Question: I know this is probably a stupid question, but I just want to be sure: are Epic Attributes always active, in that you can lift much, run fast, and see far without having to spend Legend? I'm not talking about knacks, but the basic Epic Attributes themselves and the bonuses they give.
It's not a stupid question! Scion treats attributes, powers and skills differently than many other games, and it never hurts to check and make sure.
Epic Attributes are always active. They are a "magical power", but only in the sense that they transcend what a normal human could do; in all other ways, they're merely the extension of the normal attributes that everyone in the universe has access to. Epic Strength is an extension of normal Strength, illustrating that where a mortal creature can only be up to so strong, a divine one can zoom past that barrier and leave it cringing in the dust. Someone with high Epic Perception isn't using a power in the sense of boons and knacks, but is rather simply that much hellaciously better at Perception than most other people. High Epic Dexterity means you're very, very dextrous, and without the use of knacks, that's all it means.
Of course, that's a lot! Anything that depends on your Attributes also depends on your Epic Attributes, which means that they have plenty of delicious, juicy passive effects for you to enjoy. Having Epic Strength means you can always lift heavier objects than those with only normal Strength as well as making you better at grappling, while Epic Dexterity makes you better at dodging and faster at running, and Epic Stamina makes you more resistant to disease, more durable against impacts and capable of taking more punishment. Epic Charisma makes you more central, noticeable and interesting than someone with only normal Charisma, while Epic Manipulation makes you automatically a better liar and Epic Appearance makes you able to keep rerolling your Presence rolls thanks to your overwhelming visual effect. Epic Perception allows you to see and hear farther and have a better chance of detecting liars and illusions, Epic Intelligence allows you to learn things incredibly quickly and solve puzzles that a mortal brain would just shut down after viewing, and Epic Wits lets you respond to sudden combat or messy political shifts with alacrity.
Not all of these things have codified results - Charisma, in particular, relies more on the Storyteller making sure to roleplay NPCs' reactions to you appropriately - but they're all on all the time, and all always potent and advantageous to the Scion who possesses them. You don't need to spend any Legend or Willpower to be great at your Epic Wits, because being incredibly divinely witty is your default baseline. Just as you don't have to spend anything to use normal Attributes or Abilities, you don't have to spend for Epics.
Of course, knacks, the powers that act as focused expressions of your Epic Attributes, do often have costs associated or are only active for short periods of time, but they all explain exactly what they do. They're special powers that you learn in order to show off your badass Epic Attributes, but the Epics themselves are always there even if you never use a knack in your life.
If it helps, think of them as Divine Attributes instead of using the word "epic"; you're divine, so you have access to Attributes of the gods. They work just like the Attributes of mortality, except that they're stronger, bigger, more awesome and inspiring, just like the gods themselves.
You should probably assume that your epic charisma and epic manipulation are not always working at full force. Let the player decide how much of each he is putting into any interaction.
ReplyDeleteNot true, actually. A Scion's base stats are always active, even if he's just sitting around avoiding eye contact. If you have Epic Charisma, you're a magnetic, noticeable and interesting presence even if you have your face buried in a book ignoring everyone, and people will be naturally drawn to you. Ditto for Epic Manipulation; whatever you say will sound legit, even if you're not actually trying to convince people of it, and people are much more likely to believe your most offhand comment or body language than the impassioned speeches those who have less Epic Manipulation.
DeleteWhen you're actually trying, you'll be able to direct those powers or enhance them with knacks, but they're still there when you aren't bothering, just like you don't stop being able to lift a lot of weight just because you aren't picking things up right now.
It has to be true, or the consequences become very disruptive. If you walk into a room with your full charisma around mid demigod or above, then you start erasing free will and independent thought.
DeleteThat is all well and good for your enemies, but people you have an interest in maintaining as friends, or acquaintances? You probably need them to not be raving sycophants unless you're just that kind of character.
Just because you're strong doesn't mean you have to use your full passive strength every single time. The same has to be true for charisma and manipulation.
Nope - that is exactly what happens when you walk into a room with mid-Demigod and above Charisma. People cannot handle how awesome you are. They are automatically on board with you. The sycophanty is off the charts, because you, my friend, have invested your XP in being incredibly charismatic. It's not just a stat you buy so you can occasionally use knacks - it's real and present and always on, just like all the other things. Folks with high Epic Intelligence don't get dumber when they're not actively trying to solve a puzzle (convenient though it might sometimes be for things like avoiding Virtue Extremity). And yes, actually, your passive Epic Strength is always there, which is why modifying knacks like Titanium Tools and Force with Finesse exist, so you don't automatically destroy everything you work with that isn't built for crazy super strength.
DeleteHowever, remember that Legendary creatures don't fall over with their brains oozing out their ears like mortals do. If nobody's using powers, they'll be more positively inclined toward someone with lots of Epic Charisma but probably won't turn into drooling idiots. Think of the passive effects as akin to what would happen if you actually made the people involved roll their Charisma + Presence against Willpower + Integrity + Presence; people who are Legendary and have good resist powers probably aren't nearly as bowled over as those who are low-Legend, mortal or bad at saying no to nice people. When Baldur walks into a room, all the gods in Asgard want to hang out with him because his Charisma is always there and always awesome, but if something important is going on, Odin and Frigg aren't defaulted to yes-men.
Social stats can indeed be inconvenient; Epic Appearance is actually even more of a pain than Charisma, because people tend to either be constantly all over you with sexiness on the brain or mindlessly fleeing your terribleness. But that's what social Epic Attributes do. They don't turn off just because they're inconvenient; if you want their awesome benefits, you deal with their occasional downsides.
I'm afraid that doesn't make sense. I can take my hand and press it against a button. If I use very little strength then the button does not get pressed. If I press harder, then the button gets pressed. if I press as hard as I can, then the button breaks.
DeleteIn the same sense, I can sit down and have a conversation with a friend without being forceful so we can communicate as peers. I could be more forceful with that friend when I want to convince him of something. I can then choose to be extremely forceful and bowl him over with social pressure (and probably anger him, but I do not have epics).
Also, your system requires the payment of legend when resisting social powers. At least 1 to have any real shot of succeeding above Hero. Meanwhile your social characters are constantly attacking anything and everything with their passive social stats every time they walk into a room with someone else. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as you can choose to tone yourself down to a tolerable level.
If nobody is using powers, you still end up in lots of situations where your passive socials are a lot higher than their passive resistance, so they must become drooling idiots, or run out of legend, or do something to stop you from attacking them passively (kill you, leave, etc).
When Baldur walks into a room, he either has to tone down his charisma or manipulation, or everyone in the room stops having a personality and lives for no other reason than to please Baldur, or do something to stop him as mentioned above.
(for the sake of the conversation, we are mostly discussing charisma and manipulation. Appearance is a lot harder to arbitrarily choose to tone down, and it has Malleable Allure which no other social stat has the equivalent of.)
You're doing a false equivalency here. Strength is measured only in what you do, but Charisma is not; Strength is always there but is invisible when not actually in use, but the same is not the case for Charisma. Charisma is a quality of presence, magnetism and personal importance that is always on; when a person who is very charismatic is around, that quality is always there and is always present no matter what he happens to be doing. If you will, where Strength requires you to take a physical action to show off, Charisma requires a social action - and just being near people is a social action. Of course your Charisma will be more effective if you have a conversation with someone than if you don't, but it's still present and real when you're there in a way that physical stats simply aren't. Comparing the two isn't really very useful; the mental stats are a better basis for that, because, like the social ones, they are automatic and don't depend on the movement of tangible objects. You don't get dumber when you aren't writing math equations out, you don't get slower of thought when nothing surprising is happening, and you don't go deaf when there's nobody to hear sneaking up behind you. A stat not being "in use" doesn't mean it doesn't exist and isn't as strongly present as always.
DeleteCharisma doesn't necessarily mean "forceful", and I'm not sure where you got that idea. Your friends are your friends because of your personal charisma; they like you, which is an effect of Charisma. If your Charisma were not active, they would not be interested in talking to you about anything. If you want to force them into something, then sure, use actual Charisma powers, but if you don't your Charisma still constantly affects them just by being there. It is the force that makes you interesting, fun, exciting, or just pleasant to be around. Without it, you would be literally ignored by everyone all the time.
And with Epic Charisma, you don't have that option. You are always "on", even if you're not doing anything. That's what the stat does. Baldur can't "tone down" his Charisma, and that's why Baldur is the most beloved of all the gods in Asgard. He has to be. It's the default. People love Baldur just for existing, not because he's for some reason running around randomly busting off knacks at them.
There's no magic level of a stat that reduces to "drooling idiot" status, dude; that's on a Storyteller to roleplay, but your imaginary resist not beating his imaginary Charisma doesn't mean you suddenly can't think. It means you're more likely to like him (or believe him, for Manipulation) than you otherwise would be, and if there's a very large gulf you may have trouble making decisions with your normal amount of acumen because the social stat is skewing them. But that's okay. That's how it's supposed to work. If you're hanging out around Baldur, of course you want to do whatever he says. It doesn't mean you have to - if he says "Hey, murder your brother," for example, you probably won't do it just because he says so, but you'll be conflicted and confused and upset and yeah, you'll probably think about it and wonder just what the hell your brother has been up to to piss off this awesome guy so much.
DeleteAppearance does function a bit differently from the other two social stats in that it can make it impossible to get anything done - full Epic Appearance at top god-level means you're in continual danger of rape or almost incapable of getting people to have a normal conversation with you, which is why Malleable Allure exists (along with the fact that there's mythological precedent for it - gods often dumb down their appearance so as not to smite the brains of poor mortals looking at them). But there's no equivalent for Charisma or Manipulation and there doesn't need to be - they aren't supposed to turn off and it doesn't make sense to assume they would. There is literally no reason for that aside from "I think it would be inconvenient in the game, therefore I don't like it."
All the things you're describing above as overwhelming social stats sound to me like uses of knacks. If you want to force someone to do something they wouldn't normally do, you usually have to use a knack - you can't convince people to roll over and play dead just because you're very nice unless the divide is massive (i.e., Epic 5 and above versus mortals, Epic 8 and above versus Heroes). If it's not, they'll lean toward you, want to believe you, be disposed toward you, whatever, and that will definitely color their judgement, but forcing them to take a course of action usually requires a knack.
And all the knacks explain what they do, so if a knack says "this knack does X", you can usually safely assume you can't do X with the default stat unless you are blowing them absolutely out of the water on power level.
We can certainly use mental stats to establish our equivalents if you want.
DeleteI can stare at someone without focusing upon it, only getting a general idea of what I am looking at. I can focus on it and see distinct details. I can then squint or widen my eyes to maximize my visibility and even hold a hand over my eyes to improve my sight one step further.
I can not care much about an issue an use my intelligence to half ass a problem. I can engage my intelligence on a problem and solve it with most of my capabilities. I can focus upon the problem to the exclusive of everything else and do extremely well at solving that problem.
I can split my train of thought and wits across multiple ideas and only devote a little bit to the current topic. I can focus upon one topic and think about all its possibilities at a rapid pace, or I can psyche myself up to be in the zone, a kind of zanshin state you may or may not have experienced where I am thinking lightning fast.
The nature of Charisma as forceful or not is not important. What is important is how dramatically your passive successes can overcome the passive resistance of those around you. When you beat someone by that much, they stop having personalities of their own and live only to please you. Their every decision is influenced by whether or not you will like the choice they made. They would abandon all their desires and do whatever you wish them to do.
Your imaginary resist not beating his imaginary charisma does mean you suddenly can't think, if he beat you by a high enough value (which becomes increasingly more common the higher your social epics). You may have more than 'trouble' making decisions, you would be absolutely crippled against godly level charisma or manipulation. You would cease to become the person you are, and become the person they wish you to be conciously or subconciously.
If he says "Hey, murder your brother" and he beats your resistance by a large margin then you're going to kill your brother. Being conflicted and confused and upset is Hero level charisma. Maybe low Demigod.
I am not describing the use of knacks, because resisting knacks are almost always a good time to power up your epic resistances. I am describing the effects of high amounts of passive charisma and manipulation against the passive resistance rules you use. I am describing walking into a room and hitting everyone with 46 automatic successes passively every 5 ticks, and everyone else in the room having to spend a legend (or leave, or kill you, etc) every 5 ticks or fail. Hard.
I'm confused about why you seem to think there are only two settings to dealing with Epic Charisma - totally immune to it and unable to use any brain cells at all. There are levels, just the same way there are with any stat, and both your Epic Charisma level and their level of normal resistance and Legendaryness factor into that. Your brains will not turn to goo if they have top-level Charisma, but they will be affected; that's not "crippling", it's just the facts of life. It happens that way every day on a small scale in human society, where normal people with lots of Charisma automatically make more friends, get more done and encounter fewer social obstacles than people who are not good at normal Charisma. They're certainly not using powers, and they also don't have the ability to turn that on or off. It's part of who they are.
DeleteYour mental examples are false equivalencies again - or, at least, they're looking at things wrong. Your Perception example is again trying to use physical actions to modify a very non-physical thing; if you want to argue that you can make yourself worse at seeing things by crossing your eyes, fine, but there is no charismatic equivalent of crossing your eyes, so it's pretty much irrelevant. Your Intelligence example is just wrong - you're equating study with intelligence, which isn't how Attributes work, and if you're Intelligent enough to solve a problem it's going to be an obvious solution to you from the get-go (longer problems that can't be solved that way are expressed by extended rolls, which also use all of your Intelligence each time - again, there's no "turn this stat off" action you can take). And your Wits example is again confused about what it's doing, because it's both ignoring Scion's system (in which concentration on multiple things is handled by Intelligence, not Wits, and has hard-and-fast rules about how many things you could "split your attention" between at once), and the point of Epic Wits is that you don't "psyche yourself into a zone". You are in the zone, all the time, period. It is not activated. It is what you are.
You are describing the use of knacks, actually - you're ascribing the straight base stst powers it doesn't have. If you're a Hero, yes, you will probably kill your brother if Baldur tells you to, but if you're anywhere near his level of power, you won't have to do it just because he has all the Epic Charisma. Your Legend rating and power level matter. You are not rendered helpless and incapable if you are near the same level. Any time someone wants to make you do something you absolutely do not want to do, they will need to use a power; if you're a god of any Legend, Baldur is going to need to use Benefit of the Doubt to convince you your brother is a traitor, Freeze Out to punish you until you do it, Engender Love to make your feelings for him so unignorable that you can't disobey him, or other Charisma powers. At a baseline, you'll love him, you'll want to make him happy, but he will not obliterate your free will.
DeleteFree will is very important in Scion. Mortals lose it early on when dealing with the divine, but Scions and gods still have it and continue to have it all the way through their career. If Baldur wants to make you kill your brother, he's going to have to actually give that some effort unless you're Legend 4 and he's rolling around in all his full glory.
I think maybe the passive successes model was a bad idea, because it seems to be giving you the idea that you can never win against it because you're not activating knacks for resistance. Please go back to not using that model - I was trying to illustrate the idea of your having natural resistance to socials that mortals don't have with it, but it's obviously not doing a very good job. A god's "passive successes" against you in a social roll do not actively make you do things or change your personality; they do influence your behavior toward him, but not to the point that they obviate your free will. That is the exclusive bailiwick of actual powers - knacks, boons and spells - and can't be done without them unless the power gulf is massive.
Essentially, a god not using knacks on you is him "not trying" with his Charisma/Manipulation and not forcing you to do things. Loki can lie to you all the livelong day and you will totally believe him, but he can't actually force you to do anything about it that you don't decide on yourself unless he uses powers on you.
I am the one saying there should be levels, and you have been disagreeing with me from the start. I said that you should be able to choose how much of your passive charisma and manipulation you are trying to exert because that is something people can do in real life, and not being able to choose can break the game.
DeleteA god should be able to decide he is not using all 46 automatic successes, and instead can choose to use some other lesser value. You might not be able to pick exactly how much less you are using because that kind of granularity is hard, but you can definitely exert less in a broad sense.
I am not sure what you mean about my examples being wrong because they are trying to use physical actions to modify a very non-physical thing. All social stats are expressed in physical ways (until you get things like Telepathy). You decide to act, and then you open your mouth and say a thing. You may or may not think about what you are saying before you say it, but you have made a physical act regardless. To take no physical act is to stand there without motion, not communicating, and even then you decided how to stand.
I am ascribing the straight base stats powers it does have, unless you have removed the ability to make mundane social rolls or given them limitations they do not possess. And, unless you are describing a house rule which does not appear on your web page where being the same levels makes you resistant to the social stats of others, then your legend rating and power level do not matter that much.
Let's take Eztli for example (chosen for obvious reasons). Her base resistance is 9 Wits, 5 Willpower, 10 Integrity, 10 Legend. That's 34 dice with a rough average of 17 successes. If Baldur walks into the room with her, he beats her average resistance by 29 successes unless she spends a legend to epically resist, kills him, leaves, or does something else to stop the passive social attacks.
Winning by 29 successes is pretty big. Much bigger than 'You generally like him more'.
There is nothing wrong with the passive success model you are describing, as long as the person with the socials can choose not to use all his passive successes. Baldur should be able to say to himself, "Self, I'm going to do my best not to totally blow her away". Suddenly Eztli has a lot better chance of resisting because Baldur is not trying to throw 46 passive successes at her.
Okay, let's back up. Obviously we're both confusing each other, so let's go point by point.
Delete1) Yes. You are saying there are levels, and so am I. But what I am saying is that those levels are tied to how powerful the people involved are, and you are saying they should be consciously controlled. They are not consciously controlled. You cannot decide to turn off or turn down your social Attributes. But there is a difference between Baldur's effect on a mortal, Baldur's effect on a low-Legend Hero and Baldur's effect on a god. His Charisma affects all of them automatically because that's what Charisma does, but where the mortal is a wreck who can't do anything but love him, the Hero who is bowled over and dazed but can still kinda think for himself, and the god who really likes Baldur and wants to help him out but can say no if he asks for something unreasonable. Those are the levels I'm talking about; they're basic and intrinsic to the people involved and do not have any kind of conscious control on either side.
2) No. Gods (and Scions) cannot decide how much of their Epic Attribute is "on" at any given time, which has been my entire point the whole time. Your Epic Attribute is always there and is always active unless you specifically use powers to turn it off. This is why things like Force with Finesse or My Eyes Are Up Here exist for some Attributes, because without them there is no way to "tone it down". And again, there's no reason for there to be outside of your feeling that life will be too hard for you if you can't - there's no mythic support for it and no mechanical reason it needs to happen. Having more of all the Attributes has upsides and downsides, and in the case of Charisma and Manipulation it's that people always pay attention to and believe you. That's what you're signing up for when you buy the stat.
3) You're not making a physical action to do most social things. Talking is a physical action, but that's like saying that thinking is a physical action because it involves firing neurons in your brains - the physical action doesn't actually affect the thing happening other than to be the vehicle it uses. What you say and how you say it are the factors that affect your social interactions, not the physical equipment of tongue and teeth. It's your personality and magnetism that are actually the doers here, and those are not "squintable" like your Perception example or "pullable" like your Strength example. They are always there. You are not becoming a less interesting, magnetic or noticeable person based on anything physical that is happening here.
4) You are definitely ascribing the straight base stats powers they don't have - if anything, allowing people to do things with straight rolls is more often the house rule than otherwise. Otherwise, the powers of the social stats literally do not make sense - if you can already do everything knacks like Benefit of the Doubt, Charmer, Boys Will Be Boys, Crowd Control, Engender Love, Blame James, God's Honest, Overt Order, Blurt It Out or Hard Sell can do just by rolling your stat, why in the name of every god on Scion's rosters do those knacks exist? Are the writers of the game just so lost that they created a bunch of powers that literally have no function because they somehow forgot that you could just do all that with the base stat instead? That makes absolutely zero sense. We allow straight rolls of that stat against others if you feel the need to try to convince someone without using any powers, but if they happen to be close to as powerful as you and you're trying to convince them to do or feel some way they normally wouldn't, guess what? It doesn't work, because otherwise there is a whole pile of social knacks that have literally no function whatsoever except to randomly cause you to spend Legend. It's more like working the crowd - the ST might set a difficulty you could hit to get some results, but it won't be a straight head-to-head against the other person's resistance roll. Because that makes no sense.
Delete5) Again, let me repeat: no, the "passive behind the scenes resistance roll" model does not work, and I'm sorry I introduced it. It was a poor metaphor that has caused more confusion than I was hoping it would solve. People are not just rolling their resistance against you all the time or doing your bidding slavishly, and nobody is spending Legend in either case, either you with your passive Epics or them with theire passive resistance. Refer back to item 1 - they are more or less able to deal with you because they are near or far from the same level of power. Loki is not stuck being Baldur's mindless devotee whenever he's around, but that's not because Baldur is in some way turning off his Baldurness; it's because Loki is also a god, is also a power in his own right, and is not as malleable to the charms of others as a mortal or a lesser being.
6) The solution here is not to come up with some bizarre and non-sense-making system in which people can turn off their personalities, half the knacks on the list have no reason to exist and everyone is always jello-brained. You are overpowering social Attributes insanely by assuming that they can destroy other peoples' resistances and free will without so much as bothering with their knacks, and they're already plenty powerful. You mention that you want to be able to interact with people without liquefying them, which is nice for roleplaying, but in a world where having high Epic Charisma or Manipulation grants you an automatic negation of all the free will of everyone else dealing with you, those become instant win stats and nobody should ever bother with anything else. Every powergaming munchkin would just buy maximum Charisma, because apparently it makes you the most powerful thing in the fucking universe with no Legend investment and nothing anyone around you can do about it unless you decide to magnanimously "dumb it down".
That does not make sense. That is not how it works. Your socials are always on, but their effects are dependent on what you're doing and who you're interacting with. They don't turn off at your whim; when you buy Charisma, you're always charming (or commanding, or arresting, whatever flavor you like), and when you buy Manipulation, you're always persuasive, reasonable-sounding and smooth. But since they also don't automatically win the game any time you talk to anyone, that is A fucking okay.
1) Unless you are describing a house rule that is not on your website, there is no difference between how a mortal, a demigod, and a god resist your mundane social powers besides a slightly higher average willpower + integrity + legend resistance. If such a rule exists, then I would genuinely like to know exactly what it says.
Delete2) Gods should decide how much of their Epic Attribute is "on" at a given time because normal people can decide how much of a mundane attribute they want to use at a given time. Unless you are making the claim that Epic Attributes work in a magical way that happens regardless of what you do.
When I run a game, and Bob says "I demand that you surrender!", then I put that statement through the filter of awesome. Bob perfectly nails the inflection, timing, and body language. Sometimes Bob's character even says different words than what Bob says (but still undeniably similar) to demonstrate just how super humanly awesome his social stat is. Bob can also choose to intentionally use a less effective inflection, more mundane timing, etc.
What you seem to be describing is Bob saying "I demand that you surrender!" and a magical unseen force radiates from his mouth and makes it happen. Nothing Bob can do will stop that magical unseen force no matter what he says. If the latter is true, then we are playing a different game and we can stop the discussion here.
3) You decide what to say, and usually have a pretty good idea what you are trying to accomplish by saying it, and know what you are doing that is helping or harming your statement. Some people are a little less aware of themselves, and just blurt things out, but a lifetime of experience is still guiding them subconciously.
Real people can become less interesting, magnetic, or noticable if they want to. I can do it. I can make the choice to be less interesting then I am when I interact with people, either by sloth, or calculation.
4) Of course mundane social stats can already do everything knacks like Benefit of the Doubt, Charmer, Boys Will Be Boys, Crowd Control, Engender Love, Blame James, God's Honest, Overt Order, Blurt It OUt, or Hard Sell can do just by rolling your stat. But it usually takes an extended roll or a much higher difficulty to do it through mundane stats, and Knacks speed up the process dramatically.
Real people can make people give them the benefit of the doubt, or calm groups of people, redirect the blame onto someone else, make people fall in love with them, command groups of people to follow their orders even if they do not know you, or make you blurt out the truth. Sometimes it is more difficult and real people fail, and sometimes it would take a lot longer than you have or want to spend.
There are definitely some knacks that do blatantly supernatural things, but a lot of knacks just speed the process up to the point where you get results right here, right now, when you really want those results or are afraid that your mundanes just won't cut it.
5) See #1.
6) I don't have that problem because I personally use an MDV system where the default social resistance is a heck of a lot higher. The god with his 46 passive successes is resisted by gods with their 46+ passive resistance, and those gods with too many passives can just turn down their passive successes to avoid hitting those weaker than them with a mind blowing amount of threshold successes if they desire. It is a neat, simple solution that works well with no powergaming munchkins in sight.
1.) Your Resist comes up when it's actively being pushed against. Passive Socials aren't going to make you do anything against your will because your will is not being imposed upon. No house-rule needed to clear that up.
Delete2.) Epic Attributes don't need to have filters, especially not Charisma. It actually takes a lot of skill to make yourself not-as-charming/approachable/forceful as you normally are and even then, you can't keep it up for long unless you're skilled at deception.
So, yeah, if Bob's just casually talking about surrender, there's no "magic power" forcing anyone to heed it (save for mortals) but once Bob puts some omph into it, then it needs to be rolled against and maybe your resistance fails. That's when you agree to the surrender. Not before.
3.) See 2. It's not that easy to tone your persona charisma down for long ESPECIALLY dealing with people who've known you for quite some time.
4.) Nothing to state for this one.
5.) Back to #1 for my post as well
6.)Eh, that system horribly breaks down for anyone who isn't insane about keeping their mental DV high which... isn't fair. I mean, look. Anne's got Secondhand Persuasion and there are some blog posts of hers that will make me sit down with close friends and take her viewpoints... but that doesn't make her viewpoints my own and after I digest them, I keep and throw out what I don't/do want. That's Anne's passive socials right there.
If she was rolling against my own resistance, than if she succeeded, I'd still be thinking her word-for-word was God's Honest truth.
ARGH, I just wrote another lengthy response and my computer ate it. All my feelings!
DeleteIt was probably overly verbose anyway. I'll keep it down to the two most important points, one because it's pissing me off and the other because it's the overall most important part of this discussion.
1) There is no secret house rule here, and I'm straight up baffled about why you keep pushing to make me admit that there is. There's no difference between how people of different Legends roll resistances, but the point here is that these are not resistances and are not being rolled. They are passive effects. Rolling is not happening. There is no secret rule about resistances happening differently at different levels, because we are not talking about resistances.
I'm especially flummoxed because you're actually the one pushing a house rule here. Nowhere in any Scion book does it say that you can turn off your socials. That's your invention, my friend, and it's causing me cognitive dissonance whenever you claim that me opposing your house rule is somehow a house rule.
2) And that's the single most important thing going on here. That's great that you use an MDV system that you like and that works for you, and I'm glad you're having fun with it. That's fantastic! Use it forever!
But you came into this conversation by saying, "Hey, by the way, you might want to mention to the masses that you can turn off your socials at will," and that just straight up isn't true. Nowhere in any of the original rules does it say that you can do that, and some powers are even busily implying the opposite. It's quite a logic leap to decide that you must be able to turn off passive attributes at will when that's something that almost never happens ever in any game I know of. There is no support for it in the RAW and we've made it pretty clear that we think it's a piss-poor idea for a myriad of reasons. None of that means you can't use it, but if you walk in here to our blog and tell everyone it's the way things work like it's the almighty and uncontestable RAW itself, we're going to call you on it.
You are entitled to do whatever you want to in your games, misguided though we might think it is; we're not in charge of you and you don't have to use any of our opinions unless you want to. But if you're going to come in and shill for a house rule of yours, make sure you label it as such, because there are new players and starting Storytellers around here, and they deserve to know the difference between RAW and house rules as they begin to decide how they'll want to play their own games.
So much willpower to stay out of this conversation. You can do whatever you want in your games and no one can tell you different. But we can tell you what makes a better game, and how we run things. You dont have an argument here. You can have an opinion, you can have describe how you like to run things, but telling us we're wrong about how we run things is where we draw the line. Take it to your own game and deal with it there.
Deleteyour twisting the rules to make charisma more powerful than it is. At the level your talking about your a god among other gods who are more powerful and better at resisting. Even low level gods have a natural resist to someone like Baldur's charisma. you can't tone down active charisma, but you're among people who are mostly naturally immune to it and that is how it balances out. It's not you, it's them.
ReplyDeleteThis is basically what I'm saying, yes.
DeleteAs a side question, have you guys ever considered a 'My Eyes Are Up Here' type Knack for Charisma? I don't think anyone should be able to turn off their Epic Charisma just like that, but I can see how you might not want to emanate Beatlemania all the time. A Knack seems to be the simplest solution.
ReplyDeleteNot really, mostly because there's no mythic reason for one. Gods who are very charismatic don't really have stories or examples where they stop doing that, and they tend to sort of... well, cause riots, engender unfortunate unrequited lovers and create superparties just by being around.
DeleteCharisma does have options for "get off of me", though. Simply telling people to do that often works decently enough - they want to please you, so they won't like it but they still might do it anyway. Freeze Out is also a great option for making your displeasure known.
Manipulation, of course, already has a whole "don't look at me!" tree with Who, Me? and Obliteration.
Thought about it but....why would anyone ever use it? Has there really ever a situation in your life where you wanted to be less liked? My eyes are up here help make it so you arent groped or worse. It helps so that armies dont sail across the sea to capture you. But being less liked.....I dont see a use for it.
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