Question: Oh great oracles of Scion, your humble petitioner begs your divine favour and seeks a clarification. How is fire (non-purview) damage calculated, and is it soakable? Do you have a set system dealing with intensity of the flame, level of exposure, and time exposed? If so, can you share it?
Yea, we shall answer you. Come forth and prostrate yourselves, and partake of enlightenment.
Non-magical fire is actually pretty simple to handle in Scion; you treat it pretty much like any other kind of damage. Just as the Storyteller would calculate how many dice of damage a given improvised weapon or impact with the ground might do to a Scion, so they should just choose an appropriate number of damage dice for fire, ranging from putting your hand in a candle flame (probably somewhere around 5 dice) to being doused with gasoline in the middle of an inferno (probably more like 50).
Fire damage is always lethal and is soakable just like every other kind of non-magical damage, so some Scions with very high soaks can potentially ignore lesser fires even if they don't have direct invulnerability to it, just as a high enough soak lets them sometimes ignore swords. If this is a major fire and people are running around without Fire Immunity, smoke damage to lungs and heat exhaustion may also be factors, so you may want to have your players roll Stamina + Fortitude against a difficulty you set based on the situation to see if they start suffering dice penalties from the physical stress. Scion doesn't do ping damage, so you really don't need to worry about the low-grade damage of smoke and heat actually doing damage, but they could still slow down or distract Scions who suffer their ill effects.
We don't have a quick table for you, mostly because fire is such a mutable thing and can come up in so many different ways in the game that it would probably be useless more often than not. It's hard to measure how much fire in what configuration should have a set damage pool, so we recommend rolling with the punches when it comes up. If you like planning ahead and love charts, you could sit down and do a rough table of what you think various sizes and kinds of fire might deal in dice of damage. If you do, though, be ready to have to adjust it on the fly; we can almost guarantee that some fire-related situation will happen thanks to PC shenanigans that you absolutely didn't plan for.
We realize this didn't give you an easy out on this one, and we're sorry. Sometimes rules need to be too flexible for tables, and this is one of those times; Scion's damage and combat rules are already complicated enough, and they don't need yet another table with a bunch of fiddly columns about different factors of the same damaging event.
I found this pretty helpful, actually.
ReplyDeleteThe general range of 5 dice for hand in candle flame to 50 dice for covered in gasoline in an inferno is a pretty good range.
Presumably, the damage dice are rolled automatically on exposure, and thereafter each 6 ticks, or at the top of each round, or some sort of equivalent.
And clarifying that it was always soakable was helpful too, as some things suggested that fire was not always soakable.