The Bad Old Days

Question: How much of a nightmare would it be to run a game fallowing the rules of the core book exactly?

I don't know if I'd call it a nightmare... but a headache, certainly.

It's not that original Scion is totally unplayable or anything; we've both played it, after all, and survived the experience (with great enjoyment, or we wouldn't have cared enough to start messing around with it on this website!). But it was experimental, which means a lot of things about it just didn't work, and it was written by a large number of freelancers over a long period of time, which means that it often disagreed with itself or jumped radically in intent, style and tone, and it was based on two different previous games, Exalted and the World of Darkness line, that did not play well together and were not very well meshed. It's more than a little bit schizophrenic and unbalanced, as games go, which is why if you go asking about it in places like RPG.net you will usually be met with a certain amount of disdain, dislike and suggestions that you play something else.

Playing original, unmodified Scion involves having vehicles and mundane weapons that are more effective than your Scions' powers. It involves Untouchable Opponent making anyone with Epic Dexterity impossible to hit, and environmental hazards like smoke, fire or poison totally ignorable by anyone with Epic Stamina. It involves Fatebonds being almost nonexistent in effect, Virtue channels being negligible at higher Legend, Scions dying more often because of their lower number of dying boxes, and nobody having any idea what their Perception score actually means in terms of how far they can see. It involves major gods like Itzpapalotl, Sarutahiko or Ammit inexplicably being only Demigod-level in Legend, major Titans like Apep being lost in the misty aether of unexplained status while others are shoehorned into their antagonist roles, and entire major pantheons, like the Mesopotamians, not existing at all. It involves using a Stars purview that centers around modern science fiction ideas of time travel instead of ancient concepts of astronomy and stars, and "pantheons" of folkloric figures and nationalistic figureheads that are somehow as powerful as Zeus and Thor. It involves extremely potent powers like Untouchable Opponent being the same cost and level as much less effective ones like Refined Palate, and it involves telling anyone who might be interested in using firearms as their main weapon that they will be unable to so much as scratch an opponent once they're no longer at an early Hero level because guns don't get damage modifiers. It involves Scions who buy only Legend with their XP being rewarded exponentially more than everyone else even if they never do anything interesting, relics being only five dots at a maximum and therefore hopelessly unable to measure up to the legendary magical artifacts of myth, and nobody ever botching again as long as they have picked up a single dot of an Epic Attribute. It involves nobody's social or mental character ever being effective, because every one of their powers can be shut down by spending a single dot of Willpower.

In short, it'd be a horrible, horrible mess. I've never met anyone who didn't modify something about Scion in order to play it - you almost have to. It's self-defense as a Storyteller. Even in the first game that John and I played in, long ago when the world began and we had to make our own dice out of animal hide and rocks and things were about as vanilla Scion as you can get, the ST had to houserule on the fly as he went to prevent things from falling apart.

Scion, in its original form, is busted. It's hard to play, makes no sense sometimes and wildly unbalances itself at others. But it has one of the best settings, the most incredible concepts and the most interesting underlying themes that we've ever seen in a roleplaying game, so we fell in love with it despite its many faults.

And that's why JSR is here, and we've never looked back.