Any love for Scion?

[atomicpenguin]

I'm starting up a summer campaign of Scion and I was wondering if anyone had some good stories from that game. Right now we have a scion of the Monkey King, a scion of the Finnish goddess of spring and sanity (which i've decided to treat similarly to the Norse pantheon), and a scion of Tesla (American pantheon with access to the purviews of sky, industry, and mystery)

Edit: the Finnish goddesses name is Beiwe, btw.

[erikun]

I do have the Scion: Hero, Companion, and God books. (Still missing Hero: Demigod.) However, I haven't had a chance to give them a trial run yet, although I'd like to someday.

[Longes]

I've read the books, but never gotten a chance to play it. The ammount of dice makes me suspicious though. That, and the White Wolf tendency to have mechanically terrible systems.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Short summary for those who haven't played it:

Setting good. Rules bad.

Longer summary:

Scion is a great game in concept and setting, but requires a little houseruling to be much fun to play at Hero level and a lot of houseruling to be even playable at Demigod and God levels thanks to imbalanced attack/defense progressions and badly thought-out auto-success abilities.

That said it was fun as hell to romp all over the planet when we had an unfortunate combination of this game and a GM who a) always lets us do whatever we want anyway and b) doesn't understand Fatebinding or how to use auto-success abilities himself.

[Selrahc]

Scion is a great game in concept and setting, but requires a little houseruling to be much fun to play at Hero level

Really not a lot though! Take out Untouchable opponent and things hang together quite well, because using combat tactics and stunts will let people hit hard to touch opponents.

There are some other things, but Untouchable Opponent is the most obvious one, that comes up even if you're not trying to break the game.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Really not a lot though! Take out Untouchable opponent and things hang together quite well, because using combat tactics and stunts will let people hit hard to touch opponents.

There are some other things, but Untouchable Opponent is the most obvious one, that comes up even if you're not trying to break the game.

Yeah, honestly, Demigod+ is where the game breaks down, largely due to high-level knacks and high level Epic Attributes (even without Untouchable Opponent, basic combat becomes impossible at high Legend for anyone who doesn't have maxed Epic Dexterity, due to the way the autosux scale.) Hero isn't so bad.

[Friv]

Really not a lot though! Take out Untouchable opponent and things hang together quite well, because using combat tactics and stunts will let people hit hard to touch opponents.

You'd be stunned.

Around Legend 3-4, the mid-to-late Hero tier, a lot of problems crop up other than Untouchable Opponent. Ones I can remember off the top of my head:

Legend 3:

* Aegis (Guardian 2) can easily provide Hardness 9+, making targets nigh-invulnerable for a day unless they're up against people who can insta-kill everyone else.
* Cheval 2 is an untraceable instant murder action against anyone of lower Legend than you, and will become the same against equal-Legend characters as your Legend goes up.
* Itzli and Jotunblut are terrible.

Legend 4:

* Animal Aspect (Animal 3) lets you add an average of nine dice to all rolls involving an Attribute of your choice for several actions. Using it for combat (or for certain other boons) shatters the game pretty effectively.
* Paralyzing Confusion (Chaos 3) is a one-hit kill against equal or lesser-Legend characters, unless they have really exceptional Willpower + Integrity (and I mean Willpower 8-10, Integrity 4-5 and also Legend 4).
* Ward (Guardian 3) utterly locks down all equal- and lower-Legend characters with no possible way to evade or deal with it.
* Sekem Barrier (Heku 3) instantly removes all lower-Legend people or monsters from the field whenever you use it, for one Legend, with no way to counteract its effects.
* Phase Cloak (Moon 3) makes it impossible for anyone to spot you, due to them losing 8 successes before your opposed Stealth roll comes into play. Assuming they are hyper-Perception focused, they need to get 16 additional dice above Epic Attributes, Perception 5, and Awareness 5 to have an even chance of finding you.
* Heavenly Flare (Sun 3) is a one-hit kill against every enemy on the field if they don't have a better Stamina + Fortitude than your tricked-out Appearance+Presence, which you can chain indefinitely. Just make sure your allies know when to close their eyes. (Particularly absurd combined with Animal Aspect or Arete - or both.)

* The Helpful Spirit (Tsukumo-Gami 3) lets you get a +9 dice bonus to all actions involving a type of tool for several days, which makes you functionally unbeatable against enemies who don't have an equivalent source of dice (of which there are very few; see Animal Aspect, above, which this stacks with for extra stupid).
* Cheval 3 is basically Cheval 2 but so, so much more deadly, and almost any equal-Legend character is vulnerable.
* Demand A Labor (Magic 3) is an unstoppable one-hit slavery effect if you have any Epic Manipulation which allows you to totally lock down an enemy's Willpower pool.

* Itzli and Jotunblut continue to be terrible.

Just As A General Problem

* Buying armor according to the RAW can easily render starting characters invulnerable (nothing like starting the game with 15L soak!) YMMV if that is a problem.
* Buying weapons or armor according to the RAW can result is some relics being wildly stronger than others - for example, a 1-dot relic Katana has the same stats as a 2-dot relic Xiphos or a 4-dot relic Hasta. Level 1 riot gear could have the same stats as Level 4 lamellar, and is also bulletproof. And so on.
* Speed 1 Weapons. Or really any Weapon Speed below 4, but especially Speed 1.
* By Legend 4, guns are basically useless.
* The differences in cost between Legend Points for character generation and Experience points can result in characters with literally hundreds of XP worth of advantages over each other. This problem is magnified by some gods only having four purviews, while others have fourteen.

[Eurus]

Basically, Scion has some assumptions in place which aren't immediately apparent and don't necessarily lead to fun gameplay. If you're willing to abide by them or make extensive use of a gentleman's agreement it can work okay, but it's an extremely fragile balance.

Assumption 1: Anyone lower-Legend than you is not an enemy. They're either scenery or tools. Anyone higher-Legend than you is absolutely not to be taken on in a straight fight. Find a macguffin or artifact, get some other gods or scions to ally with you, whatever. Just don't make yourself into an obvious target or threat, because it probably has several different ways to shut you off completely. Because of this, every time your Legend increases you basically massively change the way you approach the world and its problems. Entities that were significant to you only one Legend point ago are now pushovers. Gaining Legend is a really big deal, and letting people buy it with experience points instead of just handing out advances when appropriate is probably a bad idea.

(Okay, this is a bit of an exaggeration. There are abilities that lower-legend targets can use to rough up a stronger opponent, if you target a defense that they haven't invested a high epic attribute in. But it's generally contingent on getting a surprise attack against them, because they can almost certainly one-shot you in return.)

Assumption 2: Because of the way things scale, it's not hard to either get ridiculous rocket tag levels of offense. It's also not hard to get defense that can just soak anything that's not ridiculous rocket tag levels of offense. Or both at once! Either way, against equal-level enemies, you're likely to either blow away an enemy in one hit or be all but unable to scratch them, and the same applies for them to you. As a result, it's not a very good game for running actual combat, since fights are either "steamroll" or "run away as fast as your stumpy half-mortal legs can carry you." This is a shame, because an awful lot of powers are combat-oriented.

[Longes]

Itzli and Jotunblut are terrible.

Can you elaborate please?

[Plague of Hats]

Can you elaborate please?

I'm not sure what Friv's specific complaints might be, but here's some of mine:

Itzli is often either close-to-useless because the Stortyeller restricts access to the necessary "components" (sacrificial victims) to use it effectively, or it's incredibly powerful because it gives you a ridiculous boost in Legend.

Jotunblut is kind of pretty meh at points, but also you can create crazy little armies of minions that will overwhelm and stomp the hell out of single targets.

They also help carry on the proud White Wolf tradition of being obliviously racist/offensive. Itzli is a ridiculous stereotype engine, and Jotunblut strips out a lot of interesting Norse tradition-myth stuff and adds in some stuff that would actually be really disgusting to a real follower, like sharing your blood with an animal.

In that same vein, the setting has some pretty good hooks, but a lot of the details are also pretty messed up. The Gods incarnate to live all kinds of different lives in the world, sure, that's cool. Did so many of the female gods really have to specifically note their sex industry experiences? That's definitely something that, in general, would happen in a thousand-thousand lifetimes, but you really don't see an equivalent theme in the male gods' write-ups.

It's a really great premise for a game (one that's been used again and again, really). I look forward to seeing what Joseph Carriker does with it.

[Friv]

Can you elaborate please?

Plague much covered the fairly serious narrative problems with the two powers very well, so I will briefly discuss the mechanical issues.

The Problem With Itzli:

At the Hero level, you never really run out of Legend, because none of your powers cost more than 1-2 Legend points, with the exception of a few weird ones that you activate well before anything is going to happen, and because you can stunt to recover Legend on every roll that you make. In addition, the fatebinding rules for spending tons of Legend at the Hero level are fairly brutal, so the only restriction on spending the aforementioned Legend is fear of getting snared by mortals. Which Itzli doesn't help you with, so recovering a lot of Legend in combat isn't actually good in that situation.

Worse, Itzli 1-3 can only be used on yourself, and all three levels require you to take health levels of damage, which is a lot harder to regain than Legend points are. So you're trading a very limited resource for a mostly-unlimited one, and spending a lot of experience to do it. The only exception is if you use Itzli to utterly game the system, in which case it renders you immortal (this involves using high soak, dropping your DV enough for people to do 1-2 levels of damage to you, recovering nine Legend, and then using the healing Knack to recover the damage and come out way ahead. This keeps you immortal forever unless fighting things that don't deal damage.)

The Problem with Jotunblut:

Remember that laundry list of powers that just make mortals not matter? Yeah. Jotunblut doesn't give your mortal followers a Legend score, which means that any enemy with any of those powers is invulnerable against them. It also only boosts their combat abilities, but doesn't boost their Dexterity, which means that they can't hit anything with Epic Dexterity, and it doesn't give them very much Strength or Stamina, so they're useless against the giant-type enemies with Epic Strength or Stamina.

Basically, it lets you spend a ton of Legend and health to create berserkers who are only slightly more powerful than an average person, at high XP cost.


Please note that, at higher Legend ratings, Itzli gradually transitions to becoming stupidly powerful, while Jotunblut gradually transitions to be even more useless.

[Hyooz]

You kind of need to approach Scion like you would an Exalted game. It's not really about the mechanics and combat, but more about the narrative and bopping around being awesome. Combat won't be a really engaging/rewarding part of the game at anything higher than really low levels, and even then tends to be pretty one-sided.

But people have made this pretty clear. Anything with less legend than you, you will utterly destroy without really trying. Anything with more Legend than you is a huge risk to fight. If you have a group that doesn't mind some of the ridiculous imbalance and can, say, get really into obliterating a group of NPCs in grandiose ways and just revel in the imagery and thematics, it's a solid game.

I really can't imagine playing at God level, though. Really, I just can't. Things get so absurd at that point I don't even know what sort of story you tell.

[Dogbert]

I'd have more love for the game if the setting wasn't wasted on a Saint Seiya premise.

[Longes]

I really can't imagine playing at God level, though. Really, I just can't. Things get so absurd at that point I don't even know what sort of story you tell.

My common sense began tingling when I read "adds 60 dice and 50 autosuccesses"

[Eurus]

I'd have more love for the game if the setting wasn't wasted on a Saint Seiya premise.

Yeah, I like messing around and riffing on some of the general concepts rather than taking the whole setting as-is. Although I also prefer a much lower-power style, almost closer to American Gods than Dragonball Z.

[Hyooz]

My common sense began tingling when I read "adds 60 dice and 50 autosuccesses"

And that's even the low-end of things. When something as simple as maxing out a stat creates headaches beyond the highest-level DnD Wizard shenanigans.

Not even getting into the "perfections" or whatever they're called, 10 dots in Strength adds 1.25 billion tons to the character's lifting capacity. And with a few knacks, hurl that same weight around the world to himself. A "normal" move action at Godly dexterity moves at around 120 mph without any knacks to boost it. Characters not even trying very hard can break Mach 3 just running.

Course, those are just silly feats of things happening. It doesn't get really headache inducing until you start looking at the ultimate social and mental stats. By spending a bit of legend and a willpower, a God with ultimate manipulation can just ensure something happens. It just... does. Irrevocably. And that's if you don't want to automatically enslave any and everyone present that doesn't have higher legend than yours. Ultimate Perception or Intelligence? Just... ugh.

And none of this is weird theory-crafting you see for DnD like the commoner railgun or spell combos. This is stuff written in the book. I don't know how this game gets played. Nobilis characters have more limits.

All of this still ignores silly things like still needing to breathe because shut up you still need to that's why.

[Grinner]

And that's even the low-end of things. When something as simple as maxing out a stat creates headaches beyond the highest-level DnD Wizard shenanigans.

Not even getting into the "perfections" or whatever they're called, 10 dots in Strength adds 1.25 billion tons to the character's lifting capacity. And with a few knacks, hurl that same weight around the world to himself. A "normal" move action at Godly dexterity moves at around 120 mph without any knacks to boost it. Characters not even trying very hard can break Mach 3 just running.

Course, those are just silly feats of things happening. It doesn't get really headache inducing until you start looking at the ultimate social and mental stats. By spending a bit of legend and a willpower, a God with ultimate manipulation can just ensure something happens. It just... does. Irrevocably. And that's if you don't want to automatically enslave any and everyone present that doesn't have higher legend than yours. Ultimate Perception or Intelligence? Just... ugh.

And none of this is weird theory-crafting you see for DnD like the commoner railgun or spell combos. This is stuff written in the book. I don't know how this game gets played. Nobilis characters have more limits.

All of this still ignores silly things like still needing to breathe because shut up you still need to that's why.

Long story short, just play Nobilis. It does epic fantasy much more cleanly.

[Eurus]

All of this still ignores silly things like still needing to breathe because shut up you still need to that's why.

Doesn't epic constitution let you hold your breath for hours or days (or years) at a time? Although you do still need to breathe if you plan on speaking, I guess.

[Hyooz]

Doesn't epic constitution let you hold your breath for hours or days (or years) at a time? Although you do still need to breathe if you plan on speaking, I guess.

Oh no, that's still very true, but the book goes well out of its way to ensure you know that you DO still need to breathe, if only once every 81 years or so. Which is weird, because they don't know why.