Bullshit.

MiltonSlavemasta posted:

So first age Solars?

Edit: Or Elder Lunars?

MiltonSlavemasta posted:

Having Exaltations be these autonomous atomistic spheres floating around searching out people based on independent criteria is a pretty terrible setting element. "Chosen of X, except X didn't actually choose you" is not very mythic or interesting, and it implies personal qualities in the setting can be measured and detected by little beep-boop shards, which is ridiculous and reeks of both Virtue-Mechanics-As-Setting-Fact and Magitech Bullshit.

KittyEmpress posted:

Edit: And I'm going to be honest here on the first point, I like the idea that came at the end of 1e and into 2e, of the Exalted being first and foremost weapons. That the Incarnae designed them to be fire and forget WMDs to defeat the primordials, and then left them to rule humans while they played video games, no longer caring what they did with themselves. I think that makes the idea of virtuous Exalted all the more interesting and unique, while making it so that 'evil solars' aren't an impossibility.

LGD posted:

Actually it's a great setting element, because it means that the Exalted are not meaningfully beholden to their patron god and can act independently of them. You're empowered because you're the kind of person they like or resonate with, not because you advance a specific agenda now and will be expected to do so in the future. It makes you your own man, in a way that you really couldn't in a setting that required explicit divine approval.

And shards are quasi-intelligent super-souls, you only need view them as Magitech if you view all complex magical items through that lens.

LGD posted:

empty denial posted:

They're the evocation of reification of something, but I sure don't know why you insist that needs to be "humanity" or "heroism" at the expense of all the other human heroes in the game. You really haven't established this at all, and all your dancing around about how strength and heroism and humanity are associated but not linked (until they implicitly are) hasn't helped anything.

Whoa man, heavy stuff. But what if, like, Solars aren't intended to be a universal representation of humanity? Then your whole argument might fall apart. If only we could determine whether they were by looking at the way the setting is actually written rather than just making some assumptions external to the game and glossing over anything that contradicts that.

solars have overt magical powers posted:

Since you admit Solars are doing plenty of wacky things that aren't particularly rooted in any kind of excellence a human can have, it's still really unclear why this kind of magical being that does inhuman things with magic is more human that that kind of magical being that does inhuman things with magic.

Then you might have to answer for putting forward obviously garbage arguments like asserting that the ability to fire sun bolts from your rear end is emblematic of the human spirit and the true nature of heroism in the real world.

...the Yozis aren't Autocthon. Again, you're picking and choosing which "setting facts" get to apply. If we care about the thematic resonance of different Exalt types and not things like setting history and so on then the fact that Infernals are derived from Solar shards is irrelevant. They power they manifest is obviously inhuman, comes from inhuman sources, and renders than less human over time. It's a power far more monstrous than that of a Lunar (they evoke beings and principles from beyond creation) and it's every bit as potent as that of a Solar.

you're being mean to non-solars posted:

Or do Lunars tap into a fundamental human impulse to master and control every aspect of themselves and accomplish great things because of it? Do Sidereals tap into a fundamental human impulse to control circumstance, be master of their own fate? Lunars only need to be Monstrous if you're opposing them against Humanity. Except that one looks more human than the other. But poo poo, Sidereal magic look plenty human- why do their dice gimmicks make them Not Actually Real Boys? But Excellence is human I guess, so long as we ignore all the setting "facts" that suggest it really isn't and only focus on the setting "facts" you think are important as well (along with a few unsupported premises).

Me, because your outlook is the kind of garbage that leads to dumb intersplat warfare and you're promoting it as the One True interpretation of Exalted. And you should because you're actively promoting this poo poo. And look, Exalted is a cool game about all sorts of heroes doing cool things. Your interpretation depreciates large parts of the setting in service to some weird urge to make Exalted ideologically pro-human heroism only as seen and done by Solars. Everyone else is "lesser" because they don't reflect the core nature of humanity as well as the glowing sun guys. This is like saying that the fact of Wizard supremacy in D&D 3.x is a reflection of humanity's core impulse to alter reality as we see fit rather than being caught in the hum-drum reality of our lives as a Fighter, and therefore we can only interpret the setting in ways that contrast Man as Conqueror of the Cosmos vs. Man as Dirt Farmer, and we should both interpret the setting around this paradigm and work to see that it remains enshrined as the core of the setting. And I'm saying- no, that actually isn't what it's about, there are a ton of things that contradict your interpretation, and that interpretation will necessarily lead to a worse setting and worse games.

Sure. But is monstrosity their primary theme, and should they be viewed primarily through that lens? No, unless you're insisting we take a completely Solar-centric view of the game, which there isn't really any reason to do.

But everything that they do with their power becomes less and less evocative of mundane human effort the stronger they get. And if they're really supposed to be seen as an archetype of Humanity or Heroism they should reinforce those themes more and more as they grow in power, just as you're insisting Lunars become more Monstrous and Sidereals become more Fateful. They become more and more Excellent (to a truely inhuman degree) but you're quite right that they're not sliding up a Humanity or Heroism scale- that's because they're not actually intended to be the representations of those things in the setting at the expense of the other Exalted

Ferrinus posted:

Again, you've actually agreed upthread already that Solar magic is more mundane and humanlike in character than non-Solar magic. It's skill instead of shapeshifting, instuition instead of precognition. It doesn't matter what's "intended" and it certainly doesn't matter that Solar potential can be corrupted or transformed - the point is that:

* Solar magic is evocative of human arete
* Solar magic is the strongest kind

The juxtaposition of these two facts has implication for the setting in question. Stick your fingers in your ears all you want, you don't actually have contradictions to shoot me down with. All you've got is...

quote:

But, as I've said, that in no way refutes anything I've said, because everyone in Exalted has magic anime powers. The differences between those powers lie in their thematic elements (Solar charms are thematically more humanlike) and in their relative strengths (Solar charms are the strongest). Again, this draws an implicit equivalence between heroic effort and world-changing power. This equivalence is strengthened by the fact that even the most grotesquely, mind-bendingly inhuman magic available to PCs in the game just so happens to reach them through the bottleneck of a Solar exaltation.

quote:

Why do you keep bringing that up? Well...

...it's because you're fighting Exalted's equivalent of an edition war rather than actually talking about the game. You think I'm trying to belittle your pet splat, whichever one it is, by pointing out that its powers are thematically different from those of the Solars. But, I don't care. It's true that Lunars are more monstrous than Solars, and Sidereals more abstruse and esoteric, and Alchemicals more impersonal, and so on. That's what gives each kind of Exalt its punch.

You're giving me all this empty sophistry about how really all the Exalts are the same and anything you could say about one you could easily also say about another so really distinctions can't legitimately be drawn - but, uhhh, no. They're radically different from each other, both in terms of their actual in-game power sets and in terms of the themes they embody. So, no, your precious Sidereals are Not Real Boys and you're pretty much just going to have to deal with it because these sharp divisions between the different kinds of player character are part of Exalted's appeal.

Incidentally, you're right about D&D 3.5. The direct implication of the fighter/wizard power disparity, despite the fact that both classes are ostensibly about just picking a skill and practicing that skill until you get good at it, is that if you're caught in the hum-drum reality of the fighter it's your own stupid fault and you deserve to be a hapless flunky. Vindictive just-world condemnation to drudgery is coiled at the very heart of the game. That's why, among other reasons, I don't like playing 3rd edition D&D.

Ferrinus posted:

Mendrian's right; "shards" are dumb.

MiltonSlavemasta posted:

Having Exaltations be these autonomous atomistic spheres floating around searching out people based on independent criteria is a pretty terrible setting element. "Chosen of X, except X didn't actually choose you" is not very mythic or interesting, and it implies personal qualities in the setting can be measured and detected by little beep-boop shards, which is ridiculous and reeks of both Virtue-Mechanics-As-Setting-Fact and Magitech Bullshit.

2.5 declared that any Solar can get a personal message from the Unconquered Sun upon Exaltation, and that seems pretty at odds with all the autonomous shard BS. Also, I think Infernal/Abyssal backstories are more fun to write if you can declare which Third Circle Demon/Deathlord picked you and why. Being personally chosen gets a little weird for Terrestrials, but I would personally have the remnants of the ancestors in the blood silently debating whether the host was worthy, because that would be cool.

quote:

If anyone brings up crap about the Neverborn picking the hosts of those Exaltations, I don't want to hear it. The Neverborn are amorphous hate blobs and derivative and uninteresting.

Tulul posted:

"Shards" is a bad word for them, yeah. I like "sparks", but I don't know how that plays with anyone else.

Attorney at Funk posted:

So the takeaway from this argument seems to be: people who don't think Solars are as cool as other splats resent that they're abstractly the strongest as a setting conceit, whereas people who enjoy that setting conceit are unimaginably tedious and lame.

Mendrian posted:

The word is bad, but I find the very concept stupid on a basic level. We're dealing with a character's ability to become a demigod. You can catch the drat things in a net, rub some pollution on them, or 'profane' them with Yozi jizz or whatever. It's stupid. Spiritual concepts shouldn't work that way.

Mendrian posted:

So wait.

What are the dogs in this fight again? Is it important that Solars be human or... not human? Is it important the Lunars be equal to Solars? What the hell are we arguing?

LGD posted:

But that is basically how souls work in a lot of settings. And Exalted shards are significantly more difficult to mess with than souls are in most settings (including Exalted) If humanity had a natural possibility to become a Solar without external intervention the setting would be significantly different. The setting would also be quite different if the Exalted were directly bequeathed with power from their god. Though in a way they are- each shard is a tiny god who must sacrifice its independent existence to merge with and empower a human, and whose only concerns and responsibilities are maintaining a heroic legacy and selecting humans that match the preferences of its original creator. "An angel (messenger) from my merged with me and gave me power" doesn't seem like a particularly bad way to get empowered, nor does it seem unreasonable that such a messenger is catchable if you go to extreme lengths (and are a being in the same ballpark as the being that originally empowered the thing).

NiciasTSOF posted:

The exaltation coming directly from the UCS doesn't obligate you to him. It's a singular gift, not a salary.

Mendrian posted:

Yeah and then eventually degenerates into the same sort of navel-gazing setting dissection that we got in 2e. I won't tell you that you're wrong if you enjoy that sort of thing but I find it really tedious, and I for one enjoy having a few undefined elements in the setting rather than having to know exactly how every mechanism of the process that creates the thing works.

In 2e, they are not gods, they are little invisible spirit-sparks that seek out worthy successors based on predefined subroutines. When the host dies, they fly up into heaven where a god literally scrubs them clean, and then they fly out of his cabinet to seek out new hosts. Should they blunder into a net along the way, a net created by undefined setting fuckery that PCs are unable to replicate by the setting's own rules, they sit there like dumb idiots until the net is ripped apart and all the butterflies escape.

Gods/angels have character, for one thing, which would change the tenor of Exalted somewhat, though not necessarily for the worse. Without personality they are just mechanisms that fall into traps laid by brilliant villains who have the amazing power to conjure up arbitrary devices when the setting needs them do.