Prep for first-time Hellblazer-ish Sorcerer
Ron Edwards:
Oh thanks, Jesse. I read that just before going to bed. Now I don't wanna go.
I thought I'd amend one of James' questions a wee bit:
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* How has sorcery made this character's life better?
I understand that James was asking in such a way as to arrive at the character's Price, so I'm not replacing his question so much as adding a new one. Sometimes I get the idea, from some folks, that they think Sorcerer must be a game about stupid people. "What would anyone want to do that?"
Heh. Ask yourself the next time someone cuts you off by driving 'round on the right at a stoplight. Me, I ask myself every time I do my rounds of today's news. Don't ask what I fantasize about accomplishing, and what price I'd be willing to pay for it.
So anyway, my additional question is useful because the character is (obviously) not opening play by attempting to break the Binding. After all, it's pretty easy - just stop giving the demon its Need and it either starves or it rebels and goes away, right? (well, more or less) So the character really is getting what they want, or closer to it, by being a sorcerer. Yes, it's riding the tiger, but again by definition, the character hasn't fallen off or been turned upon yet, now have they.
I'm not suggesting you ask the players this now. I suggest you ask them as part of the table-talk during actual play, particularly in their first scenes. Not as storyboard or long-backstory questions either - just brief and straightforward, and carry on with play as you go.
In fact, I think you might do well simply to state your final requirements to the players and not negotiate one bit more. It must be pushing the limits of "tedious" pretty hard by now, actually, if they send you X and you send them marked-up red pen commentary, and then it goes 'round again. It's time to work with what you got.
Well, as long as you have Kickers, demon Needs and Desires, brief circumstances of Binding, short labels on the backs of the sheets (lots of names and places with no depth is better than one or two full of ten-page depth), and that's it.
I do have some comments about some of the Desires which are written too much like Needs, and about that no-'count excuse for a Kicker (which you'll be stuck with, in the interest of no more negotiation), but now I have to de-anime my mind (thanks a whole fucking heap, Jesse) and try to get to bed.
Best, Ron
James_Nostack:
(cross posted with Jesse)
Joel, if you've read a bunch of Sorcerer threads you probably already know the answer: "Depends on your setting." Lately I've been thinking a lot about the modern-day sorcery described in Chapter 7 of Sorcerer and further developed in Sex & Sorcery. Odds are this isn't too terribly different from your Hellblazer-inspired stuff. I hope some of it will be useful for you.
One thing at the outset: despite what it says in the Sorcerer core book, a character's Lore score isn't necessarily tied to the character's Lore descriptor. Your Lore score, technically, simply represents how effective this character's going to be at getting his or her way on Lore-related matters. So an Adept might have Lore 1, which could mean (if we're interpreting stuff in-fiction) that this guy spent ages learning every last bit of sorcery but totally sucks at applying it, or (at the player level) the player just wants to have this quite competent guy fail a lot due to the exigencies of this story.
So: as a description, naive just means, "Ain't been to school." The description, by itself, has nothing to do with the character's talent and/or "story juice" on these matters, only that the character is bamboozled by all this metaphysical mumbo-jumbo and doesn't understand (or care about) the fine print.
With that in mind, a Naif can acquire a Lore score simply by coming to appreciate whatever demons are all about. Y'know on your one-sheet where you define what demons are, or what sorcery is, in this setting? The Naif has figured this out intuitively, through one particular experience or through the course of a lifetime.
Let's work with Sex & Sorcery's notion that sorcery is about attempting to perceive Reality-in-the-Raw. Here, a Naif sorcerer might be someone who, through an extreme experience, somehow learned something about how the Cosmos really works, even if the lesson is vague, numinous, and difficult to comprehend. Let me use an example from Wikipedia: Ed Gein, the inspiration for Psycho's Norman Bates. Gein is hopelessly, obsessively, desperately in love with his harridan of a mother. A lifetime of sublimated hatred, sexual longing, completely unselfish love, and blind faith in the face of unbearable suffering have combined to give Gein, in his darkest moments, a strangely tender glimpse of some Ultimate Truth. He doesn't know what to do with it; he doesn't know anything about "rituals" or "magic." He just knows a thing or two about his situation; it's numinous to him. (This is much too wordy, of course: my notes say, "obsessive, sublimated, unbearable love" which is really about all you need.) (Note that this explanation might work for "Mad" too. But also note that unlike a not of "Naive" explanations, there isn't some "superhero origin" event: "Naive" can work that way, but it can also just be something that builds up over time.)
As to how/why he summoned a demon: well, that's easy. Mother is out of the picture for some reason (dead, dying, whatever). He's adrift and lonely; being abused, cheated, enslaved and damned by a demon is how he feels loved.
Anyway: the character is a terribly unoriginal cliche, and is still too repulsive to serve as a player-character, but serves to get the point across.
Joel P. Shempert:
Hi, Jesse!
Quote from: jburneko on July 08, 2008, 07:26:39 PM
Regarding Seth/Nobody. Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot of ingrained gamer habits there. However, may I suggest that backing Seth down from being involved with two other PCs was a mistake? You're right in that Sorcerer has no requirements that the PCs must "group up" but it also has no such requirement that they *don't* group up. It's indifferent. I ran a Sorcerer game where all the PCs were family members living in the same house and it was awesome. The human connection you're looking for with Nobody might very well be with the other PCs.
I just wanna clarify that I negotiated him down from being connected to 2 PCs, to being connected to one. One of the connections was frankly weak. We kept the one that made more sense.
Also, thanks for the example of Naive Binding. That gives me a pretty good picture.
Ron,
Quote from: Ron Edwards on July 08, 2008, 07:47:12 PM
Me, I ask myself every time I do my rounds of today's news.
Heh. Have you read the Manga Death Note? It's available on the web here. it's the ultimate answer to that question.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on July 08, 2008, 07:47:12 PM
In fact, I think you might do well simply to state your final requirements to the players and not negotiate one bit more. It must be pushing the limits of "tedious" pretty hard by now, actually, if they send you X and you send them marked-up red pen commentary, and then it goes 'round again. It's time to work with what you got.
Yeah, no worries. We play tonight, so I'm just going to wait till we're face to face, get 'is that your final answer?" commitments on all the uncertain stuff (which fortunately includes some Kicker stuff), and roll straight ahead.
Peace,
-Joel
Ron Edwards:
Hi Joel,
Tonight? Oy. I thought we had a couple more days. I'll have to make this quick - all of it is about you as GM and not about talking to the players.
First, here's a bit from an older thread that I repeat a lot:
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A demon's Desire is not associated with any specific thing, place, or action. Instead, it tries to bring about its Desire with whatever it encounters. Whether it does the Desire itself, influences others to do it, or simply wants to be around that particular Desire in action, is up to the demon at the moment - any of these are fine.
It does not crave its Desire in a drug-sense. It likes its Desire and thinks the whole world ought to tend that way, and might need a little help to get there. If the demon is a conversational type, then it will always bring a dialogue around to its Desire somehow.
The demon's Binder is not responsible for satisfying its Desire and Binding strength is not affected by how much the demon is getting its Desire stroked. Doing things in accord with the Desire might give a bonus die to interactions, but again, that's not a matter of Binding strength. Failing to satisfy a Desire does not incur penalties to interaction or ritual rolls, nor will it lead a demon down the path of rebellion. A demon will not lose Power by missing out on its Desire as it will with its Need.
A Need, by contrast, is for a specific thing or an action. There is no ambiguity, ever, about whether the demon received its Need and when the last time was. The demon may like its Need, hate it, or regard it as a physiological necessity. What matters is that it's literally addicted to it.
Binding by definition makes the Binder responsible for providing the demon with its Need. Both participants understand this in full, for any and every instance of Binding, even if the sorcerer is Naive. Failure to receive its Need makes the demon lose Power, just as a Parasite or Possessor loses Power when outside a host. Under-supplying or frequently-supplying the Need does affect Binding strength and the demon's tendency to rebel or not to rebel.
Desire is ideology, personality, taste, and preference. Need is addiction, payment, and power.
One more point about Desire: the sorcerer does not please or appease the demon by providing it. Or more accurately, you can't provide Desire.
Looking over the listed Desires of the demons so far, I see a couple that are not on my list in the core book. You know those aren't just examples, right? Those are the Desires you pick from, period. It's like the descriptors and not like the Needs. If you're going to change the list, then you change the list, you don't improvise new bits in a free-form way. Such a change is very consequential and not to be done casually. Given your current uneasiness and enthusiasm, I suggest letting the game text do the work for you and not changing it at this level.
Theft is easily changed to Mischief. I strongly suggest doing so because theft is too specific, and it's an action, not a principle or general effect like a Desire must be. If you want to play the demon as focused on theft for now, sure, why not, but a non-mischievous theft would be uninteresting to it.
Sudden violence is similarly easily changed to Mayhem, for the same reasons.
Fear ... h'mm, I think that needs to become Power, with fear being the demon's current focus on establishing Power.
So, now for playing these things. I think they look like fun.
First of all, don't forget that demons can and do communicate. You can always find ways, even if they don't talk. Objects can get heavier or lighter, be misplaced (not in a "can't use it" way, just mildly inconvenient), or anything else like that. Parasites ... well, it depends on what they are. Some of them just talk to their hosts, others manifest as physiological effects like sweating or exuding drops of blood on the skin, and still others are machine-like and therefore would be more like Objects except for the misplaced part.
Second, one thing you can do as GM is to provide examples of the Desires in the scenes the character's in, so that gives you the opportunity to play the demons' enjoyment of those things. Twitch likes Mayhem, does it? No problem. A guy gets mugged on the street near Nobody, when he's on his way to go do something (that's important), and Twitch wants to stay and watch, like a kid watching construction equipment. No reason, no planned time-period, it just likes it. Twitch is a Parasite, right? Well, it doesn't have automatic control over Nobody's limbs, but it might try to take control briefly, or want to "discuss" the scene by vibrating all of Nobody's muscles briefly.
(One of the points you might want to make verbally during play, conveying it as a given rather than a negotiating point, is that Twitch does not make Nobody a sorcerer. Nobody is a sorcerer with or without Twitch.)
I hope these ideas help a little bit. Don't try to "make a story" tonight, and most especially do not try to recapitulate the classic first session from many White Wolf, Unknown Armies, and related play experiences, in which the characters "get clues to what's going on" or "come together in common interest" or "meet the introductory NPC." You have Kickers, Desires, Needs, and a few NPCs with notions of their own. Just play all those things, and weave player-characters' paths together, very occasionally, rather than their conflicts.
Best, Ron
Joel P. Shempert:
Well. . .we had to cancel for tonight, so I guess that's a bit of reprieve. We're now planning on playing next Wednesday. Feel free to add anything you were too rushed to post.
So, Desires. Huh. No, I did not realize that the Desires were a fixed list. I guess I do now. Your proposed tweaks to the Desires sound fine. And thanks for the advice on handling Desires in play. Looks like really solid stuff.
Quote from: Ron Edwards on July 09, 2008, 06:59:54 AM
(One of the points you might want to make verbally during play, conveying it as a given rather than a negotiating point, is that Twitch does not make Nobody a sorcerer. Nobody is a sorcerer with or without Twitch.)
Yeah, that's a point I've made regarding Robin and Ravengod, actually, since Willem seems resistant to the idea that Robin would or might ever even consider summoning another Demon, and his Sorcerous telltale is sloughing off Raven feathers. My take is that it's fine for him to never perform another Summoning/Binding, so long as he understands that he IS still a Sorcerer with access to the rituals.
RE: Weaving paths together, not conflicts. Wow. I'd never looked at it from that angle. Sounds like a great idea for kicking "let's team up!" straight in the teeth. Excellent.
Peace,
Joel
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