Question: How big do dice pools have to get at demigod and god levels (i.e., how many dice to you have to buy/amass)?
Well, that depends largely on your personal preference, actually. In all technicality, you don't have to have as many dice as your character is actually rolling. There's a pretty wide variety of ways to handle rolls across different players.
If you're the kind of person who wants to just roll all your dice and damn the consequences, we'd generally recommend about 15 for Hero-level, 35-40 for Demigod-level and 65-70 for God-level. Some character builds will need more - Greeks with Arete, for example, or people who are heavily invested in dice-adder powers like Animal Aspect might need to go up to 100 - and some will need less, so every person probably needs to play it by ear. It's usually easiest for our bucket-o-dice players to just start with 15 or 20 and buy more as they discover they're often needing more, so their dice pools grow organically with their characters.
On the other hand, some players don't like rolling and counting a giant trashheap of dice, so there are plenty of alternatives for that, too. We've had players who prefer to simply roll a small number of dice several times; it's a little more time-consuming, but definitely easier on the wallet. We've also had players who just rolled a small number of dice and then multiplied the result (so, if the player needed to roll 50 dice, he'd roll 10 and multiply the results by 5), which is an easy but also spectacular option, since it makes your really good rolls insanely good but also makes it much easier to botch and fail miserably. There are even some players who simply take the average of a large roll instead of bothering to roll for it - saying, "Well, if it's a 50-dice roll, I'll average 25 successes, let's just do that," which has the drawbacks of not allowing you to get a great roll and ignoring the botch system, but the bonus of being quick and allowing you to gloss past non-critical rolls with ease.
And, of course, there's always the option of dice-roller programs, which many players just load on their phones or tablets and then have ready to go at a moment's notice, cutting physical dice out of the equation entirely. There are a ton of RPG dice-rolling programs for all kinds of platforms, so if that sounds like the solution for you, venture out into the internet and find the one that suits you the best.
Each kind of dice-rolling changes the tenor of the game, of course; rolling all the dice can slow things down, while using math instead of rolling makes some powers (Fortune Favors the Bold and Evil Eye both come to mind) actually functionless since the element of chance has been removed from the roll. Dice-rolling programs are only an option if you have a device to use them on, and some games find having phones or tablets at the table distracting; and if you're playing in an online game, many STs don't like programs because they provide too much temptation to cheat by fibbing about the roll if it doesn't appear somewhere it can be seen by the whole group. This is all okay, though - as long as you know what you enjoy and works for you and your group is cool with it, pick the one you like and run with it. We've had a mix of players doing it different ways at our table for years, and it's worked fine so far.
Incidentally, after giving you the general dice pool suggestions above, I thought it'd be fun to go out and check on what the absolute largest possible dice pool for any roll in Scion would be. After a lot of intensive math, I can tell you that if you are a performing-arts-geared Legend 12 Scion with maximum Arete, a maximum Stamina, maximum Animal Ken + Arete Animal Aspect, Faunaphagia from some insanely powerful Art monster, Bona Fortuna with maximum Magic boons, Theme Music with maximum Charisma, Pheromones with maximum Fertility boons, a maximum-level Become the Herald bonus to burn, Aurora, someone else's maximum-Appearance Lasting Impression, someone else's maximum-Charisma Final Countdown, someone else's maximum-Manipulation Opening Act, maximum positive Fatebonds to all of the above and Fundamentals... you'd be rolling about 578 dice.
Of course, the Legend 12 god who could do all that doesn't exist as far as I know. Something to shoot for, eh?
I love rolling dice....
ReplyDeleteOh, Tom, we know. We do, too!
DeleteI don't think anybody is ready for that performance.
ReplyDeleteProbably not.
DeleteJohn was telling me he thinks that you might be able to get a bigger dice pool on a damage roll, because you could apply all the dice buffs to an attack roll and they'd translate over as threshold, but I've lost enough of my life to theoretical math already.
Don't forget Virtue Channels!
ReplyDeleteVirtue Channels become successes at God for us, so we didn't include them in calculating a number of dice. They would certainly add to the roll's badassness, though!
DeleteRecommend changing Arete to fewer successes instead of dice. The name suggests a certain level of consistent performance, not random performance. :P
ReplyDeleteThat sounds lame
DeleteIt's not the Arete itself that is random - you having all those dice to begin with is what represents you having greater performance than someone without them. The random element of the dice represents Fate being involved in rolls, and the small chance that even if you are awesome at something, you could still fail at a critical moment, as happens all too often in heroic sagas.
DeleteAs you increase in power and get more automatic successes does it help cut down on you're dice pool or at least keep it in check. Also I plan on rolling a number of dice as many times as needed, but I needed to know if at god level I would have to roll forty dice ten times.
ReplyDeleteThe way John and Anne run botches, it NEVER pays to reduce your dice pool. You always want to roll as many as you can.
DeleteGet a dice rolling program.
We dont allow those though :)
DeleteVery true - because more 1s than successes always means a botch regardless of epics or auto-successes, having few dice is always more of a gamble than having a lot.
DeleteThat's why taking a knack like Empath makes you more likely to fuck up, even if your successes are more awesome.
DeleteYou don't allow reducing your dice pool (okay), or you don't allow dice rolling programs (booo)?
DeleteWe allow reducing dice pools by rolling a small number of dice and multiplying the result, but not by just doing straight math or saying, "Eh, I want to take the average of most of it but roll a few dice here to represent randomness."
DeleteWe don't use dice rollers except in our online game, but that's mostly because the players at our table like rolling, not because we'd tell them they couldn't.
I wish there was a knack that let you average -some- dice rolls. Keeping track of 10 Unquiet Corpses each with a different value is a PITA. Or 10 different Waterborn spirits.
DeleteSERIOUS PITA.
How many dots would you charge a relic to do something like that? No lows, but no highs either?
No, I wouldnt allow at the table dice rollers...that sounds lame.
DeleteIf you made a bunch of unquiet corpses at once, Id probably let you just roll once. I can see having many with different values is a pita, but we've never had a pc have more then one alive at once before.
Waterborn spirits should all have the same stats if you summon them at once, and that boon should probably be limited to one living group of them at once.
Need a chance to botch and for fate to take a hand in your success or failure(thats what rolling is) so wouldnt allow that relic.
If you had to make a rule of price a relic that let you just roll once for a bunch of unquiet corpses, or waterborn spirits in a single scene... how would you do it?
DeleteIf you told me ahead of time how many you were going to do for the scene, or better yet just did them all at once. Id just let you roll once without a relic(you couldnt do anything to give bonuses to the roll though, no deeds, channels, animal aspect, etc).
DeleteYeah, for times when rolling will just be a pain and there are no outside factors - I'm doing the same exact thing five times, and I'm not Deeding any of them - we'll normally let someone just roll once to speed things up.
DeleteAnd if it's something where the roll is a foregone conclusion - like, you're rolling 70 dice to hit a mortal - we'll normally let them just not roll and assume they succeed, because that's pretty much always just going to be a waste of time. That mortal is atoms now.
I'd say it depends on the situation. If that mortal really fucked up it might be cathartic for New God to get 100 successes on squishing them.
DeleteIt gets bigger than 578! You could be a Tuatha with enough geasa to make your head explode.
ReplyDeleteAnimal Ken Geasa, Animal Purview Geasa, Relic Purview channeling Animal, then a Skill Geasa for the boon you are about to use, a Purview Geasa for the boon you are about to use, a Relic Geasa that channels the purview you are about to use. Bam! 808 dice and you are destined to die a horrible horrible death.
well, we dont run gaesa like that anymore. gaesa as written are pretty stupid.
DeleteReally? What do you run geasa as now?
DeleteHavnt had any irish scions in a while, so havnt had to(a long while, like 2 years). But basically Id never let them stack and I dont use the gaesas that give straight arete to things(abilities, boons, etc).
DeleteYeah, as soon as we finish with Titans here, we're fixing that hot mess.
DeleteTuatha are incredibly popular among my friends and the games they play in. Out of the eight most recent games, there are thirteen Tuatha player characters, and that is even with a nerfed version of Enech.
DeleteI'm definitely looking forward to the Enech rewrite. It's going to bring sweeping changes around here.