Question: How would you handle a God of Love character? I mean, there is no power in the book that would make one NPC fall in love with someone else that is not you, except for relics, is there?
Indeed, there is not. While you could certainly probably come up with a bunch of custom relic powers to facilitate matchmaking (and we suspect that this is probably what the writers of Scion were banking on, especially with the example of Eros' arrows to guide them), there is no direct set of powers associated with making people love one another in the books. Or at least, not in terms that black and white.
At the moment, gods who embody love do most of their mojo-ing with their Epic Social Attributes, which is not a perfect solution but which is also what we've got with the current setup. While there's no knack that says, "point at two people, they fall in love", making two people fall in love is not difficult for someone with tons of Manipulation; not only is a god with that stat a master at the arts of suggestion, innuendo and subtle encouragement, making it easy to convince both people of the other's great traits and trivial to weave an enticing air of alluring mystery around them, but he has access to many knacks that can be twisted to bump people toward one another as well. The powers most easily turned toward this sort of purpose include Implant False Memory (to add memories of the other person's past kindnesses or erase memories of their bad actions) and its close cousin Total Recall, Instant Hypnosis (to put people in the frame of mind to respond to romantic overtures even if they might normally have ignored them) and Advantageous Circumstances, which makes it child's play to see to it that a couple at least gets together and hangs out as long as you're monitoring the situation. Those aren't the only Manipulation knacks that facilitate matchmaking, though some of the others may take a little more creativity, and there are a few useful tricks in the Charisma and Appearance trees as well (a little Perfect Actor and suddenly everybody in the area is feeling in the mood for love!). Then you've got your standard emotion-massaging powers scattered around a few other purviews, with Chaos' Impassion being the most obvious for this kind of thing.
Past that point, a lot depends on what you want your god or goddess of love to be, exactly. Overseeing a concept like "love" can mean a lot of different things, as various different gods associated with it can attest - for example, Aphrodite's emphasis on sexual love is not the same as Isis' emphasis on motherly love is not the same as Wadd's emphasis on platonic love is not the same as Hera's emphasis on monogamous love, and so on and so forth. Different love-related god concepts will lend themselves to different auxiliary powers and specialties to flesh them out, and what works for one may be irrelevant for another. You sound like you're suggesting a god who wants to be instrumental in setting up romantic love affairs, and if that's the case, the power above plus some relic boosters (I would suggest a custom relic, possibly not accessible until late Demigod, that allows you to use your Engender Love knack on behalf of others) will be close to your best fit in the current rules.
A lot of Storytellers for Scion house-rule some kind of Love or Emotion purview in order to give love gods a more concrete set of powers; it's something that we've considered ourselves, although we haven't gone as far as to try writing one yet. On the one hand, it kind of sucks for love gods, which are a fairly widespread phenomenon, to not have a purview representing their major area of influence; on the other hand, there are fiddly questions of whether or not Love is the same kind of cosmic idea as the other purviews and belongs with them, whether or not love-related powers should just be some new custom knacks, and even whether there are enough possible powers for a Love purview to even be viable. If you're interested in a custom set of powers and your Storyteller's down with it, there are more than a few fan-created purviews floating around the interwebs that you might want to check out, or else you might want to explore writing your own. We're probably not going to be working on one any time soon, but it is in our Hazy Future Possibilities bin; someday we'll probably give it a good hard look, though I can't promise we'll end up deciding we want to go for it. (Plus, if we wrote a Love purview now, Geoff's player would just whine forever about how he had to spend all his XP on it.)
Love gods are one of the more interesting archetypes for new Scions to play, I think; there are a lot of weird questions of emotion and morality surrounding the role for children who have grown up in modern societies that have very different ideas of what love, relationships and free will mean than did their ancient forefathers. Questions of whether it's morally right to force people to fall in love or keep them apart, of what love means to different people and whether or not a god should dictate that for them, of what kinds of relationships are acceptable expressions of love and even of whether or not everyone needs or wants love in their lives are all issues that probably plague budding love gods substantially more than they did the deities of ancient times.
Out of all of the knacks, Engender Love always seemed the most morally dubious to me, because of the reasons mentioned in the final paragraph.
ReplyDeleteYeah, what a person does with social powers - which can force people to do things "of their own free will" but are still a method of forcing in the end - is almost always a moral question, and it's interesting to watch it play out in different characters. Some are conflicted about the moral quandaries involved, some gloss over them or fail to see the issues, and some actively take advantage of their powers at the expense of others. It's all about the kind of character being played.
DeleteScion makes things very nebulous in general, because there is a definite roll vs W+I+L going on. The second your character starts talking and rolls those dice, the result is going to be "against free will" if you win.
DeleteEven if it is just convincing people to go to your favorite restaurant instead of theirs.
For basic, passive social skills, yes; you have a bunch of Epic Charisma, they want to go where you want as a baseline, and so on for the other socials, too. When you actively spend resources to use a power, however, that's when you have to start questioning what you're doing, what it means and where you stand on moral issues.
DeleteUnless you're of the school of players that believe all powers are automatic and instinctive, so you don't intentionally use them, sometimes your powers just activate on their own. That's always struck me as a cop-out, however; if you're aware enough of your powers to intentionally breathe fire, you should be aware enough to know when you're intentionally using something like Engender Love. (Also, there are weird mechanical considerations there - like, if things "just happen", should the ST be forcing you to use them sometimes in automatic reaction even if you wouldn't have planned to? It's a weird game model.)
My storyteller makes things "just happen" every now and then, and there are terrible consequences and much hilarity. Including burping a Dragon's Breath.
DeleteIt's usually never more than a 20/80 or 10/90 split between subconscious and conscious decision on the part of the character, though.
Heh, that sounds like fun. An ST doing that sort of thing behind the scenes is much more palatable than a player doing it to avoid having to take responsibility for actions.
DeleteDoes s/he have you spend for it even if you weren't intending to use it? The only problem I could see with such a system is that players who weren't expecting a game in which their resources randomly diminish might be put off. (If they know that going in and are cool, though, no sweat.)