Scions of Darkness, World of Light

Question: What's your opinion on a crossover between Scion and one of white wolf's other IP's? More specifically, what's your opinion on the Scion vs. Exalted argument (feel free to ignore this last part if you just want to answer the first)?

While I would normally answer all parts of your question because I'm giving like that, unfortunately I can't really shed any light on the Exalted argument; I never played Exalted and I'm not overly likely to, since the setting isn't all that interesting for me. I understand that some of Exalted's mechanics were ported over into Scion at creation, but beyond that the ways of sky pirates and sidereal magics are beyond me.

But I have played pretty gigantic volumes of the World of Darkness, both the old universe and the new, so I feel pretty qualified to talk about that. We'll be the first to say that we love the WoD; Vampire was my go-to game before Scion came out (John's was old-school Changing Breeds, because he is a masochist), and there's a wealth of awesome stuff in both versions of the game. I love the World of Darkness and I love Scion, so I understand how someone's love might motivate them to try to combine the two.

But, unfortunately, they are not compatible. Not in an "Oh, I can fudge a few rules and rescale a few powers and maybe I'll have to look the other way on some lore, but it'll basically work" kind of a way; in an "Oh, shit, nothing about this is working at all" kind of a way.

The problem is that the power scales of the two games are so vastly and unflinchingly different that combining them inevitably crushes one of them completely. Scions can go toe-to-toe with most normal-level creatures in the World of Darkness by Legend 3 or so; by the time they're mid-level demigods, they can crush the most powerful creatures in the WoD's setting. An average PC in the World of Darkness has about as much hope of hurting or even inconveniencing an average PC in Scion as a slingshot has of denting a Hummer. Vampires, werewolves, mages and wraiths are all excellent for playing against each other, but they were never built to be able to oppose or interact with gods. The most powerful beings in the entire World of Darkness setting can barely compete with Scions at high Demigod levels - if the big daddies of the WoD can't compete with Scion PCs who aren't even into their third level of development, what on earth can poor PC-level WoD creatures hope to do about them?

Most people who try to combine the two settings take the approach of nerfing the daylights out of Scions in an attempt to bring them in line with the PCs of the World of Darkness; after all, if the biggest problem is the characters not being on comparable levels of power, bringing them together should fix that, right? So they de-scale or even remove Epic Attributes, nerf boons to more closely resemble Gifts and Disciplines (or just tell Scions they're now using the Mage Spheres system), calculate everyone's health levels the same and remove other system mechanics that don't jibe. And you know what? What's left is indeed balanced with itself, and the game can be played.

But it's no longer Scion. It's a game about super-powered humans with divine backing who aren't going to progress past a certain point because it would break the setting. We've already got this game, and it is called Hunter. And frankly it's not one of the most exciting of the WoD line, is it?

The whole point of Scion is that you are the child of a god and you will one day become a god yourself; its steep power curve and cosmic forces are there specifically because representing divine power requires them. When you take those away, you're left with a PC who not only isn't particularly godly anymore, they can't even deal with normal folkloric creatures like vampires and ghosts; they are crippled down to a much smaller power scale and tied there, because if you're going to prevent them from ever out-powering WoD-style PCs, you're going to be preventing them from actually achieving godhood. The World of Darkness isn't built for godhood; it is concerned, at its root, with the world, not the powers that created it. When beings like Aten and Zeus are involved, how can you say that even Caine himself could be even close to an equivalent power? How are you supposed to be impressed by the Order of Hermes when Hermes himself is running around? PCs from the World of Darkness can't play in this pool, because it is vast and uncompromisingly more powerful than they are; and Scions can't play in the World of Darkness unless you field-strip them down until they aren't Scions anymore.

Now, you can cross the two at very low levels of Scion if you want to use the World of Darkness' creatures and peoples as antagonists; Hero-level Scions will find powerful Garou/Magi/Kindred pretty challenging, and if you want to actually drag Lasombra himself into play or something, you can continue challenging them up through some of their Demigod levels, too. But these are things you can only do in an antagonistic setting; there's no way you could run Garou PCs alongside Scion ones, because the latter would leave the former in the dust so fast your table might crack in half. If you prefer to use the World of Darkness' version of the creepy-crawlies of the night to challenge Scions instead of the vampires and lycanthropes that Scion comes with, that'll probably work for a little while, but it will be very limited and very short.

And frankly, the World of Darkness is so beautifully self-contained (both versions) that stomping all over it with Scion is just as depressing as reducing Scions down to World of Darkness levels of power. Both games have great settings that work very well, but one is a game about intrigue, horror and morality in the back alleys of the world, and the other about the phenomenal powers that move the cosmos and taking your place among them. They weren't meant to mesh and they can't do so without one of them losing so much that you might as well not have bothered; it irreparably damages either setting to smash it into the other.

But that's okay. Because there are seven days in the week, and I can enjoy the gorgeously crafted fear of Changeling on Monday, the pulse-pounding cosmic adventure of Scion on Wednesday, the suspenseful and political intrigue of Vampire on Friday and the curiously bittersweet human triumphs of Promethean on Sunday. These are delicious, delicous flavors of gaming from the company that makes the games we love the best; there's no need to pile them on top of each other when they are at their most excellent apart.

This turned into an I-Love-White-Wolf-So-Much post by accident somewhere, but I figure that sentiment probably isn't foreign to a lot of you guys.

EDIT: I wrote this post before the news broke yesterday about Onyx Path acquiring Scion and possibly doing a second edition of it. We will always have White Wolf in our hearts, but we expect to love Onyx Path just as much.