A Time and Place for Everything

Question: Social/mental characters can do awesome things in the middle of a combat, but I don't get to attack people during social/mental scenes. Social/mental characters can get boons that use social/mental attributes to blow people up in combat, but there are no boons that let me use physical attributes in social/mental scenes. What's up?

I think you may be a little confused about the difference between what you can do and what you should do, and the difference between restrictions the system places on you and restrictions your own roleplaying places on you.

Actually, you totally do get to attack people during non-combat scenes. That is a power that you, as a combat-heavy character, always have. At any moment, if you decide to, you could start throwing mountain-crumbling punches, busting bananas-ass aggravated damage, leaping over people at the diplomacy table and generally wrecking the place up, possibly before anyone else even has a prayer of reacting to stop you if you have a good Join Battle roll. At any time, you literally have the power to damage or even kill someone, and that is an incredible and dangerous power. That's why social gods, for all their bluster and swagger, are still afraid of unpredictable combat gods, and make it a point to keep them happy, confined, and away from them whenever possible.

Does that mean you should attack people during non-combat scenes? No, probably not most of the time, but that's a choice that you are making as a character. You're saying, "Hey, I don't know how to manage this social scene, I'd better let Johnny Isisbaby take the lead so I don't get confused," or "These people know something or can do something I can't beat out of them, so punching them would be counterproductive," or "I really like these people so I don't want to kill them, so we'll have to find another way to get them to do what we want," or a thousand other reasons you might have to not start suddenly roundhousing people in the face in the middle of a bar. That's what's generally referred to in human society as the "social contract", a concept that means that most people mutually agree to certain basic rules (like "don't stab others without provocation") in order for society to function, even though they technically could do whatever they want at any moment.

The social contract is in effect for gods as well as mortals, although it may take different forms and be broken or circumvented more liberally than in human societies, and that's what you're feeling is restrictive. You have all these amazing physical powers to damage, destroy, maim or maul, but you know that people will be upset if you do, or you might get punished, or you might feel bad about it later. That's just the weight of social responsibility on your shoulders, and it's something every Scion, no matter what their build, has to deal with on a regular basis. There will always be times you could do things, or even want to do things, and still don't because it's a bad idea or you know it won't be worth it in the long run. That's life.

The point here is that you have every bit as much ability to interfere in the social characters' spotlight scenes as they do to interfere in yours. You may decide not to, but that's your decision, not one the system forces on you. If you need to get someone to agree to something instead of stealing from them or physically beating it out of them, then you're making a reasonable decision not to use your powers right now. Nobody stood over you with a bat and made you do that.

In fact, for the most part, physical characters tend to always have more "power" in a scene than social ones, no matter what's going on. It's true that there are various powers in the game that allow social- and mental-heavy characters to participate in and contribute to combat, but when they're not specifically built to do that, they're always going to be worse at it than the guy who is combat-maxed, and they'll always be bleeding themselves of resources that they then don't have available to help them later in their social scenes. They can help out and have something to do during a fight, but they usually can't win it alone and are in much greater danger of dying, and in some cases there's literally nothing they can do at all. On the other hand, while the physical character with few to no social or mental stats can't do very much to participate in a chess game or tea with the queen, she always has the option to just haul off and make it a physical scene by starting some shit. Social characters can try to convert a fight to a social situation through use of powers, but they have shaky odds of doing so, have to spend resources, may not roll high enough or may have the attempt ruined by someone else's interference. All the physical character has to do is walk up to somebody and throw a punch, and presto, instant combat.

Honestly, as the combat character, you're not the most powerless person in your band. A lot of the time, you're so powerful that you literally have to restrain yourself in order to not get everyone in horrible trouble. You are a nuclear warhead they carry around with them, and while they hope they can point you in the right direction at the right time, they all know you could just detonate without warning and screw them over. It's easy to start feeling marginalized about how the social characters have all these skills that you don't, but the flip side of that is that you could literally kill them. You don't, because you have shit to do and you need them. But you could. And they know that, too. (And if they don't, reminding them is delicious.)

We often talk about the difference between "physical", "social" and "mental" characters, and it's true that you can invest so heavily in one of those archetypes that you have few to no powers in the others, especially early on. But the game intentionally balances those three so that they are all powerful, in equally game-changing and world-affecting ways but with a totally different kind of power. The physical characters wield the powers of destruction, speed and direct action, making them physically capable of performing incredible feats and actually being the movers who shift the world. The mental characters are the keepers of the potent powers of knowledge, making them the ones who decide who knows the truth and who continues to believe a lie, giving them the ability to see and learn things no one else possibly could and then dispense that knowledge (or not) where they think it will be best used, radically altering the ideas and plans of others. And the social characters can't do either of those things, but they are the masters of interpersonal communication and interplay, allowing them to defend themselves from the depredations of the other two archetypes and magically seek help from others to do what they can't.

Almost all Scions eventually become hybrids; seldom does anyone become a god without being good at at least a few auxiliary skills outside their archetypal area. But they can and do sometimes start out as only one thing, which they'll be for a long time as they grow into their divine heritage and explore what they really want to be as a deity, and there's nothing wrong with that. Just remember that they are all powerful, but have different kinds of power; and that sometimes some of them will be more suited to a given task than others, but that that does not make those others less important or worthwhile. You're going to encounter social situations, as a combat character, that you can't navigate and that you need other people to take care of for you, but that's no different from the fact that the mental characters would have no prayer of surviving combat if you weren't there, or the fact that the social characters can run the most incredible political takeover gambit of all time and still fail if the mental characters withhold a single, crucial piece of information from them.

So don't get down that you don't always have something with a PUNCH ME sign on it to do in every scene, and don't start feeling like the social characters matter more to the story than you do. It's their job to dominate scenes and try to make everything about them, but in the overall gameworld, you're every bit as powerful and important as they are. They have power over the secrets of the universe or the hearts of mankind, but you have power over life and death, and that's something everyone can respect.

Stars of the Silver Screen

Okay, so... we are nothing if not proactive. If you wanted to see our faces in realtime and watch us talk awkwardly on camera because we're not used to it, we're about to answer your prayers, because we took a little time out this afternoon to try recording a first video blog. In it, we fiddle with camera and settings, answer two questions, and have a surprise guest appearance by Achilles, one of the JSR Mascot Cats.

Question: Are roleplaying restrictions a valid metric to use when balancing a knack or boon? For example, is it okay for a knack or boon to be more powerful than average because overuse will make NPCs beat you up?

Question: I have a question about Roleplaying epic mental attributes. On paper, they should allow the character to formulate plans so elaborate they'll be incomprehensible to a mortal man. To think with the speed and wisdom that make the modern super computer seem like an earth-worm. How are you supposed to play an entity whose decision making possess is so superior to your own?

We apologize in advance for the boring living room and shaky sound quality. Experiments!

Incidentally, we mention a scene from a recent movie that illustrates Epic Wits and Intelligence well in the above video; you can find the ending clip of it here.