Thus Spake Zaranephilpal/SubjectiveMorality

Originally Posted by Kaiu Keiichi:
All heroic drama has as its basis a morality tale, an exploration of responsibility to others, the quest to do well for the world.

Playing a flawed hero who struggles against something that takes away his or her free will is one thing. Playing something that serves those who want to tortue the world for mere selfish glory is another.

Originally Posted by Nephilpal:
As someone who personally believes the exploration of morality is the best feature of the game, I wholeheartedly concur. Believe it or not, outside of two one-shots, I've never run an Abyssal game despite my love of their motifs, whereas I've been running the same Solar game for over six years now. On that note, you can thank my players for some of the rules and Charms in Second Edition (or curse, though I think unlikely).

However, an exploration of heroism needn't necessarily exclude the akuma. After all, as antagonists for Solars, they aren't merely bad guys to fight, but perverted mockeries of everything an Exalt should be. It isn't even their capacity to inflict suffering and death that makes them such Anathema, but the way they had the power to change the world, either to make it a better place or screw it up worse -- but at least to do something -- and then they deliberately and knowingly threw all of that away to become a demon. It's insane. It's unthinkable. Each akuma "could have been a contender" and then they just didn't. Instead, they have become a walking, talking self-aware agenda of a titan. I mean, sure they think and feel and plan and plot and fight and kill and walk like men, talk like men, but they aren't. They're gloriously resplendent slaves wearing jeweled manacles. And even that image doesn't do them justice, because it implies an imperfect kind of slavery maintained by force. An akuma isn't a slave because they can't escape their chain. That's a renegade Abyssal. No, an akuma isn't exactly even a slave at all, because they have knowingly forfeited their will and absolved themselves of all responsibility to be reshaped. They *want* to fulfill their masters' will. They can't not want to. And so they only rarely have to be micromanaged in any way, because they use every tool at their disposal to fulfill the plan for which they have been made.

And this is why a servant of righteousness must oppose the infernals with every power at their disposal. They aren't simply the Enemy, but the harbingers and champions of an incompatible paradigm.

Originally Posted by Kaiu Keiichi:
Again, in canon, you are correct that the gods are often portrayed as being morally broken. I put forth that this is inherently broken - that it leads to crappy gaming experiences, at least for me. I want the gods to be worth serving in Exalted. Subjective morality is a concept that goes against the very nature of heroic, mythic adventure that Exalted seeks to emulate.

Originally Posted by Nephilpal:
I'll agree that subjective morality is a more modern spin on mythos, but that doesn't necessarily invalidate its place in mythos.

Let us start with gods for a moment. You say they are often broken and that this negatively impacts the game because they are unworthy of serving. To which I say, "YES! EXACTLY!" Why should you be serving these things? What gives them the right to be ordering you around? Is it because they made you? By that logic, the gods should bow before their Primordial makers, not plot and execute their overthrow. Are the gods supposed to rule because they live in heaven? Yet, other than having the highest property values of any city in the cosmos, what makes Yu Shan so special? Are the gods supposed to be glorious and wonderful because their highest shines mightily and speaks of righteousness and righteous causes? How many tyrants in real history alone have gilded themselves in finery and wielded such words to bolster the loyalty of their subjects?

Consider that in Greek mythology, Heracles and Achilles weren't going to get together with Perseus to dethrone Zeus. That would be unthinkable. But it certainly wasn't because Zeus was categorically good. I mean, he was spiteful, lecherous, and capricious. Look what he did to Prometheus! Look what he did to the trust of his wife Hera! Look what he did to most of the mortal chicks he hooked up with, knowing what Hera tended to do to them when she found out! Exalted turns that premise on its head and demands that you actually evaluate it rationally. As an Exalt, you bear the power that overthrew the titans of old. In a past life, you helped slay and imprison beings a lot bigger than the so-called almighty Unconquered Sun. Sure, he's Essence 10. Yes, he's a badass. But as an Exalt, you *could* storm the gates of Heaven and shake down the pillars of divine tyranny and begin a third age of men. Name me a game where that is possible, and I don't mean and level 60-something, but within the scope of a normal game.

If the gods aren't worth serving, if serving them would be unheroic and unjust, well, stop serving them.

But why stop there?

Subjective morality is what lets each Exalted type embody a genre of mythic hero and let those archetypes coexist and/or battle for control of the future:

On the one hand, you have these divine bureaucrat-warrior monks who literally write and enforce the status quo. They want to preserve the strangehold of divine authority because it preserves their own power, but the nobler among them believe that they should maintain The System because it demonstrably works. Even the fall and overthrow of the Solars, an apocalyptic plague, a massive alien invasion and a cold war between superpowers armed with cosmic weapons hasn't been able to end the world as long as The System was intact. The Sidereals have the least mythic allusions behind them, unless you consider them angels, in which case it gets weird.

So let's turn to the Dragon-Blooded, who are the lesser proponents of The System, in that they are warrior aristocrats who wish to spread their empire to the far corners of the world, bringing the glories (and horrors) of civilization to all. It's hard to view the Dynasty as terribly heroic, though, given their excesses. So I'll skip ahead.

Now we get to the interesting dichotomy: Lunar vs. Solar.

On the one hand, the Lunars champion a more elegant simplicity rooted in a lower population tribal model. Life is hard and harsh, but that means evolution can function again to help humanity grow stronger and more capable of surviving whatever apocalypse the enemies of the world can unleash. The Lunar tribal model eschews the trap of non-local interdependency brought by widespread commerce and replaces the deceptions of so-called civilized etiquette with tested meritocracy and straightforward taboo laws. As heroes, the Lunars are very Norse heroes, whose heroism is rooted in the delicate balance between bravery and cunning.

On the other hand, Solars are the Lawgivers. They build civilizations, utopias, dreams made manifest. They build shining cities and skyships and geomantic power distributors for the weather machines that let the crops grow year round. They build agriculture, commerce, tiered bureucracies enchanted for efficiency and warded against corruption. They are like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Daedelus and Aeneas, visionary god-kings of unlimited potential. But their way creates sophistication, inequity of social classes, irrelevance of mortal meritocracy compared with Solar grandeur and the power of Solar magic to elevate the lowliest but favored to greatness over the wisest and noblest.

Even setting aside the futures that the Sidereals or Terrestrials would shape, the Solar and Lunar models each have their pros and cons. But they can't both win. So, subjective morality time. Who should win, the Norse or the Greeks?

(taken from this thread on rpg.net http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=247462 )