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Summary
The basic premise is that you play the child of a God- any God- there are a lot of examples from most of the obvious mythological pantheons, but coming up with one that wasn't there would be fairly straightforward. As deific offspring, you have inherited a little of your parents powers and supernatural abilities.
Opposing you are the titanspawn- progeny of the titans, who seem to be much like Gods, only older and Evil. They serve as antagonists for the PCs, though of course other scions (God-children) can also fulfil this role. Much like in Exalted, ordinary mortals are unlikely to be able to challenge the PCs much. Unlike in Exalted, Gods themselves are so far above the PCs (at character gen, anyway) in power-level, that they wouldn't make suitable antagonists either.
The preceeding paragraph really does sum up Scion: Hero fairly completely. Unlike most other White Wolf games I can think of (including Exalted), there isn't much in the way of backstory, or even really any default setting. I should add that while I think there are a lot of things wrong with Scion, upon which I'll expound later, I don't think this is one of them.
You see, there are two components to Scion's setting- the modern world (at least part of which most potential players of Scion are reasonably familiar with already) and mythology (probably likewise, and if not, well, there are plenty of sources of inspiritation sitting around). So the setting really falls together itself. It's inevitably therefore not perhaps the most coherent of settings, and the GM will have to do a little interpretation in places, but on the plus side, all the players will have a pretty good idea how things are going to work without having to have copies of the book and read 20-50 pages of backstory.
Now I should stress at this point that I'm going to be reviewing the game, rather than the book as such. This is mostly because I'm a player in my Scion game, rather than a GM, and consequently haven't actually read the GM-section which takes up almost half the book. Bear this in mind.
That said, to quickly talk about the book itself: it isn't as pretty as most WW gamebooks, certainly not up to standards of the new world of darkness core books, though it's perfectly functional, and has the odd nice piece of art. It's mostly black-and-white, with a full-colour section detailing the various pantheons. I detected no obvious spelling errors or typos, and the index, while certainly not perfect, is reasonably serviceable.
Where to begin, then? I suppose I ought to start with character creation.
Character Creation
Scion basically uses the core of the Exalted system, without the Charms. You therefore have your nine Attributes (the usual Strength, Intelligence et al; the same as Exalted) and some 20 or so Abilities (from Investigation to Markmanship; slightly varied from Exalted to fit the modern setting, but pretty similar). Each is rated from 1 to 5. This has worked fine for any number of other WW games, so I've no complaints here.
Characters also have a Willpower score (basically a pool of points to spend to achieve various things), a Legend score (raw magical power, seen in virtually every WW game ever. Think Essence, Arete, Blood Potency and the like. It begins at 2.), and a pool of Legend points (spent much like Willpower, only a bit easier to recover). Legend starts at between 2 and 4, and when it hits 5 characters become demigods, and the GM needs to buy Scion: Demigod for the relevant rules.
It also borrows some of the Exalted Virtue system, though without limit breaks. There are, however, rather a lot more Virtues. Each character only has four, but which four depends on the pantheon their parent belong to. For example, the Aesir (Norse Gods) get Courage, Expression, Endurance and Loyalty.
Then there's a few bits of new stuff specific to Scion. Character get Birthrights from their parents (magical objects, servants, mentors or mythical beasts, basically), which are fairly cool and detailed well enough that they don't need to be completely made up by the GM, but sufficiently vaguely that characters can have pretty much anything they can think of that their GM will approve. Then they get Boons (minor magical powers that generally cost Legend to use) associated with various deific purviews (Fire, Sky, Fertility, Death, and so on)
Then there are Epic Attributes.
Epic Attributes represent a lot (not all, but probably most) of what I think is wrong with the system, so I'm going to be spending a lot of the latter section of this review talking about them. For now, though, they basically enhance your standard nine Attributes, but are rated separately. For example, you might have Strength 3, Epic Strength 1. That means that your mortal body has a Strength of 3, but the divine ichor flowing in you grants you supernatural strength beyond that. Epic Attributes cannot, however, be rated higher than a character's mundane Attribute.
Each point of an Epic Attribute you take also gives you a free Knack. Knacks are a bit like Boons, only less obviously supernatural and associated with an Attribute (i.e. Wits or Charisma) rather than a concept (such as War or Justice).
OK, that about sums things up. The problems with Scion unfortunately begin with the character creation system, though it at least is merely slightly flawed.
Scion suffers from many similar problems to Exalted here, because it uses almost exactly the same system. A character gets a load of points to spend in various places (18 in Attributes, 30 in Skills, 10 in Epic Attributes and/or Boons, 5 in Birthrights, 5 in Virtues). Then they get 15 "Bonus Points", which can be used to increase any or all of these at varying costs. Then, during play, they earn the usual Experience Points, which can be used to increase any or all of these at varying, but entirely different costs. Worse still, some levels of some things can only be bought with Bonus Points (or XP), others cost more at higher levels with some methods of buying them.
The problem with this whole set-up is that some things are cheaper to buy with Bonus Points, others are cheaper with Experience Points, and still others are most cost effective with character creation points, leaving a horrendous minefield for an inexperienced character. When two players can build their characters, and one can end up substantially better in every respect than the other, something is wrong. Note, I don't just mean more effective in general: I mean one character can have all the same traits as the other, only with some of them higher, and the player of the weaker character hasn't even done anything obviously stupid.
The character creation system, is, in summary, too complex.
There is another problem, as well.
Legend is everything in Scion. Sure, say, high Gnosis is nice in new Mage, but you can play a low-Gnosis mage and still be reasonably effective. Even Essence in Exalted isn't quite so all-encompassing as Scion's Legend.
There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, every supernatural trait except Birthrights is capped by a character's Legend minus one, and beyond Legend 5 mundane traits like Attributes and Abilities are similarly capped. For example, if you have Legend 3, you can't have any Epic Attribute or Boon rated higher than 2. For Boons, this isn't so crippling, but because of the way Epic Attributes work (it's coming, I promise), a character with higher Epic Attributes will handily overcome (in whatever situation), a character with lower.
Secondly, and perhaps even worse, most supernatural abilities (Boons and others) work like this: if you have equal Legend to your target you make a contested dice roll to see whether the power works; if you have higher Legend the power works anyway; if you have lower Legend the power automatically fails. Umm... I think you can probably see where that leads.
So Legend is massively important. A character has very little chance, even at low Legend-levels, of dealing on even vaguely equal terms with a character with higher Legend than them, and this gets a lot worse as Legend gets higher.
The problem with all this is that you can buy Legend with Bonus Points. It only costs 7 of them, too, so you can raise your starting Legend as high as 4 if you like. There is virtually no reason not to do so. Nothing you might spend your bonus points on is going to be as effective as raising Legend.
Basically, you really don't want characters in a group starting with different Legend-levels. Or, at least, certainly not some with Legend 3 and some with Legend 4 (2 and 3 isn't quite so bad- see the Epic Attributes discussion later on for why, but I'd still be a bit dubious). They will be of too disparate power-levels to make the game work.
Fortunately, this particular gremlin is easily house-ruled away- just make sure characters have the same starting Legend, and ideally house-rule increasing Legend with XP too, as otherwise there's no real reason not to spend all earnt XP (as least as far as Legend 5) on Legend.
Hm, any other comments? Boons in general are not as good as Epic Attributes, but this isn't wholly universal- I'll discuss this further later on. It's not, I should perhaps state, that the character creation system is confusing or difficult to follow- the problem is merely that it's full of traps for the unwary and exploitable loopholes for the ununwary.
Core Mechanics
Scion uses the standard WW mechanic of "roll Attribute+Ability in 10-sided dice, count dice with results of 7 or higher (called "successes"), and hope these beat the difficulty of the attempted task". It goes with the Exalted route of having 10s count double, rather than the WoD one of having them grant a re-roll. This is a good thing; it saves on the re-rolling. Unlike in Exalted, dice-pools will generally be reasonable- more than about 15 is very unlikely, and most will be under 10.
Scion uses Exalted's tick-system for combat (which works well if you have suitable means for keeping track of it), and combat is at about the right level of complexity as far as I'm concerned (attacks take two dice rolls, one to hit and one to deal damage). Combat suffers from a bit of an issue with defence being better than offense, making fights take a long time as characters keep missing and/or failing to penetrate their target's armour/natural resistance. This is exacerbated by many of the antagonists statted up in the GM section being totally unable to penetrate the defences of an average starting character.
This, however, at least, doesn't seem to become a worse problem as characters get higher level, and there usually are ways of hitting things if you try hard enough.
Virtues serve two main purposes: firstly players can spend Willpower to get bonus dice on an appropriate action equal to their virtue rating (mildly useful for starting characters, but there will be more on this later), and secondly players have to roll their virtue in dice to do something in antipathy to their virtue- any successes and they're forced to forgo this and act in accordance with the virtue. Or, if it's really important to them, they can spend a Willpower point before rolling the dice to oppose the virtue.
This is much like Exalted, except for the requirement to spend the Willpower before rolling, which I like- it adds an interesting decision to make. I do have one issue though. Characters, as I mentioned before, get four Virtues, and they don't get to pick them (not by default, anyway)- they're determined based upon the characters' divine parents' pantheon. Also, they all start at 1. Even a Virtue rating one 1 means that you fail to oppose your Virtue almost half the time. This is undesirable both because it means the GM needs to do an awful lot of keeping track of when characters are trying to oppose their virtues (each character has four, probably different ones), and because it makes it impossible to play, for example, a Norse Scion who doesn't value,say, Loyalty.
Players get a small number of bonus dice to actions for describing them well (called "stunts"), and also recover Legend points for said descriptions. This seems to work fine. It's also the only default way to recover Legend, so interesting description is basically forced upon players.
And yes, there are Epic Attributes. Now is probably the time to talk about them.
Epic Attributes
It works like this. Whenever you make a roll associated, you add on bonus successes (note, not dice- free successes) related to your relevant Epic Attribute. For example, if you roll Stamina+Resistance to endure the effects of a poison, you get bonus successes related to your Epic Stamina.
Note again: related to not equal to. The bonus successes follow a triangular sequence, so if you have Epic Stamina 1 or 2, you get 1 or 2 bonus successes respectively, but if you have Epic Stamina 3 you get 4 bonus successes, not 3 (and it continues 7,11,16,22 etc.)
Even at the Scion (Legend 1 to 4) level, this is utterly dominating. 4 bonus successes is the equivalent of 8 dice; in fact it's usually a bit better than 8 dice because it's more predictable. And it gets much, much worse, at higher levels, as successes start to outstrip possible dice pools to an enormous degree.
Just one example: character with Epic Dexterity 4 and Stealth 1 is far, far, stealthier than one with no Epic Dexterity but Stealth 5.
The first problem with this is that it renders dice pools (which as I said, cap out at about 15 (in itself quite difficult to get) pretty much whatever you do) totally irrelevant, because the Epic Attribute bonus successes are far more potent. This renders, among other things, Abilities, bonus dice from Virtues, weapon accuracies, environmental penalties to actions and weapon damage ratings, almost irrelevant at character gen and increasingly more irrelevant as the game progresses.
The game, in fairness, makes the occasional nod to redress this. Because you can't have an Epic Attribute rated higher than the mundane Attribute, mundane Attribute levels are important- you need them to be able to buy up high Epic Attributes. There's also a rule that if you ever make a roll involving an Ability you don't have at least one point in, your Epic Attribute does not apply. This, however, only means that the ideal Scion character has one point in every skill, and no more.
I particularly object to the way Epic Attributes obsolete Abilities. A character's Abilities should be their defining focus- instead they're completely irrelevant provided the character has at least one point in them.
The second problem with Epic Attributes is that, certainly from level 4 onwards, and to some extent from level 3, is that they are the only thing that matters in trying to defeat someone at something. Trying to sneak past someone with Epic Perception 4 when you only have Epic Dexterity 3? Basically totally impossible. In combat, trying to hit someone with Epic Dexterity 5 when you have Epic Dexterity 4? Again, totally impossible. Combat is a partiuclarly serious case, actually, since you need both an Epic Dexterity at least as high as your opponent's and an Epic Strength at least as high as your opponent's Epic Stamina to stand a chance. This basically means that most likely, anyone the GM might decide to use as an antagonist will either be trivially defeated by the most combat-oriented character, or the other characters will stand no chance at all of hurting them.
Finally of course, all these automatic successes make the dice-roll itself almost irrelevant, since anything it might contribute will be negligible by comparsion, thus reducing any sense of suspense.
Now I'm sure some of this was probably intentional. But frankly, I don't think it works very well at all.
There's also the faintly bizarre problem with firearms. Guns become totally useless in Scion beyond about Legend 3, because there's no way to get bonus successes to damage on them. Sure, you can ensure you hit thanks to your Epic Dexterity, but there's no way you'll ever actually inflict any damage because your opponent's Epic Stamina will soak the damage and none of your Epic Attributes can be applied as damage bonuses. Only melee weapons and bows stand a chance of hurting anyone. I can only assume this was an oversight.
Boons and Knacks (aka Kewl Poworz)
I'm going to discuss these briefly, too. To remind you, Boons are (generally fairly obviously supernatural) powers associated with a concept or purview such as War or Fertility; knacks are less ostentatious quirks obtained for free when buying a point of an Epic Attribute.
I've already gone over how good (scratch "good"- they're essential. Which ones you buy is entirely up to your character concept, but buy some you must) Epic Attributes are, so what reason is there to take Boons instead (Boons and Epic Attributes cost the same and come from the same pool of points at character creation)?
Frankly not much. It's not merely that the Boons aren't balanced (they aren't) but that many of them are actively near-useless. A particularly contemptuous glance goes to the Fertility boons (someone seems to have confused the word "Fertility" with the word "Plants" somewhere, but I digress). Basically they protect plants from disease and infestation, or even, at the higher levels, allow them to grow without access to sunlight. That's it. They don't make them grow really fast, or anything, just a bit better. How someone could imagine this was going to be at all useful in any remotely-conventional table-top game I have no idea.
There are a lot more examples. Many of them require very contrived situations to do anything at all; more than one basically only works when no one contesting it has any supernatural powers (and Epic Attributes count as supernatural powers); some are easily duplicated with knacks or Epic Attributes; some confer abilities useful only against mortals (who any Scion can trivially defeat at anything anyway) and so on.
There are 75 Boons overall in the Scion: Hero book, and my general feeling is that at least half are totally useless. One or two stand out as being really good, but very few are more useful than augmented Epic Attributes plus free knacks.
And knacks? Well most are a bit vague. They allow a scion to do something that one feels anyone with Epic Attributes of reasonably high level ought to be able to do anyway. Except for the few with real mechanical effects, which are generally amazing. Like, say, Untouchable Opponent, which basically causes your Epic Dexterity to count twice for the purposes of defence (in case it wasn't obvious by now, that's really good).
While the Boons and Knacks aren't a disaster, by and large, I think they could have done with a lot more thought and balance, and knacks in particular could have done with some more concrete mechanical effects in many places.
General Impressions
Well it works. Sort of. At low levels, at least. Characters with lots of Epic Attributes and few Boons seem to be massively more effective than those with the reverse. Combat is a slow and frustrating affair because defence just beats offence most of the time. (Not quite to the degree of making combat impossible, I will admit. But enough to make it very slow.) And I think most of the game's problems get worse as characters get more competent.
Conclusions
I cannot in conscience recommend Scion: Hero. It has a lot of moderate, verging on seious, balance issues, it doesn't really contain much in the way of setting (as I noted above, this doesn't detract from the game, but it's one less reason to buy it), and I think the whole Epic Attributes system is seriously to flawed.
That said, it isn't a totally unplayable game, by any means, so I'm confident in awarding it a 2 for substance.
As regards style, I find myself wavering between 4 and 3 (I like what the game is trying to do) and have eventually settled for the latter.
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