[Sorcerer] More Evil Is More Morally Taxing?
jburneko:
So, there’s this common fear that if you throw overt demons and sorcerers into a “Dogs in the Vineyard” game it will detract from the moral issues. I’ve never found that to be the case and indeed agree with Vincent’s advice that a good place to start is to take a town all the way up to Hate & Murder. Thing is, I’ve never been able to clearly articulate WHY have overt demons and sorcerer’s doesn’t detract from the underlying issues.
I’ve now run into a parallel situation in my on-going Sorcerer & Sword game. Over the past few months I’ve been running a game for two people set in my Gothic Romance Fantasy setting. The group is on its third story arc and all three stories have been set in a city called Shadowspire, which is probably best thought of as Lahnkmar by way of Emily Bronte.
These players are new to Sorcerer, and new to the methodology behind its play. This has made the game very uneven as the players settle into “how to” play the game. The first game I made a mistake I make a lot. Basically, things were very “murky” because I had a lot of NPCs on the “verge” of doing things. When I setup a situation like that I tend to forget to have NPCs actually start doing stuff and instead kind of make veiled threats about what they might do any minute now. It’s a GM weakness of mine.
The game worked out fine but the players seemed a little at sea with regards to taking pro-active action. In particular they seemed to be hoping for a little more “action.” I chalked the whole thing up to me not providing enough motion in the NPC for the players to push against. So for the second arc I stepped things up a notch.
I took another page of out of Vincent’s “Dogs in the Vineyard” advice playbook. He once said, “Whatever your Sorcerer’s are up to, they did it yesterday.” So this time I dropped in a Lich who was the great grand-mother of one of the PCs and she already had her hooks into the PC’s relationships with judicious use of Taint. This did a really good job of stirring things up.
However, the players still seemed really reluctant to confront her directly. They did a lot of running around dealing with their Tainted friends but when it came to dealing with the Lich (and a couple of other “baddies.”) they seemed to side step the issue. Ultimately the put her in a Contain and threw away the key so to speak.
Again the players seemed satisfied but still didn’t seem to be getting what they wanted out of their characters. Again this seemed to be related to the issue of not enough “action.” So I pointed out the number of “Evil” things I had placed in the previous scenarios from Zanzil, the cat-like demon looking for a mate to Grandmother Lich who had killed one of her own children for eternal life. I was met with the response, “I don’t know. They all seemed too human.” This amused me.
So, for our third story arcs the players decided to ditch their old characters and create new ones in the same setting. In fact, they decided they wanted to play younger versions of two NPCs that had featured in the previous story arc. That seemed cool to me. So this time, in an effort to try and make things “easier” while not losing the integrity of the game I tried to make things as “pulpy” as possible.
So this time I’ve got two sorcerous Shadowspire “crime bosses” at war with each other. One of them Ivan is so cruel he makes his demon look like a nice girl. He keeps her in a cage, routinely Punishes her, taunts her with her Need. He’s a pretty awful dude. The other one is best thought of as Mrs. Havashim crossed with Fagin. By day she’s Roselyn who runs the local orphanage. By night, she’s Lady Andrea who organizes street kids to commit theft and robbery and in particular antagonize Ivan. She treats the kids well enough with the exception of constantly putting them in criminal danger. Both of these crime bosses want a scroll that describes a ritual for summoning a god.
Pretty pulpy, right? Two bad guys and a McGuffin. I also want to make clear that all three of these scenarios have been built from organizing the elements the players themselves put down on the back of their character sheets. So what happened?
One of the players completely melted down. I mean total, unfun, fit of frustration melt down. I had to show her my scenario notes to prove that I wasn’t hiding anything. That really it was just two crime bosses and a McGuffin and that there wasn’t any “trick.” But she honest to god locked up and had no clue what to do.
Now, in the interest of full discloser this player has some well-documented emotional issues that I knew from the beginning might cause problems. Indeed, I’m pretty sure that’s why this was such a large melt down. However, those aside the other player hasn’t been faring much better in the “decisive action” department.
The net effect over the course of this series of games is that the more I try to make the situation more black-and-white, the harder the players have found the game. I keep ramping up the violence, demonic and sorcery quotient of the NPCs and the players have found the situation more and more morally murky. It’s the exact OPPOSITE of the general fear regarding doing the same thing in Dogs in the Vineyard.
I don’t know if we’ll be continuing the game or not. I’ve given the player some time to think about it. But, I’ve found the whole thing fascinating.
Jesse
Christopher Kubasik:
First, this is the best sentence of my week... "which is probably best thought of as Lahnkmar by way of Emily Bronte."
Second, you don't seem to be asking advice, but I always get curious about one thing when I read APs about gear-stuck Players: what are the Kickers?
jburneko:
Advice? No. But discussion, yes, otherwise I wouldn't be posting. I'm genuinely curious as to what to make of this phenomenon. Particularly since in the past I've suffered from the "can't make things too morally simple" issue. This time I actively put work into just letting the "bad guys" be "bad guys" and the result is that the game got MORE morally tense, not less. But I don't know why.
Kickers:
Morena's (the character's name) kicker is that while doing archeological work under the city she uncovered scrolls that revealed to her that her demon (Zenov) turned its previous master (Bavmorda) into a demon. Zenov is pretty much a classic vampire which Morena keeps around because of his vast historical knowledge.
Things I added:
1) This demon transformation is the first step in what the scroll goes on to describe as a mating ritual necessary to "birth" another demon (i.e. god) into the world. Morena's demon is listed as one among many who have attempted the ritual in the past.
2) Ivan's demon is indeed Zenov's former master, Bavmorda. More importantly, Bavmorda is trying to regain her Humanity as per the Demon-To-Human transformation rules in Sorcerer's Soul. This is one of the reasons Ivan can bully her around. She's a very reluctant vampire.
Rand's kicker was that he was caught stealing from Ivan by one of Ivan's henchman. Looking at the back of the sheet Rand's player pretty much rewrote Oliver Twist. Rand has four siblings. Rand is wanted by several authorities. The City: For criminal acts. A school: who want to develop his sorcerous powers. Ivan: Who wants to kill him. And Roselyn who runs the Orphanage and wants to find his family a proper home.
Things I added:
The big thing here is that I turned Roselyn into Lady Andrea and Ivan's rival because Ivan killed her husband. Roselyn really does care about Rand and his family though.
Jesse
Rod Anderson:
From the Kickers, it seems like both players were angling for a straight-up "bad guy wants to get me" confrontation -- Morena vs. Zenov, Rand vs. Ivan -- which arguably would parse what they meant by "more action" (the main action of the story is directed right at me, right now) and "less morally ambiguous" (I don't have to wonder if it's right or wrong for me to defend my life/humanity). Does that fit the facts?
Ron Edwards:
Those Kickers ... needed to be spiked far more than you did, and as Rod said, should be expressed as quite primary (primal) action.
Morena's demon "did a bad thing" (that's the Kicker). And that thing provides back-story and motivation for what a variety of NPCs want, none of which has anything to do with Morena (that's the non-Spike). If I were a much less nice and gentle-worded person, I would have called this technique the Gooser instead of the Kicker, and if I had, then I'd say here that Morena isn't being goosed. She is not jumping and squealing. There is nothing that changes her life inherent in some back-story for her demon's misdeeds.
Rand stole something and its owner is mad at him. OK, that's not bad ... except that since the owner "wants him dead" that essentially means a straight-up attack, which apparently hasn't happened, or ... nothing, which apparently has. He stole it. He has it. And ...? It seems to me that the necessary choice is either to have the owner go to extraordinary lengths to get the thing back, or for the thing itself to be much more of a handful of trouble than it first seemed.
I can understand why the players flailed. Those Kickers don't kick.
As you can see, I'm pretty much ignoring your topics of discussion, (1) the effect of supernatural content in Dogs in the Vineyard in particular, and (2) the relationship of black-and-white morality to player paralysis. I think both of these are reaching deeper into complex principles than they need to for what is essentially a basic question of adversity and engagement.
I will say one thing about Dogs. I think that What the demons want ... has been picked up and (as sometimes happens) warped into something far less reasonable than what I did say.
For the record, my position is that the "supernatural dial" is best spun to wherever you want it, because the mechanics and moral issues of play should remain exactly the same, whether your particular group's particular story includes glowy eyes and floaty people, or not.* However - if such imagery distracts you from those mechanics and moral issues into maundering about in-game metaphysics, which it patently has done as demonstrated in many threads, then you're best off avoiding it.
Best, Ron
* Note to Jesse: Which is, incidentally, also completely independent of where you start play in the Sin progression; starting with a town in the midst of Hate and Murder does not mean an overt supernatural presence in the fiction.
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