[Exalted] Strange powers

[Shooshpanchick]

I'm Ukrainian, and therefore my English isn't as good as I want it to be (so, please, correct me if I use some words incorrectly).

There's book coming soon for Exalted - "Exalted: Fair Folk". It deals with playing Raksha - creatures from Wyld, chaos beyond the boundaries of Creation. One of developers posted on RPGNow description of two charms (simple spells). Here they are:

Antagonist Naming Technique

Cost: 2 motes
Duration: One story
Type: Simple
Minimum Sword: 2
Minimum Essence: 1
Prerequisite Charms: Aegis of a Martial Destiny

The raksha defines herself and an antagonist of her choice as the principal characters of the story. The antagonist must exist. This Charm prevents the use of shaping actions that remove the raksha or her named antagonist as active characters in the story. For example, no one can use a shaping action to kill the raksha without also in some fashion bringing her back to life.

Thematic Stunting Methodology

Cost: 5 motes
Duration: One story
Type: Simple
Minimum Sword: 2
Minimum Essence: 1
Prerequisite Charms: Aegis of a Martial Destiny

The raksha defines desirable premises of the story and genre. This adds five extra dice to her stunt pool.

If we ignore mechanics and suppose that "story" means actual story about in-game characters, which is currently created through playing (there's nothing said officially about it yet) - how could such powers affect the game? It seems like genre and narrativist Premise can be changed by in-game means, but I find this rather strange, so I may be wrong.

What do you think?

[contracycle]

It does seem that way, and I for one would be rather unhappy with them.  Not that I think they are a bad idea in principle but rather because they will not sit well alongside the rest of the system, and the probable interests of other players.

Is this built with the intent that the GM would use it?  I could kionda imagine it being introiduced in an under-the-table manner like that to assist GM plot planning.  Otherwise, I would think these sorts of directly story-affecting mechanisms would be best of in their own game.

[Jonathan Walton]

I think you can probably blame this stuff on the devious and subversive mind of Rebecca Sean Borgstrom, since I think she's responsible for the Fair Folk's bizarre set of Charms, as was the case with the Sidereals.  Personally, I'm really excited that she's able to insert such interesting stuff into a mainstream game line like Exalted, though, like contracycle says, it doesn't really mesh with the existing system or material that well (though, of course, final accessment will have to wait a week until we have the actual game and not just samples).  Shreyas mentioned the possibility too that "story" and "genre" may be special system-specific words in this case, limited in their application and not as general as it initially appears.

In any case, I don't see too much sense in getting excited yet.  Once I can get a copy of the game and see what she's actually up too... then I'll start getting excitied :)

[Walt Freitag]

I wouldn't anticipate any problems implementing these kinds of effects in play. Twenty years ago I was describing "vortex magic" -- a variety of magic whose effects were describable only in metagame terms, such as reversing the outcome of a die roll or rewinding time -- in my OAD&D games. No problems at all. In the end, it's just magic.

It looks more abstract than "regular" magic but it's really not. Consider an "ordinary" magic effect that makes a character and his accoutrements temporarily invulnerable to physical harm. Few players would have any fundamental philosophical objection to such an effect. (It might be too powerful an effect to fit some particular game, but I'm talking about a general problem on principle.) And yet, if you probed, you could come up with all sorts of conceptual problems with it on the in-game-world cause-and-effect level. "If the invulnerable character can still see, then why can I not burn his retinas out with a laser?" "If the invulnerable character eats some of the food he's carrying, how can he chew it, since it's supposed to be invulnerable too?"

So what's the difference between "invulnerable to physical harm" and "invulnerable to being removed from the current active situation?" The first sounds more concrete somehow, but it's not really. In both cases the effect comes down to "some proposed actions don't cause the normal effects, because there's a magical constraint in place that prevents those effects from occurring."

- Walt

[neelk]

If we ignore mechanics and suppose that "story" means actual story about in-game characters, which is currently created through playing (there's nothing said officially about it yet) - how could such powers affect the game? It seems like genre and narrativist Premise can be changed by in-game means, but I find this rather strange, so I may be wrong. What do you think?

I ran a game like that, actually.

It was a dark fantasy game called End of the Line, and the setup for the game was that there was a great chain of worlds which were being eaten by an alien horror. Each world threw up its primal mythic archetypes to defend it, and as each world fell the archetypes retreated to the next world. (Our Earth was the end of the line -- the last world left.) Now, the way the mythic archetype thing worked was that the lives of the PCs tended to operate according to narrative logic rather than strict causality -- and the characters all knew this. They knew that in any given situation, the character with the strongest magic would be the one whose story would be most likely to happen, and they knowingly tried to arrange themselves so as to avoid the tragic aspects of their archetype as much as possible.

The thing is, that being able to deliberately manipulate the motifs and story elements is just an ordinary metafictional technique -- writers like Borges, Eco and Calvino use it all the time. It lets you play around with themes that touch on what stories are and are for, like what fiction actually means, the nature of authorship, and so on. In End of the Line, part of the theme was exploring tragedy means, and why tragic stories create catharsis and why tragic real events create horror.