/exg/ - Exalted General

I don't understand why this is something to contest. Empires do horrible shit to people to run. That's like, Empire 101.

So Queen Victoria was a supervillain, doing it just because she hated dirty little negroes and wanted them to suffer?

That empires are awful? It's not a complicated issue.

The people in them might not be awful, but the Empire is.

Either you don't understand what you're reading or you're making a strawman argument, let us know which please.

>That empires are awful? It's not a complicated issue.
Well, I suppose.

But you seem to like reading. Why not do a little and discover that the foundational means of our modern society is based almost solely in the works of empires.

It's pretty straightforward, after all.

If you believe that a good end result diminishes how awful something was then it's going to be difficult to discuss this. Everything has limitless consequences, just picking a positive one is cherry picking.

youtube.com/watch?v=mw4WtmFcnyY
Which Caste of Alchemicals includes ninjas?

Then our modern society rose from putrid foundations.

I fail to see the problem. Lots of cool shit arises from putrid origins.

Starmetal, Moonsilver, Soulsteel or Adamant. Though each would be different in style of "Ninja"

>If you believe that a good end result diminishes how awful something was then it's going to be difficult to discuss this.

>Then our modern society rose from putrid foundations.

What I've established here is that, contrary to your assertions, this is not a pretty straightforward issue. It's couched in nuance and exacerbated by a lack of understanding and perspective.

To say that I find the writers' outlook on imperialism, colonialism, and slavery puerile is a kindness. To have excellent criticism of their puerile outlook dismissed with "you don't know what you're talking about" indicates that these people should not be dealing with paying customers, let alone complex subject matter.

Sure. I don't think she cared what the dirty little negroes thought and I don't think she would've cared whether they suffered or not as long as they produced results, and that's still pretty terrible.

Is there some kind of clever point you're trying to make with this? Like, do you actually think that you're required to have malicious intent to be bad?

It's a perfectly straightforward issue, but you're not talking about it. You're talking about modern civilisation as though it excuses anything that has ever been done in history.

>You're talking about modern civilisation as though it excuses anything that has ever been done in history.
Those are your words, not mine.

>But you seem to like reading. Why not do a little and discover that the foundational means of our modern society is based almost solely in the works of empires.
>It's pretty straightforward, after all.
Your words were:
>But you seem to like reading. Why not do a little and discover that the foundational means of our modern society is based almost solely in the works of empires.

>It's pretty straightforward, after all.

Just in case you've forgotten. If you're not saying slavery and imperialism are arguably justified because their end result is civilisation as we know it then you're going to have to tell me what you meant.

Is that really a problem in this case? I mean, the Dragonblooded are, well, kind of assholes. To be fair, you have to be an asshole if you want to keep power and the alternative is three hundred Solar God-Kings ruling over the world, like in the First Age.

It's only fair to emphasize that if you're not Exalted, your life kind of fucking sucks. Remember, all Exalted are superhumans! They're infinitely better than mortals in every conceivable sense. This isn't even hyperbole, they're just that much better.

I really don't see how anyone can argue that slavery wasn't fucked up. It made a lot of things possible, but that's not the same thing as not being fucked up?

And acknowledging the obvious ethical issues that we as modern people may have with the practice is entirely separate from saying "I wish western civilization hadn't happened."

This discussion is just so ridiculous. There's no reason at all to contest people talking about slavery as an ethical ill, and doing so by saying it's economically sound is a different discussion entirely.

>I really don't see how anyone can argue that slavery wasn't fucked up.
The alternative, for much of history, was being put to death. Slavery was driven primarily by conflict and conflict wouldn't end if one side was not in some way neutralized. Slavery ended up being a humane way of ending conflicts compared to the alternative of slaughtering every last one of the enemy.

But it's all pretty straightforward, isn't it?

Isn't it? Picking between two bad options doesn't mean the one you pick isn't bad. It's just less bad.

So I take it you don't vote in elections?

If you're actually fearing that the writers will turn the Realm into a saturday morning cartoon empire of villainy, I think you can rest assured it won't be the case, because this is Exalted, and everybody, even Ex2's Deathlords are always given "reasonable cause" to do as they do.

What you won't have is Ex1 and 2's treatment of the Scarlet Empire as a world spanning empire that somehow doesn't commit the atrocities generally associated with this type of regime. What you won't have is books that completely gloss over that kind of thing. The Scarlet Empire's hands cannot be presented as clean, because that would make the entire thing completely incoherent.

We can all understand the comlpex underlying mechanisms of empires and what they bring to the world, and still condemn the atrocities commited.

Asking people to not judge those actions seems to me like an appeal to simplification ("The results later down the line are really impressive, so we shouldn't condemn the things done to arrive where we are") rather than actually asking people to understand and evaluate things in their complexity ("Yes, empires commit atrocities. Yes, these atrocities sometimes allow for advancement. No, these two things aren't mutually exclusive").

>We have to brutally put down our enemies somehow! Slavery was nice really?

>Here's some smug sarcasm.

While the developer arguments might be shallow, you're not making any. It's just 'it could have been worse' and 'it turned out well, eh?' while sounding like a smug shit.

>I really don't see how anyone can argue that slavery wasn't fucked up.
Not all Slavery is equally bad. A janissary is just as much a slave as a cotton picker in the american south, yet their lives are nothing alike.

No. That is, in fact, what you are doing.

Jog on Holden, you gave up your right to post here when you threw a hissy fit about the leak

If you vote for a man you think is a monster because you think he has a better chance of winning then you're part of the problem. Picking the 'lesser of two evils' when there are non-evil choices is blindness.

Interesting. I supposed the entirety of the Zonder could be an extrapolation of what would happen if Autocthons Fetich Soul died during the war against the Primordials.

youtube.com/watch?v=gZLC2my3xjA

>Not all Slavery

>Somebody disagrees with me and isn't shitposting in the process
>It has to be Holden

Come back when you're interested in actually responding.

How does this make it less bad?

If you tried the same argument to a Roman, he'd laugh in your face if you're trying to insist slavery wasn't bad for slaves. He'd probably tell you "sucks to suck" and you'd probably agree.

Why romanticize it? Slavery is what it is. An ugly institution that can be very economically beneficial.

>If you're actually fearing that the writers will turn the Realm into a saturday morning cartoon empire of villainy, I think you can rest assured it won't be the case
I'm not convinced, to say the least, and I find the comparison to cartoon villainy reductive, to boot.

>What you won't have is Ex1 and 2's treatment of the Scarlet Empire as a world spanning empire that somehow doesn't commit the atrocities generally associated with this type of regime.
That was a similarly un-nuanced view of an empire, yes. That is not something that should be encouraged, certainly.

>We can all understand the comlpex underlying mechanisms of empires and what they bring to the world, and still condemn the atrocities commited.
I find myself unwilling to judge people without all of the facts I could avail myself of. This facile examination of part of the record to reach a conclusion that is absurdly off base is my criticism of such blanket condemnation.

>Asking people to not judge those actions seems to me like an appeal to simplification
But it is the opposite, rather; an appeal to examination. Please try not to be so disingenuous.

>So Queen Victoria was a supervillain, doing it just because she hated dirty little negroes and wanted them to suffer?
No, user, nobody in this thread has said anything that could reasonably be interpreted as implying that. It's entirely reasonable to see Queen Victoria as a villain, though. Her not being motivated by some kind of perverse desire to be evil doesn't really change that.

>Why not do a little and discover that the foundational means of our modern society is based almost solely in the works of empires.
How on Earth is that relevant? Good things can follow from fucked up shit, directly or indirectly, but that doesn't make the fucked up shit any less fucked up.

>What I've established here is that, contrary to your assertions, this is not a pretty straightforward issue. It's couched in nuance and exacerbated by a lack of understanding and perspective.
The horribleness of empires is not coached in nuance. The moral status of the people, especially the ruling class, of any given empire is coached in nuance. Something like the question of whether it would've been better if there hadn't been empires in the history of the world is coached in nuance. None of this is relevant to how an empire as an entity should be portrayed in fiction.

>How on Earth is that relevant? Good things can follow from fucked up shit, directly or indirectly, but that doesn't make the fucked up shit any less fucked up.
So you condemn the American terrorists for their actions against King George and the Crown?

>The horribleness of empires is not coached in nuance.
I imagine it's not coached in nuance is a true statement, but I cannot fathom what that means.

However, the horrors of empire are indeed something that can be couched in nuance. To imply that all actions of an empire are unjustifiable is ridiculous.

>If you tried the same argument to a Roman, he'd laugh in your face if you're trying to insist slavery wasn't bad for slaves.

If slavery was always, totally bad for slaves, then why did people sell themselves into slavery? Voluntary slavery was a thing, historically.

So the Realm now has no redeeming features, it is uniformly evil and will be portrayed as such from hereon in.

Boy I sure do look forward to being able to play a DB. I'm glad that "the lowest slave on the Blessed Isle has a life comparable to the average free man in the Threshold" thing is gone, I'd hate to think my Dynast gave a shit about his subjects.

>Why romanticize it? Slavery is what it is. An ugly institution that can be very economically beneficial.
More importantly - more importantly in my opinion, in the context of Exalted - slavery is an ugly institution, but the people maintaining and benefiting from that institution have largely been regular people, not soulless, black-hearted villains. That is where the nuance should be when writing about slavery, empires and such in fiction. Not in trying to find good sides or justifications for these things, but in trying to give perspective on the way a slave owner or a high-ranking official in an empire might think and feel.

Can an Abyssal attune a Creation manse?

Yes. There isn't any restriction as to what type of Exalt can attune to what type of Manse.

Not that user but as it happens, I live in France, and I don't.

I don't actually believe voting for the less evil candidate is the best course of action. I believe letting the rest of the population do so until their elected "representatives" all demonstrate their incompetence or corruption is. Then we'll be numerous enough to cause actual change, and create a new form of direct democracy that fits modern technology and does away with the need for intermediaries and "representatives". Is that course of action beyond reproach? I don't think it is. I think if things go according to this plan, there'll probably be a lot of violence, and a lot of atrocities, commited until we arrive to another equilibrium.

Even if that equilibrium is "good" from the viewpoint of those who'll live under it, I don't think they'd be justified not to consider the atrocities commited to arrive where they are as anything but that.

>To imply that all actions of an empire are unjustifiable is ridiculous.
Nobody in this thread has implied that, though. Empires being horrible does not in any way imply that literally every action they take automatically becomes evil. It's, like, a callous criminal probably isn't motivated by evil for evil's sake, and he might do nice things occasionally, or even regularly, but none of this has any relevance for his crimes or his guilt.

>So the Realm now has no redeeming features, it is uniformly evil and will be portrayed as such from hereon in.
Nobody has said that, and that certainly isn't stated in the 3e core.

I really want you to think about this for five seconds.

Or better yet, go read about why people sell themselves into slavery. I promise you it's never because the perks are so good.

If they're doing it out of choice, it's for reasons of avoiding starvation or death or worse fates, and "they'll give you food while they work you to the bone" is not actually a good thing, it's a bare minimum of living.

Seriously think about this statement, dude. It's really dumb, and ignores the context you're asking people to examine.

>"they'll give you food while they work you to the bone"
if you believe that is what happens to people selling themselves into slavery, then I really can't help you.

>However, the horrors of empire are indeed something that can be couched in nuance. To imply that all actions of an empire are unjustifiable is ridiculous.

This is what you fail to understand. It doesn't matter how justified a horrible act is, it is a horrible act. Owning a person as a slave is a horrible act, no matter what you're doing to the slave, no matter how nice you are to the slave, no matter how comfy their bedroom or nice their life under your velvet fist.

That you chose to enslave them because otherwise you woulda needed to kill them doesn't make it less of an atrocity in general. It makes it relatively less horrible than murdering them on the spot, but it's still fucking horrible.

That's fucking nuance. Going "Oh well you coulda done something even worse if you chose to so I guess we can't really call your action an atrocity" isn't. It's false dichotomy bullshit.

In 2e at least, drawing power from non-abyssal de/manses gave you a long-term internal penalty, which stacks with the one for going out in the day without wearing skulls all over you. But attuning is fine.

>Owning a person as a slave is a horrible act, no matter what you're doing to the slave, no matter how nice you are to the slave, no matter how comfy their bedroom or nice their life under your velvet fist.
An interesting view. Do you apply the same to serf and similar? After all, they were owned by their lords, too.

Yes.

>Owning a person as a slave is a horrible act, no matter what you're doing to the slave, no matter how nice you are to the slave, no matter how comfy their bedroom or nice their life under your velvet fist.

Surely if the alternative is death it would be horrible not to enslave them

What's real nuance is having an empire be horrible without literally every person in it being horrible. Honorable Dynasts and morally upstanding Immaculate monks being a part of the horrible empire of the Realm is what I want to see.

>Ignoring the death marches to weed out the week ones
Yeah being a janissary is just easy living.

Yeah, I'm sure all those medieval serfs would have preffered being homeless and without the protection of the local knight because it meant they were 'free'

Repurchases of Immaculate Golden Bow, Glorious Solar Saber, and Glorious Solar Plate allow me to take Evocations. Can you do this with Solar XP? I don't think you can RAW.

While we're on the subject, if you were to reduce Hearthflame to 4 or 5 Evocations, which ones would be the best in order to capture it's themes?

Consider the fact that the onus of being a shit is not upon the serf but upon the lord.

Of course, if serfdom didn't make sense as a system, it wouldn't have happened. It's not exactly fair, or nice, but it worked, and it especially worked well for those who were on the top.

There's your nuance, user. A lord is not cruel for the sake of it, but because the benefits of doing so are obvious. They may even show compassion or respect for those at the bottom of their system. The fact is that the reason systems like slavery existed is because it made economic sense for a nation-state to engage in the practice regardless of its cruelty.

The reason such systems are completely unjustifiable now is because they are cruel AND there is no longer any benefit in engaging in such practices.

>An interesting view.
Calm it down, I can *hear* your smug smile from over here. (This is intended in jest! Don't take this seriously!)

>Do you apply the same to serf and similar? After all, they were owned by their lords, too.
Fuck yes I do.

Do you want the short of it? I don't believe we've ever come up with a good way of governing people *ever*. We've only gone from a terrible way to a less terrible way, with the occasional regression of course.

Surely. That doesn't make enslaving them any less horrible than it is.

The whole point has always been that not picking a horrible option doesn't make the option you pick any less horrible.

> If they're doing it out of choice, it's for reasons of avoiding starvation or death or worse fates,

So? It's the same reason I go to work every day. If you do something to avoid a "worse fate", doesn't that therefore mean that the thing you are undertaking is "better" than the alternatives?

If you're starving to death, then the "perk" of actually being fed starts to look pretty good.

> "they'll give you food while they work you to the bone" is not actually a good thing, it's a bare minimum of living.

Ahh, poor Tiro, worked to the bone until he died at the age of 99, master of his own estate ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Tullius_Tiro )

As a whole, slavery is not a good institution. But to sweep the whole institution under the same narrow umbrella is just pig ignorant. Slavery to a slave working as a Roman bureaucrat was an entirely different thing than slavery to an African slave on an American plantation.

And yeah, in a society that didn't have the extensive safety nets that modern societies have, slavery was sometimes of net benefit to the slave. It was the exception more than the rule, but it wasn't unknown.

Ah, so the realm valuing it's own existence makes them irredeemably horrid?

Of course my mistake, nobody should ever have anything because it means someone else won't.

How about the local knight doesn't accaparate the entire fucking forest, plains, hills and shit for leagues on end, and doesn't break in the door of anybody who tried to cultivate/hunt/have a wank without asking for permission and "paying dues" first?

Well, if you're fine with being murdered by brigands or a roving army, sure.

Sure, but the fact remains that slavery exists mainly to benefit the slave-owner. There are degrees in treatment, and some can even be treated well, but Rome existed mainly to benefit those at the top first, those at the bottom little, and to ream the places outside of it as hard as they could manage.

>Ah, so the realm valuing it's own existence makes them irredeemably horrid?

Aaaaaand this is where this conversation ends.

It's clear you're only in this for the trolls.

I'll be in my bunk if anybody needs me. Wanking looks more productive than this.

>Ah, so the realm valuing it's own existence makes them irredeemably horrid?

No no, the Realm is quite good to its own citizens, especially if you're a Dragonblood, but even peasants benefit from stability and things like better health-care.

This is because the Threshold are the ones footing the bill, and for them the Realm existing causes far more damage than benefit!

It's not a hard concept.

I want to play Exalted!

So anyone playing a DB must be an irredeemable cunt purely by the nature of what they are or a black sheep martyr fighting against the Realm's tyranny?

Tough

Ensuring the Realm's continued existence requires horrible acts to be undertaken, yes. That's also something we've been talking about for a while now.

Are you going to contribute, or just ask questions that are all already answered?

You've come to the wrong place user. No one here actually plays it or even wants to. It's all just theorycrafting and shitposting.

>So anyone playing a DB must be an irredeemable cunt purely by the nature of what they are or a black sheep martyr fighting against the Realm's tyranny?
Nobody's fucking claimed that, you unsufferable cunt.

If the Realm is awful simply for existing, then by extension all Dynasts raised within that realm must also be awful

Someone posts this in every thread. Nobody posts here looking for people to join their group because the people that post here are shits. We play with our friends.

Yeah, but that's not the position I was arguing against. Of course, slavery sucked. That's why, as societies have developed we've moved away from it.

But that's different from casting all societies that engaged in slavery as irredeemably evil, and asserting that all slaves lived lives that were brutal, hard, and short. That's just modern egotism projecting your ethical norms back into a society that was far less developed.

Rome/Greece/Egypt/pretty-much-every-ancient-civilization-ever weren't evil - they were primitive. More primitive than modern societies, anyway.

This absence of logic is why only one person is bothering to talk to you.

>the Realm existing causes far more damage than benefit!
Sorry, but this is wrong. "Still existing because the Balorian Crusade didn't destroy Creation" outweighs whatever damage the realm does

Yeah, I just post here instead of prepping for the all day game I said I'd run in 24 hours time.

>I want to play Exalted!
Nobody wants to play with the shitlords in this thread, user. Try somewhere else.

I only run ERP Exalted games for cute people.

>We play with our friends.

The ones that are lucky enough to have any.

Who's your OTP?

Yesterday, we had one of my favourite sessions of e3 so far, and it didn't even feature any dice rolls. It was great.

"It's totally not horrible guys! It's just extortion with threats of violence!"

Also obviously you're right, and Servitude was so efficient serfs never saw they fields and houses burned down by brigands or armies.

Oh wait!

Tell us more of that miracle, Wise user of the Diceless Game!

>It's just extortion with threats of violence!"
>demanding payment for your protection is extorting people with threats of violence.

>...."fuckin' Raksha"

>All of these solaroid scum slandring the true masters of the universe

The Abyssal x The Solar

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but I'll just assume you're not:
It was a party after a couple of very hard days. It cheered up the group of refugees we've been protecting, helped prevent a shadowland from forming and was payment for a group of ghost soldiers we're allied with.
Most of the people we befriended over the campaign showed up, lots of character interaction both PC to PC and PC to NPC, several PCs got laid, one more could have but was too shy. The ST was basically running like 3 scenes at the same time as we split up to talk to people.

No, user, that does not follow at all. European colonial empires were pretty horrible, but it does not follow that every citizen of those nations was horrible. Romans did some fucked up shit, but it doesn't follow that every individual Roman, or even every powerful, influential Roman, was fucked up. The things nations do aren't solely due to desires and qualities of individuals.

Demanding payment for protection that nobody's asked for from nations that could protect themselves from mos threats aside from the Realm is exhorting people with threats of violence, yes.

>Demanding payment for protection that nobody's asked for from nations that could protect themselves from mos threats aside from the Realm is exhorting people with threats of violence, yes.
What? We were talking about knights protecting their serfs

Ugh, I'd rather play with people from Roll20 or even Game Finder threads than that incessant hugg-box. People on OPP forums are insufferable.

Best part is, you know what most Solars do after they send off a wyld hunt that went after them?

They go on to conquer.

Ah, I got kind of confused by the also ongoing discussion about the Realm. Still, demanding payment for protection is reasonable as long as the payment is reasonable, and as long as people can actually decline both payment and service. Responding to refusal to pay with violence instead of withdrawal of protection is pretty damn evil, from a modern perspective.

What on earth...

ITT: "Wah, my DB won't be able to be a smug, self-righteous cunt to the Celestials about my super-awesome, always nice, never evil empire! There's no way I can play a politician who wants to bring about change from the inside!"

All this talk of nuance and lesser evils is nice and all for a game that doesn't feature the Exalted, who are able to take two bad choices, reject them both, and create a good one. They just have to try. Every single "benefit" that one gets from being enslaved could be attained if the Exalt actually gave a shit and did the right thing, regardless of their safety. The entire game line sells itself on high-fantasy heroism along the lines of traditional anime storylines. If you're trying to morally justify slavery in Creation while the Exalted still exist, you're playing the game wrong.

inb4 "My character doesn't want to be a black sheep or die." Aww, well that's too bad. I guess you're just going to have to be complacent and directly implicit in the continuation of the evil institution of slavery, seeing as you have the means to bring change but you don't. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," after all.

...