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[Lioness]

Yeah metagaming like this is a problem you sometimes have with PCs. Being asked for a roll, static value or seeing the dice pool opposing them tips the player off that something is amiss and this bleeds through into how their characters behave....

[Lioness]

Pretty sure that's not how it works.

All-Encompassing Earth Sense doesn't exist as a distinct in-game technique but rather a power that a player buys to protect them from hidden threats, if the Storyteller tells you that the bug isn't a threat and then the bug turns into a Lunar and kills your character giving the justification that "the bug wasn't a threat but the Lunar was" they're being a dickhead.

On the other side of things, the Dragon-Blooded doesn't go "why do I roll double 9s against that seemingly ordinary insect? OH SHIT! IT MUST BE A LUNAR!&...

[Lioness]

Problem is in previous editions it was heavily overused, even otherwise good blooks like Blood and Salt fell into this trap of assuming Dynast = Dragon-Blooded and used the terms interchagably in places.

Second Edition especially started to equate the debauchery of the Realm's elite with something intrinsically wrong with Terrestrial Exaltation (seriously, the books talk about Dragon-Blooded like a plantation owner talks about black people) and not because the privilidged are prone to abusing power....

[Lioness]

Animals perform their best when they're essentially exotic pets. For example a female Bunyip can give you a free Defend Other with Parry 5 if you're willing to abide the ridiculousness of riding around like a baby marsupial because you're also mounted so +1 defence there.
I'm imagining a diminutive assassin emerging from the pouch and firing poisoned blow darts at people because that should be pretty memorable....

[Lioness]

Yeah, the Storyteller to our Infernals game followed similiar lines with her characterisation and she found an unexpected acceptance among our Green Sun Princes but I wouldn't advocate that version became canon....

[Lioness]

I know you're joking but I'll take a moment to unpack my earlier statement.

Tepet Lisara basically exists to be put in her place by a man... which isn't a problem she's a minor antagonist with a serious prejudice. You'd expect a man who thought all women were lesser to experience a similar humiliating comeuppance.
What is a problem is that she's presented as an individual of no value save for being an attractive woman whose willing to use sex to get what she wants and even the part about her seducing and blackmailing her instructors is more a narrative element to make her contemptible...

[Lioness]

Cainan was born into House Cathak so was his wife Cathak Urima and he's Cathak's chosen successor. Cathak is now an adopted daughter of the Scarlet Empress....

[Lioness]

I kind of interpreted that as the Dragon-Blooded level equivalent of the boar that took down Robert Baratheon, pretty easily driven off but if you chase them down and don't factor the Berserker merit they could really hurt you.

This is before the possibility of a pack of them, I don't know how Hellboars are supposed to work but IRL while male boars tend to be solitary female boars travel together with their collective offspring so there's the potential to ride out to deal with a single roaming monster only to find there's a whole group of them....

[Lioness]

I've always argued that NPCs are supposed to use their initiative differently to PCs. To that end gambits and low initiative decisive attacks are a useful pressure valve to prevent you from ending up with something that would play out like a slower version of 2e's rocket tag combat, it also creates more opertunities for an Exalt to get wounded or disarmed by an opponent they weren't taking seriously....

[Lioness]

I'll add that she still doesn't really work because she wasn't just a female chauvinist but also an incompetent officer who graduated and achieved her position by sleeping with her instructors (genders not given, but I imagine most people assume they were male) and blackmailing them later on. The latter part undermines the idea that she's supposed to be part of a matriarchal leaning command structure and feeds into real life assertions made about the rise of successful women in a male dominated field.

[Lioness]

Okay well there's a wider point on the banality of evil here. In my experience in fiction, when a woman has these kinds of issues there's often backstory and a history of abuse that lead to this while we more readily accept "he's a piece of shit" for why a man abuses women.
There's some patriarchal expectation at play here but it depends on your PCs general inclination towards killing people who've make problems for them and getting on with their lives....

[Lioness]

It's worth noting that 3e removed a major obstacle to mass social systems that was present in the last two editions, there's no longer a rule encouraging Storytellers to reward the threshold successes on a roll (2e called this a Legendary Success, 1e named Degrees of success from Superior +1 to Phenomenal +5)

In my experience, this lead to a lot of complex social problems being resolved by one roll because of the sheer number of successes not allowing for an outcome other than unconditional and unwavering approval. That was misguided, because the concept of rewarding threshold successes...

[Lioness]

Which is why I'm particularly pleased that it took two pages before we got some variation of "make them fuck"....

[Lioness]

What I assume was the basic idea* behind Tepet Lisara as a heel kind of works now.
An overpromoted scumbag whose irrational sexism creates problems for our protagonist except - subversion! it's a woman from a a society where men have to prove themselves worth of poisitons of authority. In 1e and 2e that didn't really work becase unless you took that matriarchal bias sidebar to heart the numbers didn't bear out for the Realm being dominated by women.

*there's still deeper problems with her as an NPC, get me started on this at your peril....

[Lioness]

It's comparable to progenitive essence in that it's the original explaination why there weren't a lot more Dragon-Blooded. I'd say they're about equally akward (I don't think there's a non-awkward way to handle this) with the 2e Dragon-Blooded women age themselves to death explaination as the winner for making the Terrestrial Exaltation seem defective....

[Lioness]

That's tricky because before the beyond existed the wyld was trying to encompass all weirdness, I think you need to define what the wyld is to first even if that contradicts canon sources.

[Lioness]

So why is Yellow Jade a tag rather than a magic material?...

[Lioness]

Yeah, I see this leading to a lot of mockery of patriarchal societies by implying men in positions of authority got there like a dominant male in a group of apes.
"There's a new king" "How does that work here, did he beat up the old one?"...

[Lioness]

I think there's going to be some serious Evocation fodder this season. Night of Mourning seems like a Soulsteel daiklave in terms of appearance and function.

[Lioness]

I think assuming the Exalts can just wander back to Creation to get whatever resources they need cheapens the whole part about it being another setting....