Quote Originally Posted by Kyeudo View Post
However, when it comes to Exalts fleeing, on a narative level, the hero escaping a losing battle or a villian living to be a threat later on is a commonly reoccuring trope and a useful plot device, on a setting level this feels wrong. Exalts usually have some investment in the outcome of a fight. If a Solar and an Abyssal clash in a village somewhere, the Solar has to win or the village will be slaughtered. The Abyssal has to win to create that shadowland he needs to advance his plan to take over Nexus. From an IC perspective, neither can afford to run from this fight until it is clear that they cannot win and even then the outcome of retreating may be worse to the Exalt than death. Can you honestly see a Compassion 5 Temperence 1 Exalt abandoning a village of innocents in their hour of need?

And when it does become clear one of them cannon win, how the heck is the loser going to effect his escape? He's probably empty on Essence and down a health level or two at the least. He has nothing availible to run. If you give him some sort of costless "escape clause" Charm, why didn't he use it in combat already to outmanuver his opponent? How do you make it easier to run away from someone while wounded than to chase down a wounded opponent? It just doesn't work on a mechanical level.
If I were burning Exalted to the ground...
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...and remaking it into its ultimate, glorious self that bears no resemblance to its previous incarnations, I'd implement a conflict resolution system similar to Mouse Guard.

Step 1: Both participants state what their Goal is. Why they're fighting. It can't be "So I can kill the other guy". In this case, Solar Bob's would be "Defend the inhabitants of his village", and Abyssal Melvin's would be "Slaughter the villagers".

Step 2: Fight. (You would have something like a Disposition score, that slides back and forth to represent how well you're doing.)

Step 3: Compare how well the loser did before they lost. If the winner had almost no Disposition left, then the loser gets a Major Compromise. If he had some left, a Moderate Compromise. If he had very little taken away at all, the loser gets a Minor Compromise. And if the loser did nothing against the winner, then he gets no compromise at all.

To use the above example, if Melvin wins, he gets what he wants and the villagers are slaughtered. However, if Bob gets a Major Compromise, then maybe he severely wounded Melvin and now Melvin won't be able to plague the area for a while, and Bob can go forth to hunt him down more easily later, and he managed to distract Melvin enough that a small number of villagers were able to hide in a cellar so the whole town isn't destroyed.

If Bob got a moderate compromise, maybe he gets the above, but is also severely wounded in the process.

If Bob got a minor compromise, maybe he's wounded and only gets one of the above.

If Bob got no compromise, then maybe he managed to fight off the Abyssal, but not before Melvin killed everyone down to the last man, woman, and child.

Why didn't Melvin kill him too? Maybe Bob used his Essence to appear like a much scarier foe than he really was, and only after Melvin left, did Bob collapse in a broken heap. Maybe Melvin kicked him 6 miles away, and Bob woke up several hours later in a crater. Maybe Melvin just decided he'd rather leave the Solar to bleed out a bit before coming back and finishing him off at leisure. Maybe, in his Abyssal cruelty, Melvin left Bob to contemplate his horrible failure because the mental anguish of others makes Melvin happy.

All of these examples could go lots of different ways, with lots of different compromises and circumstances, and uses of context that would be present in a longer campaign but aren't in short-lived examples.

I think abstraction is definitely the way to go.

The only problem is that it does take a bit of convincing. I've met a lot of people who sneer at this pretty much automatically. They play stuff like D&D, and White Wolf, and GURPS, and BESM, and complain about lethality, or lack of player agency (usually not in those words), or anticlimactic moments, or how things feel "unfair", or how most social systems feel like "mind control", but then you give them the solution and they assume it'll be terrible and unfun without even giving it a chance.

Abstraction in roleplaying games. It's a good thing.