It's not an oversight, just a different way of working with the aggravated damage system. Let's dive into it!
To start with, the Strength knacks that inflict aggravated damage - Divine Wrath for grappling, Disfiguring Attack for punching and Hurl to the Moon for throwing - are all available to a Scion from day one with no Legend restriction. Anyone of Legend 3 or above can use them with impunity (Scions of Legend 2 can also technically get them, but they aren't yet capable of paying the 5 Legend to use them), allowing them to start wrecking it up with agg early in their Hero careers. In contrast, Mortal Stroke is a level five boon, which means that no one has access to it until they're Legend 6, well established as Demigods. Unless your game is starting character creation at Legend 6 or higher, Mortal Stroke will never be a "replacement" for other methods of doing agg simply by virtue of being unavailable. That much higher Legend restriction is also one of the reasons it costs less, because Scions have to wait so long and invest in so much War to get it.
More importantly, however, it's a different kind of cost from the Strength knacks, which means that it raises different concerns. The fact that using Mortal Stroke requires an action makes it significantly slower to use in combat, as opposed to the Strength knacks which can all be reflexively activated every time a Scion hits her enemy and don't need a separate five ticks to arm beforehand. Depending on the length of the combat, the abilities of the enemies and what the Scions are trying to achieve, that five ticks (or ten or fifteen or twenty, depending on how many times a Scion needs to use the boon) may be the crucial deciding factor between different outcomes. Scions can get around this sometimes by using Mortal Stroke on a weapon before combat starts to have it ready, but this only saves the first five ticks, and still requires them to drop another action every time they want to re-agg their weapon. That's a pretty hefty restriction in comparison, which is why the Legend cost is so low.
Also, Mortal Stroke costs a point of Willpower, which is a different pool with different possibilities and consequences, which makes it more comparable to the cost of the knacks. While Willpower is easily refilled by Charisma knacks from helpful bandmates, it's a much smaller pool and needing people to refill it also ropes them into having to spend extra actions in combat, which may or may not torpedo other things they need to be doing. Other combat powers also use Willpower, putting it at more of a premium in those crunch situations when people may not have the time to refill it for you, and using large portions of your Willpower pool inevitably puts you at much higher risk of Virtue Extremity, which can rear its head at the worst possible times (especially in combat, when people, objects and environments are in danger of being damaged by the fallout and pissing off any number of Virtues).
| Pros | Cons | |
| Strength Knacks | Reflexive Available to all Legend levels | Legend-expensive Usable only by self |
| Mortal Stroke | Legend-cheap Usable on others as well as self | Requires an action to activate Willpower-expensive |
So this is all intended, actually. The two are meant to be balanced against one another, the abilities of those with great strength stacked up against those with the battle acumen to bolster themselves and allies so that both are valid ways of getting there but have different difficulties attached.
Man, I love mythological stuff as much as the next guy, but there is something about discussing rules and crunch that gets me much more excited.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, it's because i'm a rules lawyering powergamer. ^_^
We know you're out there. :)
DeleteI can see how it being so high up in the War tree makes it enough of a restriction, since on your rules you need to get the boons in order. To even get that high you must be pretty invested in War, at which point having this is a nice addition to your arsenal.
ReplyDeleteThe reason this seems so unbalanced on my table is because, while we use most of your rules, we allow picking boons from here and there at the expense of ending up with a low "purview level" (# of different-level purviews you have, used to break power ties or contested purview rolls) or a low "number of boons".
Since Mortal Stroke is dependent on neither, it became a 1-Boon wonder, one you could get to boost your damage to Agg levels at the expense of a diceless action (which is just a -2 to the attack roll if you use it to attack simultaneously). We have temporarily ruled an increased Legend cost of 3L+1W, and we'll see how it performs on the test runs (and maybe discount it to your version if you have all other War Boons before it, but no one is that invested in War, really).
Still, thank you very much for the clarification! I'm not going to ask you to balance a Boon based on rules you don't use, but if you have any suggestions we're all ears, you guys are the best at what you do :)
Ah, I see - yes, allowing cherry-picking does definitely change the balance structure. I would point out, however, that using Mortal Stroke at the same time as an attack won't make that attack agg, but rather set up your next one; the "make things agg" power is being used as an action at the same time as your attack, so it won't be in effect yet when you hit the enemy this time. It will be set for next time, though, so as long as you can keep churning through the Willpower cost and do that every time, after the first shot you can always have it up for the next.
DeleteI think an increased Legend cost is a sound fix for your dilemma. 3L + 1W sounds about right, or you could even just make it match the 5L knacks (with or without the +1W for weapon damage, depending on how big a factor you think that is in your game).
Yeah, if you're gonna let em buy it out of order....it should actually become more expensive then the strength knacks since you can use it on other peoples weapons as well. Or maybe 5L for your own weapon, but 5L +1W for other peoples weapons? Although really, if you arent buying them in order, the other peoples weapon thing really doesnt work I think.
DeleteIf you allow cherry picking then the boon certainly becomes more powerful, but the cost in the action economy is already pretty high. High enough that 3L + 1W is probably the most balanced option you will get.
DeleteI always found aggravated to be really strange. It is overpowered in the sense that it can one shot almost anyone who does not use DDC, SS, or SWB.
DeleteBut because it is so overwhelming, both parties tend to just pay their 5L tax (one to do the agg, and one to DDC the agg) and continue on their way.
Alternatively, storytellers just add a bunch of extra health levels or soak to their NPCs, which amounts to the same thing.