Monday, June 25, 2012

Scions of Fate: A Free FATE Hack for Scion


SCIONS OF FATE
I’ve finished my hack of White Wolf’s Scion setting with Evil Hat’s FATE system. It ended up a 64-page trade sized booklet; you can download the pdf of that here. To play you’ll need the Scion books, at least Scion: Hero, and some flavor of FATE. I posted earlier on my process in developing this (here and here). So far I’ve run three sessions using it- not enough to test everything, but the game’s been fun.


WHAT THE HACK?
I really love the concepts from Scion, but our group's become more accustomed to lighter systems. It has interesting mechanics, and I ran a campaign of Scion "as is" a couple of years ago. It does have problems with balance and the power curve, especially as the series rolls along. Accordingly, my hack focuses on the earliest stages that of “Hero” level characters. I chose FATE because we’ve been using and adapting elements from it for our homebrew games for the last year or so. Diaspora clued me in on some of those elements and they fit with our approach. I know some people don’t care for the player control devices in the system or what they consider the gamist elements of it, but I’ve had really good experiences with those. Veteran players have become more engaged and interested through those mechanics and have found it easier to set up what they want to do in play.

HACKING SYSTEMS
When I adapt a setting/game over to another system, I try to adapt the game I actually play. Instead of looking at all of the mechanics, I try to consider what’s important to me and also how the new system handles key elements. In the case of Scion, I had the advantage of running it using the base system beforehand. Several elements didn’t make the cut in my adaptation. For example, when I ran I kept Fatebinding more mysterious and uncertain. It ought to be a plot device, rather than a detailed and mechanically heavy part of the game. I like the idea of players developing a relationship map of sort, but given everything else, it isn’t something they need to track. So Fatebinding in my version exists as a concept the GM can use, without specific mechanics- YCMV. Legend’s a more difficult shift. In Scion Legend measures relatively level and power. In my game I’m focusing on the lower end of the scale, so I don’t necessarily need a larger track. I also want relative parity between players, so I didn’t need a ranking system. Once I decided that, it was actually pretty easy to remove those concepts from the game.

I went for simple and symmetrical over complex. So I established that all gods offer the same number of affinity epics and purviews. I also removed post-CC benefits for that, to allow players more open choices. There are no skills associated with divine parents now. Purviews are purchased in sequence, to make it easier and parallel to the Epics. Various other benefits such as mentors and followers end up lumped together for color. Most importantly, everything’s powered by Fate points- removing virtues, legend points, and willpower as spendable resources.

The biggest problem I’ve found in moving from high detail to low detail system comes from the consolidation of the combat system. High detail games often devote lots of space to combat options, special abilities, minor modifiers, and escalating powers. I encountered this years ago when I adapted Legend of the Five Rings to Storyteller. It forced me to develop variations on “gain a combat advantage” and consider how a combat advantage might be read as a non-combat benefit. In the case of SoF, I cut out a number of knacks and boons to focus on a few which did interesting things. A number of these have names from the original source, but do quite different things. I also tried to eliminate abilities and options which supersede earlier buys. The Aztec pantheon purviews, for example, seemed boring. If I were imagining this as a long-term or extended campaign, I might present stackable or building block features for the players. That could easily be developed by GMs who want to move up to the Demi-God level.

IN PLAY
We’ve done three sessions of Scions of Fate so far, an introductory combat session; a full session of investigation; and a session that began with the band following up on threads and stumbling into a confrontation in a magic cave. After we did character creation I went back and rewrote that section of the rules to make them clearer and more streamlined. I had too many non-parallel choices in the first version. I also cleaned up the Relics rules and explanations.

Pages 60-61 of the pdf have some notes on gamemastering the system. That’s worth looking at if you want to see the reasoning behind some of my choices. You’ll see I borrowed the aspect ranges idea from Diaspora and the d6 bonus concept from Kerberos Club. I also reworked maneuvers and assessments to better fit with what I wanted in play. GM’s can easily shift that to their favorite approach. You’ll also notice I kept the layout pretty basic (Scribus kept crashing on me).

A few things I noticed in play:
  • Having a little bit of skill really helps, so players ought to consider some low buys rather than trying to maximize having high level skills. If you have an Epic at 3, you don’t necessarily have to have a high skill associated with it- doing so is kind of overkill.
  • The Greek Pantheon Purview Arete is fairly potent. It fits with the costs for other abilities, but at the same time it gets past the cap of the skill pyramid. Having Arete three allows a player to be really good in one area. I would suggest a couple of restrictions for this. Players who have Arete cannot take the same skill with it. Limit players to one offense or defense skill in any particular area (i.e. they can have Dodge or Guns but not both). I would also limit players to one defensive skill for Arete (i.e. Dodge for Physical or Discipline for Mental, but not both).
  • The stress tracks are fairly short, but careful investment can increase one or more of those. However the balance of the system means that players strong in one area will probably be weaker in another (due to defenses, armor, or stress boxes).
  • The purview abilities aren’t balanced, but my version makes them more interesting than in the original. When I ran Scion before, players gravitated to knacks over boons. So far in this version, they seem to be heading the opposite direction.
  • Many things run on Fate points in this system, so players ended up keeping more of those in their pool than I expected. That means the GM has to work even harder to reduce those resources.
Download Scions of Fate pdf here

4 comments:

  1. Just wanted to say thank you for the work and effort. I've played Scion a few times and really enjoyed it every time, but always felt frustrated by the system. In particular, the combat system, since there was always an unbalanced aspect to it - say we're fighting a troll that has a combat soak of 8 or so. We might have one uber combat character who could bypass it, but everyone else could never scratch the troll. That and various other mechanical problems that you've no doubt experienced.

    I love Scion (the concept) but so far haven't found anyone who loves Scion (the mechanics/system). So when I suggested to my partner that we try it again, he sighed and actually stumbled across your hack. We had just picked up the Fate Core book not too long ago and were really excited about it, and finding your hack was really serendipitous!

    We've been playing just a little two-player game to experiment with the system before we propose a larger game to our gaming group, and so far we've had a lot of fun, so I just wanted to let you know that at least there are two people in the world of the internet who appreciate your work.

    As I mentioned, we haven't had a ton of time to work out all of the details, but here's some initial feedback.

    Combat was interesting. We did a little one-on-one combat with two characters that both had Epic Strength 2 and Epic Stamina 2, so at first I thought it should be reasonably even, right? (Turns out we had several opposing knacks - one had Knockback attack and the other had Feet Firmly Planted) Wow, the skills really came out. One character had fairly even +2s across the board (weapons, dodge, etc.), plus a weapon birthright, and the other had a +5 in unarmed, nothing anywhere else. The +5 unarmed kicked the living *$&# out of the other character (though it was partially bad die rolls). So your comment about the skills stood out for me.

    I like what you've done with the Epics and Purviews in terms of including a lot of fan-made ideas and non-standard things. You're right about the purviews being not balanced, but it is interesting. And how would you balance, for example, being able to fly versus being immune to fire? Both are situationally useful.

    You mentioned your reasons for removing Legend from the game, and I totally understand where you're coming from, but I have a differing opinion. In my mind, I really like the Legend mechanic as describing how strong your character's Legend is - how many people have heard of you, how you're a magnet for trouble. The bigger your Legend score = the bigger the legend about you. Doing away with it feels wrong to me. That being said, it's an easy fix. If you call Fate Points, points of Legend, instead, you could keep your current system the same and still be true to original Scion in that respect. You could also use the Fate Refresh Rate as the Legend cap to balance other abilities (though you mentioned you didn't think it was needed; I would still keep it in my game).

    All in all, great work, I'm so happy someone took the time to do this. And if you were ever thinking about converting Demigod, I'd love to see it.

    Thanks.

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    1. I'm glad that was useful. I've seen a couple of other interesting Scion hacks for Fate. We enjoyed the play we got out of the rules, but found a couple of problems that I would tweak in the future. I borrowed the ide aof using d6s to represent the Epics from Kerberos Club's implementation (Strange Fate). The d6's end up being too much. They wildly skew things at the upper levels. It means you really have to take the highest level for your combat skills if you want to compete. I suspect it might be less wonky if we used a d3 or d4 instead of the d6. The range would feel tighter and while characters would still have an advantage, it might not feel so unbalanced.

      I like your suggestions and I'll keep those in mind when I do other hacks.

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  2. I'll have to see if I can further hack this to Strands of Fate....my players and I dislike the Fate Core skill ladder, but we like Fate as a whole so Strands usually works better for us.

    To explain the difference, in Strands of Fate almost all of your Abilities (the replacement for Skills) would be 2. Maybe a 1, maybe a 3. Greater or lesser abilities would be shown through Aspects and Advantages.

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    1. Yeah, I've played with SoF- it seems like it would be fairly easy to switch that up. There's at least one of Scions/Fate hack out there. That might be worth looking at as well.

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