Question: Speak Hu seems a little one-sided. As PSPs are something that everyone is supposed to have access to (and I suppose technically everyone does when it comes to knacks), shouldn't it be a little more universal? With it being limited to only using the Manipulation/Overt Order tree, it doesn't feel like it's truly something the entire pantheon can utilize. Would it not be more appropriate to allow players to use Charisma/Manipulation + appropriate ability to influence stubborn items?
No, but I think I see where you're coming from. Here's what's up with Speak Hu.
Firstly, we definitely don't want to expand the knack to be just "use your social stats on objects", because that's both way too enormously vague and difficult for Storytellers and way too overpowered. Speak Hu is a boon that already causes some games difficulty with being overpowered in its current form (there's a bunch of discussion of it back here if you missed it!); removing the restriction of actually using powers would make it much too broad and all-encompassing, especially for a level one boon (PSP though it may be). We also really want to preserve the flavor of using your actual powers and commands on objects in the world around you; Speak Hu is about harnessing the Egyptian ability to speak the words of power and creation and command those things that remember them to respond, and we'd like some actual words of power and creation to be happening instead of just, you know, conversations. Also, Speak Hu is already kind of problematically close to getting into Tsukumo-gami's space, and allowing general social stat usage on items would pretty much make all the Japanese Scions give up and go home.
However, there's good news, and that's that Speak Hu is in no way limited to the Overt Order knack tree in Manipulation! I can see where you might have gotten that impression - after all, saying, "Door, open the hell up" with Overt Order is certainly an effective and straightforward way to get things done, plus the boon uses Overt Order as an example - but that's far from the only thing that a Scion with Speak Hu can do. Speak Hu can be applied to any social knack from any of the three social Attributes, and that means it has a great deal of flexibility and breadth for different Scions to use in different ways.
Persuasion, for example, has always been popular in our games; knacks like God's Honest or Benefit of the Doubt have been successfully used to convince a fuse that its lever was actually in the off position, causing it to kill all the lights in the building to correct the "mistake", or to cajole a security lock into believing that the incorrect code just entered was actually the right one. A Scion with lots of Charisma might be able to Filibuster so that objects that would normally leave the area - like a baby carriage hurtling down a hill - instead turn to stay near him and listen, or cause every recording device within his range to suddenly start recording his words with a quick use of Attention Please. A Scion who prefers the manipulative arts might be able to use Not the Face to avoid an inanimate object that was about to roll into her, Total Recall to ensure that a videotape can never have a critical moment recorded over, or Obliteration to make herself completely immune to being recorded by any device. Even the Appearance folks can do neat things with Speak Hu, from using Aura of Dread to plow through a normally movement-penalty-inducing junkyard with nary an issue to instantly blacking out cameras and recorders with Blinding Visage to using Inescapable Vision to cause some seriously hilarious results on any security footage.
Of course, not every knack from any of those Attributes is useful with Speak Hu; not much point in giving a rock bonus Willpower or spreading a rumor to a bicycle stand. But there's a wide variety of options nonetheless, and Scions only have to get creative to try to take advantage of them.
Speak Hu is a Storyteller-intensive boon where a lot depends on their rulings on what does and doesn't happen to an object, so it's also a factor in how well the boon works. If your Storyteller doesn't allow anything but Overt Order, well, yeah, that seriously sucks and wasn't our intention, and the boon probably is deeply limited compared to other PSPs. But it never hurts to try a cool move - especially if it's couched in an awesome stunt and saves the day - so keep trying to be creative, and if the ST isn't having it, maybe sit down with him or her so you can discuss how Speak Hu works and what kinds of things they think you should be doing with it, so you know in no uncertain terms what you can and can't get up to. If you're the Storyteller, it might be useful for you to go through the social knacks and make a list of which ones you think are reasonable powers to use with Speak Hu, which will allow you to be ready for them when they happen in a game and also help encourage or offer suggestions to your players if they're stumped. But also stay on your toes, because no matter how great your list is, a player is probably going to do something you didn't think of at some point; just keep a cool head, decide whether it works and what it does when it happens, and don't panic ahead of time.
So go out there and command creation and have fun, you guys.
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