Question: I was looking at Winona Nelson's character sheet and noticed she had level 2 Death at Legend 2. Is that a houserule/ because I don't see it listed on the houserules section? Thank you for you time.
Yeah, it is, but it's not in the house rules section because we're not sure we like it and may not be keeping it.
The still-unnamed Saturday game that stars Winona and her cronies is also something of an experimental proving ground for new rules and ideas; we throw stuff at them and see what sticks, and then either keep it and add it to the house rules or throw it away and never speak of it again. This particular rule is one of those.
The experimental rule was that, if you were creating a new PC at Legend 2, you could get second-level boons at character creation if you so chose. They would remain inactive and unusable until you achieved Legend 3, but you'd still have them ahead of time and would automatically get them as soon as you were powerful enough. The idea behind it was to allow Scions who wanted to specialize into a purview more to do so by "laying in" boons for the future if they wanted to, and to give Scions with purviews with only one first-level option something else to spend their character creation points on besides more abilities.
But now that we've tried it out, we're not sure we like it very much. It doesn't seem to be doing a whole lot for the game; sure, it's nice to just suddenly develop Euthanasia without spending XP as soon as you grow in power, but it may be solving a problem that isn't actually all that much of a problem at all, and in the meantime it encourages players to put things on their character sheets they can't use and neglect getting things that they can, which is not very exciting and definitely not helping them survive to even make it to that Legend 3 bump.
So we may or may not be keeping that rule for the next round of character creation (whenever that is), but you may still see a few characters floating around with a second-level boon for now who were created while we were testing it out. Incidentally, Winona is now Legend 3 and totally entitled to her Euthanasia, but she wasn't when you sent this question in, so the confusion is totally understandable.
You might try letting them actually use the boons even though they are legend 2. We do something similar in our games and it works pretty well.
ReplyDeleteNaw, we're not going to do that. If we wanted them to be able to do it at Legend 2, we'd just have made it a level 1 boon.
DeleteNo skin off our noses if it works for you guys, though. :)
yeah, i dont see any difference between letting them use the boons, and them actually just being legend 3.
DeleteThat seems like a weird rule, but I mean I guess if it's an experimental game...?
ReplyDeleteI guess it kind of assumes you're going to jump from Legend 2 to Legend 3 in like two weeks, or a period of time quick enough where it doesn't even really make a difference whether you buy it right away or not.
We mostly did it because so many starting characters looked exactly alike, with 7-9 epics and 3-1 purviews. I think Anne and John force characters to start with a certain amount of epics and a certain amount of purviews.
DeleteThat's true, our PCs start with a max of 5 Epics, so there's more spread.
DeleteIt has do do with starting character vs xp and forcing pcs to pick up more purviews then they might want. So, although we force everyone to buy 5 points of boons, perhaps the character only wants 2 purviews. It allows them to not have to pick up purviews that dont fit, and instead spread their choices out into future purchases. It doesnt have anything to do with how fast or slow they'd go up in legend.
DeleteI disagree on characters looking exactly alike. There are 23 purviews. Unless you have 10 or more players (possible, if difficult) you have a lot of room to move around. And if everybody has the same Epic Attributes, that still doesn't mean everybody's going to focus their natural Attributes in that specific area. I don't force my players to have a "max" of "X" attributes vs. X boons. But nobody (I know) is going to get ALL the Attributes or ALL the Boons. It's just not reasonable.
ReplyDeleteI like it because it allows for well-rounded characters to start with, with their own unique abilities, and they can build on those unique abilities with time and experience.
I've recently started running a side game (Vanguard of Heaven, the Ancient Japan-based setting Anne came up with) where the characters started at Legend 4, and my friend was taken aback by the sudden ability to purchase so many boons and attributes and specialize at character creation. It was a pretty new thing for us when we were so used to rounded characters!
this is probably too old for anyone to be reading at this point, but Im probably keeping the starting with level 2 boons thing. This is actually the second game ive used it in, and I kept it because i liked how well it worked in the first game.
ReplyDelete