"The Way We Weren't" - Why Scion (1st Edition) Didn't Work for Us

 "The Way We Weren't" - Why Scion (1st Edition) Didn't Work for Us

The artwork and theme of this game has captured my imagination for literal decades, y'all. Even as I'm confident I'll never play this game again, I cannot bring myself to get rid of the books.

To start with, I always liked the title, "The Way We Weren't," for an episode of Farscape, one of my favorite TV shows. It's a play on a film called "The Way We Were." From this one episode, we learn so much about Aeryn Sun and Pilot. We have gaps filled into their back stories that we didn't even realize we were missing. And it's all just really wonderful character development. But the primary thing I think about when I consider the episode and its title is that the past isn't as it seems. We weren't always the people then that we thought or think we were. It's not just a "looking back through rose-colored glasses" situation; it's that our perspectives shift, and change, and looking at the past can be like looking through a kaleidoscope. It's not necessarily good or bad; it just is.

Anyway, why bother bringing that up?

Well, the truth is that I remember Scion being a ton of fun. I played it right after college with people I went to undergrad with at SUNY Geneseo. I was sucked in immediately! The artwork looked terrific, the theme was interesting, and I loved building characters. I mean, I had fun playing and running the game (I mostly did the latter), but picking through different pantheons, creating Birthright Relics to channel godly powers, imagining what my character might become God Of down the line...I just found it all extremely captivating. I played it with the RP group I joined in Buffalo, NY after college. We played nearly weekly for months. Everyone had fun, and it never felt as though there were a shortage of material to use for content creation as a storyteller. The game felt infinite, and therefore, freeing.

The picture that inspired my Nightwing tattoo. The quote he's got about learning to love falling is something I think about pretty regularly. Name a superhero who looks as free as Nightwing does. I'll wait...

Fast forward to 2024 (maybe 2025? I can't remember if it was late last year or early this year) and Saint Louis. I hadn't had a regular campaign in 10 years (since before I got married). A member of that RPing group had just moved back to the area, and so there were 3 of us, and we decided to try and get a regular RP game going again. I have still been in the process of wrapping up my Masters' degree in social work, but I'm closing in on the end, and I was finding more balance in my life. This was an opportunity to play with some of my favorite gamers, so sure, let's give it a go! That said, I have also noticed that, over the intervening years, my love for RPing has really diminished. It's not that I don't enjoy it so much as I have limited free time to play games, and I find that I'd prefer to be playing board games than role-playing games.

I'm honestly not sure if this is just kind of how I've developed and changed as a person, or if there were only a handful of boardgames we were playing at the time that I had a regular RPG going, and now that I have so many other options, I prefer those. Maybe a mix of those two things? Both activities require focus, and I like focus for my hobbies. On a personal note, it can be very difficult for me to turn my brain off when I'm trying to relax. I think part of that is because I'm both an artist and I work in social justice. So no matter what I am consuming in order to relax, my brain is running some background programs that are analyzing whatever I'm consuming through those professional lenses. Part of me loves that, especially as I've gotten older, my brain functions that way. I love discovering and examining connections between things that I perhaps didn't notice before. But it can make it a bit difficult to relax. The best way for me to truly "unplug" is to focus on something that eats up my bandwidth. A board game that requires my focus to track the multiple courses of action and constantly changing game state is something that fits that bill! If I'm playing something like Shatterpoint or SETI, I'm so focused on the game and considering different possibilities that I'm not connecting it critically to some area of work that I spent my day thinking about.

I mean, I don't wanna fix it so much as I want it to slow down for a little bit.

When I'm role-playing, I do need that bandwidth and focus that keeps me from thinking about work. But it also calls for a level of engagement and performance that is akin to what it is like for me to spend an evening in rehearsal, rehearsing a play. I find it engaging and I enjoy it! But it's also so very draining for me. Especially if I'm running the game rather than just playing it. So while I can spend a whole week playing board game after board game with very little down time, I usually max out at about 4 hours of RPing. I just find myself drained, and my focus is in rough shape. For those weekends when I've RPed with my friends over the course of two days, the pace of play is much less breakneck, but also, we take breaks every several hours to get food, stretch, whatever. And that can help me reset.

I mention all of this because I was thinking about "The Way We Weren't." When my current group was thinking of an RPG to play, I suggested that I could run Scion. It was a game I mostly didn't need to relearn, that interested me, and in which there was plenty of material to mine. Between navigating school, family, work, and my volunteer projects, I had capacity for a very select few RPGs, and this was one of them. I think the way I played Scion 20 years ago was real - it was fun and inventive. But I'm thinking the game itself (mechanics and such) was never what I remember it being.

We tried for months to make Scion work. My buddies Biff and Cush worked really hard to not only come up with characters that worked in concert with one another, but had deep backgrounds I could plumb for material and hooks. They adjusted their respective approaches and their collective approach to the game and story so that we were all on the same page and pulling in the same direction. They really committed to trying to make it work. But I've never put that much effort into making an RPG work, and done so with really stellar players, only to have it still never gel over the course of months.

Breaking my heart and makin' me look dumb, Scion. Way to go.

I chose to play first edition rather than second because that's the one I knew. That said, I spoke to some folks who played second, and they also had issues. Some similar, some different. But ultimately, we chose to move on from Scion and play Embers of the Imperium instead. Before picking a new game, though, we debriefed around why Scion didn't work. We ultimately concluded that the game didn't actually make the players feel like children of the gods. They didn't feel as infinite as my friends and I remember feeling when we played 20 years ago. I don't know if that's a result of personal growth or what, but this is what we kept running into: four or five dots in something basically makes you a god among humans at that attribute or skill. But since the players were starting at the Hero level, there was plenty of information they didn't know, or things they couldn't do. But it felt like they should be able to do those things at 4 or 5 dots. But it also didn't feel right from a game balance standpoint.

I posited the possibility that it was a matter of me not being more permissive as a storyteller. But the players said it wasn't that; it was more that if they could actually do everything that the game said they should effectively be able to do, even at Hero level, then it felt like cheat mode. It feels like the game lends itself well to incredible visuals and ideas, but in terms of gameplay itself, maybe it works better as a diceless game? I'm not really sure. All I can say is that while I know there can be scaling issues upon hitting Demigod level, we had issues even at the Hero level. Players felt as though they were simultaneously stymied and somehow cheating the system.

Also, we felt very limited in the mundane world. Sure, at some point, they become demigods and gods, and can access the under and overworlds. But again, I can't help but wonder if this game would perhaps work better diceless? I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I could write a story that would actually sound and feel like the mythology of old. And while they tend to work really well as stories, the more I consumed, the less it felt like RPing and the more it felt like stories that people either tell together, or power gamers tell other gamers upon min-maxing at character creation. Either is fine! But not for the game we were trying to play. Very little ended up actually being challenging for the players because of the rules and their stats. And the things that were challenging were rooted in gameplay and RP that they needed to play out, and since they were playing them out as humans without these godly traits, it felt as though their play limited the freedom their characters enjoyed from a mechanical standpoint. It was a weird dynamic to encounter, which I think is why we had so much difficulty articulating it. We spent quite a lot of time trying to fix our game before finally giving up on it.

Ultimately, it was the right call to move on. I still don't think I'll be getting rid of my Scion books, but I think perhaps Scion is best left where and how I found it: as a rich treasure trove of wonderful RPing memories from a couple of decades ago.