Any thoughts on Scion: Origins?

ACOS · Post by **ACOS** » Sat May 03, 2014 4:02 pm

I know that everything about Scion was a train wreck, and the people responsible need to be dragged to The Hague.
However, it seems that they're giving it a second go:
http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/main ... -scion-2-0
and I just wanted to see what you guys thought.

thanks.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat May 03, 2014 5:05 pm

They are splitting it up into four books. They are splitting Scion into four books. The hubris of that fact is awe inspiring.

Scion is and was vaporware. Scion has no intellectual property. It has no setting. It has no story, and almost all of the characters are public domain. The game system isn't just broken, it doesn't exist. There is no "action resolution system" in Scion. It's just a first draft of a character generation system stapled to an incomplete combat engine. That's the whole thing, and it inexplicably takes up three books and over a thousand pages.

You could put every single idea that Scion actually has in four pages, and these jokers want to sell it as four books? I'd say that was a joke, but I know they are serious. The simple fact that they are blocking out Scion into more actual books than the original is proof without fear of contradiction that they are attempting a vaporware shell game.

Scion was about three steps removed from just one thousand pages of "All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy." It has no mechanical or narrative substance. Anyone who wants to spread "Scion" out into more books rather than condensing the whole fucking thing into one is a fucking scam artist.

-Username17

ACOS · Post by **ACOS** » Sat May 03, 2014 5:22 pm

Point taken on the page bloat. But then, it wouldn't be a WW product without the abusive application of filler, would it.

From what I understand, they're getting rid of novellas, and actually adding some setting (and maybe some story/metaplot?). That's gotta account for something, doesn't it?

It does seem like Origins is more disciplined than the last volley of shovelware.

Though, I do see how the hype verbiage does indicate vaporware.

IDK - I guess I'm "skeptical, but hopeful".
We'll see.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat May 03, 2014 5:50 pm

Scion wasn't a game so much as a long con. Now they are promising to have "the full mechanical concept of the scaling system, which stretches across all four core books." Which is White Wolf fan affinity fraud speak for "we are going to claim that anyone who hasn't read all twelve hundred pages of this fucking thing who says that the emperor has no clothes and we don't really have a playable game simply hasn't read far enough."

Scion Origins is simply an affinity fraud, with a "scaling system across four books" to play moving target on anyone who calls bullshit on their bullshit. Do not give them money. It is a scam.

-Username17

ACOS · Post by **ACOS** » Sat May 03, 2014 7:15 pm

Well, obviously I'll "borrow" someone's "backup copy" first (if it even comes out).

Rawbeard · Post by **Rawbeard** » Sat May 03, 2014 9:28 pm

When WW died there was some kind of peace, but its minios crawl out from beneith their former masters corpse to blot out the sun with their vapor again.

For fucks sake, why?

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Sat May 03, 2014 10:09 pm

I realize Scion was a mechanical mess in many ways and more \
than a bit of a fraud but I wound up... Liking it?

I'm not sure if that wasn't just my interest in religion and mythology from religious schooling and being a philosophy major combined with the person running the game being excellent. I played in Scion for a year
but I don't know how objective I'd be.

John Magnum · Post by **John Magnum** » Sat May 03, 2014 10:15 pm

If there's a game where the entirety of its mechanical guts consists of "[Fill this blank at the table]" and you end up getting an awesome GM who comes up with cool stuff to fill it with, you'll have a good time.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat May 03, 2014 10:46 pm

We rant about how one game or another is "unplayable" all the time. And usually, that's hyperbole. In Scion's case, it is not. You literally cannot play the game sold for real money in actual books. It simply doesn't exist. There are no difficulties. You can find out how many dice you roll and how many automatic successes you get... but so what? You get 4 successes, is that good? You don't know. You can't know, because the extremely vital portion of the game that tells you how difficult tasks are and thus what any of the numbers in the game mean is not there. There literally is no game and you therefore cannot play it.

Now... it's totally possible to use a completely arbitrary power name list and some essentially random numbers as story prompts to tell a cooperative story. That's a thing you can do. And if the theme of that story is "let's make alternate universe Percy Jackson fanfiction" I can see that being a lot of fun. But every single thing Scion is actually bringing to the table at that point could be condensed into four pages. That is not even an exaggeration.

-Username17

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Sat May 03, 2014 10:58 pm

I know you are right, but Scion confuses me. It is frequently listed as one of the very worst RPGs from a mechanical standpoint, yet the frequent houseruling and fan-made charts made things work. Kind of. And I had a ton of fun playing it 20 or 30 times over a year. So I really have no idea.

Scion at the Demigod level isn't really all that unworkable, honestly. I don't think?

I've certainly played RPGs I disliked more.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat May 03, 2014 11:09 pm

Scion at the demigod level is completely unsalvageable. Leaving aside the fact that the numbers are meaningless in the book they actually sold for real money, the numbers are so divergent that you can't make them mean anything. A fan can go ahead and write up a difficulty chart, but at the demigod level, one character's bonus successes exceed another player's entire roll. The difference, not in dice pools, but in automatic successes from one character to another are so large that no list of challenges you could possibly write wouldn't be broken. Also, a character can have an animal companion that is individually more powerful than the entire party.

The only thing that can be done to "play Scion" is to ignore everything and have the Storyteller just ad hoc everything with intermittent die rolls serving as a pause for the Storyteller to make up some more shit rather than actually being a meaningful turning point. In short: whatever your Storyteller told you was being played, you were in reality playing Apocalypse World with a Percy Jackson skin.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun May 04, 2014 4:15 am

Page 171 and 172, You roll Ability+Attribute, TN 7. Most actions require 1 hit, but more hits is better.

The books have at least a core system. And while it's buried in the middle of the book rather than put right up front, or on the back cover ("The resolution mechanic of this game is rolling a number of 10 siders, looking for sevens and above. For more explicit detail, look at page XXX") like I think all core resolution mechanics should be.... it is there.

Success levels may be completely divergent, but the fact remains that a player can say "I shoot him with my gun" roll dice equal to Dex and Shooting, and succeed as long as any dice come up 7 or more (except that they have to beat their enemy's defense value, but whatever).

The fact that sometimes your target number is higher than 7, and sometimes you need more than one hit is just... White Wolf.

ACOS · Post by **ACOS** » Sun May 04, 2014 5:01 am

Yeah, the default is 1 success = successful.
sometimes you have conditions that cancel-out or subtract successes.
I don't know anything about TNs other than 7.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun May 04, 2014 5:09 am

Page 173, paragraph 4

ACOS · Post by **ACOS** » Sun May 04, 2014 5:32 am

Thresholds change, but the # on the die is always 7.
You'll have to pull me a quote if there is something that says different.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun May 04, 2014 5:51 am

My mistake, I thought success threshold and difficulty were the same thing.

ACOS · Post by **ACOS** » Sun May 04, 2014 6:58 am

"difficulty" is the # of successes need to successfully complete the task. "threshold" refers to extra successes above and beyond what is needed. Sometimes "threshold successes" give you extra effects (mainly combat; but also gives you free reign to narrate just how awesome you succeeded).

ACOS · Post by **ACOS** » Sun May 04, 2014 7:00 am

I was reading further on the "Designer Notes". I'm really shaking my head: the Core book will explicitly contain the "bare bones" of the system.

Fuck it, Frank's spot on.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun May 04, 2014 7:43 am

The key issue is that in Scion, people have automatic successes. So any test that has a difficulty of 1 is literally not worth rolling. And the game does not tell you what a difficulty 2 or higher test would look like.

You can actually "play" the combat system, because barebones as it is, it is based on opposed tests. That means that you can figure out what your difficulties should be because they are derived from your opponent's dice pools. Now, in doing that you will doubtless notice that the power levels of different characters are wildly divergent, and that even a casually min/maxxed character is off the RNG for the monsters in the book to even hit. But if you want to do something that is not opposed? No fucking way. The rules don't exist. And even if you made some, the characters are already off the RNG with respect to each other in combat and everyone is specializing in combat because that is all there is. If you actually had people rolling for oratory performances and scrounging parts to repair god chariots and shit, the RNG would be even more busted.

The sad thing is that there's actually no reason to use "Scion" or call anything "Scion." All the characters are public domain. If you want to write a character who is the daughter of Ares or Zeus, or maybe the son of Poseidon or whatever, you can just do that. The intellectual property of people being the demigod children of those gods went public domain over three thousand years ago.

Scion literally brings nothing to the table. In order to "play" it, you have to write a game mostly from scratch. And if you did write a game on that subject matter, you wouldn't even have to scrub serial numbers off to make it be "yours," because Scion doesn't have any closed content. I don't think they can even own the name "Scion." It's a fucking brand of cars. They possibly own the rights to call a book "Scion: Hero," but as previously noted: you don't actually want to do that. If you called your book "Scion: Ascension" or something, there wouldn't be dick they could do about it.

-Username17