Question: Reading the write-up you've made on the Tuatha De Dannan, I've noticed that you associated the Dagda with Epic Intelligence. Although I skimmed through some myths about him, I am still not sure about why you chose to do so. Could you please explain the reasoning behind this association?
Absolutely! We've had this question asked before in a few different places, actually, and we never mind talking about reasoning.
Giving the Dagda Epic Intelligence was actually a decision that we struggled with for a long time when working on the Tuatha de Danann. While he certainly has a good amount of pragmatic good sense in myths, he also doesn't really appear to be wildly more intelligent than everyone else in any story, so initially we decided to completely leave that idea out. But source after source and book after book insisted that he was the patron of wisdom and thought - Green, Fleming, Sjoestedt, Monaghan and so forth, they were all big fans of the Dagda and his mighty wisdom. We didn't have a story basis for this unless you want to consider his good sense in not pissing off the Morrigan or conquering dudes with his harp to be examples of high Intelligence, but the scholars seemed arrayed against us.
From what we've gathered, the Dagda's association with wisdom is a quintessentially Irish one; it's not that he's more academically inclined or book-learned than anyone else (obviously), nor that he possesses that much more thinking power, but that he's the keeper of otherworldly and unfathomable knowledge, the sorts of things that mortals can't know and even other gods often don't. He's presented as a god of the wisdom of the unseen rather than the wisdom of the smartypantses.
So we were left trying to figure out how to express that in Scion terms. We considered just associating him with really high Occult, but that didn't seem to quite cover how pervasive the idea appeared to be in all our sources; we also considered giving him Mystery, but with Ogma right there being super Mystery-centric, he didn't seem to match up there, either. So in the end, after much debate, we decided to give him Epic Intelligence rather than leave this idea out.
We've been talking about it again lately, though, and the more we do, the more I start leaning back toward Mystery, or even maybe saying, "no deal, scholars, show us some sourcing!" despite how many of them are repeating the idea. The Dagda is certainly determined to be something of a square peg - what do you guys think?
I always figured that wisdom like is described would be more Epic Wits than Epic Intelligence.
ReplyDeleteI'm definitely still on the fence about the Dagda's Epic Intelligence, but I don't think he's a candidate for Epic Wits. Wits represents reaction time, reflex, ability to respond; it's speed of thought, not wisdom of thought. Someone with high Intelligence but no Wits thinks great, incredible thoughts but does so slowly; someone with high Wits but no Intelligence doesn't think much that's worth anything to anybody, but they do it at incredible speeds.
DeleteWits is sort of the Dexterity of mental attributes, if you will - flexibility and speed, but no real force behind it. Someone who's supposed to represent the idea of wisdom or knowledge from beyond the veil is probably not related to Wits, but should tend more toward Intelligence/Mystery/all that jazz.
I've got to partially disagree with you here. Wits also represents the ability to compress a lot of thinking into very short amount of time. The Dagda might think for an hour or something and spent the equivalent of a month contemplating it. Finally arriving at the best common sense answer.
DeleteNo, no, that's exactly what I said, actually - we're agreeing, not disagreeing. :) Wits is exactly that - being able to think incredibly quickly, so you can think your thoughts in a fraction of the time it would take someone without it.
DeleteBut that assumes you have thoughts worth thinking, and those come from Intelligence. To use an example from our games, Eztli has monstrous Wits but almost no Intelligence; she certainly can think all the thoughts available to her in the blink of an eye where it would take others forever to do so, but since her Intelligence rolls usually botch, that doesn't mean much. She's arrived at her answer long, long before everyone else in the band, but that doesn't make it a good answer, just a fast one.
Intelligence is for deep thinking, Wits for fast thinking. If you have both, then you're the awesome double threat you're describing - able to compress your genius thoughts into a few seconds.
Then I suppose the important distinction is who judges the quality of the advice. Do the myths depict him as giving good advice to mortals, or good advice to gods?
DeleteGenerally, we'd judge the quality of the advice on whether or not it worked. Unfortunately, the Dagda doesn't really do a lot of advice; he's a representative wisdom guy, not a doing wisdom guy. Which is why we've been so waffly about giving him a stat for it, because normally we want to see a god doing things.
DeleteI'd actually think that the tale of Aengus using wordplay to trick the Dagda out of his house argues against him having Wits, anyway. But then again, that could have been a few things.
So despite being a high ranking soldier as a mortal, Etzli is dumb as a sack of hammers.
ReplyDeleteShe barely speaks English anymore. Actually, she barely speaks anything anymore. She also forgets pretty much anything that isn't branded into her skin within half an hour or so.
DeleteEztli was actually smarter as a mortal and a young Scion than she is today; it's the weight of many negative Fatebonds against her Intelligence that causes her to botch rolls that she once could have gotten a handful of successes on. At Legend 3, she had 2 dots of Intelligence and 2 dots of Command; if she had to make a roll to come up with some tactics in the course of her military career, she'd average 2 successes, which is about what most mortals would. Now at Legend 10, she has 2 Intelligence, 1 Epic Intelligence and 0 Command, and she has -10 dice and -10 autos to all Intelligence rolls from her Fatebonds, making her average roll somewhere in the neighborhood of -14 successes - a pretty solid and epic botch.
Of course, the tradeoff is that she can do 80+ levels of armor-ignoring agg twice every action, so the Fatebonds also help her in other areas. But mortals long ago realized that she wasn't overly bright, and the weight of their belief makes it almost impossible for her to ever succeed in thinking something through again.
But hey, tons of Epic Wits. Any thought that makes it into the empty void of Sangria's mind moves at wind-tunnel speed.
The easiest way to play it is that Sangria acts mostly on instinct. She doesn't think things through, or indeed think about much at all; she just reacts and follows her first instinct, more like a predatory animal than a thinking human.
DeleteWouldn't that make her comatose, or just an absolute cripple? I Mean she's basically botching every single intelligence roll she makes, which is passively happening all the time.
DeleteIt seems like having that big of an intelligence penalty basically makes you unplayable.
Animal intelligence is basically the level she's at; that's not being comatose, just not being able to grasp any concepts larger than what's immediately in front of her. It is, however, very crippling; she needs the rest of her band and pantheon to tell her what to do and guide her when she can't guide herself. On her own, she would be basically unplayable, because she'd just go home and do her thing (animal instinct again), but her pantheon makes sure to steer her where they want her and her band, including her husband, keeps her on track and reminds her of the important stuff.
DeleteBasically, it's like having someone approximately as smart as your average big cat in the group. It doesn't understand anything you're doing, doesn't care about your problems and frequently tries to wander off and follow its instincts, but if you can convince it to go do what you want it to, it's an excellent tool.
(Also, once in a while Fatebonds allow her to make a decent roll - for example, she has a positive Fatebond to Occult that cancels out the negative to Intelligence, so on an Intelligence + Occult roll she can get six or seven successes and have a decent idea what's going on. Sangria lives in a world where her personal instincts and the powers of her pantheon are king, rather than one in which she makes decisions based on reason, understanding or knowledge.)
I'm guessing when you can bash through anything that isn't a legend twelve god or a titan avatar having little more intelligence than a cunning animal isn't much of a hinderance, except when smarter gods are using use as a living nuke.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Sangria's job is basically to be a tactical weapon the Aztlanti point at things they want to fall down. She's theoretically a provisional Tezcatlipoca, but in reality she just goes wherever they tell her to thanks to Virtues and doesn't really sweat the whys and wherefores.
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