ULTIMATE POWER

Question: Taking your advice in the Army of the Lesser post, could you give us an outline of what you plan to do about the Avatars/Ultimates system?

I love the competitiveness. Voting wars are awesome!

Avatars and Ultimates have been something we've been jonesing to do for quite a while now, and not just because some of our PCs will probably be Legend 12 in the not-too-distant future (although I hope not today, guys, we are not ready for you yet). Their use in the books combines an awesometastic idea - ultimate power, expressed however the player wants, and the reins of the storytelling itself passed over to them for a few shining moments! - with abysmal mechanics, or lack of mechanics, that don't actually give any guidelines or aid to either player or Storyteller. We want Avatars and Ultimates to be the badasses they were always meant to be.

As usual, project outlines are vague things at this stage, but a few things we plan to mess around with include:

• Nomenclature. We know why Scion calls four different concepts "avatar"... but shit's ridiculous. We'll probably change what these are called to try to cause fewer conversational trainwrecks.
• Permanent Effects. While Ultimates and Avatars are the final powers purchased at the end of the boon/epic trees, they don't do anything in and of themselves most of the time. That's fine, actually, because they're giant superpowers that definitely do things when activated, but we'd like to see them granting something permanent to the Scions who fork over their 50 XP as well. A god who has these things literally embodies them, so we want that to be illustrated in some awesome concrete way. We don't know what that will be yet (and it'll probably vary from power to power), but it might be anything from constant visual effects to increased aptitude with related powers to special unique abilities tailored to individual gods, making every person's Avatar of Sky different. Whatever it is, it'll be awesome.
• Usage Guidelines. The unlimited power represented by Ultimates and Avatars is totally exciting, but what they actually do is pretty vague and confusing. We'd like to give some more useful guidelines for using them, as well as maybe some examples, so players aren't put on the spot trying to guess what they're supposed to do and Storytellers aren't dithering around wondering if what's happening is appropriate. The books also do a terrible job of explaining what happens when two Avatars or Ultimates clash and oppose one another, and since "nothing happens, they cancel each other" is the least epic idea ever conceived, we're also looking forward to coming up with some cool ways to represent the conflict between ultimate universal forces.
• Specialization. Right now, many of the Avatars and Ultimates are super narrow and specific, which gives us nice description of what some gods of that thing might do but leaves all the others out in the cold. It's great that we hear about how gods with The Storm can rampage across the landscape, decimating everything with uncontrollable lightning, but what about gods of Sky who are associated with the firmament itself and have nothing to do with lightning, or who are gods of breath and air, or who are gods of gentle spring rains or heavy fogs? Avatars need to be flexible enough that any god with that purview can use them in a way that fits their symbolic role as a deity. That might mean that each purview has a few different Avatars - perhaps users of Fertility can purchase The Green or The Season or The Feast or something? - or maybe it'll be an attempt to roll different ideas into something that's applicable to all.
• Weaponization. We don't want to lose the awesome storytelling mojo of Avatars and Ultimates, but right now it's entirely impossible how to figure out how to actually use them against an enemy or in pursuit of a specific goal; it's either, "They don't have an Avatar, they die," or "They do have an Avatar, everyone blows 30 Legend and nothing happens." Not exciting.
• Equal and Opposite Powers. Some Avatars and Ultimates, despite their best efforts, are at the moment obviously on different levels of power. Ultimate Appearance is clownshoes compared to Ultimate Stamina; The Sentinel is depressingly limited when compared to The Shaper. Everything will need to be able to compete with everything else, with the end goal that all gods, regardless of their kind of divinity, are able to face each other down and triumph with whatever awesome powers they have chosen to make their own.

It's going to be a big project. We can already tell, and we haven't done any more preliminary work on it than talking about it while waiting for movies to start or making dinner. But we're still pretty excited about it, and we will shed exactly zero tears if it wins the next round of voting.

(If you missed it, a little while ago we said that we've noticed that people asking about projects or characters on the polls almost always leads to them getting a voting surge, so if you have questions about the one you'd love to see happen, hit us!)