[Sorcerer] At the GenCon booth
Ron Edwards:
When I'm at GenCon, usually I spend a lot of time playing after-hours, typically in the lobby of the Embassy Suites. I either set something up with people during the day, whether initiated by them or by me, or I show up and make myself available to a table, either for whatever's already happening or to suggest a game.
This year, I went loaded with Ronnies and other playtests and recently published Ronnies games - to no avail. Working the booth by myself was incredibly tiring and by 8 or 9 PM, I was very nearly done to a turn. I did manage to get in some play, but for two nights, something else happened. Specifically, Sorcerer lessons. In the evening, we did a full prep session, and then the next day at the booth, we played a little bit. The actual amount of play was minimal, but the point was actually didactic: to show how to prep and how that became play, as well as showcasing a couple of key points about play itself.
If I had to summarize it in a bumper sticker, it'd be something like, "You are not playing an adventurer and I am not running an adventure." Which I shall now try to explain.
Prep procedures
One of the procedures I’m hammering through several stages of play in the current annotations project is that following a general agreement to play Sorcerer, the very next thing to do is to arrive at two crucial opening lines. This should be done through discussion, although typically one person takes the lead at least to focus everyone’s attention on the task, and may well arrive with at least a provisional suggestion. Furthermore, these lines are all that should be produced at this point, exactly as such.
The first one is best understood as “environment,” a more immediate version of the familiar concept of setting. I prefer not to use the term setting because of many possible misunderstandings, such as thinking of settings as interchangeable skins. Furthermore, most of the time I discourage haring off to non-contemporary settings because in most cases that’s merely a retreat to a comfort zone. So I might say, “All right, it’s here and now, but what sort of take on here and now? What do we want to see and do in terms of environment? Any simple phrase will do.”
Some examples from real games include:
· Urban decay, rust belt U.S.A.
· Successful suburbia
· New York City! (with exclamation point)
· “Here” (meaning the location of play, using content close to the players’ lives and interests)
The second statement is about the look-and-feel of sorcery and demons, very much in the sense of presentation and atmosphere, and not at all in terms of justications or rationale.
Examples from the same games, in order:
· Spiders and eyes
· Frazetta, fleshy, animalistic
· Cronenberg body horror, maddened cosmic insights
· Hard-core necromancy
Once armed with these two statements, everyone should move straight into individual character creation. There should be absolutely no discussion between the two, whether “why we’re together” (because that does not matter) or further processing of setting material (which should emerge from PC creation, not established here), or anything else.
Another principle of preparation for this game is the two-step between making characters and making demons. For the first, the GM provides or reminds about information the players need to arrive at starting characters whom they will play; for the second, it’s reversed, and the players provide information which the GM uses to arrive at characters that he or she will play.
Finally, the crucial outcome of character creation, and the necessary armament for the GM to prep for the first session, is the diagrams on the backs of the character sheets. That’s how far we got, and were supposed to get, in each of the GenCon prep sessions. I’ll show you what came of each.
Ed and Konstantinos
The statements were, Successful suburbia + ancient languages, Frazetta-fleshy-animalistic large demons. I suggested the first phase, and Ed provided the latter, during which Konstantinos made nonverbal sounds which indicated approval and enthusiasm at a disturbing visceral level.
Ed’s character Dennis Tyler is a “basic white guy about 30, clean cut, casual but well-dressed” – the concept was that he’d come from a very different, much poorer background and made his way to this lifestyle through secret means and his demon’s help, with a fake cover career the neighbors think is real.
Stamina 3 (clean living), Will 4 (rageful and vengeful), Lore 3 (solitary adept), Cover 4 (internet pornographer), Price -1 (dishonest, penalty when being sincere)
His demon Sanchuniath, Chuni for short, is a stunning devil-babe with massive unfolding wings: Inconspicuous (Telltale: you might see an ordinary woman in your peripheral vision, who’s gone when you look), Desire: Creation/Artistry, Need: Blood. Its/her abilities are Shapeshift (self), Cover (porn star), Shadow (self), Special Damage (claws, self, lethal), Spawn (self), Travel (flight, self), Special Damage (“monstering out,” other, lethal). The Binding turned out to be +1 in the demon’s favor. (Ed has provided a helpful sketch of Chuni at Esoteric Murmurs)
You can probably figure this out, but the point is that Dennis anonymously runs a porn site showcasing the mysterious indie-fan-favorite female star who is none other than Chuni. Ed made it clear that Dennis was so deeply embedded in his own lies about this that he’s practically forgotten how to tell the truth.
His Kicker: a wealthy super-fan has dispatched a very competent private investigator to contact the porn star and arrange a private meeting.
Konstantinos’ character Eloy Simons is a former child TV star, now married to an up-and-coming politician and unbeknownst to her, responsible for much of her success as her rivals often encounter life-crises and scandals. “Tall, well-fit, late 30s white guy. Can still see the signs that made him attractive when young, under the layers of self-abuse.”
Stamina 5 (athletic, chemically heightened), Will 4 (social competence), Lore 1 (naďve), Cover 4 (former child celebrity), Price -1 (mild drug addiction)
His demon is ???? (pronounced “Fidi” for English speakers), a freaking huge three-eyed snake, never seen in its entirety: Inconspicuous (hides in improbably small spaces, Telltale: rattling sound), Desire: Power, Need: Consume old things/antiques. Its abilities: Big (self), Travel (suddenly there, self), Special Damage (snake-crush, snake-bite, self, lethal), Perception (a named target, self), Vitality (self), Vitality (other). The Binding was the same: +1 in the demon’s favor.
Eloy keeps a lot from his wife and two kids even beyond his sorcery and his demon’s activities to support her career. He has a secret apartment where he does his rituals and stores the chachkes he collects to feed the demon, and of course, he has his little habit.
It took a couple of tries for Konstantinos to arrive at the Kicker, but he nailed it with: Eloy’s wife has slammed him with a drug intervention, up to and including placing him in a detox clinic.
You can find their diagrams here.
.
A point about Kickers: players sometimes struggle a little with this concept. Konstantinos proposed a couple of situations in which his wife's political enemies were investigating him or her, one of which included something really bad the demon had done, but my point to him was that Eloy had clearly been successful so far, and therefore must have handled any such situations well in the past. In other words, the proposed Kickers were simply "more of the same" material that we'd expect to be part of Eloy's back-story anyway. I asked him to think laterally: what sort of situation would throw a rock into his character's life which could not be solved simply by sending the demon to disrupt it, but would rather upset the assumptions that he'd been so carefully protecting? "My wife puts me in detox," he said instantly. That's how to get a Kicker.
Whereas for Dennis, being investigated was a desirable Kicker because of the emphasis that he'd put on his character's history of private secrecy. I'm not sure if I'm saying that well, but to me, the point of Dennis' history is that he has isolated himself thoroughly in several layers, so a genuine competent threat to his personal bubble (and Ed was the one who'd said the detective was "very competent") was a new thing for him.
We gathered to play at the booth the next day. My preparation consisted almost solely of a simple list of names and scores. Dennis' friend became "Rowan," the detective became "Cavanaugh," Eloy's drug connection became "John-O," and a few others. Each had a Will and Cover score, with a blanket assumption of Stamina 2, and in a couple of cases, a different Stamina score. If a name didn’t occur to me straightaway (as with Eloy’s wife), I simply waited until I introduced him or her in play and asked the player (Hannah). I didn't prepare Bangs in a formal way although looking at the diagrams was pretty much the same thing, if one is thinking about scene-setting and NPC priorities. I knew I'd start Dennis in front of his house, having a conversation with Cavanaugh, and Eloy at the detox clinic, in a conversation with his children.
We can talk more about the scenes and their internal events, but to summarize, at least as far as the scenes we played were concerned, these two player-characters were in a race to the bottom. Each one writhed in the throes of admitting that yes, their current way of life was actually over. I had a lot of fun playing the various NPCs, finding that Kevin, the detox counselor, really came to life simply by taking absolutely no nonsense from Eloy and laying out very reasonable choices. It didn't do him any good, when Eloy sent the demon to retaliate, but I noted for later play that ???? would now figure out that as long as Eloy kept playing his bullshit games, he was going to be farther and farther from Power.
Let's see ... overall, Dennis had a bad morning, mis-managing his demon such that his closest friend was attacked and finally complying with the detective's directive to set up a date with her and his client. Eloy, after a sterling start by making his kids cry when trying to reassure them, suborned a detox employee to fetch him antiques, nearly successfully assassinated his drug counselor via demon, and received a sizeable contribution of drugs from his scuzzy friend John-O. How he thinks he's going to use them successfully in detox is a good question, but Eloy is nothing if not resourceful. Each one encountered at least one Humanity check, and frankly, I think I took it a little easy on them. What a pair of boy-men!
Ed and I discussed Humanity for the game a little bit at his blog, which you can see via the same link I posted above. We can follow up here if anyone wants.
At one point, Ed (and Dennis) was astonished that Chuni had attacked and drained a lot of blood from Rowan. It was a pretty extreme act, but it arose quite directly from Dennis' own actions. He'd left Chuni behind in his house, to pursue Cavanaugh's car, and he'd failed badly with an elaborate lie he'd peddled to Rowan who was very concerned about him. Failed rolls of this kind are a deep cue for me in terms of NPC behavior. Rowan went straight to Dennis' house and tried to get in. When she found a way in (which I felt was reasonable to assume might be open, as Dennis had been puttering on the lawn and had not gone back to the house to lock it up before running off), then Chuni, already riled by her observations of people surveilling the house, nabbed her for a little Need. After all, via his failed lie, Dennis had indeed "sent" her there, from a demon's point of view.
And no, Chuni didn't explain this to Dennis. I don't feel any need to play the demons as explaining themselves. I'm happy to explain it now as follow-up and debriefing as far as technique is concerned, but in play, a person simply has to accept that good Sorcerer GMing is never about arbitrary actions. It's always based off of existing characterization, previously established actions, and clear consequences of failed/successful rolls.
I'm interested in following up on Ed's question as we ended play: (slight paraphrase) "When did you plan on switching Cavanaugh's loyalty?" I told him the truth: it was not a decision on my part in terms of planning, but simply what I did with Cavanaugh in the sense of playing him as a character. Even that is hard to articulate, though. I am not talking about a fast-on-his-feet GM who can improvise "story" in the moment in the way that others must laboriously prep for hours beforehand. That is not the skill I am displaying with events like the one we saw in this game. I am talking about abandoning the GM-role of "story man" from the outset, and letting it go entirely. From my current draft of the annotations for the core book:
Quote
NPCs do stuff. They aren’t living in terror of the PCs, trying to brush them off. They respond deeply to the PCs towards their own priorities; they are grabby. They aren’t helpless. They aren’t dumbly locked into their single-blurb descriptions. And you don’t protect them from themselves.
You see, the phrase, “Just play the NPCs!” turns out to be a subcultural problem. I have learned that no one knows what I mean by it. It seems to me as if I’m giving the most straightforward advice possible. But after fifteen years, I now know that the communication rate is under 10%. Instead, it can go “doink” right off someone’s defenses, because they don’t get it, and what they don’t get, they blink away. Or it can be heard, but mis-interpreted, as in, “Play the NPCs to elicit the desired player behavior,” or “Play the NPCs according to a set track or flowchart.” Or worse, thespian: “Act out the NPCs in full, with gestures and accents.”
Whereas what I actually mean by it is that when playing NPC 1’s actions and dialogue, put aside any priorities except for those of NPC 1. Never mind what NPC 2 wants, or what the head or the ideology of the organization NPC 1 belongs to wants. Never mind what NPC 1’s actions will do to anyone else’s plans. Never mind what NPC 1’s actions might do to the immediate outcome of this scene. Basically, NPC 1 can always and only do one of three things: hold steady which whatever goals and actions and tactics he was already doing; go solidly hard-core toward getting those goals using new and extreme tactics; or abandon those goals and adopting new ones, to whatever extreme seems (to him) warranted. And in each case, do it as effectively as possible. So when playing NPC 1, you play him. Then, switching to another NPC, do the same with him, and never the fuck mind what that would mean to NPC 1 - save that for when you come ‘round to NPC 1 again.
So it’s not about an overview. It’s not about a story. It’s not about a plot. It’s not about a tapestry. You’re not playing “the world.” You’re playing characters one at a time at a very local, moment to moment level, and as far as the NPC behaviors are concerned, that is literally all.
I want to stress that in Cavanaugh's case, this wasn't even a matter of "switching." He did his job for the rich fan-guy, and as soon as Dennis had agreed to set up a meeting with Chuni, Cavanaugh gave him the contact information and his job assignment was finished. In that moment, playing Cavanaugh, "I" (meaning me-as-Cavanaugh) felt some amused sympathy for this "you hit my dose!" incompetent-but-spunky guy. Dennis may have felt intruded upon, but Cavanaugh felt as if he'd shepherded him through a difficult day and could see more difficulty coming up for him. Cavanaugh was free now, so why not offer him professional services?
Such moments are what the "story man" GMs are always trying to force upon players, whether planned before play or improvised into play. And such force is a crappy, un-fun method without any of the enjoyable springboarding effects that I enjoy routinely. To me, that's not a brilliant one-off. It's normal play, mainly because we did it without any force of that kind. I was in fact merely playing the NPC.
I'll post more about the other two game-preps and play later in the thread! I'd like to see some questions or observations about this one first.
Best, Ron
Judd:
What you wrote about just playing the NPC's reminds me of these moments when I'm GMing and the players have done something that inadvertently steps right on an NPC's toe/tail/junk and they don't know it. A few weeks ago there was this quiet moment, a pause in the game as I kind of considered the NPC reactions and it was like little imaginary pinball dinging off the bits of setting in my head until I said out loud,"Holy shit."
Pete: "What is it?"
"When you get back to the brewery, the doors are off the hinges, the guard at the door has a bandage over his bloodied head."
"What the fuck happened?"
"City guard busted down the door..."
It happens most often lately with urban settings, lots of NPC's with overlapping turf and wants and needs, all kind of grabbing at one another until the players bust on in like bulls in several china shops.
ejh:
Thanks, Ron! Would have loved to play further.
The "why did Chuni drain Rowan?" thing makes sense to me now, I think -- it sounds like the answer to that is: "you failed a roll and just walked away from it. You don't think some shit is going to go down because of that?"
Something that I'd be interested in hearing more about is this:
Quote
After all, via his failed lie, Dennis had indeed "sent" her there, from a demon's point of view.
"Demon's point of view" is something it's always interesting hearing more about.
It sounds like you're saying: Chuni, demon that she is, is likely to be keeping an eye on her environment and the actions of her binder, and so when she sees Dennis talk to a woman and that woman end up entering the house, she's going to say "ooh, my sorcerer just did something that sent this woman to me. So her blood would taste like a nice present from Dennis. Yum."? Though she might be perfectly well aware that he intended nothing of the sort, that doesn't change the fact that it's a nice need-satisfaction just waiting for her to accept it?
And on the *contrary*, you pointed out later on that when Dennis was hoping to get rid of Cavanaugh by violent means, and was hoping he could just sic Chuni on him, Chuni was not interested in that because she doesn't want to *feed*, she wants to be *fed*.
So Dennis inadvertently feeding her = awesome. Dennis intentionally directing her to feed herself, while he sits back and watches = totally unsatisfying.
jburneko:
Reading this made me realize how much I'm still struggling with this: “Play the NPCs to elicit the desired player behavior,”
I've pretty successfully jettisoned the "desired" part of that statement, but I still think I play NPCs in a deliberately pokey manner trying to elicit behavior. Rather then just let the NPCs do what they're going to do around the PCs. I'm always working to aim the NPCs directly AT the PCs in some very direct manner. I don't think that's always a bad thing but sometimes it's TOO direct.
Jesse
Ron Edwards:
Hi Jesse,
That's a subtle distinction. I'm not sure the around vs. at phrasing is quite the right way to look at it.
It helps me to think in terms of the diagram ... by definition, the NPCs clustered at the center will be doing things which affect the player-character, whether their actions are aimed right at him, or at someone else.
Can you clarify what you mean by at vs. around?
Best, Ron
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