Sorcerer and Sword ... Conan?
weaselheart:
Sorry if I'm being dense, but I've read Sorcerer and Sword a couple of times now and can't seem to get past one simple point, perhaps best exemplified by Conan.
In the book (and in threads on this site), Conan is a sorcerer. I.e. has a lore rating. This makes sense to me. However, as far as I can see, that's all Conan has. He might be able to banish a demon, but doesn't start with one. In the stories I've read, he never gets one.
Imagine I run a game with two characters: Conan and Bob (a sorcerer with a demon). Both are good fighters, and they fight each other. What stops Bob from kicking the crap out of Conan? And if he can, every time, hasn't that undersold the Conan concept?
I guess Conan could summon his own demon, but that doesn't seem in accordance with the fiction as I understand it. But if one player chooses to play a straight lore-only "fighter", what prevents his character being underpowered relative to others?
jburneko:
The Conan player has to be really good at managing the three (four if you include the Sorcerer & Sword stuff) die tricks.
1) Roll over victories: Carrying the momentum of success A into action B.
2) Double Descriptors: Actions which nail more than one Desciptor (Usually Past + Something but sometimes Lore + Something) so that you can roll one descriptor first and then carry the victories over to the primary roll in a single action.
3) Bonus Dice. There are up to 5 available and they're for pretty concrete things. 1 die for dialogue. 2 dice if the action is really going to alter the situation at hand. 2 dice for a particularly unusual version of an action.
4) Sorcerer & Sword Only: The save victories to cancel non-victories trick. I don't have much practice with this one.
In other words the "fighter only" compensates by being very smart and very dynamic. If Bob is a PC he can do all of these but his NPC demon can't really do 2 or 3. If Bob is an NPC he can't do 3.
Jesse
Ron Edwards:
Don't forget Destiny, too. That's another source of dice.
I recommend looking over the source material too. I can think of very few instances in which a sorcerer is standing there with his pet, specifically trying to kill Conan. I'd welcome help from the forum participants, but at the moment ...
Conan vs. Thoth-Amon's baboon-dog demon - basically, it can and will kill him, and would except that he utilizes a sword that had been marked by a sage in a dream to kill it. In game terms, this can mean about a zillion different things, but effectively, he had access to Special Damage himself. As I see it, and I want to stress that I'm using reversed logic because the story is a story and was not written to accomodate the Sorcerer rules - Conan's dream was itself a Contact. Or if you want to preserve theme (which posits the sage as a pro-Humanity type), then it could even be an angel scene using the rules from The Sorcerer's Soul. The point is that that story is in no fucking way the stereotype of "muscle-y Conan vs. wizard." It makes that if it were, Conan would be slaughtered.
In fact, I think the real point is to take that very idea that Howard is all about grunting-muscle man hacking his way through smarty-pants wizards, and kill it dead. Yes, there's a certain amount of oiled-muscled he-man rhetoric in the Conan stories which to some readers may suggest gay porn. But there's a lot less of it than in the pastiche fiction, and I should stress that Conan clearly learns and uses wizardly foes' behavior against them. His second fight against Tsotha-Lanti is a good example.
Another example: Conan vs. the winged-ape demon (or sorcerer? works a bit better that way, in fact) in Queen of the Black Coast. It defeats him. He only survives because Belit's ghost saves him, and secondarily because that permits him to get free of the marble column that fell on him - in fact, that literary moment was one of the many sources I used for the Will roll to supercede the damage system (along with Salome's post-sword-stroke scene in A Witch Shall Be Born). But that's a digression; my point is that Conan defeats that demon specifically and only because of necromancy, and whether he performs it or Belit does is a matter for unresolvable debate (see their dialogue before they arrive at the island, and also her death-haunted demeanor once they get there).
Ummm ... I'll have to revisit the original The Black Stranger as written by Howard (and hideously butchered by others into The Treasure of Tranicos), and see how the silver-and-fire demon was beaten, or if that scene even existed in the original. I should point out that it was not published by Howard and I'm generally not inclined to hold him/Conan responsible for stories he did not finish or perhaps did not want to.
I am a little rushed for time but will return to the discussion. I want to repeat my point here, too, that I do not consider the widely-held notion that Conan is all about muscles being better than magic (intellect).
Best, Ron
James_Nostack:
Well, some of this is besides the point. The OP asked if a "straight lore-only fighter" is, or isn't, underpowered in comparison with regular sorcerers. The short answer is that these questions of game balance, at least in a combat-only scene, aren't central to Sorcerer's design.
You choose a lore-only guy for a very specific reason: you want to have a character who's working from a rules-mechanical disadvantage, but who isn't bogged down by having to manage a demon. Conan isn't about confronting demons and sorcerers as an equal-in-power: pretty much every NPC he meets in these stories is like, "Yikes, Conan, this sorcerer dude will kill us all!" Conan is about overcoming these challenges with courage, wits, and skill. Unless he starts from a disadvantage, the accomplishment means nothing.
As the others have mentioned, the disadvantage isn't as steep as one would suppose, since Sorcerer rewards courage, wits and skill. (And it seems like none of the demons Conan fights have the Armor ability, which ties into one of Howard's themes that steel and willpower can match anything in the universe.)
But Conan isn't un-balanced when you look at him in a broader context than just killin' stuff. Conan doesn't have to be looking over his shoulder all the time, wondering how his demon is going to act up. Conan doesn't have to worry about incurring massive Humanity loss rolls for satisfying his demon's needs. Conan can just be a cool dude to everybody he meets, and as a result he's got a whole passel of friends who come to his aid at the climax of most of the stories.
Eero Tuovinen:
Most significantly, Conan isn't underpowered because the concept of character power doesn't apply to a game that is not about protagonism-via-force. In principle there is nothing, except perhaps player preferences, preventing one from playing and enjoying a game where your character loses all the time because he is noble and right and natural and good, and thus does not truck with demons that give you power. The real question is not whether Conan is underpowered in Sorcerer, but whether Sorcerer promises or should deliver equal power to all character concepts. To my understanding it does neither; power happens or does not happen, but that is verified only after the fact, not bestowed upon your character as an inherent right.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page