Moments of Perfection

Question: Does Principals of Motion allow a Greek scion to add Brawl and Arete (Brawl) and Academics and Arete (Academics) to his normal attack rolls? That could be a lot of dice... Does Fight with your Head last the whole scene?

Yes, actually it does! Provided he pays the Legend cost Principles of Motion spells out for his level of Academics, a Scion may add his Arete: Academics, even if he also already has Arete: Brawl (or any of the other skills affected by Principles of Motion or Applied Academics. If he doesn't pay the Legend cost, he'll have only his normal Arete dice for Brawl.

Arete represents the fact that a Greek Scion is awesomely skilled at certain things; if he's awesomely skilled at Academics, awesome, he has Arete dice and is beyond even most gods' abilities to master the subject. Principles of Motion and Applied Academics are knacks that specifically allow Scions to focus their academic prowess into concrete real-world applications, so it only makes sense that a Greek Scion with boatloads of Arete should be able to focus that as well. That does mean that double-dipping may occur if the Scion has Arete for both Academics and the other ability he's rolling, but that's okay; that's representing that he's A) superlatively awesome at brawling, B) superlatively awesome at the theories and ideas of brawling thanks to his book-learning, and C) possesses the kind of specialized genius needed to apply the one to the other. It is a lot of dice - the maximum, at Legend 12, would be +92 dice if he has all the Arete he can get in both skills - but that's what he built himself to do along with heavy XP investment, and those are the shining moments when he should be excelling at his perfected skills. He can go wild.

As for Fight With Your Head: yes, it lasts for the scene. Once you have used it to effectively lower your opponent's DV, it will remain lowered until he dies, you die, the scene ends, or you use FWYH again on a different stat, at which point his DV is restored to normal. I do see that it doesn't say that, though, so we'll make a point to update the knack to avoid confusion. Thanks for pointing it out!

This post totally feels like it's about Sophia, even though it's not.

Brains Over Brawn

Question: FWYH says it can "can find the chinks in her opponent's armor at a glance". Since it affects only rolls made against you, it cannot reduce Dodge, Parry, or Soak. Is this intentional?

You know what, I can definitely see where the wording might be misleading there. Thanks for noticing - we'll add to it to make it clearer!

Fight With Your Head can be used to either reduce successes from an Epic Attribute, or to affect a derived value from an Epic Attribute, including DV and soak. Targeting an Attribute that contributes to a derived value does not lower it, however; if you target an opponent's Dexterity, it will lower his ability to hit you but not his DV. If you want to lower his DV, you have to target it specifically and deal with him still hitting you as dextrously as ever.

So if you are fighting a monstrous snake with high Dexterity and Stamina, you have several options:

1) Lower the snake's Dexterity. It will have a harder time hitting you, but you will get no bonus to attacking it.
2) Lower the snake's DV. You will have an easier time hitting it, but it has no penalties to hitting you.
3) Lower the snake's soak. Both you and the snake will be hitting as normal, but you will deal more damage than you otherwise would.
4) Lower the snake's Stamina. It will continue hitting you normally and have no penalties to its soak, but you will be able to punch through it more easily with powers that roll Stamina + Fortitude for resist (like Infect, for example).

Obviously, you have other options - you can drop any Epic Attribute's successes, so you can also use FWYH to make the snake worse at charming your pants off, slower on the uptake when it comes to realizing what's happening or too imperceptive to see you creeping up for a sneak attack - but those are the most common options in the thick of combat. Since you can only have one of these active at a time, it's all about your assessment of your enemy and what you think will be the most effective strategy against it.

Which is how the super-smart roll when it comes to beating the brains out of their enemies. They use science.