Get Thee to the Gym

Question: In your previous blog post “The Apotheosis Rumba” you mentioned that Scions must have their physical Epic Attributes at at least five dots and the rest of their stats at at least three dots (save for a so-called "dump stat"). Why is such primacy given to physical attributes? Wouldn’t this leave social or mental characters with a harder road to godhood?

A good question, and one that our mental and social characters' players also asked us when it came time to start planning ahead for godhood. The reasoning here is twofold: one a metaphysical, fluff reason, and the other a solid mechanical one.

Metaphysically, this partially comes from an idea that we actually kept from Scion: God (I know, once in a while we do actually use the original books' material!). The general idea there is that the conversion from demigod to god is a physically rigorous one; it is a very literal destruction of your mortal body and reformation into a divine being composed of ichor. This is a big deal and a difficult thing to survive, and the need for five levels of physical Attributes helps illustrate that this is something that not every demigod or mortal is capable of even surviving, let along doing to move on to divine greatness. It's not an idea you have to hammer hard, and other games may prefer to look at apotheosis differently; but we liked the idea that it's a process that completely unmakes and remakes a Scion, moving them from the realm of mortal demigods and heroes, who are awesome but never allowed to really be on the same plane as the gods, to the realm of the great deities and powers of the universe, who are not made of the same stuff as mortals.

The mechanical reason, which I suspect is the more important one for most people, is that we don't want social and mental PCs to get murdered as soon as they hit God, and if they don't have somewhere around at least five in their physicals, it's almost inevitable that they will. God-level dangers and antagonists are hardcore; things are going to happen to them that they have no prayer of surviving with lower stats, and we don't want to set them up to fail as soon as they've finally reached their goal of divinity. Hostile Terrae Incognita, Titanrealms and area of effect powers from enemies will kill those with low Stamina instantly, with no recourse; enemies are calibrated to be godly themselves, and no social or mental character is ever going to be lucky enough not to need to have at least a vaguely decent DV once in a while; things in the realms of the gods and Titans are almost without exception immovable and unaffectable by those whose strength never progressed past a couple of dots. We want all the PCs, mental, social and physical alike, to have an equal chance of surviving and shaping the world, and that means that they need to have the physical stats just to live long enough to do so.

It's actually the exact same reasoning behind everyone needing three dots in the socials and mentals; it's only that being too stupid to grasp godly politics or being unable to lie well enough to avoid pissing people off, while definitely dangerous and inconvenient, are not necessarily instant death sentences all the time, and having only seven to fourteen health boxes or a DV that a mortal could hit definitely is. Three in the socials and mentals is the bare minimum we think a god needs to not only be decent enough at enough things to not be a laughingstock, but also to be able to function in divine society well enough to survive; physicals, which carry a much more immediate and concretely harsh penalty for those who fails, need to be at five, not because we want to encourage all characters to be physical or because we want to give physical characters an advantage, but because five dots is what we've observed as the minimum for having a decent chance to not die.

Social and mental characters do, therefore, have a slightly harder time of it if they need to buy a stat up to 5 dots, compared to a physical character who only needs to buy it up to 3, but it's an unfortunate necessity of survival, not an underhanded ploy to disenfranchise them. They can, of course, choose one of the physicals as their dump stat in order to ignore buying it, which helps, but not all of our social and mental gods have actually even chosen to do that; Vala did, letting Strength sit at rock bottom, but Sowiljr chose to buy physicals and let his Manipulation be the stat that took the hit, while Yoloxochitl decided she'd let her Wits take the fall and shore up her physicals instead. (Some of this relates to Fatebonds again; for some characters, buying extra dots of physicals is actually cheaper and easier than trying to fight against Fate to pick up dots of things it doesn't want them to have.)

We don't ever want characters to feel like they're being forced to be generalists instead of specializing in the things they like to do; that would run counter to the spirit of the game and be a dick move to boot. But they need to have at least basic tools to be able to function around divine allies and antagonists, and it just happens that their physical tools need to be a little higher to prevent their grisly demise. This is a consequence of the scaling Epic successes system, and while we absolutely love the off-the-charts awesomeness of the Epics scale and would never want to nerf it down to an even, ungodly progression, it does cause those with low physicals to be severely endangered when faced with antagonists their own level.