Man vs. Food

Question: How would eating contests work in Scion?

Hmm, depends on the kind of eating contest! Are we talking who can eat the most? Who can eat a specific portion the fastest? Who can eat the craziest thing without losing their lunch? Two people enter, no one leaves until one person has burst their intestines?

As far as who can eat the most, we would probably start with some good old Stamina + Fortitude rolls, to represent how much food you can pack into yourself and how quickly your digestive system can handle it. We might allow a few other rolls for specific stunts - maybe a Strength + Fortitude roll to force food into yourself even when you can't take any more, for example - but Stamina's going to be your main go-to stat. Once you've reached the point of eating more food than your body can physically contain, which is up to the Storyteller to decide on, failing those Stamina rolls will result in vomiting, but succeeding might mean that you start taking lethal damage from rupturing your own organs. Appearance knacks like Undeniable Resemblance or Unusual Alteration can also be used to change the size of your organs, allowing you to do weird, grotesque things like growing extra stomachs or just extending the one you have to that it goes all the way down into your feet or something. As the saying goes, you could literally store your food in hollow legs.

As for eating fastest, that's probably a simple enough opposed Dexterity + Athletics roll, to jump around and move food into yourself as quickly as possible, but it'll probably never occur without the Stamina rolls soon following. If you need to eat something that is particularly tough or difficult to break (rock candy? bones? foods designed for stone giants?), you might need some Strength + Athletics rolls as well to be able to tear, crush or break it with your supernaturally strong and hard muscles and teeth. And then there's the gross-out kind of eating contest, where everyone has to eat something horrifying like cockroaches or blood stew or super lemon intestine hot sauce. Those are the moments that the Scions with Selective Palate were born for, because everything tastes like a strawberry daquieri to them, but for those who can't fool their taste buds into thinking they're not eating an alien fetus with tabasco, Stamina + Fortitude, or perhaps Stamina + Awareness, would be our choices to make sure that you don't have an embarrassing incident with not being able to keep your food down.

Every Storyteller will probably want to play it by ear, or if they know an eating contest's coming in the story, plan ahead with the general rolls you'll need. But then, have fun; mythological eating contests (and drinking contests!) are all about kicking back, heroically letting loose and then epically regretting it in the morning.