Question: How do you deal with 'Swarms' in the Creatures Birthright? My players love to get 'Swarms of Bees' or 'Flocks of Seagulls' as creatures for their characters, but there are no stats for it in the book and it drives me bonkers!
There's a really good reason there are no swarm stats in the books: swarms are messy and difficult, and trying to generalize them just doesn't work very well. If you're going to have a swarm Creature Birthright in your game, you're going to have to tailor it individually, taking into account what the player's looking for, what those creatures could normally do, and how powerful other Birthrights in the band are.
If they're just mundane creatures, your work is easy and probably doesn't need too much time to rough something out. Decide how many of the creature there are; the more there are, the less powerful they should be individually, in order to keep them balanced against those who have only one Birthright Creature or Follower. They still have individual stats like any other creature; for seagulls you can probably just use the Small Bird template from Scion: Hero (page 329). The only adjustment you have to make for them as a swarm is how many of them are attacking a given target or doing a given action at once; you could roll these individually or simplify them down to a single average, but neither one takes a lot of extra work, really. Similarly, bees are very scary, but depending on the size of the swarm they probably won't be killing anyone who's mobile enough to escape them unless they descend on an unfortunately allergic victim. You don't really need stats for individual insects, because they're below the threshold of Scion's system (seriously, they probably cannot dish out a single lethal on their own, nor do they probably have even one healthbox equivalent to a human's). A generalized roll that represents how dangerous you think they should be as a unit, probably similar to the stats of any other small animal, will do just fine.
If they're going to be increasing in potency with their Scion owner, that's where you get into the real complications, because you need to make a large number of creatures into Legendary/Nemean versions of themselves without outshining other Birthrights. They have to be balanced with the other things that are going on, and that means there's no easy or simple method we can give you - you're just going to have to figure out what power level makes sense based on your game and what the other players in the band have, and tailor to suit. Players with swarms or groups of creatures should get their unique benefits - having many creatures to bear messages/run errands/do tasks/distract or hurt enemies - but they can't have those along with each creature being as powerful as the guy who only has a single Birthright elephant with an equivalent dot value, nor can they be more useful and badass than the relic shield of another character or the Birthright tattoo powers of another that are just as many Birthright dots, because that would be very unfair. Groups of creatures can't be back doors into getting more free Birthright than everyone else - and that means you can't use prefab stats for creatures and are going to have to come up with ones that work yourself.
So, alas, we have no system for you that will solve this one easily. The Birthright powers of a swarm of bees have to be individually suited to your game, the other Birthrights in play, and the specifics of the characters in question.
We've actually very seldom had large group Birthrights, oddly enough - Dierdre has her flock of hummingbirds and Folkwardr now has a troop of Follower giants, but that's been about the extent of it. They're just individualists, I guess.
This was my question, as my Group will be absolutely certain of when they see it. This very question is probably the biggest problem we have with Scion - I have gotten in more fights of "you're stifling my creativity" over group birthrights than I have anything else in the game. In the VERY first game of Scion we ran in January 2010, one of my more creative players (the one who would eventually get the Chopsticks as a guide) decided he wanted to play a Toymaker son of Ptah who had an army of little green soldiers. None of us had any idea how to properly implement that, so we decided they'd just be a nuisance/distraction against enemies. He was upset about that decision because he envisioned them as being more effective, but what could we do? More recently, he came up with both the flock of seagulls AND swarm of bees ideas, because he views a single seagull (even a growing one) as boring, whereas a flock is more intense. Same with the swarm of bees. I wish I knew how to help him, but it's very difficult mechanically stating them. :(
ReplyDeleteI feel you; they are difficult to stat, which we know from experience. John would probably end up spending somewhere around three hours or so on a group Creature Birthright like a swarm of bees, and more as they had to be upgraded when the Scion went up in Legend.
DeleteI guess the most important thing to get across to your player is that you're not trying to stifle his creativity; you're trying to make sure the game is fair and balanced for everyone. If one player dumps 5 Birthright points into a seagull and he dumps 5 Birthright points into a flock of them, the single seagull will of course have to be more powerful than the flock; it would be grossly unfair if just deciding to have more of a Creature or Follower could multiply your Birthright points that way. Large groups always need to be less powerful than individual items or beings, so it's not a matter of refusing to let him use groups, but rather of explaining that those groups have to be balanced around the Birthrights of the rest of the band. A swarm of bees sounds awesome - he should totally go for it! But if he's expecting to have them be as powerful as someone else's single full point-dump Birthright, he's not thinking in terms of the big picture and only in terms of his own benefits.
Or, to boil that all down more succinctly: you're not stifling his creativity by ensuring that Birthrights are balanced. He's stifling his own creativity by refusing to take creative Birthrights that don't have as large a mechanical benefit as he wants. It's totally within his rights to decide to get something more concretely or frequently useful, but that's his decision, not yours - you're making sure the game is fair to everyone so everyone can have fun, which is the Storyteller's job.
I would point out to him, though, that even if your flock of seagulls isn't very powerful when you're Legend 3, once you've gotten to much higher levels, they may be a lot more impressive. They still won't be able to compete with single point-dump Birthrights, but they'll be more than awesome if he uses them appropriately and against appropriate targets.
Also, were I presented with that Scion of Ptah idea, I'd suggest the player look into picking up Industry/Concept to Execution so he could actually make his own toy soldiers. That way he would be able to make them (and make them as powerful as he could manage) on his own under his own power instead of taking a static Birthright he might be disappointed in.
Your player sounds like an asshole. If he's actually saying what you.re saying he is saying
DeleteWell, we've all had our asshole moments throughout our time roleplaying so I don't really care about the attitude so much as my inability to stat something like that.
DeleteAnd Anne - we were playing that game before we discovered JSR, and I'm pretty sure Companion wasn't even out yet then, so neither Industry or Concept to Execution existed then. If we wanted to make a Reborn Barry Jones (by all the Gods, no, no, no) he would DEFINITELY have Industry. At the time, though, he only had Fire.
Ah, that sucks. Barry was ahead of his time.
DeleteYou could make the swarm a single creature for the purposes of statistics, and any damage taken by the swarm is described as some of their number dying off. This allows them to play by all the same rules as everyone else, while maintaining most of the swarm thematic the player desires.
ReplyDeleteThe only question you have left is how do they replenish their numbers (heal damage dealt to the swarm creature). This is easily answered in a lot of creative ways.
True facts. While I'd lean toward large-enough-to-be-individual creatures like seagulls needing their own stats, things like insect, vermin or other small swarms are better treated as a single thing. They'd still need to be not quite as powerful as a single Creature would be because they have added flexibility - you could send separate bees on different scouting errands, for example, and similar - but it'd be a lot closer.
DeleteWe usually have the Scion owner of a Birthright Creature that dies need to spend some combination of Legend and Willpower to resurrect it, so the easiest solution there would just be to assign a cost for replenishing parts of the swarm that die off.
This question is quite serendipitous. I'm currently designing a Scion with Ant as his Animal specialty and gave him a swarm-of-ants Birthright. So far it's only at a single dot and the ants aren't really made to do too much, but improvement is an issue, both when he grows in Legend and invests more dots. Right now, combat is a big no-no, but eventually I'd like him to be able to send a wave of ants at foes, reducing enemies to bone in no time...
ReplyDeleteI made a post on the forums (http://forums.white-wolf.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=65638) but so far I'm still kinda clueless as to how to make them.
Physical stats are one thing. Making a credible version of Bullet Ant venom is another headache...
Since Griff asked me about his ant-swarm, I decided to work on my own Swarm rules, pulling from the Chaotic Template and the Vampire rules for Swarms. Ended up going pretty far off on my own, but so far they work out in my head. We'll see how they work in play!
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/scion-swarms