In celebration of the holiday that gives us much more time to run around our house waving books and yelling about sourcing, and to make up for the lack of vlog earlier this week when we were sick, here's a super extra-long vlog. It's like a double-feature, except it's just us waving our arms and shouting about the same subject for forty minutes.
Our question today was a loaded one, so maybe it's not too surprising.
Question: In your opinion, how much of the core books should you actually listen to and use?
See? Shit. We could have spent hours more answering that - all the things we like, all the things we don't like, all the things we find completely fucking nuts about the original game material, and so on. So you guys are pretty lucky that we did a quick and dirty of only most of an hour.
If anyone was feeling a distinct lack of time to enjoy watching John yell about stuff, we've just filled that void in your life.
This was quite enjoyable. The basic theme of "good idea, terrible execution" throughout most of the core books was quite true (except for Huracan), but once you got to Companion... oh man, watching John stay a hair's breadth away from vomiting pure rage onto the camera was a sight to behold.
ReplyDeleteNow, I'm going to include one of my own complaints about the book, and it's a minor one, especially compared to others I've hurled around the Scion-online-verse, but it goes thusly:
While all of the premade characters were statted horribly, the one that made the least amount of freaking sense to me was Dr. Aaron Tigrillo for one simple reason. The dude was a medical doctor (and the idea of an Aztec Scion being a heart surgeon kicks five kinds of ass), he had lots of doctory adventures and skills, but in his "canon" progression he never had access to Health. What the flying fuck?
Great quote about me!! :)
DeleteIn rare occasions I can understand a doctor that never picks up health. Not every mortal doctor wants to become a magical super doctor.....
but yes, i completely agree.
How do you feel about the intro fiction for Demigod?
ReplyDeleteOops, did we not mention it? We like the intro fiction pretty much across the board for the first three core books. It's a good story and gives really great flavor for what modern Scions might be like at each level. We're fans.
DeleteJohn. Anne. You can smack me if you wish, but I have less problems with World at War then some of the other stuff.
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree with you on a lot of stuff, even with World at War, I personally believe the Yazata book was the worse. Cause of all the problems that you spoke about and some other things. But I digress, I do not have as many problems with World at War. I have a lot of problems, but mine stay out of the new Gods.
With the American Gods, I totally agree. Br'er Rabbit is the only true God I see in it and thats because he is suppose to be Coyote in another pantheon. I can deal with that, a god having different identities. Which is were I agree that the 'Gods' of the American should be different identities changing a brand new country and culture. Like Uncle Sam is Zues or maybe a different head of the pantheon(which I have some issues with the Greek Pantheon, but I let it slide cause its mixed with the Roman pantheon.) but I believe that is a good idea.
With the allied pantheon, first off split them up. No bs team ups, each are suppose to be different. Second, get rid of the French... After Rome invaded and conquered them, they were mostly Roman gods and then Christianity. So at most, the French should have some Greek gods having French identities.
The Slav's, I like 2/3's of them. The citizen is too out there for me, but Baba Yaga needs some love and Mother Russia was something good. Then the Russians are rich in cultures, so there are a lot of stuff to take from.
The British. Personally, and this is were you may wish to smack me, I do not want to change it. The powers associated with them, yes. But the MODERN NAMES, no. I say that, cause I fully believe that some of these are tales passed down far older then what we think, which there is some evidence of that. I mean, think of how many oral stories were never written. But before you give me a full lashing on the keyboard, the reason I am writing this is cause I think its the old Briton Gods and Goddesses, still alive, but under different names to regain followers.
Plus, with all of the factions in there, I give this theory. What if you put together the 'Gods' of the ones you do not like, like Uncle Sam(who I still believe is just another god), Robin Hood and several others and include the printing press. So you don't have just one nation believing that, but many other places. Like in India when it was controlled by Britain and Britain brought many books on like Robin Hood and Britania. Then those people begin to associate and believe that these figure heads are the cornerstone to the others nationalism. So couple in that these may be gods from older pantheons or newer gods making their own pantheon with people believing in a Nationalistic idea, you may have enough for a God character. How popular that person may be depends on how much people believe in.
Now, please be gentle with the jokes. I understand that by bringing this in, I am opening the door to like Tom Sawyer, Cat in the Hat and other crazy things, but give the idea some time to think about and then hopefully give me a response. I just want to see if the idea is good or bad.
Also John, I agree that Ragnarok is the best out of the series and wished that there were more like it.
Hey, you're allowed to have your own opinion. We disagree with pretty much everything you just said, but that's okay. :)
DeleteMy biggest disagreement is probably between Companion and Yazata. Right now, I agree with you - Yazata's a worse mess, because there's almost nothing salvageable in Yazata versus Companion having some good stuff here and there. If it were just a choice between Yazata and World at War, though, I'd take Yazata every time, barrel of problems at all. It's full of issues, but at least they're mythological issues, not made-up modern folklore/advertising ones.
The mundane armor providing aggravated soak is actually in Hero. Just like Hardness.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I will be using the word "cohegent" from now on.
Excellent. Something linguistically exciting will come out of all of this!
DeleteWhile I agree with all of this, and while I know it wasn't your intent to be discouraging... well, it does kind of discourage me. I've been in a few Scion games, and they all inevitably fall apart for one reason or another. I think most of the players know by now how broken the game is as-written. So then the issue becomes, who wants to (or can) put in the time and energy to fix it and add on to it for their own individual games? No one in my group wants to be ST because of that. I suppose the answer is to forget everything I know about the game now, and learn the rules as you've set them; while I might not like every change you guys have made, it's still the best system I've found.
ReplyDeleteI dearly love Scion as a concept. It just seems to be a much more complicated and involved process of a game than others I've played, which equals the need to put more time into it than most people I know can invest, and thus equals heartbreak (or a terrible experience all around).
I dunno. I just needed to put that out there, even if it amounts to me crying over how hard Scion is and how much I wish I could play it properly.
You're not the only one, friend. A lot of the gaming community pretty much point-blank dumped Scion as soon as they realized how broken it was, and it's become something of a punchline in the greater world of gamers, especially online (if you go to RPGnet and ask about Scion, for example, half your responses will just be "Go play something else"). It's... well, it's busted. We wish it weren't, too, but it is.
DeleteFor what it's worth, we're always willing to help with specific questions and with trying to pull the old mess together into something playable. The registration date for John's STing class has already gone by, but you can always submit questions to the blog box, and if it's something really complex or a bunch of little things together, you can email us. (Though we have pretty full email boxes these days, so we may be a little slow in our response there sometimes.)
Don't lose hope completely, though; Scion's second edition is supposed to be out some time in the next couple of years, and we're hopeful that a lot of its mechanical issues will be fixed (lord knows they've had plenty of time to listen to all of us players bitching about all the things that are broken).
You could also try running something that's just a basic out-of-the-box Hero-level game without moving up to the later levels; as a self-contained game, Hero (Legend 2-4) works with itself pretty well and most of its stuff balances more or less thanks to the lack of the higher power-level stuff. At the very least, you can enjoy the flavor that way and get your group into it, and you can see if you like it enough to be worth putting some work into tinkering with it (or using the tinkerings of others).
I've dabbled in several White Wolf games over the years, but the two I've stuck with the most have been Vampire (oWoD) and now Scion. It seems to me like tinkering with the systems is simply part of the Storyteller System experience. Maybe that doesn't jive for people who want a cut and dry, out-of-the-box game. However, I find that working to customize these games in a meaningful way is a lot of fun as a ST, right up there with writing the actual story.
DeleteThat being said, I do think Scion takes the cake in the broken-as-hell department. Vampire really only required minor tweaks for me, to help add some more depth (i.e. the influence system). Thankfully the Scion community does do its best to help make sense of the mess. To steal John's phrase, I've found JSR to be the most cohegent material out of the masses.
Coincidentally, if John decides to do another round of ST classes down the road, I highly recommend them for dealing with this sort of thing. I've learned a ton so far that's helping me improve my storytelling and worldbuilding - and we're only on the third lesson.
Royce is my new Ad guy
DeleteI think a case can be made for a Doctor Scion who doesn't have Health. Health is very much a "Divine Healing" boon, reducing the human body and indeed the lives of all mortal beings to primordial ooze used to shape life by the Gods, and therefore at the whim of the Gods. What about a Doctor who rejects such creationist views, and instead gives himself massive Medicine, massive Science, and maxed Epic Intelligence with Teaching Prodigy and other knacks, that devotes himself to healing through Divine Science and Intelligent Design instead of through "voila! All your wounds are gone!" While I know JSR despises the combination of religion and science, it would certainly be an interesting "New" God.
ReplyDeleteOh, definitely agreed! We don't like to have ancient myths try to conform to modern science because it usually doesn't make any sense, but Scions are new and can do whatever they want with science as long as they make it work. :) Just look at Aiona and Alison.
DeleteSo i may have already asked this question without getting the blog post yet, but i do want to open up the possibly of Baba Yaga having scions. Do you have any advice on fixing Companion's version of Baba Yaga to make her less of a completely bad divine parent. This is just of a few of the gem in her desicription. "Women poisoning the well water", Purviews: Animal (Chicken)". & i'm pretty sure the word "Ugly" is somewhere in the scion description.
ReplyDeleteI actually already wrote a blog post about this, which I believe will go up some time tomorrow. It was just a little further back in our queue than this question. :)
DeleteBut off the top of my head: Animal (Chicken) unforgivably silly, women poisoning well water an attempt by authors to relate Baba Yaga to Russian survival tactics when under attack in the second World War, and "ugly" legit, Baba Yaga is traditionally a seriously horrifying lady.
i'm pretty sure she's not know for her good looks but it seemed to me that the postioning in the sentence (not reading the pdf right now) was NOT meant to just be a talking about her lovely skin texture.
DeleteI guess I'm not sure what you mean, then? Baba Yaga is definitely famously ugly.
DeleteI actually just went through her writeup in there and it doesn't look like the word "ugly" is used at all, though there is mention that her Scions are often "deformed" and always in some way "terrifying".
i guess i was just reading into the phrashing too much to notice. i was skimming the book last week and i thought they were trying to perptuate the whole stupid "ugly is bad, handsome is good" sterotype. i read it last week so i guess my referance is a little out of date.
Deletei basically quoted a sentance that was'nt there. I do that alot when i get pissed at stupid writing.
DeleteAh, no worries!
DeleteIt seems that you are, rightly so, not satisfied with the current weapon stats. Would you, in the future, be willing to rewrite the weapon stats to conform to how you think they should be?
ReplyDeleteYeah, Id be up for that. They'd probably be very basic though. Big slow weapon does x, fast small weapon does x. Maybe 10-12 variations on that.
DeleteI love the John Rages.
ReplyDeleteAlso! The Yamato (863ft. long) was shorter than the Empire State Building (1250ft tall) when it was built in 1940.
ReplyDeleteAlso I listened to the whole thing and enjoyed it immensly
DeleteBOOM! I WIN!
Deleteand awesome. thanks