Scion is a Bad Game

Warning: this will be a big ugly rant...

After 8 months of fighting with the system, I've come to the conclusion that Scion is a bad game. The setting's great, the concepts are fun, but the game portions of it suck.

At first, I thought this was just because I like my RPG mechanics a bit more streamlined and elegant. During combat, I'd prefer one roll per attack, for example, not a minimum of two rolls plus the activation of 4 or more powers. The existence of things like DV and Soak indicated that the designers were taking efforts towards trying to reduce the die-rolling and mid-game math. So, thinking it had only the over-complication flaws of a game like D&D, I committed myself to running Scion, figuring I'd get over the learning curve and it'd all start flowing well.

Instead, what I should have been doing is stripping out the setting elements I like and applying them to a different mechanical base. Don't get me wrong, I have no plans of axing my campaign. We've toughed with it this far, and I intend to carry it through till they are Gods and most of the Titans have been dealt with (or the PCs die trying). But I likely won't ever run another Scion campaign, at least not without largescale mechanical modification. To such an extent that it wouldn't even be Scion anymore. It'd be Fate or Amber wearing a Scion costume.

D&D is not a bad game. It's way more complicated than I prefer, but it's good at what it does. Once you grasp the main rules, you'll be fine as long as you avoid a few of the clunky remnants (that will be fixed in 4th anyway, like grapple) and think tactically. Sure, the rules can be tough (and they sometimes get in the way of roleplaying) but once you know the rules well, D&D accomplishes what it sets out to do.

Scion is a whole other ball of wax. The combat system fails.

Characters NEED Epic Dex, or else they die (and never kill any of the bad guys), and quickly. At some point, the players figure this out, and then even the social/mental-based PCs start taking Epic Dex. In our experience, this then resulted in the players discovering how damn cheap and effective the first couple dots of Epics are. Within a few sessions, everyone had the 1st and 2nd dot of all 9 Epics. I'd have liked to say "No" on some of those. But I can't say "for the past 10 sessions, your character has been the brute force and avoided talking - he can't buy Epic Charisma now." I do, it'd be unfair to that character, since I let the PC whose concept is "Prosecuting Attorney" buy Epic Dex. And as I said, if I don't let her buy Dex, she'll die in round one of combat.

Once she started raising that Epic Dex, though, another long-term flaw of the game became obvious. There's this thing referred to on the forums as "The Primacy of Defense". The phrase doesn't occur in the books at all, it's just forum-speak. It alludes to the fact that the rules are set up to make the majority of attacks miss, and the majority of hits fail to do any damage.

In D&D, the fighter hits the typical foe more than half the time. Other characters might miss a lot, but when they do hit they at least know that the action has an impact. Every time you hit, the enemies hitpoints decrease. Two equal characters (twins or mirror reflections) chop each other to bits over time, and so the combat system at least works.

In Scion, two twins or reflections just fight eternally. No one ever wins. You have a less than 50% chance to hit yourself, and even when you do, you have a less than 50% chance to do even one point of damage (unless your attack does Aggravated damage). At God level, characters can have over 50 health levels. Closely matched characters could literally take 200 attacks to kill each other.

While that beautifully captures the saga of the gods, it would be a terrible bore to play through.

To hit, your attack pool is Dex+Skill+Weapon+EpicDex. At Hero level, that's 4 to 12 dice (17 with accuracy-based Relic weapon) plus 0 to 4 auto successes. That averages 2 successes at the low end, to an average roll of 10 or 12 (depending on whether or not they have said Relic) for best Hero-level character. Your DV is ([Dex+Skill+Legend]/2)+Epic Dex, or ([Dex+Skill+Weapon]/2)+Epic Dex. So, at Hero level it ranges from 3 (or 5) to 11 (or 13, if you have a defensive relic). There's plenty of other modifiers that can figure in, but in general, the powers and situations that boost your attacks are only about as common and powerful as those that boost your defense. As a result, every character has a slightly less than 50% chance of being able to hit themselves. (And that's not counting Untouchable Opponent - without a houserule that single-most-important knack renders about a 1% chance of hitting your twin.)

You roll giant handfuls of dice with steep bellcurves that make every roll predictable, and can spend a Legend point to reroll if there is a fluke. If their DV is more than just a few points above your average roll, you'll never hit.

Even if you do hit, the chance of you doing damage is minimal. There's this thing called soak. Let's look at unarmed attacks first. Damage is 1+Strength+EpicStr. If it's a "heavy attack" it jumps up by 3 more dice, but is slower and less likely to hit. You add to that dice equal to any extra successes above the number needed to hit on the attack - but against your twin that's maybe a die or two. So, at the weak end of Hero, a punch does 2 or 3 dice, and at the very pinnacle of hero it's 8 dice + 4 successes. Bashing soak is Stamina+EpicStamina, so a character with Stamina equal to your Strength has bashing soak at most a couple points below your punching damage. Thing is, soak isn't dice. It's a static value, subtracted from damage. So the big Hero's heavy attack rolls 8+4, averaging 8 levels of bashing. But his soak is also 8, meaning the typical attack does zero damage.

Weapons, of course, spike that up a bit. With a big honkin' axe, the PC might do 12 lethal. Lethal soak is a bit lower, so the character in question probably has lethal soak of 6. Now we're lookin' at 6 damage getting through, which is almost enough for a one-hit-kill. But of course, there's a catch. We allowed the attacker a weapon, but didn't give the defender armor. Putting the best Relic weapon against the best Relic armor generates around 15 lethal vs a lethal soak of 16. Mundane axe vs mundane armor is 12 vs 11, so you have to hit half a dozen times to kill.

Conveniently, you don't fight your doppleganger very often. Not every NPC will have Stamina equal to your Strength, either. But some will have more. Dex determines both how well you attack and how well you dodge. So a character who you can hit easily also can't hit you, and one who can hit you fairly often is probably immune to your attacks. Doesn't that suck?

Epic Attributes make this even worse. As the characters go up in power, the gaps between them get wider because the damn auto-successes raise at a rate that's technically neither geometric nor exponential nor even fibonaccian, but any of those terms catches the spirit of it. The more you specialize, the better it pays off. Which is where the whole "must have Epic Dex or die" motif came in. A social/mental PC, trailing just two dots of Dex behind the combat-monkey of the group, gets hit nearly twice as often and takes 50% more damage per attack. An extra level of Epic doesn't mean a little more damage, it means a huge spike in effectiveness. Rarely are you just a little outclassed - instead every battle is either a lop-sided foregone conclusion or a very painful and slow war of attrition.

I don't know which is more embarrassing - the fact that WWP published a game with such fundamental flaws, or the fact that I'm subjecting myself and my play group to it.

In order to make Scion fun, you have to either ditch combat entirely, or make every battle stupidly one-sided. And since it's a very cinematic game about godly ass-whupin', ditching combat isn't truly an option. Which means you have to accept that the players will win every damn fight, or occassionally get slaughtered without a reprieve.

Luckily, the game designers had the foresight to create a world in which combat is not the right thematic/in-character answer to the Titans. Had they failed to do that, the game would be utterly, totally broken at the God level. But even with that, you just might feel that you wasted most of those XP you spent on combat-related things in the early stages of the campaign. That's unfortunate.