Scion: Combat tweaking

[Nerd-o-rama]

Okay so some friends on the internet have convinced me to maybe run a chat game of Exalted in the World of Darkness Scion. I played Scion at Demigod and God levels once before and rather hated it for two reasons:

1) There was no point to even trying to fight if you didn't have Epic Dex as high as you could get it.
2) Guns were laughably useless.

Other stuff like the complex Exalted-like dice/initiative system and the really arbitrary skills (compared to NWoD) I can deal with. The gun issue I figure I'll fix by just adding Perception to firearms damage - including auto-successes from Epic Perception.

The main question is how do I nerf Dex? Should I nerf Dex if I don't actually plan to go past Legend 4-6 (I am not even going to let people buy it with BP/XP; it's a story reward as far as I'm concerned)? Does it matter? Should I just ban Untouchable Opponent and call it a day, or is there more that I need to do?

Also, are there any other suggestions for making combat or Epic Attributes in general smoother? Recommendations at all? I've never run Scion, and the closest game I actually know well is NWoD, which is very different despite using kinda sorta the same dice system.

Oh, and one more thing; what horrible things will happen if I remove the Legend caps on Boons and Epic Attributes, i.e. if I want people to start at one Legend but still be able to specialize? Regular attributes will still be capped normally and Epic Attributes are still capped at the regular attributes, of course.

[Selrahc]

The main question is how do I nerf Dex? Should I nerf Dex if I don't actually plan to go past Legend 4-6 (I am not even going to let people buy it with BP/XP; it's a story reward as far as I'm concerned)? Does it matter? Should I just ban Untouchable Opponent and call it a day, or is there more that I need to do?


If you're not going past legend 6? I think you're fine just banning UO.

Remember, even the literally unhittable don't get to dodge the undodgeable, unless they're properly stunting out in a way that probably isn't possible at much below high demigod. Hitting a large area which happens to contain them is the workaround to hit high dex builds. Meanwhile certainly up to Epic Dex 4, it's possible for a skilled person to get lucky and hit the old fashioned way, and for those epic strength guys to lock people into a grapple that prevents all the fancy dodging malarkey.



Recommendations at all?

I would say, remove the Epic Strength knack which lets you cause Agg damage in a grapple. That knack tears people apart, even if they have *much* higher Epic Stamina.


I will say. When I ran Scion, my group consisted of 3 players. 1 of them was combat focussed, the other two basically ran support for him in combat. I think that worked quite well for the system, but sadly it isn't terribly practical as advice.



Oh, and one more thing; what horrible things will happen if I remove the Legend caps on Boons and Epic Attributes, i.e. if I want people to start at one Legend but still be able to specialize? Regular attributes will still be capped normally and Epic Attributes are still capped at the regular attributes, of course.

Somebody spends all their starting points buying say...
Chaos 6, and unleashing a spreading plague of chaos which wipes memories, is communicable by sight, lasts for hours, and is literally irresistible to mortals.

Every A lot of boons and all epic attributes get a big pump up for the demigod level. You'd be well advised capping them at 3 until you're ready to unleash demigods. If you do that, I don't think things would be too bad.

[The_Snark]

Adding Perception to firearms damage (or having a Knack allowing you to do so) seems to be a common and fairly sensible way of making guns better.

Fixing Dexterity is a bit more problematic; as you probably know if you've played Exalted, the basic system favors Dexterity. (In Exalted this is not much more than a minor problem, but Scion's epic attributes make it very conspicuous and force you to invest in the arms race to keep up.) So you're going to have to change something basic.

I've toyed with the idea of making melee attacks Strength-based rather than Dexterity-based. This means that a guy who focused on Epic Strength will be deadly (high attack and high damage), but it does nothing for defense; he'll have to invest in Epic Dexterity or Stamina if he doesn't want to have a glass chin. I've never tried this out, so I'm not sure how it'll work in practice, but there are two issues that come up even just thinking about it. Firstly, it does nothing to fix ranged characters; they still get to boost attack and DV with a single stat. On the other hand, they need to grab Epic Strength or Epic Perception if they want to boost damage, so maybe that's fair? The second problem is that this rules out certain combat archetypes and forces all melee characters to be high-Strength bruisers. You could add a Knack similar to Weapon Finesse that lets you use Epic Dex to fight, but then we're right back at the point we started and the only difference is that you have 1 less Knack...

And yes, ban Untouchable Opponent. I've seen people houserule that it only adds 1 point of DV per point of Epic Dex rather than doubling your successes, but I don't feel like this is quite enough. It's hard enough to hit and hurt people in Scion as-is.

If you are not going to go past Legend 4-6, you may not need to deal with this problem; it'll start to show up around Legend 5-6, though, when not taking Epic Dex can mean people have 7-11 more successes than you. (Even taking a little less than the maximum will be a noticeable disadvantage, putting you behind by 3-4 successes.)

On that last bit: huh. Well, for one thing it encourages specialization, because of the way Epic Attributes grant scaling bonuses. Five dots in five different Epic Attributes will give you five bonus successes; five dots in the same Epic Attribute will give you eleven. So you'll start running into that problem right away. If you do this, I would consider making them scale linearly: one dots of an Epic Attribute gives 1 bonus success, and 5 dots of an Epic Attribute give 5 successes.

In fact, that may be a more sensible way to handle Epic Attributes even if you don't cap them. If you like, you can make this scale at higher Legend, so that demigods or gods get more per dot than just regular heroes; but you don't have to.

Boons are... different, First off, because you don't have to buy Boons in order you should be wary of people going straight for the god-level Boons (all boons cost a flat 4 or 5 bonus points, no matter what level, so it's not as expensive as you think). In some cases this isn't really an issue: many high-Legend Boons are cool but don't have much impact on game balance, and a lot of others depend entirely on the dice pool you use to activate them (meaning they rely on Epic Attributes to be truly powerful). There are a few that will be problematic, like Colossus Armor, but those are often overpowered even with the regular rules. You can do this, but let your players know that you'll be modifying certain Boons to make them less (or more) powerful, and make sure you're fine with giving them wide-ranging powers like plagues and rains of fire.

If you don't want to deal with this, you could make Boons work like Epic Attributes (meaning you have to buy them in succession), and that will cut down on a lot of this.

Also, I highly recommend checking out this (http://www.gothambynight.com/scion/index.htm) website: it has some good ideas for houserules there, including a whole bevy of Knacks and Boons (some revised from the originals, others completely new). It's not a good reference for the original game, because so much of it is changed or completely new; but this is also why it's not in violation of copyright! So it's all good.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Alright so what I'm getting is that banning UO should be good at start-to-low-Demigod, that the Perception fix is common and a good idea, and that I need to cap Boons somehow even if not at the normal Legend limit. What I'll probably do is cap them at 3 for Heroes and advance the cap normally for Legend 5+. That way, you can get some neat tricks right from the start, but nothing outside of your "tier".

And oh hey one of my prospective players tried to link me to that website yesterday but it didn't work until now. Thanks.

EDIT: Oh, and I don't want to single-stat melee either since said prospective player complains about every fighter needing to fight the same way already. Hence me wanting to buff guns.