Universal Mastery

Question: What's your opinion of relics that add to your purview total in boons? Like a relic that adds to +2 to your total Health boons. Also, what would be the cost per point if it was something that you would allow?

Oof. Math-heavy question indeed, and hard to answer.

If you're using our boons and system, adding to boon total is definitely a desirable power, but it's so highly variable that it's impossible to assign a flat Birthright dot cost to it. Unlike adding to accuracy or damage, where a flat +1 is always a flat +1, adding to various boon totals is inherently unequal.

To start with, different purviews have different numbers of boons available at different levels, so adding to them is not only much more powerful at Hero-level than later, but also unequal across different purviews. A +3 to a Hero who can only get a maximum of three or four boons anyway is incredibly powerful, but it matters much less once you're a god with twenty possible boons to get under your belt - but only kind of, because the higher in Legend you are, the more boons you can get that this relic power will affect. Then, too, there's the problem of some purviews using total number of boons as a mechanic more than others; for example, there are only two Illusion boons that depend on how many total Illusion boons you have, but a whopping ten Frost boons that use the mechanic, so such a relic boost for Frost would be much, much more powerful than the same relic for Illusion. And what about purviews that don't have any boons using that mechanic until Demigod or God level - how would you adjust the score for that?

And that's not even talking about how different purviews do different things with those boon totals. Sure, it's nice for the Moon Scion to grant a Willpower to four more people at once, but that's not even remotely comparable to the Earth Scion who gets a flat +4 soak. And god forbid you give this to the Guardian Scion who gets to square his boons when doing calculations - holy smokes, you just upped a Hero-level Scion's maximum Vigil Brands from 36 to 100. The potential for abuse is ridiculous all by itself, let alone if some enterprising player tries to layer it on top of even more cheesemonkey possibilities (like being Anunna and also giving yourself this relic bonus).

We wouldn't say outright that you can't add a boost to your total number of purviews on a relic, but we also couldn't give you an easy dot rating for what doing so would cost. It depends on a lot of factors, and you'd need to charge different amounts for how many "boons" the relic adds, which purview it adds them to and even what level your Scion is starting at. It's a lot of difficult percentile math that Storytellers don't necessarily want or need to do, and it'd be very easy to end up with a relic that was accidentally overpowered.

Our mathematical suggestion, if you're really set on this idea, is to scale the power's cost up as a Scion goes up in Legend. For example, a Hero-level Scion who wanted a relic that added +4 to his Fertility boon total would probably only need two relic dots to do so at Hero, when the benefits and possibilities were fairly small and not directly opposed to anyone else. When they got to Demigod, that relic upgrade would become equivalent to about seven dots, and at god we would charge a full star for that relic, thanks to its now enormous possibilities and potential to let the Scion have an edge on winning heads-up rolls against other gods and Titanrealms.

In general, it's a lot of work and we're not sure it's really worth it for most games; probably better to spend those relic points on a unique power that's specific to the character, or benefits that are less likely to explode if you forgot the details of one or two powers they might apply to. But if you want to go for it, just be ready to do a careful balancing act, and maybe let the player know that it's possible you might have to make adjustments to it on the fly if it turns out to be overpowered.