I just found ANOTHER thing I'm doing wrong - correction, I just had another thing I'm doing wrong in Scion embarrassingly pointed out on the forum. Stupid combat wheel and tick system. Stupid bouncy Defense Values. Stupid vague Knacks. Stupid contradictory rules.I can run 7th Sea, with all it's little idiosyncracies. I house-ruled the heck out of the damage system when I GM'd, but I first played under the book rules, and learned them inside-and-out. I could GM with no warning, just 10 minutes prep time, without looking anything up but specific sorcery descriptions and the details of a few swordsmen knacks.
I can run D&D 3.0, and knew it well enough to pass the RPGA Herald test pretty easily. I'm not on top of every little detail of 3.5 (I'm aware of Swift Actions, for example, but couldn't tell you whether something you named is a Swift or Free action) but I had 3.0 down pat when I was last GMing it. I haven't done so in years, but feel I could get back up to speed given 3 to 5 hours and a player's handbook.
When GMing the LARP, I knew all the intricacies of the so-called "Gehenna Edition" of Laws of the Night. I'd identified all the contradictions, and knew which version I supported in my chronicle. I mastered that system, so no one could challenge me. I made a big list of the rules I felt were imporant enough for all my players to know, which ones were relevant only to specific characters, and which ones were obscure enough that it was okay for just me to understand them.
Amber of course, is entirely committed to memory, and could be run on a desert island without paper or the books. Not that that's saying much - a trained hellhound could memorize the rules, such as there are, of Amber. Ironically, I don't have memorized the "Bergstrom Method" that I wrote up and which used to be huge on the net back in the days when Amber sites were huge on the net. (That was before Phage Press sold the game to Guardians of Order, who then folded.) I worked it out, and then only had to actually use it once.
I houseruled Continuum really heavily. I never gave the real combat rules their day in court, 'cause I could see how much the the existing frag chart and A/B/C/D hit location system were going to tick me off. I made the Sweep system work for my needs, and wrote up a ton of player aids to teach it to myself.
I can run Cyberpunk 2020! The Friday Night Firefight system is an incredibly complicated (supposedly also the most realistic, but that's a laugh) number-crunchy system. I can make it sing! I have a couple little house rules I use, but if you're not using "weird" weapons (volt pistols, paintball guns, PA suits, etc), I can run it without a rulebook, no prep time, with a single character sheet as my only reference.
I wrote a published adventure for Rune, for cripes sakes! The game where you are required to purchase every encounter from a stock of points the GM has access to, and painstakingly balance them against the players options and your budget. It's not like anyone could ever accuse me of being math- or rules- illiterate.
So why can't I get Scion to flow error-free? Have I lost some braincells in the last couple years, or is the book just that poorly written? I've houseruled so much, I can't keep it straight any more. I've built a ton of play-aids, easily three time as many as for any other game I've run, and I feel like a few hundred more would be in order. The fiddly little minutia of the Scion rules keep having different implications than my initial read-throughs gave them.
Frequently, I find there'll be some process in Scion with 5 or 6 steps. The book will spell out 4 of the 5 steps in 3 to 5 different parts of the book, but the 5th step (actually, it's usually the second or third step) will only be mentioned once, in one paragraph, on one page, under a header you wouldn't have expected, and completely skipped on the index. There's usually a chart nearby which appears to summarize the various steps but leaves out the one critical detail that occurs here and nowhere else. The system runs fine without step 13b, but then one day you stumble across it and realize that not using it changed the value and power level of 6 different PC powers. What the heck were they thinking? It's not like this is White Wolf's first book!
Yet I love the setting. My storyline rocks, the game is fun, the players are rampaging about the underworld without me ever missing a beat, Hel and Baldur were a riot last session, etc. There's nothing I'd rather be running right now, except maybe a rules-light possibly-tickless fudge-die-rolling version of Scion. *sigh*
1 comment:
I figure I should include at least one example to back up my accusations.
Example: What are the drawbacks of not having any dots in the Ability you're rolling?
The fact you roll fewer dice is self-evident, since Ability dots = dice. This is stated on pages 105 and 172, but most players will figure it out without having to go looking.
According to pages 105, and 174, the difficulty goes up by +2 as well. This is effectively the same as dropping another 4 dice worth off your roll, since each die generates 1/2 a success on average. Still pretty easy to find, despite the fact that you have to read through two more really dense pages to find it if you started in the chapter labeled "the basics".
However, it turns out page 124 mentions that your successes from Epic Attributes don't apply when you have no relevant Abilities. So a maxed-out Demigod of Grace might average 27 successes on a roll of a skill in which he has just 1 dot. (Assuming Legend 8, Dex 8, Epic Dex 7, and Ability 1) That same Demigod average but 5 successes on a the roll of the same Attribute with a different Ability Specialty, such as Art: Salsa Dancing instead of Art: Ballet. Get that? 27 vs 5.
There is not a single page that mentions both of these penalties. You must read 124, and either 105 or 174, and recognize they are different penalties, then take it on faith that both apply instead of just one. Which means that demigod's situation just got worse, since instead of scoring 26 successes past the minimum possible difficulty, he's now scoring 2 succcesses past the minimum difficulty.
Further, the stuff on page 124 is written in a section that really has little to do with die rolls. The first 2 sentences of the paragraph are summarized on the chart directly below it, so your eye may be intuitively drawn to the chart without finishing the paragraph, thanks to the unfortunate layout.
But it doesn't end there. Page 174 also says you can roll a related ability instead of the correct one, if your GM approves. The example they include is Librarians rolling Strength + Academics, instead of Strength+Athletics, to carry big stacks of heavy tomes. So basically, if you read 174+124, instead of 105+124, you get the feeling the penalty only applies if you're uncreative and the GM is being a dick. However, the bit about using alternate Abilities is in a section on non-rolled actions, so you may also accidentally skip over it if skimming.
This is made even worse since when Hero (and that's the book this is all from) released, you had no reason to suspect the bonuses from Epics would get so high. Even if you read everything multiple times and caught it all, you'd have no way of knowing that the existance of page 124 is going to have HUGE ramifications at Demigod level.
A GM could easily (and anecdotal evidence from the forum indicates many have) miss any of this, making each campaign inadvertantly function on a different set of unintentional house rules. That makes adding new players (who've played the same game before in some other campaign/group) a very dicey prospect.
My solution: I ignore page 124. I want a Demigod without the ability to lose out on 2-5 successes, not more than 20. They are a freakin' Demigod after all.
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