Two For One Deal

Question: Hello, I have a combat-oriented question. Could you please explain how the multiple action rule works? I understand that if I take a diceless action, such as let's say Winds Freedom, and want to punch someone while flying, thats -2 dice. However, if I want to do two diced actions, such as Storm Augmentation and then punching someone, its -4 dice and I use the lower of the two dice pools to roll for both. So I would roll the lower Storm Augmentation roll for both and use that for a punching roll? Why would my punching get worse?

Okay, this is definitely a great question, because it falls into the dreaded realm of Rules We Changed So Long Ago We Totally Forgot About Them and Didn't Put Them on the Site. You've just perfectly described how multiple actions work in the original Scion system, but we don't do it that way anymore. For one thing, we don't have the differing -2 and -4 dice penalties, because it's overly fiddly and past a few Legend becomes almost completely negligible and pointless; and for another, we no longer use the "lowest of the two dice pools" rule. The original writers were looking to suggest that if you're trying to do two things at once, whichever one you're worse at is going to take more of your attention and therefore make you worse at the one you're normally good at, but in practice that comes out not making very much sense. If I have 20 dice and 28 autos to one roll, and two dice with two autos to the other, it's ridiculous that I suddenly become 93% worse at the first thing that I am actually awesome at, not to mention arbitrary.

So here's the way we handle multiple actions in our games:

If you take two actions, any of them that roll a dice pool suffer a -4 dice penalty from splitting your attention, regardless of whether one is diceless or not. Both roll their own dice pools seperately. Therefore, if you activate Wind's Freedom and attack someone at the same time, your attack suffers -4 dice. If you activate Storm Augmentation and attack someone at the same time, Storm Augmentation rolls its normal Appearance + Presence roll with -4 dice, and your attack rolls as normal with -4 dice. If you activate Wind's Freedom and Lightning Flyer at the same time, the two diceless actions simply happen on the same tick.

And that's pretty much it - very simple. Always the same negative, always applied to all rolls, always use normal dice pools for each action. There are powers in the game that screw around with this, like Blitzkrieg or Multitasking, but they're the exceptions to the rule. We also occasionally allow a player to roll only once if she happens to be doing the same action twice at the same time on the same target, usually to save time at the table (especially if one or both dice pools are very large and take a while to roll), but that's up to what's going on in the scene and how important the Storyteller judges the need for separate results to be.

Honestly, we're pretty sure that lower dice pool rule is something that was written at Hero-level but that wasn't designed for higher-level play, when the difference between a good roll and a bad roll becomes staggeringly vast. It works okay when you're not going to have much more than a five-dice difference; not so much when you might have a fifty-dice difference. It's also obviously designed to try to speed up combat by having players only roll once instead of twice, which is a nice idea, but we generally found that our players spent as much time trying to figure out what dice pool they were rolling and whether or not that was mathematically the best idea as they would have just rolling both anyway.

I just updated the House Rules page so there will be less confusion in the future. Thanks for pointing this one out!