Springing the Trap

This past Wednesday, I finally sprung a trap that had been set in a game since December. In my Continuum game, the PCs had been carrying around for quite some time a set of tickets to a stage show for a particular one-night-only performance by a mentalist (hypnotist/magician). They were fairly confident that their elder selves had been to the show. They knew for certain that an allied NPC had attended it, and that sometime thereafter that NPC had been fragged very badly.

They'd done a lot of fruning trying to find out exactly what had happened to that NPC, but essentially asked the wrong questions, and missed one really important clue because they focused on one particular "crime scene" at the expense of another one. His fragging had happened at a second location, and most of the PCs inquiries were about that other location and what had fragged him. What they never quite put together until it was too late was that he only ended up at that location because of hypnotic suggestions given him at the mentalist's show. They had solved all sorts of other mysteries tangential to and growing out from this, but hadn't quite figured out what the catalyst for the whole string of events was.

There was a long scene at the lobby of the theatre, and then they went in and sat down. The house lights went down, and the next thing they knew, they were at a third location. The entire audience were at a restaurant, and no one could remember getting there. Nor could anyone really remember anything about the mentalist's show beyond that it was really good.



Clearly, they'd been hypnotized and lead elsewhere, and made to forget the intervening hours. For a spanner, this is especially bad. Time-travelers in the Continuum setting lead regimented lives, with detailed "span logs" of where and when they've been, so they don't frag themselves. The rest of the session was spent trying to piece together what had happened, and the next session will involve a bit more of that. Amongst the great moments were:

• One of the players had taken a really bizarre "hobby" skill of "Memorizing lists of words/names" for his PC. At the start of the restaurant scene, the only thing anyone could remember about the show was a list of memorized titles that had no context. They didn't know why he felt it was important to memorize this list, but he'd done so, and they pieced together some pretty big reveals out of it.
• The revelation that the big bad they'd been investigating all along was probably in attendance at the event, and that they'd noticed her, mis-identified her, and chosen not to interact or interfere.
  
• One of the PCs had brought along earplugs, in case there was a run-in with a hypnotist after the show, and chosen not to wear them at what was, unbeknown to her, the point of no return. Just a tiny bit more paranoid caution would have saved her.
• The big-bad had hired a bunch of off-duty cops as extra security for the show. The PCs talked with the theatre manager, and found out how he was upset and flustered by the unexpected arrival of uniformed security. This tipped them off that something was amiss, but they failed to realize (until it was too late) the point of the cops was to provide witnesses with guns and security cameras so that it would be really difficult for time-travelers to sneak around and undo the events of the evening. It's going to be really tough to fix this now.
  
• The scene at the restaurant afterwards was hilarious. The PCs were surrounded by other audience members at the show, in various stages of suggestibility, and only the PCs were suspicious enough to figure it out. They got into some pretty hilarious arguments with bit part NPCs that were adamant that they could remember the show, but could only regurgitate whatever little snippets the PCs threw at them.

It was a great session, with the players repeatedly exclaiming "if we'd only just done things a little differently!" They were really close to escaping the trap at two different points during the night, where a single simple action they almost took would have prevented all harm to them. To my player's credit, they did a great job of rolling with the punches, and accepting the consequences of the situation. I'm blessed to have such great players. You guys rock.

As George Peppard used to say, "I love it when a plan comes together."

Epic Willpower

Note: while this starts off all annoyingly nitpicky, it really does get around to being useful eventually. If you're sick of the whining, just skip down to the part is large bold letters.

If I had it all to do over again, I'd massively revamp the Scion rules prior to having started my campaign. There's a lot of things (that didn't look terribly problematic back when all we had was the Hero book) which are now rearing their heads at late Demigod.

One of them has to do with Willpower.

There is no Epic Willpower. Instead, Willpower runs on a scale from 1 to 10. There's technically nothing that stops a legendless mortal from buying it up to 10, which is also the highest the most stubborn and self-centered God can achieve.

This was clearly an intentional design decision. Instead of having a wider Willpower scale, PCs and immortal NPCs have access to a variety of Knacks that replenish Willpower. All involve someone else using them to replenish your Willpower for you. This seems intentionally crafted, likely so that PCs have to work together. Many of those work better on mortals than Scions or Gods. This was also intentional, intended to keep PCs from effectively having infinite Willpower, yet still allow the Knacks to be powerful in certain circumstances such as swaying the masses and raising armies. The unfortunate side effect is that a mortal backed up by Scions can access more Willpower than a Scion backed up by Scions, and that a PC without backup has no more Willpower than a Legendless Mortal.

One solution to the conundrum above is a Knack from the wiki: Refuge in Logic. It's a "must have" knack for the moody friendless God, even though it still only works once per story. With a few dots of Epic Intelligence and that knack, a god effectively has more Willpower than a mortal.

But that's only part of the complaint. Let's examine the rolls involved in most mind-influencing powers. The aggressor / brainwasher rolls Attribute + Skill and adds their corresponding Epic successes. The defender typically rolls Willpower + Skill (almost always Integrity, but sometimes Fortitude) + Legend.

At Legend 2, that means the aggressor rolls (at most) 10 dice + 1 autosuccess. The defender rolls (again, at the maximum for Legend 2) 17 dice. More realistically, the defender probably rolls around 12 dice. Point being that an average L2 Scion has a 50% chance of shrugging off the powers of a built-to-maximize L2 hypnotist.

At Legend 12, the math is very different. The aggressor could be rolling 16 dice + 46 autosuccesses. The defender is now rolling at most 27 dice. Which means success is automatic. Against mortals that'd be no big deal - Gods should always beat mortals. But those 27 dice are actually the max for a defending God. Which means no wonder Loki gets away with most anything - the Gods can't hope to resist his smooth talking.

There's a knack (Blockade of Reason in Scion: God) that solves this, by allowing the defender to add his Epic Int successes to the Willpower + Integrity + Legend roll. So now 16 dice + 46 successes are potentially countered by 27 dice + 46 successes. If the defender is Int-based, the odds have totally flipped, from being impossible to resist, to being nearly impossible (I haven't carried the math far enough, but I'd eyeball it at less than 10% probability) to fall for it. The boost is so much that Blockade of Reason is a must-have knack. Even if you only take Epic Int to 4 - 7 dots it's still a huge defensive swing (+7 to +22 successes) against most tricksters and brainwashers.

Better balance would have been achieved by making Blockade of Reason add dice instead of successes. Admittedly, no one ever wants to roll 40 or 60 dice, but at least then there'd be chance of failure. If the GM allows both Blockade of Reason and Contempt of the Superior Mind, the better purchase is always Blockade, but having both would make you truly immune to manipulation (58 successes instead of 46).

Given the system as it stands, there's really no good solution, but then Scion is full of lopsided conflicts, and you can choose to not see that as a flaw. I think better balance would have been achieved if they'd broken from the World of Darkness / Exalted template for Willpower.

Possible house-rule: Epic Willpower
One option would have been to make Willpower function like Attributes. Give it an Epic version, (possibly complete with Knacks). Limit your mundane Willpower to the higher of 5 or your Legend Rating, like Attributes. Then make brainwash powers roll aggressors Att + Skill + Epic vs defenders Will + Skill + Epic Will + Legend. The result would be always favoring the defender, but by a small margin that keeps with the "Primacy of Defense" concept of the game.

A campaign using this would likely not allow the Blockade of Reason knack from Scion: God, but may use the Contempt of the Superior Mind knack from the wiki.

Here's a handful of Knacks for Epic Willpower. Those intending to use this for a campaign will no doubt want to come up with more.

• Righteous Empowerment: Whenever you spend a Willpower to channel a Virtue, you also gain an autosuccess on that roll, as if channeling a Virtue and spending Willpower for guaranteed success on the same roll (which normally isn't allowed).
• Brow-beating: When making a Manipulation roll to influence people, you may add a number of bonus dice equal to your dots in Epic Willpower. You may only use this on rolls that represent extended arguments and unflinching force of personality. In other words, it can't apply to any roll where the target wouldn't know they'd been manipulated or at least verbally abused.
• Hidden Reserves: A number of times per story equal to your dots of Epic Willpower, you may regain 2 Willpower by meditating. Doing so takes at least 10 seconds of focus and inner reflection. Unless you have the Wits Knack "Meditative Focus" you cannot do this during combat or while otherwise under the threat of immediate harm or death.
• Master Of My Own Domain: If you attempt to fail a Virtue roll so as to resist taking a course of action, but score one or more successes (and so must normally do what the Virtue demands) you may pay 1 Willpower or 3 Legend per success to cancel them out and retain control of your character. Alternately, you can pay only enough to cancel some of the successes, so as to prevent a Virtue Extremity but not ignore the virtue entirely.
  
• All Things In Moderation: You are immune to the addictive quality of drugs, even those of the magical variety. While this does little to boost your resistance to their short term affects, you at least know you won't end up craving them again later. In addition, for any poison (or drug) that has a tolerance value based on Stamina (or Fortitude), you may spend a Legend to determine your tolerance by Willpower (or Integrity) instead for the day.