[Sorcerer] How Do You Handle Failed Contacts and Summons?
James_Nostack:
Oh, yeah. Successful rolls only. Hmmmf!
James_Nostack:
Ooops! Didn't mean to hit "post" there! Accident.
Anyway: Joel, the trick with "nothing happens" is that as the GM you need to set up context where "nothing happens" is an interesting and meaningful outcome.
Couple broad ways to do that would be:
* Getting to this point in the ritual was a huge pain in the butt. Did the ritual require you to steal something extremely valuable? Do you owe someone a huge favor? Did the Contact have consequences which will mess you up if the demon isn't Summoned? etc. etc. You've run up a huge debt, and any minute now "they" are going to be coming to collect and you've got nothing to show for it. This type of response is especially appropriate if the Summoning involved a sacrificial victim, or if there were plenty of juicy roll-overs involved.
* You only have one shot at this. Due to whatever is going on in the game, this Summoning ritual is going to be your only opportunity to ____________. It's absolutely critical you pull it off . . . and you blew it. This is related to the point listed above, and can be used in combination, but the idea is that you had limited resources which (in hindsight) were totally wasted. Here, the problem isn't the cost that went into the ritual, but rather the opportunity cost: doing the ritual meant you didn't do something else that was important, and now you've got regrets.
* Your ability to pull off the ritual is important in some social context (or indeed any context). Thinking very small-scale, the reason to Summon a demon is so you can Bind it. But it might also serve some other function in the fiction--like impressing a bunch of the Witch-King's minions so they'll aid you against the Jarl of Spiders or something. When you screw up the ritual, everyone laughs at you and you don't get your help. This doesn't have to be a one-shot wasted resource like the option above, only that other people will be affected by your failure.
Overall these still require the GM to do a lot of huffing-and-puffing to explain why you didn't whiff, though--and it has to be set up in advance, so that's kind of hard too. I kinda prefer my (erroneous) response, frankly, because at least something still happens and it's easy to implement on the fly.
Summoning is the cruelest part of Sorcerer.
Joel Rojas:
Thanks for clearing that up, Ron, and everyone for the advice. Sorcerer is a dense little game. At least my understanding of the rules were not far off, nor how I handled a failed summon in a game from many of the other suggestions. It's important to me that I understand the rules as written before messing with them.
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