Form and Function

Question: Are there any Abilities you notice getting the short end of the stick a lot? They're nifty for flavor, but just feel like big XP-sucking black holes? Like Fortitude.

Holy crap, your example threw me for a loop because Fortitude is one of the least dispensible abilities in the game. Our PCs are constantly trying to shore up their Fortitude, either desperately buying it to keep ahead of Fatebonds or jealously guarding it and keeping it maxed in case something goes wrong.

So I'll answer the opposite of your question first - Awareness, Athletics, Fortitude and Integrity are the abilities that our players generally cannot live without. If you see a PC with zero or only a few dots in one of those, chances are that Fatebonds either took all their dots away or are in the process of trying to do so while the players fight them off with XP. They are freaking miserable when they lose one of those stats (and heaven forfend they lose more than one). It's pretty funny when, every time an Athletics roll comes up, we watch Jioni's player say morosely, "It's fine, I'll just roll to the bottom of the hill on my face, tell me how much damage I take," but only out-of-character.

But, to return to your actual question: the abilities I see passed over most often are probably Investigation, Larceny and Science.

I'm not sure why almost nobody picks up any Investigation - it's such a useful skill! - but there they are, two groups of Legend 9-10 PCs, and only one of them can make an Investigation roll without the benefit of Jack of All Trades. A lot of them are relying on their Awareness to let them know if something is going on, but unfortunately that leads to a lot of PCs being complete idiots when they have to search an office for an envelope or something.

Larceny's more understandable, as the sneaky or manipulative characters usually pick some up but the majority of the rest of the characters do not, even though whenever they have to roll Perception + Larceny or the like to try to figure out someone's security system, they can't understand why they can't make heads or tails of it. It seems like more of a specialty ability, and especially when players plan to be running stand-up, honorable heroes, they often don't think of getting any dots in it, even though it has applications other than thievery.

The specialized abilities (Art, Craft, Control and Science) are completely dependent on the character, I've found. Plenty of people totally ignore them - unless something is very specialized, you can often sub in Academics or Athletics and still have a good shot at figuring out what to do with something, and of course there're always Jack of All Trades and Don't Read the Manual to fall back on. Many of those characters who do pick up some specialized abilities try to invest in the most broad, generalized subject we'll let them get away with - Biology or Boats, for example - so they can try to apply it to as many rolls as possible. But on the other end of the spectrum you have people like Aiona, who, far from trying to avoid getting extra abilities, often calls us to ask for inspiration because she wants a new Craft or Science but isn't sure what's left that she doesn't already have covered, or Sverrir, whose mission it is in life to drive all the things that require driving.

In general, there's no ability in Scion that I would say everyone views as useless or that just funnels away XP pointlessly; they all have their functions and they all contribute to a character's overall skillset. The only time we see players get cranky about XP being spent on abilities is when a Fatebond purchases something that's wholly inappropriate for the character, such as Eztli's followers buying her a bunch of Empathy or Terminus' deciding he needed as much Art (Tribal Dance) as possible. Those are just XP-sucking black holes because there's little chance the PC will ever use (or want to use) those skills, but it's not because of what specific ability they are; it's just because they don't fit the PC's concept. (Though, because that's what Fatebonds do, they often become part of the concept later anyway - Terminus has a particularly hilarious myth involving his dancing prowess and a distractable ogre-god now that would never have occurred without them.)

Besides, just because you have one dot in an ability and can therefore use your Epics doesn't mean that spending XP on any more dots is a waste of XP. Far from it; even if you aren't Greek and don't have to keep up with your Arete, if you're rolling against an enemy who has comparable stats but bought his Brawl all the way up to ten while you sat at one or two, he'll beat you most of the time. And that's a good thing; he should beat you, because he's better at brawling than you are. Abilities are expressions of what you want to be awesome at; if you're not choosing at least a few to follow through on, you're not trying to be awesome, you're trying to be mediocre. And nobody respects the god of mediocrity.