Solar Exalts and Martial Arts Development

I doubt that Experience 5 and Knowledge 5 heroic mortals are any less common than DBs.  After all, a heroic mortal can easily gain 5 XP a year, the equivalent of one session per year, which is the equivalent of 2 bonus points a year if you do the value conversion math.  Experience 5 and Knowledge 5 add up to 64 bonus points, the equivalent of 160 XP, which would take around 32 years of easy experience.  It would represent a retired Lookshy Ranger that has turned mercenary or spy as a second career.  
As Lookshy has an estimated ten Ranger Fangs per Dragon (one for every Dragon Armor/Warstrider 'Fang' and five estimated associated with the Dragon proper), five Dragons per Field Force and six active Field Forces and six Field Forces worth of retired soldiers, you could have 1500 active and 1500 retired Rangers of this level of experience in Lookshy alone.  Some of them will be older, but even the old ones will be capable fighters.  Other nations will have less people of this caliber, instead of 1% of their population, perhaps .01% to .02%, about the same proportion of their population as DBs.


Anyway, you send the solar killing mortal after newly Exalted solars.  You send a Lookshy Gunzosha Talon or a Water Dragon Armor 'Fang' against more experienced Solars or a beginning solar circle.  You send a full Field Force against an experienced solar circle.
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That is so many things you take for granted. First, the talents and rested xp do not scale properly together which is pretty obvious when looking at the bonus point costs and xp point costs. if the designers wanted them to scale to each other properly they would have given people starting xp and not bonus points.


so one percent of lookshy's population is made up of elite mutants with awakened essence and academic training? yes, sure... what do you dream of at night?


Oh and btw... your mortal would be 50 years old and probably face declining attributes and suffer from the ill sides of the second age, like a lack of medical treatment... so yes experience 5 knowledge 5 heroic mortals are a lot less common than dragon blooded because they basically have the benefits of an life of adventure at character creation and that is RARE.


And honestly... your mortal is still kinda ridiculous, cause she is not really a mortal, she is an immaculate dragon armour. Nothing else.
 
The main problem in the likelihood of this person existing is the mutations, I feel. Player characters are allowed to take mutations, but its understood that they're extraordinary. This person would have to have visited the Wyld (or been the product of sorcerous experimentattion) to get those mutations, and a mortal who visits the wyld is far, far more likely to just die - or worse - than come away with the precise muations you mention. And realistically, even if they did get those mutations, they'd get some poxes or derangements with them.
 
The XP to BP conversion rates are based on a comparison of the cost to buy a trait in play as opposed to character creation.  It works out to be, roughly, 2.5 XP to every 1 BP.  The reason why they probably didn't give out XP instead of BP is because of balance.  It costs a lot less XP to buy most traits at level one than it does, in relative value terms, using BP.


Oh, the mutations would be relatively rare, though the Inexhaustible and Tough could be inherited under the Mutation rules, as they would slip under the Stamina cap for an average Mortal.  A bit of a reality check on aging before modern medicine.  The reason why the life expectancy figures are so low before modern times is because 50% of the children died before the age of 12.  If you lived to be 20, you had a good chance to live to be sixty, barring war, famine or plague, and you were active until the last year of your life.  


People were active during the 19th centruy well into their nineties.  My great-great-great grandfather and his wife lived to be 97, and he smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish and ate like a horse.  They both had to be buried in piano crates, they died in their sleep, but they enjoyed life to the fullest.  If, given their lifestlye, could be active to almost one hundred without modern medicine, at least 1% of other humans probably can do so to.  


All I'm trying to show is that exceptional Mortals are rare, not unique.  There are a lot more people who qualify to be heroes than the Exalted.  For example, you could figure that there are going to be as many Terrestrial Half-Caste as there are DBs.  DBs are fertile until they get to be 250, some beyond that, and it says in the DB book (1E) that even the laziest DB will reach Essence 5 by the end of their second.  DBs, at least in the Realm, are expected to have at least two to ten kids a century, meaning that a DB will have likely have six Half-Caste kids before they leave reproduction age.  As an estimated one-third of DBs make it to retirement age, it probably means that one-half of DBs will be active enough and live long enough to produce an average of six Half-Caste children.  Taking account the relatively short life of Half-Caste, this would probably mean that .02% of Creation is Terrestrial Half-Caste if .01% of Creation is DB (Outcaste specifies 1:10000 to 1:5000 on average, but we will work with the lower number).


If Terrestrial Half-Caste, which are not as common as normal God-Blooded, makes up .02% of the population, then the total God-Blooded population is probably around .1% of the population of Creation.  The heroic mortal population is probably much, much more.  I would hazard to guess that heroic mortals make up 1% of the population of Creation, with the following breakdown: 30% of them will have an Experience plus Knowledge total of zero (they have normal levels of talent and are just starting out), 25% of them will have an Experience plus Knowledge total of between one and three (representing a fair amount of talent or four to eleven years of modest adventuring), 20% of them will have an Experience plus Knowledge total of four to six (representing extreme talent or fourteen to twenty years of modest adventuring), 15% of them will have an Experience plus Knowledge total of seven to nine (representing twenty-three to twenty-nine years of modest adventuring) and 10% of them having an Experience plus Knowledge total of 10+ (representing thirty-two plus years of modest adventuring).  So Experience plus Knowledge ten heroic mortals are probably as common as God-Blooded.  These will represent the most capable person in a small community, be they the chieftain, mayor, smith or priest, or the leader of a small group of heroic mortals, like the leader of a Lookshy Ranger Fang.  


If I'm an ST and need to represent more learning, I'll give a mortal more than five dots in Experience and Knowledge.  After all, five XP per year represents only one session per year.  Some heroic mortals, who are either blessed or cursed, live much more interesting lives.  A Haltan special forces soldier, who lives to do raids and counterraids agianst the Lenowyn, will probably have the equivalent of one session per season, 25 XP per year, or even one session per month, 125 XP per year, though it is unlikely that a mortal will survive long with the latter rate of activity.    


I have noticed that there is a bias against mortals that occasionally shows up in this forum.  Don't get me wrong, I like playing the Exalted, the DBs especially, but one should not forget the mortals who will be affected by the hubris of the Exalted.  After all, we are all mortal, even if we are Earth mortals as opposed to Creation mortals, and we should have some sympathy for Creation mortals.  


That is probably why I play gritty campaigns, where there are no extras, every mortal foe has a full compliment of health levels and how long they are willing to fight is based on their Valor or Conviction, depending on the circumstances (Valor for acts of honor, Conviction for acts of duty).  It works for me.  The Solars in my campaigns have to stunt like crazy to maintain enough Essence and Willpower to cut through even a small army of normal mortals.
 
Why? Why "should" we have sympathy for them?


It's a game. If you want gritty, that's fine. If you want to wade through the masses of cowering mortals, anima blazing, your character a glorious beacon above the sheep of humanity, that's fine too.


The game is all, and the focus of your game should dictate whether or not you should have 'sympathy' for them.
 
First of all, only some and with some I mean a very small minority of people, were living into their ninities. Even today it is rare. And early child death is not the reason for the low average, actually, early child death was taken out of a lot of these statistics.


Second, I have no sympathy for anoyne in creation. They are all tools to help me tell my story. If a mortal can help me, she gets her screentime, if not, she will do what mortals are best at: Stuntigprops which help replenish solar essence and willpower.
 
memesis said:
- Solars pay 8 XP per Charm if Martial Arts are favored.  Sidereals pay 10.  Both pay +2 if non-favored.  Winner: Solars.
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I am sorry if this has been already asked, I haven't read all the tread.


Where does it say that solars pay 8 for SMA charms? Where does it say that sidereals pay 10 for SMA?


If you assume that the cost have remained same as in the 1st. Then sids do pay 10 but solars pay 13.


If you assume that solars pay 8 keeping only the second edition in mind, then you can't really tell how much sids pay.
 
Sorrow said:
memesis said:
- Solars pay 8 XP per Charm if Martial Arts are favored.  Sidereals pay 10.  Both pay +2 if non-favored.  Winner: Solars.
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I am sorry if this has been already asked, I haven't read all the tread.


Where does it say that solars pay 8 for SMA charms? Where does it say that sidereals pay 10 for SMA?


If you assume that the cost have remained same as in the 1st. Then sids do pay 10 but solars pay 13.


If you assume that solars pay 8 keeping only the second edition in mind, then you can't really tell how much sids pay.
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In 2E it is official how much everyone pays for Sidereal Martial Arts as of "Scroll of the Monk" (I am without my book so I have no page reference).
 
Page 16, upper right, grey boxed:


When anyone tries to learn any MA Sytle above their station, they pay half again more XP.


Normal Mortals pay 15 for Terrestrial MA, 12 if Favored.


Dragon-Blooded pay 15 for Celestial MA, 12 if Favored.


Solars and Abyssals pay 15 for Sidereal MA, 12 if Favored.


And Normal Mortals trying to learn more than one Terrestrial path at a time pay an extra XP point per Charm on ALL Martial Arts Charms for each extra tree they are working on, until they finish the tree up on one of the Styles.
 
Thanks Kerion hadn't noticed the sidebar. So with the 2nd edition rules solars pay 12 xp for learning SMA, 8 for CMA.
 
I don't think either big time Solar fans or Sidereal fans have much to worry about. For Solars, they are more than capable of creating charms for the Solar Hero style that are as powerful as Sidereal MA charms of high essence level. The theme those charms can follow must still follow Solar charm guidelines but that's hardly a bad thing. Just a limiting of effects. And Solars can make high essence charms for 24 other Abilities, Sidereals can't.


Sidereals of course have much greater access to Sidereal MA and the sutras. As well as having a lot more concepts to base their MA's off of than the Solars have flexibility with Solar MA. But I don't think the advantages either way are anything to freak about.
 
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