How Much Elephant Can One Stomach Hold?

Question: Why is Faunaphagia so powerful? I know Abilities get rolled less than Attributes (9 vs 24), but Faunaphagia lasts an incredibly long time. Animal aspect only lasts for one action per Legend. I'm better off using Faunaphagia over and over again until all my Abilities are sky high.

Nope, actually you aren't, because Faunaphagia doesn't work that way. Faunaphagia doesn't stack with itself; once you've gained it for a single animal, you can't gain it again until it runs out. If you have Faunaphagia for multiple animals, you could use the boon on each of them to get more different abilities with buffs, but you still wouldn't be able to stack the effects if they had overlap. Faunaphagia lasts so long because it gives a comparatively small buff; you only get a few dice, but you get them for the rest of the day instead of the giant dice-dump that vanishes in a few seconds that you get with Animal Aspect. If anything, we hear more whining that Faunaphagia isn't as powerful as the players want it to be, not the other way around.

This isn't listed on the boon, and maybe that's an oversight on our parts, but it seems obvious that it's not intended to be used that way. Powers in Scion almost never stack with themselves, and I'm not sure why Faunaphagia should be different. You're not trying to pay to pop Body Armor ten times in a row in the hopes that it'll stack ten times the soak, right? Why is this different? We have, however, added a note to the boon on the website to avoid further confusion.

The same goes for Animal Aspect, but even more narrowly; you can only have one Animal Aspect active at a time, period, so you can't use it to give yourself infinite Stamina before using that infinite Stamina to give yourself infinite Strength (it is listed in that boon, because despite the fact that letting it stack is ridiculous, someone always seems to think they should be doing it). This is because that's obviously a powergaming misapplication of the power that the original rules accidentally failed to notice; there's no good reason for it in-game, and it makes a single level 3 boon more powerful than everything else sub-Avatar. That's obviously not good game design and not the intention of the writers of the boon; the only reason to try to do it is to score an obviously broken and unfair advantage, and that's not helping anybody's game out any. Again, it's a common sense ruling - powers generally don't stack with themselves in Scion, especially when doing so would make them ridiculously overpowered.

I'm not trying to go after you, question-asker, but anything that you look at in a game that seems to give you a literally infinite advantage is probably broken. It's always good practice to check with your ST to make sure they really wanted to allow it to work that way in the game before you start planning to use it, because more often than not they probably don't see it being used that way at all or just didn't notice that that power had a crack in it that needed patching.

Note: We read this question a few times and it seems like you might also be asking why you shouldn't just use Faunaphagia because it's the same benefit as Animal Aspect but for abilities. It also doesn't work that way; as the boon says, your roll is spread out across all abilities you plan to gain, and you can only gain abilities the animal has, meaning that your average dog is only going to be able to give you two or three dots of Brawl, not thirty. The boon was a little vaguely worded on this point, however, so if that's what you were asking, we apologize for the confusion. It's been corrected to read more clearly.