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United States
Brown Deer
Wisconsin
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If you answered yes, this game has probably crossed your radar already.
Disclaimer: In my opinion, the quality of a RPG experience is largely determined by the people you play with. A subpar group could take the greatest system and dredge it through mud into something unplayable. As such, this review will serve to describe the objective facts about the game as well my opinions on the system itself. The flavor and feel of the game will be left to each individual GM.
Who are you?
Scion is a game where you take on a character who is the literal offspring of a god from a polytheistic religion. Pantheons represented in the core book are Ancient Egyptian (Pesedjet), Ancient Greek (Dodeckatheon), Norse (Aesir), Japanese Shinto (Amatsukami), and what most westerners recognize as Vodou (Loa). The god you select as a divine parent will affect what abilities are easier for you to improve as well as define a rough framework of what your character is good at and acts like.
What's your motivation?
The default setting of the universe is that the Titans of ancient mythology have somehow broken free of the prison that the gods have held them in. Now, they're out for revenge. The gods are afraid to directly interfere on Earth due to a phenomenon called Fatebinding. Largely, this means as legendary beings do good things mortals affect their fate by telling stories about them. (The most classic example is most of the Aesir will die at Ragnarok, they have no say in the matter.) Because of this fear, (the gods do not want to become fatebound to a more grisly fate), the sire scions to do their bidding on Earth. Thus, you are a foot solider in the war against the Titans.
How do I play?
Character creation is a point allocation system. You will gain attributes, abilities, birthrights, boons, and knacks. Attributes are stats. Abilities are skills. Birthrights can be magic items, followers, creatures, or guides. Boons and knacks are supernatural abilities that your character can perform. Additionally, your character has a set of virtues that are dictated by what pantheon your parent belongs to. This is a framework for how your character will behave.
The game operates based off a dice pool. Most often Ability + Attribute. 7+ is a success with 10s counting twice. You are attempting to beat a number established by the ST (GM, DM, etc.).
How do I kill stuff?
This is possibly a great flaw in Scion. Combat turns into a slog fest of people not being able to hurt anything. Defense usually outweighs offense by quite a bit. In order to hit something, you need to roll a total number of successes equal to a target's Defense Value (DV) on a pool of Dexterity + Melee or Brawl or Marksmanship or Thrown + Weapon's accuracy. At Hero level, rolling 7 dice is generous. You then add a number of automatic successes granted by Epic Dexterity. If this number beats the target's defense, you MIGHT do damage. You then roll a number of dice equal to Strength + Weapon's Damage + Threshold Successes + 1. You are trying to beat the target's soak (damage that the target will ignore.) Only if you beat this number will you do damage.
Yes it sounds a mess. It is a lot of dice rolling and quick math. Yes the dice pools get very large very quickly. And yet, damage done is often small. There is a lot of defense in this game. You need to specifically build a character for combat if you want to do damage with any reliability.
So is it fun?
I enjoy my game. Whether or not that is due to the group I'm with, the game, or some combination thereof is probably debatable. I enjoy the world immensely. I am a fan of mythology and any opportunity to be a offspring of Anubis is fine by me. The game also lends itself well to fantastical situations where anything is possible. Physics has almost no meaning. However, the game is very easy to destroy as well. Because of the setting fiat is especially easy to justify. An unskilled GM can railroad a party from event to event without much trouble.
The game is hardly unique, coming from the relatively venerable White Wolf and often being called Exalted's modern clone, but it is the theme that keeps the game fresh to me. The power balance seems a bit off to me but that's what fudging dice rolls are for. The world lends itself to a wonderful opportunity to play your dream legendary hero, and that's enough reason for me to dive right in.
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Lowell Francis
United States
South Bend
Indiana
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What's your take on how successful the initiative system is. I like the idea of it, but in practice when we played, it created some strange gaps between players-- with reductions of weapon speed being ten times more effective than any other buff. I'd heard something about that before I ran and tried to keep those changes to a minimum, but it still ended up funky for us. Plus the initiative tic cost for purview actions and the like often made them much less useful in combat. Finally while the pie chart initiative thing is a neat idea, even by blowing it up 50% (or in my case mounting it on a metal pizza platter and using magnets), players still had a really hard time tracking the flow of what was happening.
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United States
Brown Deer
Wisconsin
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The flow of combat is a bit wonkier then my players are used to. They don't seem to grasp the concept that their actions dictate when they will act next. I fully agree that speedy weapons win the day. Generally, I still have just giant slog fests, and nothing too complicated happens.
So in summation, the combat system, to me, feels clunky when implemented as written. So I deviate slightly. Largely, I speed up or slow down opponents to act between resets of ticks so that it kind of turns into a "I swing, you swing" kind of thing. That's how my players understand it best and therefore how I play it.
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