Powering Down

Question: Can a god in low level avatar form still increase his legend past 9?

This is a question with many moving parts. The answer is both no and yes.

No, the Avatar itself can never increase in Legend. When a god creates an Avatar for himself, he's basically creating a low-Legend body to run around in the World in, leaving his normal power level at home. The Avatar isn't really him any more than the clothes he's normally wearing are. It can't gain Legend, because it's a vessel built specifically to be that Legend rating; if you make an Avatar that is Legend 6, it will never grow past Legend 6, regardless of what you're doing while you're using it. If you want to increase in effective Legend for what you're doing, you'll need to just make a higher-Legend Avatar.

However, yes, the god can increase in Legend while he's using an Avatar. If you're using an Avatar to run around as Legend 6 for a while and you happen to be doing really awesome things, so awesome that Fate sits up and takes notice, then, just like any other time in Scion, you might go up in Legend. But the important thing to note here is that it's your real, godly form that goes up in Legend; you would increase from Legend 9 to 10, but your Avatar would just stay Legend 6, as it's separate from your normal self and can't progress or change on its own. Similarly, your Avatar isn't gaining XP, just your real self, which often means you're spending XP on powers that the Avatar can't even access. Avatars are a tool for doing things in the World, but they're not beings in their own right and don't progress on a separate track. (Unless you're a Deva, but Deva Avatars that come from the Samsara purview are entirely different.)

On a third level, however, it's totally possible to create an Avatar that is Legend 9 or higher. Most gods don't bother, since the entire point of Avatars is to make you low enough in Legend rating that Fatebonds won't crush you for doing things in the World, but there's no reason, if you're Legend 11, you can't make an Avatar that is Legend 9 or 10 if you want to. Some of our PCs actually do drop only a single Legend pretty frequently as a sort of insurance policy; it lets them keep most of their powers and skills, but gives them a get-out-of-jail-free card if things get rough and they get killed.

We actually have a scale for the Avatar Birthright; the more points you invest in it, the better you are at it and the less expensive it becomes. Folks with really hoss Avatars like Terminus or Vala can drop to high Hero/low Demigod level for the price of just a few points of Legend, while those with less command over the Birthright, like Eztli or Sowiljr, must pay larger sums of Legend and can only drop a few dots. We've also found that many of our PCs don't pick it up at all; some of them are fully comfortable just being gods all the time, with all the badassery and tribulation that entails.