Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Prophecy Brainstorm

I posted the following to the Scion forum last week:
Has anyone put any serious effort to making Prophecy (and/or Mystery) worth raising above the first level?

My experience with it is that the PC who has it will likely never buy the second level. She gets enough to be interesting off of her 6 dice nearly every time she uses it, without it wrecking the plot by revealing too much. If the rare cases where she really needs more info, she spends a Deed or Channel on it. At Legend 7, you can imagine what a shot-in-the-arm those Legendary Deeds do, easily tripling the number of successes.

Anyhow, I was considering ways to make it more engaging, but didn't want to spend a lot of effort if someone else already has done so.

I was thinking that it'd be a good idea to strip the die rolls out completely, and/or give it boons.

Say, the first boon could be:

Minor Visions
(Prophecy o)
Dice Pool: None
Every session, the GM provides you with a minor Vision. This can take the form of a dream or meditation, or just an insight given you. The GM choses what he wants to reveal, and it can be fairly trivial. It must apply to a future (not the current) scene. If by the end of a session the GM has not given you a Minor Vision, you may prompt them for one and they must deliver. Minor Visions prove truthful and accurate unless a being with Legend who is aware of your prophecy takes actions to thwart or prevent it.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm intending this to be kinda like rolling a single success (under the old system) every session, except it happens automatically and the GM is free to make the tidbit given up by that success somewhat less useful.

Higher levels could involve:
bigger visions,
more frequent visions,
visions you can actively summon up,
powers not unlike that Rube Goldberg knack,
bonuses to dice pools when acting to fulfill visions,
bonuses to Perception or Wits rolls to act intuitively,
the ability to influence the dreams of others,
etc.

The die-roll for visions effect of the current purview could be made into a high-level boon that allows Epics.
It's such a pain to search for things on the white wolf forums, so I put this link here.

There's some feedback from people in that thread, but not much in terms of actual boon ideas. I plan to do some more brainstorming, pick it apart a bit, and then construct an entire new Purview out of it. We're talking top to bottom - 10 new boons, plus possibly a change to the avatar to separate Prophecy / Mystery / Magic a bit more. I mean, the Avatar power is really cool and quite flavorful, but if you had 2 or 3 of the three "fate-based" Purviews, you'd be a bit let down in a long-running God-level campaign - though I suppose revising prophecy would remove enough of the let down that a person might not care or complain about Avatar overlap.

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