Threshold Successes
Once a player has totaled all her successes from her dice pool and Enhancements, she spends them to meet the Difficulty and succeed. Any leftover successes are called threshold successes, and she can spend them to overcome Complications. She can also spend them to pull off Stunts, which are extra effects that stretch her success further.
Any threshold successes she doesn’t spend indicate a general degree of success. 1 threshold success demonstrates a little extra flair, while 2 shows remarkable luck or skill, 3 is a dazzling display, and anything more is bound to win you honor, glory, and millions of YouTube views.
Players with threshold successes can spend them on Stunts to improve their character’s position or further their goal. Stunts are narrative permission slips — they give you the chance to alter the scene in your favor or do something that you otherwise couldn’t have done. When a player rolls several extra successes scampering over a barbed-wire fence, a good Stunt would be to carefully snip the wire on the way over, so the other characters using raw muscle to climb won’t be injured.
A Stunt must:
• Link back to the success of the character’s action;
• Affect a different Skill or Attribute combination than the player used; and
• Be narrated out by the player as to how they change the scene.
Stunts are also deeply involved in the three areas of action, particularly in action-adventure, and these Stunts have a particular success cost associated with them. There are three basic types of Stunt:
• A complicated Stunt allows you to make a Complication for another character, making their life more exciting. How many successes you spend on the Stunt determines the level of the Complication.
• An enhanced Stunt creates an Enhancement that you can use for another action, whether that’s your character’s next action (using a different Skill) or to aid another character. Again, the number of successes you spend on the Stunt indicates how many successes the Enhancement gives you. It’s like giving yourself or someone else some successes for later.
• Finally, a difficult Stunt makes it harder for others to accomplish actions directed at you. The successes you devote to this Stunt add to the Difficulty for characters to take actions against you.
Example: Monica’s character Imogene Heat has just scaled a heavily-fortified skyscraper, and gets five successes on a Difficulty 3 Subterfuge + Dexterity roll to crack open a window on the 38th floor. When the Storyguide describes the place as filled with guards, Monica says, “Imogene waits for the telltale flash of lightning from her mother the sky goddess, counts to three, and then dives through the window as the booming thunders obscures her rapid footfalls.” The Storyguide allows her to apply Complication 2 to the Subterfuge + Composure opposed roll of the guards — if they hear anything at all, they’ll likely be drawn to the window instead of her.
If you’ve used your Path to enhance a roll and have some successes left over, you can perform a special kind of Stunt: Telling the Storyguide to twist Fate, changing the story itself. Twists of Fate are the unlikely coincidences that follow Scions around; each success spent on a Twist of Fate can add or remove one detail from the scene. Sometimes events just aren’t going the way the character wants, or sometimes it would make for a more dramatic escape if there were a door at the other end of the room, or if there was a gun conveniently placed on the end of the table. If what Fate wants is a better story for your character, think of it as that outside force changing the story to make things more interesting.
Twists of Fate can’t ask the Storyguide to undo something that’s already established, but they can alter the context of what’s established or introduce a new fact. An edit can be as simple creating a new fact about The World, “There’s an open window on the side of the building we can enter through,” or “Every fire-alarm system in this apartment building is linked to a few central sensors, like the one I’m going to light a match under,” or, with more successes spent on the Stunt, something even more scene-changing: “From my character’s background understanding of the Prose Eddas, I knew the villain was a frost giant all along, so we brought flamethrowers.” The Twist should be agreed upon by all the players and the Storyguide and can’t be anything overtly supernatural.
• The mook’s gun runs out of bullets just as they get a bead on the Scion.
• Sirens are heard in the distance as the police arrive on the scene.
• The character reveals they’ve got a gun under the table and have been aiming all this time while the villain threatened them.
• The character’s got a cache of passports just when the group needs to get out of the country, a gift from their parent’s worshippers.
• The damaged car engine suddenly turns over, allowing the character to escape.
• Reading the headline of a newspaper from a park bench reveals a vital clue.
• The “drunk” the villains just rolled for petty cash is in on the scam with the player characters.
• The Wudang monk once lost a martial-arts battle to the player characters, and owes them a debt of honor... just this once, at least.
The Storyguide may decide that some details require more successes than others (the flamethrowers up above, for example), but in general it’s one success for one scene change. Nothing created or removed via a Twist of Fate lasts beyond the current scene.
Heroes, Demigods, and Gods can create more powerful and miraculous Twists of Fate that are overtly supernatural, but this is determined by the kind of divinity they become and even their mundane Twists become limited. See Scion: Hero for more details.
After all successes have been totaled and spent on Difficulty, Complications, and Stunts, they can contribute to how impressively the character succeeds. Degrees of success follow:
When players need to resolve a challenge that involves lots of separate tasks, they can use a complex action. This is a series of linked challenges called intervals, each of which have their own dice pools, Difficulty, and so on, but all contribute toward a greater goal. For example, a character who joins an illegal rakshasa street race must navigate different stretches of the race, each of which is its own challenge.
Complex actions act like a montage in a movie, so that each interval focuses on one of the “highlights” of a criminal investigation or political campaign. Meeting the Difficulty of an interval gives the character a Milestone, which can be a clue, an ingredient, a favor, a racing checkpoint, or whatever most suits the complex action. Once a character achieves a set number of Milestones (like a static Difficulty), the complex action ends successfully.
If a character isn’t under any pressure, she can fail as many intervals as she likes, slowly accruing Milestones until her project is complete. More urgent complex actions include a limit on the number of intervals the character can attempt before the entire complex action fails. Complications can force a character to skip an interval as she wastes precious time dealing with them, or even lose a Milestone in the chaos.
In some cases, the Storyguide may award a Milestone without any need for a roll. For example, if a great luthier is gifted a strand of Sif’s metallic, golden hair for services rendered, that easily qualifies as a Milestone in his ongoing attempt to craft an incredible electric guitar.
Characters can use the rules for teamwork to collaborate on intervals. Alternatively, they can try to achieve different Milestones during the same interval. For example, one character might perform forensic analysis while her partner interrogates a suspect. In this case, each character rolls separately, earning Milestones as normal.
A complex action with opposed participants is a contest. The opposed characters or groups each work separately to gain enough Milestones, and the one who does so first is the winner. In contests with a limited number of intervals, like races with a set track, the one who gains the most Milestones within that limit is the winner. Rivals can use Stunts to interfere with each other’s efforts, so contests use initiative to determine who goes first.
Any threshold successes she doesn’t spend indicate a general degree of success. 1 threshold success demonstrates a little extra flair, while 2 shows remarkable luck or skill, 3 is a dazzling display, and anything more is bound to win you honor, glory, and millions of YouTube views.
STUNTS
Players with threshold successes can spend them on Stunts to improve their character’s position or further their goal. Stunts are narrative permission slips — they give you the chance to alter the scene in your favor or do something that you otherwise couldn’t have done. When a player rolls several extra successes scampering over a barbed-wire fence, a good Stunt would be to carefully snip the wire on the way over, so the other characters using raw muscle to climb won’t be injured.
A Stunt must:
• Link back to the success of the character’s action;
• Affect a different Skill or Attribute combination than the player used; and
• Be narrated out by the player as to how they change the scene.
Stunts are also deeply involved in the three areas of action, particularly in action-adventure, and these Stunts have a particular success cost associated with them. There are three basic types of Stunt:
• A complicated Stunt allows you to make a Complication for another character, making their life more exciting. How many successes you spend on the Stunt determines the level of the Complication.
• An enhanced Stunt creates an Enhancement that you can use for another action, whether that’s your character’s next action (using a different Skill) or to aid another character. Again, the number of successes you spend on the Stunt indicates how many successes the Enhancement gives you. It’s like giving yourself or someone else some successes for later.
• Finally, a difficult Stunt makes it harder for others to accomplish actions directed at you. The successes you devote to this Stunt add to the Difficulty for characters to take actions against you.
Example: Monica’s character Imogene Heat has just scaled a heavily-fortified skyscraper, and gets five successes on a Difficulty 3 Subterfuge + Dexterity roll to crack open a window on the 38th floor. When the Storyguide describes the place as filled with guards, Monica says, “Imogene waits for the telltale flash of lightning from her mother the sky goddess, counts to three, and then dives through the window as the booming thunders obscures her rapid footfalls.” The Storyguide allows her to apply Complication 2 to the Subterfuge + Composure opposed roll of the guards — if they hear anything at all, they’ll likely be drawn to the window instead of her.
TWISTS OF FATE
If you’ve used your Path to enhance a roll and have some successes left over, you can perform a special kind of Stunt: Telling the Storyguide to twist Fate, changing the story itself. Twists of Fate are the unlikely coincidences that follow Scions around; each success spent on a Twist of Fate can add or remove one detail from the scene. Sometimes events just aren’t going the way the character wants, or sometimes it would make for a more dramatic escape if there were a door at the other end of the room, or if there was a gun conveniently placed on the end of the table. If what Fate wants is a better story for your character, think of it as that outside force changing the story to make things more interesting.
Twists of Fate can’t ask the Storyguide to undo something that’s already established, but they can alter the context of what’s established or introduce a new fact. An edit can be as simple creating a new fact about The World, “There’s an open window on the side of the building we can enter through,” or “Every fire-alarm system in this apartment building is linked to a few central sensors, like the one I’m going to light a match under,” or, with more successes spent on the Stunt, something even more scene-changing: “From my character’s background understanding of the Prose Eddas, I knew the villain was a frost giant all along, so we brought flamethrowers.” The Twist should be agreed upon by all the players and the Storyguide and can’t be anything overtly supernatural.
• The mook’s gun runs out of bullets just as they get a bead on the Scion.
• Sirens are heard in the distance as the police arrive on the scene.
• The character reveals they’ve got a gun under the table and have been aiming all this time while the villain threatened them.
• The character’s got a cache of passports just when the group needs to get out of the country, a gift from their parent’s worshippers.
• The damaged car engine suddenly turns over, allowing the character to escape.
• Reading the headline of a newspaper from a park bench reveals a vital clue.
• The “drunk” the villains just rolled for petty cash is in on the scam with the player characters.
• The Wudang monk once lost a martial-arts battle to the player characters, and owes them a debt of honor... just this once, at least.
The Storyguide may decide that some details require more successes than others (the flamethrowers up above, for example), but in general it’s one success for one scene change. Nothing created or removed via a Twist of Fate lasts beyond the current scene.
Heroes, Demigods, and Gods can create more powerful and miraculous Twists of Fate that are overtly supernatural, but this is determined by the kind of divinity they become and even their mundane Twists become limited. See Scion: Hero for more details.
DEGREE OF SUCCESS
After all successes have been totaled and spent on Difficulty, Complications, and Stunts, they can contribute to how impressively the character succeeds. Degrees of success follow:
COMPLEX ACTIONS
When players need to resolve a challenge that involves lots of separate tasks, they can use a complex action. This is a series of linked challenges called intervals, each of which have their own dice pools, Difficulty, and so on, but all contribute toward a greater goal. For example, a character who joins an illegal rakshasa street race must navigate different stretches of the race, each of which is its own challenge.
Complex actions act like a montage in a movie, so that each interval focuses on one of the “highlights” of a criminal investigation or political campaign. Meeting the Difficulty of an interval gives the character a Milestone, which can be a clue, an ingredient, a favor, a racing checkpoint, or whatever most suits the complex action. Once a character achieves a set number of Milestones (like a static Difficulty), the complex action ends successfully.
If a character isn’t under any pressure, she can fail as many intervals as she likes, slowly accruing Milestones until her project is complete. More urgent complex actions include a limit on the number of intervals the character can attempt before the entire complex action fails. Complications can force a character to skip an interval as she wastes precious time dealing with them, or even lose a Milestone in the chaos.
In some cases, the Storyguide may award a Milestone without any need for a roll. For example, if a great luthier is gifted a strand of Sif’s metallic, golden hair for services rendered, that easily qualifies as a Milestone in his ongoing attempt to craft an incredible electric guitar.
COMPLEX TEAMWORK AND OPPOSITION
Characters can use the rules for teamwork to collaborate on intervals. Alternatively, they can try to achieve different Milestones during the same interval. For example, one character might perform forensic analysis while her partner interrogates a suspect. In this case, each character rolls separately, earning Milestones as normal.
A complex action with opposed participants is a contest. The opposed characters or groups each work separately to gain enough Milestones, and the one who does so first is the winner. In contests with a limited number of intervals, like races with a set track, the one who gains the most Milestones within that limit is the winner. Rivals can use Stunts to interfere with each other’s efforts, so contests use initiative to determine who goes first.
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