Saturday, January 7, 2012

Spartoi, Samurai and Other Pets

Question: I don't really understand your house rules concerning followers. Does it change the number of followers you get or is it about the point value of the birthright?

Neither, actually. What we're talking about when we say that Followers and Creatures gain in power along with their controller is a fix for the serious problem of those Birthrights becoming about as useful as lukewarm noodles once their owner hits Legend 5 or 6.

In the original rules, if you blow all your Birthright points on a sweet backup army of five samurai, those guys are awesome through your early Hero career. They kill bad guys, watch your back, run errands and anything else you need them to do. They're as effective as the best-trained human warriors, and as a result they're the most useful of your Birthrights.

Then you get to Legend 5, and you're a demigod! It's time to celebrate! But now when you're fighting foes appropriate to your Legend, something becomes depressingly clear: your samurai can't compete anymore. They're still the best-trained human warriors in existence, but they're just humans. Legend 5 and 6 monsters decimate them without even trying; they can't even make a dent in return. Suddenly all your Birthright points were spent on something that is totally useless.

So what our rule is trying to accomplish is making sure that your Followers and Creatures don't become pointless as soon as you get a few dots of Legend under your belt. Instead, when you go up in Legend, so do your Followers and Creatures; they don't remain stuck at their starting level of power forever. To keep things balanced, larger groups of Followers aren't as powerful as if you poured all your points into a single one. This doesn't change the Birthright point value; it just makes sure that you're always getting about as much benefit for your Followers as you were when you purchased them.

So if you start with a single Legend 0 Creature (let's say a giant crocodile) when you're Legend 2, it'll "level up" with you; when you're Legend 3, it'll become Legend 1, and so on until when you're a Legend 12 god it'll be a monstrous Legend 10 itself, a beast that rivals the typhonian monsters of the Titans. Your group of 5 samurai will only make it up to Legend 8 when you're a Legend 12 god, but since there are a bunch of them and they can work in concert, they're still useful backup for a variety of situations.

A Scion should never be only about his Birthrights, but Birthrights are still a cool and important part of an individual Scion's Legend. We use this rule to make sure that Follower and Creature Birthrights stay part of the story for their owners for their entire careers, if they so choose.

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