Scion: Guns vs Melee

Over on the Scion forums, there's several threads of lively debate about guns. They run something like this:

Someone feels guns are seriously underpowered in the game, so they post a "solution". (I use quotation marks, because it's only a solution, if you think there's a problem. If you're okay with guns being less impressive than battle-axes, then there's no prob, ergo no solution needed). Often the proposal goes too far, making guns better than melee weapons. This provokes a response from another poster, typically someone who plays a melee-based character who's envious of the more streamlined gun-wielding PC in their group. And then they argue. Heck, sometimes I give in to my baser emotions and argue on forums too. It gets ugly.

The math behind weapons in Scion is roughly summarized as follows...
Guns have a set number of damage dice, and rely only on your Dexterity stat. Melee weapons, in the other hand, use strength to augment damage.

In the early stages, when strength values are fairly low, that's a pretty balanced system. You'll do more damage toe-to-toe than you will at a range, but aiming bonuses and being several yards away from the Nemean Cobra is a good thing. Also, with only one stat affecting your attacks, it's much easier to build a focused character and get full value for your XP and Bonus Points. Let's examine a starting character, Legend 2 with one dot in all Epic Attributes, and 5's in mundane Dexterity and Strength, and 3's in Marksmanship and Melee.

They fire a rifle. Their average attack roll is 5.5 successes, or 7 if they spent 3 ticks aiming. Average damage roll is 4 successes.

They swing an axe. Their average attack roll is 4.5 successes. Average damage roll is 7 successes.

Thanks to the system that turns overflow successes on attack rolls turn into extra damage dice, the rifle actually performs a little better than those numbers indicate. It probably trails the axe by only 1 points of damage when all is said and done. Sniping, shooting on the run, etc can make the Rifle feel a lot more versatile and keep enemies from ever hitting you. If you'd made a non-physical character with lower strength, the rifle would still do the same damage but the axe would drop off. At starting level, that Remington's pretty good.

But later on, melee trumps range. There's this thing called Epic Strength, and it adds Automatic Successes to your damage in melee. There's just no equivalent for guns. Let's look a Legend 8 character, with all their traits maxed out for Demigod Status.

They fire a rifle. Their average attack roll is 30 successes, 33 if they spent 3 ticks aiming, since we'll assume they took the Knack that doubles the Aim bonus. Average damage roll is 4 successes.

They swing an axe. Their average attack roll is 29 successes. Average damage roll is 30 successes.

Even with threshold successes from exceeding the attack roll difficulty, that rifle will do 24 fewer levels of damage (than the axe will) per hit.

Now, admittedly, that's a pretty stilted example, since we maxed the characters traits in everything. More realistic might be to compare two characters, one who spreads his XP between the three traits relevant to Melee (Strength, Dexterity and Stamina) and one who just focuses on Epic Dex to boost their gun...

Relative levels of Epic Dex is likely the biggest factor. It makes you hit more often, makes you less likely to be hit, and adds damage in the form of Threshold successes. But the total math that goes into who wins is really complicated. It depends on how you built your character, how you spend your XP, and what Legend you're at.

Basically, the gunbunny wins if they focus entirely, just raising Legend and Epic Dex. If they can keep both above the corresponding trait of the melee guy, and aimed-snipe or shoot while running away, they'll win.

But the melee guy has the advantage of being able to raise Dex and Strength. Since raising your weakest stat is cheaper than raising your highest, he'll be able to boost something every session or two. He won't hit as often, but he'll connect for a lot more damage when he hits. The fact that he gets hit more often can be mitigated by the ability to spend points on Epic Stamina as well.

Over the long term, the melee guy just raises whatever is currently their weakest relevant stat, favoring Dex slightly to keep the gun person trapped in an arms race. The gun guy needs to stay above him in Dex, so they have to raise Legend, and both Mundane and Epic Dex, to stay on top. The gunner keeps getting more accurate, but that doesn't mean the exact same thing as more damaging. The melee dude does both, but not to the accuracy extremes of his counterpart.

Who's actually more deadly will flip-flop from session to session based on exact levels of Legend, Dex, and XP.
In a nutshell, whenever the gunner raises their Epic Dex, they'll retake the lead for several sessions until the melee person incrementally catches up.
Whenever their Legend and Epic Dex are equal, the melee guy is more powerful because of the increased damage from Epic Strength, especially at Demigod levels.

Eventually, that Strength (and more importantly, high Soak) may make the gun completely pointless. At that point, it's gonna totally suck to discover your character can no longer compete via their divine handgun unless they use it to pistol-whip.

In the setting, it makes perfect sense - when you can run faster than a bullet (and use a skyscraper as a club) you're just going to be a lot more deadly than a bullet.

As far as mechanics go, it's the kind of thing that would have been better if it had been spelled out clearly in character creation. 16-point font, top of a page:

"Guns are superior at Legend 2, but become useless at Legend 7. If you plan to play this character for a long time, put your relic dots in a Axe, not a Rifle."

If it had said that, this wouldn't be such a hot-button topic on the Scion forums.

To those who design point-based character creation systems...

Here's a lengthy rant. It was recently provoked by Scion, but I first noticed this issue in the 7th Sea RPG. Truth be told, the problem is as old as gaming itself.

My rant will start with number crunching, but get into design theory and philosophy before I'm done. The part where numbers turn into theory will be marked by a picture of Odysseus amongst the stars - why, 'cause it's a picture I can conveniently upload. And it gives a visual clue to those who want to skip the parts of my rant that deal with math and the specifics of the Scion RPG experience system.

Where it begins: Some RPGs use point-based character creation systems. In the abstract, it's my preferred character gen ideology, since it gives so many options to the player. However, sometimes the execution has problems...

Often times that problem is that the system uses a different type of point for character creation and character advancement. If it was just semantics, two functionally identical points with the same name, it would be perhaps a tad silly but not troublesome. The issue comes when the points work differently.

Let's look at Scion, a game I love and am having a blast GMing/Storytelling. In Scion, you get multiple types of points. First there's "dots" that you get in various categories, such as Attributes and Epic Attributes or Boons. Then you get "bonus points" that can be used to buy things from any of those categories at the end of character creation. And later you get "experience points" at the end of each session. Even later, if you become a Demigod, you get a second round of "dots" and additional "bonus points". Dots vary by category and occasion, bonus points come in a cluster of 15, and xp arrives about 4 to 6 per session.

Raising an Attribute from level 2 to 3 costs 1 dot, 4 bonus points, or 8 xp.
Raising an Attribute from level 4 to 5 also costs 1 dot or 4 bonus points, or it costs 16 xp.
Note that it's the same cost in dots or bonus points, but double the cost in xp.
Conclusion #1: Mechanically, you're encouraged to raise your most important attributes only at character creation and ascension to Demigodhood. But the attributes that only matter a little to your character concept you can put at really low during character creation and then bump up to mid-level with xp.
Conclusion #2: Effectively you get a price break if you focus heavily at character creation and then use xp to just cover your self-inflicted weaknesses. If you had to choose between having three attributes at 2, 2 and 5 or having them both all at level 3, you're better off going with 2, 2, and 5. It will save you xp in the long run.

Epic Attributes do the same thing:
Epic level 0 to 1 costs 1 dot, 4 - 5 bonus points, or 8 - 10 xp
Epic level 1 to 2 costs 1 dot, 4 - 5 bonus points, or 4 - 5 xp.
Epic level 2 to 3 costs 1 dot, 4 - 5 bonus points, or 8 - 10 xp.
Conclusion #3: Conclusions 1 and 2 also applies to Epic Attributes.
Conclusion #4: Since getting to 1 from 0 costs more xp than getting from 1 to 2, you are also encouraged to take at least one level in any Epic you plan on ever being interested in. Doing so saves you 4-5 xp, which is about an entire session's worth.
Conclusion #5: At the end of character creation, each Epic should be rated at 0 or 3, rarely at 1, and never at 2 (0 if you'll never be interested in it, 3 if you plan to use it at all, and 1 only if you really wanted it at a 3 but ran out of points to get there).

But there's this other category of powers called Boons.
A level 1 Boon costs 1 dot, 4-5 bonus points, or 4 - 5 xp
A level 2 Boon costs 2 dots, 8-10 bonus points, or 8 - 10 xp
A level 3 Boon cost 3 dots, 12-15 bonus points, or 12 - 15 xp
Note that while dot cost remains in ratio with bonus point cost and xp cost.
Conclusion #6: Conclusions 1 through 4 don't apply to Boons. There's no way to get an effective xp break on Boons. If you had to choose between three level 1 Boons and one level 3 Boon, either is an equally good choice from a point of xp. So, you'd choose based on personal desire for one big flashy power or the versatility of multiple little powers.

Now's where it gets interesting. Epics and Boons come out of the same pool of Dots. Let's compare them:
Epic level 0 to 3 costs 3 dots, 12 - 15 bonus points, or 20 - 25 xp.
A level 3 Boon cost 3 dots, 12-15 bonus points, or 12 - 15 xp.
Note the same cost in dots or bonus points, but Epics cost nearly twice as much in xp / Boons cost just over half as much in xp.
Conclusion #7: Mechanically, your best move is to spend all those dots on Epics. Leave the Boons for your experience points later. Provided you eventually get them all to the same level, doing so saves you 8-10 xp (nearly two session's worth) for each Epic you buy at character creation instead of a Boon.

So, conclusions paraphrase: Your best call during character creation is focus on a few high Attributes and a few high Epics. Leave everything else at their starting/base level. You should never buy Boons with dots or bonus points, only with XP.

Conclusion #8 (Drawn from that paraphrase): Focused, narrowly specialized characters will eventually be much better than jack-of-all-trades generalists. They have vulnerabilities if the opening sessions of the campaign, but they will compensate for them much faster (for fewer xp) than the generalist evenly spent PC will be able to catch up with the specialists best moves and powers.


(For those who scrolled down to this picture to start, what you missed is an in-depth analysis of the Scion RPG experience and character creation systems, some quirks in said systems, and how to maximize your character by drawing conclusion from those quirks) The rest is observations, theory and philosophy...


In my experience, players will generally fall into one of three categories:
Category A: "I made those conclusions the first time I looked at the Scion rulebook. My character is all the better for it. I'm here to game."
Category B: "I made those conclusions at some point, but had a cool character concept that was fun to play even if it meant a few suboptimal decisions at character creation. I'm okay with lagging behind in XP because my character does really neat things right out of the gate and is a lot of fun to play. I'm here to roleplay."
Category C: "I'll never notice. All this math isn't my thing. I'm here to have fun."

Now, I wish everyone fell into category B. Oh, the games we'd have then! But my experience is that the real distribution amongst gamers is 45% A, 30% C, and only 25% B. And that's after years of gaming and self-selecting my gaming groups.

Back when I was in junior high, and only 3 people in town role-played, it was a very clear 33%A, 66%C, 0%B breakdown. For the record, I was group C. And when I figured out that one person in our little clique was Type A, I was pretty rude to him. "Point Weasel" was I called him, but I think "Munchkin" and "Twink" are the accepted (but no less harsh) terms these days.

But I wasn't being fair. (And wherever you are, dude, my apologies) The game system we were using had the same flaws, I just couldn't see them yet. He did, and he took advantage of it. The books were (and generally are) written to reward you for figuring out the math behind the systems, but that math is almost never (in the books) put into language that could possibly make a Type C player get it. That language, in Scion, would have been something along the lines of my 8 conclusions, above. Just conclusion #8 and the paraphrase directly preceeding it would have done it. 2 extra paragraphs added to a 330-page book would have benefited hundreds of gamers.

The same thing is what contributes to the main criticisms of D&D 3.x and the OGL. All those feats and prestige classes and 3rd-party supplements mean you min-max and penny-pinch or tweak your character for days.
The Category A's think there's nothing wrong with it, and the rulebooks clearly agree with them. For a subset of this Category, figuring out how to get the most out of the system is part of the fun.
The Category C's often think it's cheating, and many get as rude as I used to about it. Even if they don't call it cheating, it'll often rip the fun out of the game for them, because they don't want to crunch numbers, they want to play and socialize.
The Category B's can go either way. Some will be happy with a character that's fun and unique, and others will slowly grow resentful of their Cat A buddies till it wrecks the group.

Nowadays, I'm pretty clearly in the B category. Concept is most important to me, but I'll analyze a system to make sure there's nothing that's really holding my character back. If I notice something (like the above 8 conclusions) before character creation is done, I'll point them out to the rest of the group.

After character creation, it's a lot less useful, but I still get pretty offended at the subset of Category A players who horde the secrets of the system to themselves. Sometimes it's about ego, they want to have the most powerful PC at the table. Sometimes it's about not trusting the GM, pulling a fast one because your so fearful the GM will kill your character.

But the thing I need to keep in mind is that most of the time, for most of the Cat A's, it's a much more innocent reason: "Huh, that looks like it might be better. I'll try it out. If it proves to be really broken, everybody will notice and the GM will house-rule it. But if turns out just a little better than my other options were, then nobody gets hurt and it's all a-o-k. Next time we're making characters, since I'll know how well it works by then, I can tell everybody about it."

The game that opened my eyes was 7th Sea. We were several hours into character creation for the first time, and everyone was nearly done but me. We were all really tired. I was trying to decide whether or not I really could stretch my points to be both a Swordsman and a Full-Blooded Mage. Weighing it in my mind, I decided to look at the XP charts to see how long it'd take me to regain things I might cut from my character sheet to make room for it. Suddenly I realized that the base Swordsman and Mage placeholders were all I needed, that and the Attribute called Panache. All the Advanced Knacks dropped off the character sheet, 'cause I'd get them all cheaper by experience a couple sessions down the road. Sure, I'd roll less dice in the first few combats, but since Panache let me act so quickly, it'd be sure to hit at least once a round. It was late, I was tired, and I didn't think to explain this to my fellow players, who had already finished their characters.

Three sessions later people were pissed at me (And here's another apology, for a different group of people: Sorry I didn't speak up the night we made our characters, I really should have) because I got twice as many actions as them, had made up for most of their initial dice lead, and had Magic and Swordsman tricks too. I felt horrible, but it was too late to do anything about it.

My advice to game designers and developers: the lessons to be taken from this are ones that Monte Cooke has already called out a couple years back. I'm mostly seconding what he said. We need to step down from our Ivory Towers and meet the people. We need to make sure the character creation sections of our rulebooks include simple approachable statements about the math behind our game systems. We need to ensure it's possible to get the most out of your character without 2 hours of math and multiple thorough reads of the rulebook.

Don't worry too much about losing those for whom the dissecting of the rules is a big part of the fun. We can still debate the merits of whether an low-damage area-effect power is better than a high-damage single-target ability. And you can make the high-end powers (that starting characters don't get) have all the depth and subtlety that requires analysis - by the time a player gets to worrying about those they're pretty invested in the game and already know what they're doing.

Make sure the most basic math of your system is spelled out where (and in a way that) the non-scientists can get their hands on it. It'll improve everyone's first experience with your game. Thanks.