Mechanical Mysteries

Question: So, Bestial Nature states that it adds Animal only as dice to Mystery, rather than successes as in other purviews. Since this was presumably written before you revamped Mystery's autosuccesses, does this mechanic still work this way, or should that be reworked?

This is a good question, and definitely one we've been debating. Prior to our overhaul of Mystery's mechanics, using the purview had no automatic successes attached, so every power that affected it needed to use dice-based mechanics to avoid being wildly overpowered. Now, however, Mystery rolls do get automatic successes based on the level of Mystery the Scion possesses, so all those older powers that affect them need a fresh look.

On the one hand, it's very easy to want to just add automatic successes to Mystery just like we do to everyone else. Having a separate mechanic in each boon just to handle Mystery is annoying, and it would be a lot more streamlined for both Storyteller and player if a given power's effects were more global and had fewer fiddly exceptions. Since Mystery now does get autos, it shouldn't hurt anything to start letting it be affected by other auto-adding powers, right? It's on the same scale with everything else, at least generally.

However, we're not convinced yet that that's a great idea. Mystery still uses a unique mechanic in our system: where other purviews get their automatic successes from the corresponding Epic Attribute that a given boon uses, Mystery's successes are always based only on the level of Mystery the user possesses. That means that every other boon requires investment in two stats where Mystery requires only one, which in turn means that it's still not running on the same system as everything else. Mystery gets more bang for its buck, XP-wise, than other purviews, which in turn means that adding to its autos is more powerful. Someone with Fire could potentially not have invested in a corresponding Epic Attribute and be pretty terrible at the roll, but someone with Mystery always has the autos automatically, so adding yet more autos on top of that is still a balance concern.

We're thinking at this point that we'll probably have to go through all the boons that can potentially buff Mystery and evaluate whether they should stay at dice or be bumped up to successes on a case-by-case basis. Until we get around to that, the official rules remain dice-only. Personally, I would be inclined to let Bestial Nature, which is a pretty big investment all on its own, go up to successes, but John the Ogre of Balance might come bite my head off if I said so publicly.