Question: Why on earth have you replaced all the parts in boons that base power on (Legend or Legend/2) with (# of purview boons/2)? I mean, most of the time, it looks like that will mostly even out, and it means less paperwork if you just use Legend which is already supposed to be a metric of your power to begin with.
Because, in our not very humble opinion, using total number of boons is a much, much better mechanic for all-purpose purviews.
When you use the total number of boons as your metric instead of Legend, you're actively giving characters a reason to want to invest in their purviews and rewarding them if they do. They don't have to buy up every power in their skillset, but if they do, they gain more power. It encourages PCs to choose focuses and specialties; it encourages them to choose things they want to be God or Goddess of, not just random abilities that might be useful. They are, of course, free to take whatever random powers might come in handy, and often those things are super useful and fun when applied, but they won't be as good at them as someone who is God Of that purview - and that's the way it should be.
Consider this comparison: Johnny Storm is Legend 10 and has all the Sky boons he can possibly have (a total of 19). His arch-enemy, Bobby Blaze, is Legend 11 and has only 6 Sky boons, just up to Levin Fury. They have an equal level of Epic Wits. If they decided to have a thunderbolt-smiting competition of epic proportions and were using the old Legend metric, Bobby would be better at zapping bad guys than Johnny - he'd be able to hit more of them at once because of his higher Legend rating, despite the fact that Johnny is way better at the Sky purview than he is. But using the number of boons metric instead, Johnny will be able to hit more than three times as many targets as Bobby, totally blowing him out of the water - and he should totally blow Bobby out of the water, because Johnny is a God of Sky and Bobby is not. Johnny is a sky god; he shouldn't be worse at Sky than Bobby, who is not, just because Bobby happens to be a single Legend higher than he is. That's ridiculous. If Bobby wants to be impressive, he should challenge Johnny to an Inferno contest, which he would no doubt win hands-down since he's probably a fire god, whereas Johnny, who concentrates in other areas, would probably look mediocre next to him at best.
Also, using boons as a measurement instead of Legend allows for more epic feats and totals, simply because there are always more than twelve boons in a purview, so PCs get bigger numbers from mastering their chosen purviews than they would in the old Legend system. It's a simple joy, getting a slightly bigger number, but one that players definitely appreciate.
I'm not sure what your paperwork objection is about - boon totals aren't changing during game or moving around a lot, after all, and our players usually just glance at their boon list or, at high Legend when they have more than 10, write the number next to the purview for quick reference (i.e., Moon [13] or similar). Quick, easy, no muss. Legend is easier still to keep track of because it almost never changes, I totally grant you that, but neither one is a hardship for a player.
We do still use the Legend rating metric in PSPs, however; there it makes much more sense, since a PSP is an inborn set of powers that all members of a pantheon have access to, and being more powerful as a god is the only thing that really makes a useful measurement in most cases. It's not like some Egyptian gods are better at being Egyptian than others, after all. And even outside of PSPs, Legend is still an important measure of power; it governs how many Legend points you have available to spend and what higher levels of boons and Epic Attributes you can buy. It's hardly crippled by not being the major mechanic for APPs.
We love the total number of boons mechanic in APPs, and we've never even considered going back to Legend rating. It's cooler, it makes more sense, it allows Scions to dabble if they want to but to always be better if they choose to really go for it, it gives lower-Legend Scions more of a chance to triumph against slightly higher-Legend opponents, and it makes the game about more than just what Legend rating you are. It's one of our favorite system changes of all time.
There's no way Bobby Blaze could win an inferno contest with the Human Torch.
ReplyDeleteI see you caught my most subtle homage!
Deleteits really funny when someone can make custom boons and get like 20 in one purview by legend 5
ReplyDeleteDoing that would cost an absolute minimum of 80 XP and at most could cost up to 400 XP. Does that heavy of an investment in a Purview not demand a reward?
DeleteThere are definitely some areas where I disagree with John and Anne, but this fix of theirs is a REALLY good idea; it works efficiently and simply. I use it all over the place when designing new Boons or revising old ones. I even call for things like Perception + #OfDeathBoons rolls, because that's a much better metric for figuring out how connected someone is to death-related things than, say, Occult.
Even if someone DID have twenty Rank 1 Boons in a Purview and went up against someone who had two Boons at every Rank up to 8, what would happen? The low-power guy who knows every in and out of the low-level powers that he's mastered will be more effective at using them than the guy who has better overall knowledge of the Purview. I still get that, it makes sense in my mind-brain.
We don't allow custom boons in our games, so that's an issue that doesn't come up for us. If a player has an idea for a boon that's good enough to use, it becomes a standard boon in the purview that everybody has the option to buy. That's rare, though, since in most cases there are plenty of ways for PCs to figure out how to do what they want to do without needing to write a new boon.
DeleteThe only purview where the sheer number of low-level boons can really beat someone who's higher up in it is Magic, which has a slew of low-level spells that could theoretically outnumber the higher levels of someone who only bought one of each. I've never seen it happen, though; gods of Magic are usually so epically Fatebound to it by the time they're Legend 7 or so that they can't help having most of the lower-level spells anyway.
One of the most important parts of our system is balance. If you go off and make 20 custom boons before legend five, its gonna be unbalanced. Dont do that. In fact, if you want to keep as much balance as possible, stick with what we have.
DeleteI don't understand, why would that be unbalanced? Assuming that one player can come up with 20 new Boons, the other players either have the choice to make up their own Boons or buy some of the 20 if they want to, or just spend that 80-400 XP on whatever else they want that might be Knacks or Epics or whatever. As long as the 20 Boons themselves are well-designed and balanced, how would it be an issue?
DeleteMy players and I write new Knacks and Boons fairly often. Knacks more often than Boons, but I would guess that's probably because my players tend to favor Epics over Purviews. Everything has to be tested and checked before it's 'official', but after that, it goes into our lists.
Something Anne said kinda pointed me to make this distinction: a custom Knack/Boon is just one written that didn't exist up to that point. Once written, anyone can learn it. There wouldn't be Knacks/Boons that only one character could learn, like some kind of unique signature power. If you meant you don't allow unique powers, that I'm behind.
In our current Fatebond system, having twenty level one boons would be torture for someone Fatebound to that purview; they'd sit there watching their XP be spent on low-level boons over and over and over again until they had all of them, whereas a purview that was more streamlined would see them start to get higher-level powers or even max out and get to see their XP spent elsewhere. Our poor Magic-users are the only ones who suffer with this now (and I'm cool with it as Magic is kind of a special case), but it'd be very messy for us in all APPs.
DeleteMore to the point, though, I seriously doubt that there could ever be that many level 1 and 2 boons we'd think passed muster enough to be in the game. We don't like just duplicating things that are already happening in other APPs (we allow it sometimes, when it makes the utmost of sense, but generally it just homogenizes things which is lame), and I seriously don't think that number of individually distinct, mythic, cool and mechanically sound boons are going to turn up. (I'll totally eat my words if they do, but I'm very skeptical.)
The Fatebond XP thing aside, I think the only issue that's really about balance is the fact that if one purview has twenty level one boons and another only has the usual one to three, the people specializing in the first purview have a much higher amount of XP they need to spend to be an expert in their purview. There's always a little of that going around, since APPs don't have exactly the same number of boons (there are more Sky boons than Illusion, for 'zample), but it shouldn't get too pronounced or it starts to make the APPs themselves uneven.
Of course, I personally am a huge fan of "if it makes sense as an awesome boon, put it in the game!", so I don't normally have any inclination to check totals of boons across purviews. But then again, I also tend to assume that there are probably a comparable number of cool boons to be written for all purviews, so maybe it's just my blind optimism showing.
I'm totally with you on disallowing unique powers, though. Birthrights are already filling that particular need admirably.
And signature stunting of general powers; those also cover "signature powers" a lot of the time.
DeleteI, for one, am in a game setup where XP expenditures are more or less flat, or at least scaled way back from what standard spending would be.
ReplyDeleteI am also not fond of your hack of the fatebinding system, but that's a different beast.
Well, you, for one, are in a game that doesnt really make sense and is imbalanced.
DeleteAlso, Im not sure what you mean by hack, since its just an extrapolation of what little rules are given in the books.