I keep doing these kind of late at night, I should start doing them first thing in the morning so I'm not so tired when I do them.
Today we're talking about the much more coherent Essence System, as well as Anima Banners. For readers who are unaware, in original Exalted, the equation for figuring out a character's Essence Pools were very mathy, ex: (Essence x 3 + Willpower) + (Essence x 7 + Willpower + Sum of all Virtues). Essence was also split into "Personal Essence" and "Peripheral Essence". Personal Essence was 'invisible', allowing Exalted to use their powers without fear of detection, where Peripheral Essence raised a character's Anima Banner, a glorious and terrifying expression of their supernatural might.
After playing Exalted several times, I've come to believe that the existence of Personal Essence and Peripheral Essence creates a very inappropriate expectation in players: namely, "So long as I restrict myself to only Personal Essence, I am safe from people knowing I am an Exalt." The problems with this are threefold. One, Exalted is not a game of self-restriction, it is one of doing what must be done. Two, by allowing one to act magically without showing one's Anima Banner, it made showing one's banner a primarily negative thing, and therefore something that GMs would use to keep their players under control. Finally, by creating an expectation that raising one's anima banner was a negative act, they downplayed the strong element of their own mechanic.
Our changes to Essence are, therefore, aimed at eliminating the twin problem of heavy math and inappropriate expectations of the in-character visibility of characters. The former problem is simple, we decrease the size of a bite of essence from one 'mote', a very small amount, to a 'point', which for our purposes is approximately equal to 12-15 motes and probably Willpower as well. Characters will have a number of points equal to their Essence Rating, with more traditional methods of essence regeneration providing the ability to regain Points of Essence when they run empty.
Anima Banners require a slightly more thorough reworking of the system. The original game had a sliding scale of how brightly glowing the anima was, we will dispense with this necessary sliding scale. Instead, Anima Banners have two states: 'down', in which they are invisible, and 'ignited', in which case the character is unmistakably an Exalt. The exact level of the banner's flare can be left up to whatever is attractive to the story, the point is that nobody will mistake the character for an Exalted. Spending Points of Essence will always ignite one's banner, but all Exalts can also ignite their banners as a reflexive action. Like in canon, Ignited banners cannot be 'switched off', but they will usually go away at the end of a scene.
Now that we know the general states that Banners occur in, let's talk a little bit about why one would want to risk igniting theirs. Since there is no longer such thing as 'tiny' essence expenditures, like one or two motes, any such expenditure is essentially now free. This dramatically opens up Exalts' freedom to use their supernatural abilities. In order to provide a sense of character growth, there must limiting factors. I choose subtlety, in the form of lowered anima banners, to be one of these.
In short, characters with their Anima Banners ignited will often gain both stunting and mechanical benefits. The Anima Banner, for our purposes, is your game face, taking off the training weights of appearing mortal, explaining that you weren't left handed. An Exalted who wants to disguise their power can still do so and be effective, but in order to act at their maximum potential, they must reveal themselves in all their terrible glory, inviting the world to see them for what they are.
Intelligent GMs will adapt to this change by taking the more common route from late second edition Exalted that the Wyld Hunt is mostly powerless, and that most people outside the Realm and the near Threshold care more about the sincerity of the help being offered than who is offering the help. Insisting on 100% perfect secrecy at all times means you're not really playing Exalted, anyway.
Next time we'll FINALLY get to talking about a few basic Charms, like the Excellencies, as well as the Core Powers of the Solar Exalted.
As always, feel free to leave questions or comments. Thanks for reading!
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