Use, Not Abuse

Question: How creative do you let your characters get with boons? Do you let them modify some boons on the fly, do they have to stunt when using a boon in a way other than written, or are boons meant to function as written in your games and only as written?

Well, I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, because it's all kind of vague up there. I get the general idea, but I'm not sure what you'd consider using a boon "only as written" to mean, or using it with a stunt, or "modifying" it. So bear with me here, and feel free to jump into the comments and elucidate if you need to.

One of the things we love about Scion is that the stunting system gives PCs a huge amount of creative room that they wouldn't necessarily have in other games. Being able to pull something off just because it's awesome rather than getting bogged down in the details of exactly how to model it mechanically or whether or not you have the correct feat to do that is an excellent freedom that makes for more cinematically exciting games and more player creativity, two things we feel no Scion game can ever have enough of. Stunts give players wiggle room, and they do it so that it's totally legit and awesome when they use it. Excellent.

But stunts also shouldn't be used to circumvent the mechanical constraints of a boon, because those are there for a reason, usually to make sure the game is balanced and doesn't break thanks to overpowered or underpowered boons messing up the landscape. A stunt should never allow a boon to do something that is obviously overpowered for its Legend, or that exactly duplicates something another power does for more resources or XP, or that is clearly counter to the boon's intent. Stunts are enhancing effects designed to make things more awesome, but they're not carte blanche to cheat, which is what often starts to happen when they're allowed to change too much about how a boon works.

This is all difficult to describe in general terms, just as your question was hard to understand in general terms, so I'll try to illustrate with some examples.

Billy has Storm Augmentation and Wind's Freedom. He can always blaze his sword up with lightning and fly out of the sky to attack people, because that's how those boons normally work.

Billy chooses to also attempt to harass some nearby enemies who are fighting while standing in a canal full of open water. By stunting, he can dive into the water with his Storm Augmentation-crackling sword and cause them to be electrocuted thanks to the lightning coming into contact with the water. This will probably only deal normal electricity damage to them, so how much it hurts them depends on their soak, but it's definitely cool and creative!

If Billy flies into the air using Wind's Freedom and tries to whip up a tornado to suck up his enemies by flying in a circle really quickly, however, he cannot do that. A tornado that powerful is clearly beyond the reach of a level 2 boon, and there's a higher-level power, Tornado Tamer, that already does that. He could probably create some cosmetic effects by doing so, but nothing that will have a serious effect.

Storm Augmentation's on my mind because something similar happened with it in one of our recent games, actually; a player had put Storm Augmentation on his weapon, and then wanted to use Storm Augmentation on himself as well so that the weapon would get double the boon's benefit. While there's no problem with using Storm Augmentation on a weapon, or using it on yourself so you can brawl with it, it's pretty clearly overpowered to be able to stack it that way, so we had to tell him no. It's not that he wasn't being creative, but being creative does not always translate to being balanced for the game.

Our rules of thumb are these:

• If what you want to do with a boon is already being done by a higher-level boon in the same purview, you can't do it. You can't use Bolster Fire and expect to get the same results as Inferno.
• If what you want to do with a boon is really similar to a different power in the game, you can't do it. You can't use Changing States to make yourself a magical ice-weapon, because that's what Frozen Panoply does.
• If what you want to do with a boon is overpowered for the boon's level or cost, you can't do it. You can't use Bless Harvest to grow pumpkins the size of battleships, because that's clearly more than the boon is intended to do.
• If what you want to do with a boon is counter to the spirit of the boon, you can't do it. You can't use an Unseen Shield to push someone outside it off a cliff, because that's the opposite of what Guardian is all about.

These things are always decided and adjudicated by the Storyteller, so every game will be a little different when it comes to what is and isn't allowed within the confines of the boons and stunting system. We use the guidelines above and they've always worked well for us, preventing players from tipping over the sometimes fine line between creative use and opportunistic abuse, allowing them to shine in their good ideas and making sure they know why their bad ones won't work.

For the most part, boons are meant to function as they are written, but there is always room for a player to come up with some new and awesome way to use them. As long as it doesn't reach beyond an appropriate power level or infringe on other powers he doesn't have, we love to let them go for it and see where it takes them.