Error: Tried to destroy world that hadn't been created!

I'm attempting to get back into modding for Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.
I really love that game, and when the mods work, they're a lot of fun. When the mods are crashing, it's not nearly so much fun.

In the past, when it crashed, I had no clue what exactly was causing it. Now, I have a debug tool. It's not great, but rather than being totally clueless, I get to ready pithy little reports like this:

Error: Tried to destroy world that hadn't been created.

Which is annoying to see pop up when there's nothing in your mod that destroys worlds.

Other interesting bits include:

Can't load asset misc/intro_scrugug.ogg

Frustrating when there's no scrugug.ogg referenced anywhere in your mod. In fact, a search of my harddrive indicates that file doesn't exist. So I thought maybe I'd try to figure out what referencing it. Searching the contents of files, I found the reference. The main game has a line that is supposed to trigger the playing of that file - yet the file did not come with my download.

Oh well, sometimes the debugging mode generates helpful messages. For example, it clued me in that I'd missed an "s" in one occurrence of the command to access the file graphics/items/s_itemssgq1.jpg. Adding in that s got rid of one potential crash.

And it gave me pages of the following:

warning: couldn't make new Gongaquai fleet
warning: couldn't make new Gongaquai fleet
warning: couldn't make new Gongaquai fleet
warning: couldn't make new Gongaquai fleet
warning: couldn't make new Gongaquai fleet
warning: couldn't make new Gongaquai fleet
Fatal signal: Bus Error (SDL Parachute Deployed)
*** malloc[396]: Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0x281ca00; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug
*** malloc[396]: Deallocation of a pointer not malloced: 0x281ca00; This could be a double free(), or free() called with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug

The malloc stuff is right over my head, but I at least have an alien race called the Gongaquai, who only show up if a particular quest is triggered, so I have a solid lead on where to start looking for the source of the trouble.

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.
  

To outer space and back

Someday, I may end up running a (hard) sci fi game, and thus may find this post I wrote about relativity and the twin paradox useful, so I'm providing a link here. Einstein doesn't get discussed much here, whereas there's no guarantees it'll remain easy to search for amidst all the craziness at Repeated Expletives.

Arete in other's hands

Over at the forum a lot of work's being done on Arete. The version they're hammering out has a lot more flavor than the original version, but it's still just "good at skills" which I think is pretty narrow, and the jury's still out on whether or not it's balanced.

I'll give them credit, though. They've solved issues C, H, and J completely. B is mitigated, and if it's still a problem, it's only because of level 10 being broken in the same way Tsukumo-Gami 3 is broken, so that's a big improvement. F and G are arguably solved as well.

Re-evisioning Arete

Rather than Arete, which is a very narrow Purview (that only exists as somewhat flavorless die-adder), I'd like to make a broader Greco-Roman Purview.

I'd like to see the things Arete does (excellence on a handful of focused skills, aka rerolls and or bonus dice) be just a couple (neither too weak nor too strong) boons within a larger Greek Pantheon Purview.

So, I'd stick some skill boosting boons in the lower stages. Probably 2 boons total.
One grants one free reroll per scene to a small number of Abilities.
The other grants +Legend Dice to those same skills.
I'd be tempted to call those levels 2 and 4, in the absence of a larger context.

Somewhere in the low levels I'd have a power that reveals the trophies of Titanspawn. This is something Scion's been needing for a while, and it jives with the notion of the Greek myths seeming to really emphasize the "use bits of the monsters later" theme.

Some level should involve little models of mortals, being placed upon a chessboard or miniature ampitheatre, since anyone who's seen a Ray Harryhausen film thinks of that when you mention Zeus. This would manipulate mortals or fate.

For that matter, a "View From Olympus" observational power or something that superimposes you as a giant transparent dude in the clouds could work.

Perhaps a Pandora's Box power somewhere in the high levels? We could then reveal that it's what Prometheus used to make cavemen everywhere discover fire simultaneously.

Pomegranites, Golden Apples - there could be a level about accursed fruit, though I don't yet know exactly what it would do.

Some sort of transformative power might work, too. This could represent both Circe's efforts at turning men to beasts, and Zeus's many non-human dalliances. (Zeus doesn't have Animal Avatar, since it's not one of his Favored purviews. That means he probably doesn't have Animal 10 either, so either he has Level 5 a whole bunch of times, or there's some other power at play).

For level 10, I'd be tempted to have it be Zeus's lightningbolts, or perhaps the power that locked the Titans in Tarterus in the first place, but both are possibly better handled elsewhere.

If there was some way to work Hubris and questing into this Purview as well, so much the better.

Other than being paragons of skills, what else do Greco-Roman gods and heroes have in common? What other cool powers could we work into boons and stick beneath the Dodekatheon banner?

Problematic Arete

Several attempts have been made in the past to revise Arete. All (that I've seen, anyway) simply change the nature of the dice pools. They still keep the concept of "Greeks are just better at Skills" and don't branch out at all. Me, I think giving bonuses to skills is pretty narrow design space, not truly worthy of 10 levels of a Pantheon Purview.

There's numerous criticisms that have come up about Arete. Note that this is an attempt to just list everything I've heard/read people complain about it, both in person and on the forums. I'm including them in the same barely-sensible order I used on the Forum, so that I don't get confused and refer to the wrong letters later.

Here's the short version:
A) Not as good as Epics, for around the same cost.
B) Yet way too good in the late campaign, especially Legend 12.
C) Too many dice to fit in your hand. Too many rerolls, too.
D) Better than Abilities.
E) Very cost-prohibitive.
F) Not as flavorful as other Pantheon's Purviews.
G) If you do buy it to a high level, you get called a munchkin/twink.
H) The first dot is rather weak compared to the first dot of anything else.
I) If it applies to DV, Greeks are unhittable.
J) The rerolls are pointless.

Here's the long version:

A) Not as good as Epics, for around the same cost. Until your Legend gets really high, there's little reason to buy it. Investing the XP in Epics will pay off better. Since my campaign uses "Legend Rating by Storyline" not by XP, this isn't really a problem with my group. They aren't rushing to keep Legend and one or two Epics maxed, so therefore they have time and XP available to spend on little things, like Arete. Even if they were focused on maxing something, they'd get the Epic topped out, and then have to wait till the next time I felt a Legend increase was justified. In that wait-time, they'd be tempted to spend XP on Arete to further max out their pools. But for those who require XP to raise Legend, Arete looks pretty crappy. (And for the record, I think that's just fall-out from the truism that compared to Epics, everything else looks crappy as heck.)

B) In the late God-stage campaign, when it's finally worth spending XP on it, Arete gives the Greeks a huge bonus. Obviously, I'm not at this hurdle yet, but I'm not sure how it'll feel when the one Greek PC in my campaign is rolling 16 to 46 more dice than anyone else at everything. Greeks get all the die-adders the other pantheons have access to, plus Arete on top of it. The only cost is XP, which limits it in the early game, but at Legend 12 it's a sudden pump method.

C) No one really wants to roll +46 bonus dice. Nor do they want to roll +20 or 30 extra dice and a stack of emergency rerolls. Truth be told, there's really no reason to ever hold back more than 1 or 2 rerolls. Still, a Legend 12 Greek Character using their primary schtick will be rolling at least 60 dice total, with one reroll set aside just in case. Since you can't really get more than 20 dice in your hands at once, that's roll and pick out the successes, roll and pick, roll and pick, add them up, decide it's not good enough so you reroll and pick, roll and pick, roll and pick. Yuck.

D) Compared to Abilities, Arete is actually really good. Increasing your overall die pool from 9 to 10 is cheaper if you do it by getting Arete 1 than if you do it by getting Ability 5. It typically takes less XP, and gives a bigger benefit for what you do spend. This is a pretty minor complaint, and it's completely obliviated if the PCs take Fast Learner / Star Pupil / Teaching Prodigy. But still, it's just enough to make certain other complaints (E, H, and J) feel like unwarranted whining. ...which they aren't.

E) Maintaining Arete in more than one or two Abilities is very cost-prohibitive. I actually see this as a balancing factor, since Arete is so powerful at high-legend and/or a Legend by Storyline campaign. Yet it seems to be the #1 complaint by players of Arete, at least on the Forums. It requires them to become narrow specialists, not just broadly amazing at everything. I think that reinforces the concepts of Greek myth, but some folks feel it fails to capture the "We're just better 'cause we're Roman" concept. I suspect that "we're better" statement has been made by every culture in history, but it's just more familiar to us thanks to the heritage of our civilization. Mentioning such doesn't dissuade anyone on the forums, though.

F) Other pantheons get cool powers that have flavor, whereas the Greeks just get dice. As I said, bonus dice is pretty uninteresting for 10 levels of anything. I also think that as far as dice-adders go, the current Arete does it in a pretty flavorless way. It's just "everytime you roll, add these dice" not something that allows for slightly rarer Heroic feats or truly memorable greatness. Even with 7 dots of Arete: Craft, you can't make a magic item, for example. Compare this to Animal 3 and Animal 5, or Tsukumo-Gami 3. All of those add dice to rolls, but do so in more interesting and flavorful ways. (Though, I'll admit, A3 and TG3 are broken. I've houseruled them in my campaign to solve that, limiting bonus dice by your Legend).

G) Arete is the one Purview that a player can't purchase to it's highest level without being insulted, at least on the Forum. For some reason, using an Avatar or Ultimate to rewrite the plot doesn't get you called a twink, but taking Arete above level 7 does. Using a mirror to talk to your followers via Heku 8 isn't twinkish, but rolling 60 dice (Arete 8 gives 29 dice, plus the 15-30 dice in most of your pools at Legend 9) is likely to unleash the verbal snipage. Sure, it being an impersonal forum makes that easier - but if people are saying that on the net, they must be thinking it when playing face-to-face.

H) The first dot of Arete is rather weak compared to the first dot of any other Pantheon Purview. You're not getting the same payout for your XP. Even original Jotunblut, which was frequently disparaged on the forums, gave you magic puppy dogs for the first dot, and brainwashing for the second! Compare that to +1 die on Animal Ken or Command, and it's clear which is best.

I) If applied to DV, Arete makes Greeks unhittable. The rules are a tiny bit unclear about whether or not it should apply to DV, and this causes big flaming fights on the forum. As I see it, the implication of the rules about bonus dice are that it should affect DV, though I can see why some would disagree (it's not spelled out terribly clearly and is lacking from the DV calculations of the sample PCs). As I said, if you do interpret it to apply to DV, it makes Greeks untouchable in combat somewhere mid-DemiGod (I'd say around 5 or 6 dots of Arete in Melee or Athletics).

J) The rerolls are pointless. This is no big deal, since Arete gives so much power just via the bonus dice. However, it's silly (and annoying to some) that the books mention you could have 23 rerolls with Arete 10. I can't really think of anything where 20 dice and 23 rerolls (so 0-40 successes, most likely a final result in the high teens to low 20s) is actually better than 66 dice (0-122 successes, but most likely a final result just over 30).

Turning my attention to Arete

Things that were on my to-do list:
1) Revise Jotunblut
2) Revise Prophecy
3) Revise Mystery
4) Figure out some way to make Magic cool again once the Companion brings us alternate boons for every Purview
5) Revise Arete before my campaign gets to the God level where it could break down
6) Minor tweaks to all Pantheon-specific purviews and special purviews so that they can all function under the same XP/purchase rules as All Purpose Purviews.

Obviously, 1-3 are dealt with. Not all are perfected, but they don't suck anymore, either. Minor tweaks may occur over time, but I don't need to do anything in the short term.

#4 is almost irrelevant. No PCs in my campaign have Magic, only NPCs, so the need to keep their powers "cool" is pretty minimal. Also, the Companion section with all the alternate boons won't release for over a month, so there's no point to working on it yet - for all I know, they may deal with it directly in the Companion and do the work for me. I'll hold off on it.

That means it's time for project #6: Arete.

I brought up the subject over at the Scion forums. Most people thought I was just trying to make a joke about how much Arete causes flamewars - there's a steady stream of faux insults going back and forth now. Someone actually got flamed for not being flaming enough. It's amusing, but not terribly useful. My own fault, that. I knew it would result in arguments, so I made a joke or two at the get-go, and now everyone takes it as a big laugh.

World Hopping At God-Level

As my campaign approaches Godhood, :) I'm considering the means available to PCs to travel from world to world. World hopping seems fairly vital to the game at that stage, yet not every PC is likely to have true access to it. So, I'm compiling a list of how one could gain access, so that the players can make informed decisions at the time of achieving Godhood.

Methods that exist largely irregardless of your character sheet:

• Cultural Connection: You can get into your Pantheon's regions of the Underworld from places related to your Pantheon's death practices. This tends to be slow and awkward, and it doesn't give you a way back.
  
• Death Connection: Can be used to gain access to the Underworld from various tombs, graveyards, etc in the mortal world. Cheap but not easy. It only takes a Birthright (no boons, technically), but it's one-way only, you have no control of exactly where in the Underworld you arrive, and it can take some time and circumstance to work it.
• Terra Incognita: Mythical places that exist as cul-de-sac's off the main stem of the world. Most can be entered by any Scion for a legend point or two, but it's hard to find them unless you have the 5th level of Psychopomp. They are a destination themselves, not truly a means of transit to other places.
  
• Axis Mundi: There are a number of pre-existing bridges between worlds. They aren't as fast as using powers, but they don't cost XP, either. One draw back is you need to know of them and find them, and there's no equivalent of the Terra Incognita Power of Psychopomp. Typically, each Pantheon has one or more that they access, and which they guard from Titans and other intruding outsiders.
  

The following boons will help you travel more freely:

• Death 8: Far better than just the generic Underworld transit ability conveyed by having access to the Death Purview and standing around in a graveyard. It's faster and more versatile, but more expensive. It's still just one-way, too.
• Guardian 5: It's limited to taking you to people under your protection and places you've visited before. Further, you can only use it if that person, place or thing is in danger.
• Moon 9: You get a private estate on the Moon, which then has doors leading to the world and the overworld (no access to the Underworld) and you are somewhat limited in where in those places it can take you.
• Psychopomp 4: Let's you drag others with when using other powers. The book seems to specify that this is only other Psychopomp boons, but I don't think it's broken to broaden it a bit (and I've done so in my game) to other travel/movement powers.
• Psychopomp 5: Gives you access to Terra Incognita. It's not terribly flexible or useful during combat, and you're at the whim of the GM and/or locale.
• Psychopomp 9: A major transit power. This lets you jump from world to world largely free from restriction. It's expensive, but it's very versatile.
• Psychopomp 10: You can exist in multiple places at once. Technically not quite as good as Psycho 9 for exploration or retreat, but still an astounding world-hopping power.
• Avatars: While only a few specifically mention traveling between worlds, I bet most GMs would let most Avatar boons let you world-hop, especially if doing nothing else with the Avatar activation. Earth could burrow anywhere, Water could wash up on any shore, etc.
  

Other options:

• Sanctum Background: Gives you a single location that lets you travel between specific places in two worlds. Costs 1 to 5 Birthright points for the Sanctum, plus an extra Birthright point to link it to another world. Basically, you can buy your own little Axis Mundi or Underworld Passage connecting your Divine and Earthly estates for 2 bonus points.
  
• Psychopomp 6 & 7, Moon 7, and Sun 7 all speed up Earthly transit significantly. They can't change what world you're on, but they'll cruise across it speedily.

So, one thing I've learned from compiling this list is that I've been playing my Gods as a bit too free to travel. As the books are written, most Gods really don't have a means of easy transit from world to world and (surprisingly) from place-to-place within the same world. So, for Poseidon to get from the Overworld to any specific place in the Ocean, he must

1. climb Olympus,
2. descend a mundane mountain,
3. hoof it to the sea,
4. and swim,

or pop 30 legend on an Avatar. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Social Combat system from Exalted

I posted this comment at someone else's blog today, and thought I might want to save it here for future reference. He was considering porting over the Social Combat system from Exalted to Scion, as someone had done on the White Wolf Wiki. While I think the notion of Social Combat (making social interactions have more game element and thus giving them more screen time), I think that system is a poor fit for Scion. Here's why:

That system uses temporary Willpower to track how well you’ve convinced, tricked, or intimidated someone. There’s a couple problems with that.

Willpower totals max at 10 in Scion, for both puny mortals and the most strong-willed Gods. So, it doesn’t really scale as you go up, and almost all PCs start at 70% of maximum. Social attributes, however, have a higher cap, and Epic socials expand almost geometrically (+46 automatic successes at the top level). Social characters will wrap the gods around their fingers with fairly minimal XP investment.

Rather than scaling up the willpower pools, the designers just made lots of knacks that restore spent willpower, especially in Demigod and God (but those knacks can be purchased by Hero-level characters). In fact, there’s several different knacks that refresh someone’s entire willpower pool for a single point of legend (and Gods have over 100 legend points). Two characters both armed with that power would render each other immune to ever being dissuaded.

I’d guess by Legend 5 or so it’ll break down almost completely. You’ll always succeed at persuading someone if you talk to them in private, but are incapable of affecting groups of 2 or more. That just doesn’t sound like fun.

A possible solution would be to create a new stat that works similar to willpower, and is the target of social combat, but which scales up like Epics and/or can’t be refreshed infinitely via knacks like some sort of M:TG combo deck. But that may be a lot of work to implement.

I have one other complaint about that Social Combat system, or anything similar. I think allowing a Player to roll to schmooze their way past troubles the character could handle but the player can't is a good idea. However, such a system has to be quick, non-intrusive, and doesn't pull you out of character too much. It'd be very easy to accidentally create a system that smothered the improvisational acting elements of RPGs. You need a system that solves impasses and gives the GM guidance, not a system that undermines peoples efforts to portray their character. That's not an easy tightrope to walk.

Anecdote in June

I have a cute little anecdote to tell you, but I can't share it yet. I promised someone I'd wait until June, because the story I really want to tell today would ruin a surprise they have planned. Remind me then, and I'll tell you more.