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[Blaque]

It feels more like "Precision decapitation of our enemies" to me more than it does an accross-the-board murder here....

[Blaque]

I mean, in 3e, if you want to be the brainy tactician who doesn't htemself fight...you do that as a Zenith. They can favor Lore and War just fine, and also are good at getting folks to follow them and keeping cool when shit goes awry. Which I think is something to consider a bit too. Castes have quite a lot of gorund they can cover now, including with how soem Abilities that were "Twligiht" or whatever, arne't exclusivley so anymore....

[Blaque]

I mean, nothing stops a Twlight from being a warrior. You get five Supernals. Unless you mean as generally as a Dawn, probably not. But than again, if you were going to be running around wanting three forms of killing folks as Abiliites, were you actually that interested in having Craft do a lot or are you just spreading yourself thin hypothetically?...

[Blaque]

Sail has no effect on your ablity to do strategic manuevering as I can read on the rules. In fact, once you board a ship and are actually fighting, the rules say to just use normal combat, and that's about it. This seems to tie in with how I think on things a bit. The game rules as they are separate being a good navigator/pilot of a ship from being a good strategist in actual fights. The mechanics as they are separate what it takes to be a good tactical sailor from a good tactician.

That there is combat applicaiton of Sail and Dawns don't get it is a matter of a few things to me....

[Blaque]

The Merit itself is there to make dipping into MAs actually a decision. I have argued at some point I kind of wish sorcery was like this too, actually. The goal was to make "being a martial-artist" something meaningful about the character, not something they do trivially along other stuff.

I will admit, that I think the Merit being a barrier to learning Charms is probably more sensible than a barrier to learning the Ability itself however. And admit that if I were to run mortal or pre-Exaltationg ames, I'd wave its cost until mortals would pick it up. But in a context of...

[Blaque]

Moray Darktide always seemed odd to me that he's brought up. Since while, yes he's a sailor and pirate, that he's Exatled as a Dawn to me should indicate what his definings trenghts are. He can still favor Sail and be a badass. But the Sun didn't Choose him to be the ultimate Sailor, he Chose him to be the ultimate Warrior. And so as noted upthread a bit, he's probably Supernaling Melee (he does have a badass katana there) or something. Because he was Chosen as a fighter or commander first, not Sailor.

I guess to me that's the big where it is a bit on setting-immersion. I actually...

[Blaque]

A lot of it to me is less actually the Bronze Faction and more the Empress. She liked having a lot of control of the reigns of power, and some dumbass doing a big sorcery project ot summon a big demon or rewrite the leylines in an area is something she would rather not have to spend resrouces dealing with the cosnequences of. My views on the Realm trying to co-opt sorcerers to serve it when possible is purely power-play, with the societal norms being part of that. I tend to see the Bronze Faction as while an important cabal, still a cabal trying to affect a giant nation with complex insittutions...

[Blaque]

The book says nothing about this constraint. They get Essence 2 Charms becuase they're well, Essence 2. The character creation rules reflect them having been Exalted since being teenagers. It's not that they just recently are Essence 2. They reflect htat you've been Chosen longer than default starting Celestial Exalted. If you were constrained to only Essence 1, it'd say so.


There's about a thousand Exalts per house, give or take a few hundred, plus thousands more mortals. I'm pretty sure you can have a good handful depending....

[Blaque]

I'd go similar with LeTipix. There are mortal sorcerers in the Realm, but they often were from backgrounds of privelege and luxury to do so, or were individuals with enough weight as sorcerers to be recruited. The Realm doesn't mass-produce them since it well, can't. The handful of known sorcerers in the Realm are notable because they're sorcerers. So it's not like there's this imperial service that has sorcerers specially trained and has procedures. It's a range of very unique, powerful, and valuable individuals the Realm has drawn from folks who might be allowed to do so and doesn't consdier...

[Blaque]

Yep. When the guy you think was the hundredth huckster you are about to arrest is actually a sorcerer, shit gets fun....

[Blaque]

The issue is how many of these tea-readers do anything besides occassioanl read tea. Or how many can do it and never try. It's notable as bit that this points tea-readers are rarer than identical twins on a couple order of magnitude. I would assume the subset of them who even do anything with it or more so is less so.

Of course, this is a bit of an example of how giving numbers to things like this leads to brain spiders <_<...

[Blaque]

I guess to further add contrast in my preferred view of scaling of thaumaturgy and preferred setting, most folks who claim to be holy men, mystics, or whatever, aren't. A lot of stuff that was "mundane magic" in 2e is just...normal pplications of Abilities. You don't need to do magic to do make medicine, you just need to know the right herbs, minerals and animal bits to make them. It's just being a good doctor (Medicine), scholar (Lore) or naturalist (Survival). There isn't some magical "animal husbandry" thing. Folks just you know, know how to selectively breed animals like...

[Blaque]

This entire thread feels more about "You should do what makes a character who's optimal at 'winning' the game" than actually building a character. While there is more breadth of powers gained by being a sorcerer, I think the entire premise that "I have more power this way, so every character should hav eit" isn't at least in the spirit of things.

Sometimes a character just isn't going to be interested in the stuff sorcery gains. Nothing wrong if you do, but the idea that it's "optimal" to build a character in such a way in a non-competitive game is kind...

[Blaque]

I kind of go the opposite end. Thaumaturgy is not really an IC "thing" that exists. It's a mechanical representation of some of the strange, unique or uncanny things people in the world sometimes can do, but ultimately they rarely do more than that. Some might not even know they have a supernatural power. The girl who reads tea leaves accurately might have it be something she does on her own, while working for a fortune teller who's a complete shame but makes bank. It might be contact with some other-wordly entity, being able to change your physical sex at a whim (ala Simmu in Death's...

[Blaque]

I go with this as well, actually. Hence why there's pretty much always a ~ infront of the numbers when I bring it up. Just becuase there might be around 300 Solar Exaltaitons, doesn't mean there are that many out right now. It could be years between someone inherits a particular Exaltation....

[Blaque]

The numbers are last said based on the Storyteller's Companion 1e. Which were ~150 Solars and ~100 Abyssals, plus the 50 Infernals in the Abyssals book I think. So still about 300 Solars, but with a big "Give or take" added to it and maybe not exactly so....

[Blaque]

Another thing as noted, is that the Lunars aren't for the Solars. The Solar Exalted had no gaurantee to the world after the War of the Gods, with Dragon-Blooded having to be recruited to Solars, and the Lunars fighting the war over the world with them. The entire Bond thing is actually a weird synergistic outgrowth of the Exaltation not in their original conceptions. It's a happy accident, not a hard-coded mandate.

[Blaque]

Not every Lunar does for sure. The devs have said a few tiems they are using the 1e Storyteller's Companion numbers, which is about 300 Solars and their derivatives, anda bout 300-400 Lunars. Which means there are Lunars who have never had a bondmate, and there might be Solars who never signed-up either....

[Blaque]

The last post kind of gets into a fundamental thing to remember with anything crossover-related. That being you have to kind of establish what your goals are (like, what do you wnat Mages to be, how much do you think they should warp the setting), and then you have to no matter what comrpomise or change one or both settings involved in order for the crossover to function.

In the case of a Mage and Exalted, there's a big range between them being able to manipulate the world, even setting-rules-brekaingly, on one end. And on another, it could be argued that the nature of reality in...

[Blaque]

It was specifically their description in the Antagonists chapter of the first printing of the 1e corebook. Later runs had it be violet.