Thunder and Lightning

Question: Hey John and Anne, I've been using your site as a helpful reference since 2010, and though I own all of the books, I have always found your site and your house rules to be the fix the game needs to really run smoothly. I was very disappointed by your recent changing of the Gods' purviews and attributes, but after reading this blog I can understand WHY you did it and I respect it... but I'm curious why you weakened Zeus so much? Shouldn't the King of the Gods have at least Epic Strength?

A two-part answer: we don't think Zeus should have Epic Strength associated, but we also don't think he's "weakened" in the slightest because of it.

In all frankness, we couldn't find any reason Zeus should have Epic Strength, so it was stricken from his list fairly early in our edits of the Dodekatheon. Zeus is an incredibly potent and powerful figure, but it's not because of the strength of his arm; it's because of his authority over the gods and his position as the preeminent god of the heavens. Zeus rules by right as the unanimously voted and supported king of the gods. He rules by law and decree, by the respect due him from all other deities and the uncontested authority of his position. He doesn't rule because he goes around busting in the heads of people who disobey; in point of fact, almost nobody disobeys, ever, thanks to his incredible ability to just Lay Down the Law, and those few who do usually end up consigned to Tartarus for their sins. That's what his Epic Charisma and Justice associations are about: his incredible force of will and ability to make rules that nobody - not grieving Demeter, not vengeance-bent Poseidon, not unfairly-punished Apollo, nobody - can argue with. Zeus is In Charge, and it has nothing to do with anything as pedestrian as the threat of punches.

Which is not to say that Zeus isn't terribly scary when he wants to murder you, but he doesn't do that with strength, either; he does it with lightning, because he's an epic master of the Sky purview and has a really rad relic thunderbolt (forged for him by either Hephaestus or the Cyclopes, depending on the story) that we assume does horrific amounts of damage. When Zeus starts striking people with lightning, people die; it's as inevitable as the damage lightning causes in real life, the awesome power of which he represents. Is Zeus mad at somebody? Thunderbolt. Does Zeus need to make a point? Thunderbolt. Is Zeus just in the mood to remind everybody of how awesome he is that day? Thunderbolt. But he almost never makes an altercation physical, because Zeus is not a physical combat kind of a dude. It's not really in his skillset.

In fact, in the only major story in which he does a lot of described physical combatting, his titanic battle against Typhon, he gets his ass kicked when he stops using thunderbolts and decides to grapple directly against the monster; he ends up with his sinews ripped out, in a sack stuffed into a cave, where Hermes has to come rescue him and restore his body parts before he can do anything else. Typhon is a great example of a being with Ultimate Strength; he's unbeatable in hand-to-hand combat and during their second battle just rips mountains out of the earth to use as missiles. Zeus, in contrast, does not do these things, and wins through his awesome command over lightning, striking the flying mountains with his thunderbolts to drive them back against Typhon and eventually bury him. That Zeus is an undisputed master of Sky is totally unarguable; he is the most baddest of dudes ever to throw lightning at someone's face. But stronger than everyone else ever who doesn't have the Ultimate? No, he's not.

But this doesn't make Zeus less than powerful! Far from it. For one thing, I'm sure his Strength (and Wits and Dexterity etc., while we're at it) is perfectly serviceable; I'd assume he probably has eight dots of Epic Strength or somewhere in that area, which is nothing to sneeze at. Just because he doesn't have the Ultimate doesn't mean he's limp and noodle-like. For another thing, Zeus has Arete, and if you haven't played with high levels of Arete yet, it's really easy to forget how insanely powerful having an extra 46 dice to your rolls is. Zeus may not be primarily a combatant (and he shouldn't be - that's what he has people like Ares and Athena for, after all), but that doesn't mean at all that he's weak. On the contrary, I doubt anyone wants to get into a fight with him unless they have nothing left to lose.

It's easy to view gods with more associated powers as more "powerful" and gods with fewer as "weaker", but it ain't necessarily so. Our goal is always to give gods the associations that make the most sense for their stories and roles in ancient myth. Among the Dodekatheon, especially (as Greek and Roman myth are very fond of choosing one or two specific things for a god and sticking with them), having few associated powers is the norm; it doesn't mean that they're weak, but rather that they've specialized to be really amazing in a few areas instead of branching out in a bunch of others. Add in the fact that any of them might have Arete maxed in several abilities (which is equivalent, for them, to having more purviews maxed), and they're the opposite of less powerful: they're extremely potent specialists who can kick any other god's ass in the area of their expertise.

Incidentally, I'm sorry you've been disappointed by our changes. That's never our intention.