The Course of True Love

Question: I don't know if you play DOTA, or even know of it, but Zeus is a character in it. In DOTA, he's fighting other, lesser creature, and since its a game they can fight back. The explanation for this is that Hera, sick of his sleeping around, turns him into a mortal (but he still has some power) until such time as he learns to be faithful. So, thoughts, opinions? Why or why not would this be able to happen? Personally, I thought that his brothers would get PISSED and stop her, but I don't know for sure.

Heh, we know the DOTA (Defense of the Ancients, for those who don't, a battle mod for online multiplayer in Warcraft III). We're old WC3 players ourselves, and now John is dancing around the room singing about it.

While the Lord of Heaven is totally awesome to have on a DOTA team, we wouldn't duplicate his circumstances in Scion for a few reasons. The most important one is that we feel strongly that there should not be powers in the game that can drop someone Legend permanently, no matter who's doing it or why. It would be horrendously overbalanced, being immediately the most powerful ability in the entire game (Death of the Soul is already bananas, and it can only do this to gods for a few ticks!), capable of instantly rendering any and every god or Scion murderable, controllable and comparatively helpless when dealing with foes of his former Legend or higher. When your Legend is taken away, you lose all your powers and innate abilities that are higher than that current Legend, representing not just an insane loss of XP but a massive and incontrovertible drop to where you are literally incapable of dealing with the people and problems you know anymore. The gods that had the power to drop others' Legend would outright rule the world with no competition except for one another, and everyone else would be at their depressing mercy.

It's a case where one of the golden rules of roleplaying comes into play: is this something that you would find absolutely horrible, unfair or grounds for immediately quitting the game if it happened to your character? If so, it should not be in the game at all, because if it is, at some point it might happen to the PCs. If you can't look your player in the eye and say, "Sorry, bud, you drop from Legend 10 to 4 permanently and lose all your powers," it probably shouldn't be an option for things that can happen to NPCs, either. On top of that, we don't think losing Legend dots from any agency other than your own actions makes much sense in Scion's setting; Legend isn't just your power stat but also represents your importance to the World and its religions, the strength of your renown and stories, and the general effect you have on the universe as a whole. Dropping your Legend means erasing your renown and power in mythology from the universe itself, and it runs counter to the entire idea of Legend as the measure of a god's existence.

That doesn't mean this scenario couldn't happen in Scion, though, just that we would probably operate it differently. Zeus can presumably drop his own Legend and stay lower-powered indefinitely if he has the Avatar Birthright, so the easiest assumption here is that he's the one keeping himself at a lower Legend rating. This is a marital spat, after all, and while the king and queen of Olympus don't have them very often, they're legendarily disruptive when they do; Hera might simply have kicked him out until he proved he could behave himself, and he's trying to do that to appease her. If that doesn't feel like enough to convince him to give up the comfy throne for a while (which is reasonable - he presumably has a lot to do, and while he's very fond of Hera he also sometimes gets pissed off rather than apologizing for his shenanigans), Hera could enforce his desire to do these things with some of her own powers. Demand a Labor would make it in Zeus' best interests to prove his love to his wife because it would be very difficult for him to get anything else done before he did, and it would be a simple thing for Hera to hit him with any number of unpleasant, crippling or painful Justice boons, refusing to grant him a Pardon until he earned it.

Of course, this would be a very bad idea while the gods are busy trying to fight a war against high-powered enemies, but love (and Virtues) sometimes makes people do crazy things. As for Hades and Poseidon, I could see them being peeved if Zeus being AWOL interferes with their own plans or makes the defense of Olympus more difficult, but as a generality I imagine they probably wouldn't care about whether or not Hera is inflicting marital vengeance on her husband. They don't have Loyalty and aren't really big on interfering in their brothers' affairs, so they'd be most likely to shake their heads and ignore it unless it started causing them personal problems. There's also a possibility that they'd get up to more shenanigans of their own than usual, too - with Zeus, the only dude in their pantheon who can really try to argue with them about anything, out of commission, now's the perfect time for power plays or vengeance gambits that might not normally be worth it.

I think Zeus' absence and the PCs' actions, either to help him succeed or try to get things done in his absence, could be a lot of fun as the foundation plot for a chronicle. You could call it "When Mama Ain't Happy."