Setting of [Kult] in [Sorcerer]
lachek:
Aha! I hadn't picked up on the binary nature of Humanity in Sorcerer, thanks for cluing me in.
Quote from: Peter Nordstrand on February 28, 2008, 04:24:15 AM
As Marshall and Ralph said. I'll just add that players must always be in control of their character's actions. You can't demand that a character must act more crazy just because his humanity is low. Humanity mustn't be an indicator of how you should roleplay a character.
Why would introducing such a rule break the game? Because, players making decisions for their characters is what the game is about. Take that away, and you are left with a very different beast. The whole point of playing sorcerer is to have players making these decisions.
Gotcha. So to adapt Mental Balance into Sorcerer play, all I have to do is allow players to interpret their current Humanity score in whatever way they would like without feeling like they're being judged by their peers or themselves? Or did I misunderstand?
I realize now that Humanity is not actually on a sliding scale (the 10 lbs of pressure light switch is a great analogy), but are there potential game-breaking pitfalls in treating it as such? Assuming we recognize the subjective nature of it and avoid judgment of a player's ability and willingness to play it out in a way that fits with our own perceptions, of course.
To answer my own question, I suppose that if a player feels their actions are being pulled a certain way based on their Humanity stat, it could remove some of the emotional impact of having to make such decisions your own damn self, without relying on "what the character would do". Then again, if someone really wants to use reverse-pawn-stance, they could point to any of the other stats - Stamina, Will, Cover, Lore - and claim the same: "I did it because it's what a low-Will high-Cover police officer would do."
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 28, 2008, 06:07:44 AM
The Humanity value would have to become descriptive of the character's appearance and apparent habits, but not prescriptive for what he or she might do under stress.
So Humanity is descriptive, not prescriptive. Short, sweet, effective. I like it.
What about Lore? One of Kult's basic premises, like Mage: the Awakening or the Matrix movies, is that reality as we know it is an illusion - and the more we know about the real world, the more control we have over the illusion. In Kult, this is reflected in skills like the schools of magic, Dreaming, various low- or high-Mental Balance powers and The Dark Art. Can we map these skills onto Lore without game-breaking effects? Perhaps by treating the effects as some sort of temporary, instantaneous Demons? I feel like I'm way out on dark, weak ice with this one, but I'd appreciate comments.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 28, 2008, 06:07:44 AM
The setting's certainty regarding the horrific, "real" world would have to be diminished. Instead of cracking the illusory reality open so the player-characters could glimpse and eventually fully enter "the truth," I'd play it more as an interface between the normal experience of life and the horror/hell/whatever that shone forth every so often.
Because if you used the setting and the ultimate nature of humanity intact then, as in Vampire, you'd implicitly encourage people to shed their humanity because it misleads and weakens them, am I right? After running Kult for a while, the at least semi-human characters we'd start the game with would be turned into, essentially, dark superheroes devoid of emotions and human connections, going on fantastic journeys to more and more gruesome locales to kill ever-scarier monsters with ridiculous guns (which, ironically, I think is actually the starting point for Mutant Chronicles). This is exactly the effect I'm trying to prevent by using Sorcerer in the Kult setting - I'm hoping to switch the game goals towards preserving your humanity to make the game about human horror, not shedding it in favour of dark fantasy no player can have any emotional connections to.
Could I do this - maybe better - by using Sorcerer proper? Well, duh. But I do like the Kult setting material... and my driving force here is largely based around salvaging childhood disappointments.
Any other tips and tricks for integrating Kult's setting into functional Sorcerer play?
Ron Edwards:
Hi,
I think I can help with everything you wrote starting with "What about Lore" with a pretty basic idea: that Lore, in Sorcerer, is never certain at the metaphysical level. Even if the demon is bright red, has a pointy-tipped tail, speaks Hebrew or Coptic or something, reminisces about Solomon, and seems obsessed with the character's immortal soul, that doesn't mean all the occult and Biblical references from which this stuff is drawn are established as true in the game setting. In this game, nothing can be so established, as far as Lore (and sorcery, and demons) is concerned.
Nor does the character's certainty about any of it mean a damn thing either - in fact, the descriptor Belief System was chosen in order to characterize such certainty and to emphasize that it's a feature of personality rather than a key or window into what's "really out there." That's also why there is no Lore descriptor called True Knowledge; the closest thing to it is Mad, and I hope that makes my point about that.
I will discuss how this concept applies to fighter-jet-AI-spaceships and similar 'solid' things later. Right now we will stick with Kult.
So to "do Kult" with Sorcerer concepts firing, the whole setting notion has to change. Instead of reality being an illusion, and Lore being access to truth, reality is real, these awful/horror things may also be real, and Lore is a way to cope with the contradictions and questions at the interface of the two. So any of the paths of magic or the skills that apply to such things are all means of coping with and manipulating that interface.
Does that help, or make sense?
Best, Ron
lachek:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on February 28, 2008, 11:26:21 AM
Does that help, or make sense?
It does, yes. In other words, your Lore is like your Arete in Mage: tA - it reflects the degree of comfort and flexibility you enjoy with your Paradigm, allowing you to extend it to affect reality more effectively. It doesn't explain reality - it doesn't explain what lies behind reality - but it compensates for the disjointed intersections between them and allow you to create more for your personal benefit.
So why is it so important for "reality" to be "real" in Sorcerer? Is it to prevent the GM from being the Keeper of Reality who says what goes and what doesn't? I can't see that being a problem in Kult - the setting material is vague and the details are intended to fluctuate from group to group, game to game. If it's a player authorship issue, I can definitely cope.
Or is it to lend legitimacy to the idea of sorcerer's dealing in mundane affairs, like buying milk and having one night stands? If that is it, I have a counter-proposal. The idea I like about having a false reality, an Illusion, and to slowly reveal it to characters (and/or players) a la Kult, is that at some point they will have to make the same choice Cypher had to make in The Matrix: leave the Illusion and embrace power and truth in Reality, or remain in the Illusion by closing your eyes to Reality (with limited success, of course). Sorcerer's rules would make such a choice be between leaving or remaining in the game, which might cause players to naturally gravitate towards Illusion and high Humanity. Kult doesn't really offer this choice so much as it assumes, by natural progression, that you will move through the storyline towards Reality with an extreme Mental Balance.
Is this approach workable? If not, why? I have no particular reason to resist the idea of making both worlds "real", other than that I'm trying as hard as possible to use the original Kult setting.
Thanks for helping me with this, everyone. In addition to learning about interfacing the games, I'm definitely learning about both Sorcerer and Kult as individual games.
joshua neff:
Iachek,
I hope this doesn't come off as a smackdown. It's certainly not meant as one. But as someone who came to Sorcerer after playing a number of World of Darkness games and similar things, I think I have some...well, some insight into this.
There are a lot of "hidden reality" games out there: Kult, Mage and the other World of Darkness games, Call of Cthulhu, and more. In these games, there is a hidden, occult truth to the world, and the people who can access it go mad or get great power (or both). Sorcerer is not one of these games. Sorcerer is about arrogant people who willingly risk their very humanity and enter into a dysfunctional relationship to get more power. The demons in Sorcerer are absolutely not part of an occult reality. They are UNreality; they are literally from nowhere and they should not exist in our world at all.
I think of Sorcerer as one of the great existentialist RPGs (The Shadow of Yesterday and Dogs in the Vineyard are two others, by the way). Reality ultimately has no meaning, and the PCs make their own meaning in the world. Not in the Mage sense of bending reality through their enlightened powers, but in the real world way all of us make our own meaning: by living life and ascribing meaning to our actions and the actions around us. In Sorcerer, a lot of that takes "real" form as demons, but the demons aren't there to signify occult truth or enlightenment. They're there as a dramatic convention to show the lengths people will go to gain power in the world. In Mage, the ultimate truth is that mages (and sleepers to a lesser extent) shape reality. In Sorcerer, the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth, and any occult revelations or enlightened truths a Sorcerer discovers will be personal and in no way universal.
Does that make sense? Does that help at all?
lachek:
Okay, I must admit, the nature of reality seems to be the major hang-up here and its emphasis continues to puzzle me.
Ron says that for a Sorcerer/Kult hybrid to work, both Illusion and Reality must be real. Joshua explains it by naming Existentialism a major part of what makes Sorcerer work - there mustn't be any reality that is "truer", or any underlying purpose to reality and life for that matter, since that would rob players of their ability to truly make choices and creating meaning for their characters (man, talk about a "Fruitful Void").
So, hey, without pulling in preconceived notions of Kult or Mage or Cyberpunk or whatever, can we talk about why the philosophical basis for Existentialism wouldn't work if you're placed in a new, cold, hostile world equally - if not more so - devoid of meaning than the one you thought you came from? Yeah, in a twisted way, Kult does point the characters in a certain direction. There is a degree of hope in Kult that doesn't exist in, say, Call of Cthulhu - humans are secretly divine and possess the ability to escape their imprisonment and fight back. I fully intend to rob a potential Sorcerer/Kult hybrid of this glimmer of hope, since it would seriously fuck with Sorcerer's premise.
Robbed of this external hope, I can't see that Kult's concept of Reality would screw with Existentialist ideas. Screw Nietzche's God is dead - in Kult's Reality, not only is He either dead, missing or completely uncaring, He's not even God. His lieutenants, the Archons, are fighting amongst themselves and are no more benevolent towards humanity than their malevolent reflections, the Death Angels, are. The ironic thing about Kult's Reality is that the world beyond the veil offers absolutely no answers and demands nothing less than complete personal responsibility or total annihilation.
Does that sound like a suitable backdrop for Existentialist play? Or, Ron and others, are there reasons for ensuring "reality" is "true" other than not focusing play around the elimination or manipulation of external forces?
Now, on the issue of the reality of demons. How important is it that demons be "from nowhere and should not exist at all"? This has been repeated multiple times in different ways, and I'm still not understanding why that it - other than as a reflection of the above, to ensure players take responsibility for their actions by negating the existence of higher truths.
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