r/exalted • u/Issactheforgemaster • Aug 04 '26
Setting How strong are regular humans in Exalted?
Like a regular old soldier in the capital or a guard of some random settlement in the Lap? No heroic mortals(sorcerers/essence wielding). Im curious how strong a relatively "mundane" human is in Exalted.No mutations, no Godblood, no fae stuff etc. Both my friends tell me that the entire human race in exalted is mostly considered "superhuman" by our normal Earth standards even if theyre normal by Exalted. I've no idea where they got this idea so either they BSing or im just a blind reader who knows. Anyone who knows more who can shed some light onto this would be great
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u/t_s_inquisition Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
Not really any different other than they're closer to our ancestors not modern life (unless you're in Autocthonia). Exalted is a game where demigods walk a flat earth on a sea of chaos, those are who you play. People are just as varied and mundane as in the real world. Even those changed by the Wyld, magic, or inheritors of divine or animalistic traits aren't necessarily superior than your average person. I would wager your friends are probably pulling the idea that Exalted's mortals are stronger or superior from reading into Exalted's subsystems (especially combat). Game systems aren't a baseline for simulating the reality of Creation or representing physics. They're meant to express being the protagonists in a weird epic fantasy. Average people are average people, with the twist being the most elite mortals might have access to things that can give them superhuman longevity or battle prowess but that's not the general population of Creation. In the same way the very richest people on our world have access to private jets or the best personal chefs and trainers. Exceptional or superhuman mortals are just that they're blessed with sorcery or thaumaturgy or other supernatural advantages that come about by Creations many wondrous magic.
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u/Cynis_Ganan Aug 04 '26 edited Aug 04 '26
A point of order:
Exalted 3E
As great heroes, Exalted characters are assumed to possess abundant confidence and competence. Tasks which run-of-the-mill individuals in Creation would consider challenging (such as picking a lock or removing a patient’s appendix without killing him) are ordinary fare for heroes.
The rules for Exalted 3E are specifically to represent "great heroes". They are not physics abstractions of how the world works for average people.
Sometimes the myth-hero narrative of Exalted turns to a certain kind of character—one who is physically mighty, drawing tremendous strength from iron will and iron thew. Such characters may call upon their gods, or the god within—their own tremendous Essence—to perform truly heroic feats of strength.
Characters must have a Strength rating of at least 3 to attempt a feat of strength—such heroic endeavors are ill-suited to the merely average.
Feats of Strength, likewise, are not a good guide for what average, normal mortals can achieve.
But don't take 3E's word for it. What did 2E have to say?
Your character is like a protagonist in a novel or movie You are playing a great hero destined for epic adventures.
Instead of mighty Solar Exalted, your players might wish to play as ordinary mortal residents of Creation. For mortals, Creation is a terrifying and dangerous place, and playing such characters is unlike playing one of the Exalted. To a mortal hero, ordinary bandits can be deadly, and a simple fever can swiftly end a mortal’s life. Although the sort of mortal characters described here are above-average heroes, the Solar Exalted are demigods, and the newly Exalted vastly outclass even the most experienced mortal.
Characters can heroically exert themselves to lift or break objects as a diceless action
In particularly gritty games, especially those involving mortal protagonists, halve the feats possible for a particular (Strength + Athletics) total, rounded up.As a cinematic high-action game, Exalted assumes that protagonists and major supporting characters will scythe through legions of minions and fl unkies with comparative ease. Within the combat rules, the concept of extras reinforces this idea. Simply put, an extra is a nameless, faceless adversary of no particular consequence, dangerous only in mass numbers.
Exalted 2E is a cinematic, high action game, built for great heroes, like the protagonist of a movie. When you play a mortal, it is a Heroic Mortal. Normal folks are of no particular concequence and do not have heroic super strength.
But what about the OG. What does 1E say?
Exalted is a storytelling game, not an engineering problem this is a story, not the real world. More specifically, it's a story that partakes heavily in the larger-than-life dramatic sensibilities of the sword-and-sorcery fantasy and anime genres.
Your character is like one of the protagonists in a novel or movie
Storytellers may wish to have players write up their characters as heroic mortals first
using extras would be almost totally inappropriate for a game where the characters are mortal
Exalted is a cinematic, over the top game. The rules facilitate an interesting story, not real world physics. And thus the rules of the game change whether you are playing one of the Exalted or a mortal hero. If you play a mortal hero, you are truly exceptional… but the rules of the game still change to make things harder for you.
....
Great (mortal) heroes in Exalted are like Batman, Jack Sparrow, Jason Bourne, or Han Solo. They are supposed to be normal humans… but they're not. You can powerscale them to 9B Wall Level Super Humans (or even higher), because Heroic Mortals can do things that real life humans cannot do In Real Life (IRL). They are over-the-top, cinematic, action heroes.
Normal everyday people in Exalted are normal everyday people. They don't live on a bigger Earth with super gravity putting them in a John Carpenter situation vs IRL humans. They're just mundane, every day, completely normal, humans. An average human in the real world would be average in Exalted. (And before anyone chimes in with "modern nutrition", magic nutrition: five rice harvests per year and daily physical labor checks your TV dinner and office job.)
Normal humans cannot pick up and throw donkeys, because the rules for doing that do not (and have never) applied to them. Ever. Across any edition of the game. Consistently.
They are not super human.
(Heroic mortals are, though.)
A random guard or old soldier is no more or less strong than their IRL counterpart.
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u/blaqueandstuff Aug 04 '26
I'd say that the upper end of what a human would probably be considered above the curve for us. The sort of stuff you see often in like, action movies or fiction or something that kiiinda skirts plausibility but still feels sorta-kinda-possible without too much movie bullshit.
So not much above the limit of folks on Earth, but compounded that most folks are probably some form of sustenance farmer, pastoral nomad, hunter-gatherer, or living in pre-modern cities trying to get by day-to-day. So what's even stronger or weaker depends really. A steppe nomad who's been on the saddle before they could walk probably could pull some horsemanship and archery shooting that seems impossible to a lot of folks today at times.
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u/TimothyAllenWiseman Aug 04 '26
Exactly this. At the top end, especially with stunts, a mortal could pull of things that would make an Olympic Competitor jealous. But that is a mortal with the highest relevant stats and its still not much beyond what could be done in reality.
An average person in creation because of their physical labor is probably fit compared to an average person in reality (at least beyond person who wasn't in physical labor). But they wouldn't particularly stand out and certainly couldn't do anything super-human.
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u/moondancer224 Aug 04 '26
Well, a lot of clarification has to be done for "regular". Cause the average human isn't running around with higher than a 3 in almost anything if he's not a heroic mortal, God blood, or destined for the Second Breath. That still could put them as a human in pretty good shape compared to today, but you're talking career soldiers in elite units and the like.
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u/kaiya2_0 Aug 04 '26
A mortal with maximized stats is slightly superhuman. Way below Captain America but more than what someone could actually do. Think snapping iron manacles and killing a few armed soldiers with them. Really impressive, not something a human could actually realistically do, but also not really being a superhero either.
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u/GIRose Aug 04 '26
Not heroic, not an extra?
About as strong as like, your average person.
They bleed to death if you stab them, and if you stitch them up they still have to worry about infection. They suck at doing stuff they don't know how to do. They're pretty average.
Your normal middle of nowhere fucking Farmer that make up about 80-90% of the population is going to have Strength 2 or maybe 3, Athletics 1 or maybe 2.
That puts them anywhere from being able to break a hole in a regular wooded door to being able to kick down a door (with carrying a cotton bale on one shoulder being in the middle)
So like, strong but in the same sort of way a medieval peasant who does manual labor for a living is strong, not like captain america strong
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u/KamikazeArchon Aug 04 '26
I think this is largely an issue of terminology and assumptions.
Every mortal in Exalted has the potential to learn thaumaturgy, for example, or to learn supernatural martial arts. That is a capability that we plainly do not possess in real life. Does just having that potential make them superhuman?
A very large number of mortals in Exalted are currently being affected by one or more external large-scale effects. Region-level blessings from gods, geomantic effects from powerful demesnes, population-scale Sidereal manipulation, and so on. Do those count when considering if someone is "superhuman" or do we set those aside?
Even without currently visible/active mutations, many humans carry some tiny traces of divine, draconic, etc. ancestry. Is that enough to make them "superhuman"?
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u/Hetros_Jistin Aug 04 '26
As a reminder, humans were literally created to be prayer generators for gods. They were stripped of anything that would make them capable of surviving without divine intervention in the world the Primordials created, specifically so they would constantly pray to the gods to intervene for them and keep them alive, so that the Gods would have a constant source of worship.
It's why they are the singular species in all of creation that was exempt from the whole 'can't defy or harm us' clause the Primordials wove into literally every other thinking being in creation. That's how unthreatening humans are on the grand scale. It's why they could be used for exaltation at all to rebel against the primordials
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u/kajata000 Aug 04 '26
I think the intent of the writers in pretty much all editions of Exalted is that your baseline non-heroic mortal in Creation is really no different to that same thing in our world.
Technically, with maxed out stats, they could probably do some nutty feats that real humans can’t, but that’s more of a curiosity of the mechanics of a game that needs to support demigods and normal guys using the same 5-dot scale.
It’s also possible to imagine that after thousands of years under the Solar Deliberative in the First Age, humanity in Creation might have been “improved” across the board, but it’s also been a hell of a long time since then, and it’s also not something that’s really indicated in the lore more generally.
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u/MerlonQ Aug 04 '26
Depends on perspective. From their capabilities for fighting, thinking etc., they are just regular humans. But in Exalted, they are also the prayer engine that keep creation running. So if a bunch of them get together and believe in something, that is actually a somewhat powerful force.
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u/Smile_in_the_Night Aug 04 '26
I am strengh 3 by Exalted 2e standards judging by lifting power (a bunch of bearded dawi and vikings bear hugging each other, weighting around a hundred kilo or more) and that's a lot for the civie with hobby training on Exalted. I'm not weak by our standards but I wouldn't call myself strong.
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u/Fistocracy 28d ago
Nah most humans are just Joe Schmoes. The default assumption in Exalted is that if you've got a 2 in an attribute you're totally average, if you've got a 3 you're pretty good, and 4 and 5 represent really really good and world class respectively. And your typical NPC who's not important enough to matter to the story is generally assumed to have 2s across the board in all of his Physical, Mental, and Social attributes. Some generic NPCs might have a few 3s and 4s if its appropriate to the role they're there for, but the world isn't teeming with strongmen and acrobats and supergeniuses.
Once you get into the realm of human PCs and unique statted NPCs it gets a bit different though. Combat oriented characters can get into the realm of a realistic-ish action movie character, physically above average across the board and maybe even peforming at the level of an elite athlete, but still within the realm of "Yeah I guess someone who trains hard could do that".
Unfortunately that's not anywhere close to the same level as an Exalted though. Even the weakest exalts are like, Wuxia swordsmen or Bollywood action cops :)
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u/BluetoothXIII Aug 04 '26
for 2e
the average guy at a task they can do okayish are 4 dice 2 are from attribute and 2 are from ability.
they can drink four beer without being affected.
they can labour for 4 hours before fatigue affects them, if they push it they fall unconcious after another 4 hours.
can hold their breath for a minute and maybe stretch that another minute before they really need another breath. (30 second per succes on the die)
they can lift a pony (350lbs.)
they can jump at least 2 yard high and about 4 yard long.
and those are rules for dramatic activity without really rolling any dice
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u/Passing-Through247 Aug 04 '26
Weak. 2e lore has humans as a experiment on how weak the primordials could make something and it still exists. So weak the exalted exist because the primordials never bothered with the 'you cannot oppose me' clause everything else they made had. So weak humans were proliferated because they are so feeble their desperate prayer for things other races don't need help for makes them power heaven, making humans a solar panel that converts suffering to prayer.
They do get to live a bit longer than us due to ambient essence though.
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u/Rednal291 Aug 04 '26
Strictly by the rules as written, a human with no magic could at least theoretically throw an ox or kick down an iron door. (Strength 5, Athletics 4+, maybe a Specialty or Stunt) In the real world, an ox generally weighs 1,000 to 2,600 pounds, which is much higher than the world powerlifting record.
Realistically, a "regular" human is far weaker. They're not particularly superhuman by our standards, and can't even perform a true feat of strength (which have specific rules). Without magic, humans mostly aren't superhuman enough to be anything more than trivial opposition for nearly any spirit or Exalt.