General Exalted Discussion Thread X: Playground Cosmic Principle

[Drascin]

Bah, Warhammer 40k is much darker. Exalted is light compared to the real grimdark I've seen.

Wrong. 40K is harsher, more dangerous, more brutal, but when it comes to the stories themselves, it is not darker. In 40K, sometimes heroes are focused upon, and revered. They're rare, but for that, they become a focus. Ciaphas Cain, who for all his cowardice tries to do the right thing, is treated as admirable by the writers, not laughed at. The Salamanders are an entire chapter of Space Marines who champion the common man above the grim necessity, and they are never treated as being anything other than goddamn awesome badasses for standing up like that.

Compare Creation. In Exalted, heroes (in the current sense, not the Exalted sense) are treated like doomed idiots who can't see the writing on the wall and who will never amount to anything before getting screwed by the "realistic" people, or worse, will certainly make thing worse because idealism and morals are for kids or idiots. Creation Gandhi does not exist, and if he existed, he would be laughed at, be an idiot, or unwittingly threaten to doom the universe. Writers spend pages upon pages detailing how horrible First Age Solars and Lunars were, and then give off a couple sentences of "oh, and I guess there were a few people who weren't so bad, maybe". Good people are, basically, not important in Exalted.

Creation is every bit as doomed as the galaxy of 40K, but it seems the writers of 40K, as terrible as they are with things like prose or basic sense of scale, understand that sometimes people need someone to empathize with.

So no, Exalted does not deal in shades of grey all that much. Seirei no Moribito deals in shades of grey. Hell, even Etrian Odyssey 3 does shades of grey better than most of Exalted and EO probably has less wordcount dedicated to story than a single small softcover supplement. Exalted is just a world where everyone is an *******. And despite what World of Darkness may try to convince us of, a world of *******s does not actually make for shades of grey .

Well, except in Autochthonia. Autochthonia is cool precisely because it speaks of the writers finally understanding how shades of grey work. It is a place full of people with good intention trying to improve their lot and that of those around them, and coming into horrible conflict for it, and a couple monsters on the side. That is how you do shades of grey. Grey means you can see the point of all sides, it means difficult moral decisions. It does not mean a world of cartoon villains who nobody in their right mind would want to work with, like First Agers, the Yozis, the Deathlords, Ma-Ha-Suchi, Raksi, the revealed Empress, the Bull, etc, etc, etc.

Or, heck, to sum up and give a tl;dr, I'll just quote myself from one of the threads Tavar linked:

Many books have portrayed Creation as such a horrible, filled-with-myopic-*******s place that when reading them one can't help but wonder if the Neverborn have a point in the "just blow up everything" bit. In the real world there are good people, bad people, and most people in the spectrum inbetween trying to do their best with varied consequences. In ****dark Creation, everyone is an out-for-himself sociopath which you have to squint really hard to see any redeeming features to, and "altruistic" and "delusional" are used interchangeably. Like Holden said, a monotone crapness where there is almost nothing worth fighting for, not that there's anybody in the whole world who would be bothered to stop filling his own pockets for a second to come help fight for it anyway.

This does not, shall we say, exactly motivate players to heroics.