[Sorcerer] Sorcerers in Casablanca
Paiku:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on January 29, 2010, 06:57:54 PM
Not only must you abandon all thoughts of when any Kicker will be resolved, but most especially of how and about what. It's not up to you in terms of planning. You must relinquish control of any such planning.
Maybe I'd do well to study Zen before Sorcerer night. ;-)
Christoph, (2) my players are definitely willing and able to participate in the story-telling. We've been playing story games (and rotating GM duty) for a year and a bit now. Of the four of us, I'm the most recent convert from the olde D&D ways. As for (1) whether I feel ready to go into a session without a story to offer... I'd give myself a 5-out-of-10 on that one. I understand kickers and bangs and author-stance well enough that I know I don't need a dungeon map with numbered rooms, or equivalently a list of pre-planned scenes with each one leading neatly into the next. But to show up with no preconception of what's going to happen at all? No I'm not quite there yet.
Ron, thanks for pointing me back towards that earlier thread, I had read it before, but I went over it again at half speed and I think I got more of the intended meaning this time.
Ok, so I shouldn't try to plan how a kicker will be resolved. But i do have to plan some things. Here, let's take a specific example. Backstory: Jacques bound a huge demon, massacred a Nazi occult research team (the NGF) in Paris, and fled to Casablanca where he joined the local resistance. Kicker: he arrives at a secret resistance meeting to find everybody dead, and an NGF calling card on the table. What should I plan... no wait, let's say "prepare"... what should I prepare based on this. I should draw up a villain who is a powerful figure in the NGF organization. I should draw up a few demons for the villain, and a few NGF agents (most of whom aren't sorcerers). I should decide how much the NGF know about Jacques at the start of play. And I should draw up some surviving resistance fighters, and a few other setting details for the players to interact with, like locations and regular folk.
What I shouldn't plan, if I've understood everything correctly, is any specific scenes or encounters with the antagonists, and especially not how or when (or if) the PC will shake off the NGF threat for good, ie. the resolution of the kicker. No wait - I shouldn't even decide what constitutes resolution of the kicker, right? I create world details and bad-guys, and we'll recognize kicker-resolution when it happens, is that right?
But what about bangs? Bangs are the GM driving the story, right? Not driving the story towards some pre-planned conclusion, that would be the olde way, but driving the story forward, away from the comfort zone, into danger, into confrontation with the antagonist NPCs, into morally complex situations that force the PCs to weigh their Humanity carefully.
If I do it on the fly it's facilitating player storytelling, but if I plan them the night before then it's railroading?
And what about what the Sorcerer rulebook has to say about the final bang? "Envision a climactic set piece... The nice thing about well-planned set pieces is that they are the only time during the run when all the characters have to be in the same place at the same time... The final Bang of a run doesn't always have to be a violent set piece, especially if your game is more oriented towards moral dilemmas or problem-solving. These are much harder to establish as true climaxes, though,..." All of which suggests to me that the GM is meant to pre-plan the final conclusive confrontation with the main villain, no?
I feel like we're drawing lines in the grey zone between railroading and purely extemporaneous play, and that somehow my line isn't close enough to the latter end of the scale. Am I close? What's the key point that I'm missing?
Thanks all,
-Paiku
Ron Edwards:
Of course you prep. What you don't do is plan is the outcome of anything that happens which you or anyone else has introduced during play.
You can write up all the NPCs you want. But you can't earmark one as the worst and most important of the bunch that they'll fight at the end. You can add depth and content to any of the Kickers you want, inventing tons of characters and fifty years of back-story. But you can't commit to one particular reaction or approach that the player-character is going to take to his Kicker, or even to 'nudging' him there.
I'm distinguishing between prep and plan. I said, "let go of planning what will happen." I didn't say, "let go of prepping what to introduce."
All of this is reminding me very greatly of Jesse Burneko during the Art-Deco Melodrama. As long as we were making up back-story, he was perfectly happy and excited. But when I refused to say what a given NPC was going to accomplish for the story, or to plan how the story "went" up to three-quarters of an upcoming session, he freaked. "How, how, how, how?!" he screamed, right here in this forum.
Jesse, hop in. Please help P see that this is absolutely nothing Zen, nothing mysterious, and nothing hard. In fact, it's exponentially easier than what some of his prep statements have (strongly) implied. It's not a mystery or a contradiction.
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
Um, a little more.
1. I loathe fully extemporaneous play. I consider that to be a way for someone to tacitly control and bully others into making up a story with them as color men. Nothing I'm saying moves "toward that end." Both ends of your stated spectrum turn into railroading in my experience.
2. Preparing Bangs the night before isn't railroading. It's absolutely required. What's not required are (a) actually using any one of them unless you want to, and more importantly, (b) what cannot work is thinking of a Bang as a means to some desired end. "And after they kill the hyenas, then they'll find the business card ..." It's also important to know that a lot of the time, what a given player-character does is just as good as a Bang, and in fact is a Bang, and it may well negate one or more of your planned ones, in which case you mentally abandon them.
3. The endings text in Chapter 4 is quite lousy. I was unable at the time of writing to clarify that such endings can emerge from play itself, causally from played events, and that the GM must be alert to realizing this when it happens. In that section, my attempts to explain good Sorcerer GMing fell back on half-railroading and half-emergent effects I'd generated as a GM for a decade or more.
Best, Ron
greyorm:
Quote from: Ron Edwards
this is absolutely nothing Zen, nothing mysterious, and nothing hard.
Neither is Zen! Ha!
Quote from: Ron Edwards on January 30, 2010, 05:36:26 PM
The endings text in Chapter 4 is quite lousy. I was unable at the time of writing to clarify that such endings can emerge from play itself, causally from played events, and that the GM must be alert to realizing this when it happens. In that section, my attempts to explain good Sorcerer GMing fell back on half-railroading and half-emergent effects I'd generated as a GM for a decade or more.
It occurs to me that some of the advice in Chapter 4, and John's own attempts to puzzle this out, parallel almost exactly the conversations you and I were having in autumn of 2000 about how to run games in a Narrative fashion, which we later decided were...about half-right, but also half-wrong. And which I think we also discussed post-publication, too (though my memory of those later discussions are much fuzzier as that's about the same time my life started sliding down the toilet).
I recall specifically how we talked about set-pieces and throwing this-or-that pre-prepped situation into play when necessary rather than in a linear fashion, about having PCs talk to the important guy to get the important clue just by changing who it was, and so forth. And I don't wonder if John's confusion parallels our own travel through that halfway point, because that all seemed so heady and wildly divergent from tradition at the time, even though it never really quite jumped the gap because it wasn't what you're talking about doing above.
And I know I'm not Jesse, so I hope I'm not overstepping by contributing the following in trying to explain that gap:
John, I don't know if this will help, and I hope it does, but: it's like improv. And by "like", I mean to compare it to how improv shows are not completely random or extemporaneous despite being improvisational. That is: characters are characters. In a place that's a place. They all want something. Things are happening to them. And then the audience gets to say, "Oh, but then!" and see what falls out. That's your Bang. You're the audience.
But so are the other players. You, as GM, just happen to be improv-ing a bigger cast of characters than the other members of the group.
And as a collective you are putting on a weekly, serialized show instead of skits. So when someone drops a Bang during the show, they're things that actor has thought of between shows and planned to drop into the situation based on what they know of the other characters and their character's own relationships with those characters, and then only when (and if) the timing seems right, when it seems that specific Bang will have an impact and make things interesting for the audience, give the other characters something personally motivating to riff off of themselves.
You start off the game going "Who are we? What do we want? Where are we?" and that's all character creation. That's the point in the skit where the improv actors are asking for "a person" "who is a?" "and where is he?" "what's he doing?" And the audience, which is also you, is all, "A fire-fighter from Texas, on a ladder, trying to save a kitten." That's all pre-game, pre-session stuff.
Play is just what happens when then the improv actors are going with that and the audience jumps in and says, "Then his wife shows up because she's in labor!" And the wife character is going "Get down from there and drive me to the hospital!" and the kitten character is going "Meow! Meow!" and we find out if the firefighter is all "Goddamnit, honey, I'm saving a kitten, hold it in!" or "Fucking kitten, rot up here you little beast!" and the kitten player says "Actually, I'm a bear. RAWR." and the firefighter says "Um, that's not a kitten, that's a BEAR! Run honey, run!" to which she replies "I'm nine-months pregnant and in-labor you dope!" and so on, or however it works out.
As GM, all you're really doing is asking yourself, "What would my character(s) do now?" Just like all the other players (the world environment also counts as a character: "I am a desert. Um, I have a sandstorm blocking the protagonist's progress towards the temple of Karnak. Whoooosh!").
So, you don't prep outcomes or potential outcomes, because you don't know what to expect in play. You prep potential situations that may or may not ever happen. You prep interesting potential "how will THIS end?" and "what will they do with THIS" situations based on what you know about the characters, their personal desires and relationships/histories, and the overall situation that has emerged in play thus far. Based on what they want and why they want it.
Here's an example off the top of my head: Chuck is a Catholic physicist with a wife and a daughter. He's been trying to split the atom. It's 1930's Berlin and the Nazis are looking for him because yesterday, he figured it out, and they figured out he figured it out. And they want the bomb. He managed to make it home without Herr Frank and the Gestapo tracking him down...except his wife and daughter were not there. He prayed to God to help him, and God sent him an angel made of fire and vengeance.
Now, if this were a real game, you would have more details about Herr Frank and the Gestapo, the Nazis and the atom-bomb project, Chuck, his relationship with his wife and daughter, and the angel, than I do here. You'll also know where Chuck's wife and daughter are/what happened to them and so forth. And from all that stuff you'll build Bangs.
But here's the thing: he may never find his family. He may never in fact look for them. He may try to get out of Germany first and foremost. Or maybe he won't. Maybe he'll decide to become a crazed Nazi-killing superhero. Or decide to sell the project to them and run off with his mistress. The point is: you can't bank on any of that.
Because who's the uber-bad guy? What's at stake? What's the showdown even all about? We don't know. Not yet.
Yet Bangs are still really easy, easier than prepping scenes and climaxes and plot-points, because we know things about Chuck, and the Nazis, and so forth -- and we'll know more and more each time we play:
Bang: "The phone rings and Chuck is told his wife and daughter are in Nazi hands."
Bang: "Chuck discovers one of his secret project papers is missing."
Bang: "The angel tells Chuck to forget his wife and daughter."
Bang: "It appears Chuck's wife has been killed to send him a message."
Bang: "Herr Frank catches up to Chuck...and claims he wants to help him escape."
And this is all just something I came up with in maybe ten minutes sitting here thinking about it, and is completely pale compared to what you can do and come up with when you have actual characters and an actual game running, but the point is none of those things have to happen at all or may never be used, but they are formed from what I discussed above and inject a whole lot of decision-juice into the experience, such that the audience (that includes you and the other players) sits up and goes "whoa...what is he going to do NOW/about THAT?" and doesn't know where it will lead, even though they can imagine how so-and-so's character will probably react to that moment right there, and so Oooo.
Also those "what?" moments have to be interesting and germane to the character situations, not just "and then a fucking alien with a forehead penis falls out of the sky" or whatever wonky stuff you can think of (and if you do, they may just go, "Clearly, I took acid last night, and this is a flashback" and that's that, or just "No. Not even." -- you also have to be willing to accept that as a response even when they brush off your best, most honest attempts and just move on).
But what you might have noticed is that all you are really doing is prepping is characters. What those characters want. What those characters will do to get it. And where those characters hang out so you have some sets for the action to happen in. Everything follows from this. But note at no time are you prepping what will happen in those sets with those characters as a complete thing. You are not prepping a scene in a movie, you are prepping a set for improv actors to interact with one another in to see where it goes. If that makes sense.
Hopefully you see how that is different from creating a climax and moving towards it, and how prep in Sorcerer works, how it isn't a point on a continuum between railroading and completely freeform play but something distinctly different?
Paiku:
Guys, this is brilliant. Many thanks! It really does help to have something explained several different ways. The improv metaphor brings home the idea that the GM isn't supposed to have any sort of grand plan behind his Bangs -- an improv audience certainly doesn't!
GMing is not as random as an improv audience -- the GM does have NPCs with wants and means (and problems of their own) -- but it's a lot less planned than I was thinking before. I was guilty of planning to use Bangs as a means to an end, as Ron said. "Once they finish Bang-A, they'll have the clue that leads them to Bang-B..." This really does require one to let go of any expectation of being able to plan a plot. Start with enough interesting characters with conflicting motivations, and have faith that plot will happen. In this sense, Bangs are just things that I have in mind that my characters (the NPCs and the world) might do.
Jesse, it's not too late to step in swinging with another take on this, if you're so inclined!
I feel like I should keep trying to summarize all the lightbulbs that have come on in my head as a result of this discussion, but I think I'm still digesting. I'll post again with some analysis after I've tried putting this into practice, probably after the first session of Sorcerers in Casablanca (4 more days).
Again thanks fellas,
-Paiku
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