The core system's concept of “high Essence” effectively means that higher Essence means more power. This creates two effects. First, with exponential power growth high Essence charms effectively become finger-snap solutions to cool stories, and secondly the world's elders are also ridiculously powerful to the point of making any other entity irrelevant the moment they interact with the world.

This proposal aims to change the way high Essence is interpreted, and outlines the implications this brings.

The core idea is as follows: an entity's Essence rating is seen as the level of insight into the world and the entity's own state of being.

Talking points:

• Identity
• Abstraction and focus
• Filtered reality
• Detachment from creation

We make a distinction between the following rough classes of Essence ratings:

• Essence 1-5: These ratings are effectively unchanged from the original interpretation. This is the scale on which most normal and supernatural effects fall. An Essence 5 being is capable of achieving almost anything with effort, and their Charms reflect this.
• Essence 6-7: These ratings are a refinement of the being's insight into the world, their own place in it and their power over it. At this scale the being is capable of refining their influence on the world through Charms that leverage their improved insight into the world. They are also capable of creating Charms that flow from their strengthened identity.
• Essence 8-10: These ratings represent the entity's growing insight into their own identity and state of being. Charms at this scale can no longer influence the world, but are capable purely of interaction with the being's identity. Through these Charms the entity can strenghten, dissolve, seperate, or replace parts of their identity.

Increasing and Lowering Essence: Increasing Essence remains relatively unchanged for all ratings with, for example, introspection as a common method for most Exalt types, and increasing domain relevance of influence for gods. Due to the detached nature of high Essence beings, it is sometimes necessary for an entity to lower their Essence permanently to either advance their insight through direct experience, or simply from a desire to partake of creations bounties. Lowering Essence does not cost XP.

• Essence rating is a measure of power due to the domain-focussed nature of gods

• Distance from the hyper-focussed Yozi means dilution of insight and identity
• Essence is effectively a measure of Power

• Higher Essence means acceptance of the state of unfinished business