(in response to a post pointing out Celestial Exalts don’t fit into his usual maxim of “let the players succeed at what they invested in”)
Well, yes. But I want a Celestial Exalt to be a End of Season Boss Fight. Like, each and every Celestial Exalt should be an Event, a Living Legend, the kind of guy whose whispered name causes entire armies to submit and whose enemies scramble to avoid or appease. I want confronting them to be like confronting Darth Vader or like fighting Frieza or like Father in Fullmetal Alchemist.
I want there to be at least an eight session build up and us scrambling around trying to find another way to avoid throwing Final Light of Dawn against Dying Shadows of Dusk because everyone knows that when they throw down everyone in a one mile area will be collateral damage and we can’t be certain that our guy is going to walk out, and if he does it may be sans an arm or an eye or his sanity.
…which plays exactly into how the system handles Lockpicking now. 99.9% of the time you are going to bypass them with a touch and 3m. That other time? Well, you’re trying to jack the Scroll of Unknown Horrors from the inner sanctum of Lady Jupiter and she’s assigned Chejop Kejak to keep anyone out while she is attending the Games. I want the game to work up to that as the climax of a series of adventures, not as a every second session event.
I want genuine threats, genuine challenges that involve a chance of failure to be something we build up to out of a series of increasingly difficult moral dilemmas that eventually and inevitably move these two unstoppable forces into orbit of each other with all the creeping horror of knowing that there is nothing you can do to avoid it.
Because Exalted is a tragedy.