It's Not the Size that Counts

Question: How do you handle the imbalance of XP from one player to the next? Unfavored things, the Demigod upgrade, and the God Upgrade can all conspire to create a gulf of 200 XP or more by god.

Most of the time, we don't! And that has always worked out pretty great for us. We do some small things to try to keep XP striation down - we award Legend instead of letting it be bought, for one thing, and if there are PCs of different Legend in the same band, those of lower Legend get slightly more XP than those of higher Legend to prevent the higher-Legend people from leaving them in the dust - but most of the time, we let things happen organically based on how the players want to run with their points. There will always be some XP variation between PCs, but the key is that that variation is in their hands, not ours.

You're right; where a PC chooses how to spend bonus points at creation, where to put their dots at the Demigod and God upgrades, whether they're buying favored or unfavored abilities and associated or unassociated powers, whether they're buying knacks on their own or getting them for free from Epics, and whether or not they have the XP-discount or free-dots-of-abilities Knacks all make a difference in how far the same amount of XP stretches. In our games, Fatebonds are a further element, as Fatebonds buy things at a reduced price from what the PC would pay to buy them alone, so someone who has 50 XP worth of a purview bought off will see it coverted into other things that, if they were trying to buy themselves, would be worth more than 50 XP. Players missing games, which happens inevitably over the course of a long game, also now and then causes them to lose out on XP that the other players get. There are a lot of ways to monkey around with XP and how you spend it and where it goes in Scion, and it's inevitable that some characters will end up "ahead" if you consider it a zero-sum total number.

But we generally don't, because the players have almost total control over their own XP and whether or not they want to spend it in the most "efficient" manner or take a hit in order to do something they like better. Sure, the player who wanted to have "the most XP" should probably only buy things that are associated, always immediately buy all the XP-discount knacks and hope they get Fatebound for stats they don't like to be bought off to increase ones they do, but that doesn't sound like very much fun to me, to be honest, and I'd assume it doesn't to our players, either, because none of them have ever tried to do it. Which is not to say that they're not on the lookout for how to stretch their XP the furthest, of course, nor that we don't help out with that whenever it looks like someone's struggling to figure out how to do everything they want to do, but the most important thing is generally getting the most bang for your XP when doing what you want to do, not getting the most bang for it in general terms.

We've never had a PC who didn't at some point start buying something that was unassociated or unfavored of their own accord; we've never had one who had only Fatebonds that made life easy (nor one who only had Fatebonds that made life hard, in fact). We've had a few buy up all the XP discount knacks, but it's much more common for them to have one or two in the attributes that make the most sense for them. Those are things that naturally happen over the course of a character's growth, as their priorities and plans change and they grow beyond being just a servant of their parents and start becoming a deity of their own. And of course this means that they end up with, as you note, an XP "gulf" of a few (on up to quite a few) points between different PCs, but that disparity has never made the slightest difference in play.

There are just so many ways to be powerful and effective in Scion that having the most points doesn't matter as much as where you put them and whether or not you're covering areas the other PCs aren't, which is one of the wonderful things about the game. Someone like Terminus, who has had his stats bought off and rebought by Fatebonds so many times that he's like a walking patchwork quilt of a god, covered in Arete and trailing thread, may have technically "more" XP spent on his character than someone like Zwazo Fou Fou, but the fact remains that Zwazo frequently saves Terminus' bacon, because Terminus' points are in things like "seeing really far" and "using Magic to make Fate hate me", while Zwazo's are in more concrete things like "chopping people into small pieces" and "running away really fast". Scion is a beautiful example of a game in which where you spend your points and what you choose as your specialties is much more important than your gross amount of XP, which leaves XP (basically just the measure of how quickly your character can learn something) free to be more of an in-game flavor source than a be-all and end-all almighty game-decider.

So, yeah, if you reverse-engineered, say, all nine of our current Legend 9 PCs, you'd find that probably none of them have the exact same total amount of XP as represented by dots and boons. But all of them are incredibly powerful and vital members of their teams, and the fact that Sowiljr probably has slightly less total XP than Eztli does not in any way make him less powerful than she is or less critically important to the success and survival of the entire band. The only time a difference of XP is going to be a problem is if two PCs in the same game have exactly the same associations and favored abilities and exactly the same Fatebonds and are buying only exactly the same stats with no variations or extras, and I can't imagine that ever happening. Ironically, it's just as often the PCs who technically have more XP calling frantically for help from a PC who has less as it is the other way around; in Scion, unless you're looking at incredibly extreme cases, the differences in PCs' XP totals don't matter even remotely as much as what they have chosen to do with that XP.