Question: Your write-up of Mystery says that players can ask yes/no or short answer questions of Fate. Can you give me a basic framework of what you would consider appropriate questions for a Scion to ask Fate? What do you consider an unacceptable question/series of questions? Examples would be appreciated.
This is a pretty neat question, and examples are definitely helpful! Let's do a few.
Our goal with keeping Mystery questions simple is mostly for the players, not the characters themselves. PCs who use Mystery are not actually "asking questions", per se; rather, they are tapping into the mysteries and secrets of the universe and of Fate itself, learning things that they otherwise could not have known. How they stunt that is up to them - maybe they read secrets in runes, discover truths in the depths of drunkenness, hear the ancient wisdom of the stars or whatever else they might come up with - but they're never actually talking to or asking questions of Fate as if it were a person. The act of asking the Storyteller questions is a proxy system, not what's actually happening in the game.
So the exact wording of a Mystery question doesn't necessarily matter. The player isn't going to hoodwink extra information out of Fate with clever wordplay to make a question "count" more or anything like that, since an actual question isn't being asked of anyone, so instead the Storyteller's job is to figure out what information the player is actually trying to learn and how difficult it should be to discover. The simpler the question, the easier it is to tell what they're looking for and the more likely it is that it can be answered simply as well.
That doesn't mean every simple question is easily answered or only one "Mystery question"'s worth of answer, though, or that every complicated one can't be. These are the kinds of questions we usually encourage from players:
1) "Where is the closest Terra Incognita's entrance?"
2) "Can this puzzle be unraveled with non-magical means?"
3) "Who is the leader of the secret cabal of magicians?"
4) "What is the greatest weakness of the evil zombie leader?"
5) "What incentive could I give to Hera to convince her to act as my patron?"
6) "Is Set in the Underworld right now?"
These are all pretty simple and easy to go about answering. Most of them are short answers; #1 would be along the lines of "In a cave forty miles north of here," or "On the rocks where the Colossus once stood," while #3 should probably just be "Bob, the sinister TV salesman," #4 should be something along the lines of "He's vulnerable to the powers of healing and light," or "He has a soft spot on the back of his neck where he's less armored," and #5 might say, "She's looking for someone to go on a dangerous quest for her," or "She would accept a relic of five dots or higher in return," or whatever else the lady might want. The yes/no questions have a simple yes/no answer, although you might want to keep an eye out for whether or not that's actually what the player is trying to learn; for example, the answer to #5 up there is an easy yes or no, but the player asking #2 is probably actually asking how that puzzle can be unraveled non-magically and may need follow-up information that costs more questions. Remember that just like the player can't cheat with wordplay to get more questions out of this situation, the Storyteller likewise can't cheat to try to make a player waste questions uselessly; you're both working together to make sure the Scion's ability to dip into the mysteries of Fate yields useful information. If a player accidentally words a question poorly - like, for example, "Oh! Can I defeat the emperor with some kind of special strategy?" - it's your job to give her useful information about a strategy, not to glibly say, "Yes!" and then pat yourself on the back while she looks depressed over losing a question to poor wording.
With questions that are actually multiple questions - either because a player isn't great at wording them on the fly or is trying to shenanigans their way around the system by using a lot of semicolons and conjunctions - the Storyteller's job becomes to figure out what information they're looking for and how many "questions" that costs. Generally, the rule of thumb is that one piece of information = one question cost, so that in essence you're pretending the player did ask these questions in the correct phrasing and order to get maximum use out of them. For example, for #2 above, if you know that the puzzle can be solved via mortal means, that it requires a particular set of tools, that a particular mortal has the technical expertise to do it, and that it will take approximately a month longer to do it that way than it would to do it with magic, that's three pieces of information. We would say to the asker of #2, "Okay, to get the full lowdown on that will take three of your questions," and let them decide if they want to commit to that or decide to abandon that route of inquiry and ask about something else.
Unfortunately, a question being simple and direct doesn't always mean it's easy to answer, or that it should be answered. Some questions are clearly great mysteries of the universe and wouldn't be so if anyone with a single level of Mystery could just unravel them, and others may regard things, events or people who are part of Fate's grand design or possessed of great talents of subtlety themselves that shouldn't be immediately uncovered by any yutz who can roll a single success. In those cases, the Storyteller has to figure out how "expensive" a particular question should be, which really means how secret it is, how powerful the forces trying to hide it are, and how difficult it should be for this Scion at their current level to access.
Some examples of information that needs multiple questions to answer:
1) Where is the Tablet of Destinies hidden?
2) Who is that mysterious one-eyed old man who keeps appearing and watching me?
3) What secret plot is Tezcatlipoca up to right now?
4) What is Loki's motive for engineering Baldur's death?
5) What is the secret formula and process for creating Zeus' thunderbolts?
In the case of the first question, this is something that we know is secret even from most of the gods, and that would be enormously powerful and dangerous knowledge for anyone to have, so it clearly isn't easily accessible information even with Mystery. #2, 3 and 4 are cases of gods who are excellent at hiding their intentions and actions from everyone, some of whom are also masters of Fate as well, so again it would be overpowered for any Hero-level Scion to be able to uncover their grandiose Ultimate Manipulation plots with a single Mystery question, and therefore it probably costs a hefty amount to uncover their secrets. The final one is something that probably took Hephaestus and the cyclopes a huge amount of successes on their planning rolls to figure out, so it would be pretty broken if any kid with Mystery could duplicate it in a few seconds.
How much each of those might cost depends on how difficult it should be for the Scion you're dealing with to figure out that information; if you want it to be barely within his grasp if he really commits, set it at a level that he could achieve but only if he tries hard (e.g., if his average successes are 30, set it at 35 or 40 questions so that it's technically doable but difficult). If it's something that he really shouldn't be able to figure out right now, or that should be hard for anyone including gods to figure out, base it on that instead; for example, a god with maximum Occult and Mystery will average around 50 successes and could easily use resources to get even higher, so something that is a massive secret that even the gods don't know should probably be at least 100 or more questions.
One thing we do allow people to do, when shooting to find out giant state secrets that cost a lot of questions, is to blow a few successive uses of Mystery at the same time. For example, if a player rolls 25 Mystery questions and then asks about something that costs 100, they could either say, "Okay, that's out of my league, I'll ask about something else," or if it's really important to them decide to spend three more of their Mystery channels in one huge dump to get enough questions (or maybe only two more if they want to add Deeds or Channels). Often, players will want to save their Mystery uses for future story needs, but if they feel like it's worth it to invest everything, we'll let them pay for a few uses of Mystery in the same scene to get enough total questions to go for it.
Since you asked for a few questions that are not okay, we can provide some examples of those, too.
1) If I get caught sneaking into the imperial palace, will I be put in the dungeon?
2) Who is the mysterious Blue Demon, how do we find him, what is he planning and where is his hideout, and what's the best strategy for dealing with him when we confront him?
3) What's the best course of action for us now?
4) Where is my arch-enemy going to be on the fourteenth of July?
5) What does Manannan mac Lir think about the Morrigan?
These questions have a variety of different problems. #1 and #4 deal with events that are yet to come, which Mystery cannot answer; only Prophecy can provide glimpses of the future, so you simply have to remind players who ask these kinds of questions that they're outside Mystery's scope. #4, along with #2, also has the problem of trying to combine several questions into one, which we talked about above, so we would tell a player who asked either one that those were not single questions, and that it would cost at least four questions for #2, and possibly two for #4 (assuming the player was trying to sneak in knowledge of who their arch-enemy is if they didn't already know). #3 is basically unanswerable; there are too many options for a given group of Scions that could be the best choice, and while Fate certainly has plans for any given Scion, it doesn't know (or care) all the details at every juncture or what the Scions themselves might consider "best". Finally, #5 has many of the same problems of trying to ask about secrets belonging to other gods - its answer would give you the ability to literally eavesdrop on the minds of gods massively more powerful than yourself with very little difficulty, which is simply overpowered, and it's not really answerable anyway, since it's a very vague question and what any given person "thinks about" another is likely to change often and in subtle ways.
Again, don't penalize players for asking a bad question - it's easy for even quick-on-the-uptake players to misstep once in a while, and you never want to make them waste a question. Instead, let them know that that question doesn't work and suggest an alternative, or explain that while that's askable, it costs X amount of questions so they can consider if that's really what they want.
The most important thing to remember is that it's not player vs. Storyteller as antagonistic personalities interacting, but rather that both are working together to get the Scion using Mystery the best and most information for their divine powers.
Showing posts with label Mystery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mystery. Show all posts
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Visions of Past and Future
All right! As promised, it's time to release a new purview - or, in today's case, two new purviews! Prophecy is today's exciting release, and since Mystery has barely any changes, we're throwing it in for free.
We are incredibly excited about Prophecy, so let me tell you about it for a minute. The old Prophecy purview was thrown together from the work of some previous players right when we started playing the game; we knew that the original book's version of Prophecy, which was functionally useless and frustrating for players and impossible to managefor Storytellers, needed to be replaced, but we were baby game developers back then and not yet ready for how many unique problems Prophecy, as a game concept, really has. The previous version served us well over the years, but we always knew it was lacking; it had only one level of boons for players to choose from, and while some levels saw a ton of use and were perennial prophet favorites, others were ignored so thoroughly that we had to admit they were probably doing a completely poor job of representing a cosmic purview.
So in the Prophecy rewrite, we spent a good long time just talking about what exactly Prophecy is, in both a mythological context and a Scion context, and how we could make sure that the powers Scions have represent it in a meaningful and useful way. We also looked at trying to make Prophecy more cross-culturally applicable, because while the old purview did a pretty decent job of presenting the kind of prophecies familiar from, say, the Norse Ragnarok stories, it was not nearly as good at trying to model the journey-prophecies of the Orisha or the fortune-prophecies of the Shen.
So the Prophecy purview is now a completely new beast; it has been entirely retooled from the ground up, and contains only one crossover power from the old purview (although there are several boons that use similar ideas from the old purview). There are two boons per level now, and the major theme that runs through the purview is that prophecy is the tool of Fate and the way that it writes a hero's story; so, as a prophet yourself, you can see what the "story" looks like in advance, and eventually help write it in a limited sense. Of all purviews, Prophecy is the one that has to do with the actual story structure of a hero's life and journey, and therefore Scions with prophetic vision are those rare characters who can actually read the saga of their own adventures in advance, and ensure that they come to pass.
Without further ado, here are Mystery and Prophecy - go out and enjoy them, and if you have any questions, drop them in the comments below!
We are incredibly excited about Prophecy, so let me tell you about it for a minute. The old Prophecy purview was thrown together from the work of some previous players right when we started playing the game; we knew that the original book's version of Prophecy, which was functionally useless and frustrating for players and impossible to managefor Storytellers, needed to be replaced, but we were baby game developers back then and not yet ready for how many unique problems Prophecy, as a game concept, really has. The previous version served us well over the years, but we always knew it was lacking; it had only one level of boons for players to choose from, and while some levels saw a ton of use and were perennial prophet favorites, others were ignored so thoroughly that we had to admit they were probably doing a completely poor job of representing a cosmic purview.
So in the Prophecy rewrite, we spent a good long time just talking about what exactly Prophecy is, in both a mythological context and a Scion context, and how we could make sure that the powers Scions have represent it in a meaningful and useful way. We also looked at trying to make Prophecy more cross-culturally applicable, because while the old purview did a pretty decent job of presenting the kind of prophecies familiar from, say, the Norse Ragnarok stories, it was not nearly as good at trying to model the journey-prophecies of the Orisha or the fortune-prophecies of the Shen.
So the Prophecy purview is now a completely new beast; it has been entirely retooled from the ground up, and contains only one crossover power from the old purview (although there are several boons that use similar ideas from the old purview). There are two boons per level now, and the major theme that runs through the purview is that prophecy is the tool of Fate and the way that it writes a hero's story; so, as a prophet yourself, you can see what the "story" looks like in advance, and eventually help write it in a limited sense. Of all purviews, Prophecy is the one that has to do with the actual story structure of a hero's life and journey, and therefore Scions with prophetic vision are those rare characters who can actually read the saga of their own adventures in advance, and ensure that they come to pass.
Without further ado, here are Mystery and Prophecy - go out and enjoy them, and if you have any questions, drop them in the comments below!
Monday, December 9, 2013
Mechanical Mysteries
Question: So, Bestial Nature states that it adds Animal only as dice to Mystery, rather than successes as in other purviews. Since this was presumably written before you revamped Mystery's autosuccesses, does this mechanic still work this way, or should that be reworked?
This is a good question, and definitely one we've been debating. Prior to our overhaul of Mystery's mechanics, using the purview had no automatic successes attached, so every power that affected it needed to use dice-based mechanics to avoid being wildly overpowered. Now, however, Mystery rolls do get automatic successes based on the level of Mystery the Scion possesses, so all those older powers that affect them need a fresh look.
On the one hand, it's very easy to want to just add automatic successes to Mystery just like we do to everyone else. Having a separate mechanic in each boon just to handle Mystery is annoying, and it would be a lot more streamlined for both Storyteller and player if a given power's effects were more global and had fewer fiddly exceptions. Since Mystery now does get autos, it shouldn't hurt anything to start letting it be affected by other auto-adding powers, right? It's on the same scale with everything else, at least generally.
However, we're not convinced yet that that's a great idea. Mystery still uses a unique mechanic in our system: where other purviews get their automatic successes from the corresponding Epic Attribute that a given boon uses, Mystery's successes are always based only on the level of Mystery the user possesses. That means that every other boon requires investment in two stats where Mystery requires only one, which in turn means that it's still not running on the same system as everything else. Mystery gets more bang for its buck, XP-wise, than other purviews, which in turn means that adding to its autos is more powerful. Someone with Fire could potentially not have invested in a corresponding Epic Attribute and be pretty terrible at the roll, but someone with Mystery always has the autos automatically, so adding yet more autos on top of that is still a balance concern.
We're thinking at this point that we'll probably have to go through all the boons that can potentially buff Mystery and evaluate whether they should stay at dice or be bumped up to successes on a case-by-case basis. Until we get around to that, the official rules remain dice-only. Personally, I would be inclined to let Bestial Nature, which is a pretty big investment all on its own, go up to successes, but John the Ogre of Balance might come bite my head off if I said so publicly.
This is a good question, and definitely one we've been debating. Prior to our overhaul of Mystery's mechanics, using the purview had no automatic successes attached, so every power that affected it needed to use dice-based mechanics to avoid being wildly overpowered. Now, however, Mystery rolls do get automatic successes based on the level of Mystery the Scion possesses, so all those older powers that affect them need a fresh look.
On the one hand, it's very easy to want to just add automatic successes to Mystery just like we do to everyone else. Having a separate mechanic in each boon just to handle Mystery is annoying, and it would be a lot more streamlined for both Storyteller and player if a given power's effects were more global and had fewer fiddly exceptions. Since Mystery now does get autos, it shouldn't hurt anything to start letting it be affected by other auto-adding powers, right? It's on the same scale with everything else, at least generally.
However, we're not convinced yet that that's a great idea. Mystery still uses a unique mechanic in our system: where other purviews get their automatic successes from the corresponding Epic Attribute that a given boon uses, Mystery's successes are always based only on the level of Mystery the user possesses. That means that every other boon requires investment in two stats where Mystery requires only one, which in turn means that it's still not running on the same system as everything else. Mystery gets more bang for its buck, XP-wise, than other purviews, which in turn means that adding to its autos is more powerful. Someone with Fire could potentially not have invested in a corresponding Epic Attribute and be pretty terrible at the roll, but someone with Mystery always has the autos automatically, so adding yet more autos on top of that is still a balance concern.
We're thinking at this point that we'll probably have to go through all the boons that can potentially buff Mystery and evaluate whether they should stay at dice or be bumped up to successes on a case-by-case basis. Until we get around to that, the official rules remain dice-only. Personally, I would be inclined to let Bestial Nature, which is a pretty big investment all on its own, go up to successes, but John the Ogre of Balance might come bite my head off if I said so publicly.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
You're Not the Boss of Me, Fate!
Question: How would you suggest a Scion of the Orisha who does not want to invest in Mystery or Prophecy (and has no one in his group who wants to) proceed in regards to his PSP boons?
A Scion of the Orisha who wants nothing to do with divination is embarking on a difficult road. Because the idea of discovering and working toward one's destiny is so deeply and fundamentally important to the religion that supports the Orisha, to the point that the gods themselves practice it as much as the mortals below, a Scion who eschews the idea is setting himself up for a lot of confusion, difficulty and adversity. The Orisha and their worshipers believe that someone who fails to achieve their destiny has lived a failed and wasted life and will fall prey to (and cause for others) many misfortunes, and they're likely to be somewhat aghast at a Scion who refuses to participate. Just as a Scion of the Tuatha who won't take on any geasa would look irresponsible to them, or a Scion of the Aztlanti who refuses to participate in blood sacrifice would look like a deadbeat to his pantheon, so the Orisha probably won't know quite what to do with a kid who isn't doing what they perceive as his job.
However, that doesn't mean anything that doesn't involve divination can't be a valid character type, or that you can't do very neat things with Ori despite not being big into chicken bones and palm nuts. I would think this issue comes up a lot more for Scions of the Orisha who know them in their New World incarnations; while ceremonies strongly associated with Mystery and the gods do exist in vodun and Santeria and the like, the urgent need to perform a divination for everything, all the time isn't as strong as it is at home in Africa, and Scions from across the big water may be from different religious milieus despite still being under of the overall Orisha umbrella. Also, sometimes there are just Scions who don't wanna do what their parents do. That's traditional for this game, after all.
So, anyway. The concept of Ori and figuring out what it is and what to do about it is best expressed in Scion by the Prophecy and Mystery purviews. That makes a lot of sense and gives us a nice clear framework for stuff to happen around the concept of sacred destiny, but it does make life more challenging for Scions who don't have those purviews (or easy access to others who have them). At low Legend levels, the easiest thing to do is probably what everyone who isn't Orisha usually does when they need to talk to an oracle: go find one. Seek out the local wise woman, witch doctor, oracular mouthpiece or servant of the gods, and use your Ori boons on them (and remember, they don't have to be Yoruba or perform divinations the Yoruba way as long as they get you the info you need). You won't be able to do it as often as if you had a mobile oracle with you, but you can still make it something you do before embarking on important missions or making life-changing decisions. You could also try to get a non-Scion oracle to travel with you, at least sometimes; the simplest way to pull that off is just to take a Guide or Follower Birthright that can perform divinations for you, but if you want to save those points, you could also try to just convince oracles you run into to accompany you (or kidnap them, but they're probably less inclined to cooperate that way). Once you've reached Legend 7, of course, you'll be able to use Babalawo/Iyalawo to just designate people as temporary diviners, making it unnecessary to seek out professional ones unless you need a truly epic feat that those with the temporary powers can't manage for you.
If, on the other hand, you happen to be a Scion of the Orisha who just doesn't want to ever bother with divinations and doesn't plan on using those boons at all, you do have a thornier path to travel. Just like a Yazata Scion who is a pathological liar or a Bogovi Scion who doesn't want to be saddled with additional Virtues, you're choosing to go against the traditional powers, dictates and values of your pantheon, and that's naturally going to mean that some doors are closed to you. The divination boons will probably be mostly useless to you, and there's not much that you can really do about that. But the good news is that only three out of ten Ori boons require divination, and they're not all clustered at any one level, meaning that you'll still have the tasty bonuses of Akunlegba to keep you warm at Hero and Akunleyan, Iwa Pele and Olori Rere to prevent your Demigod career from being all about bothering prophets for information. You'll still have to buy those divination-based boons, of course, but you're trying to become well-versed in the powers and beliefs of your native pantheon, after all, and it's not up to you what they consider most religiously important. You can absolutely decide you're not interested in their bullshit and not participate, but it stands to reason that you're not going to get access to all the powers that bullshit brings if you do.
Honestly, I think nonconformist Orisha Scions have it easier than those of some of the other pantheons; at least they do get other powers, and they probably only have to worry about Eshu (who is notoriously easy to offend when he feels he isn't getting enough divination sacrifices) going batshit on them for neglecting their duties. Compared to the poor Aztlanti Scion who won't perform blood sacrifice and has an entirely useless purview and a whole pantheon ready to kick his ass over it or the Yazata Scion who loses his whole PSP and becomes Enemy One to his parent when he starts lying about something as innocent as whether or not his friend looks fat in those jeans, the Orisha Scion who doesn't feel like divination is doing pretty well.
As always, the pantheon determines what their powers, Virtues and outlook on the universe are, but Scions are new creatures who can choose to align themselves with or reject those values as they see fit. Fighting against the current is always harder than swimming with it, but that doesn't mean you can't do it.
A Scion of the Orisha who wants nothing to do with divination is embarking on a difficult road. Because the idea of discovering and working toward one's destiny is so deeply and fundamentally important to the religion that supports the Orisha, to the point that the gods themselves practice it as much as the mortals below, a Scion who eschews the idea is setting himself up for a lot of confusion, difficulty and adversity. The Orisha and their worshipers believe that someone who fails to achieve their destiny has lived a failed and wasted life and will fall prey to (and cause for others) many misfortunes, and they're likely to be somewhat aghast at a Scion who refuses to participate. Just as a Scion of the Tuatha who won't take on any geasa would look irresponsible to them, or a Scion of the Aztlanti who refuses to participate in blood sacrifice would look like a deadbeat to his pantheon, so the Orisha probably won't know quite what to do with a kid who isn't doing what they perceive as his job.
However, that doesn't mean anything that doesn't involve divination can't be a valid character type, or that you can't do very neat things with Ori despite not being big into chicken bones and palm nuts. I would think this issue comes up a lot more for Scions of the Orisha who know them in their New World incarnations; while ceremonies strongly associated with Mystery and the gods do exist in vodun and Santeria and the like, the urgent need to perform a divination for everything, all the time isn't as strong as it is at home in Africa, and Scions from across the big water may be from different religious milieus despite still being under of the overall Orisha umbrella. Also, sometimes there are just Scions who don't wanna do what their parents do. That's traditional for this game, after all.
So, anyway. The concept of Ori and figuring out what it is and what to do about it is best expressed in Scion by the Prophecy and Mystery purviews. That makes a lot of sense and gives us a nice clear framework for stuff to happen around the concept of sacred destiny, but it does make life more challenging for Scions who don't have those purviews (or easy access to others who have them). At low Legend levels, the easiest thing to do is probably what everyone who isn't Orisha usually does when they need to talk to an oracle: go find one. Seek out the local wise woman, witch doctor, oracular mouthpiece or servant of the gods, and use your Ori boons on them (and remember, they don't have to be Yoruba or perform divinations the Yoruba way as long as they get you the info you need). You won't be able to do it as often as if you had a mobile oracle with you, but you can still make it something you do before embarking on important missions or making life-changing decisions. You could also try to get a non-Scion oracle to travel with you, at least sometimes; the simplest way to pull that off is just to take a Guide or Follower Birthright that can perform divinations for you, but if you want to save those points, you could also try to just convince oracles you run into to accompany you (or kidnap them, but they're probably less inclined to cooperate that way). Once you've reached Legend 7, of course, you'll be able to use Babalawo/Iyalawo to just designate people as temporary diviners, making it unnecessary to seek out professional ones unless you need a truly epic feat that those with the temporary powers can't manage for you.
If, on the other hand, you happen to be a Scion of the Orisha who just doesn't want to ever bother with divinations and doesn't plan on using those boons at all, you do have a thornier path to travel. Just like a Yazata Scion who is a pathological liar or a Bogovi Scion who doesn't want to be saddled with additional Virtues, you're choosing to go against the traditional powers, dictates and values of your pantheon, and that's naturally going to mean that some doors are closed to you. The divination boons will probably be mostly useless to you, and there's not much that you can really do about that. But the good news is that only three out of ten Ori boons require divination, and they're not all clustered at any one level, meaning that you'll still have the tasty bonuses of Akunlegba to keep you warm at Hero and Akunleyan, Iwa Pele and Olori Rere to prevent your Demigod career from being all about bothering prophets for information. You'll still have to buy those divination-based boons, of course, but you're trying to become well-versed in the powers and beliefs of your native pantheon, after all, and it's not up to you what they consider most religiously important. You can absolutely decide you're not interested in their bullshit and not participate, but it stands to reason that you're not going to get access to all the powers that bullshit brings if you do.
Honestly, I think nonconformist Orisha Scions have it easier than those of some of the other pantheons; at least they do get other powers, and they probably only have to worry about Eshu (who is notoriously easy to offend when he feels he isn't getting enough divination sacrifices) going batshit on them for neglecting their duties. Compared to the poor Aztlanti Scion who won't perform blood sacrifice and has an entirely useless purview and a whole pantheon ready to kick his ass over it or the Yazata Scion who loses his whole PSP and becomes Enemy One to his parent when he starts lying about something as innocent as whether or not his friend looks fat in those jeans, the Orisha Scion who doesn't feel like divination is doing pretty well.
As always, the pantheon determines what their powers, Virtues and outlook on the universe are, but Scions are new creatures who can choose to align themselves with or reject those values as they see fit. Fighting against the current is always harder than swimming with it, but that doesn't mean you can't do it.
Monday, March 25, 2013
Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum
Question: 506+ Mystery questions per story seems a little excessive. Maybe let the players add successes as if Mystery were an Epic Attribute, then let them save any unasked questions to be used throughout the story?
We were a little confused by this one. John responds to confusion by yelling. I respond by organizing things. So here's a shouty but very well-organized post, comin' at ya.
In case anyone missed it or wasn't quite sure what we were doing, I'll preamble with a quick explanation of the recent change to Mystery and why it's now better than it was. In the old system, your Scion with Mystery had channels equal to his dots of Mystery each story, and to use them he'd pay a point of Legend, roll his Intelligence + Occult without the benefit of Epic Attributes or Fatebonds, and then use the resulting successes as a pool of questions he could ask the Storyteller to gain secret knowledge. In the new system, the Attribute is removed; the Scion instead rolls only her Occult, and gains her level of Mystery as automatic successes as if it were an Epic Attribute. Then, just as before, she uses those total successes to ask her questions.
The old version worked well enough, but its major problem was that it wasn't justifying its XP cost. Scions who purchased more Mystery were spending ever greater amounts of XP, but their only reward was a single Mystery channel more per story than they already had, and that remained constant throughout the purview's lifetime. It sucks to pay 40 XP and still get only the same benefit you got when you were paying 15 XP, and since the roll was totally dependent on an Attribute and Ability, it didn't actually make you any better at your powers and buying more Mystery became an increasingly expensive way to throw some XP down a black hole until you made it to the Wyrd. You were getting benefits for your XP, but they weren't scaling the way they should have been. So the new system solves that problem; each dot of Mystery you buy still gets you an additional channel, but your increased XP cost also brings with it increased success at actually using the purview.
So that's why we made the change, and it's a good one that rewards Scions for their investment. So on to your question!
First of all, the number 506 puzzled the daylights out of us - where did it come from? What kind of character are you envisioning and what kind of model are you using? What's going on here? In an effort to put the world in order, I made a table of the average Mystery questions at each level, because shut up I can do that if I want to.
Okay, there we go - obviously, you're thinking of someone with maximum Mystery (and probably maximum Occult or close to it). Groovy. Keep in mind that the table above is just for average, unadorned rolls - if you have Arete or Serendipity, apply dice adders to Occult, choose to use Legendary Deeds or channel Virtues or do anything else to buff your Mystery rolls, these numbers can easily go up. Of course, that's not new - you could do all those things in the old Mystery system, too (at least the new one cuts Animal Aspect out of the equation).
Moving on to the question: actually, we don't think 500+ish is excessive at all. The person you're talking about is a god or goddess of Mystery; they are one of the few embodiments of that concept walking the Worlds and are masters of it in a way that very few deities ('bout 10% of the gods available as divine parents) could ever hope to be. We're not just talking about a Scion's Mystery roll - we're talking about Thoth's Mystery roll, and we have no trouble whatsoever believing that Thoth can easily pull a 50+ every time he reaches into the mysteries of the universe. It can look a little daunting when you realize that you'll have to deal with that same level of successes, either from the point of view of a Storyteller who's going to have to answer all of them or a player who's going to have to come up with that many things he needs to ask about, but it's important to remember that, once that PC has reached this level, he's on a level playing field with Thoth. Scion's famous for the stratospheric power curve that lets lowly semi-mortals become insane divinities by the time they reach godhood, and that goes for the mental powers just as much as for the physical ability to hit stuff or the social moxy to charm the kingdoms of heaven. If you don't want to Storytell for PCs who become equivalent in power to the gods themselves, you'd better tell your players ahead of time that you'll be capping them after Demigod or else get out of the game entirely. If you don't want to play as a being equivalent in power to the gods, you probably aren't looking for God-level Scion play.
It's also important to remember that worrying about the 506/510 number is more of a panic and distraction issue than a useful one. That's going to be spread out over the course of a story, remember; nobody is ever going to sit down in front of the ST and say, "Okay, I got 510 questions and YOU WILL ANSWER THEM RIGHT NOW." (Well, I suppose that could happen if they blew all their channels at once, but sweet fried froglegs, why would you ever do that?) What you'll actually be encountering are PCs who say, "Okay, I got 55 questions," and they'll do that occasionally over the course of the story, when it's most important or useful for them to do so. This is manageable for both player and Storyteller; I promise it is. Our Prophecy and Mystery PCs at Legend 9 were rolling more than that in the old system because they wanted to juice their rolls or would blow more than one channel together, and it still worked just fine. Don't let the big number scare you - it's theoretical, not a bogeyman that will ever actually appear at your table in all its glory.
Now, down into the nitty gritty of managing large numbers of Mystery questions. I sympathize with you, actually, because I personally hate using Mystery on my own characters because I always feel pressured to come up with questions. I don't have a lot of real-life Wits, so in the heat of the ASK YOUR QUESTIONS moment I often get scatterbrained or feel like I must be forgetting something I need to know. I'm also familiar with the dilemma of, "Well, I learned everything I popped Mystery for, what the hell do I do with these other twenty questions I still have?" I feel you, I really do. But there are things that both parties involved can do to make large numbers of Mystery questions not just palatable but fun, and nobody need groan when they roll high. Like all other things in Scion except for Virtue Extremities, rolling high is good! It means you are awesome and able to do and learn ever more awesome things!
For players, the first thing to keep in mind is that there are other fish in the sea. Most of us use Mystery because we're in a predicament, stumped by a puzzle or in need of more information before we go into a situation, but it's easy to lose sight of the fact that you can ask about anything, not just what was first and foremost on your mind when you decided to use Mystery. If you get thirty questions and still have ten left over, those ten aren't accidental excess and cause for consternation; they're an opportunity to get some other stuff figured out, like a bonus! Ask about other things that are important to your character, perhaps personal issues, side quests or just things she's curious about and can't figure out on her own. Ask about events transpiring elsewhere, about the secrets of your fellow Scions, about the weaknesses of recurring enemies who aren't here right now. There is an entire world that your Scion lives in that contains secrets she doesn't yet know; ask about those secrets! Some of our Mystery-using PCs in the past have kept a list with their character sheet of things they might want to know about, so they can whip it out and start firing off questions if they have any extra available. That's actually how Sophia solved the riddle of her true birth parents; she used extra questions to ask about them whenever she had them until she finally figured out what was going on. Yes, Mystery is often used to succeed at whatever the band's up to and to help out the team, but don't be afraid to use questions on your own agenda, too. If your friends complain about it, they can get their own Mystery channels.
And speaking of your friends, that's the other really helpful part of extra Mystery questions - you can open the field to everybody else! Mystery is modeled mechanically by the player asking the Storyteller for information, but that doesn't mean that within the gameworld it necessarily means that, so you could learn hidden knowledge you weren't even looking for at the drop of a hat. If you've got extra questions and don't have anything to use them on, see if your fellow players have suggestions; just as we talked about above, there may be plenty of things they want to know about that aren't directly related to your current mission, or they may have suggestions that didn't occur to you. You should never feel pressured or obligated to use your Mystery questions for others if you don't want to - as I said, they can buy their own damn Mystery if they're that hungry for it - but if you've got extras, why not share the love? Remember, too, that you're the one gaining that knowledge, not them, and if you're so inclined you can wait until the perfect moment to reveal what you know or hide it until it most benefits you. Aurora drove Will absolutely bonkers by withholding Mystery knowledge so that he would do what she wanted him to do, and we had a really fun time with the interaction of those two characters bartering knowledge and favors.
On the other side of the table, the single most important tool at a Storyteller's disposal for Mystery is this line right here from the purview's description, bolded for your convenience: Extremely complex, fateful or intentionally obscured questions may require more than one question be used in order for Fate to provide the answer. That means that successes don't necessarily translate directly to questions. Some questions, by virtue of being too important, large or mysterious, cost more than one success in order for a Scion to get an answer about them, and if they don't pony up they'll remain in the dark. Sure, if all of a Scion's questions are along the lines of "How many soldiers does the enemy have right now?" or "Where is the troll's treasure-hoard buried?", those will all be easy one-question answers. But if they start asking things like, "Who was that suspiciously clever old one-eyed man who disappeared when we weren't looking?", you know what? That's gonna cost you, let's say... fifty questions. Odin ain't as easy to find information about as your garden-variety spartan soldiers. Cough up or go home.
That doesn't mean you should abuse the system just to cut down on questions; your player paid XP and Legend to use this power, and you should let him shine just as much as the guy who did the same to buy Mortal Stroke or Theme Music. If you charge five questions a pop for mundane things like the movements of people the same Legend as the Scion or what the secret code to a locked safe is, you're being an asshole. But you're fully justified when, if your Legend 4 player rolls in with his ten questions and asks you where Atlantis is sunk, you smile cheerfully and tell him he'll need like six times as many questions to find that out. After all, if some things are mysteries even to some gods, your Scions with only a couple of dots of Mystery shouldn't be able to easily find them out. Remember that anybody after Legend 4 can pick up a few dots of Mystery for a couple measly XP, so there are a lot of things in the world that can't be and shouldn't be answered for the price of a single success on that roll.
This also means that your players can never cheat the system, they can never use clever wordplay to screw with you, and they can never get more answers out of you than they should. They never get to say, "Ah, but I worded like five questions into one so you have to answer all five for the price of one question!" You don't. Tell them no. They never get to say, "It's only a single question I'm asking so you have to answer even though I'm demanding to know where the lost regalia of Amaterasu is hidden!" You don't. Tell them no. You are in charge of personifying Fate, and Fate is not impressed by their shenanigans. You're the one in charge of this show, and your job is to appropriately dispense hidden wisdom in proportion to the effort, power and success of their Mystery rolls. You want to encourage them to discover neat stuff and to peer past the mists of obscurement, but you don't have to put up with them being dicks.
Another thing to keep in mind to increase your players' comfort level with Mystery is that every player's different in how they want to actually do the deed. Some love to do their Mystery at the table as a community event, sharing all the info around so they don't have to repeat it later and relishing the excitement as everyone learns new stuff together. Others prefer their answers to be secret, since after all only they actually know this information in the game's world, and need more shenanigans to be involved. Don't be afraid to step into another room with your Mystery player for a second to give them their secret answers, or to write them down on a piece of paper and slide it over to them instead of speaking things aloud, whatever works best for your group. If the other players grouse about not being in the loop, remind them, once again, that they can buy Mystery themselves if they want access to this power.
Finally, if you see that a player's struggling with their Mystery questions, it's okay to make suggestions. Don't outright spend their questions for them by just giving them info they might not have asked for, but as the Storyteller you're totally free to suggest alternative options they might not have thought of, or to remind them of things they've mentioned wanting to know more about in the past. Just as you'd nudge a group that was floundering with where to go or what to do, you can nudge a player who's floundering on Mystery.
With all of those things in your corner, you should be able to make Mystery as awesome as it needs to be whether you're a player or a Storyteller. Remember that it's all about the magical power to discover secret knowledge, and have fun with that; don't get stressed or panicky because it's "too hard to think of questions" or "might ruin your plot". Scions have a lot of things going on that they need to know about, and their actions can change the course of plots in a lot of ways, regardless of whether or not Mystery is involved. Treat the purview like a collaborative effort between the Storyteller and the player (and the rest of the band, if the player is so inclined) so that everybody knows what to do and can benefit from that Scion's awesome and unexpected wisdom.
As for the last part of your question: no, we're not going to do that. Mystery is about learning unknown or arcane knowledge through some ritual agency - throwing bones, entering a trance, becoming intoxicated or otherwise calling in some impressive way upon Fate to reveal its mysteries. Actually performing Mystery (which could be any of those ways or whatever other thing your players want to stunt) should be an event that has a result in the sudden gain of mysterious enlightenment. It isn't, however, a random "let me ask whatever I want whenever I want regardless of what's happening" power, and it shouldn't be used that way. "Banking" questions like that takes Mystery from the realm of the divinations and enlightenments of mythology to a bland RPG power that's just about getting the ST to answer your questions, and it loses all of its mythological resonance as a result.
Then, too, it's also powergamey in the extreme; isn't it always better to "bank" questions if you can, because then you can ask them after you're learned more later rather than when you first decided you needed Mystery? You're in effect able to finagle it so that your Mystery questions are worth more if you save them because they can build on knowledge you didn't have yet back when you first used Mystery, and it would be silly to do anything but always use all your Mystery channels at the beginning of a story and then just sit on the monster pile of questions and parcel them out throughout. Doing so at the beginning of the story also ensures that you never have to worry about having enough resources to use your Mystery, that you have all your channels, Deeds and other buffs ready and unused and just waiting to go into buffing it, and that you're never in danger of picking up Fatebonds or spending ticks in combat doing it, thus avoiding all the normal issues that powers are prey to. That system actually encourages Scions to field the giant number of questions rather than discouraging it, and, more importantly, it's not part of the mythology of what people like Dionysus or Orunmila actually do and represent.
And besides, it's just the reverse mirror of what is already happening in the current system. You're suggesting they do a divination, then ask questions when they need to know things; we're suggesting they wait until they need to know things, then do a divination. There's no good reason to swap - it doesn't even bring the total number of questions down! - and a very good reason, the dissolution of Mystery's actual function in mythology, not to.
I hope you guys wanted to read a lot about Mystery today.
We were a little confused by this one. John responds to confusion by yelling. I respond by organizing things. So here's a shouty but very well-organized post, comin' at ya.
In case anyone missed it or wasn't quite sure what we were doing, I'll preamble with a quick explanation of the recent change to Mystery and why it's now better than it was. In the old system, your Scion with Mystery had channels equal to his dots of Mystery each story, and to use them he'd pay a point of Legend, roll his Intelligence + Occult without the benefit of Epic Attributes or Fatebonds, and then use the resulting successes as a pool of questions he could ask the Storyteller to gain secret knowledge. In the new system, the Attribute is removed; the Scion instead rolls only her Occult, and gains her level of Mystery as automatic successes as if it were an Epic Attribute. Then, just as before, she uses those total successes to ask her questions.
The old version worked well enough, but its major problem was that it wasn't justifying its XP cost. Scions who purchased more Mystery were spending ever greater amounts of XP, but their only reward was a single Mystery channel more per story than they already had, and that remained constant throughout the purview's lifetime. It sucks to pay 40 XP and still get only the same benefit you got when you were paying 15 XP, and since the roll was totally dependent on an Attribute and Ability, it didn't actually make you any better at your powers and buying more Mystery became an increasingly expensive way to throw some XP down a black hole until you made it to the Wyrd. You were getting benefits for your XP, but they weren't scaling the way they should have been. So the new system solves that problem; each dot of Mystery you buy still gets you an additional channel, but your increased XP cost also brings with it increased success at actually using the purview.
So that's why we made the change, and it's a good one that rewards Scions for their investment. So on to your question!
First of all, the number 506 puzzled the daylights out of us - where did it come from? What kind of character are you envisioning and what kind of model are you using? What's going on here? In an effort to put the world in order, I made a table of the average Mystery questions at each level, because shut up I can do that if I want to.
| Level of Mystery | Average Successes | Total per Story |
| 1 | 2-4 | 2-4 |
| 2 | 3-5 | 6-10 |
| 3 | 5-8 | 15-24 |
| 4 | 8-10 | 32-40 |
| 5 | 12-14 | 60-70 |
| 6 | 17-20 | 102-120 |
| 7 | 23-26 | 161-182 |
| 8 | 30-34 | 240-272 |
| 9 | 38-42 | 342-378 |
| 10 | 47-51 | 470-510 |
Okay, there we go - obviously, you're thinking of someone with maximum Mystery (and probably maximum Occult or close to it). Groovy. Keep in mind that the table above is just for average, unadorned rolls - if you have Arete or Serendipity, apply dice adders to Occult, choose to use Legendary Deeds or channel Virtues or do anything else to buff your Mystery rolls, these numbers can easily go up. Of course, that's not new - you could do all those things in the old Mystery system, too (at least the new one cuts Animal Aspect out of the equation).
Moving on to the question: actually, we don't think 500+ish is excessive at all. The person you're talking about is a god or goddess of Mystery; they are one of the few embodiments of that concept walking the Worlds and are masters of it in a way that very few deities ('bout 10% of the gods available as divine parents) could ever hope to be. We're not just talking about a Scion's Mystery roll - we're talking about Thoth's Mystery roll, and we have no trouble whatsoever believing that Thoth can easily pull a 50+ every time he reaches into the mysteries of the universe. It can look a little daunting when you realize that you'll have to deal with that same level of successes, either from the point of view of a Storyteller who's going to have to answer all of them or a player who's going to have to come up with that many things he needs to ask about, but it's important to remember that, once that PC has reached this level, he's on a level playing field with Thoth. Scion's famous for the stratospheric power curve that lets lowly semi-mortals become insane divinities by the time they reach godhood, and that goes for the mental powers just as much as for the physical ability to hit stuff or the social moxy to charm the kingdoms of heaven. If you don't want to Storytell for PCs who become equivalent in power to the gods themselves, you'd better tell your players ahead of time that you'll be capping them after Demigod or else get out of the game entirely. If you don't want to play as a being equivalent in power to the gods, you probably aren't looking for God-level Scion play.
It's also important to remember that worrying about the 506/510 number is more of a panic and distraction issue than a useful one. That's going to be spread out over the course of a story, remember; nobody is ever going to sit down in front of the ST and say, "Okay, I got 510 questions and YOU WILL ANSWER THEM RIGHT NOW." (Well, I suppose that could happen if they blew all their channels at once, but sweet fried froglegs, why would you ever do that?) What you'll actually be encountering are PCs who say, "Okay, I got 55 questions," and they'll do that occasionally over the course of the story, when it's most important or useful for them to do so. This is manageable for both player and Storyteller; I promise it is. Our Prophecy and Mystery PCs at Legend 9 were rolling more than that in the old system because they wanted to juice their rolls or would blow more than one channel together, and it still worked just fine. Don't let the big number scare you - it's theoretical, not a bogeyman that will ever actually appear at your table in all its glory.
Now, down into the nitty gritty of managing large numbers of Mystery questions. I sympathize with you, actually, because I personally hate using Mystery on my own characters because I always feel pressured to come up with questions. I don't have a lot of real-life Wits, so in the heat of the ASK YOUR QUESTIONS moment I often get scatterbrained or feel like I must be forgetting something I need to know. I'm also familiar with the dilemma of, "Well, I learned everything I popped Mystery for, what the hell do I do with these other twenty questions I still have?" I feel you, I really do. But there are things that both parties involved can do to make large numbers of Mystery questions not just palatable but fun, and nobody need groan when they roll high. Like all other things in Scion except for Virtue Extremities, rolling high is good! It means you are awesome and able to do and learn ever more awesome things!
For players, the first thing to keep in mind is that there are other fish in the sea. Most of us use Mystery because we're in a predicament, stumped by a puzzle or in need of more information before we go into a situation, but it's easy to lose sight of the fact that you can ask about anything, not just what was first and foremost on your mind when you decided to use Mystery. If you get thirty questions and still have ten left over, those ten aren't accidental excess and cause for consternation; they're an opportunity to get some other stuff figured out, like a bonus! Ask about other things that are important to your character, perhaps personal issues, side quests or just things she's curious about and can't figure out on her own. Ask about events transpiring elsewhere, about the secrets of your fellow Scions, about the weaknesses of recurring enemies who aren't here right now. There is an entire world that your Scion lives in that contains secrets she doesn't yet know; ask about those secrets! Some of our Mystery-using PCs in the past have kept a list with their character sheet of things they might want to know about, so they can whip it out and start firing off questions if they have any extra available. That's actually how Sophia solved the riddle of her true birth parents; she used extra questions to ask about them whenever she had them until she finally figured out what was going on. Yes, Mystery is often used to succeed at whatever the band's up to and to help out the team, but don't be afraid to use questions on your own agenda, too. If your friends complain about it, they can get their own Mystery channels.
And speaking of your friends, that's the other really helpful part of extra Mystery questions - you can open the field to everybody else! Mystery is modeled mechanically by the player asking the Storyteller for information, but that doesn't mean that within the gameworld it necessarily means that, so you could learn hidden knowledge you weren't even looking for at the drop of a hat. If you've got extra questions and don't have anything to use them on, see if your fellow players have suggestions; just as we talked about above, there may be plenty of things they want to know about that aren't directly related to your current mission, or they may have suggestions that didn't occur to you. You should never feel pressured or obligated to use your Mystery questions for others if you don't want to - as I said, they can buy their own damn Mystery if they're that hungry for it - but if you've got extras, why not share the love? Remember, too, that you're the one gaining that knowledge, not them, and if you're so inclined you can wait until the perfect moment to reveal what you know or hide it until it most benefits you. Aurora drove Will absolutely bonkers by withholding Mystery knowledge so that he would do what she wanted him to do, and we had a really fun time with the interaction of those two characters bartering knowledge and favors.
On the other side of the table, the single most important tool at a Storyteller's disposal for Mystery is this line right here from the purview's description, bolded for your convenience: Extremely complex, fateful or intentionally obscured questions may require more than one question be used in order for Fate to provide the answer. That means that successes don't necessarily translate directly to questions. Some questions, by virtue of being too important, large or mysterious, cost more than one success in order for a Scion to get an answer about them, and if they don't pony up they'll remain in the dark. Sure, if all of a Scion's questions are along the lines of "How many soldiers does the enemy have right now?" or "Where is the troll's treasure-hoard buried?", those will all be easy one-question answers. But if they start asking things like, "Who was that suspiciously clever old one-eyed man who disappeared when we weren't looking?", you know what? That's gonna cost you, let's say... fifty questions. Odin ain't as easy to find information about as your garden-variety spartan soldiers. Cough up or go home.
That doesn't mean you should abuse the system just to cut down on questions; your player paid XP and Legend to use this power, and you should let him shine just as much as the guy who did the same to buy Mortal Stroke or Theme Music. If you charge five questions a pop for mundane things like the movements of people the same Legend as the Scion or what the secret code to a locked safe is, you're being an asshole. But you're fully justified when, if your Legend 4 player rolls in with his ten questions and asks you where Atlantis is sunk, you smile cheerfully and tell him he'll need like six times as many questions to find that out. After all, if some things are mysteries even to some gods, your Scions with only a couple of dots of Mystery shouldn't be able to easily find them out. Remember that anybody after Legend 4 can pick up a few dots of Mystery for a couple measly XP, so there are a lot of things in the world that can't be and shouldn't be answered for the price of a single success on that roll.
This also means that your players can never cheat the system, they can never use clever wordplay to screw with you, and they can never get more answers out of you than they should. They never get to say, "Ah, but I worded like five questions into one so you have to answer all five for the price of one question!" You don't. Tell them no. They never get to say, "It's only a single question I'm asking so you have to answer even though I'm demanding to know where the lost regalia of Amaterasu is hidden!" You don't. Tell them no. You are in charge of personifying Fate, and Fate is not impressed by their shenanigans. You're the one in charge of this show, and your job is to appropriately dispense hidden wisdom in proportion to the effort, power and success of their Mystery rolls. You want to encourage them to discover neat stuff and to peer past the mists of obscurement, but you don't have to put up with them being dicks.
Another thing to keep in mind to increase your players' comfort level with Mystery is that every player's different in how they want to actually do the deed. Some love to do their Mystery at the table as a community event, sharing all the info around so they don't have to repeat it later and relishing the excitement as everyone learns new stuff together. Others prefer their answers to be secret, since after all only they actually know this information in the game's world, and need more shenanigans to be involved. Don't be afraid to step into another room with your Mystery player for a second to give them their secret answers, or to write them down on a piece of paper and slide it over to them instead of speaking things aloud, whatever works best for your group. If the other players grouse about not being in the loop, remind them, once again, that they can buy Mystery themselves if they want access to this power.
Finally, if you see that a player's struggling with their Mystery questions, it's okay to make suggestions. Don't outright spend their questions for them by just giving them info they might not have asked for, but as the Storyteller you're totally free to suggest alternative options they might not have thought of, or to remind them of things they've mentioned wanting to know more about in the past. Just as you'd nudge a group that was floundering with where to go or what to do, you can nudge a player who's floundering on Mystery.
With all of those things in your corner, you should be able to make Mystery as awesome as it needs to be whether you're a player or a Storyteller. Remember that it's all about the magical power to discover secret knowledge, and have fun with that; don't get stressed or panicky because it's "too hard to think of questions" or "might ruin your plot". Scions have a lot of things going on that they need to know about, and their actions can change the course of plots in a lot of ways, regardless of whether or not Mystery is involved. Treat the purview like a collaborative effort between the Storyteller and the player (and the rest of the band, if the player is so inclined) so that everybody knows what to do and can benefit from that Scion's awesome and unexpected wisdom.
As for the last part of your question: no, we're not going to do that. Mystery is about learning unknown or arcane knowledge through some ritual agency - throwing bones, entering a trance, becoming intoxicated or otherwise calling in some impressive way upon Fate to reveal its mysteries. Actually performing Mystery (which could be any of those ways or whatever other thing your players want to stunt) should be an event that has a result in the sudden gain of mysterious enlightenment. It isn't, however, a random "let me ask whatever I want whenever I want regardless of what's happening" power, and it shouldn't be used that way. "Banking" questions like that takes Mystery from the realm of the divinations and enlightenments of mythology to a bland RPG power that's just about getting the ST to answer your questions, and it loses all of its mythological resonance as a result.
Then, too, it's also powergamey in the extreme; isn't it always better to "bank" questions if you can, because then you can ask them after you're learned more later rather than when you first decided you needed Mystery? You're in effect able to finagle it so that your Mystery questions are worth more if you save them because they can build on knowledge you didn't have yet back when you first used Mystery, and it would be silly to do anything but always use all your Mystery channels at the beginning of a story and then just sit on the monster pile of questions and parcel them out throughout. Doing so at the beginning of the story also ensures that you never have to worry about having enough resources to use your Mystery, that you have all your channels, Deeds and other buffs ready and unused and just waiting to go into buffing it, and that you're never in danger of picking up Fatebonds or spending ticks in combat doing it, thus avoiding all the normal issues that powers are prey to. That system actually encourages Scions to field the giant number of questions rather than discouraging it, and, more importantly, it's not part of the mythology of what people like Dionysus or Orunmila actually do and represent.
And besides, it's just the reverse mirror of what is already happening in the current system. You're suggesting they do a divination, then ask questions when they need to know things; we're suggesting they wait until they need to know things, then do a divination. There's no good reason to swap - it doesn't even bring the total number of questions down! - and a very good reason, the dissolution of Mystery's actual function in mythology, not to.
I hope you guys wanted to read a lot about Mystery today.
Friday, March 8, 2013
Through the Veil, Again!
Question: Fluff-wise, what's the difference between Prophecy and Mystery? Why would some gods have only one and not both?
The quick answer: because Prophecy is seeing things that are yet to be and making pronouncements about the future, and Mystery is seeing hidden knowledge that exists in the here and now and can only be accessed by the truly enlightened. They both involve gaining information from Fate, but they are very different ideas, and of all the gods across all the mythologies involved in Scion, it's a very tiny number that actually do both instead of being aligned with one or the other.
The long answer: in this post on the subject here! Go wild!
The quick answer: because Prophecy is seeing things that are yet to be and making pronouncements about the future, and Mystery is seeing hidden knowledge that exists in the here and now and can only be accessed by the truly enlightened. They both involve gaining information from Fate, but they are very different ideas, and of all the gods across all the mythologies involved in Scion, it's a very tiny number that actually do both instead of being aligned with one or the other.
The long answer: in this post on the subject here! Go wild!
Thursday, August 30, 2012
The Art of Seeing
Question: I have considered merging the Mystery and Prophecy purviews into one purview (Vision maybe?). What do you think are the pros and cons of this idea and why didn’t you decide to merge the two together?
We have never combined Mystery and Prophecy because they're completely different ideas that are expressed by completely different gods across world mythology in completely different ways. So that.
I see where you're coming from, because when you boil them down and remove all their context, they sound like very similar powers; they're both about magically learning knowledge as a result of poking around in Fate's innards, and under that lens it sounds silly to have two specializations. But when you widen that scope to look at how Mystery and Prophecy manifest and are used across world mythology, it quickly becomes apparent how very different they really are. Instances in which the one accompanies the other are extremely rare, and practices involving the two are very different.
The easiest comparative example is a favorite of classicists everywhere: Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo is the epitome of Prophecy; he is the power behind the Oracle of Delphi, the dispenser of visions of the future that was famed and revered across not just Greece but most of the ancient world. The oracle (and prophetic Apollo himself) dispensed warnings and glimpses of things yet to be and was sought out to help make decisions that affect the future. Dionysus, on the other hand, is a perfect example of Mystery in action; he is associated with seeing beyond the veil of normal perception and discovering secret knowledge by subjecting himself and those around him to the warping influences of inebriation and madness. He is representative of the idea of learning secret truths and mysteries by altering himself and the world around him, and is accompanied by more mystery cults and rites than you could shake a stick at.
They're both awesome, but they're also very much not the same. Nobody goes to Apollo or any of his many oracles to ask about what their neighbor is thinking right now or solve the mysteries of the universe; they ask what will happen if they take a particular action, or what their eventual fate will be, because Prophecy is about things that will happen, not things that exist now. And in the same manner, nobody is looking to Dionysus to have prophecies of the future in his drunken stupors, because that's simply not how Dionysus works; he's about enlightenment and understanding of secret ideas, not knowing what's going to happen next Tuesday. They are both strongly associated gods who clearly have one of those purviews but clearly not the other.
And they might be the easiest examples, but they aren't the only ones. Odin, who hung himself from the World Tree for secret knowledge and was the possessor and dispenser of the secret wisdom of the runes, still has to go dig up a dead prophetess and threaten her in order to get any idea what's going to happen in the future. Zeus may be one of the most widely celebrated prophets and oracular gods in all of ancient Greece, but he obviously can't just figure out things that are happening in the here-and-now, or Prometheus would never have been able to taunt him with the hidden knowledge of the identity of the mother of his fated son. Xochipilli is a god of learning secret knowledge through the ingestion of sacred hallucinogenics, but he has no whisper of knowledge of the future associated with him at all, while Manannan mac Lir is able to make pronouncements of Lugh's future with aplomb, but nobody ever calls him up for help with profound questions, instead going on quests to those who can.
In fact, of all the currently playable gods on our site, only one, Cernunnos, has both Prophecy and Mystery. That's how seldom those ideas overlap.
So while Visions is a nice idea, it's not one we ever considered seriously; the separation of Mystery and Prophecy is too deep and significant in world mythology to ignore, and keeping them as separate purviews is something we're very grateful to the original game for doing (however poorly executed those purviews might have been). The con for the idea is simply that it doesn't reflect world myth at all, and that it would be oversimplifying to a depressing degree and adding connotations to an alarming number of gods that they just don't have.
The major pro, I'm sure, has already occurred to you: Visions, as a combined purview, would be simpler. Having only one "seeing magic stuff" purview would mean that Scions could invest in a single purview instead of two, saving them XP, and the Storyteller would have fewer individual ideas to worry about if the two powers were just combined. But it wouldn't be that much simpler - it's not as if it would cause there to be fewer powers happening in play, after all, or making them take less time - and what you'd lose in mythic meaning and flavor wouldn't be nearly made up for by gaining a little XP for those few PCs who want to pick up both.
I've seen suggestions about combining these purviews before (some even want to fold Magic in and call the whole mess Fate), and my advice is always the same: don't lose sight of the setting of Scion in favor of non-essential mechanics, because that setting is what we're all here to love. Prophecy and Mystery are very different ideas and are represented by very different gods; just as you would expect a Scion who wanted both Guardian and Justice to purchase both purviews, so a Scion who wants to be both an oracle of the future and a master of the world's mysteries should commit to both of those different powers.
We have never combined Mystery and Prophecy because they're completely different ideas that are expressed by completely different gods across world mythology in completely different ways. So that.
I see where you're coming from, because when you boil them down and remove all their context, they sound like very similar powers; they're both about magically learning knowledge as a result of poking around in Fate's innards, and under that lens it sounds silly to have two specializations. But when you widen that scope to look at how Mystery and Prophecy manifest and are used across world mythology, it quickly becomes apparent how very different they really are. Instances in which the one accompanies the other are extremely rare, and practices involving the two are very different.
The easiest comparative example is a favorite of classicists everywhere: Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo is the epitome of Prophecy; he is the power behind the Oracle of Delphi, the dispenser of visions of the future that was famed and revered across not just Greece but most of the ancient world. The oracle (and prophetic Apollo himself) dispensed warnings and glimpses of things yet to be and was sought out to help make decisions that affect the future. Dionysus, on the other hand, is a perfect example of Mystery in action; he is associated with seeing beyond the veil of normal perception and discovering secret knowledge by subjecting himself and those around him to the warping influences of inebriation and madness. He is representative of the idea of learning secret truths and mysteries by altering himself and the world around him, and is accompanied by more mystery cults and rites than you could shake a stick at.
They're both awesome, but they're also very much not the same. Nobody goes to Apollo or any of his many oracles to ask about what their neighbor is thinking right now or solve the mysteries of the universe; they ask what will happen if they take a particular action, or what their eventual fate will be, because Prophecy is about things that will happen, not things that exist now. And in the same manner, nobody is looking to Dionysus to have prophecies of the future in his drunken stupors, because that's simply not how Dionysus works; he's about enlightenment and understanding of secret ideas, not knowing what's going to happen next Tuesday. They are both strongly associated gods who clearly have one of those purviews but clearly not the other.
And they might be the easiest examples, but they aren't the only ones. Odin, who hung himself from the World Tree for secret knowledge and was the possessor and dispenser of the secret wisdom of the runes, still has to go dig up a dead prophetess and threaten her in order to get any idea what's going to happen in the future. Zeus may be one of the most widely celebrated prophets and oracular gods in all of ancient Greece, but he obviously can't just figure out things that are happening in the here-and-now, or Prometheus would never have been able to taunt him with the hidden knowledge of the identity of the mother of his fated son. Xochipilli is a god of learning secret knowledge through the ingestion of sacred hallucinogenics, but he has no whisper of knowledge of the future associated with him at all, while Manannan mac Lir is able to make pronouncements of Lugh's future with aplomb, but nobody ever calls him up for help with profound questions, instead going on quests to those who can.
In fact, of all the currently playable gods on our site, only one, Cernunnos, has both Prophecy and Mystery. That's how seldom those ideas overlap.
So while Visions is a nice idea, it's not one we ever considered seriously; the separation of Mystery and Prophecy is too deep and significant in world mythology to ignore, and keeping them as separate purviews is something we're very grateful to the original game for doing (however poorly executed those purviews might have been). The con for the idea is simply that it doesn't reflect world myth at all, and that it would be oversimplifying to a depressing degree and adding connotations to an alarming number of gods that they just don't have.
The major pro, I'm sure, has already occurred to you: Visions, as a combined purview, would be simpler. Having only one "seeing magic stuff" purview would mean that Scions could invest in a single purview instead of two, saving them XP, and the Storyteller would have fewer individual ideas to worry about if the two powers were just combined. But it wouldn't be that much simpler - it's not as if it would cause there to be fewer powers happening in play, after all, or making them take less time - and what you'd lose in mythic meaning and flavor wouldn't be nearly made up for by gaining a little XP for those few PCs who want to pick up both.
I've seen suggestions about combining these purviews before (some even want to fold Magic in and call the whole mess Fate), and my advice is always the same: don't lose sight of the setting of Scion in favor of non-essential mechanics, because that setting is what we're all here to love. Prophecy and Mystery are very different ideas and are represented by very different gods; just as you would expect a Scion who wanted both Guardian and Justice to purchase both purviews, so a Scion who wants to be both an oracle of the future and a master of the world's mysteries should commit to both of those different powers.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Unsolved Mysteries
Question: Why does Prophecy have a whole Purview while Mystery stays the same?
Oddly enough, because Mystery works perfectly for its intended purpose as it is. But Prophecy didn't, really, so we booted it into the realm of normal purviews with levels.
Prophecy, in the original rules, was a terrible mess. It could only be used once per story and only did one thing, which was to give you a vague premonition of possible ideas or events from the Storyteller. It was almost functionally useless, required a Storyteller to have ironclad knowledge of what was going to happen in the story arc (so also forced Storyteller railroading if PCs started to change it from his original vision), and didn't get any more useful or powerful as you gained in Legend, no matter how many levels of it you purchased. It was perfectly awful as a purview, and one of the things we changed before we even started running the first game because no PC in their right mind would want to waste Birthright and XP points on such a useless mess.
In addition, there are so many different ways in different cultures of interacting with, learning about and influencing the future that we felt a single "here's a flash of insight" boon was very unsatisfying when it came to portraying Prophecy as a power used by very different dieties in very different ways. The Prophecy purview as we currently use it has a lot more flexibility in different future-seeing powers, from knowing when something's about to happen to making prophetic pronouncements to seeing the invisible hand of Fate in the workings of the world around you; it's a much better fit for Scion's landscape as a whole instead of trying to narrow the idea down to a single unchanging dump from the Storyteller.
Mystery, on the other hand, surprisingly didn't need most of this tinkering at all. It certainly needed to be usable more than once per story (most lame thing ever), so we altered it to be usable a number of times per story equal to your dots in Mystery, which has worked very solidly for us so far. The thing is that while prophecies take different forms and have different powers around the world, the idea of Mystery really doesn't; it might be stunted differently, from reading entrails to hearing voices to getting intoxicated to just suffering sudden brief flashes of insight, but in the end it's exactly the same thing, which is drawing mysterious knowledge out of thin air. Mystery's flexibility is in that it can ask about anything that isn't covered by Prophecy, so it already encompasses all the possible powers you could reasonably assign to it. Like Arete, it was something that, while an unorthodox idea, actually worked pretty perfectly to represent the idea it was based on, so other than making sure it wasn't a lame XP sink, we left it mostly as it was.
If you're interested in exploring alternatives, there are a few versions of Mystery out there that use boons instead of the question-system, including this one from the Scion Wiki. But we love Mystery's simplicity and perfect ability to do its job, so we're sticking with it as it is for the time being.
Oddly enough, because Mystery works perfectly for its intended purpose as it is. But Prophecy didn't, really, so we booted it into the realm of normal purviews with levels.
Prophecy, in the original rules, was a terrible mess. It could only be used once per story and only did one thing, which was to give you a vague premonition of possible ideas or events from the Storyteller. It was almost functionally useless, required a Storyteller to have ironclad knowledge of what was going to happen in the story arc (so also forced Storyteller railroading if PCs started to change it from his original vision), and didn't get any more useful or powerful as you gained in Legend, no matter how many levels of it you purchased. It was perfectly awful as a purview, and one of the things we changed before we even started running the first game because no PC in their right mind would want to waste Birthright and XP points on such a useless mess.
In addition, there are so many different ways in different cultures of interacting with, learning about and influencing the future that we felt a single "here's a flash of insight" boon was very unsatisfying when it came to portraying Prophecy as a power used by very different dieties in very different ways. The Prophecy purview as we currently use it has a lot more flexibility in different future-seeing powers, from knowing when something's about to happen to making prophetic pronouncements to seeing the invisible hand of Fate in the workings of the world around you; it's a much better fit for Scion's landscape as a whole instead of trying to narrow the idea down to a single unchanging dump from the Storyteller.
Mystery, on the other hand, surprisingly didn't need most of this tinkering at all. It certainly needed to be usable more than once per story (most lame thing ever), so we altered it to be usable a number of times per story equal to your dots in Mystery, which has worked very solidly for us so far. The thing is that while prophecies take different forms and have different powers around the world, the idea of Mystery really doesn't; it might be stunted differently, from reading entrails to hearing voices to getting intoxicated to just suffering sudden brief flashes of insight, but in the end it's exactly the same thing, which is drawing mysterious knowledge out of thin air. Mystery's flexibility is in that it can ask about anything that isn't covered by Prophecy, so it already encompasses all the possible powers you could reasonably assign to it. Like Arete, it was something that, while an unorthodox idea, actually worked pretty perfectly to represent the idea it was based on, so other than making sure it wasn't a lame XP sink, we left it mostly as it was.
If you're interested in exploring alternatives, there are a few versions of Mystery out there that use boons instead of the question-system, including this one from the Scion Wiki. But we love Mystery's simplicity and perfect ability to do its job, so we're sticking with it as it is for the time being.
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