Drunken Review: Scion

[Seramus]

A situation in which Dexterity has a definite advantage is not a fucking hard counter to a Dexterity character, you tool.

It is when there are various options for building your strength and dexterity characters. For example, a grapple strength character could destroy a melee dexterity character, but not a ranged dexterity character. A throwing strength character could destroy a ranged dexterity character but not a melee dexterity character. See how that works?

Character A *does something other than attack with dexterity*.
Character B *spends a willpower point*, ignores it.
Character B kills A with dexterity attack.
Character A *tries to spend willpower point to negate dexterity attack*, *fails*..

If Character A is forced to be in that situation, sure! There is always room for people to make mistakes or be put in unfavorable positions by the Storyteller. But that won't happen most of the time.

[Koumei]

Whipstitch: Pretty much. Some of the other WW games have a thing where mind control powers are just flat-out better than anything you could possibly do in combat, nearly always working and not being outright negated by "spend a WP" or "have higher BeingAwesomeStat".

Scion does not follow that trend. There are three types of target for these powers:

• Those with higher Legend. They are immune.
• Those without higher Legend, but with Willpower. They spend a Willpower and are thus immune.
• Shitty people you could beat with no problem. And dominating a hundred of them won't actually help you in fighting the Dexterity: ALL character.

Mind control is seriously the shitty option for once. I can't remember the last time WW did a game where fighting (hard mode: without guns) was the big thing. Maybe W:tA?

As for Dex being the path to victory, that's nothing new. It's always been "the one and only important stat for combat - if you're a sucker who actually fights" in WW.

[squirrelloid]

Character A *does something other than attack with dexterity*.
Character B *spends a willpower point*, ignores it.
Character B kills A with dexterity attack.
Character A *tries to spend willpower point to negate dexterity attack*, *fails*..

If Character A is forced to be in that situation, sure! There is always room for people to make mistakes or be put in unfavorable positions by the Storyteller. But that won't happen most of the time.

Do I have to put you on ignore, or do you start talking sense at some point? A is always in that situation, because all meaningful opposition has willpower they can spend to make their actions useless.

Now, either their opposition is equally useless, because they're also using abilities that can be stopped with willpower, at which point its only a question of who has more willpower. OR their opposition just kills them because they're a dex monster. He never just wins anything, and gets hosed by the actual optimal character - the dex monster. This is not a counter system, this is a 'there is one true path to power' system.

And since there is only one true path to power, every player should be playing a dex character, because they can actually *do something*.

[Whipstitch]

a ranged dexterity character but not a melee dexterity character.

...You're talking about virtually same dude, given that it's Scion we're talking about and contributions from skill are puny relative to the big honking pile of successes you're getting from your attributes. To "spec" one way or the other really only becomes noticeable if you've got high rated Arete or Birthrights slanted towards one shtick and one shtick only or if you skipped having a single point in Athletics and Thrown for some dumbass reason.

[Seramus]

Do I have to put you on ignore, or do you start talking sense at some point? A is always in that situation, because all meaningful opposition has willpower they can spend to make their actions useless.

I've tried to be civil so far, but that just isn't doing the job apparently. It's probably best if you do put me on ignore, because you don't know enough about the system to back up your arguments, and you might be compelled to reply to this.

I've already stated that there are multiple ways to eliminate an opponents willpower, up to and including all of it in the case of several knacks. One even completely prevents the recovery of said willpower for an entire day. But you would know that if you were familiar with the system.

There are multiple ways to make social attacks from hundreds, or even thousands of miles away if you build your character that way. You can make social attacks without your opponent even being aware that you are making those attacks. You can make social attacks by proxy, through random mooks, billboards, or even a silly plane flying through the sky with a banner behind it. But you would know that if you were familiar with the system.

All of this is putting aside the fact that the game does not take place in a white room with a dexterity character and an X character standing in a room together. You've got friends who can simultaneously hammer the dexterity character (and themselves get hammered by whatever additional players the dexterity character has on his team). You've got people who can take blows for you. You've got other attributes and boons that can completely invalidate the attacks of the dexterity character, from just teleporting away, slipping through shadows, shrugging off your skin, or deciding that the dexterity character does not even exist for a moment in a fit of solipsism. On, and on, and on.

But you would know that if you were familiar with the system.

..You're talking about virtually same dude, given that it's Scion we're talking about and contributions from skill are puny relative to the big honking pile of successes you're getting from your attributes. To "spec" one way or the other really only becomes noticeable if you've got high rated Arete or Birthrights slanted towards one shtick and one shtick only or if you skipped having a single point in Athletics and Thrown for some dumbass reason.

There's a lot more to it than that, if a character picks up animal feature, flaming weapons, teamwork bonuses from summoned critters like unquiet corpse, some other PSPs like tsukumo-gami, and/or reverences which favor one style or the other and have no upper limit on how high those dice can go.

The system is crazy, and wacky, and completely unbalanced. But dexterity is just not that threatening in the scheme of things.

[squirrelloid]

Do I have to put you on ignore, or do you start talking sense at some point? A is always in that situation, because all meaningful opposition has willpower they can spend to make their actions useless.

I've tried to be civil so far, but that just isn't doing the job apparently. It's probably best if you do put me on ignore, because you don't know enough about the system to back up your arguments, and you might be compelled to reply to this.

I've already stated that there are multiple ways to eliminate an opponents willpower, up to and including all of it in the case of several knacks. One even completely prevents the recovery of said willpower for an entire day. But you would know that if you were familiar with the system.

There are multiple ways to make social attacks from hundreds, or even thousands of miles away if you build your character that way. You can make social attacks without your opponent even being aware that you are making those attacks. You can make social attacks by proxy, through random mooks, billboards, or even a silly plane flying through the sky with a banner behind it. But you would know that if you were familiar with the system.

All of this is putting aside the fact that the game does not take place in a white room with a dexterity character and an X character standing in a room together. You've got friends who can simultaneously hammer the dexterity character (and themselves get hammered by whatever additional players the dexterity character has on his team). You've got people who can take blows for you. You've got other attributes and boons that can completely invalidate the attacks of the dexterity character, from just teleporting away, slipping through shadows, shrugging off your skin, or deciding that the dexterity character does not even exist for a moment in a fit of solipsism. On, and on, and on.

But you would know that if you were familiar with the system.

I just want to make sure I understand you correctly: In a game of fighting monsters intent on destroying reality, the optimal line of play is to *not fight the monsters at all*, but engage in extended spooky action at a distance? And the rules provide no means of reprisal whatsoever, and also allow the spooky action at a distance character to infallibly reduce the target's willpower to zero *even when they know it's going on*?

Is it just me, or does that sound like the lamest game ever invented?

[Whipstitch]

Pretty sure of the things you just listed only Blazing Weapon is hard-coded to give a crap about whether you throw stuff or swing stuff. Even then, we could probably have a goofy, shameful argument about whether you can benefit from the Blazing Weapon buffs while throwing your birthright returning yaomitl.

Mind control is seriously the shitty option for once. I can't remember the last time WW did a game where fighting (hard mode: without guns) was the big thing. Maybe W:tA?

Sort of. If you were to stack up all the pages Werewolf spent on fapping to melee oriented gifts you could feel comfortable that yours would be the paper mountain that pierced the heavens. And certainly, if you grabbed a non-punchin' Gift at random from that pile, odds are super good that it totally sucks eggs. But the winners that were in there did shit like turn people to stone or buried people under mountains of garbage or made them run away from you like a screaming little girl for a number of turns equal to the successes you rolled.

[Seramus]

I just want to make sure I understand you correctly: In a game of fighting monsters intent on destroying reality, the optimal line of play is to *not fight the monsters at all*, but engage in extended spooky action at a distance? And the rules provide no means of reprisal whatsoever, and also allow the spooky action at a distance character to infallibly reduce the target's willpower to zero *even when they know it's going on*?

Socials certainly are incredibly powerful. But, you've probably got several other players in your game who all enjoy different things. Some might love that kind of backroom manipulating, others just want to punch faces in, and more want to solve everything like a puzzle. Just like every other RPG.

Pretty sure of the things you just listed only Blazing Weapon is hard-coded to give a crap about whether you throw stuff or swing stuff. Even then, we could probably have a goofy, shameful argument about whether you can benefit from the Blazing Weapon buffs while throwing your birthright returning yaomitl.

It's not about something being hard coded to only melee or ranged. It's about only having enough XP, time, or legend to get some of the things and not all of the things.

Epic dexterity might make you equally good at shooting bows or swinging swords with a single dot of ability in both, but summoning critters to give you teamwork takes some of your resources. Using helping spirit to max your sword leaves you with none to max your bow, or if you split the difference then both are weaker than one who specialized. Reverences can do the same thing, either helping your melee, or your ranged, or splitting across both but being weaker for it on account of limited time playing the game. You've only got a few animal features to give yourself. Etc.

[Username17]

In case anyone was wondering: Seramus is exactly as full of shit as it sounds like he is. While there are ways to run a dude out of Willpower from a distance, there aren't any ways to do that without spending a buttload of legend points, the only ones that work at a distance great enough that your target can't just throw their returning tomahawk of speed at you five times between losses of willpower points also work on a timeframe so slow that your target could just do things to refresh their willpower and run you out of Legend, and more importantly of all there isn't any way to do as a starting character. So we're talking about a long walk and a lot of XP, and during all of it you can't basically do shit while the Speedster has been winning everything and making you look like a hobo. And at the end of the day you can probably spend out your legend to remotely chew through the willpower and finally dominate like one elite soldier - because even 2nd tier mortal mooks have 6 Willpower for some fucking reason.

Mind Control is a GTFO ability, but everyone gets a hard counter. Even fucking bystanders get 4 Willpower. Unnamed fucking characters get to say "LOL, No" four times before your mental powers can do anything. And it literally only goes up from there. Paul Krugman has a Willpower of 8 and gets to recover Willpower every time something bad happens.

Oh, and grapples do not stop the Speedster. At all. The target still gets to use their epic dex to defend themselves. The one and only advantage is that you can use Epic Strength instead of Epic Dexterity to power the attack roll. So if you don't have super speed but you do have super strength, you can make attacks which are about as good as what the speedsters do, but at five times the time cost (because you don't get to use relic speed modifiers) and at no range. This isn't a "counter" so much as a "really shitty 2nd best option". Also note that grappling causes Bashing Damage, which means that it scales away to nothing even for starting characters. So really, grappling isn't even a way to do damage, it's just a defense debuff to help one of your companions who is a real warrior (that is: one with epic dex and a speed weapon that can actually hurt enemies just like you could have been) to stab them in the back. But they still attack five times as often as you do, and probably don't need your charity because their weapon attack is still probably better than your grapple because it has a longer range and a presumably positive accuracy modifier.

-Username17

[Seramus]

While there are ways to run a dude out of Willpower from a distance, there aren't any ways to do that without spending a buttload of legend points

You're forgetting about stunts, which let you equalize or even recover legend. A God's Honest for example costs only 1 legend and you can earn 2 legend just from describing the lie in an awesome way. Turn that into a multiple action and your target is losing willpower faster than he can stunt it back.

That's not even counting the fact that the social character can make mundane non legendary social attacks.

the only ones that work at a distance great enough that your target can't just throw their returning tomahawk of speed at you five times between losses of willpower points also work on a timeframe so slow that your target could just do things to refresh their willpower and run you out of Legend, and more importantly of all there isn't any way to do as a starting character.

There are a lot of ways this is wrong, but at the very least a starting character with legend 3, epic charisma 2, unimpeachable reference (prereq), and borrowed credibility. Spend a bunch of legend, stunt a bunch of legend back, then you've got a dozen mortals who can all smash enemies with a social attack simultaneously. Oh, and they can do that over and over and over again for two days.

Oh, and grapples do not stop the Speedster. At all.

Hero page 200. " If it hits, the target character immediately becomes Inactive (see p. 191)." That's six seconds at 0 dv before the defender can even think about rolling to contest the grapple.

but at five times the time cost (because you don't get to use relic speed modifiers) and at no range.

Companion page 151. "Gain a -1 to a weapon’s Speed (max. 4, or 3 if the item normally has a 4."

Also note that grappling causes Bashing Damage, which means that it scales away to nothing even for starting characters. So really, grappling isn't even a way to do damage

Hero page 126. Crushing grip. Demigod page 51. Divine wrath. Or if we're talking high levels of strength he can just throw you into outer space.

[Whipstitch]

Epic dexterity might make you equally good at shooting bows or swinging swords with a single dot of ability in both, but summoning critters to give you teamwork takes some of your resources. Using helping spirit to max your sword leaves you with none to max your bow, or if you split the difference then both are weaker than one who specialized. Reverences can do the same thing, either helping your melee, or your ranged, or splitting across both but being weaker for it on account of limited time playing the game. You've only got a few animal features to give yourself. Etc.

This is the most determined case of denial-in-depth I've seen in a while. Alright, look, you can't reasonably balance a theoretical DexThrower>StrGrappler>DexMelee paradigm if the majority of the time DexThrower and DexMelee are the same fuckin' dude, which is what I was trying to get at with my post. And the vast majority of the time, they are the same dude. The Helpful Spirit thing only comes into play if you're running a specific Pantheon Specific Purview AND your MC wouldn't let you have a mini-mjolnir yaomitl to pull double duty with. Personally, I find the Arete issue I already helpfully brought up more plausible since you can't reskin that one every time your Legend has refilled. In any case, none of that is even touching on the whole "Yo Dex Build, You should just be throwing regardless, you newb," issue.

[squirrelloid]

I just want to make sure I understand you correctly: In a game of fighting monsters intent on destroying reality, the optimal line of play is to *not fight the monsters at all*, but engage in extended spooky action at a distance? And the rules provide no means of reprisal whatsoever, and also allow the spooky action at a distance character to infallibly reduce the target's willpower to zero *even when they know it's going on*?

Socials certainly are incredibly powerful. But, you've probably got several other players in your game who all enjoy different things. Some might love that kind of backroom manipulating, others just want to punch faces in, and more want to solve everything like a puzzle. Just like every other RPG.

If other players don't let you do spooky action at a distance, then you're useless, because your impact on actual combat is nil. (Since by the time you've managed to burn their willpower away, your buddy epic dex has already killed it). If one character's uber-schtick takes *days*, and the other character's uber-schtick takes *rounds*, they cannot play together in any meaningful way.

[Seramus]

Alright, look, you can't reasonably balance a theoretical DexThrower>StrGrappler>DexMelee paradigm if the majority of the time DexThrower and DexMelee are the same fuckin' dude, which is what I was trying to get at with my post. And the vast majority of the time, they are the same dude.

They certainly can be the same dude, but they are not necessarily the same dude. A player can invest his relics into a melee weapon and build up reverences about wielding a melee weapon, and he is probably going to use that melee weapon most of the time.

Is it completely possible for that character to also pick up a bow and shoot the dangerous strength character that will grapple and trash him? Yeah, and that's the smart thing to do. But if he does try to pull off a dexterity melee attack then he gets one actions worth before he gets hard countered by the grapple specialist.

And that's why I said that particular match up favors dexterity earlier in the thread. It takes strength a lot longer to get effective universal counters to the things dexterity can do much earlier.

If one character's uber-schtick takes *days*, and the other character's uber-schtick takes *rounds*, they cannot play together in any meaningful way.

Luckily they can and do play together in a perfectly meaningful way! That's not just theorycraft, that's actual experience with both types of characters totally rocking it in the same game.

And if you really insist on speed dominating through social means, you can use the method I suggested to Frank above and start at Legend 4 instead. Then you could set up your uber-social schtick in about 30 seconds give or take however long it takes to find enough mortals. Which would all be done prior to combat.

[Jefepato]

Mind Control is a GTFO ability, but everyone gets a hard counter. Even fucking bystanders get 4 Willpower. Unnamed fucking characters get to say "LOL, No" four times before your mental powers can do anything. And it literally only goes up from there. Paul Krugman has a Willpower of 8 and gets to recover Willpower every time something bad happens.

The thing where it talked about how you can blow off anything with 1 Willpower. They needed to clean up their shit hard.

I wanted to like this game, I wanted it a lot. I really like the "modern-day demigod" thing. But, well, most of what you said.

[Whipstitch]

Reverences are rarely a big deal beyond Hero tier and even at that level of play it mostly matters if the MC Fate has conspired to make you heroically attempt something you're not good at while people who think you are a big jerk act as the audience. That's because going with or against expectations nabs a grand total of a single die per every two points of fate bind strength, and that's rarely going to be enough to warrant changing your strategies given that it's game where you can purchase auto-success in your specialties. Even then, that actually has fuck all to do with what kind of weapon you choose to wield unless the MC has decided to make one of your weapons Fate Bound in a way that doesn't screw you and ignores or nerfs the other one. Plus, on top of that, one could make the argument that you don't have to actually wield something that is fatebound to live up to its expectations. You do, after all, get bonus dice to harm your Nemesis even if you are not actually forcing his own hand into his face and telling him to quit hitting himself like a 5th grade bully. Ugh, I hate fate binding.

But honestly, I'm getting kinda tired of this avenue of discussion given that you seem to agree that the character is at a disadvantage while still describing grappling as a hard counter.

[Username17]

Mind Control is a GTFO ability, but everyone gets a hard counter. Even fucking bystanders get 4 Willpower. Unnamed fucking characters get to say "LOL, No" four times before your mental powers can do anything. And it literally only goes up from there. Paul Krugman has a Willpower of 8 and gets to recover Willpower every time something bad happens.

The thing where it talked about how you can blow off anything with 1 Willpower. They needed to clean up their shit hard.

I wanted to like this game, I wanted it a lot. I really like the "modern-day demigod" thing. But, well, most of what you said.

Perfect Defenses was not a good model in Exalted, and it's not a good model in Scion either. The thing where perfect defenses exist only for non-physical combat doesn't make it half as bad, it makes it twice as bad. Then the thing where they give those perfect defenses to mundane bystanders even though they don't have any celestial Virtues to get any Willpower points from is just bizarre.

I believe we're looking at the natural result of having 17 cooks. Whoever wrote what Willpower did thought that they were doing the Exalted thing where "run your opponent out of defense points" was the normal way to conduct business, so they just wrote in that Willpower was ablative defense for all forms of mental and social influence and attack. After all, that section gives a Willpower calculation that says only Scions get Willpower, and presumably all the Scions are going to have perfect defenses in melee as well, right? Well wrong. Because the people who wrote the physical combat section didn't write any perfect defenses into it, and the people who wrote up the NPCs didn't get the memos that mortals weren't supposed to get Willpower.

But basically, you can't write a system that is supposed to go into epic craziness like that. You have to have all the writers on the same page about what is supposed to counter what, how many rounds things are supposed to take, what things are supposed to cost, and how crunchy or squishy targets are supposed to be. If there are hard counters to things, the web of counters has to be very tightly built because it's really easy for such things to degenerate into One True Wayism, Slapjack, or Stalemate, and that's all really bad. If there aren't hard counters to things, you have to heavily police the RNG and the GTFO abilities lest the game be broken in other more numerical ways.

---

I wanted to like Scion. Being a Demigod is an awesome idea for an RPG, there are millions of stories to tell with thousands of characters you can plop down whenever. The modern age and the rich history of mythology are probably the two most heavily sourced settings ever, and if you mash them up you have virtually limitless source material to work with.

Also: White Wolf has cool art. The promos for Scion were Michael Komarck pieces and looked really cool.




(the cover to "God" looks like it was rolled in by a scarab, but they can't all be winners)

But really you have to ask what Scion is even bringing to the table. With the exception of a ludicrously small number of named Scion NPCs, all the characters are public domain. Percy Jackson was a thing. Hercules in New York was a thing. If you want to do the child of Thor running around fighting Frost Giants in Chicago, you can just do that. That's a public domain concept.

-Username17

[John Magnum]

When you say Paul Krugman, are you kidding, or did they literally stat up the economist?

[Username17]

When you say Paul Krugman, are you kidding, or did they literally stat up the economist?

There's a guy who is a "nationally syndicated opinion columnist" who is always right and always negative because he's a cynical pessimist who is also a Cassandra. They call him "Frank Belltower", and the drawing shows a guy yelling into one of those old sportscaster microphones and smoking a cigar. I just call him Paul Krugman because I can't think of any other chronically pessimistic nationally syndicated opinion columnists are right all the time.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Krugman is not right all the time.

He's just the only one who will admit when he is wrong and revise his models to compensate, thereby making him more likely to be right in the future.

[hyzmarca]

So, how easy would it be for a starting social character to call up the President and tell him to airstrike a bitch, assuming that the PC bothers to put some work into it beforehand? Any abilities that would make Obama your yes-man forever? And how effective would an airstrike be agianst a demigod, anyway?

[Whipstitch]

(the cover to "God" looks like it was rolled in by a scarab, but they can't all be winners)

Yeah, I dislike that cover but it doesn't really affect my opinion of the artist much since I don't really envy anyone the job of portraying an Aztec themed god. After all, for ttrpg purposes the Aztec themed gods are all heavy metal torture machines whose fashion industry is based mostly on killing someone and using their meats as a hat. So while I don't condone having super lame fires, an ill-advised skull and a rainbow all in the same picture, I can kinda understand how he got there.

[wotmaniac]

Any abilities that would make Obama your yes-man forever?

be the head of a major labor union

[John Magnum]

Any abilities that would make Obama your yes-man forever?

be the head of a major labor union

Yes, because organized labor is currently running the show in American politics today. You fucking nailed it.

[Username17]

(the cover to "God" looks like it was rolled in by a scarab, but they can't all be winners)

Yeah, I dislike that cover but it doesn't really affect my opinion of the artist much since I don't really envy anyone the job of portraying an Aztec themed god. After all, for ttrpg purposes the Aztec themed gods are all heavy metal torture machines whose fashion industry is based mostly on killing someone and using their meats as a hat. So while I don't condone having super lame fires, an ill-advised skull and a rainbow all in the same picture, I can kinda understand how he got there.

I love Komarck's art for the most part, but the God cover is shit. There's really no excuse for it. The shield is a clear afterthought and doesn't match the arm it was digitally attached to, the perspective lines on the floating shangri-la shit point every which way, and the open chest cavity reveals a rib cage that is clearly in a different pose from the outside of that guy's body. It looks like phoned in clip art. I wouldn't be super happy with it if it was one of the collages I made for my Los Angeles Horror board game's card art pieces. From an artist of Komarck's caliber, it's equal parts surprising and insulting.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Maybe at that stage Krugman had realized the game was not even remotely worthy of his attention, so he started turning in perfunctory art. The terrible design process was probably fundamental enough that he would've noticed it in his corner at least half as bad as consumers noticed it over in ours. And if working with the Scion team is even half as bad as playing their product I'd be pretty unwilling to turn in more than the bare minimum my contract requires.