Question: With respect to the Fire 5 boon "Dragon's Breath", I am a little confused as to the system. The to-hit roll is Wits + Survival. The resist seems to be a Dexterity + Athletics (is that if the victims have not taken an action yet? or does the Dexterity + Athletics dodge count as an action? or is it a free reflexive?). Then, damage seems to be calculated on the basis of attacker's Stamina (including Epic successes, presumably) + 5 + threshold. Is the Stamina + 5 + threshold successes a roll, or is automatic damage? And since it produces a cone of fire, can you hit multiple people with a single attack? How wide is the cone?
Sure, let's break Dragon's Breath down. You're right; if you use it to attack someone (which most people do), you roll your Wits + Survival as the attack roll. The boon isn't "resisted", but rather avoided like other area of effect attacks (Perun's Apples over in Sky, for example, or Shockwave in Strength) by the target attempting to dive out of the way. This is an automatic and reflexive roll; Scion doesn't require "readied actions" or dedicated guarding to attempt to avoid being hit, and this roll is just as automatic as a target's DV is against normal attacks.
As the boon says, it does "lethal damage equal to his Stamina roll plus 5, added to his threshold successes". This does indeed mean it is rolled, not static (static would be bananas!). The five, incidentally, is just the basic damage that fire usually does, while the Stamina represents your divine firepower and the threshold successes how dead-on you managed to incinerate your unfortunate victim.
As for the cone, yes, you can hit multiple people at once, especially if they're nice enough to be hanging out in a clump. The boon has a range of your Fire boons in feet at its farthest point; we didn't map out how far the cone itself extends on either side because that involves mathiness that most people don't care about, so in most cases it's easiest for the Storyteller to rule on it based on cinematic awesomeness and what makes sense for the scene. But if you absolutely insist on figuring out the exact size of the fire's cone, you'll need to know both its length and its angle. Length's built into the boon - it's your Fire boons in feet - and we use ninety degrees as the easiest cone angle (hold the corner of anything square up to your mouth and you'll get an idea of the shape).
There's a lot more trigonometric math involving tangents and cosine you can wander off into now, but if you want to cheat, use this cone calculator instead. Plug in your Fire boons under "perp height" and 90 under "S angle", then double the "base radius" and presto, you will have a number with unnecessary decimal values.
But seriously, nobody wants to stop at the table to do trigonometry or argue about the exact angle at which the flame issues from your mouth, so don't bog the game down with all that unless you happen to be an entire group of mathematicians who enjoy breaking out the modeling clay. Most of the time, there's no need to figure out the cone's exact width if your Storyteller is paying attention and narrating well, and if that's the case, abide by his or her ruling. If you can decide as a group on a particular angle you like (we don't recommend anything wider than 90, because that stops being a cone and starts being a wall, but you could go narrower), feel free to make up a table for easy reference, but if you're not using hexes and exact battlefield positioning, more often than not that won't be that useful anyway.
Scion's about wrecking a lot of stuff, but this is a case where breaking out a bunch of extra math to determine the exact parameters of said wreckage is hindering the game instead of helping it. Make it awesome, make it stunted, and make it within your Storyteller's guidelines, and you should be just fine.
Why is there an automatic roll to get out of the way in the first place? Getting out of the way is what Dodge DV means. That's it's literal function. You can just put a line in there about not being able to use your Parry DV.
ReplyDeleteBecause it's not the same kind of dodging as DV. DV represents normal combat avoidance; you're dodging, sidestepping, ducking, whatever. But when someone is nuking the entire twenty yards around you, it's not possible to just dodge as normal - you have to get the fuck out of the entire area, which is significantly more active than just having good reflexes when someone throws a punch at you. So for those times, we require the victim to actually roll to escape, since they're being forced to dive out of a giant effect instead of just dodging as normal.
DeleteIt's actually better for the person being aimed at, because they can juice that Dex + Ath roll with deeds, channels, dice bonuses or whatever else, whereas DV can't be buffed on the fly that way. It helps even the playing field a bit since boon attacks are so egregiously powerful when the person using them is good at their job.
What you're describing is almost exactly a combination of Dodge DV and the reflexive move action you get every tick. You literally dodge out of the way by moving out of the area of effect.
DeleteI guess the better question to ask is why you added an extra mechanic to this power when perfectly good mechanics already exist? Do you think dragon's breath is so powerful that dexterity characters need a higher chance of avoiding the damage?
No, what I'm describing is an alternative mechanic for dodging certain kinds of attacks. :) We wouldn't use it for all attacks (in fact, we use it for very few) because DV is much simpler and better suited to the task most of the time, but it's perfect for large area attack situations. Obviously we didn't think DV was sufficient, or we'd have just used that.
DeleteRelying on the Move mechanic assumes that all Scions can move the same distance, but since it's a derived value based on their Dexterity, there's wide variation from Scion to Scion. Just like DV, it's a static, derived value, and it's a pain in the ass to boot because suddenly everyone has to break out the hexmap and make sure they know exactly where everyone is and how many yards are between various combatants. (Not that there's anything wrong with playing combat that way if you enjoy it - we do it once in a while, particularly for very large battles - but it shouldn't be a requirement for everyone playing the game.) Scion's combat needs to be more cinematic and less fiddly - it's already messy enough.
And... yes? That's what I just said above, where I mentioned leveling the playing field. Dragon's Breath is heinously powerful because of its ability to hit multiple targets on the field at once with no limit on targets, penalty to attack or lessening of damage (not to mention its cheap addition of aggravated damage once a Scion has Baelfyr). That's one of the major reasons it and Perun's Apples, the other major aggravated area-nuke, use a rolled dodge mechanic instead of simply aiming at DV. For something that powerful and dangerous, not only does allowing a dive for safety make more sense than the usual method of dodging, it also gives the targets more of a fighting chance than a static value they couldn't do anything to buff would.
Plus, DV doesn't use most Athletics bonuses in the game, and this is a situation where folks with And the Crowd Goes Wild, Arete (Athletics) or Animal Feature should really get the benefit of those skills while trying to escape the fryer.
Can you parry Dragon's Breath? Basically put a giant shield between yourself and the breath like an iconic dragon slayer might do to protect himself from a fire breathing dragon?
ReplyDeleteParry as in using your DV or just hiding behind a shield, no... but we've allowed awesome stunting to get around it before. We've had players either take the blast to protect other players (provided they're large enough to completely shield the other person - usually works best for those who have Jotunblut) or perform creative stunts using their environment like leaping behind a semi truck or whatever else is around. It won't work more than once or twice, probably, since whatever you hide behind that isn't a relic is going to get melted or toasted into oblivion, but if it's clever or badass, we're inclined to allow it.
DeleteIncidentally, what effect does using a mundane shield have in combat? The RAW rules say it gives +1DV - but is there a downside, similar to the mobility penalty for armor? Otherwise it just seems like everyone should be using shields all the time.
ReplyDeleteI personally think shields seem more like they belong with parry, being that you're not actually avoiding the hit, but rather deflecting it. Also, would you rule that if it isn't a relic shield, it's gonna get broken over time with regular supernatural wear & tear? Probably fairly easily, actually...given the amount of shenanigans Scions find coming their way.
You can make the same ruling about armor, which is not designed to take endless blows. You can even make the same ruling about melee weapons which would not last long impacting the kind of relic armors and supernatural hides that show up in Scion.
DeleteThis might force everyone to use relic weapons and armor, which is not necessarily a bad idea.
But then you have the issue of marksmanship and thrown, which does not have as many problems with wear and tear and throws the whole idea out of whack.
Makes sense though, doesn't it? Mundane armor definitely has its limits. I think all mundane items/weapons/armors/etc. should. In fact, this is implied by knacks like Titanic Tools, which exist for reasons just like this.
DeleteThrown and marksmanship have their own issues, such as ammo. And especially with marksmanship, guns don't like water, so getting thrown in the drink is going to make your gun useless pretty fast.
As for forcing people to take relic weapons and such, I think the combat folks who are into that jazz are going to be taking them anyway. It isn't going to matter to non-combat PCs because they've probably already accepted they're gonna have to find more clever ways to participate in those fights, or just avoid them entirely.