Anyone who can search may can find Frank T's scathing review of Scion 1E. I loved the premise, but found the rules lacking and the game full of holes. I was already thoroughly frustrated with it before reading Frank's review, which encapsulated most of the issues with the game.
That said, there's now a Kickstarter for 2E:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/20 ... bletop-rpg
and some preview documents.
(Rules)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7FqVi ... dIY2M/view
(Greek Pantheon)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B01LwC ... cyRkE/view
Reading through the basic ruleset... It looks a bit more thought out. Success is on a 8, 9 or 10, with 10's getting rerolled. Stunts are purchased with extra successes rolled pass the difficulty. (i.e, 8 dice, against difficulty 2 task (notable), roll 4 successes, you have two successes to spend on stunts.)
I like that they're thinking outside the box, I'm not sure this will make for a speedy combat.
After Mage the Ascension having so much BS in it that the actual magic system was released in another book, and not even having the Exalted books in my hands yet... I'm leery of signing up for another OPP kickstarter.
Any other thoughts?
Scion 2E Kickstarter
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Schleiermacher
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"Leery" is the understatement of the year, Onyx Path is an affinity fraud scheme.
If they were ever anything else (I must confess that I did like the 20th anniversary Vampire edition they put out, but it was pure nostalgia fodder and more of a "build your own vampire game" kit than anything playable in its own right) they certainly aren't anymore. Exalted 3E convinced me of that.
If they were ever anything else (I must confess that I did like the 20th anniversary Vampire edition they put out, but it was pure nostalgia fodder and more of a "build your own vampire game" kit than anything playable in its own right) they certainly aren't anymore. Exalted 3E convinced me of that.
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Heaven's Thunder Hammer
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It does seem to depend on the team. The M:tA team started after Exalted 3E and got it out this summer, but Ex3 still isn't out yet. Scion is yet another team altogether.Schleiermacher wrote:"Leery" is the understatement of the year, Onyx Path is an affinity fraud scheme.
If they were ever anything else (I must confess that I did like the 20th anniversary Vampire edition they put out, but it was pure nostalgia fodder and more of a "build your own vampire game" kit than anything playable in its own right) they certainly aren't anymore. Exalted 3E convinced me of that.
Despite getting M20 in a much more timely fashion... I'm looking at it like... Well, they sure cleaned up a lot of the rules around combat, paradigm, spell casting... But then spent so much wordcount detailing i'm not sure what, that they had no room for the actual magic system itself. Admittedly, the magic book did go into considerable detail (for Mage) to actually codify all the types of things people normally do with magic. But it wasn't in the main book, which just irritates me.
My point being for Scion... I just... I want it, but I hate spending money only to get a product I don't like so much and am irritated with the game design. I think logically speaking, I can support at the PDF level, and then if it really is shit I'm out $20. If I feel like being a tosser I can always pirate it.
Last edited by Heaven's Thunder Hammer on Wed Oct 12, 2016 8:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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angelfromanotherpin
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This got mentioned before and had some minimal discussion on why it looks like it will be terribad.
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Username17
- Serious Badass
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My friend Jonathan dumped money down this particular hole, and I will tell you what I told him:
While the concept of Scion is indeed one that immediately grabs you and appeals, the brand is not "worth saving." Indeed, and this is important:
THE SCION BRAND DOES NOT EXIST!
Scion was fraud from the beginning. There is nothing there. It's a one thousand page piece of vaporware. It never got beyond the concept stage of "We should totally have an RPG where you play young demigods in the modern world, like Wondergirl or Percy Jackson." That's seriously as far as it ever got! Everything, and I mean everything else in Scion is just smoke and mirrors.
If you bought the Scion book, you would get nothing. If you bought the Scion rights, you would get nothing. There is nothing there. There's no design to build on, there's no intellectual property to own. It's completely empty.
The characters are public domain. The plotline is public domain. The game system is not finished or remotely playable. The suggested numbers are so out of whack as to be less than worthless. The only thing in the entire body of work that isn't basically just a restatement of the concept "Percy Jackson/Wondergirl: the RPG" or the result of a half hour brainstorming session of what powers should be called is their rambling diatribes about fate and free will. And you know what? I've taken philosophy courses too! And their fate/free will ramblings are the kind of stupid shit that stoners say at 3 in the morning and not something you could actually use.
So the next thing I told Jonathan was that if you wanted a playable game of Scion, that waiting for the Hamlet Typing Monkeys to make it for you over at Onyx Path was a sucker's game: you should just write it yourself. There's nothing privileged about the intellectual property that Onyx Path has leased. There's nothing they specifically own that you'd even want to have in your final product.
So what we did is brainstorm for an hour how you'd go about making your hypothetical game where you play Teen Titans for about an hour. I won't bore you overmuch with the mathematical number crunching we did about why dicepools should be d6s that hit on 3+ while defense thresholds were set based on half the target's virtual dicepool (which sounds like it would be divergent, but within the expected dicepool range of 4-18 only produces an overrun of 3, which is trivial to make up with special abilities even if you don't make something as ridiculous as Scion's Untouchable Opponent). But I will say that we consider it a feature that people roll over average more often than they roll under average and that we consider it a feature that in order to regularly exceed another character's potential output you only need to roll more than 150% of someone's dicepool (as opposed to Shadowrun where you need to be rolling over 300% of their dicepool). In a game about characters being semi-divine, it is positive that you could cap normals at 6 dice and player characters would exceed the normal potential output more than a third of the time on 9 dice.
Anyway, the basic concept is that you have the Gods and you have the Titans. The Titans want to destroy the world, the Gods want to reconquer the world. The player characters are on Team Human and are thus not really on the side of either the gods or the titans, and could therefore be the demigod spawn of either a god (like Wondergirl) or a titan (like Raven). The gods have a tendency to give gifts and training to their children (and make them in the first place), because they would quite like them to fight the monsters that the titans make. The titans meanwhile make a lot of spawn and some of them fall through the cracks and end up raised as relatively well adjusted humans who have no interest in destroying the world to advance some ancient grudge of their ancestors.
There are regional nodes which can become "thrones" if you attune them, and then you get to be the god of something in that region. The player characters can become a local pantheon, but monsters and demons can also pull it off and you may have to fight one that has already attained that kind of power. When the monsters tap into nodes they energy drain all the non-supernatural people in the area like in Sailor Moon, and then all kinds of weird shit happens to the terrain based on what kind of divine portfolio is being accessed. This is why you have big setpiece battle boss fights and also why just charming twenty guys and handing out shotguns isn't an answer to your problems. Once you've done this, you can ascend to divine realms, and can consider having adventures there sometimes. Or if you're a monster or demon, you can ascend to divine realms and try to murderstab one of the existant gods, which is why they want to do this.
The number of pantheons running around is unclear. They have separate divine realms, and there are a couple dozen refugees from each of the divine realms running around on Earth. These creatures (Dwarves and Alfar for Asgard, Apsara and Naga for Svarga, Nymphs and Satyr for Olympus, etc.) all know when a demigod who got the touch from their divine realm gets their powers, and they also know that one way or another such demigods are potential tickets for them to get back to their divine realms of origin or at least get access to stuff from that realm. So there may well be Qallupilluit or Menehune in the world, but there's no particular reason for you to encounter any unless you or the villains of the week are powered up by Inuit or Hawaiian gods or titans.
Then we decided that we wanted to support characters who were "bricks," "martial artists," or "blasters" in the Champions sense. Because that way you can make a team with Wondergirl, Raven, and Robin in it.
-Username17
While the concept of Scion is indeed one that immediately grabs you and appeals, the brand is not "worth saving." Indeed, and this is important:
THE SCION BRAND DOES NOT EXIST!
Scion was fraud from the beginning. There is nothing there. It's a one thousand page piece of vaporware. It never got beyond the concept stage of "We should totally have an RPG where you play young demigods in the modern world, like Wondergirl or Percy Jackson." That's seriously as far as it ever got! Everything, and I mean everything else in Scion is just smoke and mirrors.
If you bought the Scion book, you would get nothing. If you bought the Scion rights, you would get nothing. There is nothing there. There's no design to build on, there's no intellectual property to own. It's completely empty.
The characters are public domain. The plotline is public domain. The game system is not finished or remotely playable. The suggested numbers are so out of whack as to be less than worthless. The only thing in the entire body of work that isn't basically just a restatement of the concept "Percy Jackson/Wondergirl: the RPG" or the result of a half hour brainstorming session of what powers should be called is their rambling diatribes about fate and free will. And you know what? I've taken philosophy courses too! And their fate/free will ramblings are the kind of stupid shit that stoners say at 3 in the morning and not something you could actually use.
So the next thing I told Jonathan was that if you wanted a playable game of Scion, that waiting for the Hamlet Typing Monkeys to make it for you over at Onyx Path was a sucker's game: you should just write it yourself. There's nothing privileged about the intellectual property that Onyx Path has leased. There's nothing they specifically own that you'd even want to have in your final product.
So what we did is brainstorm for an hour how you'd go about making your hypothetical game where you play Teen Titans for about an hour. I won't bore you overmuch with the mathematical number crunching we did about why dicepools should be d6s that hit on 3+ while defense thresholds were set based on half the target's virtual dicepool (which sounds like it would be divergent, but within the expected dicepool range of 4-18 only produces an overrun of 3, which is trivial to make up with special abilities even if you don't make something as ridiculous as Scion's Untouchable Opponent). But I will say that we consider it a feature that people roll over average more often than they roll under average and that we consider it a feature that in order to regularly exceed another character's potential output you only need to roll more than 150% of someone's dicepool (as opposed to Shadowrun where you need to be rolling over 300% of their dicepool). In a game about characters being semi-divine, it is positive that you could cap normals at 6 dice and player characters would exceed the normal potential output more than a third of the time on 9 dice.
Anyway, the basic concept is that you have the Gods and you have the Titans. The Titans want to destroy the world, the Gods want to reconquer the world. The player characters are on Team Human and are thus not really on the side of either the gods or the titans, and could therefore be the demigod spawn of either a god (like Wondergirl) or a titan (like Raven). The gods have a tendency to give gifts and training to their children (and make them in the first place), because they would quite like them to fight the monsters that the titans make. The titans meanwhile make a lot of spawn and some of them fall through the cracks and end up raised as relatively well adjusted humans who have no interest in destroying the world to advance some ancient grudge of their ancestors.
There are regional nodes which can become "thrones" if you attune them, and then you get to be the god of something in that region. The player characters can become a local pantheon, but monsters and demons can also pull it off and you may have to fight one that has already attained that kind of power. When the monsters tap into nodes they energy drain all the non-supernatural people in the area like in Sailor Moon, and then all kinds of weird shit happens to the terrain based on what kind of divine portfolio is being accessed. This is why you have big setpiece battle boss fights and also why just charming twenty guys and handing out shotguns isn't an answer to your problems. Once you've done this, you can ascend to divine realms, and can consider having adventures there sometimes. Or if you're a monster or demon, you can ascend to divine realms and try to murderstab one of the existant gods, which is why they want to do this.
The number of pantheons running around is unclear. They have separate divine realms, and there are a couple dozen refugees from each of the divine realms running around on Earth. These creatures (Dwarves and Alfar for Asgard, Apsara and Naga for Svarga, Nymphs and Satyr for Olympus, etc.) all know when a demigod who got the touch from their divine realm gets their powers, and they also know that one way or another such demigods are potential tickets for them to get back to their divine realms of origin or at least get access to stuff from that realm. So there may well be Qallupilluit or Menehune in the world, but there's no particular reason for you to encounter any unless you or the villains of the week are powered up by Inuit or Hawaiian gods or titans.
Then we decided that we wanted to support characters who were "bricks," "martial artists," or "blasters" in the Champions sense. Because that way you can make a team with Wondergirl, Raven, and Robin in it.
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OgreBattle
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So is this a system where offensive and defensive stats are one and the same so it's my combat pool rolled against a threshold of 1/2 my target's combat pool?I won't bore you overmuch with the mathematical number crunching we did about why dicepools should be d6s that hit on 3+ while defense thresholds were set based on half the target's virtual dicepool (which sounds like it would be divergent, but within the expected dicepool range of 4-18 only produces an overrun of 3, which is trivial to make up with special abilities even if you don't make something as ridiculous as Scion's Untouchable Opponent). But I will say that we consider it a feature that people roll over average more often than they roll under average and that we consider it a feature that in order to regularly exceed another character's potential output you only need to roll more than 150% of someone's dicepool (as opposed to Shadowrun where you need to be rolling over 300% of their dicepool). In a game about characters being semi-divine, it is positive that you could cap normals at 6 dice and player characters would exceed the normal potential output more than a third of the time on 9 dice.
Will there also be situations where an offensive pool is a different category than a defensive threshold, like stealth vs perception?
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Username17
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We figured we'd keep the Physical/Social/Mental split, but go down to two of each:OgreBattle wrote: So is this a system where offensive and defensive stats are one and the same so it's my combat pool rolled against a threshold of 1/2 my target's combat pool?
Will there also be situations where an offensive pool is a different category than a defensive threshold, like stealth vs perception?
Strength; Dexterity; Intelligence; Perception; Carisma; Willpower.
What that implies is a game where the expected game session is about 1/3 combat by time. And that in turn means that every character needs to have a combat shtick and also that being "good at combat" is insufficient for a character. All the "fighter" aspects need to have demonstrable non-combat powers that they are required to get and every character needs combat boosts no matter what portfolio they have.
So this in turn led to the idea that the basic aspects would all grant boosts to Strength and Dexterity. With Brick specs giving more strength, Martial specs giving more Dexterity, and Sorcery specs giving less of both but giving you attacks that targeted alternate attributes.
So in a few minutes we hacked out a simple twelve point matrix, that looked something like this:
- Rulership - Brick
- Sea - Brick
- Earth - Brick
- Craft - Brick
- Wisdom - Martial
- Weather - Martial
- War - Martial
- Animal - Martial
- Fire - Sorcery
- Death - Sorcery
- Plant - Sorcery
- Love - Sorcery
Anyway, going forward you need to throw down a rock paper scissors matrix as well as fill out some combat, non-combat, and optional powers for each of the domains. Then you can write up some advancement options including throne powers (since you are very specifically not required to attune yourself to a throne of Fire if you awakened as a Fire Demigod. Posseidon was the god of the Sea, but he was also the god of Horses and Earthquakes because fuck you that's why).
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Heaven's Thunder Hammer
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Frank - interesting ideas on making one's own RPG for a Scion like setting. I don't have a head for that myself and typically end up house ruling existing games.
I found a thread on the Onyx Path forums going into the rules into a bit more detail. It sounds like the system and ideas used are quite different than 1E, for what it's worth. I'm still not sold. I think I'll pirate the PDFs, and if they're any good order some PoD via drivethrurpg.
http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main ... discussion
I found a thread on the Onyx Path forums going into the rules into a bit more detail. It sounds like the system and ideas used are quite different than 1E, for what it's worth. I'm still not sold. I think I'll pirate the PDFs, and if they're any good order some PoD via drivethrurpg.
http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main ... discussion