Thus Spake Zargrabowski/DBsVsSolars

>>>Well, the major problem I have with Exalted as-written is that the Solars are very, very iffy "heroes." The hubris and stupidity that drove the Sidereals to overthrow them are still present.<<<

As people have pointed out, the heroism of Exalted is heroism in the classical sense -- excellence beyond that of mortal men. I'm not interested in heroism in the modern sense, which pretty much means being a paragon of the the ideology of the person dubbing you a hero. Actual protagonists in actual epics are often pretty questionable people, and I didn't want to discard that sort of richness and replace it with silver age comicbook morality.

For starters, it limits the setting and narrows the range of characters available for play and the kind of stories you can tell, and just generally makes things too easy -- when the questions about methods and motives go out the window, it's pretty much just a matter of taking your enemies out of play and waiting for the credits to roll. Also, it's much easier for the Storyteller to take the moral ambiguity out rather than it is to put it back in. If you want to run a game of Exalted where one particular faction is heroic and everyone else is villainous, it's trivial. Just take the political rhetoric of one faction and make it actual situation of the setting -- the people you want to be the heroes are actually nice people and everyone else is a villain or dupe whose opinions are either self-serving lies, dangerous delusions or plainly malevolent designs.

>>>Right now, we have no reason to believe that the Solars would be any better rulers than the DB are now.<<<

Nope, and if you're a collaborationist, a devout Immaculate, a patrician resident of the Blessed Isle or someone else who has a vested interest in the system as it stands, that's probably a good reason to oppose them. However, there are plenty of people in the setting -- the disenfranchised of the Realm, the poor or nationalistic inhabitants of the Threshold and various beings whose personal ambitions are checked by the imperial presence -- who would argue that the system was set up for no purpose other than the enrichment of the Dragon-Blooded and the preservation of their power. While the Solars might not do better, it would generally be hard for them to do worse from the perspective of the people who support them. Once you're starving and totally disenfranchised, the threat of death or loss of station doesn't really mean anything.

>>>Hell, if I'd been around during the First Age, I'd have probably supported the Sidereal/Dragon-Blooded coup myself. The Solar heirarchy simply didn't deserve rulership.<<<

The motive for the murder of the Solars was that it was risky to try to actually do something about the problems of the time. Rather than grapple with the difficult problems which their infallible astrology told them were on the horizon, the Sidereals took the simple way out and murdered the problem. They wrecked their Vingean supermagic society because it was easier than working to save it, and made up a religion that teaches that the Dragon-Blooded are spiritually advanced near-bodhissatvas who rule by divine right. Then Dragon-Blooded daimyo fought Dragon-Blooded daimyo for centuries, squandering their legacy of power, until the Great Contagion (guess that astrology wasn't infallible after all, huh?) killed 90% of the population, opened the gate to the armies of the Fair Folk, and wiped away the decaying remains of the First Age almost completely.

You can make an argument that killing the Solars was a painful necessity. What came afterwards pretty much deprives the Dragon-Blooded and Sidereals of any claim to the moral high ground.

>>>So why should my Solar PC deserve it now?<<<

Force majeure? It's not like the Dragon-Blooded have a particular mantle of legitimacy other than a religion they made up and bunch of demigods with military training.

The point of this isn't to prove you wrong, it's to provide an alternative view of things. I don't think the game would be as interesting if the positions of the various Exalted factions weren't all at least somewhat tenable.

Geoffrey C. Grabowski
Exalted Developer, WWGS
raindog@white-wolf.com

Comments

Anyone know what Vingean supermagic is? -MeiRen

Vernor Vinge was a sci-fi writer who (among other things) wrote about what would happen to the human race if a self-improving AI were developed. It's the general "your technology has advanced faster than your ability to control it" idea. It's just that the Solars had supermagic instead of rapidly evolving AI. Qzujak49

Note that Vinge was looking forward to this, not warning about it -Fade