No, it is to the heart of the point. Exalted is a game that rejects the idea that your internal desires will fail to change the world. It is a game where there is no internal/external divide. If you want to accomplish a goal, that goal is external to you because it affects the world.
The Problem With Clarity
Clarity always struck me as a complete kludge of a system that doesn’t work right. The idea is that as Alchemicals get more powerful, they begin to optimize actions based on Utilitarian ethics. Which is fine, I like the idea. But why stick that in Clarity rather than, I don’t know… building a Charmset which …
The Scale of Primordials
Primordials are not so much a person or a place as they are an entire Mythos. Each Primordial is a self-contained culture, a cosmos in and of itself that does not rely on outside context. For example, if you took the works of H.P. Lovecraft, then Cthulu would not be a Primordial. Neither would Nylarothep …
Modern Guns in Exalted
Just impose a -1 internal penalty to each attack after the first with a firearm until the player takes a Reload action. The penalty represents “having less ammo”. Guns with large capacity magazines could have a Capacity trait that negates it. So if my AK with a banana clip has Capacity 3, I can take …
A New Crafting System
I think if you’re going to rewrite the Craft system you should rewrite the Charm system at the same time to supplement it. Basically, the point of Craft in a purely gamist1 perspective is to give your characters Cool Stuff that does Neat Things. Those neat things can be simple (“I get a +2 to hit!”) …
The Role of Perfect Defenses in Game Balance
What perfects did was effectively cap the power level, or at least they were supposed to. You could never get a better defense than Heavenly Guardian Defense/Seven Shadow Evasion, and no attack could pierce them. The idea, I believe, was to force the scale to stop growing. Basically once you got to ‘parry landslide’ there was no …
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Third Circle Demons Are Final Bosses
Note that fighting a Third Circle is still on the level of fighting an overwhelmingly powerful god-being who can fuck up your shit unless you have perfect defenses. Remember that Ligier alone can be summoned and pull out his sword and throw it into the air and the sword alone will fight off entire armies and any challenges and …
Exalted Combat Charms versus Primordials
The ultimate goal of the Exalted combat Charms should be to force all combat to occur on the scale of human combat; i.e., resolvable by individual heroic human action and the movements of armies. It should basically no sell anything above that. The Exalted Host wasn’t stronger than the Primordials by any objective measure of …
Why Perfect Defenses Exist
The point of perfects isn’t to render you immune to extras or weak opponents. Even in 2E just having a high enough DV will do that. The point of perfects was to render you impossible to destroy to things significantly outside your weight class. It was to justify the Exalted host slaying the Primordials and …
Fixing the Overpoweredness of Stealth Attacks
A stealth attack should basically be a normal attack except you roll Stealth and the opponent defends with Awareness. You don’t make a “surprise roll” and then a second attack roll after that. It’s much easier to just treat it like any other attack roll vs defense; with extra successes adding to damage and so …
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