That Darn Barn

Question: We are starting up a new game and I found your site. I like a lot of your redone boons. But I have not seen anything in your page that addresses the big issue we have with Scion, that being that once you get to demigod level any character that does not have a lot of Epic Dex can never hit anything in combat. Do your rule changes have anything dealing with that?

Indeed, we do not. However, we have no problem with that, and we'll not only tell you why, we'll also tell you how your characters can still be major and important combat forces without Epic Dexterity!

First of all, it's entirely on purpose that you need Epic Dexterity to hit things. Dexterity is the stat that measures your aim, speed and flexibility; it's the stat that allows you to be able to actually hit what you swing at, as well as avoid other peoples' swings hitting you. When you become higher Legend - and your enemies are higher Legend, too! - you will find that if you don't keep up with Epic Dexterity, you will start not being able to hit all your foes' DVs. And that's on purpose, and that's how it should be; you decided, after all, not to buy the stat that is for hitting things. So you can't hit things. Your aim sucks.

But that doesn't mean that you can't do any damage in combat! It just means you won't be able to do it with the normal punch-kick-swords variety of attacks. There are plenty of options for alternative styles of combat in Scion, and it's not just the guys who frontload their physical Epic Attributes who can fight.

To begin with, if you want to stick with just physically hurting your enemies, you can decide to be a grappler instead of a brawler or a melee fighter. Grappling - that is, wrestling or otherwise physically getting into a clinch with an opponent instead of striking them - can use Strength + Brawl to hit instead of Dexterity, allowing you to ignore that pesky Dex stat completely. It does have its limitations; enemies that are too large for you to wrestle will not be attackable in this way, and when you are in a grapple, your DV is lowered to half if you're winning or zero if you're not, making you more vulnerable to additional bad guys who may want to take a piece out of you. But it's still an option for the physical fighter who doesn't want to be all that light on her feet.

There are also a ton of powers that can allow you to lower the DV of your opponents, making it much easier to hit them even if your aim isn't great. Stuff like Blitzkrieg, Tidal Interference or Trimarkisia can lower your enemy's dodging ability through the floor, so that even if you can't normally hit the broad side of a barn you might still be able to take a piece out of them. Even without powers, your band can also perform Coordinated Assaults, which allow you to strike against an enemy at a lowered DV as long as everyone attacks at the same time.

Outside of purely physical fighting, there are also tons of ways to use boons to fight enemies. Various purviews give you excellent tools for melting the faces off your opponents - for example, at Demigod level you get access to things like Shadow Boxer in Darkness, Dragon's Breath in Fire, Levin Fury in Sky or Burn in Sun. Those are just the direct damage ones, but there are also a ton of powers that give you various other combat bonuses, from making Coordinated Assaults better to giving you a dice bonus to a specific ability or attribute to increasing your damage and so on and so forth.

While we don't change the rules to make low-Dex melee fighters inexplicably succeed at hitting enemies, you might be interested in another house rule we use, affectionately termed "purview lasers" by most of our players. The basic rule is that Scions can directly attack Titanspawn or Titans (only - not other Scions, gods or mortals) with the purviews that directly oppose them, by channeling their connection to that purview and releasing it against the Titanic creature. To do so, they spend two points of Legend and roll their total number of boons in that purview, and the unlucky Titanspawn target suffers their successes in aggravated damage. This allows anyone, fighter, healer, mage or any other type of character, to contribute in combat when they're fighting something that is opposed to their mythical powers. Even if you're the weakest most delicate flower petal of a character, you can beat up a Death-aligned creature with your Health boons once in a while.

Keep in mind, also, that not every creature you fight is going to have a maxed-out DV. Some creatures - like giants, for example - are naturally slow and ponderous, and typically have low DVs and high soaks. In many combats where more than one enemy is facing you, there may be one that is the "boss" with majorly hard to hit DV, but several minions that are easier to mop up that those of you who don't have great Dexterity, meaning you can still take some people down while letting those who are better statted take on the big ugly.

We don't see any real reason to create some kind of extra system for hitting monsters; Epic Dexterity is the stat you buy for hitting people, and if you want to hit people, you should buy it. That's kind of a no-brainer. But there are plenty of ways to be effective and useful in combat (we didn't even touch on using social powers and curse-style boons to screw with enemies!) without being able to hit the broad side of a barn, so don't feel like every character is forced to buy Dexterity until the cows come home. If you want to be accurate, speedy and capable of delivering a wickedly perfect strike to an opponent's face, buy Dexterity; if you want to do other things instead, let Dex fall by the wayside and invest in other methods of fighting off the bad guys or contributing to overall group success.

Ten Questions with Excited Waving Arms

On today's blog, project updates, future possibilities, a call to action for you guys, and a whole bunch of questions!

Question: How do you handle "secrets" in myth? Things that supposedly certain gods do not know (and would have extreme reactions if they found out) yet are an established part of the myths about them?

Question: How do you explain the story of King Midas? I mean, the guy's an ordinary mortal who gets the power to turn anything he touches into gold. What Scion powers can give such a power to a mortal?

Question: Can you kill a death god? Should you be able to kill a death god? Does killing a death god really accomplish anything?

Question: What do you think would happen if a Scion, who has not yet received a Visitation, were to simply stumble across a Birthright relic that doesn't belong to an active Scion? Could that result in a kind of "triggered activation" of the Scion's divine blood? Or would nothing happen since it isn't a true Visitation?

Question: How do you determine the damage from some of the more extreme attacks that Scion's power allows? If my Strength monster picks up the Empire State Building and hurls it at a Titan Avatar, or some other powerful foe, how do I determine how badly such an impact hurt the target? If I used Create Earth to conjure up a mess of diamonds, then threw the diamonds into a tornado conjured by Tornado Tamer and hurled the whole thing at a bad guy? How would I determine THAT damage?

Question: How far is too far for you guys at GothamByNight when it comes to PC morality? When do you take one of your Players to the side and ask them if their PC could still be considered "a good guy/aligned with the Gods" and not some Chaotic Evil Titan in waiting that is deserving of a Dark Virtue or two? For example, do you think that a God-level PC Band's active attempts to wipeout humanity or kill off their parents for their own ambitions justify them gaining Dark Virtues?

Question: Do you guys have anyway of setting apart gods and goddesses of hunting mechanically? I'm working on some homebrew and I feel like these hunt gods need some association to really drive the point home, but I don't know what. I almost find myself wanting to make a Hunt Purview, but that's a heck of a lot of work. But what else to use? Is War fitting? An attribute that most fits their hunting style? I'm really at a loss here.

Question: You said in an earlier vlog that the difference between Followers/Creatures and Guides were that Creatures and Followers were below you and Guides were beings above you. Now what if I have a character who's got contact to the Valkyries as a Guide from Hero - would it be possible at Demigod that they turned into more like an equal ally type of thing? That instead of them just giving you good advice, they help you out physically when you really need it.

Question: Nut is a Titan, Shu is a Titan, and Geb is probably going to be a Titan as well - but the most ancient of them, Ra, is not?

Question: So! If everyone on Earth, for whatever reason, suddenly got a point of Legend, and the Gods were then able to get up to their old tricks without having to worry about Fatebinding, would they? If they could without having to worry about Fatebinding, would the Gods return to Earth? Related question, is there anything you can think of from any mythology that would be capable of giving everyone on Earth a legend point? Some Uber Relic or ritual that, if done, would give everyone that kind of power?

To our sixth questioner, we now realize that while we talked about PC morality in answer to your question, we didn't really address Dark Virtues. Our rule of thumb is that Dark Virtues are something PCs gain by contact with Titans or otherwise through magical events, so for the most part we would not give them any Dark Virtues automatically just because they're being jerks. It is entirely possible for Scions (and gods, too!) to be sometimes or even often malicious without actually having Malice, just as it's possible to be interested in knowledge and learning without having Intellect or to bravely run into battle without having Courage. However, Scions who are consistently evil or often do things that are in line with the goals of the Titans are likely to attract their attention, in which case it is entirely possible they might end up corrupted by a Titan Virtue later on.

If you want to email us boons, do it here! Go nuts!

A Nice Compliment to Give Your Fighter

Question: How would you guys represent an Aristeia? A relic-altered version of Fury of War? A Virtue Extremity? Something else?

We're not totally convinced an aristeia needs to be anything, actually.

For those not up on their epic Greek poetry, an aristeia - meaning "excellent moment", from the root arete which we already know and love - is the moment in a literary or poetic story, usually a battle, when the hero demonstrates his or her finest skills and most impressive feats. The most common example of a hero having an aristeia is in the Iliad when Achilles routs the Greek army almost by himself and eventually kills Hector in the ensuing chaos, but while the Greeks use it extensively as a literary convention, heroes from other cultures could just as easily be said to have an aristeia, such as when Arjuna and Krishna rout practically all the asura in one go or Cu Chulainn clears the battlefield in the depths of his raging riastrad.

But, we don't know that you need a game mechanic to represent an aristeia in Scion. Aristeia are supposed to happen when your Scion is being at his or her shining best in combat, truly demonstrating their best abilities and worth to be a hero, and that's something they ought to be doing all the time. If your Scion's story was being written as an epic like the Iliad, their climactic battle-winning awesomeness at the end of the story would be an aristeia automatically. It's just a literary convention describing a certain part of a story, not a thing happening to the characters of the story themselves.

Most combat-oriented Scions will have an aristeia at some point in their careers - ideally, in their most awesomest battle each story. Think back over your combat characters' careers: were there times they were so awe-inspiring in combat that everyone's jaw dropped, or that they took out a seemingly impossible scene all by themselves? That was their aristeia. And if that hasn't happened yet, don't worry, because every battle might be that battle. It's a combination of good rolls, awesome stunting and just general amazing battlefield domination. We've certainly had them, from the time that Russel blew all his Deeds and Channels in one scene to take down the fire demon we had designed to fight the whole group with no one to back him up but an unconscious Skylar, or the time Eztli popped her Army of One and single-handedly wiped out an entire invading force of giants from Niflheim.

So no, we wouldn't make a relic or Extremity or anything else specifically to represent an aristeia. An aristeia might involve a relic weapon, or happen during a Virtue Extremity, or be kicked off by a Scion using a boon, but it's not any of those things itself. It's just a poetic way of saying, "Right now, this Scion is being fucking incredible at wiping the floor with her enemies," and that's what most combatters are doing in their most exciting and climactic moments.

Hired Help

Question: You've designed a lot of summoning boons. How useful have they been in your games? They all seem like they are combat-oriented, but how useful can they be against gods that are specced for combat? I'm not trying to sound critical, I don't doubt that they ARE useful, I just would like to know how so.

Well, you're not wrong about one thing: most of the mid-to-high-level summoning boons are not meant to be able to go toe to toe with a fully maxed-out god of wrecking things. They weren't designed to be replacements for actual combat characters, nor to make the elemental boon-users who call them up immune to combat problems, so if you're coming at them thinking that they're supposed to be able to take out your mortal enemy, you will be disappointed. A god that has truly invested in murder is going to be able to cut them down pretty quickly in a one-on-one fight.

However, they are in fact useful in combat in a myriad of other ways! One is simply that they are bodies you can hurl at your opponent, and in Scion's system, that's always helpful. Thanks to the five-man rule, once at least four people attack the same target, the fifth person gets a shot at them at a DV of zero, which means that if you summon a bunch of elementals, they may not do much damage on their own but may be able to give your resident badass a perfect opportunity to wreak delicious agg-soaked mayhem on an enemy from behind. This ability to overwhelm with numbers can also help people who aren't quite combat-heavy enough to hurt an enemy under normal circumstances be able to get in a few good shots. Having large numbers also makes your little army perfect for including in Coordinated Assaults, which, with enough participants, might give everybody a chance to make a dent in the opposition.

In addition to helping with big enemies, summonable creatures also make fantastic crowd controllers for combats in which there are more than one opponent or in which a large monster brings a bunch of little monsters with it. They can soak up hits that would otherwise be murdering your bandmates, buy time for people to use their powers to best effect, and mop up smaller, less dangerous opponents on their own, freeing you and your friends from the danger of being overwhelmed or taking damage from anything but your central foe. They can also do things during combat that need doing but that aren't fighting - protecting civilians, for example, guarding important items, supplying the fighters, or anything else that you and your bandmates now don't have to do so you can concentrate on the battle instead.

Also, while elementals (and even the big showstopper creatures, like the Flame Beasts and Water Beasts) aren't usually able to compete with truly badass fighting gods, they can still help you out with enemies who are less maxed out for beatdowns, and you will undoubtedly encounter a few of those in your adventures. Even the mid-level elementals can theoretically get pretty beefy; if you choose to just summon one and use all your extra successes to buff its stats, it can get up to where it can compete with middling-level Scions and monsters. Sowiljr can get a 100 on his Charisma + Command roll pretty easily, which means he can send a Frostborn Spirit in with an attack roll of 50 dice + 10 autos, soaks of 40 and a DV of 35, which is probably about comparable with a high-level Scion who hasn't really decked themselves out for combat all that much. It's not going to take down an Eztli, but it could probably manage to handle a Terminus, at least for a little while.

And, of course, they can also do non-combat things, like building stuff, guarding stuff, running errands, looking impressive when you want to be impressive, and all of that (in fact, that's all the third-level summoning boons can do anyway, since those creatures won't fight for you at all). They're not going to take over combat so all your battle Scions can go take a coffee break, but they're still versatile and useful for a lot of different things, and we've enjoyed watching Scions use them.

All Abilities, All the Time

Okay, so this is last week's vlog, finally freed from the prison of John's video processing software. Please ignore all the business about the Secret Scion gift exchange, because obviously that was meant to mostly remind people to send us pictures last week. Also please ignore all the empty space above our heads in this video - I don't know what's up lately with all our vlogs being just the tops of our heads, but we promise we'll fix it.

As promised, this vlog is about abilities in a bunch of dimensions - so here we go!

Question: So, Arete. Massive lifting, dodge DV...you'd figure a hellacious Arete: Athletics would help these derived stats, but as written, seems not?

Question: So we know you'd pick Epic Strength and MAYBE Mystery as associated for Herakles. What would you choose for his six associated abilities?

Question: Could you explain the uses of Politics and Integrity (aside from your resistance roll)? I've always had trouble defining those.

Question: Scion is the only WW system not to have Subterfuge. Does this bug y'all? Do you use Empathy for lying to people? I hate that so.

Question: Would art restoration fall under Art, Craft or Science?

Question: Why does Hel have Medicine?

Question: I'm making an NPC scion who as a mortal practiced the martial art capoeira. In this instance, is it justifiable to use either Art (Dancing) or Brawl when making an attack? Or even combining them?

The other post about the Politics ability can be found here!

Apparently, a weird video cut (John was in charge of editing this, I would like to note) accidentally cut off our discussion of how Hel is not actually one of the Aesir and there are a lot of questions about who she is and what she represents, since she's both classified with the monsters but also treated as a goddess or at least an equal to the gods of Asgard, as well as being Loki's daughter. We're sorry about that, but it can always be a topic for another day!

Two For One Deal

Question: Hello, I have a combat-oriented question. Could you please explain how the multiple action rule works? I understand that if I take a diceless action, such as let's say Winds Freedom, and want to punch someone while flying, thats -2 dice. However, if I want to do two diced actions, such as Storm Augmentation and then punching someone, its -4 dice and I use the lower of the two dice pools to roll for both. So I would roll the lower Storm Augmentation roll for both and use that for a punching roll? Why would my punching get worse?

Okay, this is definitely a great question, because it falls into the dreaded realm of Rules We Changed So Long Ago We Totally Forgot About Them and Didn't Put Them on the Site. You've just perfectly described how multiple actions work in the original Scion system, but we don't do it that way anymore. For one thing, we don't have the differing -2 and -4 dice penalties, because it's overly fiddly and past a few Legend becomes almost completely negligible and pointless; and for another, we no longer use the "lowest of the two dice pools" rule. The original writers were looking to suggest that if you're trying to do two things at once, whichever one you're worse at is going to take more of your attention and therefore make you worse at the one you're normally good at, but in practice that comes out not making very much sense. If I have 20 dice and 28 autos to one roll, and two dice with two autos to the other, it's ridiculous that I suddenly become 93% worse at the first thing that I am actually awesome at, not to mention arbitrary.

So here's the way we handle multiple actions in our games:

If you take two actions, any of them that roll a dice pool suffer a -4 dice penalty from splitting your attention, regardless of whether one is diceless or not. Both roll their own dice pools seperately. Therefore, if you activate Wind's Freedom and attack someone at the same time, your attack suffers -4 dice. If you activate Storm Augmentation and attack someone at the same time, Storm Augmentation rolls its normal Appearance + Presence roll with -4 dice, and your attack rolls as normal with -4 dice. If you activate Wind's Freedom and Lightning Flyer at the same time, the two diceless actions simply happen on the same tick.

And that's pretty much it - very simple. Always the same negative, always applied to all rolls, always use normal dice pools for each action. There are powers in the game that screw around with this, like Blitzkrieg or Multitasking, but they're the exceptions to the rule. We also occasionally allow a player to roll only once if she happens to be doing the same action twice at the same time on the same target, usually to save time at the table (especially if one or both dice pools are very large and take a while to roll), but that's up to what's going on in the scene and how important the Storyteller judges the need for separate results to be.

Honestly, we're pretty sure that lower dice pool rule is something that was written at Hero-level but that wasn't designed for higher-level play, when the difference between a good roll and a bad roll becomes staggeringly vast. It works okay when you're not going to have much more than a five-dice difference; not so much when you might have a fifty-dice difference. It's also obviously designed to try to speed up combat by having players only roll once instead of twice, which is a nice idea, but we generally found that our players spent as much time trying to figure out what dice pool they were rolling and whether or not that was mathematically the best idea as they would have just rolling both anyway.

I just updated the House Rules page so there will be less confusion in the future. Thanks for pointing this one out!

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Question: How do you do combat in game? My ST is having trouble figuring out the combat system.

Hmm. This is hard to answer, because said combat system belongs to Onyx Path and not us, and we don't want to just sit down and walk through all its mechanics because that kind of makes it unnecessary to buy the books and people get pretty mad and litigious when you encourage people not to buy their books.

Instead, could you tell us what you guys are having trouble with when it comes to the combat system? Is it the tick system? How or when to activate powers? Covering ground with Dash or Move? Damage and soak? DV and attack rolls? We'd be happy to go in-depth on any of those, but let us know so we can narrow the focus down instead of doing something that would just be a copy and paste from the rulebook.

titles

How do you use Mass Battles and how do they work in your system? (didn't find with the search)

I feel like we've talked about it once before, but the search button is shitty so who knows(but thank you for searching, it is appreciated).

Mass Combats...
We really dont have a system for it, per se. I know this isnt "helpful" but I generally deal with each mass combat separately as its own unique thing. This is really because the "mass" part of the mass combat isnt really important. Its epic, and eventful, and mass combats can be a necessary and integral part of the story. But a strict overall system that details how to work them, wouldnt be "fun" or in my opinion "good for the game."

I tend to make mass combats more like "events"(or as mat calls them, "minigames") and I have some guidelines, but not really rules.

1. The PCs are the center of the action, and their actions must have the greatest consequences.
a) Yes, maybe its a battle with 100,000 warriors. Thats cool, but it should be designed so that, no matter what, the PCs actions matter.
b) Cool stuff can happen around them or in the distance, but make sure just as much cool stuff is happening with them

2) More time(much more) is spent with the PCs and their stunts and actions then is spent doing "other stuff"
a) Dont make a system that is going to require you to take up the whole game doing "math" or rolling for npcs the pcs arent involved with
b) You can have a system to randomize the other events, but dont make it long or complicated. save the complicated stuff for pc scenes

3) Remember, the outcome doenst need to be random.
a) you want random results for actions around the pcs, but everything else can have outcomes that are predecided.
b) Just make sure to have a plan for possibilities if the PCs start interacting with predecided stuff.

I hope that was a little helpful. Next time I have a mass combat, Ill see if I can write down all my notes after so other people can use them.

Also, I think this post may end up being formatted horribly.

Arrows of the Sun

Question: Is it just me, or do a lot of sun deities seem to be ranged combatants most of the time? Could you explain how that came about?

It's not just you! Many solar deities do indeed have ranged combat associations. Huitzilopochtli is famous as the Divine Hurler, Apollo's golden arrows are renowned among his people, Houyi is a divine archer before all other things and Lugh is a danger to the universe with his trusty sling.

The major reason for this is that the sun itself is traditionally seen by many cultures as a source of incoming objects or power. The rays of the sun radiate outward and down to the earth, inescapable and ever-present; for an ancient person seeing the first shafts of sunlight appearing in the morning, penetrating through the chinks in walls and clearing away all shadows, it was an easy leap to see those rays as missiles or arrows that came from the sun. These religions are ancient and in many cases the arrow or sling was their highest level of ranged technology, but if these myths were being written in the modern day, people would probably conceive of many sun gods as being armed with lasers, carrying on the same imagery with a new example. Because the sun is in the sky, always unreachable for humanity, it was also understood by many cultures to be extremely far away, which naturally led to the assumption that its rays must be in some way hurled across that great distance to reach the earth. The same reasoning is often applied to thunder gods, who are usually also hurlers or archers thanks to humanity's perception of lightning as a missile hurled toward the world from the far-distant sky.

Many cultures also conceived of the sun as a warrior; after all, it drives away darkness and cold and returns each day to battle anew, so it only made sense to associate its far-flung rays with potent weapons. Not every sun god is a ranged combatant, of course, but even those who aren't often retain that combat imagery; Mithra's mighty arm with magical mace or Svarozhich's dragon-slaying prowess with a sword are both examples of that concept of the sun god as a cosmic soldier who overcomes the forces of darkness using melee as their preferred form of combat instead of ranged.

It's a very common image in solar mythology, which is why things like Flare Missile appear in the Sun purview, although it's not universal and your sun-related Scion has no obligation to learn guns or bows if he doesn't feel like it. There are also plenty of sun gods who don't bother with combat, either ranged or close-quarters, and if such august characters as Amaterasu and Shamash can ignore the tradition of solar archery, PCs certainly can, too. We've seen both types in our games, from Alison's explosive marksmanship combat literally blowing the heads off of her foes to Geoff's general preference for melee or just smiling really big at potential enemies.

It's always neat to see those kinds of cross-cultural similarities. It's fun to be reminded that no matter how uniquely different each pantheon's gods are, they're still creations of collective humanity, which has some universal ideas no matter where they are in the world.

Mortal Aggravation

Question: Regarding the War boon Mortal Stroke, it strikes me as extremely cheap (1L + 1w) for a power that deals aggravated damage (and based on the damage of a weapon on top of that). Considering that most other powers that deal agg cost at least 5L, is this an oversight? Or was it intended? Is there something I'm not seeing?

It's not an oversight, just a different way of working with the aggravated damage system. Let's dive into it!

To start with, the Strength knacks that inflict aggravated damage - Divine Wrath for grappling, Disfiguring Attack for punching and Hurl to the Moon for throwing - are all available to a Scion from day one with no Legend restriction. Anyone of Legend 3 or above can use them with impunity (Scions of Legend 2 can also technically get them, but they aren't yet capable of paying the 5 Legend to use them), allowing them to start wrecking it up with agg early in their Hero careers. In contrast, Mortal Stroke is a level five boon, which means that no one has access to it until they're Legend 6, well established as Demigods. Unless your game is starting character creation at Legend 6 or higher, Mortal Stroke will never be a "replacement" for other methods of doing agg simply by virtue of being unavailable. That much higher Legend restriction is also one of the reasons it costs less, because Scions have to wait so long and invest in so much War to get it.

More importantly, however, it's a different kind of cost from the Strength knacks, which means that it raises different concerns. The fact that using Mortal Stroke requires an action makes it significantly slower to use in combat, as opposed to the Strength knacks which can all be reflexively activated every time a Scion hits her enemy and don't need a separate five ticks to arm beforehand. Depending on the length of the combat, the abilities of the enemies and what the Scions are trying to achieve, that five ticks (or ten or fifteen or twenty, depending on how many times a Scion needs to use the boon) may be the crucial deciding factor between different outcomes. Scions can get around this sometimes by using Mortal Stroke on a weapon before combat starts to have it ready, but this only saves the first five ticks, and still requires them to drop another action every time they want to re-agg their weapon. That's a pretty hefty restriction in comparison, which is why the Legend cost is so low.

Also, Mortal Stroke costs a point of Willpower, which is a different pool with different possibilities and consequences, which makes it more comparable to the cost of the knacks. While Willpower is easily refilled by Charisma knacks from helpful bandmates, it's a much smaller pool and needing people to refill it also ropes them into having to spend extra actions in combat, which may or may not torpedo other things they need to be doing. Other combat powers also use Willpower, putting it at more of a premium in those crunch situations when people may not have the time to refill it for you, and using large portions of your Willpower pool inevitably puts you at much higher risk of Virtue Extremity, which can rear its head at the worst possible times (especially in combat, when people, objects and environments are in danger of being damaged by the fallout and pissing off any number of Virtues).

	Pros	Cons
Strength Knacks	Reflexive Available to all Legend levels	Legend-expensive Usable only by self
Mortal Stroke	Legend-cheap Usable on others as well as self	Requires an action to activate Willpower-expensive

So this is all intended, actually. The two are meant to be balanced against one another, the abilities of those with great strength stacked up against those with the battle acumen to bolster themselves and allies so that both are valid ways of getting there but have different difficulties attached.

Endless Questions

Late-night vlogging! With both of us now, like a band reunion tour but with more crochety mythology!

Question: When I reread the Aztlanti pantheon, I noticed that Tlazolteotl has a loooong enemies list. How did that happen?

Question: I think by now we know your hatred of World at War Scion and the gods of the US and the Allied pantheons, but I still like the idea of being a Scion of Robin Hood or someone similar. Who would you say would be most thematically similar to him (not mechanically)?

Question: Been reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman and loving it. If you HAD to, hwo would you model the Endless in Scion?

Question: Love your version of Jotunblut, but two questions about it. Does the size increase also affect your shape in boons like Animal Form and Beast Shape (do you turn into unusually big animals)? What about Appearance knacks like Undeniable Resemblance - if you change your size with it, is the shit permanent or not (giantsblood is strong stuff, after all)?

Question: Is there any way to be able to reply on Dodge late in the game? I was looking to be more of a dodge-tank, but after reading a couple of blogs and doing some math, dodging is not a good path for a combat god. Do you have any suggestions for me that would help me build a character who fights like Jackie Chan - all over the place and rarely getting hit hard? If it comes to boons, would the more ethereal elements (air and fire) be a good place to start? Are there any untouchable combat gods?

Question: My character has ripped out his eyes. Does Epic Appearance still work against me? If it still works by smell or sound, what if I destroy my nose and ears?

Question: So Lionel Cuthbert, the plantation-owning raging demigod of death, sun and ice... is he also a racist who would own slaves if he could?

The freeze-frame on this video makes us both look like someone just asked us something that makes us tired and annoyed.

Agg Damage

If Aggravated damage "rends the target's soul", what happens when you're killed by it? Is your soul so thoroughly obliterated that there's nothing left for a psychopomp to pick up afterwards - do not pass "go", do not collect your eternal reward?

I wouldnt say there is nothing left, but it is probably pretty damaged looking. Im not sure if this is a houserule or not, but all of our deaths are, eventually, from agg damage. After they have full lethal(and have taken their first dying box) I allow additional damage to go either into dying boxes or to be made added as agg damage. So, a PC always ends up taking full agg damage before they actually die as they try to survive(npcs dont have this luxury,, usually, so the question is still there).

Souls still exist even when people die of horrible agg related tragedies(unless the story needs it not to). We still want there to be souls from when people are dropped in volcanoes. We want the survivors of hiroshima or pompeii to still have souls that exist, if for no other reason then as a painful reminder to those who might make the same mistakes again.

However, thats just how we play it. I could totally see a world where you werent allowed to upgrade damage from lethal to agg to avoid death, but that if you died from agg there was no way of bringing you back. Or maybe you could still upgrade lethal to agg, but that was a choice between a normal death and losing your soul forever. I think that is probably an even more brutal game then the scion we play(which is fucking deadly), but could be very interesting.

Sucker Punch

Question: I am a bit afraid to ask... how do you survive being hit by Eztli? The first hit is skinshedded, but after that?

Alas for Eztli's foes, for she wields a great and totally uncontrolled power, and she's not picky about whose face it hits first. You're right that getting hit by Eztli is now An Experience; at this point, only gods with Strength associated with them are rocking a meaner left hook, and her job is almost exclusively to mow things down while the rest of the band does the things that require finesse or emotional response or brains.

But she doesn't automatically murder everything - far from it. Just like every other combat PC in the world, she tends to fight things tailored by the Storyteller to challenge her, because otherwise there would be no point. Eztli's enemies are usually other gods, Titan Avatars and Typhonian beasts that are far from pushovers, and she still has her share of major scenes in which she has to turn it up to eleven or twelve to triumph.

As for other PC-style enemies, though... well, survival is harder, not gonna lie. After the initial skin-shed, nobody else in her band could survive a direct shot to the face from her if she really meant it (luckily for them, however, she usually doesn't, and they only get the love taps that are a hazard of the business for hanging out with super-strong loose cannons). Most Scions and gods at her level couldn't unless they were expressly built for survivability; if you want to survive someone who's put most of their effort into breaking your face, put yours into keeping that face intact.

To start with, Stamina knacks are your best friends when trying to keep from being pulverized (by any majorly strong enemy, not just our favorite Aztec psychopath). Damage Conversion and Divine Damage Conversion are musts to ensure that you can apply your best soaks to the incoming damage, and Unbreakable allows you to blow as much Legend as necessary to deal with overflow that your normal soaks can't handle (of course, it's a lot of Legend at once sometimes, but it beats dying). Some of these will be rendered moot if she happens to get her Armor Crusher on, but Earth Body has the awesome side effect of letting you apply your armor even if she would normally ignore it. Dexterity knacks, while they won't always spare you actually taking the hit, can bring the pain down to a more manageable level as well, especially Roll With It to increase your soaking capacity and Untouchable Opponent to bring down the threshold successes that are about to be translated into broken bones.

Secondly, you can never have too much armor when you're trying to keep yourself in one piece. In addition to the good old Stamina standbys of Body Armor and Impenetrable, anyone invested in Earth should be rocking out their Earth Armor and Earth Body to get further tasty protective layers, while Greenskin in Fertility, Devil Body in Fire, Phase Body in Moon and Colossus Armor in War can all further boost your attempts to become teflon. There are also various powers that you can employ to try to stop her from hitting you quite as hard as she otherwise might, including Solar Shield in Sun, Battle Cry and Warrior Ideal in War and Do Not Want in Appearance.

Honestly, though, if you're not built to be a massive juggernaut of mountain-like indifference to damage, just don't get hit again (you might need Between the Ticks to get the chance, though). There's a lot to be said for using Guardian powers to cower behind shields while your friends deal with it (Woody's preferred method of handling Eztli on a rampage) or Psychopomp powers (or the infamous Out of the Frying Pan) to just peace out before things can get any uglier. Eztli, like every other dangerous god, has blind spots and areas in which she's not very skilled as well, so exploiting those can often give you a better than average chance at survival; she's something of a beast when it comes to resisting mental and social powers aimed at her, but her tragically low Perception rolls make it child's play for anyone with Illusion to misdirect or entrap her without her getting anywhere near them, not to mention making it extremely difficult for her to find anyone good at hiding until the storm blows over. Even mortals have been able to successfully evade her by hiding behind trees and telephone poles.

But yeah, your options are basically A) be awesome at taking damage like a champ, or B) get the fuck out of Dodge. It's not impossible for PCs to be at the same level of survival that Eztli herself is at for damage output; not only is she personally great at that stuff (she's got to survive things that are just as badass as herself, after all), but Sverrir is also a badass when it comes to soaking and surviving, and the two of them are probably the most evenly-matched opponents among the younger generation of gods. And, if you think you have time for it, you can always try to go with option C) get Sowiljr to call her off, although once in a while that results in Virtue Extremity and then things become very, very unpleasant for everybody involved.

Eztli has reached a level of physical danger that allows her to now outclass most gods, and it's definitely no joke to be on the receiving end of her anymore. In a recent game, Tezcatlipoca had been put to sleep by Hypnos and she tried to wake him up by slapping him, and she accidentally caved in his skull. It was quite an eye-opener for the PCs, who had until that point really not thought about the fact that she probably could decimate some of the gods they'd always thought of as eternal and all-powerful if the circumstances were right.

Long Awaited Join Battle Post

Question: There were a whole bunch of questions for this.  And they were generally long.  The basic premise was: How do you work join battle? How do people with high JB get extra actions?  What about Opening Gambit?

           Apparently some people want to know about this. Annes been bugging me to answer this for a while. I'll try to explain it as simply as possible. But its probably gonna end up convoluted and stupid. The reason I havnt written it down, is Im not sure its something Id want to suggest for everyone else. It is much like my fatebond system in that it works for me, but I think its too complicated for other people, especially for others to have to do on the fly all the time. But since you asked for it, the following is how I run Join Battle: 

        Placement on my tick sheet(i dont use a wheel) is on a stratus between 0 and 10. The highest JB goes on tick 0, the lowest(as long as the difference between highest and lowest nonbotch is 5) goes on tick 5, and botches go on tick 10. So the first question becomes, where do the other people go? 

I do a break up of where the other people go based on what they rolled in comparison to each other.  We'll use 5 combatants.  Lets name them, Alan, Guy, John, Kyle and Hal(shout out to Tom).

On their join battles for this combat they got: 65, 35, 25, 10, 5 respectively.  I look at a difference, and figure out an even(ish) spread for them across the 6 spaces.  Something like this. 

0: Alan

1: 

2: Guy

3: John

4: 

5: Kyle and Hal

        This gives us a nice spread so that peoples actions are happening at different times, and the game doesnt turn into "ok all the heros go, ok now all the bad guys go" which I find boring.  Kyle definitely got higher then Hal, but in the grand scheme not high enough to matter so they go on the same last place tick.  And I put a second in between Alan and Guy to show the large spread between their two numbers(even though the two ticks isnt actually a large spread, its a mental thing for the PCs, if they see they go a little before, they'll automatically feel a little superior about their high roll as well).  

       Then I make a break point that seem fair for the spread of JBs.  For this, Id shoot towards the middle(ish) and pick 25.  Everyone who got higher then 25, in addition to going sooner, also get to activate/use X number of "non-interacting with the enemy" actions where X = (their JB - 25)/5.  

Or more simply, for every 5 more then 25 they got on their JB, they get to take an action.  This action cannot interact with the enemy in any way and in our games these actions are often used for body armor, army of one, animal aspect, what have you.  

In our above example, Guy would get to take 2 actions, and Alan would get to take 8 actions.  

But what about Opening Gambit?
Were you yet tired of my rambling?

Ok.  Using the above example.  Hal(like geoff often does) spends for opening gambit.  Now he goes first(and fucks everything up for everyone else).


0: Hal
1: Alan
2: 
3: Guy
4: John
5: Kyle


Hal bumps everyone down.  Even though he has a horrible JB roll, he has a knack that fixes that for him.  Now no one gets any extra JB moves because the knack doesnt actually give Hal a 66 JB(and the actions that go with it) it just lets him go first.  So everyone also loses their extra actions because they are not going before him.  **

If Guy, who has higher epic wits then Hal was to also then use JB itd look like this.

0: Guy
1: Hal
2: Alan
3: 
4: 
5: Kyle and John

As more people use opening gambit, others with lower wits(and anyone else) get bumped down a step towards tick 5.  People with same epic wits stay on the same tick(that gambit'd).

**If you were running into a problem with people using opening gambit to ruin the lives of high wits people, I could see using the same system but still letting the super wits people use the actions they would have gotten had the person not opening gambit'd or all but one of the actions.  But like the feeling of "opening gambit means combat starts right now, no time for shenanigans."  However I dont abuse it(or really use it unless pcs do) and my players havnt had problems in that area.  Usually one person  using opening gambit becomes an opening gambit cascade.  


I hope that helped some people.  As always Im poorer with the written word, and expect many confused questions where I either mistyped or said something that wasnt helpful or enlightening.  But anyway, thats how I do Join Battle, feel free to use whichever way works best for your group. 

The Cone of Flame

Question: With respect to the Fire 5 boon "Dragon's Breath", I am a little confused as to the system. The to-hit roll is Wits + Survival. The resist seems to be a Dexterity + Athletics (is that if the victims have not taken an action yet? or does the Dexterity + Athletics dodge count as an action? or is it a free reflexive?). Then, damage seems to be calculated on the basis of attacker's Stamina (including Epic successes, presumably) + 5 + threshold. Is the Stamina + 5 + threshold successes a roll, or is automatic damage? And since it produces a cone of fire, can you hit multiple people with a single attack? How wide is the cone?

Sure, let's break Dragon's Breath down. You're right; if you use it to attack someone (which most people do), you roll your Wits + Survival as the attack roll. The boon isn't "resisted", but rather avoided like other area of effect attacks (Perun's Apples over in Sky, for example, or Shockwave in Strength) by the target attempting to dive out of the way. This is an automatic and reflexive roll; Scion doesn't require "readied actions" or dedicated guarding to attempt to avoid being hit, and this roll is just as automatic as a target's DV is against normal attacks.

As the boon says, it does "lethal damage equal to his Stamina roll plus 5, added to his threshold successes". This does indeed mean it is rolled, not static (static would be bananas!). The five, incidentally, is just the basic damage that fire usually does, while the Stamina represents your divine firepower and the threshold successes how dead-on you managed to incinerate your unfortunate victim.

As for the cone, yes, you can hit multiple people at once, especially if they're nice enough to be hanging out in a clump. The boon has a range of your Fire boons in feet at its farthest point; we didn't map out how far the cone itself extends on either side because that involves mathiness that most people don't care about, so in most cases it's easiest for the Storyteller to rule on it based on cinematic awesomeness and what makes sense for the scene. But if you absolutely insist on figuring out the exact size of the fire's cone, you'll need to know both its length and its angle. Length's built into the boon - it's your Fire boons in feet - and we use ninety degrees as the easiest cone angle (hold the corner of anything square up to your mouth and you'll get an idea of the shape).

There's a lot more trigonometric math involving tangents and cosine you can wander off into now, but if you want to cheat, use this cone calculator instead. Plug in your Fire boons under "perp height" and 90 under "S angle", then double the "base radius" and presto, you will have a number with unnecessary decimal values.

But seriously, nobody wants to stop at the table to do trigonometry or argue about the exact angle at which the flame issues from your mouth, so don't bog the game down with all that unless you happen to be an entire group of mathematicians who enjoy breaking out the modeling clay. Most of the time, there's no need to figure out the cone's exact width if your Storyteller is paying attention and narrating well, and if that's the case, abide by his or her ruling. If you can decide as a group on a particular angle you like (we don't recommend anything wider than 90, because that stops being a cone and starts being a wall, but you could go narrower), feel free to make up a table for easy reference, but if you're not using hexes and exact battlefield positioning, more often than not that won't be that useful anyway.

Scion's about wrecking a lot of stuff, but this is a case where breaking out a bunch of extra math to determine the exact parameters of said wreckage is hindering the game instead of helping it. Make it awesome, make it stunted, and make it within your Storyteller's guidelines, and you should be just fine.

This is What a Do-Over Looks Like

Happy six months of vlogging, everyone! We are dedicated people! Today, we talk about random stuff from our question queue while we race around trying to get other stuff done!

Question: I know that in previous posts you've explained that some pantheons are more against some purviews than others, like Fire and Frost for the Norse or Stars for the Aztecs. But what happens to a Scion who picks up that purview and becomes proficient? Do they become less trusted or cast out in some cases? I ask because I'm playing a character that is specializing in something that his pantheon seems to be totally against and wanted to know what I could expect.

Question: According to one myth, Demeter once attempted to make the mortal son of a Greek king immortal by anointing him with ambrosia and bathing him in flames. If you were to stat this out, would it be a Fire or Magic boon, or something else entirely?

Question: Please add aggravated ranged attack knacks, even if they are more expensive than melee ones. Having none makes baby Apollo cry. :(

Sorry, person whose question got bumped, but I'm going to answer it in the regular blog with EXTREME PREJUDICE!

Back to Africa!

Exclamation points!

Fastest Gun in the West

Question: I've been focusing a lot on Wits for a character I'm playing. While it fits the concept and was very cool at Hero, now that we're late-Demigods I'm a little bummed out. What's the point of maxing it if, no matter how high you roll, you only get to go 5 ticks before someone who has abysmal Wits? And on top of that, your roll gets trumped by a single tier-1 Knack... I feel cheated! It's like having a knack that autohits you, no matter how high your DV gets thanks to your Epic Dex.

Well, the most important question here is: what is your concept?

There's a weird perception (especially for those playing closer to Scion vanilla, I think, which had admittedly fewer knacks and interesting powers for Wits) that Wits is the Join Battle stat, and that that's the only reason anyone would ever buy it. This leads on to the conclusion that if Wits is only good for going first in combat, it's totally unfair if people who don't invest in Wits get to go first in combat and trump it. That makes it pointless to have all these dots of Wits!

But that's in a world where Wits only does one thing, and this is definitely not that world. Join Battle rolls are a great place to have a lot of Wits, but they're far from the only thing Wits does; what else are you using it for? If you're keeping your Wits maxed, surely you use it for other things besides just Join Battle rolls. What Wits knacks do you have from your Epics and how do you use them? What boons do you have that use Wits and how are you using them? Why did you decide to invest in Wits in the first place, and what can you focus on to work with that? Sure, some of this is up to your Storyteller to help with - if he never has anyone roll Wits for anything, I'm sure that would be frustrating - but there's plenty to do with the stat even if you're confined to powers that use it.

Just like every other Epic Attribute, Wits has knacks that represent different specializations of your divinely quick thinking, and that means that specializing into different trees will get you different results. Those who primarily want to use their Wits to go first, go fast and go before anyone else knows what's happening should specialize into Opening Gambit and Between the Ticks, because those are the knacks that represent a Scion whose Wits are finely-honed combat responses. You clearly took other Wits knacks instead of those, so you have other Wits advantages instead - I don't know what they are, but other options in the field of Wits include being able to shield your comrades from harm, being a badass at driving and operating machines, being able to improvise any weapon on the spur of the moment or being able to socially skewer someone with your rapier wit. Of course the guy with Opening Gambit will go before you in combat - he specifically statted himself to do that, whereas you statted yourself to do something else. He's not cheating you any more than someone who uses Language Mastery to learn ninety languages is "cheating" someone who has lots of Epic Intelligence but decided to put his points elsewhere and is now disillusioned that they don't know as many different tongues. Just having the dots of an Epic Attribute is very powerful, and puts you a cut above those who don't have it by default; but not everyone with lots of Wits is created equal, and your choices about where you put your XP naturally grant you different advantages.

Opening Gambit's not the only way Scions who aren't as high in Wits as you can go first, either. Those with high Intelligence and Tactical Planning will be just as ready for battle as you are if they know it's coming, while Scions with high Epic Perception can take immediate actions with Environmental Awareness and Scions who are strongly aligned with the Prophecy or War purviews will reap the benefits of Extended Awareness or Blessing of Insight. Like most things in Scion, there are many paths to get from point A to point B, and simply buying up one Epic Attribute does not guarantee you an instant win all the time.

We actually illustrated this in a game the other night - Eztli got it into her head to relieve Folkwardr of his spine, and although she has an insanely high amount of Epic Wits, he still beat her on the Join Battle roll thanks to being a god of both Prophecy and War. And that makes perfect sense; Eztli has lightning-quick reflexes, but Folkwardr's a soldier who's been in battle for literally centuries and who can see the future, so it's no stretch at all to believe that he could see her about to take a shot at him before anyone else in the scene even knew she was there. He had time to hide behind Sowiljr and start shouting for help, and thanks to his timely warning everyone was able to interfere and prevent tragedy from striking.

It's also very important to note that having Opening Gambit trump your Join Battle roll is not at all like having a knack that auto-hits you through your DV. For one thing, you are not taking damage from losing Join Battle; you still have all your other powers, soaks, DV and abilities at your disposal for when you get attacked, and nothing is injuring, incapacitating or instantly taking you out of the game. You're just waiting a few more ticks. For another thing, your Join Battle is still useful because it's putting you ahead of everyone and everything in the combat that doesn't have Opening Gambit, which is likely to be several people.

The bottom line here is that, just like all the other Epic Attributes, Wits gives you access to a bunch of powers and specializations that those without Wits don't get. It's not just a Join Battle machine; if all you want it for is to go first in combat, then you should get Opening Gambit and go about your day, but if you actually want to take advantage of having high Wits, there's a whole world of other stuff it can do that you should explore. Having seen the colossal, insane things that characters with high Wits are capable of in our games, I can tell you that those who don't have Wits are generally pretty jealous of those who do, and not just because they have to wait an extra five seconds to go in combat.

Other small notes: Opening Gambit is a level 2 knack for us, not level 1, and we allow those with very high Join Battle rolls to take non-combat actions before tick 0 depending on their roll. But your frustrations sound like you may be playing in a game that doesn't apply those rules, so I'm not sure how helpful that is for you.

Tick Tock

It's the beginning of the week, and that means video blogging! This week, John and Anne talk about combat, the tick system, and how Anne is always right.

Question: Why do some boons require 10-tick actions? Doesn't that seem a bit counterintuitive, since the wheel has 8 ticks?

Question: How do you handle combat in your games (at Hero, Demigod and God level)? While I like the tick and battle wheel system in Scion, I find that combat can become a huge time sink in the session. How do you balance combat for characters who aren't that combat savvy, or whose actions might require them to spend a significant amount of time performing secondary objectives? I'm reaching a point where I'd prefer to cinematize my combats to save time while still illustrating the main points of the encounter while also allowing for my players to shine. How does combat work for you and your group? Perhaps understanding how another Storyteller handles it may shed some light on my own problems.

It's longer than usual, but that's because of a combination of excitement and fights, so we figure it's at least entertaining!

Archers at the Ready

Question: In the myth of Arjuna on Agni's page, Arjuna and Krishna "battle Indra to a standstill" while Agni is burning down the forest to regain his strength. Do you think in Scion's mechanical system it's even possible for a Demigod and a Probably-Demigod-Level Avatar of Vishnu to fight a Legend 12 God on even footing? (Even in possession of a powerful relic?)

Man, it's a Hindu mythology extravaganza around here these days.

Mechanically, it's doubtful; even with Gandiva, Arjuna is probably not sufficiently badass to take on Indra for even a short period of time, and you're right that Krishna is probably not powerful enough as an Avatar at this time to add sufficient bolstering. Having seen what happens when demigods try to take on Legend 12 gods, it's very clear that Indra could easily have wiped the floor with them.

I suspect the reason he didn't doesn't have to do with their power levels, but rather with political expediency and Indra's generally shitty situation when it comes to the Trimurti. While Indra has no issue with raining all over Agni on his own - after all, Agni's his brother and that's the kind of shit divine brothers do to one another, plus his buddy Takshaka was hanging out there - things change considerably when Arjuna and Krishna get involved.

For one thing, Krishna is the avatar of Vishnu, and Indra probably knows better by this point than to try to electrocute a member of the Trimurti; it's pantheon-politics suicide, and possibly literal suicide if Vishnu and his friends decide to be offended about it. Krishna also makes a point of busting out the Sudarshana Chakra, which is Hindu religious code for "horrible serrated decapitation murderdisk", one of Vishnu's most famous weapons, as if to drive this point home. None of this is really encouraging Indra to give it his all when it comes to smiting the guy, snake-friend or no snake-friend.

Then there's also the fact that Arjuna is actually his son and his own Scion. He probably doesn't want to murder him over this (although with Indra's temper, you can never quite tell), which would be a pretty colossal waste of resources, not to mention that one assumes he's probably vaguely fond of the kid. When your son starts attacking you, apparently because he's siding with his uncle on some subject or other, you really don't have a lot of options that don't end in heartbreak and recriminations from everyone else (plus, there's still that ugly spectre of what happened to him the last time he killed someone in battle hanging over him, and he had the Trimurti's support on that one). It's actually pretty clear that he wasn't going to kill Arjuna, and that his son can't really resist him in terms of power - when Arjuna's about to kill Takshaka's escaping son, Indra pretty much just knocks him unconscious and doesn't let him back up until the snake's out of his range.

So in the case of this particular story, it's not really that it's in any way realistic for a couple of Legend 6 dudes to try to take on Indra of the mighty thunderbolt, but rather that Indra of the mighty thunderbolt is also mightily hampered by a lot of considerations that prevent him from really unleashing his fury the way he probably normally would have. You know how it is; it's all fine to go beating up punks that look at you funny, but when it's your son and your kinda-boss giving you the mutual finger, you're not really sure what to do about it other than get pissed off and yell a lot. Indra just happens to yell with thunderbolts. (And then, because he's Indra and he appreciates a good beatdown, applauds when he calms down.)

(This would also explain how these two guys, moments later, somehow managed to run off basically all the Devas and Yazata combined. It's one of the most hilariously gigantic instances of everybody pretending to lose just to avoid problems ever to appear in an epic.)

An alternative explanation might be that Arjuna and Krishna have Fate backing them in this endeavor, meaning that Indra and company are probably operating under hefty anti-Fate negatives while the two archers are being buffed far beyond what they might normally be able to accomplish. It is declared to Indra that the forest's destruction has been foreordained by Fate and that no one will be able to defeat its protectors, and if that's true this isn't a case of Arjuna and Krishna beating the massed might of an entire pantheon; it's just a case of Fate using them as convenient tools, and Fate beating the massed might of an entire pantheon. Which is kind of what Fate does.

But my money is on everybody realizing that killing these kids off would be a nuclearly bad political move, and thus deciding to just make it look good so everyone could save face and then go home.

Stop Trying to Hit Me and Hit Me

Question: I can’t seem to find anything in the books regarding this. What rules do you use regarding how your players choose to wield their weapons? Would wielding a weapon two handed allow you to do more damage at the expense of accuracy? Would wielding a weapon in each hand allow you to make attacks more often than you normally would? Have I been playing too much D&D?

Maybe just a bit. (But then, can we ever really play too much D&D?)

There are no rules for weapon-wielding style; that's a matter of flavor and stunting that varies from Scion to Scion, and we really don't want to assign mechanics to it. There's no difference in Scion between two-handed or dual-wielding styles, and adding mechanics for that sort of thing would be more trappings on a combat system that we're usually on the lookout to slim down, not bloat with more issues. Scion instead rewards creative weapon use with Legend or Willpower from stunting, which also adds dice to attacks, and I don't know about you, but I'd always rather have more resources with my few extra dice to a blow (especially at Demigod-level and higher, when +2 dice doesn't really matter anymore but +2 Legend points really, really does).

There are, however, ways to vary your attack that involve pulling a blow to control the damage it does or performing a Fierce Blow that detracts from your accuracy but adds to your damage. You can find all the details on attack variation in Scion: Hero, page 200.

Scion also handles this issue by just folding it into weapon stats. A two-handed broadsword probably does more damage but is slower, while a rapier is probably a faster weapon that does fewer dice of damage. Of course, games like D&D do this, too, but Scion doesn't go much further.

We do have things in the game that encourage and reward weapon-swapping and creative melee, however. Blitzkrieg, for example, rewards PCs for using different limbs to attack instead of pouring everything into a single weapon, while Ingenious Improviser and Master at Arms allow dice bonuses for improvising weapons from available materials. And we try never to pass up an opportunity to dole out stunt rewards for those doing something fun and different with their attacks.

Honestly, I don't think Scion needs extra rules for weapon-wielding in its base set. It's already got almost infinite options for what you can do to vary your attack and benefit from it thanks to the stunting system, and adding a modifier based on your weapon style would just be extra frippery on the system.