Violence is always an option - a look at player interactions

Sometimes when you play a tabletop RPG, your character may want another character to do or not do something they are dead set on. How do you convince that character to follow your preferred course of action? If you were just playing a pure simulation game, you'd be able to convince them socially, devise some sort of intellectual scheme for them to see your way, or physically stop them. However, many games and players shun the social and mental approaches - "I don't want my character to be mind controlled", "you should roleplay social interactions", "the system doesn't have a roll for making someone change their mind", etc. This, however, leaves you with one approach that will always work. Violence is always an option...

Now of course, threatening another player's character physically is usually seen as bad form, but at the same time if no other option is available to you, a physically stronger character will have better odds of getting their way, whether that means beating another character up, restraining them, or outright killing them. You just need to establish yourself as a credible threat - even if an orc barbarian fails their intimidation roll, it doesn't mean they won't follow through with their threats later. Heck, in one of our old Exalted game of Princes of the Universe, we had a player character (Killer Queen) that on multiple occasions has threatened the party with a button that would release a demon they used as their personal Evangelion to rampage through our city. Luckily it never came to that, but the PCs did fear what Killer Queen could do to us if we crossed her... It was fun!

Killer Queen, in a nutshell ;)

This puts non-combat characters at a disadvantage. If you are a social character and you can't do "social attacks" on other characters, you can't do much. If you are an intellectual character and you can't devise things to match what other characters are doing (build a player-killer mech, enact a convoluted scheme to get your way, etc.), you can't do much. Combat characters always have the option of using violence.

We had a situation like that happen in our recent Godbound game of Evicting Epistle. One of our PCs, Matiel the Pirate Queen, decided to arm a group of NPCs not aligned with our factions with Godwalker Jaegers. Another PC, Thaa, was very much opposed to that. However, while Thaa had a lot of influence as the Godbound of nature and networks, she was physically the weakest of the party and could not match up to Matiel. Since the game of Godbound has zero rules for "social combat" or any sort of mental influence that is not straight up mind control (which the other PC could shrug off almost effortlessly), there was no way for Thaa to stop Matiel. When the NPCs ended up being antagonistic towards us after getting the Jaegers and causing our game to end, Thaa's player asked our GM to always remind her to play a combat character in games like these, so she'd always be able to get her way. Of course, that was meant jokingly, but it's not untrue...

Unfortunately, there isn't much that can be done about the situation unless the RPGs themselves accommodate non-combat player conflict resolutions and players embrace these outcomes as binding. Exalted did have an interesting mechanic for that in form of Intimacies. Those were things and relationships the characters cared about that could be altered by other characters. While you might not be able to use them to stop someone right there and then, you could make them care about things that were important to you and thus making them align with you in the long run. It would also take the buy-in from other players to play into the Intimacies and not just dismiss them as "my character wouldn't care about that", "don't mind control me" or "whatever, I'll do what I want anyway", etc.

Alternatively, you could introduce a PC v PC conflict resolution engine that's entirely flat - you wouldn't get an advantage on it whether you're strong, smart or charismatic, and it would abstract various ways PCs could sway one another in their respective fields. This would only apply when PCs are in conflict with one another. This would be fair to the players, but perhaps not to the characters.

Conclusions

There will always be conflict between characters at the party, and if one kind of conflict is more useful / stronger / more acceptable, whichever character dominates that field will be able to get away with a lot if left unchecked. It would be nice for systems to have a robust conflict resolution method that could be used by any sort of character in the system without a significant disadvantage...

Is Exalted with a different system still Exalted?

Our RPG group plays a lot of Exalted. We have recorded over 120 episodes of our podcast on Exalted, many of which were 4+ hours long. That being said, a lot of Exalted we play these days does not use the Exalted system, so is it fair to still call it Exalted? At least that's a question someone brought up in regards to our content.

Exalted is a game started by White Wolf in 2001, at the tail end of the Old World of Darkness. It was a game of mythological-scale hero adventurers in a world that's a mix between sword-and-sandal and wuxia stories. The world is vast and colourful, the mythology of the world is compelling, and the player's heroes themselves are larger than life. Where D&D games would end, whether it is dealing with gods or forming empires, Exalted starts you off.

We have done Exalted using Exalted 2nd and 3rd edition rules (Princes of the Universe), Exalted using Godbound rules (Princes of the Universe, again), Exalted using Broken Worlds (Skeleton Keys and Gangs of New Gloam), Exalted using Exalted vs World of Darkness (Heaven for Everyone), and are planning on doing Exalted using Fellowship. Each of these had a different focus - Broken Worlds focuses on the wuxia genre (where every conflict and conversation is an excuse to start throwing punches), Godbound focuses on exerting your will on large swaths of the world, while Fellowship is focused on saving communities from a big bad overlord. Each game has a different sorts of mechanics, and those mechanics inform a different style of gameplay. What stays the same in our games though is the core of Exalted - you are the mythic heroes of legend, destined to face off against impossible odds and larger-than-life challenges, in a world filled with threats that need a hero like that.

But is it Exalted though? It depends on what metric you're using. To compare, let's talk about Star Wars. The original trilogy definitely is Star Wars. Are Star Wars novels still Star Wars? They aren't theatrically released movies shot on film. Are Star Wars video games, animated shows, tabletop roleplay games, comics, card games, etc. Star Wars? Is the Christmas Special Star Wars? It is easy to debate what is canon and what is not, but you can't really deny that all of these things are Star Wars. They might be on different media, they might tell different stories, they may contradict one another, but they are still facets of the same franchise, telling the stories of the Jedi and Sith, Empire and Rebellion, and the various people of that universe.

So all in all, Exalted in a different system can still be Exalted. It might be quite far from the original game, it might have different themes and mechanics, it might even be so far removed you personally won't enjoy it, but it's still Exalted nonetheless. And hey, if the original Exalted could also be Battlestar Galactica but in fantasy space as Gunstar Autochtonia, you can probably suffer someone using a different rules to make the space combat more fun ;).