Lightning Crashes

Question: There seem to be a lot of boons that impose small penalties, like your Thunderclap's -4 penalty. My question is, how useful has your group found those boons that just seem to impose a penalty to a given task at god level? It seems like the Epics would just be able to power through them. More than that, they just don't seem that godly. What's your take on powers that just adjust difficulty?

You know, I just went through all our god-level boons, and the only one besides Thunderclap to impose a small penalty like that is Strike Blind (which, while it doesn't impose a penalty itself, does make people blind, which is normally a -4 dice penalty). Most others levy much heftier penalties; all the boons with small penalties are pre-god-level, where they matter much more.

The -4 penalty from Thunderclap isn't meant to ruin most gods' days; it's intended to illustrate the power of fear wielded by someone with the awesome noise of thunder behind them, and depending on who is being frightened by it, it runs the gamut from harsh to negligible. Hero-level Scions or lower powered Titanspawn or lesser immortals can be seriously crippled by Thunderclap's -4 dice penalty, and while it's true that higher-Legend beings like demigods and gods will be able to ignore the issue with enough appropriate Epic dots, they won't be able to do so for all rolls. A -4 dice penalty for a god who doesn't have Epics in that area or suffers from negative Fatebonds can make the difference between being really bad at a roll and automatically botching it (and botching is always a big deal!). This goes for all small penalty-causing powers: while they are definitely more useful at Hero and Demigod levels, they aren't entirely ignorable by gods, especially gods that might have to do something that they aren't already good at. Of course they won't prevent Ares from still hitting someone because he's excellent at hitting people, but they may cause such a critical failure of an Intelligence roll that he does something very, very bad for himself because he wasn't smart enough not to.

More importantly, though, this is a boon that, like many god-level boons, has a use meant for opposing beings near the Scion's same level - that is, the clause that allows Scions to deal bashing damage by directly targeting an enemy with the crash of thunder - and a use that's meant for representing his awesome power as a god for the mortal populace. Thunderclap completely takes all mortals within range out of everything, leaving them hiding in mindless terror; that's something a thunder-god should be able to do, considering that thunder is one of the most terrifying things for most ancient cultures, and the -4 dice penalty on Legendary beings is mostly there to illustrate that even they can't ignore it, not to be an area of effect attack against them (if a thunder god wants that, may I suggest Perun's Apples?). Thunder, as a cosmic force, is scary in mythology; Thunderclap allows Scions to visit the awesome fear of it on others, but it's not meant to cripple gods facing him, just remind them that he means business. I'd actually go so far as to say that it's a very godly power; putting all mortals in a five-mile radius into a state of catatonic terror just from the boom of your thunder is as thunder-godly a thing as you could be doing.

For the most part, dice penalty powers exist with small numbers in the Hero- and Demigod-level boons because larger numbers would be unbalancing; we can't forget that enterprising Scions (especially if more than one Scion in a band has penalty-inducing powers) may be able to stack many of these powers against the same enemy, and someone afflicted with Battle Cry and Center of Attention and Heatstroke and Recurring Distraction and Poltergeist Beacon is already operating under a pretty hefty negative. If all those powers levied more dice penalty than 2 to 4, it'd be unbalanced. This does mean, of course, that your small dice-subtracting power is not going to be as meaningful for bothering a god as it was for bothering a Legend 4 opponent, but that's as it should be; the dice penalty is still present and can still make a difference, but you'll have better luck with god-level powers against gods.

As far as powers that adjust difficulties, they're in the game, too, and we don't mind using them; it's just a different mechanic for the same idea, sort of like approaching a math problem from two different directions. It's more difficult to use since it has to apply to specific rolls, so we don't use it as much unless we want a power to make a specific action or idea more difficult than others, but it's as valid a mechanic as any. In the case of Thunderclap, I wouldn't monkey with it too much, though; that part of the boon is working as intended to clear an area of mortals or put the fear of your godly self into lesser beings, and it doesn't need to be buffed when there's a direct damage component to it already.