Question: Maybe I'm just dense, but I just can't understand how Axiom works. Does reality just warp to make whatever the Scion states true? Could you give a more concrete example of its use and effects, maybe from your games?
Axiom is definitely a weird one. It has the same problem that the Prophecy purview does: because it deals with things that are going to happen and haven't yet, it has to use strange backwards mechanics to illustrate foreknowledge, which can make what it actually does look confusing.
Actually, Axiom doesn't do anything. You don't use to to warp reality or force things to happen, but rather to notice patterns that already exist, leveraging your awesome intellect to understand cause and effect in a way normal people can't. What's actually happening is that the pattern you notice with Axiom has been there all along, but you never noticed - and neither did anyone else - until you managed to successfully use the knack.
Obviously, this would be less confusing if the Storyteller simply had a list of cosmic patterns that you could find out about with Axiom, but just like Prophecy, that wouldn't actually work. It's possible for almost limitless things and occurrences to be covered by Axiom, and so, since the Storyteller doesn't actually know the future and can't predict what you're going to use it on or what things are going to repeat in the game, she has to wait for the pattern to be confirmed and then retroactively claim that it's been there all along. Scions with Axiom see part of Fate's grand design, specifically the bits where certain events always repeat themselves or certain ideas are always reinforced, and the Storyteller shores those up as soon as the Scion notices them.
It's very similar to the common syndrome of frequency illusion, which is what it's called when you learn or hear about something you've never heard about before, and then suddenly see it everywhere; for example, you might learn that there's a band from the 80's called the Charging Rhinos, and then suddenly you seem to see mentions of them or hear their music everywhere you go. The Charging Rhinos didn't just come into being because you know about them; they were there all along, but you never noticed because you didn't recognize them. Axiom is like that.
It's a very neat knack, but we've found that in practice it's difficult for players to really get it working, and as a result it doesn't see a lot of play. We'd like to rework it some time in the future to make it more user-friendly.
Our entire group agreed to never take it, since it it essentially almost limitless prophecy in the hands of any halfway decent player.
ReplyDeleteThe storyteller is basically obliged to say False most of the time just to keep it from breaking the game.
Hey, careful on the verbiage there - our players are definitely at least halfway decent, and Axiom is still super challenging for them.
DeleteIt's fine if you don't want to use it in your games, though.
Axiom is one of those knacks that I always want to take, but it seems like something else will be more useful in the near future and I buy it instead. At game, we do jokingly call "axiom" when two unrelated things happen together. I can't think of a specific example, but it's usually something silly and likely not covered by the original knack.
ReplyDeleteHeh, yeah, whenever someone says, "Man, X always happens," someone else is like, "Axiom! Someone blow it!"
DeleteSophia had it and had several axioms in the works, by which I mean she'd seen things happen twice but hadn't gotten the third link in the pattern to be able to really pin them to the bulletin board of the universe. But I don't believe she ever successfully finished one; it's really difficult to have the exact same situation come up three times when you're dealing with crazy magical powers and whatnot.
I do think players who really committed to Axiom, as in going out to make those things happen multiple times, could do some neat stuff with it, but in practice it's been too much work for anyone to bother.
I don't find Axiom broken. Game changing, yes, but even from an ST's point of view, I don't find Axiom frustrating...in all honesty it seems fun? I don't really see how it's game BREAKING - Powerful, yes, but it also seems like something someone with epic Intelligence should be able to do, and if the ST has to change a bit of his plot to suit the Axiom, that doesn't really break the game, it just changes it.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot of room for a Storyteller to rule on what constitues something happening the same way three times, too. If it's something that would be gamebreaking, you can usually say, "X detail was different, sorry," without preventing players from still using it for other things that aren't.
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