Saturday, January 12, 2008

Leveling Legend

One houserule I use in my Scion campaign is that no one is allowed to spend XP on Legend. All characters started as a group, at Legend 2, and advance as a group whenever their actions (and the resulting public awareness) justify it.

I didn't have this rule until about the 12th session in. All the PCs had chosen independently to start at Legend 2, playing characters who did not yet have much popularity or reputation. A few sessions in, one player advanced to Legend 3. The next session, another PC followed, and the third did the session after that. But it was noticable to me the differences in power-level in that time. Two characters have the same social knack, one where whom you could affect with it was based on Legend rating. Suddenly one PC got much more potent than the other, despite the now-suddenly-weaker individual having about 6 more dice in the relevant Attribute + Ability pool. Nothing relevant had changed, except for Legend. This rung a warning bell for me - it was clear that issues like that were going to crop up anytime the PCs Legend Ratings were spread apart. Further, those issues would get more severe at the higher levels - as is evidenced by the growth pattern of Epic Attributes (which give autosuccesses equal to 1, 2, 4, 7, 11, 16, 22, 29, 37, 46, 56 as the level goes up).

3 comments:

March said...

:)

SiderisAnon said...

This sounds like an excellent idea for maintaining character balance.

So, would you always start all of the party at the same Legend at character creation? What would you about new characters or replacement characters coming in?

I'm just thinking ahead for other games I might be involved in.

rbbergstrom said...

In future campaigns, I'll always start the group off at the same Legend.

A possible exception might be if someone were only going to be able to show up for a fraction of sessions, and the group wanted them to play the semi-NPC mentor or sidekick.

New and replacement characters would have the same Legend as the existing characters, but only a fraction of the experience points. They'd have the same potential for a big power or two, but would be weaker in other areas if they chose to focus.