Vital question : How do you make Scion's system balanced and viable ?
Between the useless as fuck powers for some eities and the fucking busted ones for other, the combat system that takes hours to get your head around and the already made characters that makes you believe this shit is balanced and useable, what can you do with it ?
Use a different system.
I use Savage Worlds for everything, but someone has the pasta about why that's bad. Savage RIFTS is something I'm using for everything now.
DnD definitely doesn't work. Or Pathfinder.
Storyteller-style systems are too loosey-goosey for the play style.
WoD can come pretty close. You could finagle something.
Exalted is confusing as fuck.
Probably going to say: Cut it down.
Whatever you do, cut some of that shit down. How complicated does it need to be? Make it so, and no more.
Scion's system is cluttered with useless shit. Cut that out, see what's left, and then choose an appropriate system to port it over to.
This is the first time I've ever seen Scion posted on Veeky Forums everyone loves all the other White Wolf systems so much its always seemed like the red headed step child with too many dice.
I love the setting but the clutter is obnoxious, I was reading into Godbound for something that can capture a similar feeling within the setting but way less clutter.
>Use a different system.
I ran one game of it and my players and I agreed it was not tolerable. Ported it to FATE, worked fine. You can port it to pretty much any generic or super hero system with little trouble. The mechanics are asinine anyway, so don't bother trying to emulate them, just copy the lore and give similar sounding powers.
Make free successes from Epic Attributes go up linearly instead of exponentially. Ditch Untouchable Opponent.
rebuild the system from the ground up so that DEX is not the god stat as it is in every White Wolf game because they cannot into balanced combat that is fun for people who aren't combat autists
I'm currently setting up Ragnarok for my group, and I have a few house rules to try and make things run a bit more smoothly.
- You can't buy Legend.
- As mentioned above by , Epic Attributes only give a linear bonus. Same goes for things like Arete that give scaling bonuses. This way,
- General Purpose Boons can be bought in any order within the same Tier (1-3, 4-7, 8-10).
- Guns get Perception to damage, and melee attacks can be resolved with either Strength or Dexterity, depending on the weapon.
P.S. Also get rid of all of the weird, conditional ways that taking action mucks with DV. Our group played for about three years without even realizing that those rules were a thing, since the ST ignored them completely. Upon reading them, I immediately knew why.
Maybe add a bigger boost when you go from 3 to 4 and from 6 to 7? That way you still have a serious demarcation between Heroes, Demigods, and Gods, but everyone in the same tier can still compete.
I never found it necessary to make that demarcation. You get new powers and whatever, you don't need to supercharge them at what is pretty much an arbitrary point.
Which Purviews are the ones with problems? I know Arête and Enech are generally considered the best and Jotunblut the worst as far as Pantheons go, but which Universal Purviews need buffing or nerfing?
Fertility usually gets cited as the worst, since several of its abilities tend to be extremely thematic abilities that tend to not have any in-game utility, with most of its useful things getting poached by Health. Fire works, but tends to be a little disappointing early on. Sky Scions can fly and imbue their weapons with wind and lightning! Water Scions can manipulate water, walk on water, and form ice out of the vapor in the air! Fire Scions can...keep a campfire burning without fuel, and look though a fire within sight.
Ah yeah, they did kind of make it the Plants domain. A more interesting demarcation could have worked, as well as some more general utility powers. There's all kinds of fun plants in Mythology, from the Peaches of Immortality to the Apple of Discord... Giving them some ability to work other Purviews into plant life could have been a much more interesting utility power.
>dex is the godstat in every White Wolf game
not in nWoD it isn't
Seriously though, OP, just do Part-Time Gods instead.
>ctrl+f 2e
>no responses
Just play Scion 2E when it comes out, OP.
You misread. OP wanted something balanced and viable, not a new load of shit that they managed to fuck up so badly that you need an extra book to actually play as scions.
OP here, thanks for your advice
I don't want to spend too much time on adapting the system so I guess I'll use another one completely...
But I agree with you, the setting is nice.
Wait, they're doing another "Mortals" book thing? That could either be very good (something to turn your Mortal into besides a Scion) or very annoying (one books split into two).
Not sure where the "rar they've fucked if up" is coming from, though.
The core rules for Scion 2e are written for people who aren't actually scions. You play as sons of gods pre-Visitation (i.e. without boons, purviews, etc), as mortals, and as non-scion creatures like satyrs.
If you want to actually play Scion as full Scions, you need to buy at least 1 additional book (the Scion rulebook), so with 2e you need 4 books to do what Scion 1e did in 3.
I'm not opposed to having rules for pre-Visitation or non-human scions, it can be fun for a lot of groups, but I hate the idea that I need to carry 700 pages around to actually play Scion and not "slightly magical people in the world of Scion". They took what should be a splatbook, and shoved it so hard into core that it displaced actual core rules.
I guess they figured if it worked for NWoD it'll work for Scion?
But at least with NWoD it was an actual World, and you went down different paths (Vampire, Werewolf, etc) depending on what part of the world you wanted to explore.
Scion is all about Scions. A game of Scion without Scions is a sandwich without bread. Or filling.
I didn't like carrying all the books around for NWoD either.
That's why you get pdfs you silly
You're talking like they won't do a Titanspawn set of books if Scion is a commercial success.
But the smell of paper and the ease of using a book and passing it around! But more importantly, I don't want to spend the money for an extra book to alt-tab to all through the session.
For what purpose? They've said they're scaling back the War in 2e and focusing more on inter-Pantheon stuff (which I could take or leave), and 1e already had rules for playing as Titan-aligned Scions (all you need is a new Pantheon Purview for the Titan). If you mean playing as monsters, that's a splatbook, not an entire line.
Ah, I wasn't aware of that. Pity, I like the Titanic war.
Anyway, it is a splatbook... Which is built on top of the new Mortal rules, rather than the Scion rules. You could then have other Splats built using the same framework. I think if they use it well, it's got potential.
>I like the Titanic war
So do I. The upside is that they're going to do many more pantheons (I think there's rules for 10 in Scion, with more promised via stretch goals), and White Wolf/Onyx Path write terrible metaplots so we can ignore that and keep on with the strange bedfellows against every apocalypse.
But my point is that I don't see what they are using Mortal as a base. The base power level of 1e was Legend 2, because that's when the exciting things happen (you can deal with monsters, you get Boons worth a damn, you have your Birthrights from visitation, you have decent Epics). I don't understand why they are cutting the power level way down for 2e, as far as many new players are going to see. If I wanted a generic urban fantasy, there's dozens of systems; I choose Scion because I want to play heroic cycles as Scions.
What's your favorite Pantheon and why is it the Tuatha?