This week, I'm doing a solo blog while John is out of town! If you only tune in to watch his gruff yet endearing rants against life the universe and everything, don't worry. He'll be back next week.
In the meantime, here are some questions and some answers!
Question: I'm curious: how do you handle "working the crowd" rules in your games? In general, the rules for it are lacking in comparison to the social combat rules from Exalted. I like the idea of Exalted's intimacies and D20's attitudes, but I don't have a clue about how to use them in Scion. Any ideas?
Question: In your Scion games, do you tell your players to do out-of-game research projects or write stories for the game? Like having a player who plays an Aztec have to read up on a lot of their myths, or when the group has some downtime to deal with stuff, do you have them write extensive stories? If so, do you reward the ones that do or punish the ones that don't?
Question: If a player chooses to take a disadvantage - say, blindness - while creating their character and keeps it as part of his or her Legend, what, if anything, would you give them in return for doing this?
Since I'm now posting this after the fact, you guys now definitely know I wasn't attacked by murderous ghosts living in my house. Unless I'm writing to you from beyond the grave.
A pleasant vlog for a Saturday afternoon! I think you hit the nail on the head about Social Combat. It really does take away something when you roll the dice and go 'I got 20 successes, he does this for me now'.
ReplyDeleteI think dice should shore up a person's weakness in social-fu but not dictate it entirely. Even with a... 30 success roll, if you talk to Ares like he's a puny weakling, pretty sure he'll ignore those successes and murder you regardless.
True. We generally decide that if someone is being particularly rude or inflammatory, it makes the eventual social roll have a much higher difficulty. Sometimes you can laugh and give Ares the finger guns after you called him an asshole, but usually he's going to smite you.
DeleteI'm occasionally tempted to write stories for my characters, but then I read Anne's fiction and I sigh and keep dreaming. I may be creative, but I'll never be that articulate!
ReplyDeletePfft, whatever! I'd love to read a story you wrote.
Delete-Enter Success Kid Meme-
ReplyDeleteAsks four questions on a blog, three of them answered within a week.
I proposed two of the questions on here, the second and third. The Second one was mostly just me seeing if its just me and other ST's have their players do it or if I am in a near isolated case. My ST makes us do stories or we get punished. Anne knows about them. Like heavy penalties that have long distant game problems(killing of fatebounds/ no legend anymore/ etc).
Anyways, the next question was not as a 'free xp' type thing. I mean, the models that I based it off of, you do get extra stuff, but I was not asking for that for me. Mostly for other people. But I was wondering cause it seems prevalent in other White Wolf games, but not in Scion and just thought I'd ask if you do that or thinking about it.
I think the second question has to be approached differently for each situation. Not writing a detailed background for your character is fine because maybe you like defining that kind of thing in play, or maybe writing just isn't your cup of tea.
DeleteTelling the Storyteller what your PC does during downtime? That's totally different. It doesn't have to be a written narrative, it can be a list of things they just did. If you can't tell the ST what your PC does for the next month, that isn't a writing issue, it's a whole different issue. It really does become an issue in games where downtime happens frequently if all the other characters are Getting Stuff Done and yours is just sitting there, not doing stuff.
To your other situation, about research... well yes and no. If you're playing an Aztec Scion and you're playing them as if they are part of that culture, then yes you need to do some research. But you can avoid that legitimately by simply having your character be ignorant of his divine cultural history. It's your choice. Now if you want to involve a lot of Aztec stuff in your Aztec character's adventures, then you need to bring something to the table. Maybe not the level of research that John and Anne do, driving to university libraries to check out scholarly resources and scouring JSTOR for citations, but certainly some basic googling and browsing at the local library.
I don't give XP to my players that do lots of research and spend a lot of time developing their characters outside of game sessions (through writing or brainstorming or whatever else), but they are the ones who reward THEMSELVES by doing that. It means I have more material to work with when trying to come up with stories for them. They get involved in more plots because they're coming up with all these extra ideas.
Really, the only problem I've had with something like this is where a player wanted all the stories and intrigue and interest that the proactive players were getting, but just loathed doing research or external work. He pretty much wanted that done for him, which no one was interested in doing. It didn't end up working out well for anyone.
they are the ones who reward themselves by doing that
DeleteBingo. If they don't like doing that, I won't make them, but if they do it, they'll almost always get more out of the game than otherwise.