[Sorcerer] The Cold and Bloody Northland
Ron Edwards:
You've got it all just right.
Regarding the pre-roll rolls and the pitching deck situation, I think the text is pretty clear that "no penalty" is the default. It struck me in writing that section that not everyone will agree that no penalty should be applied for missing the first roll, and it also seemed to me to be worth giving a little for someone who didn't see it my way. For you, in this case, with these players, and given all your concerns and the questions you're asking, I strongly recommend ignoring the qualifier and sticking with the basic instruction: no penalties to the second (i.e. main) roll if the augmenting roll fails.
Best, Ron
greyorm:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on May 28, 2009, 05:05:06 PM
...it also seemed to me to be worth giving a little for someone who didn't see it my way.
That's really interesting, because I was going to say whenever I've read that section, the whole "and you could end up with penalties" bit always seemed out of place.
I say that because the pre-roll isn't a conflict, so the idea that you might rack up penalties beforehand, on your own dime, seemed out-of-place. Yes, it makes sense from a simulatory point of view ("Oh, you didn't completely clear the fence when you jumped it, your foot snags, so now there's a penalty on your attack") but not narratively--it seems like a very un-Sorcerer-ish whiff-type rule.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Raven,
I'm not so sure about that. Both when writing and playtesting, and now after so many games, I think that play benefits from having the option for the world to be effectively inimical around the characters. Sure, you can try to rack it to your advantage, but it doesn't like you (or anyone), and so fences try to trip you, pitching decks try to make you lose, and fancy acrobatics are a good way to get your head bonked.
A certain existential viciousness pervades the thematic elements of Sorcerer, and I couldn't bring myself to excise that from the way 'the world' gets played necessarily. Yes, in practice, I treat the augmenting rolls as win/neutral, but one of these days, I can see myself playing and treating them as win/lose.
My point in posting is to clarify that my writing and design process did not include an attempt to placate readers who might disagree with me in a dichotomous way, but rather to acknowledge that another interpretation of those augmenting rolls at least made sense to me even if it wasn't my first choice.
Best, Ron
jburneko:
Hello,
I thought I'd weigh in on the pre-rolls discussion with something I've been doing. So in the Sorcerer & Sword game I'm running now one of the characters a soldier with a demon who gives him a Cover relevant to fighting. So whenever we go into a fight, I normally roll a few dice against it which he then rolls the result into his Stamina for his actual attack. Failure simply results in no dice for that action.
However, sometimes he goes up against another soldier or similarly trained opponent. At that point I have the two characters roll their Covers against each other as a pre-roll and the winner gets to roll over the dice into their Stamina based action. I basically narrate this as "which opponent gets the menacing establishing shot before the action goes down."
Jesse
Callan S.:
Hello Ron,
With that Indiana Jones example, it seems like the dice aren't there for what he's actually doing, but for how loud and clear his persona is showing (in what he does)? I don't mean in any "that's roleplaying/that isn't" way. I mean just like if you'd met the guy in RL, how much you can sort of 'get' him just instinctively off the bat? "I get you, man, here's dice to show that" Far off? I'm not really going anywhere with that, it just seems to be the procedure of what your saying but alot of reference to physical actions is being blended in?
Though if that is it, and on the subject of zero dice being neutral, that'd mean that hey, maybe he is showing his persona but it just doesn't click with your own way. This is easiest to see when people with two different human cultures just don't get each others cues (both concious and habitual). But the same can happen even in (supposedly) the same culture. So I'm looking at that 'neutral' result and thinking that's coming right up to the safety barrier - if you were to call it a lose, that's climbing over the barrier I'm percieving, I'd think? I'm asking in terms of asking about what seems to be dangerous ground (but might not be) simply to ponder it (and perhaps a murky fascination with such ground and it's closeness).
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page