The Metamorphosis of Vivian

Question: Now that the Orisha are complete, this seems like a good time to ask the question: How much will Vivian change due to your edits? How do you handle those changes in-game and out-of-game when you drastically change a pantheon with an active player character from that pantheon?

Major pantheon change is difficult when you already have players in the game. We're lucky to have very flexible players who are pros at rolling with the punches, but even so we don't want to dump a bunch of new stuff on them with a "hey, sorry, deal with it!", and neither should you if you want your own players to stick around. It's a question of finesse; you need to combine making changes to the gameworld in the service of having a better game, and making sure you don't needlessly upset or disenfranche your players to do it. If you make changes to make a better game, you'd better be sure it's still a better game for those most directly affected by those changes.

We've been through this a few times, actually; Egyptian and Indian PCs were affected by the Heku and Samsara changes way back when we introduced the new versions of those purviews, and the Aesir rewrite left Woody a little bit out in the cold with his father removed from the playable roster. And, of course, changes to all-purpose powers - new knacks or boons, different orders for old knacks and boons and so on - affect everybody regardless of pantheon, and players have weathered the storms of our constant tinkering in those areas for years.

Here's the best rule of thumb for changing stuff on your players in midstream: don't force them to change if they don't want to, and if you absolutely need a change to happen, find ways to make sure they don't lose out because of it. Explain exactly what's changing and give them choices for what to do about it and how they want it to affect their characters. If you can't give them a choice, give them a reward instead for dealing with all your bullshit. God knows our players deserve one now and then.

Some more specific examples of exactly what we do for these poor kids:

Pantheon Rewrites: If a PC is already in play, their associated powers do not change, even if we changed their parent's associated powers (or kicked them off the roster). They get grandfathered into keeping the associations they already had, because it would be a pretty shitty thing to do to tell them that they get no XP discounts on some things now and there was no way they could have planned for it. The Baron has departed our game roster, but Vivian remains his Scion and still has the same associations she did before we made the changes.

PSP Rewrites: If a PC is already in play and possesses boons in the old PSP, we offer them a choice: keep the old PSP as you have it now, or convert to the new one. If they choose to keep the old one, they won't be able to buy new boons for the old version because we're not using it anymore, but they won't lose the boons they already have if they want to keep them. If they choose to convert, we immediately switch all the PSP boons they have now with the new ones. This is what we did for Vivian; we offered her the choice to keep Cheval or switch to Ori, and when she went for Ori her old Cheval boons instantly converted to Ifa, Akunlegba and Ebo.

APP Rewrites: If a PC is already in play and we mess around with boons by changing their levels, they get to keep them, even if that means they wouldn't have a prerequisite boon anymore (in which case they'll need to get one of those before moving on, but it's an XP save overall). If we change the level so drastically that it's no longer available to the Scion at their current Legend, we give them a choice: choose any other boon at the appropriate level and lose the one that's been changed, or keep the one that's been changed without needing to rebuy it but remain unable to use it until you go up in Legend. They can then choose between XP savings or having a power they can use right now. In the rare case that we remove a boon from the game entirely, we let a PC that had it gain another boon from that purview at the same level immediately for free - when Illwind Curse was removed from the game, Goze instantly picked up Luck be a Lady instead. We've never had it happen, but if we removed a boon from the game and there was no other boon in that purview of the appropriate level, we'd probably either give them the equivalent value in lower-level boons of that purview, or just refund the XP and let the player figure out where they wanted to put it.

Knack Rewrites: If a PC is already in play and we mess around with the order of knacks - moving them to different trees or changing their prerequisites - the PC is grandfathered and doesn't need to change anything. You'll actually see this a lot in some of our older characters' sheets, where they have knacks without their prerequisites because we changed the prerequisites at a later time. We're not going to make them retroactively lose knacks they already have, nor are we going to force them to spend XP on prerequisites that didn't exist until today to justify powers they've been using all along. We do, however, require that they purchase missing prerequisite knacks if they want to move on in a tree, mostly to keep power level-to-XP ratio balanced; that is, when Alison had Blockade of Reason and we then moved it from a first-tier to second-tier knack, she needed to get Telepathy before she could move on to Parapet of the Mind.

Of course, a big part of changing a pantheon is that it affects the gameworld itself - the gods, their interactions and politics, their Scions and how everyone interacts with, changes and controls the World and Overworlds that they inhabit. For the moment, the only visible change for Vivian was the somewhat surprising appearance of her Akunlegba features (badass tribal tattooing across her face and a pair of giant ear discs); within the gameworld, she's not really sure what that was about, but Hermes hinted when asked that the more African gods of the Orisha may be making some kind of comeback or otherwise doing something that brought her Yoruba blood to the forefront unexpectedly. She probably won't learn much more about that for now unless she goes out and investigates - since she's already involved in a bunch of plots and stories, we're not going to force her to go deal with those androgynous palm-drunken bastards unless she wants to, but the option is there.

Honestly, every game's players are different, so how much or little you can change and what you need to do to keep players comfortable and having fun varies from table to table. We like to keep our players apprised of what we're up to behind the scenes so it doesn't come as a surprise, which helps some; Vivian's player knew we were working on the Orisha from the minute we started, and we told her a little bit here and there - the basic concept of ori and how it appears in the religion, some stories of a few of the gods and so on - so that she was ready for it and it didn't come out of left field without warning. It's all about gauging your players' willingness to roll with a change and knowing what things you might be able to do for them to ease the way when you shake the world up a little bit.

We've never had a particularly difficult transition for changes to the game - at most, it's usually just a learning curve for people trying to read up on a bunch of new boons to see what they do, or a player waiting to purchase powers they know are going to change - so we think it's working pretty well, but everybody's game will be different. Woody's player is still lobbying for us to change everything about one of his purviews, but other players may want to stay where they're comfortable, and as long as everyone has a fun and satisfying gameworld to play in, there's nothing wrong with that.