[Sorcerer] The Brotherhood
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hey Christopher,
Quote
And Ryan replied, "The main thing I learned from him is to approach stories from a character point of view, as opposed to a plot point of view. Forget about the plot in the beginning, because if you know what emotional journey you want to take your character on, the rest will follow. We break our crime stories [on The Shield] not in terms of who did this and what's the clue; it's what do we want our cops to go through on this particular story. Once we know that, the plot will come later."
And that's what I'm finding works in Sorcerer -- and is easy as pie in Sorcerer if you focus on the Kickers, the Bangs, the Relationship Map and the Humanity. A much as possible I'm just trying to go from one emotionally strong choice/beat to the next, lettign the "plot" grow out of the choices engenedered by the emotinally strong Bangs and scene framing.
It's a blast.
I like that! It kind of fits my approach in my current Sorcerer game, which focusses on relationships.
- Frank
Christopher Kubasik:
Quote from: Frank Tarcikowski on June 26, 2008, 09:53:54 AM
I like that! It kind of fits my approach in my current Sorcerer game, which focusses on relationships.
- Frank
Hi Frank,
Excellent!
One of the things that first blew me away about Sorcerer the first time I read it was that it was designed to be about relationships right from the get go. I'm not talking about The Relationship Map chapter form S&Soul....
I mean, I start reading this book and Ron has hand the GM NPCs that the PC is intimately tied to. It's not the typical "dependent" that we might or might not ever use from so many other games (or someone to simply dick the Player over with, if used in the hands of some GMs... no relationship, but always someone the GM can say, "She's dead! The bad guys killed her!")
Demons were direct, dramatic narrative characters that changed the core dynamic between the GM and the Player as a matter of the rules. It was no longer a matter of "You have the PCs, I have world, I send the world after you, you fight back (or visa versa...)" it was, "We're in this together. We're not on opposite sides of the drama. We're joined at the hip."
Then, when you carry this kind of rule and play into the "back of the character sheet" -- which lists all important NPCs to the PLAYER (not the GM's "plot" but to the Player), you see how the game really is suggesting that the game is all about the dramatic interation of the PCs with the NPCs -- not the PCs with the GM's Plot.
The Relationship Map is simply the extension of this thinking to GM prep. The R-Map is not a model of relationships (again, Sorcerer's rules aren't any kind of simulation engine.) The R-Map is simply a tool to build grabby bits of human behavior and lay them out in an organized fashion. It's a telescoping of the relationship between Demons and Sorcerers, through the "back of the character sheet" and out into the GM's prep. We don't have a GM Plot... but we do have a web of characters with their own agendas connected at the level that tend to grab us at the level it's easist to grab us human beings: familial and romantic relationships -- which have been the core of grabby narrative hooks from Greeks through Battlestar Galactica.
Rather than having a "story" to run the Players through, story is produced through the interaction between characters in the tale. This doesn't mean that the stories just happen because there are relationships: agendas, concrete goals, objects and property at stake make the conflicts something people can grab onto and understand. But relationshps, from bound demon outward from the PC, are what drive the game.
So, it sounds like all of your game's pistons are firing.
CK
Frank Tarcikowski:
Yeah, the relationship approach is pretty much just good old Sorcerer as written, even though I didn’t explicitly use the relationship map technique as described in Sorcerer & Sword. I also have some NPCs that I made up myself to challenge the PCs in interesting ways, some of which didn’t receive much attention by the players and some of which did. I find it very rewarding when an NPC I created, or my interpretation of an NPC a player created, really grabs the players’ interest.
When I read that quote above, and compared it to what I’ve been doing, I easily saw the connections: The relationships are about the character and how she feels. They are actually the easiest and most effective way of getting at the character and how she feels. And the demons are of course superb because it’s just so easy to rely on them, to even like them somehow (because, let’s face it, they’re really pretty fucking cool), and then suddenly they decide they don’t like this other relationship of yours and woah are you in trouble.
And the most fun part is, as opposed to Shawn Ryan writing his screenplay, it’s someone else who controls the character’s reaction. That’s authored role-playing, baby!
- Frank
Christopher Kubasik:
A bunch of things:
You wrote: "The relationships are about the character and how she feels." Absolutely. And, keeping in mind that Sorcerer Prep still involved lots of "plot" stuff as well (who is doing what to whom, what is the McGuffing everyone is fighting over etc.) the relationships are the "adventure". Dogs in the Vineyard is identical in this regard.
You wrote: "Even though I didn’t explicitly use the relationship map technique as described in Sorcerer & Sword." (I think you meant Sorcerer & Soul?) Well, I don't do that particular technique either. I was just talking about this Ron the other day. When I first read the Relationship Map chapter years ago, I thought it was absolutely the coolest thing, but I circled it for months because I felt like there was something about it I didn't understand. And then, finally, I realized my problem was: "This is too much work!" I mean, read a whole novel just and draw the relationship map from the book and erase the names and re-draw some lines.... I was confused because I thought that was a vital part of the process Ron was describing... but what interested me was the end result (the Relationship Map itself). That's what I wanted and what I cared about. And because of the reading I'd done through the years (plays from the Greek tragedies onward, lots of stories, and my own efforts at writing) I was much, much happier just pulling out a piece of paper and starting to create a map of characters bound by family and romance and just going to town. As Ron pointed out in the conversation, because of my own training and experiences, this was just something I do. Suddenly Relationship Maps seemed easy and I happily whip them off today with glee.
The big epiphany of the Relationship Map for me, was that -- just like the GM's "adventure" used to do -- it provides a focus of interest for the Players. (Again, just like the Town Creation in Dogs.) They're a thing floating -- mostly unseen -- between all the players at the table, that they can slowly chew their way through, discovering mysteries and conflicts, help and hinderance. In this way they are stand ins for dungeons or "adventures" -- not literally, but in function. Their advantage is that they are more fluid than a pre-written dungeon or adventure: nothing will stop because Players don't go to one place or fail to speak to this one person. Bound with the techniques of Kickers and Bangs, the Players are rushing toward what they want and the GM is throwing new revelations and reversals at them via the Bangs.
Another advantage is what you mention above -- they're a big ink blot test of what the Players find interesting, and they're free to choose who and what interests them and (importantly) interact with such characters and objects in any way they want, since they are making their own statements for and with their characters. As I said above, the R-Map is not a "model" of relationships that matter to people. They are a short hand tool to get Players at a table to focus on something together and build a shared narrative as they interact with it. Because human beings are innately curious about other human beings and we're specifically curious about relationships involving families and sex (and how people treat each other in other in relationships) we tend to seize the opportunity to examine such relationships. This is true even in fictional relationships from epic poems to TV, from Greek Tragedies to the musical Sweeney Todd. We might not know much about the lead characters in Law & Order -- but those would be our PCs, and so they're not the point. We're curious about the perp and the witnesses and the other suspects... and as the cops and the lawyers dig deeper, they invariably find a hot and active R-Map of some kind, where wives lie to save their husbands, or sons murdered their fathers for making a pass at their girlfriend. We're curious about this kind of stuff, so we keep watching the show. That's the function of an R-Map (and, again, a Town in Dogs) -- a tool to draw our curiosity and focus the Players as they chew their way in through the relationships and make judgments and decisions as to how to respond to them.
You wrote: "I also have some NPCs that I made up myself to challenge the PCs in interesting ways, some of which didn’t receive much attention by the players and some of which did." Well, absolutely! Again, a Sorcerer game isn't a happy Christmas day family reunion. In the game I'm running now I have plenty of NPCs that aren't in the R-Map, but certainly give the Players grief. Cramming every NPC onto the map would be difficult and probably dangerous! It'd be a parody of a family tree from Greek mythology. Like Kickers, Lore, and Demons, I look at the R-Map as one set of tools that helps keep the Players imaginatively focused on building something robust in terms of theme and color. To me, they are like Strange Attractors from Chaos theory, that interact with each other to help create a pattern (the emergent play) that we might not have anticipated, but which certainly makes sense as a pattern given the strange attractors. But that doesn't mean everything is a part of one of these strange attractors. Other, random elements can certainly be dropped into the mix and see how the affect the emerging pattern of play -- which becomes, ultimately, the story.
You wrote: " They are actually the easiest and most effective way of getting at the character and how she feels." I want to add: "... and to get to the PLAYERS and how he or she feels." This was the biggest ah-ha moment I had when I started hanging around here years ago. It seems obvious now, but back in the day RPG techniques were usually focused on "How do I hook the character?" or "What does the character care about?" and so on. Now, in terms of the fictional content these are good questions to ask. But people seldom asked, "Say, what are the Players interested in?" That's why the player authored kickers were such a big deal deal -- they're not just a plot hook for the character to "get into the adventure." They're statements by the Player about what they want their game play to be about. Huge difference! And the same thing with R-Maps and Players: players have a field of emotional and provoking relationships they can choose to interact with or ignore. What does the Player feel about these relationships? What judgment or forgiveness do the Players want to dole out? This, to me, is the meat of the story-now stuff.
In my current game, Eric (a Player) has a character (David) who had a daughter murder who was murdered by a cult. His wife goes insane from the murder is is sent to a hospital. The cult leader is safely ensconced in a prison and gets off an a technicality, though David's own (pre-game) research makes him certain this man ordered the murder. He goes to jail to get vengeance upon this man. While in prison he realizes there's Sorcerous Lore floating around. He grabs at it in oder to accomplish his goals. In his last session he just found out that his wife had an affair with the cult leader years ago and the daughter isn't even his daughter -- her father is the cult leader! His Kicker is that he found out his daughter is still alive! She's out there somewhere!
So, here's a man who has ruined his life to get vengeance, who has just discovered he's trying to avenge the murder of a daughter who isn't his daughter, that he's a cuckold, and that the cult leader is still trying to kill the little girl. What is David going to do? Well, that's Eric's decision and I have no idea! I mean, it wasn't just Eric that got all electric cold when this Bang hit the table. You can bet that Colin and Vasco, the other two players, might have some opinions about this as well. I mean, should David try to save the little girl's life anyway? Will Vasco or Colin have their characters try to save her if Eric has David blow the little girl off? What is David's relationship to the little girl? What will his relationship to his wife be? Will he continue his agenda to beat out vengeance -- and is his wife on that list now? I don't know and all of us at the table can't wait to find out. And, as mentioned, the other Players have their stake in this as well, if only because they're human beings. Vasco's character, Roman, was standing right there when an NPC hit David with this Bang. If David goes off to kill his wife (and again, he might! I don't know!) will Vasco have Roman try to stop him, and so on...
This, I think, is why the R-Map as a replacement to the dungeon or adventure is so powerful: it opens up all sorts of compelling choices to the PLAYERS... because we, as humans, find these things so compelling. Given compelling circumstances to plug into, we have compelling feelings, and make compelling choices in response, which create compelling conflict. And sits it is driven by the feelings of the Players, it's more compelling and electric than it would be than if I was just "playing my character."
CK
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