Willing and Able

Question: Why are Fast Learner and Star Pupil so powerful? Raising a single skill to 12 costs 156 XP or 78 XP with the appropriate knack. Even if you charge 30XP for Epic Intelligence 1, and two Knacks, that is still 48 XP saved. Each skill after that is a solid 78 XP savings. Several of your active characters have flushed away 400+ XP!

No such thing, my friend; there is no flushing here. Our players will all be happy to tell you that nobody is ever wasting XP around here.

This question comes up every now and then (if you like, check out previous discussions on PCs with different amounts of XP and Fate spending XP), and it always bemuses me a bit, because it comes from the mindset where XP is king and it doesn't matter what you buy as long as you have gotten the most possible dots on your sheet for the amount of XP you have. But that just isn't so; having the most XP to spend somewhere on your sheet isn't king. Having the most XP to spend on the things you want to get is, and there's a very important distinction between the two.

Just like every other knack in the game, Fast Learner and Star Pupil (and their identical brethren Natural Juggernaut, Natural Leader and Eyes in the Back of Your Head) represent a specific kind of specialization; the character with Fast Learner and Star Pupil is good at learning new things. Scion represents learning new skills with XP, which is a measure of how much your character can learn over time, so skills that have to do with learning certain subjects quickly affect the XP ratio. A character being better at learning new skills than others is just as valid a choice as a character being able to see radio waves when others can't or speak mind-to-mind when others can't; like everything else you spend XP on in a game, you're simply making a choice about what you want. Those who want more dots in abilities buy Fast Learner; those who would rather have the nifty power of speaking all tongues get Language Mastery, and those who want to be able to think their way through magical smokescreens get Blockade of Reason. Fast Learner isn't inherently more powerful than other Intelligence knacks because it affects XP; it's just different, and just like character A might be different from character B because one is great at soaking hits and the other great at marching on until the bitter end, the only difference between the character with Fast Learner and his buddy is that one of them is better at learning abilities and the other is better at learning languages.

The point of the game isn't to have the most XP spent on your character; it's for your character to be the most awesome and effective at the things you want to do. If you want to be an awesome generalist who is an expert in every ability, that's awesome! Pick up all the XP-saver knacks! But if you want to focus on being an impregnable resistance fortress, or being able to take all the physical punishment the world can dish out, or being able to spy on Overworlds unfathomable distances away, that's awesome, too! Get those knacks instead.

It's a bit of a mental prison, I think, the idea that XP is always the most important thing in the game and no matter what you do, you're getting the best result if you technically have more XP than the next guy. It just doesn't work that way; having more abilities than the next guy will sometimes give you an edge over him, and sometimes work against you because he was able to get other powers you didn't. Like all other choices when it comes to building your PC, it'll be awesome in one area but mean you didn't get something in another area. The idea that not focusing on abilities is somehow a "waste" is ridiculous; it's only a waste if your character really wants to focus on abilities and for some reason doesn't.

Every Scion is different, and there's no perfect character build that is better than all others. If your XP is spent on something you want and you get to be awesome with it, there's never any waste involved, no matter what your friend across the table spent his on.