In today’s installment of System Mastery we seek to determine if one dad could beat up another dad, assuming the dads were Susano-O and Papa Legba. We’re reviewing Scion, a White Wolf game of thoroughly modern godlings in a modern world, battling titans to stop hell on Earth or some damn thing. Special guest host Claire joins us in our discussion of a stereotype battle to determine if this book’s Japanese gods of anime could be more offensive than its bloody bloody blood bloods of Mesoamerica.
System Mastery 
No offense, while I like your banter, I do find it a bit distracting that you always go off on D&D for a few minutes. I’m not a 3.5 fan, I just prefer if you stayed on topic.
Since you’ve now done Exalted and Scion, you should really hit up the third game/line for White Wolf’s “badly done superheroing” triple threat and do the whole Trinity system – Aeon, Adventure, or god forbid Aberrant. Which I guess would be three more, but, whatever. Eat your vegetables.
I am actually really sad I never picked up a copy of Aberrant back in the day. We totally need to get on that.
After a cursory examination of the Wikipedia page for it, I’m completely on board. Looks like one of those “People of various ethnic groups develop super powers and pick a weird ethnic way to refer to themselves” things. I can only hope the brits waited for like 5 minutes after the apocalypse before sewing on a bunch of crosses and starting up the a new Knights Templar.
You also owe it to yourselves to look up the Aberrant: Fear and Loathing supplement, which is terrible in exactly the White Wolf-y way you’d imagine, but I don’t want to spoil why without you experiencing it firsthand.
Nobilis is an RPG where you play Gods of specific things, and it does a really good job of making anything you might want to be a God of impressive.
Instead of having a list of things you can be a god of, players just get to choose any concept they want. You could be, say, the God of Trade, or Growth, or Robots, or Light, or Light Bulbs, or whatever you can think of. The thing you’re a god of is called your “Estate”.
You use two stats to manipulate your Estate:
Domain, which lets you summon, control, strengthen, and destroy your estate; and Persona, which lets you make things more or less like your Estate.
So, if you’re the God of Candy, you can use domain to summon a giant Candy Golem and have it knock things down. You can use Persona to turn people into peppermints if you want, but you can also use it to make things metaphorically more like candy. For example, everybody likes candy, so everybody likes the God of Candy, too! Candy rots your teeth and makes you fat, so with a wave of her hand the God of Candy can make you too bloated to move under your own power.
It’s a really elegant system, and it really works to make any Estate you can think of useful, even if it sounds silly or useless.
I have heard good things about Nobilis. Maybe we’ll take a look at it. As fun as it is to dump on games, we really do enjoy putting one in the win column from time to time.
Because you told me to, I feel compelled to point out how 4E is lame and 3.5 rules.
Except it doesn’t. In actuality, 4E is pretty good at what it does. Likewise, 3.5 is pretty good at what it does… for the first few levels, before everything breaks down.
It’s just personal preference that the thing which 3.5 tries to do is something that I happen to enjoy, where the the thing which 4E tries to do happens to make me nauseous.
That’s absolutely fine. We probably dump on 3.x unnecessarily. We both played it, and I played it a lot in particular. It’s not a very good system, but what is, really? I think a lot of our distaste for it is really just reactions to the internet’s weird vitriol for 4th edition, most of which is just bizarrely misplaced. Like are there problems with 4e? Oh gosh yes. The first MM was completely written wrong so that the monsters are all boring meat sacks, the multiclassing systems are tacked on, and some of the classes are boring or under par or both. But instead of hearing those legitimate complaints it’s always “Fighters have anime powers! Wizards aren’t special enough! It’s just tabletop WOW!” and so on, which are largely just spurious memes.
I love how in trying to illustrate how sexist the book is, the group(especially Claire) buy into a lot of sex worker stereotypes to a ridiculous degree (99.9% of Prostitutes are sex slaves? really?) and do a lot of flatout terrible jokes at their expense; in short, being somewhat sexist themselves.
I want to play a game where I’m a teenaged god at a foreign school for gods in a god exchange program.
Yeah, that’d be awesome. I think it’d be a great setting for Monsterhearts, or maybe just the first Scion book.
I would like to point out that Eric Donner, the guy on the cover, is maybe the worst-optimized premade character I’ve ever seen. He invests all of his points into Strength/Epic Strength… and fights with a gun. Even ignoring that guns are terrible in this system to begin with, it’s just hilariously dumb.
Just want you to know, I get a half chub whenever you shit on 3.X DnD. Please keep it up.