Fumbling Toward Heaven

Question: You previously said that apotheosis requires quite a lot of Epic Attributes. How do you attain apotheosis if you have several negative Fatebonds to those Attributes which keep buying them off? Just stockpile XP and buy them all at once?

Man, when we get questions like these, I realize that it has actually been years since we had a character achieve apotheosis. Then I feel like a dinosaur.

We do indeed require certain minimum numbers of dots in Epic Attributes before Scions can achieve apotheosis and becomes gods, in addition to needing several abilities and purviews at maximum level (the exact specifics are in this very old but still accurate post). But Fatebonds seldom leave your stats alone just to be polite or make life easy, so what's a beleaguered Scion to do?

When you're in the home stretch to head toward godhood, it's relatively easy to max out stats like abilities so that Fatebonds can't buy them off, but Attributes are another story; they aren't truly "maxed" in that sense unless you have all possible dots and Epic Attribute dots as well as all knacks, and most people aren't going to make it to that marathon of a goal. Since maxing them out usually isn't practical, that means that you have to instead embark on the wonderful world of playing catch-the-Fatebond.

Fatebonds can be stopped from buying a stat off if, when they are about to do so, you buy a dot (or boon or knack) of that stat instead. When you do that, they are immediately prevented from buying it off, and move all XP they had banked toward doing so on to the next thing they were trying to buy off instead. That doesn't mean they'll never buy off your "protected" stat again, just that it's now at the end of the list and they'll have to cycle through everything else they want to take away from you before they get back to it again. If your Fatebonds happen to also be buying off something you don't really care about - a purview you decided wasn't worth saving because it wasn't one of your main concepts anyway, or an ability you don't use much - then you're pretty much golden if you just save enough XP to keep shifting the focus away from the Attribute you want to save and over to that unnecessary stat instead.

It's hard to explain how Fatebonds work in words here, but think of it like a list of things the Fatebonds are buying off. They always follow it in order, so if you move them off their current choice, they'll go to the next one and then all the way through the list before coming back to the one you kicked them off of.

If the Attribute you need to save is the only thing your Fatebonds are buying off (for those about to hit apotheosis, this is almost never true unless the Fatebonds have already bought everything else they hate down to 0), however, or they're buying off several things at once that you need to save, your problems are more complicated. In that case, you need to save enough XP to be able to move the Fatebonds down their list more than once, potentially buying several things to make sure you move the Fatebond buying machine down the line to the next thing that's "safe" for them to buy off. If nothing is safe to buy off, then you need to refer to this rule that isn't on our Fatebond page (damn, guys, I know, but we keep putting fixing the Fatebond stuff on our work poll and you guys keep not voting for it!): if you prevent your Fatebonds from buying something off twice in the same round of buying, they instantly lose all XP they had banked toward it and have to start over from scratch, thus giving you some breathing room.

That's hard to visualize, so let me give you an example. John needs to keep his Fatebonds from buying off any more Strength or Perception if he wants to hit apotheosis, and has negatives to only those two things. When his Fatebonds try to buy off Strength, he buys a knack to stop them, which makes them move all their XP over to trying to buy off Perception instead. So he buys a Perception knack, which makes them move the XP back to Strength again, since it's the only other thing on the list. Then he buys another Strength knack, and all the banked XP the Fatebonds had to ruin his day is trashed and they start over from zero, and he is safe from their depredations for at least a little while.

Now, obviously this involves managing your XP very closely, and it also involves working with your Storyteller to figure out what you may need to do in the near future. While we never tell players all the details of their Fatebonds unless they have used the appropriate Magic/Perception powers to find out on their own in character, we do give them forecasts of what the next Fatebond buy-offs will be and about when they will occur, so that they can plan accordingly. At the end of game, when we're all doing the "okay, you get this new boon, you lose this dot of an ability" Fatebond circus, we are also always up to tell a player who asks that their Fatebonds will be buying off Sky in about two weeks, and after that will start working on Wits, and are also happy to tell them where their XP will move if they protect a stat and about how long they have to save before things come back around again.

But, you say, okay, so there are all these ways to save my stats with XP, but what if a situation arises in which it's mathematically impossible?! And while that isn't always very likely, it is possible and it is something that Scions may need to face once in a while. Sometimes, you can't save everything. You can almost always save one stat, or maybe even two or three, if you dedicate your XP to them only, but you probably can't save any more than that. Sometimes your Fatebonds to something are so brutal (because large numbers of people think you shouldn't have it) that it's much more difficult to save than any other stat, and the math race is too difficult to keep up with. Sometimes there are other stats that aren't negative but that you need to buy anyway before apotheosis, and so you have no choice but to split your XP. Sometimes you have to let one stat be bought off so you can save another, and then come back later and rebuy the one you lost. Sometimes you just mishandle it, maybe because you don't have much ability to understand Fatebonds as a character, and then have to suffer the uncomfortable consequences.

But this is all on purpose. The entire point of Fatebonds is that, based on your previous exploits and actions in the World, you have influenced mortals who begin to shape your destiny to fit those actions. If your Fatebonds have come down on something so hardcore that you literally cannot overcome them, that's the game mechanically showing you that it is straight-up no longer your Fate to be or do that thing, most likely because you're consistently bad at or opposed to it. We give out enough XP for Scions to overcome some of their negative Fatebonds, but not enough for them to always be able to beat all of them, and that's on purpose, too, especially right before apotheosis; you're about to become a god, which means that now is the time that you may have to make some choices about letting go of things you will no longer embody as a deity and building up others that you have so far neglected. We want Scions to be able to sometimes overcome what Fate wants them to do if they try hard enough, but we do not want them to be able to do so always, because otherwise there is no point to the Fate system being there in the first place.

And, as always, Fate is directly in the hands of the Scion. If they want to change it, they can go out, do that thing, blow a bunch of their Legend and try to rewrite their own stories. But they need to do that actively, as part of their budding myths and actions as a hero who is about to become a god; they can't just do it passively behind the scenes with their XP, because this isn't just about their capacity to choose things for themselves but also about the influence of Fate on their development and eventual role in the universe.

For some Scions, the road to godhood is relatively easy. They might have gotten lucky on their Fatebonds and only have one or two to fight in order to make it to apotheosis, or they might have been able to say, "You know what, I can let that purview go without losing too much sleep," so they can just let it drain away while they focus on more important things. For others, things are harder, when they have negatives to a larger spread of stats, or they want to save some stats they don't strictly need for godhood but are personally invested in. It is never mechanically impossible to become a god, but it can vary in difficulty depending on what state your Fatebonds are in and how much you do to try to work with or against them, and it may take some characters a little bit longer than others. When our god-level bands achieved apotheosis, I believe there were about three months (so 15 game sessions or so) between the first Scions to become gods (Sowiljr and Vala, respectively) and the last (Zwazo and Yoloxochitl).

Actually, the one way you can't go about this in our games is to stockpile XP and buy everything at once. For one thing, the would-be god needs to hold his stats for a few game sessions after achieving them, in essence to prove he's god material - he has to not only make sure Fatebonds don't get the better of him, but also make sure his mortal cults stay safe, his Virtues don't get screwed up and he doesn't lose his contacts in the pantheon, all things he will need to be doing when he graduates to the big leagues anyway. And for the other, it's a house rule for us that no Scion can save up more XP than it would cost to buy the most expensive thing available to him, so for most Legend 8 apotheosis hopefuls, 35 is the most XP they can have sitting around not doing anything at a time. We do that partly because we want people to actually, you know, do the Fate system that helps illustrate their relationship with their destiny and believers instead of just relying on math to let them ignore it, and also because a character who spends no XP for twenty games in a row because he wants to buy five dots and five Epics of something all at once is both super boring for both the player and the rest of the game, and probably not very effective compared to his companions since he hasn't gotten better at anything in forever and isn't keeping up.

By the way, for those who are looking at this and going, "But that sucks, I'm just going to lose all these negatively-bound stats at godhood anyway because I can't fight them forever!", there we have your back. Once you hit apotheosis, those minimum Epics you needed to get to godhood become "locked", and are the new minimum that Fatebonds can never buy down past. So you could have fifty negative Fatebonds to Perception, but they can never buy it below the three Epics you came into godhood with. That way all that work you did to be able to have basic skills for your new career as a god isn't lost, and you always have at least a small base to work from if you want to try to make a Fatebond-fighting sprint for glory with that stat later on.

Of course, for those who don't use our Fatebond system, or don't use our apotheosis rules, or don't use either, this is just a really long post that you don't care about. But, as Geoff would say, maybe you'll have better luck next time.