On Top of the World

Question: Do you think there's something wrong with how purview avatars are treated in the original Scion setting? Are you planning to change them? And if so, how?

Man, it's like you guys are psychic sometimes - we mention something in the vlog and then we open up our question file for the week and there you are asking about it. Purview Avatars (and Ultimate Attributes, too!) are definitely an area that we're excited about working on and shoring up.

On the one hand, we love the idea of purview Avatars as presented in the Scion books; the idea of fully taking on the mantle of one of your powers and becoming its most awesome and ultimate expression, of transcending even other gods for a few shining moments, and of being a player who gets to reverse the power structure and take on the storytelling role normally occupied by the ST, is totally amazing. In concept, it's a great way of illustrating how awesomely powerful the PCs can be at the pinnacle of their powers and of very directly placing the cooperative storytelling power in the hands of the players. Those are both awesomely worthy goals.

But, unfortunately, the Avatars and Ultimates in the books fall short of actually succeeding at these things as much as we would like them to, and their excellent concept is undercut by their slapdash implementation.

For one thing, they give players next to no guidance, which will be liberating for some but too daunting for others, and the whole point of letting the players take over the helm of the story is lost if they don't want to do it because they're afraid of it or if they do it but can't articulate what they want to do well enough to enjoy it the way it's meant to. Players have very different levels of creativity and ability to think on their feet, and since the current Avatars and Ultimates are incredibly vaguely defined, those powers will always be more fun and useful for some players than others. We don't want to see that, and we also don't want to see players just use them as one-use hammers - i.e., "I don't know what to do in this situation, so I'll just pop my Avatar and smite that person/thing," rather than really making it the story event it deserves to be.

Another issue is the fact that, even with their ill-defined and vague explanations, some of the Avatars and Ultimates in the books are clearly far less powerful than the others, which creates an unfortunate and inaccurate inequality between what universal and cosmic powers are more powerful than others. Some Ultimates and Avatars, like Guardian's The Sentinel or Ultimate Wits, are incredibly and almost limitlessly powerful; others, like Ultimate Appearance or the Fate purviews' The Wyrd, are by comparison extremely lackluster and have far less utility, even though there's no reason that any one cosmic universal force should be weaker than another. Then, too, some of them have very carefully defined mechanics - Ultimate Strength, for example - while others, like The Crown, in Stars, are almost impossible to figure out. Still other Avatars, like Animal's The Beast, are written to apply only to some deities' expressions of that power, seemingly having forgotten or ignored others and making the Avatar something that actually runs counter to some of the very gods who should possess it.

We're talking a lot here about mechanics and definitions, and I want to be clear: we don't want to bog these things down with massive amounts of nitty gritty details. The original writers didn't want that, and we don't want it for the same reason: we want these powers to be all about granting options, not taking them away, and we want there to be room for as much creativity as players can muster. But right now they're so amorphous and so unsynchronous that they're failing to perform their intended purpose; they need to be defined at least a little more than they are, because at the moment they simply don't work.

And speaking of not working, there's also the issue of how to manage Avatars and Ultimates against one another; the Scion books detail how these interactions work in some cases (Ultimate Strength versus Ultimate Stamina, for example), but totally fail to address how many, many others might interact other than saying that they can counter one another. If Scion A pops The Storm and Scion B pops The Void, we have no idea what happens or how they can interact or work around each other; at best, you're looking at a stalemate of "Welp, my Avatar cancels your Avatar, guess we both spent 30 Legend and this scene doing nothing," and at worst you're looking at one Scion's Avatar unfairly trashing the other because that player/Storyteller is better at thinking on their feet and coming up with things for it to do to counter their foe. These massive cosmic powers need to be balanced against one another, and clearly the Scion books want them to be when they state that they can counter one another - but at the moment we have no idea how to do that in a meaningful, fun and epic way in a game, because the powers as written don't tell us.

The Fate purviews are another major issue; in the original Scion rules, all three of them share the exact same Avatar, the Wyrd. While we totally understand where this decision came from and respect it - the idea being that since all three purviews represent in some way meddling with or utilizing Fate, they all have the same ultimate expression because Fate is universal - it doesn't work at all in its current form and desperately needs some love. For one thing, while the Fate theory is nice in its simplicity, it doesn't really ring true for those powers' different styles of use, impact on stories and gods that use them; gods who are prophets are not doing remotely the same things as gods who are magicians, and their Avatars should be representing and doing different things as well. It's unfair and confusing for people with very different purviews to all get the same ultimate power at the end because of out-of-game justifications that don't really have any bearing on the mythology the game itself is based on, and furthermore, it definitely disenfranchises anyone who happens to have invested in more than one of those purviews, requiring them to buy the exact same expensive ultimate power two or even three times in order to be officially associated with it for their children. Then there's also the problem that the Wyrd is currently literally useless - unlike every other ultimate power in the game, instead of allowing the player to do something amazing and change the course of events, it completely removes her control over the character and hands it over to the Storyteller, who, as Fate, is in charge of her for the rest of the scene in exchange for a nebulous possible increase in good fortune at some future date (which is, again, incredibly poorly-defined and entirely on the Storyteller's shoulders to accomplish, cutting the player out completely). Again, it comes from a good root idea, that Fate is the ultimate power in Scion's universe and therefore can't be overcome even by gods, but when you've spent your entire career as a Scion learning how to temporarily manipulate and bend Fate to your whim, being told at the top level that you can't actually do that while all your friends are masters of their areas of influence sucks pretty hardcore. It's an idea that's good in theory but totally does not work in play, and as a consequence the Wyrd is one of the saddest ultimate powers in the entire game.

So the grand question after all that is one of how to fix all these concerns. It's a project that will require a lot of in-depth thought and time, but that both of us have been working on in a sort of backburner way for a while now (oh god players stop getting so close to buying these things!). Our goals will be:

A) Provide meaningful examples, guidelines or mechanics for what these things do
B) Balance these powers against one another so that all are at a level of equivalent awesomeness
C) Establish how use of these powers affects others in game and what using them against one another means
D) Create different Fate purview avatars for the three different ways of working with Fate
E) Do all this without crushing opportunities for player creativity or losing the flavor of Ultimate Mythic Power

It's a tall order, but a lot of the basic ideas and premises are already there, and we're more than ready to go for it. Scion's purview Avatars and Ultimate Attributes are problematic only in that they are great ideas with poor design behind them; something that players are absolutely excited about but will probably be clueless about how to actually use in a game. If we can define them and make them the awesome powers they were meant to be while still being understandable and usable by every player, then we'll have done our job well.