Excellencies

These are not options that I plan to adopt in my current game, because I feel that the system is so integrated that it is difficult to make changes of this magnitude without breaking something somewhere or putting in a lot of work. Of course I might change my mind or decide to put in a lot of work.

Excellencies: Ideas for future changes

Excellencies are the most fundamental, basic Charms. As such, they are the surest way to draw immediate and lasting differences between the different types of Exalted. Every character is going to need Excellencies, so they are an excellent (no pun intended) way to introduce an ever-present, subtly pervasive and substantial difference between the different Exalted types.

Solar Excellency

Solars would be the ONLY Exalted to have a direct success-adder. The canonical Second Excellency Charm would be renamed as Solar Excellency, and be unavailable to anyone else. It would allow a Solar to add a number of successes equal to half (rounded down) of her total Attribute + Ability dice pool.

Solars would then have First Excellency (the dice adder), Second Excellency (the reroller) and Solar Excellency.

Alternately, the Solar might be limited to perfection within her natural ability. Thus, if she has Dexterity 5 and Melee 5, then she might be limited to 10 automatic successes via the Solar Excellency, or a "perfect success" on her roll.

As an even deeper option, perhaps the Solar Excellency might allow the Solar to choose between 1 success per die in her pool and what she actually rolled, whichever is better.

Dragon-Blooded

Dragon-Blooded would only have access to First Excellency (the dice adder), and Third Excellency (the reroller). Third Excellency might be renamed Second Excellency, which incidentally might be a more thematic title for a Charm which gives one a second chance. Or maybe just call it Second Chance Excellency?

If there is some sort of Terrestrial booster Excellency, that might be fine. However, what seems MOST important to me regarding the Dragon-Blooded Charms is that there be a direct, openly-stated rules backed and setting-fluff supported statement that the reason why Dragon-Blooded get free use of reflexive Charms is because they are designed to be able to help each other, as a unit. I feel that this would end up recursively polishing the Dragon-Blooded Charm set, such that it would more and more come to be what it should be.

Celestials

Personally, I would be satisfied with Solars being the sole Exalted group to have a success-buyer of any type. However, I can see that others might not feel similarly, and I can certainly see a potential need to do more to set the Celestial Exalted above the Dragon-Blooded.

In order to give the other Celestial Exalted limited access to "perfect" effects, I would propose that there might be a Lunar Excellency and a Sidereal Excellency.

Lunars

The Lunar Excellency would involve giving up an Attribute die to gain a success. This would allow a Lunar to "roll" a number of successes equal to her relevant Attribute, provided she wanted to drop enough Essence. Then, she could still actually roll the Ability + Specialty dice, but she wouldn't actually be rolling any dice for her Attribute.

Sidereals

The Sidereal Excellency would involve reducing one's target number to 1, thereby gaining all successes. I would not give Sidereals a free success just because they reduced their target number down below 4. It's 1 or roll, baby! This would allow a Sidereal to automatically "roll" a number of successes equal to her dice pool, provided she wanted to drop enough Essence and/or Willpower.

Excellency Summary

Thus we might have First Excellency, Second Excellency, Solar Excellency, Lunar Excellency and Sidereal Excellency. Of course we would need an Abyssal Excellency, too, but such a thing could be a dice-remover.

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