Sorcerer and Sword ... Conan?
weaselheart:
Thanks for the responses. I think I'm near to getting it, but I'm not there yet. I particularly appreciated Ron's answer about what would be happening in the fiction if I was running Conan as Howard wrote it. After that answer, if I was to run a single-protagonist Conan game, I reckon it would be fine. My problem, I think, is a multiple protagonist game.
Here's one place I have difficulty:
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on March 16, 2010, 01:08:21 PM
In principle there is nothing, except perhaps player preferences, preventing one from playing and enjoying a game where your character loses all the time...
... except, Conan doesn't lose all the time. In all the stories I've read, he wins. It's a near-run thing frequently, or it wouldn't be an exciting story - and he often needs help. But he always wins.
Also, I think this may the root of one problem I have:
Quote from: Eero Tuovinen on March 16, 2010, 01:08:21 PM
The real question is not whether Conan is underpowered in Sorcerer, but whether Sorcerer promises or should deliver equal power to all character concepts.
... I have read before on the forum about Sorcerer not being about game-balance, but I'm still not clear why. Perhaps it's my D&D experience, but in a game about (to some extent) heroic fantasy action, wouldn't it be important for each character to have a fair crack at being as good at that as the others?
So, for example:
Quote from: jburneko on March 15, 2010, 05:23:39 PM
In other words the "fighter only" compensates by being very smart and very dynamic.
... feels disappointing. It's like you're saying, Jesse, if you want to play Conan, you have to be a smarter player than anyone else. Fair enough, but it's a pity to need the player to make up for a mechanical disadvantage, I think.
I understand that stories are about more than mechanical force, but mechanical force is nonetheless an important aspect of fantasy stories I've read. I may not be expecting Conan, Fafhrd, or the Grey Mouser to always win, but I do expect them to be able to swashbuckle with the best of them when they need to.
I guess the crux of my question is this: if my hypothetical two protagonists link up to rob a temple, on the way they may be attacked by brigands sent by someone on the back of their character sheets. Later, the temple may have a wall that needs scaling. Then, a huge great snake may need evading/killing. All these seem to me to need character competence to overcome, if not outright force. If I scale the bangs to meet the Conan character, what stops Bob from finding them too easy - or vice versa. Or, to put it another way, what stops Conan from effectively becoming the "sidekick" character, doomed always to find that there's nothing he can do that Bob couldn't?
And, as a follow-up, if the answer is that for all his power, Bob will be much more conflicted and aggrieved by having his demon, wouldn't that make the focus of the story even more about Bob?
Here's an extreme version of what I'm concerned might happen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F17rPg_pYOs
weaselheart:
Also, sorry to double-post, but there doesn't seem to be an edit button and I reread this and thought it a key point:
Quote from: James_Nostack on March 16, 2010, 04:57:04 AM
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.
... I don't think so. When people read Conan, some appreciate Conan, some (me for example) Pelias. Whatever game my group plays, some people play fighters every time while others are always wizards.
I think they'd pick a lore-only guy because they want to play a sword-swinging badass, not a disadvantaged character.
Lance D. Allen:
Another thought: Demon doesn't *have* to be defined within the fiction... at all.
A demon can simply be played as a stack of abilities, a need and a desire. Sometimes those abilities will fail if the need and desire aren't met. The need and desire shouldn't be too easy to meet.
Sure, it's more *fun* to play a demon as a personality, but it's not required. Conan could have a "demon" whose abilities are shown as extraordinary feats of heroism, and whose need and desire are the character's own vices and addictions.
At least, that's the way I remember it.
Eero Tuovinen:
I'm going to nitpick one phrasing here because it might be illuminating: you do not "scale Bangs" to characters, because Bangs are not about challenges, but choices. The only way character strength is involved in Bangs is in that the character's positioning in the fiction determines the choices he can make, and therefore a lowly slave can't effectively make the same choices the king can (and vice versa) - the choice of killing or not killing a begging brigand is one Conan can make only if he can first disarm the man, for example. So Conan's strength will only matter for Bangs when the Bang concerns a situation Conan can't get into because he's too weak.
As for heroic fantasy, Ron actually writes about this rather well in &Sword; he discusses the importance of creating heroism and competence for the characters not by making them win conflicts, but by describing their circumstances and struggle in admirable ways. Thus you might not even roll dice for scaling walls and beating snakes if these activities did not carry interest beyond the prospect of victory; if there is no meaningful way of playing the defeat, then do not roll the dice, but instead just describe how heroic the character is. On the other hand, most of the time you do have many meaningful ways of having the character lose while preserving his heroic mien: instead of the character being too weak or clumsy or stupid, how about the opponent is too fierce, the conditions conspire against him, his virtues trip him up or simple ill fate takes him down? There is no reason for defeat to equal deprotagonization.
To elaborate on that in a multi-character context, Sorcerer is not a team-based game. This means that you never need to compare character achievements against each other in any measurable way. Furthermore, what makes characters cool in this sort of game is not their strength, but their humanity and the difficult choices the character makes when confronted with difficulties. The weaker character can quite easily be just as cool or cooler than the other guy because we do not measure coolness by whose character can pawn the others in a cage match. Conan can be cool for being able to beat the sorcerer without stooping to the same depths of depravity, he can even be cool for trying and failing - I see no contradiction.
Furthermore, a point about the relationship a roleplaying game like Sorcerer has to fiction: we can't read a Howard short story directly into Sorcerer and demand that our characters succeed in the same string of struggles Conan does because one of those things is a roleplaying game while the other is a story. Specifically, Sorcerer belongs in a category of roleplaying games that presume that your character's particular brand of heroism and its consequences - his very protagonism - is up in the air to some degree when we begin play. You can make Conan as a character in the game, but you can't expect to be entitled to flawless success beforehand; the game's methodology when correctly applied will ensure that the story outcome of play will be interesting and meaningful, but it won't ensure that Conan will succeed in the same places he succeeds in a given story. This time around Conan might fail heroically in his fight against an evil sorcerer, which might then lead the story into even greater heights, or perhaps a grim closure. The story will be good (insofar as the methodology of the game is correctly designed and applied), but we won't know in advance what it will be like, or even whether Conan will be the flawless hero we might wish him to be.
Finally, for what it's worth, it seems to me that Conan would win his various struggles in the Sorcerer rules by the virtue of his high Stamina, Will and Past values, at least in part. I find the trade-off in playing Conan entirely reasonable from a strict character efficiency viewpoint: you might give Conan less Lore because he "doesn't need it" for what you have in mind, allowing you to give him more Stamina and Will. Conan can also bind a demon for himself later if he feels like it, and he will in fact pay the exact same price for it that the other guy did in character generation - except that Conan gets to hunt for bonus dice when he does it in-game, and he gets to pick the demon to suit the occasion. If anything, I'd say that playing Conan is slightly more attractive than playing a demonologist, that much the prospect of being a hardcore no-demon protagonist in Sorcerer entices me (and that's how much trouble the demons are, really).
In practice sorcerer Bob and Conan can well adventure together for a while, provided that they both have solid, discrete motivations for what they're doing, moment to moment. Conan won't be reduced into a sidekick not because of comparative strength, but because he has motivations and goals worthy of a hero in his own right, regardless of Bob. (Note how the chargen procedure ensures that this is so; you never play Sorcerer with a character who's just along for the ride out of simple greed.) The choices he faces will be ones Bob cannot make for him for all of Bob's power: Conan needs to decide whether he'll go help his girlfriend from a deathly peril, not Bob - Conan needs to decide whether to skim the reward money, not Bob - Conan needs to decide whether to spare the pretty enemy spy, not Bob - Conan needs to decide whether to turn against Bob when he goes crazy, not Bob - the job of the GM in the game is to cater to each character's specific concerns whether they're together or not, and thus each character will have their own story regardless of who might or might not be more powerful when the dice go down.
One more viewpoint - this thing goes to the roots of the game's philosophy, that's why there are so many points to this. The last point is that sorcerers always pay in Humanity for their demonic ways. It is not power without cost. If all we cared about was the power, then Bob could grow even more powerful by summoning even more demons, uncaring of the consequences. This is an absurd logic, surely, for ultimately Bob would come to his end as a Humanity zero wreck - powerful in his way, perhaps, but no longer a hero or protagonist of a story. You might view the Conan choice of starting without even one demon as an extreme form of prudence in a world filled with inhuman wretchedness. You're giving up some power, yes (I for one wouldn't claim that there is some objective advantage in immediate strength in not having demons at your call), but you're also hoping that what power you have is enough for facing what is ahead regardless. If it's not, then you need to decide whether you'd rather fail or dip a toe in sorcery - and that's what the game is about. Bob and Conan are on the same path, just at different points of it. You don't play "just a fighter" in this game, you just play a sorcerer with above-average standards for debasing himself.
(For what it's worth, I'm not satisfied with the "play better" answer to game balance here, either. I'd rather question whether losing more is really that terrible a fate - we have the methodology for playing weaker and stronger characters, and for having characters win or lose, and making play meaningful nonetheless. Enjoyment of the game does not need to hang on how well your own character does in the game in comparison to other characters or some abstract prior expectation.)
greyorm:
Summarizing what Eero is saying, I think, I see you going into this with a very D&D-based mindset: everything must be balanced, it's all about the mission, fight-the-monster, team-based play.
To put a different spin on it: you're thinking about D&D when you're being offered Tolkien, and you're confusing them because of this.
Consider: the Fellowship in LotR isn't all well-matched in terms of power, are they? Not at all! Heck, it is the two weakest characters in the entire group, in a D&D-kind of measure, who are the ones who destroy the One Ring and defeat Sauron. It is not the destined uber-warrior heir, the godling wizard, or the supernatural elven archer...all of whom had abilities and powers and skills far beyond a couple of run-of-the-mill midget farmers.
And that is what Sorcerer is like.
(And why "he has a demon and I don't" is a red herring when thinking about play.)
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