Hostile Workplace Environment

Question: You mentioned in an earlier blog post that you disliked the core book's take on environmental effects not being penalizing for anybody with Epic Stamina 1. How do you handle stuff like environmental damage, toxins, alcohol, etc.?

It's true - Scion: Hero's rules for environmental damage, disease and toxins (starting on page 182) are woefully inadequate. They work pretty well at Legend 2, but Epic Stamina renders them entirely redundant and pointless with distressing speed. Various things are put on the same plane of "environmental hazard" that really shouldn't be together, and various fiddly little rules like Toxicity, Treated/Untreated Morbidity and Virulence, all borrowed from other systems at Scion's creation, combine to make the system both unnecessarily complicated and confusing. Many of the sample environmental effects don't even make sense - it's somehow possible to resist the effects of arsenic, but not marijuana? "Blistering heat" inflicts only one bashing per hour of exposure - but I thought you said it was blistering, as in causing blisters!

So we don't use any of these systems from the original setting, because they tend not to work and seem to have been lifted from other games without a lot of thorough playtesting as to how they'd work in Scion. Instead, we separate environmental effects into two categories: things you can resist with a Stamina + Fortitude roll (like smoke, cold, poisons, drugs, disease) and things you can't (like fire, acid, or other things that directly damage you).

Instead of a complex system with various capitalized words, we tailor each threat depending on who we think it should be able to threaten. If it's something that habitually injures humans but probably can't hurt gods, like chilliness or alcohol poisoning, we set a difficulty for the Stamina + Fortitude roll that makes sense in those terms - that is, something that a very hardy human could manage but that would hurt most average mortals. Similarly, if we're looking at some kind of Titanic poison from an antagonist for Legend 5 Scions, the difficulty will be set based on the average Stamina + Fortitude roll for a Legend 5 Scion (or adjusted up, if we want this particular poison to be especially dangerous; your mileage will vary depending on what you're trying to do).

The drawback of this system is that the Storyteller has to plan ahead for environmental hazards or toxins he plans on throwing at his players, but the beauty of it is that it keeps those things relevant no matter what Legend everyone is. Scions with extremely high Epic Stamina have a much higher chance of ignoring poisons or hazards that would pose a threat to others their level, while Scions who are very poor on Stamina might find themselves hurting from things that most people their level can safely ignore. It places the importance of such dangers on the Stamina of the PC - if you're good at Stamina you have nothing to fear, and if you're bad at Stamina you're likely to get sick or contract hypothermia. It's more realistic and balanced.

For a real-life example that actually happened in our games a while ago, Colin, at Terminus' wedding, served potent magical alcohol to the entire band. It was very heady and had a good chance of getting those who imbibed it drunk. Stamina + Fortitude rolls went all around; Eztli rolled a 45 and shrugged its effects off, Aiona and Zwazo Fou Fou rolled a 35 and 30 respectively and hit a nice buzz, Terminus rolled a 23 and got pretty drunk on delicious blood mead, and Sowiljr rolled a measly 4 and got so smashed he molested his wife on the dance floor and then passed out. It was a great illustration of the fact that Eztli, as a Stamina monster, ignores most physical effects, while those with more average rolls were affected but not incapacitated and Sowiljr, who is a featherweight, paid for his fragility by being very susceptible to having his brains pickled.

It does suck to have to try to come up with difficulties on the fly, but it's not too bad when you know your PCs; take a minute and make up a table of their average Stamina + Fortitude rolls so you know how they're likely to do against what you throw at them, and adjust accordingly to make sure it's the level of challenge you want.

As for things like fire or acid, those don't seem to us like things that should be resistable via a Stamina + Fortitude roll. They're directly damaging substances that hurt even gods in myth, so we prefer to roll damage for them and let their unfortunate victims deal with them via soak like most other forms of damage.