Elemental Master

Question: Questions about Water Mastery! What happens when you want to make a stunt to attack with ice? Does Mastery cover that or do you have to use Changing States on top of it? And if you do, do you end up getting triple Water Boons total as autos, or does it count as a different attack? Also, is the damage on both boons Lethal or Bashing? On a different note, how do you handle multiple attacks with it? Is it limited to two like everything else, or can you go all tsunami on armies and the like?

Answers about Water Mastery!

Water Mastery - and all other Water boons, for that matter - affects water only in its liquid state; if it's frozen and solid, it falls under the Frost purview instead. We know that's weird because Science, but by now we should all be used to the fact that Scion's mythological rules don't care about science when it gets in the way. If you want to use your Water boons to attack people and there's only ice around, you'll need to blow Changing States first to get something you can work with.

(Obligatory note from John: whenever we do our overhaul of the elemental purviews, Changing States is probably going to go away, or at least change significantly; right now it's one of those science boons that doesn't really make sense in a mythological setting. But until then, change all the states!)

Once you have some water, you'll use Water Mastery as normal, which means you won't be stacking its effects with those of Changing States (as a general rule of thumb, any time you think you might be getting triple your boons, that's probably wrong and/or broken). So the sequence of events will look something like this:

1) You need water. There's only ice. You use Changing States to turn it into water.
2) You can also hit people in the face with it for the usual Changing States damage, if you want to.
3) You can now use Water Mastery on this water that you've created from the ice, and hit people with it for the usual Water Mastery damage.

Using Water Mastery is a separate action from using Changing States, so you'll need to do the one before you can do the other and it won't be instantaneous. You can use both at once with a double action, but if both are happening simultaneously, the Changing States won't have turned the ice into liquid yet so the Water Mastery will have nothing to target and simply fail. If there was enough water and ice around for you to do both, you could do a double action (with the normal penalty for doing so) and use both at once, but their rolls wouldn't stack; each would deal damage as normal and be soaked by enemies separately.

You can always use two boons at once (or the same boon twice) in a double-action, but I think you're asking more about flooding an entire area and hoping to hit everyone in it. In most cases, we probably wouldn't allow you to make an attack that way; you could certainly flood it and maybe knock people down, but you'll only be able to use the boon to deal damage against a single target. Alternatively, with a good stunt and reason, we might let you try to slap everyone with the water (perhaps with some dice negatives), but instead of being a multiple action, it would be a single action and your targets would treat it like any other area-of-effect danger, meaning they'd roll their Dexterity + Athletics to try to avoid it rather than you just trying to hit their DV.

Of course, if you have Multi-Tasking, you can use Water Mastery a bunch of times simultaneously and totally smack your enemies around with it.

I have a strong feeling that John is going to have lots of things to add to this post... so watch this space.