Question: I get that a Scion of Bast does not get an XP break to Animal (Koala Bear) by your rules. Does a Scion of Aphrodite get an XP break to negative Epic Appearance? Also, is it possible for a Scion to be positively Fatebound to one side of Appearance and negatively Fatebound to the other?
This is an area where I think I've seen some confusion floating around in the comments, too, so I'm glad you asked! While Animal is specifically tied to a totem beast, it is the only power in the game that requires specialization that way. Epic Appearance, which is at its base the stat that determines how awesome, crazy and inhuman you look, can be messed around with by Scions but is a single stat that is affected singly by Fatebonds.
So yes, anyone whose parent has Epic Appearance associated gets an XP discount to buying Epic Appearance, regardless of which kind they pick up. Aphrodite's children can be uggo-monsters if they want to, while Kali's kids can be as gracefully beautiful as the morning dew. (There are, however, always those non-mechanical pitfalls to be aware of; Hephaestus getting thrown off Olympus at birth by his disgusted mother is a cautionary tale for those who play against their parent's favored Appearance.)
Because Epic Appearance isn't really two kinds of stats the way two separate Animal purviews would be, it's too much of a headache to try to track positive versus negative versus neutral for XP and Fatebonds, so we don't do it. We started out with it early on, but if mortals who believe a Scion has Appearance are normally counteracted by those who believe he doesn't, then you have a mess if you add a further layer of two different kinds of Appearance that are unfairly detracting from one another in a way that doesn't happen to other stats. If you're Fatebound to have Appearance, you get Appearance and Epic Appearance bought for you, period, regardless of whether the mortals believe in your hideousness or your flawlessness or different ones believe in both. What they really believe is that you Look Really Impressive, so they buy dots accordingly.
We do keep a couple of nods to the different Appearance specializations in the Fatebond system, mostly to reflect the power of the mortals involved. If you're currently rocking beautiful Epic Appearance and mortals who believe you're terrifying buy you a new dot of it, your Appearance immediately reverts to the scary side of the scale as their beliefs affect you; if you want to go back to being pretty, you'll need to have the appropriate knacks to exert your powers to overcome Fate's preference. This can lead to some wacky swapping if more than one mortal believes you have different specializations, and we have had characters who flipped from beautiful to ugly and back on the whim of Fate, much to the distress of their comrades and mortal onlookers. Also, if you have a Fatebond to a specific kind of Appearance and you have all the dots they can buy you at that time, they won't buy you knacks of the opposite speciality; if you have a positive Appearance Fatebond and they need to buy a knack, they'll never choose the Aura of Dread tree, while if you have a negative Appearance Fatebond they'll refuse to embark on the Doin' Fine set of powers.
We've lowered the number of knacks that are tied to one or the other - lots of them are able to be used regardless of your kind of impressiveness - but there are still a few out there. Appearance is a stat we think is absolutely necessary for Scion, in which so many gods have it as such an important and defining characteristic of their legends, but it is still a little bit weird when compared to the other Attributes that don't have a built-in revolving door. Our goal is usually to make it up to the character to decide what they look like and what powers they purchase to control that, and to let Fate's chips, as usual, fall where they will.
Just Want You Guys to Know: John is the worst blogger in the history of the world.
Why don't you restrict some other purviews the way you do Animal? Water and Fertility seem like the biggest culprit.
ReplyDeleteFertility I get (and Anne gas already tackled that here: http://johnsscionresources.blogspot.in/2012/11/god-of-greens.html ), but how would you restrict Water?
DeleteMostly because there's no reason to - Animal's restricted to totems because that's the way it appears in most myths, but Water doesn't have the same issue (sure, a few gods specialize in salt or in fresh, but that's about all I can think of and there are plenty who do both at will). We're not restricting Animal to be contrary, just because it makes sense for it to be based on specific totems in a way that others don't. There are staggeringly more totemic animal gods than nonspecific ones, but the reverse is true for other pantheons.
DeleteWe've talked about Fertility totems in this old post over here, if you're interested in more detail there. :)
Man, sniped by Samudra!
DeleteMan, and "pantheons" should have said "purviews" in that comment. I need to go home, I'm clearly drunk.
DeleteYou would restrict water by location. Sobek was not the god of the pacific ocean, and He-Bo was not the god of the arctic sea for example. The individual bodies of water tend to have different mythical significance, and very few gods are shown to control water in other regions, unless their territories directly overlap with one another.
DeleteSo you would divide it up like Water(Nile), and Water(Mediterranean), and Water(North Sea), for example.
Doesn't work for the majority of gods, though. Some are specific bodies of water - Poseidon for the Mediterranean, for example - but many gods are just "the ocean" or "rivers in general" or "water in general, including lakes and rivers and so on". It's a much less homogenous group of gods than the animal-totem folks; I can count non-totem animal gods on the fingers of one hand, but there are many more water gods who are not nearly as specialized. It wouldn't make sense to shoehorn a bunch of general water gods (like Anahita, Njord, Susano-o, Manannan mac Lir or Chalchiuhtlicue, just for starters) into specializations they don't really have.
DeleteAs we talked about in the Fertility post, it's something that doesn't benefit mechanically from specializing and also doesn't make sense mythically. So Animal remains singular for us; other purviews don't have the same specialization need. (Although I could see maybe some custom boons that give specialization bonuses, a la Health's Hippocratic Oath?)
Questioner here. Thanks for this; this question has been bugging me for a while now :)
ReplyDeleteNo sweat!
Delete