Sorry, everybody. I set the video to upload, and set the blog to post it when it was done... and then John closed my laptop when he walked by and stopped it from finishing. Because he is a clown.
It'll be up in about 20 minutes. Sorry about the wait!
Man, Stamina really IS a problem. I know you guys have mandatory lower limits for your God characters, but I feel like that's a pretty harsh solution to the issue of everyone dropping dead immediately if they don't have Demigodly levels of Epic Stamina and are trying to exist in the Overworlds.
And, yes, everyone in Scion needs to have Damage Conversion, Divine Damage Conversion, Self-Heal and Regeneration. That's lame. Super lame. But it's either that or 1) die or 2) drain all the Legend from your Guardian/Health friends.
I had a low-Stamina character in Lost Atlanta and he was consistently unhappy about not being able to go places the rest of the Band was. Especially since he was a travel God and felt very limited that he was theoretically ABLE to go lots of places, but would die if he did. He couldn't pop into Titan Realms to negotiate with Avatars because he'd die if he tried to visit them. He was Skin Shedding every single time he got hit, or using Rainbow Bridge to escape every single time someone growled at him. I also had some characters with decent Stamina, but they felt like they didn't want to buy certain Knacks. One guy didn't want to buy Regeneration, another didn't want to buy Skin-Shedding and those were such core "survival" traits that both of them came within millimeters of death multiple times specifically for lacking those Knacks. Not because they lacked Stamina or Soak, they had tons of both, but because they specifically lacked *those* abilities. The ability to negate a super-attack (Skin Shedding) and the ability to heal Aggravated so it doesn't stack up quickly (Regen).
I cheer the crap out of removing dice adders! Woo!
Epic Intelligence is really hard to manage because so much of any task is related to Intelligence. If you're smart enough, can't you just figure out how to design crazy hyper-tech without a Craft Purview? If you're smart enough, can't you use your hyper-tech to genetically engineer whatever plants or animals you want, without Animal or Fertility? If you're smart enough, can't you research and just brain-inspire knowledge instead of needing Mystery? Or calculate the odds of things happening instead of using Prophecy?
It becomes really iffy where the line between Epics and Purviews runs with Epic Intelligence. There are other cases, but Int has a lot of them.
I definitely agree about Stamina having knacks that are basically a requirement. Skin-Shedding, Self-Healing, and Regeneration are such high priorities other players in my groups get angry looks because they have to spend resources to save you.
I also dislike the way Epic Stamina 1 knocks food and sleep out to an entire week. I actually enjoy the effects of deprivation coming up in a game, and think it would make the deprivation knacks a lot more enticing if your ability to resist deprivation were lowered to the rate of auto successes.
+1, +2, +4, +7, +11, +16, +22, +29, +37, +46 days you can ignore deprivation.
Yeah, we were talking about that the other day, when we were trying to figure out how often Eztli has to eat and realized it was pointless to even bother because it's never going to come up ever ever ever again. She's an extreme case with ten Epic Stamina, but she basically hasn't actually had to sit down and have a meal since Legend 3, which was pretty early to start ignoring one of the basic life motivators that even gods pay attention to.
We've been having fun with penalties for not taking care of oneself lately, most notably with our Deva Scions (Tapasya for the win! ...sometimes!), and it'd be good to see that be more of a realistic issue for Scions at Hero and low Demigod levels. It should be something they can get away from, but not super easily.
Yeah. As an anecdote, a few months ago I had a character take Holy Fortitude and Divine Fortitude(Sleep). With every other character in the game able to stay awake for 1-2 weeks, and most of our stories taking place within the span of a few days, the lack of sleep never came up.
Even when it did come up, we were often in an exotic location so my staying awake for eight hours while everyone else slept accomplished little because I was not a perception monkey.
When we became demigods, I politely asked and was allowed to exchange them for... you guessed it... damage conversion and divine damage conversion.
yes pleeeeease change some of the Stamina knacks. the Fortitude tree's been brought up but what about Inner Furnace? Gods (especially Norse Gods) get drunk a lot and are often subject to the whims of the Gods of Alcohol when they appear, but with Inner Furnace (a tier one knack) they can pretty much go 'haha Dionysus you actually thought you could get me drunk and do chaotic stuff'
and you could always argue 'well Dionysus's special powerful wine overrides Inner Furnace' but the player will go 'uh that's not what the knack says' and then throw a huge fit and hurl the table over and walk out of the room when you tell them that their knack which specifically says 'you can't get drunk' doesn't prevent them from getting drunk
I could see it maybe assisting AGAINST being drunk, but there's no way that a tier one knack should be able to completely override the power of alcohol considering how mythologically relevant it is.
I've always felt that the Inner Furnace line was a bit bloated for what it does, and yeah, odd in the way it works. There aren't many Gods that drink forever and don't get drunk, and there are tons that get drunk all the time.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the eating-weird-stuff Knacks and I've added to them so that players can do weird things like swallow harpies and vomit them back out later, perfectly fine. Or keep magic herbs in their stomachs for when they need them, but they should still be able to get *drunk*.
From a brainstorming perspective, I would not be sad if all the immunity knacks and boons went away. Instead they might give a bonus somewhere in the range of +8 successes on a relevant resist roll.
Done this way, it would make you essentially immune to anything in your own power league, unless your defenses are falling behind or they throw a lot of bonuses into their attacks.
This could be extrapolated into things like Cipher or Math Genius like you mention in the vlog.
I like the riordan books, but no matter what the expectations are, Disney is still going to rape them in the movies. I've read all the books, and it sounds like they strip Percy of most of his Heroic nature and ability to get shit done without whining about it and Anabeth's intelligence common sense and guide role to Percy's leader role. Also in the books grover's white. Also, in the books Hermes was more divine currier and less corporate shipping mogul, delivering the items and relics to Percy himself rather than them having to go to him. I totally agree with John. They ripped the guts out of the book and left us with a ramshackle mess. Here's hoping they don't try to do the Kane chronicles, the Pesedjet version of Riordans series.
A Few Knack Ideas. 1. A Knack to determine the gullibility/emotional liability of a target. 2. Sweat/Bladder/etc. control Knacks. Maybe not the second one so much, but some myths do involve divine/legendary beings making a lot of sweat during their tasks and jobs (especially during creation). 3. A kind of debate knack system of making a statement/counter-statement (kind of like arguments between animals during creation-time, or God and Satan arguing in the bible (just an example).)
What did Demeter and Hestia and Hera do in mythology in the Titan War? I've always heard stories about the weapons forged by the Cyclopes for the three brothers (Zeus' thunderbolts, Hades sneaking around and stealing all the weapons with his helm of invisibility), but I have no idea what any of the ladies did against Chronos and his side.
Their roles are a little more vague than the sharply-drawn tales of Hades sneaking into the Titans' camp to break their weapons or Zeus cutting Cronus' belly open, but they were definitely present. Nonnus says that Hera aided Zeus in battle against Cronus, and Apollodorus says in general terms that all the Olympian siblings fought Cronus during the Titanomachy. The lack of specifics on what exactly they were doing to help is probably because, well, ancient Greeks would have considered it mostly the dudes' jobs to be out warring against Cronus and so they focused more on what they were up to, but the ladies were definitely there.
Ironically because this is Percy Jackson we're talking about, there's also no information on what Poseidon was doing during the war against the Titans, either. Like his sisters, he's assumed to have been there, but there are no surviving sources to tell us what he was doing.
Here's a general view of some of my group's homebrewed Knacks, I'll try not to get too much into specifics, but I'll elaborate if anyone is interested.
Strength: Added a new knack that reduces DV by 1 and knocks back for 1 yard after each subsequent and successful melee hit (up to a cap of user's epic dots). The effect ends if an entire round goes by and the user doesn't attack again.
Dexterity: Added new knacks for stealth and larceny specialists, allowing them to have certain actions like pickpocketing or hiding count as reflexive, instead of misc actions. Also, a similar Knack to the one for Strength, but instead reduces lethal and bashing soaks by 1 on each subsequent hit (they can't be used together though, since one is supposed to represent brutal strikes and the other precise cuts).
Stamina: A knack that halves your natural healing times for bashing/lethal damage. We were kind of stumped to see that no matter how high your Epic Stamina got, you never really healed any faster (we made this as a tier 1 and prerequisite to the conversion/regen trees). Another one was added to be able to do unarmed parry even if you don't have Body Armor on, and one following it that allows the use of E. Stamina to calculate unarmed parry DV for a single attack and a shitton of Legend.
Appearance: A knack that's basically Fight With Your Head for social encounters (we struggled really hard not to name it Fight With Your Boobs). It only works out of combat and while the user is performing some intimate gesture (like kissing or sex). We felt this Knack was needed because divinely sexy gods briefly turning others into weaklings, stumbling fools, and blubbering idiots is a common theme.
Perception: Made a new knack to ignore (or aleviate if they are supernatural) shooting penalties (strong winds, etc.). A "Microscopic Senses", and another one to locate inanimate objects with ease.
Intelligence: Added a knack that allows the player to retroactively claim his character is prepared for something they otherwise wouldn't be, such as knowing an obscure language he needs at the time (it can only be used in non-combat situations, and only once per story per dot of epics).
And that's pretty much it... they need some serious balancing though, we'll probably see it once we hit God.
More of a question then a request, but i noticed that most pantheons (even the fan-made ones) tend to have a smell & a sound associated with them but not a sight. Is this because sight is too broadly applicable to use for a knack or is more that divine sight tends not to be used in mythology?
What I meant is whether the decision to not include sight is because its too easy to power-game or if the idea itself never really comes up in these sort of stories.
I'm not sure it ever comes up; the knack is meant to be a way of "sensing" other divinities, but seeing things would fall under the realm of visions or illusions, which is probably not something that belongs in the knack.
In Stamina something to deal with Disease could be interesting , supernatural immune systems.
I don't know where this would fall under but something to do with supernatural like control of one's own body, slowing down your heartbeat/breathing/blood temperature to the point where you could "play possum".
Charisma, i feel like there should be something like Game Face, where you're just SO likeable that no one could even bring themselves to hurt you. (Who would hurt Baldr?! He is so great!) Seems like the other social trees have them but Charisma is lacking in that department.
In manipulation I think some sort of Epic "Wingman" type of power could be neat, where someone is soooo convincing in their talking up of someone being awesome, that you end up seeing them in a better light.
Just some things bouncing around in my head but alot of these may be already covered well in one way or another.
The books are actually pretty good, I'm not big into Middle Grade or Young Adult books, but his books are one of my exceptions. The first movie had basically nothing in common with the book, the only adaptation I've seen that's worse is Blood and Chocolate, and I haven't seen the second one yet but from what I've seen and heard, its closer to the book, but still has a ton of differences. The books explain everything but the movies feel rushed like they don't have time to explain anything. The Percy Jackson series of books is pretty good, Heroes of Olympus is even better and gives plenty of ideas for how to use the Roman gods in Scion which we've been using. The Kane Chronicles is his Egyptian series and its pretty good to, but he doesn't use scions in that one, more like gods possessing human magicians. Either way, he has plenty of cool ideas, but the movies just ignore them and use their own.
Empty video is empty.
ReplyDeleteWhy is the video unavailable?
ReplyDeleteSorry, everybody. I set the video to upload, and set the blog to post it when it was done... and then John closed my laptop when he walked by and stopped it from finishing. Because he is a clown.
ReplyDeleteIt'll be up in about 20 minutes. Sorry about the wait!
Adaptations... that happens all the time. I read the books and although they're not that bad they are not mythically accurate.
ReplyDeleteMan, Stamina really IS a problem. I know you guys have mandatory lower limits for your God characters, but I feel like that's a pretty harsh solution to the issue of everyone dropping dead immediately if they don't have Demigodly levels of Epic Stamina and are trying to exist in the Overworlds.
ReplyDeleteAnd, yes, everyone in Scion needs to have Damage Conversion, Divine Damage Conversion, Self-Heal and Regeneration. That's lame. Super lame. But it's either that or 1) die or 2) drain all the Legend from your Guardian/Health friends.
I had a low-Stamina character in Lost Atlanta and he was consistently unhappy about not being able to go places the rest of the Band was. Especially since he was a travel God and felt very limited that he was theoretically ABLE to go lots of places, but would die if he did. He couldn't pop into Titan Realms to negotiate with Avatars because he'd die if he tried to visit them. He was Skin Shedding every single time he got hit, or using Rainbow Bridge to escape every single time someone growled at him. I also had some characters with decent Stamina, but they felt like they didn't want to buy certain Knacks. One guy didn't want to buy Regeneration, another didn't want to buy Skin-Shedding and those were such core "survival" traits that both of them came within millimeters of death multiple times specifically for lacking those Knacks. Not because they lacked Stamina or Soak, they had tons of both, but because they specifically lacked *those* abilities. The ability to negate a super-attack (Skin Shedding) and the ability to heal Aggravated so it doesn't stack up quickly (Regen).
I cheer the crap out of removing dice adders! Woo!
Epic Intelligence is really hard to manage because so much of any task is related to Intelligence. If you're smart enough, can't you just figure out how to design crazy hyper-tech without a Craft Purview? If you're smart enough, can't you use your hyper-tech to genetically engineer whatever plants or animals you want, without Animal or Fertility? If you're smart enough, can't you research and just brain-inspire knowledge instead of needing Mystery? Or calculate the odds of things happening instead of using Prophecy?
It becomes really iffy where the line between Epics and Purviews runs with Epic Intelligence. There are other cases, but Int has a lot of them.
I definitely agree about Stamina having knacks that are basically a requirement. Skin-Shedding, Self-Healing, and Regeneration are such high priorities other players in my groups get angry looks because they have to spend resources to save you.
ReplyDeleteI also dislike the way Epic Stamina 1 knocks food and sleep out to an entire week. I actually enjoy the effects of deprivation coming up in a game, and think it would make the deprivation knacks a lot more enticing if your ability to resist deprivation were lowered to the rate of auto successes.
+1, +2, +4, +7, +11, +16, +22, +29, +37, +46 days you can ignore deprivation.
Yeah, we were talking about that the other day, when we were trying to figure out how often Eztli has to eat and realized it was pointless to even bother because it's never going to come up ever ever ever again. She's an extreme case with ten Epic Stamina, but she basically hasn't actually had to sit down and have a meal since Legend 3, which was pretty early to start ignoring one of the basic life motivators that even gods pay attention to.
DeleteWe've been having fun with penalties for not taking care of oneself lately, most notably with our Deva Scions (Tapasya for the win! ...sometimes!), and it'd be good to see that be more of a realistic issue for Scions at Hero and low Demigod levels. It should be something they can get away from, but not super easily.
Yeah. As an anecdote, a few months ago I had a character take Holy Fortitude and Divine Fortitude(Sleep). With every other character in the game able to stay awake for 1-2 weeks, and most of our stories taking place within the span of a few days, the lack of sleep never came up.
DeleteEven when it did come up, we were often in an exotic location so my staying awake for eight hours while everyone else slept accomplished little because I was not a perception monkey.
When we became demigods, I politely asked and was allowed to exchange them for... you guessed it... damage conversion and divine damage conversion.
yes pleeeeease change some of the Stamina knacks. the Fortitude tree's been brought up but what about Inner Furnace? Gods (especially Norse Gods) get drunk a lot and are often subject to the whims of the Gods of Alcohol when they appear, but with Inner Furnace (a tier one knack) they can pretty much go 'haha Dionysus you actually thought you could get me drunk and do chaotic stuff'
Deleteand you could always argue 'well Dionysus's special powerful wine overrides Inner Furnace' but the player will go 'uh that's not what the knack says' and then throw a huge fit and hurl the table over and walk out of the room when you tell them that their knack which specifically says 'you can't get drunk' doesn't prevent them from getting drunk
I could see it maybe assisting AGAINST being drunk, but there's no way that a tier one knack should be able to completely override the power of alcohol considering how mythologically relevant it is.
I've always felt that the Inner Furnace line was a bit bloated for what it does, and yeah, odd in the way it works. There aren't many Gods that drink forever and don't get drunk, and there are tons that get drunk all the time.
DeleteDon't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the eating-weird-stuff Knacks and I've added to them so that players can do weird things like swallow harpies and vomit them back out later, perfectly fine. Or keep magic herbs in their stomachs for when they need them, but they should still be able to get *drunk*.
I tell people their knacks dont work all the time.
DeleteFrom a brainstorming perspective, I would not be sad if all the immunity knacks and boons went away. Instead they might give a bonus somewhere in the range of +8 successes on a relevant resist roll.
DeleteDone this way, it would make you essentially immune to anything in your own power league, unless your defenses are falling behind or they throw a lot of bonuses into their attacks.
This could be extrapolated into things like Cipher or Math Genius like you mention in the vlog.
I like the riordan books, but no matter what the expectations are, Disney is still going to rape them in the movies. I've read all the books, and it sounds like they strip Percy of most of his Heroic nature and ability to get shit done without whining about it and Anabeth's intelligence common sense and guide role to Percy's leader role. Also in the books grover's white. Also, in the books Hermes was more divine currier and less corporate shipping mogul, delivering the items and relics to Percy himself rather than them having to go to him. I totally agree with John. They ripped the guts out of the book and left us with a ramshackle mess. Here's hoping they don't try to do the Kane chronicles, the Pesedjet version of Riordans series.
ReplyDeleteA Few Knack Ideas.
ReplyDelete1. A Knack to determine the gullibility/emotional liability of a target.
2. Sweat/Bladder/etc. control Knacks. Maybe not the second one so much, but some myths do involve divine/legendary beings making a lot of sweat during their tasks and jobs (especially during creation).
3. A kind of debate knack system of making a statement/counter-statement (kind of like arguments between animals during creation-time, or God and Satan arguing in the bible (just an example).)
Thakns for the suggestions, man!
DeleteWhat did Demeter and Hestia and Hera do in mythology in the Titan War? I've always heard stories about the weapons forged by the Cyclopes for the three brothers (Zeus' thunderbolts, Hades sneaking around and stealing all the weapons with his helm of invisibility), but I have no idea what any of the ladies did against Chronos and his side.
ReplyDeleteTheir roles are a little more vague than the sharply-drawn tales of Hades sneaking into the Titans' camp to break their weapons or Zeus cutting Cronus' belly open, but they were definitely present. Nonnus says that Hera aided Zeus in battle against Cronus, and Apollodorus says in general terms that all the Olympian siblings fought Cronus during the Titanomachy. The lack of specifics on what exactly they were doing to help is probably because, well, ancient Greeks would have considered it mostly the dudes' jobs to be out warring against Cronus and so they focused more on what they were up to, but the ladies were definitely there.
DeleteThey get way more awesome press for their battle feats during the Gigantomachy, which there's even art for - check out Hera murdering the giant Phoitos and Demeter smiting the face off some other nameless Gigante.
Ironically because this is Percy Jackson we're talking about, there's also no information on what Poseidon was doing during the war against the Titans, either. Like his sisters, he's assumed to have been there, but there are no surviving sources to tell us what he was doing.
Here's a general view of some of my group's homebrewed Knacks, I'll try not to get too much into specifics, but I'll elaborate if anyone is interested.
ReplyDeleteStrength: Added a new knack that reduces DV by 1 and knocks back for 1 yard after each subsequent and successful melee hit (up to a cap of user's epic dots). The effect ends if an entire round goes by and the user doesn't attack again.
Dexterity: Added new knacks for stealth and larceny specialists, allowing them to have certain actions like pickpocketing or hiding count as reflexive, instead of misc actions. Also, a similar Knack to the one for Strength, but instead reduces lethal and bashing soaks by 1 on each subsequent hit (they can't be used together though, since one is supposed to represent brutal strikes and the other precise cuts).
Stamina: A knack that halves your natural healing times for bashing/lethal damage. We were kind of stumped to see that no matter how high your Epic Stamina got, you never really healed any faster (we made this as a tier 1 and prerequisite to the conversion/regen trees). Another one was added to be able to do unarmed parry even if you don't have Body Armor on, and one following it that allows the use of E. Stamina to calculate unarmed parry DV for a single attack and a shitton of Legend.
Appearance: A knack that's basically Fight With Your Head for social encounters (we struggled really hard not to name it Fight With Your Boobs). It only works out of combat and while the user is performing some intimate gesture (like kissing or sex). We felt this Knack was needed because divinely sexy gods briefly turning others into weaklings, stumbling fools, and blubbering idiots is a common theme.
Perception: Made a new knack to ignore (or aleviate if they are supernatural) shooting penalties (strong winds, etc.). A "Microscopic Senses", and another one to locate inanimate objects with ease.
Intelligence: Added a knack that allows the player to retroactively claim his character is prepared for something they otherwise wouldn't be, such as knowing an obscure language he needs at the time (it can only be used in non-combat situations, and only once per story per dot of epics).
And that's pretty much it... they need some serious balancing though, we'll probably see it once we hit God.
Some good ideas, will add it to the planning Q. Thanks
DeleteHappy to help!
DeleteMore of a question then a request, but i noticed that most pantheons (even the fan-made ones) tend to have a smell & a sound associated with them but not a sight. Is this because sight is too broadly applicable to use for a knack or is more that divine sight tends not to be used in mythology?
ReplyDeletethats just cause thats what the original knack did and we kept it that way. Im not sure theres a good reason.
DeleteWhat I meant is whether the decision to not include sight is because its too easy to power-game or if the idea itself never really comes up in these sort of stories.
DeleteI'm not sure it ever comes up; the knack is meant to be a way of "sensing" other divinities, but seeing things would fall under the realm of visions or illusions, which is probably not something that belongs in the knack.
DeleteIn Stamina something to deal with Disease could be interesting , supernatural immune systems.
ReplyDeleteI don't know where this would fall under but something to do with supernatural like control of one's own body, slowing down your heartbeat/breathing/blood temperature to the point where you could "play possum".
Charisma, i feel like there should be something like Game Face, where you're just SO likeable that no one could even bring themselves to hurt you. (Who would hurt Baldr?! He is so great!) Seems like the other social trees have them but Charisma is lacking in that department.
In manipulation I think some sort of Epic "Wingman" type of power could be neat, where someone is soooo convincing in their talking up of someone being awesome, that you end up seeing them in a better light.
Just some things bouncing around in my head but alot of these may be already covered well in one way or another.
The books are actually pretty good, I'm not big into Middle Grade or Young Adult books, but his books are one of my exceptions. The first movie had basically nothing in common with the book, the only adaptation I've seen that's worse is Blood and Chocolate, and I haven't seen the second one yet but from what I've seen and heard, its closer to the book, but still has a ton of differences. The books explain everything but the movies feel rushed like they don't have time to explain anything. The Percy Jackson series of books is pretty good, Heroes of Olympus is even better and gives plenty of ideas for how to use the Roman gods in Scion which we've been using. The Kane Chronicles is his Egyptian series and its pretty good to, but he doesn't use scions in that one, more like gods possessing human magicians. Either way, he has plenty of cool ideas, but the movies just ignore them and use their own.
ReplyDelete