It waters down the power and supremacy of Solars, sure... but I think it might be good for the game.
Excellencies are not, ultimately, interesting abilities. They're number inflation, plain and simple. While it's certainly fun to roll 20 dice, the ability of Solars to drown foes in dice pools makes strains everything, starting with the benchmarks. 5 successes are enough to read a letter by feeling the imprint of the ink, or to swan-dive five hundred feet unharmed--what do 10 successes mean? Or 15? Any kind of opposition becomes basically meaningless--it doesn't matter what kind of cool powers a demon has, it'll just get blown away by bigger numbers.
On the other hand, what happens if they're gone? Not more expensive, not turned into 2e style Charms to learn, just gone?
Excellencies are not, ultimately, interesting abilities. They're number inflation, plain and simple. While it's certainly fun to roll 20 dice, the ability of Solars to drown foes in dice pools makes strains everything, starting with the benchmarks. 5 successes are enough to read a letter by feeling the imprint of the ink, or to swan-dive five hundred feet unharmed--what do 10 successes mean? Or 15? Any kind of opposition becomes basically meaningless--it doesn't matter what kind of cool powers a demon has, it'll just get blown away by bigger numbers.
On the other hand, what happens if they're gone? Not more expensive, not turned into 2e style Charms to learn, just gone?
- All emphasis gets placed on Charms, which are inherently more interesting than "1m per die." The difference between a skilled mortal swordsman and a Dawn isn't that the Solar has twice as many dice, it's that they've got magic tricks and powers.
- Boring dice/success adding Charms like Excellent Strike or Impassioned Discourse Method become interesting again, as do dice tricks-- they're actually expanding your capabilities, not just serving as a marginally-better-in-some-situations Excellency.
- Charms like Flawless Diagnostic Technique can feel pointless, because they're not letting you do anything you couldn't already with a sufficiently large die pool. Now they are.
- Enemy design gets easier, because there's no longer a need to inflate dice pools to match the Solars-- we can focus on creating Charms with active effects, not just new variations of dice tricks so that the Dragonblooded scion has a faint prayer of landing a hit.
- The difference between Celestial and Terrestrial Exalts becomes a question of Charm capabilities. Ie, "what kinds of cool stuff cane we do," rather than "who can roll more dice?"
- Solars get weaker, encounter design gets easier, and there's more incentive to spread your Charms across multiple abilities.
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