Caught In The Act

Can you give a two-paragraph version of what the guy on the threads was trying to do? Maybe on your game blog. - Digital Sextant, commenting to a post at Repeated Expletives

No. But here's a one-sentence inflamatory summary:

What I thought was a brainstorming session designed to make a fair and balanced "super-tech" system for Scion, turned out instead to be a munchkin's attempt at creating mechanics he could abuse to get the upper hand over his GM and fellow players.

I tried to trim the following down to two paragraphs, but doing so resulted in inaccuracies. Instead here's a three-paragraph version that I can share without feeling like I'm putting words in his mouth...

Basically, this guy was trying to build a system that would allow Scion characters to design super-science and improve the stats of weapons. Overall, it's a cool idea, but his mechanics had some flaws. In a nutshell, it would let a starting character create a weapon more powerful than the best magic weapon the existing Relic system would allow. I'd responded by saying his system seemed "a little too good for my tastes," and then offered some suggestions on how he might consider changing his difficulty numbers to prevent that from happening. I also followed up with a different take on a system to represent the Hitori Hanzo portion of the concept. I largely left the super-science parts alone, since they were less relevant to my campaign.

We went back and forth for a bit, fairly amicably at first, but growing more aggressive with every post. He used very stilted examples that showed only the least abusive utilization of his system, and refused to acknowledge the more broken applications. His responses included emotional appeals like "This really seems like a knee-jerk reaction to a new mechanic and to water it down to uselessness." He also frequently misinterpreted (things I'd proposed) in ways that smack of straw men - it was just too many misunderstandings to be believed. On the 5th page of point-counterpoint, he finally mentions that his whole system is predicated on a bunch of other house rules he'd never mentioned previously. This felt deceptive to me - and so I reread key portions of the thread with greater skepticism.

Those portions of his posts made it crystal clear that, yes, he did intend for characters to make weapons better than the best ones in the books. Further, he'd started the thread with: "I'm playing a modern Scion of Athena." I wasn't debating the merits of the system with the GM who would implement it - instead, it's likely this was a Player trying hard to hide the fact that he'd intentionally sold his GM on a system he could abuse. All in all, my responses to this revelation (and the whole thread) were far much more polite and measured than he deserved, but it was still more flamey than I prefer.