FrivYeti/AttackRant
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Whenever defense discussions come up, someone always hauls out that "Page 179" chestnut, and uses a sentence from the page to justify their explanation of why you can defend against blizzards / Essence inversion / speeches / starvation with a Seven Shadow Evasion. They say, "Hey. Look at Exalted 2e's corebook, page 179. "An attack is an effect that damages or changes the Exalt's body, mind, spirit or traits." Therefore this is an attack, and you can use a perfect defense against it.
This is wrong.
This is, in fact, wrong on multiple levels, but I'm going to explain simply. First, when you are discussing something, it is critical to see what it says in context. The context of that sentence is how to adjudicate conflicting explanations within two Charms. It defines "attack" and "defense", with quotation marks no less, solely for the purpose of its own explanation of how things work. It goes on to specify that this only applies in situations where the descriptions of the Charms are already in conflict.
Now, with that in mind, we move on to point two - the same word is often defined differently in Exalted. If a Charm allows you to make (Essence) attacks, you do not assume that it gives you attacks based on your Essence pool. If a Charm costs 5 Essence to use, it generally means someone dropped the word 'mote' without thinking about it.
Now. Check Page 142. Specifically, check the combat action called 'Attack'. In this passage, an attack is defined as an action taken to attack someone, resolved using the combat resolution chart. This is a definition of attack that does not in any way relate to the definition of attack from Page 179, because attack means something different in a combat situation than it does in a Charm-conflict situation.
Most combat Charms define their actions in terms of combat situations. Many Charms create attacks. Some Charms, in fact, create attacks that do not qualify as attacks according to the definition of "attack" under Page 179 (Throat-Baring Hold, for example, fails to do anything to an Exalt's body, mind, spirit or Traits). At the same time, many combat defenses respond to these attacks. These Charms are interacting with combat definitions.
To use another example, if I were to use the same line of "logic" from whatever imbecile first started the whole Page 179 thing, I could pull out the following quote: "If an attack does not have a raw damage greater than the victim's Hardness, the attack is utterly ineffective". It's on Page 149. Therefore, since social attacks are attacks, and social combat uses Steps 7 and 8 of combat but inflicts no damage, having a Hardness of 1 renders you immune to social attacks.
Ta-dah!
Basically, you shouldn't take quotes from one section of text and apply them to another area unless they say that they are meant to apply to that area. You doubly shouldn't do this when you are taking a definition for a term that is used differently in two places, and only using one of those two terms.
If you have any questions, too bad. This is a copy-pasted essay response, created because I can only just take the ten seconds of effort needed to drop it into the thread.
