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[LadyLens]

Definitely flourish the knife at it, try to force it back or otherwise convince it that we're bad choice of potential meal. And do not break eye contact if at all possible.

[LadyLens]

Ashi is demon-blooded, no questions asked. If nothing else, she can run and fight on a near-vertical cliff, heft large slabs of rocks quite easily, and flatten an entire army single-handed. Her powers are inborn, not the result of godly blessing like the Exalted, and her father is, well, Aku. You don't get more demon-blooded that being literally the daughter of the ultimate evil.

[LadyLens]

The Martial Arts Ability, if you're buying it for a mortal, shouldn't require a merit. The entire purpose of the merit is to gate off access to the Charms, which mortals can't buy anyway.

[LadyLens]

Toss the ration to the cat, grab what we can of the river dragon stuff, and scat!

[LadyLens]

Well, we now know what Ashi would be.

[LadyLens]

Well, Ashi's not a Night Caste, despite the whole "darkness" motif of her upbringing. I was thinking Athletics Supernal because acrobatics and agility are the base of her most impressive feats.

[LadyLens]

Samurai Jack and Ashi: Dawn Caste. Solars, definitely. Jack's Supernal is probably Athletics, Ashi's is definitely Athletics.

[LadyLens]

Well, I generally go with "what suits the artifact?" In 3e, some artifacts I've designed for my peasant Twilight include a bowl that will produce nuts on demand. It will have to be carved from a burl (not the correct term, but I don't if there is one) from a nut tree not less than a hundred years old. The Abundant Vessel will require a glaze made from the saps and seeds from ancient fruit and nuts trees and long-cultivated fields, and blood from the bellwethers of long-established herds of sheep and bulls of similarly long-established herds of cattle (cattle in the broader sense), and...

[LadyLens]

"Too many" in this context means "more than you can RP." Fortunately, this is a self-correcting problem if you use the rules on losing intimacies that aren't played. In practical terms, more than six to eight is probably too many for practical play.

[LadyLens]

That would be a good stunt, I'd accept it in a heartbeat.

[LadyLens]

Actually, the ST can, should and indeed must overrule stunts that make no sense. "I leap from the window, slide on the clothesline to the window of the building across the way, and dash through the apartment!"

"No, you don't. You're in a nobleman's castle, remember? No clothesline, no building across the way, no apartment to slide into. Try something else." Freewheeling is one thing; just plain dumb is another. Simlarly, the proper responce to "I strike at him with a mighty overhand swing, carving my unstoppable blade through the ceiling!" is "The...

[LadyLens]

You act like a Stooge, you get appropriate results.

[LadyLens]

Why? They still have mass, they still experience resistance. Do an overhead swing in an area where it's not possible, and you'll break the blade (unlikely) or it will jam (more likely) or you'll bring the roof down on yourself (very unlikely, and if you do, smooth move, loser)....

[LadyLens]

And if the description is not cool but careless, why reward them? If you know the hallway is eight feet tall, and your sword is six feet long, and your character is six feet tall, and you declare that your character is attempting an overhead strike, that's not cool, that's being a careless fool....

[LadyLens]

It would also help if there some indication of what Occult can actually be used for. We know it can't be used to banish demons (there are no rules or even suggestions on banishing demons, actually), or summon them, or call elementals or dismiss them. It can't be used to affect the weather, or to ward an area in any way beyond "lay a lines of a thing's bane," or in fact do anything that we would regard as magic. So doing anything not involving Essence channeling seems to fall outside its purview (Craft, Lore, Medicine, social skills), and anything involving Essence channeling seems to...

[LadyLens]

It's more that Lunar shape-changing isn't amenable to reality checks; weapon sizes are. As has been said before, you can ask your audience to accept the impossible, but not the implausible....

[LadyLens]

That does not make things better, Count. A foot-wide blade is still idiotic, the quantity of magical material is still ridiculous. Sure, you can say "oh, it doesn't all go into the sword," but you still have a stupidly huge and heavy sword and the question of "Where does it all go?"



If you need five talents then you need five talents, and the Charm is nonsensical. If you need less, then you can use less, in which case the Charm makes sense but the flat requirement does not. But five talents of jade is also a vast amount of wealth, roughly (very roughly)...

[LadyLens]

Well, I certainly wouldn't require at least 340 pounds to make a single sword. Seriously, every version of Exalted has suffered badly from Writers Can't Do Math. We're told that a talent is 68 pounds, and a grand daiklave requires five talents of a magical material, meaning it is composed of substances at least as dense as lead. I did the arithmetic myself. Jade, by way of reference, is less than a third that dense, and iron roughly two thirds. Seriously, "five talents" is a huge amount of even a tremendously dense material. If the sword is to be a weight that doesn't require specially-designed...

[LadyLens]

That's all the carbon you need to add to iron to make steel; it's the same with other additions such molybdenum or titanium....

[LadyLens]

Personally, I use the general rule that an Artifact weapon is roughly 1.5 the size of a regular weapon in all directions, meaning it's about 3.5 times the mass (3 3/8, to be accurate). I take the position that the magical material is a very small amount of an artifact weapon, about .5% to 1%.