The Animal We Become

Question: Why does Animal have so many dice adders? It's less about animals and more about adding tons of dice.

Ah, Animal. Perennially popular for the complaints and confusion.

Animal is a representative purview; it has to represent a Scion's connection to her totem animal in various ways, but at the same time it revolves around a concept - animals - that can only be concretely expressed in so many ways.

All purviews have some of this disconnect; there's a difference between what a boon represents - that is, what effect it has in the world of the game and what everyone sees happen when a Scion uses it - and what it mechanically does - that is, what game mechanics occur that try to model that effect. What a purview is about is the actual meaning and use behind the boons, not what the game has to do to try to represent that. Boons across all purviews - Hornet's Nest in Chaos, Prince of Lies in Illusion, Aurora in Stars - can be reduced town to merely "adds/subtracts some dice", but that doesn't mean they aren't portraying important and necessary powers.

The Animal purview is twofold: it is about both commanding and controlling animals, and becoming more animalistic yourself. Boons such as Animal Communication, Animal Obedience, Call of the Wild, Ride Animal, Hive Mind, Hybrid Chimera and the creation boons belong to the first part of the purview, giving a Scion tools to interact with, control and communicate with her totem animal whenever and wherever she encounters it. On the other hand, boons like Faunaphagia, Animal Aspect, Animal Feature, Animal Form, Natural Army and Bestial Nature belong to the second portion of the purview, allowing a Scion to become closer to the symbols and powers of her totem animal herself. The first set of boons are relatively easy to mechanize because they have easy, clear effects: animals talk to you, or show up when you call, or combine and become new animals and so on. The boons that involve being more bestial yourself, however, are much more difficult to turn into direct effects.

Animal Form's the easy one; you turn into an animal, bang, boom, done. But what about all the other boons that involve taking no animalistic parts of yourself or aligning more closely with the beast? Those don't have clear-cut effects, so Scion has to try to come up with some. Animal Feature and Bestial Nature have a clear effect in that they give you actual body parts from an animal, but with the exception of purely utilitarian ones like wings or gills, that doesn't actually do anything mechanically, and your nifty eagle talons are just ornamental without some other system to make them worthwhile. Even more abstract ones like Animal Aspect, which involve taking on a quality of an animal rather than a concrete body part, have no clear effect to call their own at all, despite being ideas that should be represented and available to young Scions. The dice adders (or, in the case of Bestial Nature, success adders) are quick and simple ways to add a mechanic to those very necessary boons so that Scions aren't stuck with only Animal Form to illustrate their close connection to their own animal natures.

Of course, dice adders are easy to overdo, so we try not to add too many new ones. Too many powers in the game that add extra things to rolls have the effect of bloating those rolls, which in turn bogs the game down with too many things to keep track of and too much time spent doing math. There are a lot of Storytellers who feel that the game has too many dice adders already, let alone adding new ones, and we think there's definitely some truth to that. But we honestly don't have a better mechanic for the Animal boons, which benefit from a very simple bonus and don't have anything else that more accurately describes what they do.

The important thing is to remember what your boons do, not just what mechanics model that. When you take on an Animal Aspect, you're not just paying Legend to get some extra dice; you're temporarily aligning yourself with some part of your totem animal, taking on its power and surrounding yourself with the aura of its symbolism. Don't just say, "Eh, I pop Animal Feature"; you're growing extra body parts, man, narrate that shit! The dice are what you're getting to make the power worthwhile, but they're not what's actually happening in the game itself. Don't forget to be awesome.

As with most dice adders, it's all about the stunting. Animal does have more adders than most other purviews, but that's because it has to try to model a concept that is harder to turn into a concrete effect than most others (and the fact that they're so close together at the high-Hero/low-Demigod level makes it seem even more rampant). Don't confuse what the purview is doing in terms of dice with what it's actually about; those boons are about cloaking yourself in your totem animal's powers and aspects, and that's the way they should be played.