Monday, October 22, 2012

A Great and Present Darkness

I don't know if anyone's ready for what's going on in today's vlog. But it's about to happen anyway.

Question: Can Titans (by which I mean Titan Avatars, not the Titanrealms) have Scions, or some equivalent method of empowering humans? And, on a related note, how do you handle characters like Kane Taoka? Does he get a set of favoured powers from his mother and another from Mikaboshi, or something else?

Question: How bad would it be if Kali and Itzpapalotl had a complete knock-down drag-out fight?

Late thanks to technical difficulties, but still technically Monday!

17 comments:

  1. Just have one question to add to this. What about Titan Avatars that used to have Scions and had lesser forms? Do they lose their Avatar forms after becoming Titan Avatars and can no longer have children? I ask this cause of some of the write ups of your Titan Avatars used to be gods, either casted out, brought done or left out of their free will. Mostly cause it would be a very interesting twist on Titans Avatars that used to be Gods, having children that are similar to Scions. I am looking at Hestia and Uke Mochi mostly, but I am sure there are other examples.

    The other thing that I wanted to say is that the corruption happened in a game I was playing. My character, a scion of Hel, was getting fed up with the group cause of how he was treated and the GM did not help any. So all of the sudden we had to kill someone and it turned out to be a corrupted Scion of Thor with a titan relic. I do not know exactly how or why they would, but he had one that was all about electricity and controlling it. So my character kept it and no one knew cause the others were arguing amongst themselves. Turned out the thing was trying to corrupt me, but my will was too strong. When I left the game due to it going horribly and the other players were making my character just part of the background and the GM let them and cared not cause he was trying to hook up with the single lady in the group, I told him my character, who was a Scion of Hel, had a titan relic, had Guardian and Vigil brand on 2/3 players and had come running on a relic so he could use it as a Hero, that my character would leave, let himself be corrupted and wait for the party to be almost dead before he shows up and kills them all because of the issues I had with the players, the games and how my character was being treated.

    If you were running a game that went this badly, which by how you have the class, the several games under your belt, and many other things that make you a good gm and this would probably never happen to you now, would you allow a player to do that to his character, even if it was petty revenge for a horrible game?

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    1. Hmm, that overuse of the word Avatar's getting in the way again. Do you mean if they had the Avatar Birthright and could power down to lower levels? I've actually never thought about whether or not Titans could use Avatar. My gut would be to say no, because conceptually they're all about being huge, unfettered power, but it's an interesting thought.

      Scions can still exist for gods that only later became Titan Avatars; they won't retroactively stop being Scions because their parent's jumped ship (although they probably need more help from/are viewed with more suspicion by the rest of their pantheon now). I'd definitely save that for in-game developments, though - that is, the god goes Titan during the game at some point, rather than making it part of the backstory. If it happened offscreen and your only reason for doing it was to get a Scion whose parent is a Titan, that's just monkeying around the rules, not adding to the story. (And, generally, while we've had gods leave to become Titans in our games, the default assumption should usually be that Titan Avatars have been Titan Avatars for a good long while unless you have a good reason for them to be only recent additions.)

      For your hypothetical situation, it's tough to say. Did nobody else in the group have decent Perception? They'd need to all have pretty poor Per + Awa rolls to not notice you having an extra relic (especially if one of them had Unlidded Eye, which would make that sucker light up like a Christmas decoration), and pretty poor Per + Emp rolls to not realize you had started to hate them. But if they were all blind to the situation, then yeah, that could theoretically happen - but if you bowed out of the game, your PC would become our NPC, so it would be up to us what he did at that point. He'd probably end up with a bigger plan than that or a more wide-ranging way of taking revenge, because while it would be legit to make him an antagonist because he hated the group, it would not be legit to let one player auto-kill all the others out of bitterness.

      Also, we would never ever let you or anybody else put Come Running on a relic, so it would be kind of moot.

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    2. Yeah, sorry. I reread that and say how confusing I put it, though its kinda how the books put it. But in the end you got the Just of it. I was basically asking if a god has birthright avatars to go down to earth, would he or she still have them when she became a titan.

      The group we had was pretty bad. We had a Scion of Heimdall, but he left the game before I even started to go rouge. But he was the only one, besides me, that had epic perception and decent perception. The rest of the group included two Greeks, Apollo Health Scion that acted like batman(Please, do not ask how this came to be. Its a sore spot in this game some of the stuff.) and a thief that was a racer in underground races that was a child of Zues, who had an affair with a Chaos Titan Avatar(Again, do not ask. I have come to terms that this idea was so idiotic and had no basis for it at all.) The last was a Gun Smuggler of Baron Samedi. He played him like the Shadowman from the Princess and the Frog, but fell on his face hard a lot of the times. Everyone of those were Social / Physical characters, with one having some decent Intelligence. But no one had much Perception, but a lot had Stam. Then no one had Unlidded Eye, though the Baron scion had magic.

      I understand why you would do that. What I wanted him to do was vent and grow more powerful as he waited for the right time for them to be the weakest. I even told him he would kill the Apollo Scion with a headshot to forever shut up his annoying mouth, shoot the knees out from the Baron scion, gut him with a sword and stuff C-4 in the wound and blow it up to see how he likes being bombed by someone that should be a friend.(he tried sacrificing my character's life so his could live when there was a bomb threat.) As for the girl, he would corrupt her and make her his property, thus taking the pretty girl that ignored him and had all the guys trying to be with her his. Though it never happened. I thought I had a good idea on how my character would leave the group when I quit the game and the GM liked the idea, though I heard he ignored it throughly. Oh well, I hope I never again get in a game so bad that I want my character to follow a titan and kill everyone.

      If I may ask, Why would you not allow anyone to put Come Running on a Relic? Is it because of how the power is set up that it can not be or is it a house rule you guys have that disallows it?

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    3. We don't allow anyone to put boons on relics anymore; it's something the original system did that we really disliked. It shortcuts XP with Birthright points, lets people pick up all the immunities like cheating cheaters with very little difficulty, and most importantly undercuts purviews and boons themselves. If you can just reproduce boons with relics, it's almost always a better idea to do that and buy up epics than to actually get boons themselves. It makes boons, which should be the awesome showstopped powers of the game, that much less cool.

      Also, even in the days when we did allow it, we would not have allowed anything higher than level three or so. Letting Legend 2 Scion have access to level 5 boons is massively unbalancing when compared to the rest of their group - which you're demonstrating pretty well by noticing how easy it would be for your one character to just kill off the other three thanks to it.

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    4. Well that, but more importantly guardian can never be used to hurt those you have guarded. If you have malicious intents the boons just don't work.

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    5. Ah, well. Makes sense how you both explain it. When I first got it, it was me trying to be clever with a character concept, where he was a protector of the group. The other thing was I knew the players that were playing the game and I had some doubt on how stable the party would be, but I thought the GM would countering that. It didn't happen. But I picked it up as a way of solidifying my role as the muscle to protect the group, not to harm them(or for that matter others at first).

      The GM was allowing a lot of stuff that is questionable to all I would think, but I thought I try to be the nice guy and not break it. Only when the players decided to be jerks and the GM started to not care, is when he became from the helpful hand to the 'monster', in a sense. The game did not last long, maybe another 2 weeks after I left, the game in total less than 3 months.

      I'd rather not unbalance games, all my characters seem like they are unstoppable to some GMs and players, but two out of six gms I have had that were good recognized my character weakness that I left blatantly open for a good character and not like a Gary Stu. My Egyptian is bad with all social events due to his past, My Irish had a thing about family that makes him have the need to keep them safe, My Gaul is treated worse than a dog to the rest of the pantheons and etc. Its not like I am trying to get my character killed, its just that I like good stories, not mid-maxed characters or people who can do everything(though I do wanna try and make a Jack of all Trades one of these days to where he is a support in everything, but a damn good support character.)

      I also understand the Guardian purview and how it should not be for malicious intents, but my GM did not understand that and so I let him continue to think his way of thinking cause the players liked manipulating false rules into where they won everytime. /rant over.

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  2. Great vlog! Terrible hair.

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    1. I'm a lover, not a hater! Or is that fighter? I can never remember which.

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  3. We had a guy who got hit with full-blown amnesia and got corrupted by a titanspawn with Implant False Memory, AND we had a person who was a "titanspawn scion" as presented in that sidebar snippet from God pg. 209. Both yielded madness, and both are still alive!(oddly enough)

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    1. Our Titan-corrupted Scions are mostly still alive, too. They got better.

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  4. Course Overview is what my boss informs me that that thing is when he makes me submit one each semester. Apparently that is different from a syllabus!

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    1. That makes sense. (Although the syllabus is just inside the course overview, so I guess John's just bad at academic form?)

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    2. No, the syllabus would be much more specific about each class and break stuff down more

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    3. In that case, it is clearly I who am bad at academic form.

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  5. Well, this answers one of my biggest and most pressing questions:

    What would Bryan Cranston look like if he were cast in an upcoming Mr. T. biopic?

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    1. My sister has always sworn cranston was a dead ringer for my dad. So it makes sense.

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