Trying your best and the limits of rewards

I recently gave up on running a campaign of Exalted. It’s not a friendly parting. I have many complaints with the game, and have no intentions of ever running it again. There’s a lot of angles to criticize it, if I wanted to dig into a detailed list of grievances someday. For now, however, I want to focus on a part of the system I don’t think is inherently bad, so much as, bad in context: The PCs are naturally too good at things. It’s really hard to meaningfully challenge them. A build in Exalted is highly specialized in a few fields of engagement – combat, sorcery, social persuasion, long-term bureaucratic logistics, sailing, etcetera. Nominally, each of these fields has its own bespoke game mode. In practice, however, not only are these game modes not given equal weight… a character who is specialized in a given game mode will simply win. A social build enters a social interaction, has vastly higher numbers than any NPC who is not themself one of the rare empowered chosen ones in…