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.