Setting of [Kult] in [Sorcerer]
Marshall Burns:
Quote from: lachek on February 25, 2008, 10:24:09 AM
For your point #1, are you saying that the number next to Humanity on your Sorcerer sheet is not a quantitative measure at all, but some sort of abstract game token with no representation in the fiction? That is, when a Sorcerer loses Humanity by performing a heinous act, they lose a "point" of "currency" and get closer to "losing" the "game", but this doesn't necessarily reflect in the internal or external state of the Sorcerer hirself?
It was my understanding that Humanity is an either/or sort of thing; the character is either still human (Humanity 1+) or inhuman (Humanity 0-), with the meaning of "human" and "inhuman" depending on how Humanity is treated by the group. I mean, take two characters who both have Lore 1 but have divided their other stats differently; is the guy who has 6 Stamina and 6 Will (and thus 6 Humanity) less human than the guy who has 4 Stamina and 8 Will (and thus 8 Humanity)?
At least, that's the way I thought it worked.
-Marshall
Valamir:
Yeah, humanity is binary.
The analogy that helped me is to think of it as a lightswitch; a lightswitch that requires 10 pounds of pressure to flip.
If you start with Humanity 7, that means you've already got 3 pounds of pressure on the switch. As you lose humanity you're adding more pressure to the switch, until finally at Humanity 0, you have the needed pressure and bam, the lights go out.
But right up until that last moment...the lights were still on. And here's the important part. They were on just as brightly...the increasing pressure on the switch, didn't cause the lights to dim at all, until they went out altogether.
Peter Nordstrand:
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.
Ron Edwards:
All of those are good points, but I think I can also see what you're talking about, Iachek. I am basing that on actually trying to prep Kult and in doing so adapt it to my preferences, over ten years ago. To do that, I found myself driving toward two things.
1. 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.
Unfortunately, doing that means that nearly all the support material or scenarios I'd bought were made almost useless, because casting off the illusion and seeing the horror/truth is a big deal in the game concept. My limitation here is that I have no interest in metaphysics like whether God is really the Demiurge, or whatever. As I discovered with trying to prep the original Vampire, I found myself too interested in the normal people and their stories to want to go cast all that off as mere illusion.
However, if someone else were to find a better or more functional balance among these concepts than I could generate, then Kult's setting could be Sorcerer-like. It'd merely have to be about the real people and normal situations as much as the blood streaming down the concrete walls or the bloated torturers stumping along the corridors that you never realized existed in your house before. And all that God-and-such stuff would have to become supposition within the setting rather than setting-as-agreed-upon at the player level.
2. 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. That's a pretty big conceptual shift, actually. It's what makes Sorcerer Humanity distinct from the feature of the same name in Cyberpunk and Vampire.
Ultimately, I realized that to do all this with Kult meant that I'd be playing my game-in-design Sorcerer anyway, and playing Kult as written was not really possible for me based on points #1-2 as well as the phenomenal GM-control implicit in every published scenario. So I went with "be inspired by Kult for cool things in Sorcerer" instead.
However, should anyone think he or she could do it, I'd be interested. The game always impressed me with its guts; it somehow managed to combine splatter horror with human interest, and (although I don't know how) avoided mere adolescent excess even when it was indeed excessive.
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
Whoops, I mean Mental Balance, in #2 above.
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