True Colors

Question: If mantis shrimp have 16 color-receptive cones, how the hell do you describe scenes to people with all the Epic Perception?

Storytellers have a hard job. Not only do they have to manage writing a compelling and adventurous story, guiding their players through it and challenging them meaningfully along the way, they also have to play every NPC, stat every monster, keep a running summary of their PCs' abilities in their heads and be in charge of setting each and every scene so that there's a believable and vibrant world for players to do things in. This is a Herculean effort, so if you haven't hugged your Storyteller today, go do it now!

Mental characters are always among the hardest to manage, both for the people playing them and the Storytellers trying to give them appropriate input. While we more often hear people trying to work through the other two mentals, trying to grasp how to play someone who is light years more intelligent than themselves or thinks so fast that they should have figured out what they were doing in this scene yesterday instead of right now at the table while everyone is staring at them, Perception is not any easier, especially because it requires both the player and the Storyteller to have their shit jointly together.

We'll just get the obvious out of the way: you can't accurately describe to a player what a scene looks like with Epic Perception (especially once you get to 5+ dots of it). It's literally impossible, because not only are they able to perceive a zillion different things you'd never think to mention, they can also perceive things you actually can't conceive of, because they're impossible for any human to perceive even with the help of powerful telescopes/microscopes/chemicals and so on. Human perceptions are very limited, even compared to those of other animals; the mantis shrip is a great examples because it can see colors we literally can't imagine and will never see, while the nose of a bloodhound which can smell events and creatures months back is another example, or the sensitive ears of a bat picking up echoes of incredibly high-frequency and quiet noises it made minutes ago. Those are normal, mortal animals, technically nothing "special"; a Scion with Epic Perception, then, is by definition so insanely perceptive that you have no prayer of actually telling them what they're seeing.

This isn't a new problem for Scion, or for any other roleplaying game, for that matter. It's always challenging to play someone with capabilities you don't personally have; while we can imagine what being strong might be like (because we know things like how much strong people can lift and we've seen movies in which strong people do things), we can't conceive of what being smarter would be like, because we don't have the mental capacity to know that or we would be smarter. We don't know what extra senses feel like or what it's like to have them because we don't and can't have them, and we have to make a sort of sad, shambling approximation of it as we go along. That sucks, of course, but it's one of the pitfalls of roleplaying; if you're going to pretend to be something you're not, you're automatically not going to be able to fully represent everything that you don't have experience or ability with in real life.

But don't despair, Storytellers! The fact that you can't technically succeed doesn't mean you can't find ways to make players feel like you succeed, which is all us poor mortals who don't have mantis shrimp eyes and cobra reflexes and Dr. Manhattan's brain can do.

First of all, know what's important in your scene and describe it for everyone. Do your usual scene-setting of where the buildings are, who's around, what important things are immediately obvious to everybody, and so on. That's all information that the entire band should have, and it's also information the Perception users among them will also know. Then, move on to whether or not there's anything important that the high-Perception Scion might be able to sense that the rest of the band can't, and let her know about it (if several people have different levels of Epic Perception and you're not sure who should know what, now's a perfect time for a Perception + Awareness/Empathy/Survival roll to get you a hierarchy of who's noticing what). If there is, she'll be armed and ready to proceed thanks to her awesome talents, and if there's not, there's no need to spend ten minutes trying to describe every detail you can think of just because she can technically see it. While she might be excited about her incredible scope of perception the first few times she does that, she's not going to care anymore after the novelty wears off, and the rest of your players are going to be very bored if you launch into a fifteen-minute soliloquy on the local scent index every time they go somewhere. I promise, if there's nothing important that her extra senses are telling her, odds are she doesn't care.

That doesn't mean you should ignore the fact that your PC has a ton of Epic Perception unless it's getting him something, however; it just means that you need to know when to pick your battles. Just as you don't leap in to say, "Remember, that's light as a feather!" every single time someone with Epic Strength picks something up, you also don't need to say, "Remember, you can see six miles in every direction!" every time your Epic Perception character goes somewhere. They know that. Instead, bring it up when there's an appropriate moment; for example, if your characters are confronted by an incredibly complex and splendiferous work of divine art, that might be a good moment to let the Epic Perception people know that they can see details they'd never have comprehended before, or if very loud noises occur, remind them that that wasn't just normal crack-of-thunder-loud, it was more like crack-their-heads-open loud. Also remember that, while Epic Perception is crazy useful, it has drawbacks like everything else; we're particularly fond of imposing a -4 dice distraction penalty on Scions without Meditative Focus if they're somewhere very noisy, surrounded by a lot of people or otherwise in the middle of bedlam. It's hard enough for normal people to concentrate in the middle of a busy marketplace, but imagine the difficulty if you were also simultaneously hearing every marketplace in the tri-state area. Another thing we like to do when a Scion gains a new dot of Epic Perception is take a moment to remind them that they are even more perceptively crazy than they were before, in as much lurid detail as possible. One of our group's all-time favorite such moments was when Goze, thanks to his usual Fate-meddling shenanigans, accidentally developed seven dots of Epic Perception over a very short period of time. John's description started something like, "Okay, you can see, hear and smell with perfect clarity for almost three hundred miles in every direction. You can hear every conversation in that radius in a stream of unending babble. Every couple having sex within that radius is as if they were having sex right in front of you. You can smell with perfect clarity every living thing that has taken a shit within that area. It's in your mouth."

The second most important thing you need to do is to always be ready for your players' questions. Players who buy powers are going to use them - not a big surprise - and Epic Perception is no exception to that, so they can and will probably ask you whether or not they can do such and such or sense so and so. Those requests are going to fall into three basic categories: contested rolls ("Make a Perception + Ability roll against [person hiding something/crafting something/difficulty you determine for this particular situation]!"), knack-related refusals ("No, but if you had [Perception knack that does that] you'd be able to check right now!"), and easy yeses ("Sure! I didn't think to mention it, but yes, you can sense blah blah blah in the area!"), which should be anything not covered by the first two. This means you're going to have to be able to come up with difficulties and estimations of your players' Epic Perception capabilities somewhat on the fly; if a player wants to know if she can identify the factory a banana came from by scent, you'll have to decide whether or not she has enough Epic Perception for that, whether or not she should roll to make the attempt and what the difficulty on that roll should be. We'd love to have convenient tables for all the possibilities the way we do for distance, but unfortunately there are too many possible ways a Scion might want to use her Epic Perception, from tracking things to their sources to separating distinct smells to listening for a particular voice in a throng of speakers to differentiating between pieces of cloth by touch. We can't cover every eventuality, so, like everyone else, we've got to be ready to handle it when it comes up in a game. If there are situations you know come up often, or it helps you to do so, by all means sit down and make some tables, but be aware that you'll always have to be on your toes anyway. Your players are going to want to do things not on your tables. It's the nature of players.

Incidentally, for those things that do have tables (distance, and we've been talking a bit lately about adding microscopy as a chart as well; I'm sure some Storytellers have others), it never hurts to remind your players how special they are by doing a little quick math about how far they can see and what that means. Even though everyone knew that she had more Perception than anyone else in the game, it never failed to impress the group to remember that Aurora could see an entire hemisphere at once and hear halfway to the moon, and players of high-Perception characters can always use that little bit of love since they're not doing a lot of obvious things like lifting mountains and their skills can thus be more easily forgotten.

Finally, remember that, just like every other Epic Attribute, just having a bunch of it isn't an instant-win button for the Scion, so you are allowed to tell them they can't do or notice something if you have a good reason. If there are obstacles in their way, if there are powers arrayed against them that block their senses, if they need a particular knack to justify what they're trying to do, if they can see something but aren't in a position to understand exactly what they're seeing, or if they just have a different idea than you do about what their Perception means, you can always give them partial information or even tell them they just can't pull that off as they are right now. Passive Epic Perception is great, but sometimes characters have to use powers or go out of their way to investigate things, even if they're excellent, and the enemies and dangers of the divine world that work against them may be just as good at hiding as they are at seeing. Don't be afraid for an Epic Attribute to sometimes not immediately work the way the Scion wants it to; that's par for the course in any game, any story and any myth.

But when it comes to describing scenes, don't get too worried about trying to invent a bunch of new colors or bog yourself down in the details of what's being said in every diner in Minneapolis right now. Keep it simple and focused on being as vivid and interesting in your basic description as possible, describe what things are important or intriguing that they should notice off the bat, make sure you include flavor when and where it enhances the story and reminds everyone of the perceptive Scion's awesomeness, and know that if they want to try to perceive something more, odds are they're going to ask you about it.

You don't have to figure out how to describe what a mantis shrimp sees, is what I'm getting at, because your player wouldn't be able to understand that description even if you could. Work with the senses you've got, and as long as you can preserve that awe-inspiring flavor of incredible perception, you don't need a lot of specifics that aren't adding to anything.

Just Want You Guys To Know: John totally failed to write his blog post today, so I had to do two. Calling him out!