Question: Guardian boons can't be used to hurt others, and you've talked about Unseen Shield before, but what about something like I Say Thee Nay? Is a Scion forbidden from fighting back against someone trying to hurt their charge? That seems awfully restrictive.
Of course not. You can fight back against an enemy all you want. You just lose the benefit of I Say Thee Nay! as soon as you do, because you've decided to take an action that involves attacking someone else instead of devoting yourself to defense.
The boon is restrictive, and it's restrictive very much on purpose. Adding your successes to your DV is bananas-cherry-pie craziness level of powerful; as we recently noted in posts about maximum defense capabilities, a god with this boon who uses Animal Aspect easily adds over 100 to their DV, making them literally untouchable to anyone who isn't completely frontloaded for attack (not to mention a lot less hurtable, thanks to cutting over 100 off the threshold successes that would otherwise have become damage dice). And not only do you get that DV, but you also get to give that DV to someone else, something that no other power in the game can duplicate and which is incredibly useful for protection of vulnerable people or other party members. I Say Thee Nay! is one of the few ways in the game, along with the Wits knacks that allow Scions to force enemies to target the user instead of others, that Scions who are not yet gods can reliably protect friends, loved ones and other important people from being hurt in the constant high-stakes craziness of the Titan war.
More to the point than power level, however - that can always be adjusted, after all - is the point of the boon, and the Guardian purview as a whole: it's for protecting other people, period. It's not for making you better at fighting; it's not for making yourself invincible; it's not even for using to get rid of enemies who might hurt those you want to save. It's a purview that is conceptually built around the idea of defense and defense only, and its powers should never be used to enable damage or danger against anyone, friend or foe. Guardian boons can never be used to hurt others, period, and that means that the second you start doing that, whatever Guardian boon you already had active stops functioning.
Just like you can't take a shot at anyone and still stay safe inside an Unseen Shield, you can't use I Say Thee Nay! to protect yourself while wreaking havoc on the battlefield. If that were the case, it would be a mandatory boon for all combat characters thanks to its incredible power; everyone would buy it specifically to hurt other people without being hittable in combat, which is the exact opposite of what the Guardian purview is supposed to do.
So yes, if you want the badass DV bonuses of I Say Thee Nay! for yourself and your target, you can't attack anyone, even if they're trying to attack you. Guardian is here to protect you and your friends, not to make it easier for you to kill your enemies, even if said enemies are the ones you need protecting from. The boon enables you to be incredible at defense only, and is not intended for any other use.
It's true, it would be incredibly awesome to mow down enemies on the battlefield while being almost completely invincible thanks to your crazily boosted DV and ensure that Unconscious Comrade A was similarly teflon, but it would also be broken as fuck. So you can't do that. Sorry.
There are a few minor exceptions, but as a general rule, any time you think you can use a Guardian boon to hurt, kill or make yourself better able to hurt or kill someone else, you're probably doing it wrong.
Could someone who has i say thee nay use non violent knacks or boons on their atacker ? Social boons to make them not want to attack you anymore (or centre of attention to make people pay attention to them) and still maintain the benefits of the guardian? Or would the act of interfering with someone's facilities during battle be against Guardians Do No Harm rules?
ReplyDeleteFurther to this, say a Scion had I Say Thee Nay! active on a target. The enemy goes to attack that target, and the Scion dodges in front to take the hit. If the Scion then activated Brick Wall, would she break the tenets of Guardian by dealing damage? The spirit of Brick Wall seems to be that the enemy hurt themself by attacking you. Or does the letter of the law apply here, where you intentionally activated the knack, therefore intentionally causing harm to the attacker?
DeleteI Say Thee Nay! is very straightforward - the only action you get to take is I Say Thee Nay!. Once it's up, you can't do anything else, violent or otherwise, because all your energy is going to maintaining your awesome defenses. You can take a different action any time you want, but I Say Thee Nay! instantly breaks when you do.
DeleteUnseen Shield is the boon that depends on your intent - you could use things like Center of Attention or Charmer while in one of those, provided you weren't doing so in an attempt to harm or incapacitate someone. I Say Thee Nay! doesn't care about your intent, because any action, no matter how benign, means you've stopped devoting yourself to defending a person or thing and started doing something else.
Oh, good addendum, Royce! No, reflexive powers don't break I Say Thee Nay!, so you could use Brick Wall, Damage Conversion, Roll With It, or anything else that doesn't require a separate action to activate. In the case of Brick Wall, you're right - you're not taking an action to hurt your enemy, your enemy hit you and you're so hard and solid that they hurt themselves, so it doesn't count as a hostile action (or an action at all).
DeleteAwesome, thanks for the clarification!
DeleteI've had this question come up among my players, though none are heavily invested in Guardian yet:
ReplyDeleteIf you unseen shield a friend (mortal or bandmate), what are the criteria for the shield breaking. Obviously if you attack, the shield around you breaks. But if you attack, does the shield you put on someone else (who is not themself attacking) break automatically?
I suppose this same question could be asked of I Say Thee Nay as well, for clarification.
Thanks!
Unseen Shield, once you put it up, is no longer attached only to your actions but to the actions of whomever is being protected by the shield. We usually have our players think of it like a bubble of protection that everyone is inside; if you take a violent or antagonistic action, you get kicked out of the bubble, but the bubble itself is still there. If you create an Unseen Shield for yourself and three friends, and then you take a swing at someone, you'll be booted out of the shield's protection, but they'll remain safe unless they also make a violent move. The shield stays intact and active for as long as someone you put it on is non-violently being protected by it (or until an outside force breaks it).
Delete(Of course, thinking of it as a bubble sometimes confuses people into thinking it takes up actual space and has a concrete shape, which it doesn't necessarily - if you get kicked out of the shield for violence, you won't also be catapulted twenty yardss away to where the shield "ends". You'll just be exactly where you were but no longer affected by the shield, no matter how large it is for those who do enjoy its protection.)
I Say Thee Nay! is the opposite, though - it only works as long as you, the guardian, are actively defending the other person. As soon as you stop defending them to take another action, both of you lose the DV bonus.
You mentioned that There are a few minor exceptions. What would those be?
ReplyDeleteI hope this question is coming from a place of interest, not a place of "which boons can I use to murder people."
DeleteCome Running is the most obvious - it only takes you to whomever is in distress, and it doesn't care about your intent, so it always works even when you're fully intending to murder whomever or whatever is endangering the person you have Vigil Branded. Ditto Watcher at the Threshold, which doesn't even require danger to let you know you can pop Come Running and come open up a can of beatdowns.
Pretty much any other damage caused by Guardian boons is incidental, not intentional. None Shall Pass can get someone killed because they can't magically flee to safety in your area, for example, but it's pretty hard to plan ahead for that unless you know someone else will be killing them and you denying them entry will help (same thing goes for Ward). If you know someone else has Salvation Sacrifice on you, you can also do some weird things like intentionally injuring yourself to injure them or even using Salvation Sacrifice on yourself so that they then use it in a chain away from you, but that's both rare and hard to predict, since unless they're in Loyalty Extremity or something you can't know they'll decide to do that.
The trickiest one is probably Divine Pass, because while it won't work if you go in intending to kill someone, occasionally people go in with peaceful intentions and change their minds while in there. Of course, when that happens the entire place scrambles to kick your ass, so if the ST is on the ball it hopefully polices itself.
Oh, yeah, certainly a place of interest. I'm porting the setting to another system, and me and my players disagree about the nature of guardian, so i'm trying to get a better feel for it. My writeup will probably be slightly more "violence friendly," but not by all that much (though enough that my players think it's a travesty)
Delete