A Stopped Clock

Question: How is Scion RAW so broken?

We dunno, man. We didn't work on it so we don't know how it all came together or what decisions went into making various parts of it happen; all we know is the mess that results afterward. We have some theories, though.

For one thing, much of Scion at its outset was pretty obviously copied and pasted from Exalted, another of White Wolf's most popular roleplaying games - so much so, in fact, that for a while after its release there was confusion over whether or not Scion was intended to be a "sequel" to Exalted. A lot of the problems with the base system for Scion come from this wholesale borrowing, which isn't really very surprising; the rules were intended for Exalted, so they don't work as well when imported into another game that doesn't use the exact same mechanics. To compound the problem, rules from White Wolf's other big game line, the World of Darkness, were also brought into Scion, and they not only weren't designed for Scion but also weren't designed to work in tandem with rules from Exalted. The result is that you have a lot of messy relics of previous systems hanging out and gumming up the works: Hardness, Willpower gain from Nature, environmental damage rules that stop applying around Legend 3, and so on.

Another problem is that the line was written in installments, from Hero to Demigod to God, and while we're sure the writers were aware of the power curve between different levels, that awareness didn't always translate into rules that were balanced the whole way up. Lots of the most broken powers in the game are that way because they balance perfectly fine for the tier in which they're located, but break like fine china as soon as a Scion goes up in Legend (or buys them at a lower Legend than they were apparently intended for). Scion's mix-and-match style of powers, which allows anyone to get basically any combination of abilities they want, is very liberating but also presents a huge number of extra ways that things can be broken, abused or overlooked, and it looks like the game just didn't get the playtesting it needed to bring these issues to light.

And finally, of course, the single biggest problem: too many cooks in the kitchen. There have been an absolute boatload of different writers for Scion, all with their own vision, ideas and plans, and they were very poorly integrated together into the line, leading to rules that contradict one another, render one another useless, are incredibly broken when combined with earlier rules, or that just plain don't make sense. This isn't a problem of bad writers, but rather of too many writers writing about the same thing without being familiar with what other writers had written before them (or, in some cases, were probably writing at the same time). It's a soup of freelance writing that needed a lot more editing and quality control before being truly integrated together than it got, and that's how we end up with one book that says Scions are immortal at Demigod and another that implies they aren't until God, one book that introduced weapon stats and another that introduced ridiculously better weapon stats for supposedly inferior weapons, and so on.

The thing about Scion is that, at its base, it has one of the most awesome premises ever, and many of its systems and powers do a great job of modeling that. Obviously, or we wouldn't all be so into it despite all its warts! But it's inconsistent, flawed, messy and at turns both underpowered and overpowered, so despite all its good intentions it simply has to be house-ruled, edited and fixed to make it playable. We don't know all the details of how it got that way, but now that it's here we're on a pretty much neverending quest to whip it into shape.

Salute broken old Scion, because it was still so awesome at its base that a lot of players loved it enough to keep playing it and writing for it and spending I don't even know how much time now on fixing it. Be all that you can be, Scion!