How do you award Bonus Dice for role-playing?
Christopher Kubasik:
I, too, had a similar and profound reaction.
Ron Edwards:
In one of the earliest short Sorcerer games, at a game-day at a game store in Orlando in maybe 1995, I played with two guys who instantly "got" Sorcerer. It was a hell of a lot of fun, much more fun than some of the eight-person overly-con-like games I'd run with the same scenario (the house) at other public events. I don't remember their names, unfortunately. At one point during play, one of them announced his character's action and included a hand gesture: sort of like a karate chop, not miming the character's action but simply emphasizing the verbal content. His eyes flashed and the announced action was absolutely decisive and exciting. We were all into it.
Hey, I said. That's worth a bonus die. I had included the first version of the bonus dice list in the draft, but it was a little bit tactical and (influenced by Over the Edge) slightly more punitive in terms of penalizing being boring. Hey! I said, again. That's what makes all the other stuff on the bonus dice list good. What's that called? Why, that must be called "good role-playing."
Little did I know that the term "good role-playing" had gained a lot of new meanings: (1) long-winded description, (2) obedience to the GM's expected notions, (3) speaking in character, (4) wishing you were really LARPing, (5) not "rolling" with those awful dice, (6) ... you get the idea. Nor did I realize at the time that what the fellow had just done (and which I immediately knew was what I wanted Sorcerer play to be like) did not have any name, nor had had any attention called to it in the twenty-plus extant years of role-playing history at the time.
So there you go.
Best, Ron
Frank Tarcikowski:
Huh. I usually award bonus dice only for stuff that relates directly to the fiction. My feeling about Sorcerer has always been that (a) the rules and the fiction interact very strongly and (b) the fiction leads, as Vincent put it at some point. Therefore, it felt (and feels) sorta out of place to me to award bonus dice in Sorcerer like Fanmail for something like "making the others wince". So, the "role-playing" bonus dice, to me, are bonus dice for some sort of addition to the fiction that would somehow furher the character's cause. This also seems to resonate well with the idea of conflicts in Sorcerer being between characters and about goals of characters, not players.
So, um, this as a contrast.
- Frank
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