Horror in Sorcerer: Does it happen, is it different?
Larry L.:
CK,
"H.P. Lovecraft Halloween Pageant"? Oh, that's good! I'm using that phrase in the future.
Jaakko Koivula:
Cheers for all the answers and musings, this is extremely interesting. And sorry if the subject is a bit of an undead horse for most already.
Ron: The last bit about "what you mean about horror?" is pretty much my problem also. I was asked to participate to a panel discussion and Im now trying to find out what I think about the subject. I just had this hunch, that Sorcerer might be about the most harrowing game that anyone can play.. but would it be "horror" in the sense that horror is usually understood? The subject of the panel is basically how horror, fantasy and gaming interact and mix.
My original thought went somehow like this: "Game of Sorcerer can have all the bits that a good horror story/movie has. It has demons, death, hauntings etc. Still, I haven't heard it described as a horror game. Why is this? Are there actually any horror games that scare you like a good H.P. Lovecraft -story does?"
I've played Call of Cthulhu just a few times and always with really brilliant GMs, so I might have a pretty skewed view of the game. In retrospect it's rather painfully obvious that those games could have been played using any other gaming system ever. Call of Cthulhu propably didn't make the horror happen, it just didn't get in the way either. As Ron pointed out, CoC still pretty much is the de-facto horror game. If someone says they're playing horror, they're propably playing CoC.
And that means, that if I want to speak about horror and gaming, I've got to say something about CoC too. You guys have really helped me about this bit. I personally might have needed that "CoC doesn't naturally lead into great horror" -nudge.
Looking at the definition of horror we are arriving at in this thread, Sorcerer seems to be about nothing else than it! Calling demons is hyper-wrong, impossible and bad.. and still you decide to do it. Pretty much taking what Christopher and Marshall said to the max.
Im still feeling, that old school players of CoC would be more willing to accept Dead of Night as a "proper" horror game more readily, because of the simulationism aspect. But Im not sure if that actually has most to do about how hard it is to get old school to accept non-simulationist games in general...
But on the subject:
I love the observation that Dead of Night's system actually promote terror. This is actually the real meat of what Im personally interested in. System, that does matter about horror. CoC has rules about sanity loss and stats for The Cthulhu, but it's just sort of assumed that those actually make the game more horrible. "Auugh, yog-Soggoth, crap! Where do I run? .. oh wait, gotta roll for my sanity first. Damn, lost 2d4 + 3 points." It maybe makes the game look more like a lovecraftian novel with characters going insane, but does it intensify the experience the players get from the game? There might be the re-enacting the genre -trap for you again.
I haven't played Dread either, but the Jenga-system sounds like that might really work with horror. "Does the passing monster notice Im hiding in the cupboard?" and there's the diegetic tension of being eaten and the concrete tension about drawing the block and it just sounds like it might mesh beautifully. You can prolong pulling a block way longer and more appropriately, than just tossing a dice and finding out if you die. Also, success and failure are immediately more spectacular and demand less interpretation. Slightly different than in a normal RPG, where first you throw the dice and the GM thinks and shuffles the book for a really long time if he can save your character by giving enough obscure bonuses to your ridicilously low roll, etc.
I really don't know much anything about game designing, so in this area I really have to rely on others. Do sanity rolls make the game more horrible? Or is it better to have the players make the characters go insane of fear on their own?
P.S.
I want to share an experience of terror also.
We watched The Grudge with my roommates and got pretty terrorised about it. It's a rather stupid and cheap movie, but still. Worked on us. After the movie, my roomies went drinking and I went home, honestly slightly worried about being in a big, old house by myself the whole evening. At about 04:00, I suddenly woke up to that "hgrrr hgrrr hgrrr" sound the ghost in the movie made. Roommate had come home from bar and was making the sound at my door. It was extremely hilarious, but goddamn. I mean, goddamn!
jburneko:
Something I wanted to add this discussion. Sometimes I run into people who are struggling with how to play Sorcerer in a way that doesn't really have much to do with the rules or the play style assumptions but rather the setting. They're struggling to understand what "the world" of Sorcerer looks like. This is because they're thinking of Sorcerer as an "Urban Fantasy" game like the World of Darkness games or the Dresden Files books. They think it's a place where there's a hidden reality where demons and Sorcerers battle for the souls of mortals or something like that.
It's interesting but usually all I have to say to this kind of person is: "Sorcerer doesn't use fantasy story logic. It uses horror story logic." There's almost this instant re-orientation. Here, "Fantasy" means complex imagined world (hidden or otherwise) with imagined factions and political agendas. While "Horror" means ordinary everyday world encounters a singular, unknowable *thing* whose explanation ranges from unrevealed dark human truth to completely incomprehensible.
Jesse
KevinH:
Interesting thread.
Not to hijack, but this whole discussion brings up a wider question.
Arguably, terror/horror/fear is an emotional response. So the OP's point becomes, is ruleset X better than ruleset Y at eliciting this particular response from the players?
My response is to ask:
Do any rulesets reliably elicit emotional responses, of any form, from the players?
I think there are some; MLWM, Vampires (the one based on Hungry, Desperate and Alone), probably loads of others. I wonder, though. The rulesets I mentioned play with very negative emotions. Are there any rulesets that aim to elicit positive emotions?
Ron Edwards:
Kevin, that is a reasonable paraphrase of the question, but it's a given in this particular discussion community. It may help Jaakko immensely in his panel to make that clear, for sure.
You also hit the nail on the head by distinguishing between the content and the response. Or perhaps "use" is a good word for the latter too, as "use" and "response" are often indistinguishable for this activity.
My first thought was that Sorcerer horror is almost totally going to be about response, because the text is built as a musical instrument rather than an album or a karaoke machine. Reading the book doesn't produce substitute the same thing that play might produce, any more than looking at or studying a trumpet will produce a song ("studying" in the sense of not touching it).
Yet ... there are some content issues to point to.
1. As you wrote about in your first post, the concepts of demons and sorcery itself offer a degree of cognitive dissonance on several levels.
i) The "demons don't exist" concept is fundamental. It's important to understand that in most applications of Sorcerer, the demons do not exist in the setting you're playing in. They are 'wrong' in a basic way. You should never introduce the game as "demons exist and you bind them." You should say "magic doesn't work at all and your character has bound a demon." If the person you're talking to goes "Oh!", then you can play Sorcerer with them. If they say "Huh, what?", then drop the subject and play some other game.
ii) Given the awesome not-possible-but-you-did-it context for demons and sorcery, the real question is what could possibly be worth doing such a thing. In many ways, what matters most for a given character is not what sort of sorcery they do or what sort of demon they have, but what they are actively opposing or striking out against. Can you think of anything, here and now in the real world, that strikes you as so evil and wrong that you would break - in fact, disrupt and damage! - the universe in order to stop? I can.
2. The person as a sorcerer is only framework; the core for play is the Kicker. As Christopher says, first you have a person, then the person is a sorcerer, and then the sorcerer faces a Kicker. This means that an opportunity or a danger, or both, has arisen that will put everything implied by #1 above to its harshest test. Before play starts, the character is reasonably comfortable with his or her metaphysical trade-offs regarding sorcery. The Kicker should be the day in which that comes under question.
3. Check out these threads: (i) Sorcerer doesn't scare me. What's wrong with me?, and the older , which pretty much speak for themselves; and (ii) So, I'm flying a spaceship, in which you can see that the essential point ("horrifying" potentially) concerns Humanity, and its relevance to the real person, rather than details of technology and whatever it can or can't do by the game rules.
4. In terms of theme, the core book sticks with the basic concept of demon-bargaining, but with a strong dose of pre-1960s horror fiction and a certain emphasis on urban splatter action (e.g. Hong Kong cinema of the late 1980s). Sorcerer & Sword is profoundly existential; Sorcerer & Soul is about "sin" at the visceral level even for people without metaphysical convictions; Sex & Sorcery focuses on the raw uncertainty and potential chaos found in love, which we claim is the most reliable source of meaning and fulfillment in life (in addition to the points in that book about the real people who are playing). The Sorcerer line of books, in pure content terms, dances continually between two things: disrupting certainty about what you think you believe, and finding values and emergent certainty when you think or pose that you don't believe anything.
None of these is itself horrific to see in abstract form, whether here or in the books. Nor is any of them horrific in terms of simply describing game mechanics. But much as the various resolution and character creation mechanics of the game procedurally add up to, or prompt, something more, the various thematic components of the books, especially all together, procedurally add up to or prompt something which certainly includes the potential for horror.
Jaakko, that's the best I can for you, in terms of an author statement. I hope you've found it interesting or helpful.
Kevin, your wider questions about emotion and role-playing are good, but I think they are both broad enough and personal enough to merit a new thread by you in Actual Play, following the guidelines for posting in that forum.
Best, Ron
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