[Sorcerer] At the GenCon booth
Judd:
Quote from: David Berg on August 23, 2011, 10:59:44 PM
James, here's a thought on "just" playing NPCs:
If you have designed them absolutely perfectly in prep to bang into the PCs in the right ways, then you can just play them.
Dave,
My feeling, gut, something-I-can't-describe-well, feels that playing NPC's as people who react, rather than as pawns that make players do things is more of an internal shift, more of a "every tool is a weapon if you hold it right" kinda thing and not an imperfect tool kinda thing.
I'm not sure where or how that shift happens, exactly, though and that isn't helpful at all.
David Berg:
I think my personal default is actually to view NPCs as people who react! I only turn them into pawns when their reactions don't produce what the game needs.
Ron Edwards:
This is directed toward James' earlier post.
I'm not seeing how the plausibility or logistics of the sorcerers' presence in a given location applies. I don't think I mandated that the characters be in one another's laps; if the described environment is big enough, they could well be out of one another's perceived spheres (although able to affect one another indirectly). And as for multiple sorcerers in an isolated location, that strikes me as a feature of a certain kind of story, no different from having the tough-ass outlaw, the idealistic new lawman, and the corrupt rancher all being in the same hick town in the same hick county in the same hick state.
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Here's my question: how do you reconcile "just play the NPC's!" with "driving with bangs"? I think there's an implied bit of scene-framing in there, and I think it could stand to be made explicit.
I confess bafflement. The two concepts don't need reconciling; they're complementary to the point of being synonymous. And yes, scene framing is not only implied, but utterly integrated with them, because part of scene framing is casting. I really don't know what else to say.
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When I'm GM'ing Sorcerer, I'm not just playing the NPC's. I'm filtering for NPC's whose natural inclinations will provoke interesting responses from the PC. If your mom doesn't really care that your demon made you shoot the bank CEO, well, your mom isn't going to be in the next scene no matter what irrelevant tidbit of information she may have about the neighbors.
I think you might be reading "playing" to mean talking in a characteristic way for that character, regardless of content. But by "play," I mean doing things. So necessarily, when I play an NPC, I am starting by grabbing one of them for whom circumstances are prompting action. In my quoted text above, I tried to dismiss the possibility of "playing an NPC" being taken to mean "stand there and bobble-head while talking about something unimportant, ever so perfectly in the character's accent."
Best, Ron
woodelf:
First, my context: I read the first page of the thread, got to the second page and realized that the last three posts (as of the time I'm starting this) bring up whole new things I want to comment on, so I have chosen not to read them until after I post this response, so as not to confuse myself.
Oh, hey, I don't remember how identifiable names are here, so I'm the "Nat" that Ron refers to in the Western game.
So, Ron is half right about what I came to the game for: it was definitely "when do I roll?", but there's a little more context to that. The short version is:
either,
(1) Sorcerer is just like the way I've always played RPGs, and all the explanations (both in the book and elsewhere) are [unintentionally] obfuscating that fact--perhaps because those explanations are being made by people who didn't always play that way, so this *is* in fact a change, and they assume that everyone started out the way they started out, or,
(2) I actually don't understand Sorcerer, and there is some subtle distinction that I'm missing.
In order to address this, I really wish I'd gotten to play a little longer with Ron, and with at least one other player--this would give me the chance to see the rolls from the outside as well as when I'm involved in them. Nonetheless, I think I've gotten some insight into the whole thing, and my conclusion is that I was missing some subtleties of how the dice are used in Sorcerer, but that a large part of it was having it explained to me as "this is unlike the other games you've played" so I was looking for the differences when, in large part, it actually wasn't that different [from how I was playing "traditional" RPGs in the early 90s]. Different, yes; completely new, no.
However, the other thing I discovered by playing with Ron is that it is different in a completely different way than I was looking for. Specifically, he has a different notion than I had [from reading Sorcerer and some tentative attempts to play it] of not so much when to roll--though I'm not entirely sure we're on the same page yet--but in what to roll for.
Let me use a scene from our play to try and elucidate the distinction.
Our first scene was Jenkins, my character, going to Seamus' wagon to...well, I didn't know for certain until he got there. When he did, Ron described Seamus' partner sitting on the back step of the wagon, while the wagon was literally rocking with the activity inside. I tried to order him out of my way, but was unsuccessful. Hmmm...I have a recollection of having an extra die for my next roll, which would imply success, but that doesn't match up. Oh, right, I think I recall: he just sat there, grinned, and revealed the pistol under his coat. Jenkins was unarmed. I realized that Jenkins isn't particularly impressive at action stuff, and he doesn't think of himself as a powerful man--magically or otherwise--so he isn't about to go up against the armed guy. So, instead, he orders his "wife" out of the wagon, now! She flings the door open, nearly knocking Seamus' partner over, and stands there in the doorway, stark naked, glowering at Jenkins. Jenkins orders her to come home, and she responds, very matter-of-factly, that Seamus isn't finished yet. However, I won *this* die roll (that's where the bonus die came from, IIRC) vs. the demon (being rolled by Ron, of course), so she complied. The fact that Seamus said "oh, it's all right, you go on now" didn't even matter, because this was about the battle of wills between demon and sorcerer.
Up to this point, everything had happened exactly as I would have expected, mechanically speaking. Which things we rolled for, vs. role-played, vs. just accepted as a given, matched up with how I would've called it as a GM. Or, at worst, it was obvious in hindsight why Ron made the call he did. Right here is where it got interesting for me, in terms of understanding the mechanics. Seamus' partner pulled his gun to shoot Jenkins. Jenkins took off his coat and held it out for the demon, to cover her up. The demon came to Jenkins and used its armor to protect Jenkins. Now, I would've thought that my roll for Jenkins would be opposed by Ron's roll for Seamus' partner, maybe with a bonus from the demon's armor ability. But, if i recall correctly, Ron declared that the rolls were only to determined he order of these actions--that, basically, Jenkins' and Seamus' actions weren't in direct opposition--both could occur or fail independently. So the demon's roll beat the pants off Seamus' roll (I think it was like 9 dice vs 4), meaning I was protected regardless. Essentially because I'd succeeded at commanding the demon on the previous roll.
I'm gonna stop at this point, so that Ron can correct any misrememberings and add his interpretations and explanations, and so that I can sees what he specifically wants to address in this thread WRT "when to roll".
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
I think we've developed two different threads. I'll split the posts about setting into their own thread and here we'll stay strictly with the details of the sessions at GenCon. I'll post replies and clarifiers for the two threads soon.
Best, Ron
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