[Sorcerer] Berkeley 1968
Ron Edwards:
Hi Christopher,
I always dread talking about this stuff. I even considered saying "never mind, not for the internet, call me," until your second post, specifically this bit:
Quote
my views on the PCs from Sorcerer have changed a lot over the years. I used to see them as people troubled by demons, and the whole point was to finally dump the demons.
But, over time, I've come to ask, "Why did they summon their first demon anyway? What was the crux of their life that made them go that far?" It seems to me that in that gap of "Why summon a demon?" we have the easy access to empathy -- something in the PC's life that we understand, "Yeah, if my back was up against the wall, I might go there, too."
I should start by saying to the general readership that I'm not interested in debating what follows. You'll find any number of grey areas, nits to pick, places where I contradict your dear English 101 prof Mrs. McGillicuddy, and opportunities to shout "what about (fill-in-the-blank)?" Please feel free to consider yourself right and myself wrong; but also please, don't tell me about it in this topic.
After all the years of torment, I decided for myself that "protagonist" means a character whose actions are in some way, actually in any way except as a pure object lesson of "don't do this," morally instructive. By "morally," I don't mean metaphysically in any way, nor associated with any societal mores, I'm speaking at a personal/ethical level that is distinguished only by its overwhelming sense of relevance to me when I read the book or watch the film or play, or play the game.
Please note that "instructive" is a tremendously specific term and can be applied via counter-example as well as example. I definitely do not mean someone to emulate, necessarily.
With that in mind, the category of protagonist expands greatly. Hero by whatever meaning, anti-hero by whatever meaning, et cetera. Also, many villains become protagonists, sort of "protagonist B" for their respective stories. A lot of them are people whose interests simply clash with the A protagonist(s). Others made a wrong turn in life, or born into the wrong tribe (stories are full of wrong tribes), and yet are perfectly understandable in that context. Yet others are entirely fucked-up and evil in some specific way, but again, in such a way that what they do matters to what I, the real person, might do. I'm saying that someone with an antagonistic relationship to "the main guy" is often protagonist-y, to me.
A number of them do not, though. They are plain antagonists. They deliver adversity from the very core of their fictional existence. Their presence inspires terror, contempt, rage, wonder, even respect, but my sense of "man, I get it, that's why and how I might do that" or perhaps, "yeesh, oh my God, but yeah, I can see why and how he'd do that," isn't there. I'm not saying they're morally neutral, either. Nor do they fail to touch me as human characters, necessarily, although I can certainly think of a few who don't.
At the risk of bringing up an example that never fails to become obscured by mindless fan-think, Darth Vader, for me, is the second sort in the first Star Wars film (the real first one, of that name), and he's the first sort in The Empire Strikes Back. I hope people can read that without taking any of the other franchise films or material into account in any way ... faint hope ...
Now, all of these - for present purposes, protagonists and antagonists alike - are main characters, "the ones you watch." A player-character in Sorcerer is supposed to be like that. I also say, in the book, to make your initial player-character someone you could root for in a movie - I say without any ambiguity or failure of memory that this was the most carefully-chosen phrasing in the entire text. You'll note that I did not say "hero" or "good person" or "someone you agree with."
Other characters, as you've written about, can be many things: support, foils, information sources, mirrors, fifth business, and more. Back when we were discussing all of this at the Gaming Outpost and the early Forge and the Sorcerer mailing list, all of us were struggling to get characters out of this category at all, and "protagonist" was the term we used most often. That never sat 100% well with me, because I knew that Sorcerer characters did not begin play with associations of hero or good guy, or even more importantly, they were intended to be played to see whether they became (in my terms above) protagonists or antagonists. But the discourse and my own thoughts never fell into a shape in which I could articulate that.
Shock helped - I really liked its emphasis that you had to have protagonist player-characters and designated antagonists in pure narrative terms. Polaris is the same but there's a kind of looseness to where one's sympathies go, in playing Shock, that I like a lot. It might be there in Polaris too, but I haven't played that game enough to say. In Shock, I'm always totally on board with the jargon term *Tagonist. It doesn't operate as an ambiguous, one-way-or-the-other-as-we-see, but as a starting designator - but if you made it into such a "let's see how it goes" starting-character technique, you'd have Sorcerer.
Christopher, I don't know if the distinction between Pro-tagonist and An-tagonist appears "at the end" or not, for a Sorcerer player-character. Nor can I say whether its appearance in the creative agent's commitment to the character is the same as its appearance in the fiction. I can only say that it appears at some point, and it informs the content of whichever of the four final outcomes eventually arrives, as an integral part of who the character is. In other words, it's only analytically relevant to that outcome in retrospect.
I hope that made sense to someone, somewhere. I promise never ever to use the terms like this outside of discussions of Sorcerer.
Best, Ron
jburneko:
Ron,
For what it's worth that makes total sense. More importantly what you're describing was in full effect with the recent Shock series I played. We played three sessions. At least TWICE someone choose to play an antagonist from the previous session as their protagonist the current session. It was the most natural thing in the world to do. No struggling with how to suddenly make this guy a hero or sympathetic or anything like that. Hell, we picked them up and kept playing them because they were sympathetic and we wanted to know more about them. In play it was obvious that "antagonist" just meant "dude causing problems for this guy" and a few times that lead to us saying, "man, I wonder what THAT guy struggles with."
It also matches a lot of my In A Wicked Age... play. I didn't realize it was supposed to apply to Sorcerer though. I have to think on that.
Jesse
Christopher Kubasik:
This is really cool.
Before I checked in and found Ron and Jesse's posts, I'd been thinking of a Sorcerer game I GM'd last year.
It was called The Brotherhood. The Demons were the stuff of prisons (razor blades, shivs, tattoos, pin-ups and so on). Lore was rituals of submission and domination of prison culture. Humanity was playing by your own rules and treating others as equals.
(Imagine HBO's old prison series Oz mixed with Stephen King or Clive Barker, and you've have the game.)
Each of the Players had to be a Sorcerer who had learned the Prison Lore. They could have been prison guards, prisoners, ex-cons, whatever....
* One Player created a guy, David King, who's daughter had been killed on the orders of a cult leader who lived hidden in a prison. He killed the cult leader's lawyer to get into the prison system and get his vengeance.
* One Player created a guy, Visili, who had been in the prison for decades. He decided his demon was Cell Block C and kept him safe and never wanted to leave.
* The last player created a convicted cop, Roman, who had killed his partner and learned the lore to protect himself from the criminals he had once put away.
What I discovered when thinking about them is that while David is the only one of the bunch most people would consider a "protagonist" -- each of them served the story as protagonists exactly as Ron defined the term (this, again, before I read Ron's post.)
David is out to avenge not only his daughter's death, but to get a man who the law has effectively hidden away from retribution. David knows of the Lore now, and knows that Carver, the cult leader, must be put down before he kills others. We're with him.
Roman, meanwhile, is not only a cop who went to jail, but a cop killer who went to jail. He's a bully, interested only in his own survival. In the show he's be cast as one mean-looking-muther-fucker, always angry, always on the edge of losing his temper or doing something violent.
But here's the thing: about two-thirds the way through the sessions, David and Roman end up together during a prison riot. Each of them has business with prisoners in another cell block (David is after Carver, Roman is after Stubbs, a petty drug dealer he had killed who, um, turned out not to be dead and was the guy behind the betrayal in Roman's crew.
So, they manage to get across the yard during the riot and into the cell block, working together. And during two sessions of Play, David basically gets the emotional shit kicked out of him when he discovers that the cult leader is really the father of the little girl he's been trying to avenge. (The cult leader had been fathering children for the expressed purpose of using them in sacrificial rituals later on).
And, the most amazing thing happens -- Roman steps up to comfort David. It was really quite extraordinary. This character that had been defined by his brutality and selfishness was looking at this father trying to set things right, he got sucked into David's orbit of morality. There was one moment that was really quite moving, actually. (Humanity gain check!)
Anyway, I never would have considered Roman a protagonist in the "hero" sense of the word. And more than that, if this was a TV show, for the first half of the run he would have been kind of in the background. You'd think he was there to provide a kind of random menace. But, in fact, there's this moment when you realize they cast an actor who has chops, and he steps up and takes his place alongside our lead and the who show shift -- because of the choices the character made. He was "morally instructive" in the sense Ron wrote about, because shifted the moral dynamics of the story. Suddenly, redemption was possible. If Roman could pull it off anyone could! More importantly, it breathed new hope into David's character. It was like a second wind he received when things were at his darkest -- all because, really -- a convicted cop / cop-killer -- put his hand on his shoulder and said, "You're going to get through this."
Meanwhile, Visili's Player, Colin, had created a guy who had a Cell Block for a demon. I hadn't thought of this as a possibility before we gathered for character creation. ("Can I have a cell block for a demon?" "Ummmm... Sure!")
Within the character creation session, Colin declared that Visilli had no desire or intention of even leaving jail. He was living inside his demon -- who kept him safe -- why would he leave? He had been the jail for decades. Managed to blow every parole hearing on purpose.
It was an amazing revelation to me, and informed the rest of my prep work: The sorcerer's at Landsfield State Penitentiary did not want to leave. They were safe in jail from those outside it's walls who would do them harm, but because of their Lore, they could go manipulate the outside world at their will.
Colin did something that I'll always be grateful for: he represented the culture of the prison every time he was on-camera. He was like all the mobsters around Tony in THE SOPRANOS. Sure the show was really about Tony and focused on his family. But there were all those guys -- a little bit dingier than Tony, a little bit stupider, a little bit pettier... and every time they were on you were forced to realize, "These are the guys Tony hangs out with. Sure, Tony is Our Guy and he's tough and all. But you know what. This is his world."
So, even though Visili, again, might not have been a protagonist, he was VITALLY morally instructive to our game. He defined the darkest boundary of The Brotherhood as a Sorcerer game. David had made a deal with the Devil to get vengeance. Roman had made a deal with the Devil to stay alive. But Visili had made a deal with the Devil because he wanted to make a Deal with the Devil.
And, Visili, too, had a big moral imperative turn at one point. He was locked in a fight with the lich sorcerer (Landsfield, who had built the penitentiary a hundred and fifty years ago on the backs of slave labor he had murdered) and Colin is losing Stam die rolls even with the help of his Demon, so he tries to bring his strong Will into play, and says, "If you let me help you, I can get you out of here."
And this hollowed out husk of a corpse, only inches from Visilli's face, says, "Why would I want to leave?"
And BAM Colin freaked out and goes, "Oh, my god! HE'S ME IF I STAY!"
And, again, was Visili a protagonist in the "hero" sense? Not at all. But in that moment and others he was certainly morally instructive in the context of the story.
My own view of protagonism in Sorcerer up until this evening is that if the camera is on you and you're doing interesting things, you're a protagonist. (Certainly this is a close approximation of the characters I see on the cable shows I watch!)
But, for me, Ron's definition added the last vital component: if the camera is on you and you're doing interesting things and are "morally instructive" then you are a protagonist.
You don't have to "earn" your PC's protagonism outside this definition nor fight for it. It's kind of a given in fact, since if you're playing Sorcerer with all the pieces, your PC will embody these qualities.
xenopulse:
Alright, first some replies to Ron, then to Christopher :)
Ron,
I found the solution to the penalties in the middle of a combat round on the Sorcerer wiki. It makes perfect sense, and I'm sure I've read it before. But it didn't stick until after our session. Often, I need some actual play context to really remember and understand rules applications like that. Also, bringing someone up to 1 die by adding bonus dice to the opposition solves my problem of not knowing what to do with enemies whose penalties exactly match their stamina.
Thanks for the clarification on the humanity rolls.
As for the setting, I'll admit that my knowledge isn't very deep. I've read some things, lots of wikipedia articles, and I've got a general idea just from living in this country for 9 years and having had an advisor in graduate school (poli sci) who was a student at the time and had some opinions and stories to share. If you've got good references, I'd love for you to share them. :) I do know the basics about the Panthers (who were mainly feeding hungry kids at the time), COINTELPRO and its methods, and so on. If I get the chance, I'll use more private means to talk to you about the way I tied sorcery and background events into all that.
Christopher,
I'm not remembering enough of MacBeth, I admit. But Othello might be somewhat similar, right? A tragic hero who does something bad in the end. I'm not sure I'd consider him a protagonist, and maybe that is because in the end, he chooses the wrong path. Sure, I've got sympathy for him for most of the piece, but murdering his love, a defenseless innocent--even if she were betraying him--crosses a line that I just can't support. Though apparently, in Ron's view, that might still make him a protagonist, given that his actions and fate certainly have strong moral dimensions.
The Spartans in 300 are evil because of the massive infanticide they commit. Right at the beginning of the movie, we are shown that they murder their babies--those they consider "unfit"--not simply through euthanasia, but by tossing them over a cliff and letting them lie there, broken and twisted and starving infants crying helplessly, among rotten corpses and piles of bones of thousands of previously-murdered innocent babies, until they die. That, right there, is the very definition of evil. There is nothing--NOTHING--that could justify those actions. Ever. I absolutely cannot understand how anyone could root for these baby-mass-murdering sons of bitches.
Thanks for the summary of Dexter. I tried watching it, but couldn't get through the first few minutes, which involve a lineup of corpses of murdered children (see a pattern here? :). Even though I know the perpetrator was going to be punished in a minute; I just couldn't stomach it.
Now, as to the Sorcerers in our game. One of them, Devin, learned Lore from his mother. It was a tradition, if you want, a piece of his particular subculture. One of them is naive (Lore 1) and doesn't know what he's dealing with. And one of them is pushing science to its very limits.
So basically, their first bindings weren't planned, in either of the three cases. The question I'm pushing for in our game is, what needs to happen for them not only to keep their demons but to purposely reach out for more demonic power, now that they know the costs? Devin's already done that; it was a perfect fit for our definition of Humanity, too, as that's the opposite of isolation. He lost trust in his family, he feels isolated, and so he reaches for demons to tell him the truth. Pretty twisted in a way. The other two, I'll have to push hard and see what they're made of.
Christopher Kubasik:
Hi Christian,
Thanks for the answers!
(And, even worse, Desdemona actually never betrayed Othello. Iago makes Othello think she did, but it's all a trick.)
And this....
Quote from: xenopulse on January 17, 2009, 08:04:04 PM
So basically, their first bindings weren't planned, in either of the three cases.
I was kind of expecting this, actually, from the summary you'd given above.
Now, I'm not saying this as a correction, nor as something you did wrong or need to fix. Just something to think about:
On page 64 of Sorcerer, Ron writes, "It is not recommended to permit 'natural' sorcery, so that characters start accidently summoning demons... Sorcery is all about meaning it -- and meaning it for real."
There are all sorts of implications that zoom into play the moment one has a PC who is the sort of person who fucks with the laws of the universe. You have a PC who actually is that strident, that determined, that focused on agendas. You have Players who are now responsible for stepping up to the plate and creating PCs worthy of being sorcerers. It means that you've already created a bit of backstory for the PCs with strong narrative motion -- "My guys summoned a DEMON! Here's how, here's why..."
If you don't do this you run the risk of having to "ramp up" the PCs into motion. If they're already, willfully, sorcerers, I've found that Players are pretty much raring to go. In that case I can do what a Sorcerer GM is supposed to do, which is to react to the motions and circumstances set by the Players, rather than push the Players toward motion and circumstances.
Now Sorcerer hedges by saying "it's not recommended" -- so anything does go. And it sounds like your game is going great. But it is something to consider.
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