OSSR: Exalted: The Infernals

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OSSR: Exalted: The Infernals

Post by Username17 »

OSSR: Exalted 2nd Edition

Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals

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No.

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Definitely not.

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Closer.

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There we go.
Frank

The Infernals is a comic made by punk and metal musician (and all around douchebag) Glenn Danzig. This has almost nothing to do with what we are talking about today, which instead will be The Infernals the splat book for Exalted 2nd edition. This is a thing that came out in 2009, so it's ten years old and practically begging for an OSSR. Now the first question you probably have is “Wait, didn't White Wolf go bankrupt before 2009?” and the answer to that question is of course Yes it did. “The Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals” is a book that was produced by the White Wolf remnant after the IP had been purchased up by an Icelandic videogame company and before they actually shut down the print studio altogether. This is a book whose primary purpose was to keep people employed, which is why five people are listed as the primary author. The creative director is Richard Thomas, who went on to become Onyx Path and spew out even more of this shovelware crap by taking the funding stream directly to Kickstarter. But that's another tale for another day.

We're going to be tackling this as a tag team. I will of course be on “Team Rage,” while I believe K is batting for “Team There's Some Good Stuff Buried In Here and It's Basically Worth Reading.” Neither one of us are under even the slightest illusion that the game system presented in any edition of Exalted is remotely “worth playing” or that the fluff “makes sense” on any metric. So if you were hoping that one of us was going to do some kind of complicated gloss to explain how it all “works” or tie ourselves in knots to create some sort of apologetic framework to excuse this piece of shit, that hope was in vain. Go to Big Purple if you want someone to self-refutingly defend White Wolf branded output from the post-bankruptcy shovelware period. K is going to be calling out turds that can be polished, and I'm going to be calling out deal breakers that should have gotten everyone involved with this project permabanned from the entire industry.

This book is somewhere between 218 and 226 pages long, depending on how you count comics and art spreads. It has an Introduction, seven numbered chapters, and several comic interludes. We're going to try to tackle this in about eight posts.
K:

I think that it's important to remember that this book sits squarely in the spiked cocktail that is the Exalted system: whatever promises it makes are lies and whatever treasures it holds were clearly unintentional. The things that are compelling about it do not override the flaws and there is no point where I have ever even imagined that I was going to convince someone to even play it ironically as a one-shot.

Clearly, this product is the result of a team that had decided that rules frameworks, whether moral or design, were for squares and yes-men, and basically did whatever they felt like. The lack of editorial restraint is the cause of all of the problems, but also makes this one of the more interesting Exalted products. I'll point out places where themes and ideas are straight improvements over the base system of Exalted, and then move on with my life.
Frank

The Infernals did not exist as an independent faction in First Edition Exalted.
K:

I think first edition had the Abyssals who were the baddies whenever the generally asshole Solars were not bad enough, or the government asshole Dragonbloods, or the asshole and crazy Lunars, or the asshole dick Sidereals…well, you get the point. In second edition, the Abyssals are still around as evil nihilists and perverts, but I guess it's hard to twirl a mustache when your face is rotted off, so the Infernals are added into the mix to be pureblooded evil perverts who are double bad.

Heck, maybe someone decided that they wanted to play Inuyasha from Inuyasha or Dante from Devil May Cry, or at least have him to kick around. That would be a laudable goal if the execution had not been so botched.
Frank

There are two kinds of Infernals: the Green Sun Princes and the Akuma. This book is primarily for playing Green Sun Princes, who are further divided into five flavors: Slayers, Malefactors, Defilers, Scourges, and Fiends. Now there are supposed to be fifty of these fuckers total, so remember while we're reading this book that each one of these motherfuckers is the member of a “group” whose members you could count on your fingers with fingers left over. The number of characters so described is in fact so minuscule that this entire book could have dispensed with categories altogether and simply wrote up a backstory and game mechanics for every single fucking Infernal. Had they given themselves four pages for each Infernal for a character bio, full page art, character sheet, and complete explanation of magic powers, the book would be like twenty pages shorter than it actually is.

So rather than bash my head into this point repeatedly for every chapter and every declaration of numbers, we'll just make a standing complaint: The Infernals are even more “The Anime Club at your Highschool” than the other flavors of Exalted are. All of the “categories” and “typing” of the Exalted are stupid and myopic considering how few of these characters are supposed to exist in this setting, but it's legitimately even worse than that for the Infernals. Similarly, the entire Jade Prison event happened like last Thursday and there is zero reason for any of the social dynamics described in this book to have happened.

In a broader sense, there's honestly not really any reason for this book to exist at all. This book is the second edition of a book that literally doesn't exist. In the first edition, there weren't separate Infernals at all, the various fallen Solars were lumped into a single category. But some time after White Wolf went under someone decided that they could get an additional shovelware book out of splitting the villains into two groups that were just that much more unique. The quest for more shovelware topics had by that point become all-consuming: this book's credits page contains teaser blurbs for more shovelware that covers parts of the setting that had also previously been thought completely unnecessary. Seriously: it's a fatsplat book for the fucking robots on the moon, and Celestial Compass Direction Book Five. That last one is not something I made up, despite there obviously not being a fifth direction on the Compass. It's not even the fifth direction book (the fifth direction book was “North”), it's the fifth Celestial Direction book that they made after they ran out of real directions. It's the fucking tenth location book put out in a series about locations whose fucking central metaphor was the four directions.

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The Rabbit Hole is very deep.

Despite the fact that five authors is a small enough group that you could get everyone on board with a specific viewpoint, and that the entire cadre of Infernals is so small that all the groups are a rounding error on zero in the amount of world space actually allocated to them, there's absolutely no sense of unified vision anywhere in this book. It's very clear that Richard Thomas didn't even try. A team of five writers is easy enough to manage – you could get them all into a car and drive around talking until major disputes were ironed out. But Infernals did not have a team of five authors, it literally has five different primary authors and it's clear as day that some of them weren't really talking to any of the others.
K:

If I had to guess, I'd say that this book exists as a secret sourcebook for Eclipse charms. Abyssal charms are so close to Solar charms that they count as prerequisites for each other and spirit charms are mostly all worse than Solar charms, so there needed to be a sourcebook for actually useful charms to justify the double cost.

That being said, the fact that Exalted books are wildly shallow is a pretty big deal. It really paints you into a corner when want to have a viable business that involves writing RPG books because it means that any deep dive into any particular part involves a much more skilled setting and game designer, which is this case was not someone they had on staff. It was easier to just do another Exalted than to expand on anything else.

As for the numbers of Green Sun Princes (GSP), I figure that the actual numbers are kind of meaningless. The Yozis mindfuck the Green Sun Princes with heavy memory alternations during Exaltation, so the GSPs can have a new culture installed every time a new set of them Exalt, which I expect is pretty often since they are bound by Infernal Limit to act like caricature villains out of a cartoon. Honestly, I don't see how they live longer than a year in most circumstances. While the number is rated at 50, there might have been hundreds in the five years they are supposed to have been around.

Infernal-as-suicide-bomber would have been a lot more interesting hot take.

I also have a personal theory that all of the fluff can just be considered elaborate stories with little veracity, meaning that the actual number of any kind of Exalted might be vastly higher or lower, but I think this might be a bad case of mind-caulk on my part. Certainly, the fluff would work better if the actual details were not binding at all because there are lots of internal conflicts here.
Frank

The quality of the art in this book varies tremendously. Some of it is quite good, some of it looks like something I could do. A lot of it looks like it was half-assed or phoned in at whatever skill level the artist happened to have. Much of this is presumably because credited artists outnumber credited authors five to one. That is, there are twenty-five people credited as doing the art. And that's not even including the studios credited with doing the art. So like, two of the peoples' names are included in a parenthetical after Imaginary Friends Studios and eight people are credited in parentheticals after Groundbreakers Studios. In addition to large differences in skill between the artists, there is also large differences in give a shit between the artists. Some of these people are subcontractors of subcontractors and really couldn't care less.

The book opens with a comic that is about... vampire airpirates I think. It's not terribly clear. Exalted books tend to open with comics because of branding issues. The amount of actual setting and genre conveyed by this comic is really very little. Sometimes people say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but that's only if you get a good exchange rate. This comic is like the exchange rate you get at the airport, and I feel pretty strongly that you could have gotten across a lot more information in a single paragraph.

Chapters also begin, or perhaps end, with two page comics. They come before the heading saying that the chapter has started, so maybe they are supposed to be attached to the previous chapter? In any case, there's one before the Introduction, which has nothing to really be attached to that's before that, unless it's supposed to be part of the credits. The first comic is a two pager about a vampire infiltrator who has joined some government body and who is about to kill someone who was trying to expose her.

The only thing you really get from the first couple of comics is that these guys are basically vampires.
K:

I thought the air-pirate was an Inuyasha puppy-demon guy.

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Claws. Fangs. Funky eyes. Demon Blood. Check, check, check, and check.

Does anyone read the comics? I mean, none of them are even good at relaying the flavor or have a coherent narrative. Maybe just cheap art and bewbs?

That being said, how cool would an air-pirate book have been? Sigh.

Chapter Zero: Introduction

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We could get all Jaggery on this, but we won't.
Frank

Considering how much verbage is spilled on this book and how shovelwarey the entire project is, it surprises the hell out of me that this Introduction is only two pages long. I can only assume that whoever wrote the introduction wasn't being paid by the word and did not have a quota to fill. So you get a single paragraph of setup and then it immediately jumps into the “How to Use This Book” section. There is zero explanation of how to use this book in that section, there is in fact zero preamble in that section, and it is in fact 100% composed of a telegraphic description of what is in each chapter. Nothing in that section tells you how to use this book. As will be revealed later on, the various authors were sharply divided about what the actual fuck this book was supposed to be used for, and when someone decided that the book needed a “How to Use This Book” section, no one decided to try to canonize their vision and instead all we ever get is an abbreviated chapter summary. Does it even rate mentioning that the chapter summary gets the name and contents of the first chapter wrong?

This is not a small issue. The introduction contains a sidebar called “This Is Not a Complete Game!” that explains that you can't play this game without the main Exalted book that is itself about creating and playing Solars, who are a different kind of character altogether.
Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals wrote:This supplement just gives in-depth information about the Infernal Exalted, their society, their activities and the rules necessary to create and play Infernal characters. You’ll need to consult the Exalted core book in order to play.
The core issue of course is that if this book doesn't tell us enough to play the game, and the book that does tell us how to play the game makes no allowance at all for these characters, how do we play these characters? This is a fundamental paradox and this book has no answer.

Exalted is just basically unplayable anyway, but the fundamental assumptions of the game, such as they are, pretty much exclude the players actually using any of the material in any of the books about non-Solars. There are rules for making and playing the characters from the other Exalted types, except that there actually aren't because they aren't complete in their own book and the book they want you to defer to writes them off as a possibility. It's a weird uncomfortable halfway point between oWoD where all the splats were stand-alone games and nWoD where all the splats refer to one core book. In Exalted all the splats are unplayable without the core book, but they are still fundamentally different games from the core book and none of them end up being particularly usable.
K:

I feel like an Exalted game is basically supposed to be a game of subjective challenges where you pick things at chargen and the Storyteller gives you a game that fits your choices. It's like Fate, but you need to read a million words of useless mechanics before you figure out that the rules consist of you asking the Storyteller to not make a game of objective challenges for you to face because nothing in the system is built for that.

That being said, there are a lot of objective failure points. Choosing different charms than your peers is bad, but playing something other than a Solar in a game with Solars is also very bad. Solars are the best at anything you want to do as an RPG character.

Green Sun Princes are slightly shittier Solars with more options, so you can almost justify doing that. They certainly have more interesting flavor, so as bad choices go, I'm not going to go too hard on you.
Frank

The Lexicon takes up most of a page, includes twenty five terms, and aptly demonstrates that the authors did not agree on terminology or metaphysics before writing this thing. It's possible for a person to be “Yozi-Kin” and “Demon-Blood” and “Akuma” all at the same time, and you could be a “Hellspawn” instead of a “Yozi-Kin” but also you could be a “Hell-Spawn” and also not be an Akuma. And I already don't care! This terminological inexactitude makes the rage rise up within me.
K:

Yes, they don't know how words work. If it makes you feel better, this problem is in every book.
Frank

Now for the rape-bug elephant in the room: the comic at the end of the Introduction. Or maybe it's supposed to be the prologue comic for Chapter One. I don't fucking care, we're talking about it now. It's two pages long, and I am not going to post it because it violates the terms of service of this message board. Yes. Really.

This comic is pornography. I don't mean that it's erotic, because I certainly don't find it erotic. I mean that it is literally pornography. Despite its short length, it manages to achieve the following “porn tags,” which I will recite in order of increasing squick value:
  • BBW, Incest, Rape, Bestiality, Pedo, Guro
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If you don't know what some of those tags mean, I strongly suggest that you keep it that way. I mean, you could look them up, but this is not a point in your life where dispelling ignorance is going to make you a happier person. Quite the opposite.

There's no excuse for including this in a book for a mass market book to have this kind of thing at all. It's so Edge Lordy that there is no redemption or forgiveness possible for this or any person who worked on this. It's like if someone included a 2Girls1Cup link in the middle of a reference book. The book literally Goatsees you on page 16.
K:

I really hate to have any defense here, but they call the bloated girl-thing "Mother" and "Sister" as a title and not a description because she is clearly Lillun, the Empress's daughter, who carried the Infernal Exhaltations after… Oh fuck, can I back out of this sentence and wash my eyes with bleach at the same time? No fucking excuses.

So yeh, totally fucked up.

Where most of Exalted is classic anime-themed where a graphic sexual assault might just get tossed in like in Akira or Ninja Scrolls, this book is the hentai one. It’s the worst stuff. The worst.

If it is any consolation, there is nothing here thematically that can be salvaged. It is one thing to grant that the demons are doing fucked-up shit off-screen, but there is no profit in spelling it out and adding drawings of it unless you've decided that cornering the lucrative sex criminal market is your goal.

I skip these parts. You should too.
Frank

On that note... next time we will do Chapter One: Green Sun Princes. Which is erroneously labeled “The Infernal Exalted” in the chapter summary which is itself erroneously labeled “How to Use This Book.”
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Post by OgreBattle »

I read a Gengoroh manga with a Minotaur that kinda sounds like that but intentionally humorous instead of edgy
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Re: OSSR: Exalted: The Infernals

Post by Thaluikhain »

FrankTrollman wrote:and Celestial Compass Direction Book Five. That last one is not something I made up, despite there obviously not being a fifth direction on the Compass. It's not even the fifth direction book (the fifth direction book was “North”), it's the fifth Celestial Direction book that they made after they ran out of real directions. It's the fucking tenth location book put out in a series about locations whose fucking central metaphor was the four directions.
Um...what? That's either painfully clever or painfully stupid, and I think I can guess which one.
FrankTrollman wrote:Now for the rape-bug elephant in the room: the comic at the end of the Introduction. Or maybe it's supposed to be the prologue comic for Chapter One. I don't fucking care, we're talking about it now. It's two pages long, and I am not going to post it because it violates the terms of service of this message board. Yes. Really.

This comic is pornography. I don't mean that it's erotic, because I certainly don't find it erotic. I mean that it is literally pornography. Despite its short length, it manages to achieve the following “porn tags,” which I will recite in order of increasing squick value:
  • BBW, Incest, Rape, Bestiality, Pedo, Guro
That seems an amazingly bad idea. I mean, yes, obviously, but aren't you risking bringing down the wrath of potential customers, consumer groups and law enforcement (at least in some jurisdictions you might want to have been able to sell to), for no real gain you couldn't get just by being normally edgy?
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Post by Whipstitch »

What bums me out about this is knowing the factions are so small that there's presumably no more than a dozen boobie nuns, tops. That's probably not even enough for Koumei to get a proper dormitory pillow fight fantasy out of the deal.
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Post by OgreBattle »

That seems like a plus given that exalted is supposed to be I think a game of a few god heroes

Like there were only a few androids that wrecked the earth in Trunk’s future then Buu is the only Buu type monster for that arc and reforming him with puppy was meaningful for Satan
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Post by Whipstitch »

One thing that makes DBZ work though is that the non and half-aliens in Goku's crew are still culturally earthlings. Goku's a goofball with an extremely weird upbringing but he wears clothes, eats noodles and has a wife who wants their kids to go to college. The show is extremely weird, but it doesn't front like a dozen people constitutes an entire alternate faction with its own cultural mores, which is something White Wolf games consistently struggle with.

I mean, I don't know to what extent that applies to Exalted, but I've been disappointed by WW enough times that I fear the worst with these things.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

I'd agree that having supernaturals participate in society generally, even if the PCs don't, that's probably better in terms of giving clear adventure seeds. Always playing in the 'secret society' that nobody else knows is pretty limiting; tying your secret society into larger 'organized crime syndicates' gives you a bunch of 'fixer' missions that aren't explicitly against supernaturals.

And I'm all for giving your supernatural a reason to disrupt a white supremacist drug dealing motor cycle gang.
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Post by Username17 »

Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals

Chapter One: Green Sun Princes

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Almost literally exactly this.

Frank

The fact that this book is intended as edgelordy poetry to the exclusion of actually being a playable game is perhaps perfectly summated by the fact that the first chapter is called “Green Sun Princes”. I mean, you obviously are not going to call your character a “Green Sun Prince Malefactor” in game, because you just obviously are not going to do that. This is part of a larger design issue where things having poetic and evocative names is “kind of cool” but things having names that are remotely functional is required for well, any kind of function. At all.

It's not enough to create some wicked cool names or wicked cool characters or wicked cool sweater patterns or whatever the fuck you think is awesome. Role playing games are technical documents, and people have to fucking use them to communicate with other people and tell cooperative stories. The purpose of an RPG book, if it is to have any purpose at all, is to present the reader of the book with a common language that they can use to communicate ideas within the story and the game to other players.

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Bonus points if using this common language in public is merely inscrutable rather than getting the FBI called on your ass.

Needless to say, no one seems to have seriously considered this fact of RPG existence when creating any part of this book. All the GSP character classes are named things that are pulled out of the thesaurus and are synonyms of each other. The bondage nuns are called “Malefactors” and the air pirates are called “Scourges” but I had to look that up while I was writing this, because those words don't mean different things. If our evil bondage nun had been called a “Scourge” and out evil air pirate had been called a “Malefactor” nothing would be different. The terminology is simply not helpful. At all. For anything.

More generally, there isn't much to hang your hat on as far as moving parts that the players of the game can meaningfully grapple with. Most of the provided missions are for individuals rather than groups, and there is no discussion at all about how different character abilities work together to promote anything in particular.

The proposed character classes are Barbarian, Crab-Mummy, Air-Pirate, Bondage-Nun, and Sex-Ninja. Which is a weirdly specific and unhelpful set of character classes. But their names are all interchangeable thesaurus pulls. Is there a reason that Fiend is Sex-Ninja and not Crab-Mummy? Is there a reason that Defiler is Crab-Mummy and not Bondage-Nun? Is there a reason that Malefactor is Bondage-Nun and not Air-Pirate? No. The class names could have been assigned by the roll of dice.
K:

I think the characters in the art are iconics like Pathfinder uses, so instead of Mialee you get Sex-ninja.
This chapter is the second least-interesting part of the book, so we'll get through it as we can.

Frank

The GSP chapter is 31 pages long, but almost all of that chapter is not about GSPs and is instead about five really awesome dudes that you aren't going to ever play, fight, or really even meaningfully interact with. There are five main Yozis that the book concerns itself with, and they have awesome names that look like they were rolled up on an awesome name table: Malfeas, Cecelyne, She Who Lives In Her Name, Adorjan, and The Ebon Dragon. It isn't just that these five super demons get a lot of text. It's that they get absolutely more text than anything and indeed everything else in this fucking chapter.

It's not just that there are long screeds about shit that the Yozi did in the before-time and more long screeds about what the Yozis did in the before-before-time when they were called Primordials, and that the GSPs have only actually existed since last Thursday and all of that historical stuff is basically irrelevant to the GSPs – it's that every time it does have a section devoted to even nominally telling you something about GSPs it is directly paired with a Yozi rant of equal length. If the chapter bothers to tell you about Scourges for three paragraphs, it also has a subsection that is specifically about Adorjan the Yozi that is also three paragraphs right next to it. But then on top of that, in the three paragraphs labeled “The Scourges,” the Scourges themselves are referenced four times and Adorjan is referenced five times by name (and referenced by pronoun fucking six times on top of that).

Despite the fact that this book is supposed to be about the Infernal Exalted and that this chapter in specific is supposed to be about the Green Sun Princes, none of the authors seem to much care about that shit and are instead caught in their own little worlds ranting about their favorite Yozis. It's like listening to an obsessed toddler or a drug addict, constantly veering all topics back to Spiderman or heroin respectively. A paragraph that starts with the nominal thesis sentence “The Green Sun Princes fill a unique position in the hierarchy of the demon realm” still goes on to mention the Yozi Cecelyne three fucking times. The whole chapter is like Alyson Hannigan's character from American Pie, except that instead of constantly inserting stories about band camp, it interrupts everything with stories about one of the five Yozis that the authors fap to.

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This is probably where I should point out that the Yozi are inspired by Magic the Gathering cards from 1997. The Ebon Dragon was a Portal card first and then got written into Kindred of the East, and then got back-ported into Exalted a few years later as part of the World of Darkness // Exalted crossover clues shit. Gradually he became a more and more important character in the mythos of Exalted, and by the time of The Manual of Exalted Power: The Infernals, you have fans of the old material writing the new material and it's basically all self referential gibberish all the way down.

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Where it all started.

It's not even a good card, it's just something some guy in Atlanta thought had a cool name when he was writing pseudo-Chinese shit for Vampire in 1998.
K:

Well, all of the Exalted books start with a rant about the before-times and the Primordials, usually tailored to whatever the particular part of the Primordial War that the Exalted the book talks about were involved in as a way of setting the scene. This is the "frustrated-writer-who-is-pretending-to-make-an-RPG section" where the backstory the author's aborted novel gets shat out, and its only notable in Exalted because of the weirdness and inappropriateness of content. Pull out a Forgotten Realms supplement and you'll get thousands of words of history that the PCs will never interact with.

The interesting bit is how none of the details in one Exalted book really match up to other books, or they refer to events from a different perspective. This is where I get my "unreliable narrator" mind-caulk.

The focus on the Yozi's and not the GSPs is important because there are going to be MTP-ish mechanics that are going to rely on knowing how the various Yozi's think and act, so getting stories about them is actually useful in some small way. A weak tea way, but a way.
Frank

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The cooperative storytelling game that is an RPG necessarily creates differently structured stories than books or movies. And nowhere is that more obvious than in the imperative to “not split the party.” In books or movies, characters split off all the time so that individual characters can be more fully developed or the relationships between specific characters can be explored. Sometimes characters leave shows for whole seasons and come back later, and so on and so on. In an RPG, characters are stand-ins for the players who in turn are the collaborating authors of a collaborative story. If one of the ensemble protagonists isn't around for a scene, that character's associated player is not normally able to contribute to the story – there's now a person at the table who basically isn't even playing the game. This isn't a new issue or anything, there are essays about this problem from magazines printed in the 1970s before I was even born.

So it's kind of weird how little give-a-shit this book seems to spend on this issue. Indeed, when it mentions the dynamics of getting the player characters together and keeping them together, the authors write in additional impediments rather than solutions. The Slayers and the Defilers are stationed on opposite ends of Creation (literally). When a new character is made, they are introduced to all the previously existing characters of their own character class (who are virtually by definition NPCs) and zero of the contemporaneous characters of other character classes (the demographic that would contain any of the other player characters). When GSPs are put together into teams (called “Covens”) the expectation is that they will break up the band as soon as the first mission succeeds or fails.

The authors seem to have simply not gotten the memo where they were supposed to write up even the fucking possibility of playing this as a long running campaign. If I make a bondage nun and you make an air pirate, there is no reason for those characters to know each other or to even be on the same side of the planet. For them to work together, they'd presumably have to get called in to Queen Beryl's throne room and given a joint mission as a Coven. But then after completing a single mission, the expectation would be that my bondage nun and your air pirate would then go their separate ways – the air pirate to go shoot cannons at mountain forts in the North and the bondage nun to go preach Randian philosophy to desert nomads in the South.

Exalted: the Infernals is not playable as anything other than an ironic one-shot. And the authors clearly had no ambition for it to be anything more than that. Maybe this is a cynical marketing ploy – that the book had a clear expiration date that prevented long use and would get people to go out and buy new books when the robots on the moon book came out. But honestly, that seems too thought out for this product. No, by 2009 the entire Exalted project was nearly nine years old and well deep into its second edition and everyone involved knew that Exalted sold more books than it created lasting campaigns. Obsessively ranting about Yozi minutiae in lieu of writing a playable game was catering to the audience they actually had. In 2009, people who wanted a vaguely playable game were playing Pathfinder if they weren't still playing 3rd edition D&D. Exalted was not part of that conversation, and the people who still bought Exalted books were obsessive collectors and fans of the setting who genuinely wanted the latest gossip on The Ebon Dragon's marriage plans.

So the thing where this book spends a lot more time throwing out hints that the Ebon Dragon in Exalted is the same as the Ebon Dragon in Kindred of the East is a feature for the neck beards that are this book's intended audience. Actually making a remotely playable game was and is irrelevant to these people.
K:

This is a Team Monster Book and is a playable game in the sense that it is a less functional version of the base Exalted game. It's a recognition that monsters and PCs need to be built on the same-ish set of rules, but it commits what I'll just call the Exalted Fallacy from here on out. (The Exalted Fallacy is the design choice where you deliberately make things worse for flavor reasons like the way that Solars are better and more powerful than other kinds of Exalted).

I think the marketing ploy was that some people are going to want to stat up some Infernals as NPCs and will use the book for that, some will use it as a source of Eclipse caste charms, some want another chunk of the history, and the rest are just collectors of art objects for perverts. Honestly, it’s the one thing in the base game Monster section that hadn't been expanded yet, so maybe they were just being completionists.

The end of the book has the bits on how to run an Infernal game within the framework shown here, with some of the options being conventional hero narratives and the others being Grand Theft Auto: Creation/Malfeas Edition. I could see a short-lived campaign doing that as a break from playing Solars in the same way you might want to do a short-lived Dragon-blooded or Lunar campaign.
Frank

Am I the only one who finds the idea of seven or eight bondage nuns creating a “riotous parade” to be inherently hilarious? I hope not. It's a cheap shot that we can make an unlimited number of times throughout this book, but the ludicrously small numbers of people involved in every part of this makes some parts of the chapter unintentionally hilarious. There are less people in the GSPs than in Trump's Whitehouse staff, so whenever it talks about them organizing things that would logically involve a lot of people, it's like “What the actual fuck are you talking about?” Like, every “crowd scene” is like one of those crowd scenes in a cheap movie they show latenite on the USA network – with members of the crew milling about and canned crowd noises that are obviously out of sync with the eight person “crowd” actually shown.
K:

Well, you could be at the head of your demon-monkey army. That sounds like a party to me.

Don't tell me that you don't want a demon-monkey army. Everyone wants one.

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People have wanted a demon monkey army for a long time. History fact.
Frank

Like Scion, much of Exalted spends its time giving extended rants about various authors ruminating about free will and determinism. This shit makes absolutely zero fucking sense. It made no sense in Scion, it made no sense in Exalted, and let's be honest – it really didn't make any sense in Matrix Reloaded or in the Bible. Free Will is a dumb concept that can't be independently verified without functional time travel and has no consequences on how the universe is or ought to be. Everything around you, including coherent arguments about moral behaviors and responses to actions and events do not change whether or not Free Will actually exists in any form.

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Because Matrix Reloaded was too dumb for me to remember how to get good memes from it.

Every sentence and paragraph that The Infernals wastes on talking about the subtle gradations between slavery and freedom is time that you, the reader, cannot ever get back. There are few certainties in the universe, but one of them is that your entire life is an extended and inexorable march to death and every moment you spend reading or contemplating some sophomoric ruminations on the nature of free will are moments that are lost like tears into the abyss. You can never return, you can never recover, it just brings you ever closer to your eventual death and you will have nothing to show for it except the bitter realization that Richard Thomas' philosophical chops have always been laughably poor.
K:

The Infernals are slaves, so I think at least some musings on free will are important. It doesn't even matter if they are good because RPG players are not prepared for a game actually about free will vs slavery. They are going to skim this section once and never look at it again, so I'm not specifically mad at it.

This book is like an akuma. It's a degraded and inverted and painted on with flavor until you get basically an art of the grotesque piece on how awesome Solars are because the GSPs are so fucked. In a lot of ways, it’s the perfect RPG-that-you-will-only-play-in-your-head because you won't find a group of people who even want the possibility that someone will mention in-character that your character was gang-fucked by all of your patron's Third Circle souls.

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Also, you have a bad head if this is your power fantasy.
Frank

The big Plan of the villains makes essentially no sense at all. They send villains to the surface world to do miscellaneous “bad stuff” and um... that's it. Eventually they break free from Hell. Comparisons to the Underpants Gnomes in Southpark are at this point unavoidable.

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And we didn't bother avoiding them.

The overall goal appears to be to replicate the villains from Sailor Moon or He-Man. Skeletor or Queen Beryl gives their generals some weird vague orders and then a group of villains steps forward with a scheme of the week and then it's off to the races for some setup and a final confrontation with the heroes after the commercial break. Which is... fine? That's a reasonable goal for a game. You could easily imagine doing a Sailor Moon style campaign from the perspective of the villains, where you have a scheme each week and various monsters of the week die after accomplishing something between almost enough and nothing at all, and it gradually builds up to a final confrontation at the series finale where main characters die. But while that sort of thing actually seems like it would write itself, this book somehow fails to grasp this honestly low hanging fruit.

The first failure point is that the goals aren't laid out in a manner that's remotely approachable from the player side. You aren't seizing power sites or breaking seals or killing fated individuals or collecting energy. You're “doing bad stuff” and “wrecking creation.” And that's um... kinda all there is? There's no specific goal. Like, maybe you could arrange for Ma-Ha-Suchi to get raped to death (an actual suggestion which I am in no way making up to make this book look bad – it does not need my help on that front), but there's no discussion of how the rape and murder of an ancient goat-wolf-man would meaningfully alter the prison of the Primordials or advance any goal. It's all “stealing forty cakes” except with more rape.

It's weird for a book this size to be significantly shallower than the Sailor Moon Live Action Series, but that's where we are. I mean, Exalted fans and the authors of Exalted probably think of this shit as “The Adult version of Sailor Moon” but really it's just a superficial pastiche of Sailor Moon tropes with edgelord crap thrown in. I mean, we aren't even at the level of an Alan Moore parody where the Justice League are secretly pedophiles. We're at the level of a Mark Millar parody where Superman is literally made out of poop. Because poop is gross.

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We are basically here.
K:

This Big Plan is that when Creation resembles Malfeas enough, a secret loophole in the pacts binding the Yozi will let them enter Creation at the head of their armies. Some part of that plan is geomantic dragon line schemes, but some is just making the people of Creation miserable in an effort to poison the Essence that flows through everything all the time.

In various other books, you find out that demons regain Essence in places that resonate with "bad" acts, so general badness is understandable except for one thing: it's some pretty low-scales shit that the GSPs are tasked with doing. I don't know how much evil Essence you put out into Creation after destroying the city of Gem, but I'm guessing is a pretty local issue. (Of course, a baby GSP is as weak as any other baby Exalted, so maybe starting Urges are scaled to your power level.)
Frank

We can't go a chapter in this book without dealing with deal-breaker awfulness. The sidebar about how the little girl they use to to hold pre-born exaltations likes to play with innocent children in between the times she is raped by demons is... it's a thing. People often call that out as the worst thing in this book and indeed the worst thing in Exalted full stop. It's very bad. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the editorial decision to “go there” but it was obviously the wrong decision.
K:

If I pour the bleach directly into my ears, will it clean my brain?

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Significantly less effective than advertised. I can still remember that this book exists.
Frank

The final comic is our resident sex ninja being confronted by a hero and tossing a snake-boy off a clock tower. It's very similar to the Death of Gwen Stacey, except all the things about that iconic scene that made it interesting or emotionally powerful are missing.

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Sooner or later all heroes must contend with a maniac offering a sadistic choice. But if it comes before any of the relevant characters have been introduced in a meaningful way, no one fucking cares.
K:

It's that edgy child-murder all the kids are clamoring for these days.
Frank

Next Up: Chapter Two: Servants of the Yozi.
A concerned citizen might note that this could have been the chapter name for literally any chapter because of course all the characters are broadly speaking servants of the Yozi.
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Post by Koumei »

So while I'm obviously on board with bondage nun tiddy, I elected not to have this book because taste and decency required me to draw a line somewhere. Anyway, I'm fairly sure you could buy it in Australia, even though the starting comic literally counts as child pornography in Australia. As in, the law sees it as 100% the same as darkweb creepy shit that harmed real humans in the making. I know that's more an issue on this country being mental (and customs being notoriously bad at checking "stuff that's brought in by a corporate entity, for sale" or just not wanting to read a copy of every RPG splat that heads their way), but still.
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Almost literally exactly this.
Yeah, when I read it I was thinking somewhere between "The Dark Kingdom Generals of Sailor Moon", "The actual Sailor Senshi themselves" (insofar as the trapped-and-reincarnated bit goes), and "Rita Repulsa before the opening sequence on Power Rangers".
The proposed character classes are Barbarian, Crab-Mummy, Air-Pirate, Bondage-Nun, and Sex-Ninja. Which is a weirdly specific and unhelpful set of character classes. But their names are all interchangeable thesaurus pulls. Is there a reason that Fiend is Sex-Ninja and not Crab-Mummy? Is there a reason that Defiler is Crab-Mummy and not Bondage-Nun? Is there a reason that Malefactor is Bondage-Nun and not Air-Pirate? No. The class names could have been assigned by the roll of dice.
I'd argue that Scourge is a good enough name for a "complete destruction, raze their villages to the ground, be a total [EDITED] that everyone wants rid of" thing. Because "this thing is a scourge on the land/society/whatever" (as might be said of this book) is a reasonably well-known saying. It's a perpetual blight that brings ruin. So give that to one of the more direct and violent and destructive ones.

Defiler sounds like a corruption type deal, where you sit around and make people get down with the sickness or whatever. Are Crab-Mummies in that kind of long game, or are they more about snipping people in half and basically being great contenders for Scourge name? (You could also use it for a rapist thing, but that's a terrible concept and should not have enough traction and support for even one character, let alone a whole class. AND YET HERE WE FUCKING ARE.)

Malefactor doesn't resonate either way with me, and as a D&D player I feel "Fiend" means "Evil Outsider" but you could probably argue for them being "You fiend!" type villains, the sort of evil overlord who does deliberate and sometimes pointless evil just because they're EVIL!

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I didn't set out with the goal of making a NJPW reference, but here we are.

I can't remember what the last one is, which probably undoes the previous paragraphs and proves your point more than anything.
The focus on the Yozi's and not the GSPs is important because there are going to be MTP-ish mechanics that are going to rely on knowing how the various Yozi's think and act, so getting stories about them is actually useful in some small way. A weak tea way, but a way.
I kind of like the direction that goes in, because "having some different vague part of the character sheet or something" be "the thing you use in dice pools and for excellencies and whatever" is something that could be used as an interesting way to set characters apart. That isn't how it worked out, but the idea isn't a non-starter. I'd still limit it to "a page of basic dot points and shit" each, tops, though.
Exalted: the Infernals is not playable as anything other than an ironic one-shot. And the authors clearly had no ambition for it to be anything more than that.
It really wouldn't surprise me if the basic assumption is that any Exalted game is actually either a one-shot or a solo campaign. I have no real reason to believe this isn't how it actually happens, too.
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Post by maglag »

FrankTrollman wrote: This comic is pornography. I don't mean that it's erotic, because I certainly don't find it erotic.
As a matter of fact pornography and erotic are two separate concepts, and one doesn't automatically imply the other. That was explained by my biology teacher of all people who also commented that she had to watch both in her university classes and prove she could tell the difference.
Koumei wrote:So while I'm obviously on board with bondage nun tiddy, I elected not to have this book because taste and decency required me to draw a line somewhere. Anyway, I'm fairly sure you could buy it in Australia, even though the starting comic literally counts as child pornography in Australia. As in, the law sees it as 100% the same as darkweb creepy shit that harmed real humans in the making. I know that's more an issue on this country being mental (and customs being notoriously bad at checking "stuff that's brought in by a corporate entity, for sale" or just not wanting to read a copy of every RPG splat that heads their way), but still.
That reminds me that I saw a review of this book years ago that included photographs of the reviewer ripping off the pages with that particular scene. Then setting them on fire and making sure only ash remained.
FrankTrollman wrote: Actually, our blood banking system is set up exactly the way you'd want it to be if you were a secret vampire conspiracy.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

I don't care enough to go back and check but I remember there being claims in later supplements that it was actually intentional that the Yozi plan was shit - the Ebon Dragon had a totally different plan running concurrently to get only himself out of Malfeas. Stinks of retcon when faced with how stupid the initial plan looks.

But then, I never really digested all the edgelord shit in the main Infernals book in the first place.

Sadly I doubt there was ever the intent that Exalted campaigns be one shots, since they presumably expected you to tediously level grind at glacial pace from starting characters to maybe smacking down one named character after 4 years of weekly play. (For comparison my interest was barely sustained by a level of power creep in a WoD//Exalted crossover campaign in which we went from starting characters to permakilling the Wyrm in a lot less than 52 sessions.)
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Post by hyzmarca »

Omegonthesane wrote: Sadly I doubt there was ever the intent that Exalted campaigns be one shots, since they presumably expected you to tediously level grind at glacial pace from starting characters to maybe smacking down one named character after 4 years of weekly play. (For comparison my interest was barely sustained by a level of power creep in a WoD//Exalted crossover campaign in which we went from starting characters to permakilling the Wyrm in a lot less than 52 sessions.)
The Game has rules for playing at Essence 10, where you're basically an invincible god and it's 90% magical tea party, but they explicitly wrote abilities that require essence 10 to get, for players to use, with the implication that players should be able to get them, eventually.

The XP gain and costs do not support that. The XP rules basically assume that you'll be playing the campaign for several hundred years, real time.


FrankTrollman wrote:
Frank

We can't go a chapter in this book without dealing with deal-breaker awfulness. The sidebar about how the little girl they use to to hold pre-born exaltations likes to play with innocent children in between the times she is raped by demons is... it's a thing. People often call that out as the worst thing in this book and indeed the worst thing in Exalted full stop. It's very bad. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around the editorial decision to “go there” but it was obviously the wrong decision.
It's been a while since I read that sidebar, but I remember it saying that she violently and compulsively raped demons, not that she was raped by demons. Of course, I'm pretty sure that's actually worse.



It's pretty clear there this book was written by two groups with two different and incompatible visions of what they were making. You've got the group who heard the words hell and demons and thought that meant that they should engage in the worst and most gratuitous edgelordiness possible, and the other who tried to make Malfeas beautiful but alien, and allow for the GSPs to be brooding but plucky antiheroes rather than irredeemable villains.

Indeed, I latched on to the latter. It's just that huge portions of the book have to be excised and replaced to make that work.
Am I the only one who finds the idea of seven or eight bondage nuns creating a “riotous parade” to be inherently hilarious? I hope not. It's a cheap shot that we can make an unlimited number of times throughout this book, but the ludicrously small numbers of people involved in every part of this makes some parts of the chapter unintentionally hilarious. There are less people in the GSPs than in Trump's Whitehouse staff, so whenever it talks about them organizing things that would logically involve a lot of people, it's like “What the actual fuck are you talking about?” Like, every “crowd scene” is like one of those crowd scenes in a cheap movie they show latenite on the USA network – with members of the crew milling about and canned crowd noises that are obviously out of sync with the eight person “crowd” actually shown.
To be fair, Exalted social charms, especially at the Solar level, basically allow you to mind control huge numbers of NPCs as a feature. Seven bondage nuns could easily have seven million unnamed minions, who being unnamed extras lack the ability to defend against mind control. Not to mention the billions of demons who hypothetically have to take orders from them.

50 guys don't make a culture, or even a subculture. But 50 guys can certainly make an oligarchy that rules a culture. And when I read it, that's basically what I assumed. The GSPs are positioned as upper-level aristocrats in Malfeas, below the Yozis and the First circle demons, but above almost everyone else. And are expected to build or co-opt organizations in Creation.

But, personally, I find the building blocks much more interesting than everything else, and the Yozi sections are really the most interesting part of the book. I barely read the parts that talked about the actual GSP types, because those sections were boring.
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Post by GnomeWorks »

FrankTrollman wrote:Free Will is a dumb concept that can't be independently verified without functional time travel and has no consequences on how the universe is or ought to be.
That's a neat opinion you have there.

The question of free will, soft determinism, and hard determinism is an important one, with all sorts of ramifications.

If we're hard determinist, literally punishing criminals isn't fair because they do not have a choice. Keeping them away from society makes sense in that context, but anything past that would be morally repugnant. If we have free will, then punishment is back on the table, because criminals had the ability to choose.

If you go full hard determinist and you're an atheist, I'm pretty sure the conclusion from that is hardcore Nietzschean and you get absolute nihilism: if you have no choices and everything is hard-coded, then nothing you do has any meaning and can never have meaning. I'm not sure what happens if you're not atheist, but it probably makes the conclusions of some religions look real funny if you think about them.

You can say that free will is dumb. But I'm pretty sure that you don't act in accordance with that claim.
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Post by Chamomile »

GnomeWorks wrote:
If we're hard determinist, literally punishing criminals isn't fair because they do not have a choice.
That Blog That I Have wrote:This argument always comes off like “it’s not my fault I missed my kid’s baseball game! The universe is deterministic! I never had a choice!” When we say “you had a choice” we aren’t talking about the boundary conditions of the universe, dumbass, we mean that the critical factor that led to you missing your kid’s baseball game was you. Your car didn’t break down, you didn’t forget, you just decided to stay home and watch TV instead, which means we can expect you to act selfishly as a general rule and we will repay your anti-social behavior by excluding you from the parts of society that we reserve for people who act in a reasonably pro-social manner.
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If you actually read what I wrote, putting criminals away from the rest of society because of their behavior would be sensible in a hard determinist universe. What would not be sensible or moral is punishment beyond that. You are attempting to reduce their impact on the rest of society, but there is no point in doing more than that, because there is no way to change anything.

And no, that isn't how you would respond in a hard deterministic universe. If everything is deterministic, there is no "you" that matters in any decision you've ever made. No choice you have ever or will ever make was actually a choice, you're just a process that was kicked off by another process and you're purely programmatic. Your argument fails to take into account what hard determinism actually is.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

GnomeWorks wrote:If you actually read what I wrote, putting criminals away from the rest of society because of their behavior would be sensible in a hard determinist universe. What would not be sensible or moral is punishment beyond that. You are attempting to reduce their impact on the rest of society, but there is no point in doing more than that, because there is no way to change anything.
Why can't you change them? Or rather, you are going through the motions and it ends up with them changed.

Presumably you can change people's minds by persuading them the determinist universe idea is correct, why not change people's mind by incarceration?
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Post by maglag »

Thaluikhain wrote:
GnomeWorks wrote:If you actually read what I wrote, putting criminals away from the rest of society because of their behavior would be sensible in a hard determinist universe. What would not be sensible or moral is punishment beyond that. You are attempting to reduce their impact on the rest of society, but there is no point in doing more than that, because there is no way to change anything.
Why can't you change them? Or rather, you are going through the motions and it ends up with them changed.

Presumably you can change people's minds by persuading them the determinist universe idea is correct, why not change people's mind by incarceration?
In a deterministic universe, you may as well be asking to change the speed of light in vacuum or the mass of a proton. In a deterministic universe with no free will, the criminal's mind can't be changed, point.
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Post by GnomeWorks »

Thaluikhain wrote:Why can't you change them? Or rather, you are going through the motions and it ends up with them changed.

Presumably you can change people's minds by persuading them the determinist universe idea is correct, why not change people's mind by incarceration?
In a hard determinist universe, everything is predetermined. Everything.

The best analogy here that I can use is a movie. You don't have any real choices, everything you do is predetermined and everything you're going to do is already going to happen because it's a natural consequence of what's going on right now. If you had perfect knowledge of the current state of the universe, you could calculate any future state using that knowledge.

You didn't choose to get out of bed this morning. It just happened. You may think you had a choice, you may have even had mental processes that made you think you had a choice - but it was going to happen. You're not an actor, you're just along for the ride.

Punishing criminals in this sort of world is morally ambiguous because there's no actor. Moral judgments generally assume that you have responsibility for your actions. We don't blame hungry tigers for killing people, for instance, it's just their nature. Hard determinism is much like that: Bob was effectively predetermined to kill that guy. Is it morally justifiable to punish him for actions when he was literally incapable of choosing otherwise?
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Post by erik »

Except the existence of punishment as a consequence has an effect on those deterministic outcomes.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

GnomeWorks wrote:In a hard determinist universe, everything is predetermined. Everything.

The best analogy here that I can use is a movie. You don't have any real choices, everything you do is predetermined and everything you're going to do is already going to happen because it's a natural consequence of what's going on right now. If you had perfect knowledge of the current state of the universe, you could calculate any future state using that knowledge.

You didn't choose to get out of bed this morning. It just happened. You may think you had a choice, you may have even had mental processes that made you think you had a choice - but it was going to happen. You're not an actor, you're just along for the ride.
Certainly, yes.
GnomeWorks wrote:Punishing criminals in this sort of world is morally ambiguous because there's no actor. Moral judgments generally assume that you have responsibility for your actions. We don't blame hungry tigers for killing people, for instance, it's just their nature. Hard determinism is much like that: Bob was effectively predetermined to kill that guy. Is it morally justifiable to punish him for actions when he was literally incapable of choosing otherwise?
Again, yes, but surely punishment isn't merely about justice, it's also about trying to change someone into a different person, one less likely to commit crimes? If people are going to act according to their nature/programming, why can't you alter that nature/programming?

(Surely the person doing the punishing is as incapable of not punishing them the same way the criminal is of not committing a crime anyway?)
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Post by GnomeWorks »

erik wrote:Except the existence of punishment as a consequence has an effect on those deterministic outcomes.
It does, sure, since everything is causally related.

But again, the question is one of moral justification. Is it right to punish someone for doing something that they no control over?

In a deterministic universe, every universe-state was determined the moment time began. Things can only go one way. They never go another. There is no opportunity for things to work differently than they have, and the way things fall out in the future is the only way they could happen.

Everything you have ever done and everything you will ever do, that path you have walked is literally the only path you could have walked. You may have thought you had choices along the way, but you did not. You can say "well I chose to go to X town instead of Y," but you didn't choose, it was determined.

If Alice talks to Bob to try to change him from his life of crime, everything about that interaction was going to happen all along and the outcomes of that conversation were already determined. If you were omniscient you would be able to see the causal chains and point out the path of A leading to B that led those two to that moment, all the way back to the beginning, and you could see how it impacts future events. Because there's only one way it can go. There's no branching paths, no alternate futures, no decision-points. You act because the algorithm has determined that you will act, and the algorithm determines the outcome of your actions, forever. Your "choices" are meaningless, you have no agency, you are as responsible for your actions as you are for your neighbor's.
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Post by GnomeWorks »

Thaluikhain wrote:surely punishment isn't merely about justice, it's also about trying to change someone into a different person, one less likely to commit crimes? If people are going to act according to their nature/programming, why can't you alter that nature/programming?
Everything is interconnected by the causal chain. Every action you take is the result of other actions, and so on and so forth, all the way back to the beginning of time.

If Alice talks to Bob to try to convince him to stop being a criminal, everything about that conversation is predetermined. Alice didn't have a choice in having the conversation, Bob didn't have a choice in being in his position, the conversation will play out in exactly one way with no agency on either participants' part, and its outcome is predetermined.

Alice and Bob are no more responsible for the outcome than they are for the weather, because Alice and Bob aren't actors making decisions, they happen to be entities with conscious experience along for the ride in bodies responding to physics and following paths that were determined from the moment things starting existing.
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Post by erik »

It’s totally justifiable to punish them if the punishment results in less victims.
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Post by GnomeWorks »

erik wrote:It’s totally justifiable to punish them if the punishment results in less victims.
In hard determinism punishing a criminal for killing someone is literally the same as punishing them because it rained. Bob has exactly as much control over the weather as he does "his" actions. The universe could happen in exactly one way, and that way contained the event wherein he killed a guy.

There are no actors in hard determinism. No one is making any choices or decisions, everything is playing out the way it is playing out and could not have happened in any other way.

You talk about punishment to prevent future crimes - in hard determinism I think you could probably justify removing those people from society, but anything past that? People can't be held responsible for their actions because they literally could not do otherwise. You don't have any control over what you do. I don't see how you could morally justify much punishment in that scenario.
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Post by Chamomile »

GnomeWorks wrote:If you actually read what I wrote, putting criminals away from the rest of society because of their behavior would be sensible in a hard determinist universe. What would not be sensible or moral is punishment beyond that. You are attempting to reduce their impact on the rest of society, but there is no point in doing more than that, because there is no way to change anything.
If you actually read what I wrote, we aren't talking about the boundary conditions of the universe, dumbass, we mean that the critical factor that led to you missing your kid's baseball game was you. We as a society have absolutely no reason, moral or pragmatic, to care whether or not "you" is a result of quantum unpredictability or if "you" are a mechanistic entity reacting to external stimulus. We do not care about the boundary conditions of the universe. They aren't relevant. You can't get anywhere by declaring over and over again that things were pre-determined, because when we say "you had a choice" we are not referring to quantum randomness at all. Nobody is. The idea that the key factor in whether or not someone "had a choice" is how predictable in advance their actions were is simply false. All of your proclamations on the subject are completely irrelevant, because it has nothing to do with why people hold others responsible for their actions. It doesn't matter. How many different ways do I have to rephrase this before it sinks in?

Indeed, most people assume the universe is deterministic. Like, that's the default opinion of our culture, to the point where most time travel stories rely on it as a premise, a premise which is so thoroughly accepted that most people do not even think to question the possibility that things could be any other way. That is how embedded into our culture this "stunning revelation" of yours is. Virtually everyone agrees that the past will be altered only if you take actions to alter it, and either it is possible to travel back in time without causing significant alterations (in some cases that it is impossible to cause significant alterations because everything you've done has already happened) or else the butterfly effect will cause significant alterations no mater what you do, but in the latter case only because of unpredictable chains of cause and effect that are nevertheless initiated by external stimulus, not quantum unpredictability.

When you declare that a conversation between Alice and Bob would only ever end one way, you are not transmitting new information to anybody. Everyone already knows that. It's the premise of pop sci-fi adventure movies that regularly gain traction in mainstream audiences, one trilogy of which has gone on to be an enduring cultural touchstone recognizable even decades after its release. Indeed, the suggestion that people would be more culpable if their actions were detached from stimulus and instead determined in some part by total randomization is extraordinary and requires extraordinary defense. Defining "free will" as "taking actions that are not caused by external stimulus" is to define free will as "taking actions induced by cosmic madness," and people generally consider the insane to be less, not more, culpable for their actions.
Last edited by Chamomile on Mon Mar 25, 2019 5:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
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