Talk:Craft (Ability)
Some design notes, on changes and clarifications.
As a general principle, Exalted 1e had too many Crafts, and many writers mistook Craft for the same thing as Profession in DnD, if there wasn't an Ability for it, or if 'it' required a combination of Abilities and you didnt want to have to put dots in a bunch of different ones, make it a Craft. 2E attempted to clean this up with consolidation: everything fits into one of five elemental Crafts. But then further books expanded this back upwards: Sidereals had Craft Fate without ever explaining what it was exactly in terms of 2e rules, WotLA added Magitech and Genesis with an array of exceptions for maintenance and different sets of prerequisites and caps from other Abilities, Abyssals tried to avoid creating a new Craft Ability by making Necrotech just something derived from already extant Abilities, Graceful Wicked Masques needed something new for crafting Glamour from the Wyld, other books had Craft Reality to represent the Solars going out and also crafting with the Wyld. and Underworld copy-pasted a lot of 1e ideas to add in a whole array of different Crafts for each little variation on manipulating spirit and magical material. Maybe Craft should work like Melee, be massive in breadth, but I lean towards it being the exception, making different things being more difficult and divergent than hitting things using different variations on shape and sharpness of implement. But I like the objective of simplicity that 2e promised, and I don't like the massive expansion from it brought on by later books. So, this is an attempt to pare things down, to simplify and combine as much as seems reasonable.
- Calligraphy gets moved from Craft Air to exist entirely under Linguistics
- Textiles get moved from Craft Wood to Craft Air
- A lessening of the priority of the material versus the scope (building a house is Craft Earth, even if that house is made of wood, weapons and armour are Craft Fire even if they're made from bone, etc)
- Clarifying agriculture and livestock under Craft Wood (sometimes they'd been linked with Craft Earth, sometimes just ignored).
- Fate is not a Craft, but knowing how looms work is directly applicable to knowing how the Loom works (Occult may cover understanding what it does, but Craft Air is key to knowing how it does it. See Esoteric Crafting for further information.
- Magitech, Necrotech, Necrosurgery, and Genesis are not Crafts, they are crafting fields which require synergy between several different Craft Abilities to accomplish Esoteric Crafting.
- Jadecrafting and Soulforging are not separate Crafts. Both fall mostly under Craft Fire, though large works of Jade fit under Craft Earth. Occult is likely required to take advantage of the properties of a magical material, and to be able to alloy souls into Soulsteel.
- Craft Moliation, Craft Glamour, Craft Reality, Craft Pandemonium, etc. are all variations on a theme, too narrow to match the breadth of Craft Air/Earth/Fire/Water/Wood. But TOGETHER they end up similar, and they all land under the umbrella of mucking about with the stuff of the Wyld, the stuff of spirits. So they all get combined into one, as Craft Moliation (Ability).
