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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Asmor" data-source="post: 3556789" data-attributes="member: 1154">Well, the game wrapped up. It was largely an interesting learning experience, and it turns out I knew the rules better than most (including the GM). In particular, noone had understood the connection between relics and boons. When I mentioned this in the game, everyone had to stop for about half an hour to get their sheets straightened out, and lots of people had trouble understanding it (I'm a poor teacher, I think). Boons are basically "super powers," and come in groups of three under a thematic "Purview" (purviews would be something like Sky, while under the sky purview you'd find a power that allows you to fly, one that allows you to jump high, and one that allows you to summon thunder and lightning). In order to use a boon, you not only have to purchase it, you must also have a relic which grants access to the purview. Think of the relic as a key or a focus. There is an exception to this rule for the pantheon-specific purviews (each of the pantheon has a purview which is unique to it; every member has it, and no other god in a different pantheon does). You may always use a pantheon-specific purview's boons.Before I go any further, here's my initial impressions of the system: Great ideas, absolutely horrendous organization. I've looked for many things in the "index" in the back, and I've literally found none of them. Not a single thing of the dozen or so I've had to look up were in the index. Not even such basic and important things as soak and weapons! Important "totals" like defense values are buried in the middle of combat examples. (I hesitate to use the word stats primarily because there's no place on the default sheet at the back of the book for them... I highly reccommend <a href="http://www.menchhofer.com/chris/scion.html" target="_blank">these sheets</a> I found on WW's forums. Much more verbose, and I learned a lot just looking up things to fill in everything).I fully intend to go through and make a combat cheatsheet/flowsheet, both because I still have a little trouble wrapping my head around it and I think just making the sheet should help, and also because it would help the other people.The book includes several examples of how to keep track of damage with the "ticks" system. This was a huge mistake. There's basically one way where it's incredibly simple and intuitive, and if you don't use that way then it is just unimaginable difficult. The way I reccommend using, which is one of the suggestions in the book, is the combat wheel.[sblock=Combat Wheel Explanation]Combat wheel setup: Basically, draw a big circle on a piece of paper divided into 8 pie slices. Number them 0 through 7. People start somewhere between 0 and 6; everyone who ties for the highest "Join Battle" roll (initiative) goes to slice 0. Everyone who is 1 less than the highest goes to slice 1, everyone 2 less than the highest goes to slice 2, etc. Everyone 6 or lower than the highest goes to slice 6; you can't join battle lower than 6). This is easily where we wasted the most time the first time, because we didn't have tokens ready and had to use dice... I volunteered to run the combat wheel since I was the only one who'd read that section (others had assumed combat worked like in the WoD), and had to spend about 10 minutes making a list of which die belonged to who... i.e. "black d10: me." Next time I'll bring poker chips and masking tape or dry erase markers so that we can actually label them accurately...Beginning combat: Take a seperate counter, easily distinguishable from the ones for the players, and use it as your "tick counter." Place the tick counter on tick 0.Actions: Whenever your counter is in the same pie slice as the tick counter, you take your action. Obviously, it's common for multiple people to be in the same slice; these people act simultaneously (in game terms! For the sake of all that is good and holy, please take turns IRL and just resolve them simultaneously!). Every action you could possibly take has a speed, usually between 3 (fast) and 6 (slow). Move clockwise around the pie a number of spaces equal to your speed. For example, if you took a speed-3 maneuver, move 3 slices around the pie. If you were on 1, you'd move to 4. If you were on 6, you'd go to 1 (remember! The pie slices go from 0 to 7! So you'd count 3 slices and go "7, 0, 1")Moving the tick counter: Once the slice the tick counter is in is empty (i.e. everyone in that slice has taken an action already and moved to their next slice), move the tick counter 1 slice... from 0 to 1, from 1 to 2, etc, until you reach slice 7 and move back to 0.[/sblock]There's not a whole lot else I can really think of that's worth mentioning. It was just a short session today (less than 3 hours, and much of that was spent sorting things out). We only had one really brief combat against 4 mooks.So... overall, I like it, I think it has a lot of promise, but I think whoever laid out that book should be shot. It could benefit greatly from some clearer explanations, better documentation, and an actual index... If you think a lack of an index is bad, it's not nearly as frustrating as an index which doesn't actually list anything important.</blockquote>

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