[Sorcerer] At the GenCon booth
jburneko:
Hey Ron,
Sure, your example of Rowan going to Dennis's house after he lied to her is a good one. If I'm reading your account correctly that all happened "off screen" as response to Dennis's failed lie. In other words, Dennis failed the roll provoking Rowan to go off and do something on her own, which in turn provoked a response from Chuni which Dennis then later discovers the aftermath of.
That's what I mean by "around" the PCs. Both Rowan and Chuni took consequential action that Dennis basically had no opportunity to directly intervene in.
My response in such cases is usually to have an NPC like Rowan act hurt or get pushier towards the PC. And if the PC still brushes such a character off they tend to just go off and basically do nothing until the PC approaches them again later. They basically go in a little closet in my brain since they failed provoke a direct action or response.
Similarly, I might then have a demon like Chuni come up to the PC and say something like, "Hey, she's getting to be a problem. I could take care of that for you, if you want?"
If it gets to the point where in my head that I would think Chuni might actually act toward Rowan on its own then I tend to wait until an opening presents itself to have it happen directly in the PC's presence. If no such opportunity arises, it never happens.
I'm not saying I have this problem ALL the time, but it's a struggle to stay conscious of it.
Does that help?
Jesse
Ron Edwards:
Yes! I see exactly what you mean.
I know what you're talking about from experience too, because I encountered the same difficulties for a long time. It was particularly hard when GMing Champions in the heavy-duty early Marvel + intense mid-80s indie comics style hybrid that I favored. What I wanted demanded very proactive NPCs, and yet I had no way, procedurally, to say what they were doing unless a player-character was actually looking at it. To do it, I had to create a method that involved columns with all the names running down the left, and an ordinal timeline across the top, to keep track of what I was having the NPCs do.
Sorcerer makes such things much easier because the basic assumption of play is that player-characters' decisions really matter to the NPCs on the diagram. If you blow someone off, they'll do something to retaliate or whatever is appropriate for them. If you indulge them, they'll be on you with everything they need from you. Or with less needy/weird NPCs, they'll call you on your bullshit in no uncertain terms, and support you when they approve or sometimes, gritting their teeth, when they don't.
As an aside, this is why the complex relationship map method in The Sorcerer's Soul is advanced: it's adding layers of backstory that are not on the player-character diagrams. It does work, but in retrospect, I really wish I'd emphasized and pushed "basic" Sorcerer harder in the 2001-2003 period, so people wouldn't have hared off to the relationship map as the one-and-only means of prepping. (And here, I want to distinguish between that specific method and what we can call an ordinary, Kicker-influenced set of relations that are personal for the character, like the ones described here.)
Maybe we can talk more about the diagrams as a core feature of prep-to-play, because as I indicated above, those characters are exactly those whose needs and views simply cannot ignore the player-character's actions or inactions. Can you see how the diagrams are taken directly from what the players said about their characters and the various descriptors and terms they chose? Can you see why some names and things are clustered at the center and others aren't? And then can you see how I chose to scene-frame based on the centers, and how I used stuff in the center to "reach" to the stuff in the same quadrants? For example, as soon as Hannah interacted with the pills (which is precisely what the Kicker implies), the pills "called" John-O into action.
Here's another technique for the "around" concept: one can even use rolls. As I recall, I actually did roll Chuni vs. Rowan, just a single oppositional roll, to see whether Chuni got'er or Rowan got away. I rolled three or four such things, including one with Kevin vs. John-O, to see whether the latter blustered his way into Eloy's room (he didn't). I haven't talked much about this technique, but I often use it nowadays for a lot of scene framing when GMing Sorcerer. I have a whole little section in my annotations to explain it.
Also, Ed, in response to your second post, all I have to say is "yes," and I'm pointing that out here because the reasoning you explicated is exactly what gets this "around" concept into practice. Plus the wondrous fun of playing demons, who are beings of nothing but Desire and Need, and thus are imbued with a dreadful sincerity.
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
The three young guys
I remember only that one of them was named Ian. They came to the booth and we discussed Sorcerer in some detail, and at least one bought the core book. We agreed that we'd meet the next day at the booth for some prep, in hopes that they themselves would carry forward from that point in play. And they did!
Again, we began with the two key phrases. They came up with:
- New York City!, with the exclamation point definitely audible.
- Cronenberg body-horror demons, sorcery based on Lovecraftian cosmic/insane insights
In this case, one of three guys would be the GM, so the other two made characters. Unfortunately, I didn't retain copies of the diagrams, and the details have mainly fled clean out of my mind. I remember that one of them was a tycoon whose demon was a possessor with Hop, and it favored obese people, opening hideous fanged mouths in their stomachs. His Kicker was a strong emotional grab, too, in that this ruthless and exploitative person was confronted with values that he'd forgotten he had. I do remember that the other character was very good as well.
I kept up a dialogue with the GM as we went through character creation, especially once the diagrams were done. I explained that the next step would be to
I sure would like to know how that game went, if it did.
Nat and (sort of) Marc
This was a bit less organized than the previous two. I'd rounded up three people for the prep session, but only Nat ended up being able to attend. I was getting more and more fatigued as we waited around, and we finally roped in Marc, for prep only, as I really think one-on-one Sorcerer prep and play would not be productive for what Nat wanted to see.
We came up with the two statements:
- frontier old west
- Native American + Christian mash-up sorcery
This bears a little discussion. For a past few years, I have greatly preferred "here and now" as the context for playing Sorcerer, as my above list of examples for the first statement implies. I do not regard the flexibility of settings for Sorcerer to be a feature in the same sense that it's a feature for GURPS. "You can play in any setting!" has connotations, in gamer-talk, which I do not really think I want to see in Sorcerer. Those connotations concern setting as skin, i.e., a completely trivial aspect of scribbling perhaps-elaborate but ultimately inconsequential Color onto a totally-consistent System which has its own features that really drive exactly what play is like no matter what setting is concerned. Whereas for Sorcerer, the Color is supposed to integrate with Setting in such a way that the Character-centric concepts are highlighted even further.
A related, perhaps synonymous issue is that Sorcerer settings are supposed to be personal, invoking the Shudder concept that's been discussed at some length in the Adept Press forum. And GURPS-style setting-as-skin is antithetical to that approach, as it treats setting and genre as comfort zones.
(Side note: the techniques in both Sorcerer & Sword and The Sorcerer's Soul do produce stronger setting effects in productive ways for the game, but I hope you can see that they do so from character-centric angles, much different from "we'll play ninja!" or "we'll play space opera!".)
So I went with Nat's desire for the old west, but asked him what he meant by it. When he said that he was going for the frontier, a sense of being well away from ordinary human community, with the implications of alienation, desperation, and gritty determination (all my paraphrases from what he said), I was more confident that we were doing it Sorcerer-wise and not GURPS-wise.
Nat's character was Jenkins the general store owner, described as "late 30s, starting to put on weight." Stamina 3 clean living, Will 5 belief system, Lore 2 solitary adept, Cover 5 general store owner, Price -1 still in denial, Telltale: Native American tattoo on arm.
His demon is what he's conjured up as the spirit of his dead wife Samantha, animating her actual body. Stamina 7, Will 8, Lore 7, Power 8, Possessor, Desire: Power, Need: Undivided attention, Telltale: doesn't sleep; abilities = Armor, Fast, Cloak, Cover (Samantha), Link, Spawn, Perception (what people want). Just as the Price implies, Jenkins is a guy who desperately wants to cope with his wife's death by making it not have happened. He hangs out at her empty gravesite for his moments of reflection. He'd be a perfect main character for an Ambrose Bierce story, which in my book is about the highest praise you can get for an American character set in the nineteenth century.
His Kicker is lovely: Jenkins catches Samantha having sex with Seamus. As you can see from the diagram, this threatens both his sorcererous and his personal identities, racking a ton of stuff right into the center.
Marc's character was Seamus Long the traveling snake-oil salesman. Stamina 2 clean living, Will user/manipulative 5, Lore 3 apprentice, Cover 5 snake oil salesman, Price -1 cynical (to Humanity checks), Telltale: doesn't blink.
He calls his demon the Urge. Stamina 6, Will 7, Lore 6, Power 7, Parasite, Desire: Corruption, Need: physical contact with others, Telltale: auditory displacement of the host's voice, in that it may seem to originate within a listener's head. Long and the Urge add up to a creepy dude, huh?
Marc went around in circles for a bit over his Kicker, partly out of an excess of riches than anything else, I think. He first suggested that Jenkins was going to be thrown out of town for selling useless remedies, but I pointed out that this was business-as-usual for Jenkins, not a life-changing moment. He suggested "accused of rape," which seemed fine to me, but then changed it to "fell in love with a liaison," who he then identified as Julia, the parson's daughter.
I really liked the net effect of what all this material had developed as "our western." It was not intended to be historical so much as pure atmosphere and thematic potential, much like the settings for A Fistful of Dollars and Django. In retrospect I wish I'd developed its physical features more specifically in play, because its "feel" was very strong in my mind.
The diagrams are here. I'm not sure if I've made it clear exactly how these are made, so here goes.
1. Start by making four headings on scratch paper: Lore, Cover, Price, and Kicker. Then list any people, places, or things which go under them. It's important that the items are only nouns of this time, not adjectives or attitudes or anything else. One obvious and necessary item for any Sorcerer character is the demon. Covers typically include homes and workplaces, as well as any relevant items in them, but if such items are associated with sorcery, then they go under Lore.
2. Add stuff through dialogue. The player usually does so without much struggle. Marc tossed out the existence of Seamus' partner more-or-less off the cuff as we were making the diagram. I usually sort of riff off of what I see, asking questions like "if he's a traveling salesman, does he have a wagon or just ride a horse?" and things like that. In the example I described above, the tycoon character's Price was arrogance, so I mentioned that if it were a genuine Price, then we could expect to see at least one pissed-off former friend in that quadrant. I always leave the final call up to the player for such suggestions, though. My goal is usually about ten terms per character, although in this case (this western example) we had less. I think six or seven terms total would be the bare minimum.
2. Hypothetically, every item gets placed into its quadrant at the outer edge and dead center of that quadrant, i.e., as far apart from the items in the other quadrants as possible. Then pull together the ones which are physically or socially associated with one another. Pull them toward one another, not toward the center as a default. Therefore if two things are in adjacent quadrants, they travel toward the diagonal boundary line, not toward the center.
3. Two associated things will go toward the center only if they are (i) in Lore and Kicker, (ii) in Cover and Price. Often, when this happens, one of the items will drag other stuff with it, either in its own quadrant or from an adjacent one.
That's why Seamus' wares are in the center. First, the wares and the Urge are necessarily connected as he routinely uses it to successfully sell his gunk. Marc had retained the idea that Seamus was indeed at the late stage of his sojourn in town, when the locals are getting pissed off about his crappy wares; this was important because it highlighted that falling in love was keeping him there longer than he should be. So the customers (associated with his Price of cynicism) and the wares (in his Cover) are pulled together, which in this case means toward the center. So the Urge gets dragged to the center through its association with the wares. And Julia is pulled toward both because she's the one he's staying for and heightening the hassle between the other two - which means she gets dragged straight into the center too.
So even though Julia and the Urge have no direct connection between one another, they are both in the center of the diagram, "face to face" as it were, meaning that the moment they do come into contact is a big ol' Bang waiting to happen.
Another issue this instance brings up is character association. In the suburban game, the two characters were not created in direct reference to one another aside from the fruitful aspect of being done at the same table. In other words, they weren't brothers or trained by the same guy, or anything like that. (I put them next door to one another merely for the fun of Crossing, a GM technique.) Whereas in this case Nat was quite explicit that he wanted Seamus in Jenkins' Kicker. I don't think it was out of a misguided notions about "bringing the characters together" or anything like that; I think it was simply that upon looking at Seamus, Nat found it perfectly logical that such a character would be the candidate for an affair for Samantha, especially as a sorcerer and especially as a cynical sensualist. In other words, if the shoe fits, wear it. That's the best and actually the only reason to associate two characters directly in Sorcerer.
Note as well that the players did not try to make the two Kickers into a single Kicker, either. The content of Jenkins' Kicker actually doesn't concern Seamus' at all, but rather his Price. I think that's good practice for this game as well, which unfortunately I didn't quite manage to pull off with my example characters in the core book, although I was trying.
By the end of character creation, Marc was excited to play too. But unfortunately, the next day, he slept in (and I mean GenCon sleeping-in), so it was just Nat and me at the booth. I enjoyed playing this a lot, starting right in with Jenkins hanging out at Samantha's grave, checking in on her location via Link, only to flash on hard-core sex with Seamus, ewww! We did three solid scenes: (i) Jenkins fetches Samantha from her, uh, predicament, taking her home and then apologizing profusely and pampering her; (ii) dealing with a customer, whom Samantha sends a Spawn to possess, an action very much like my role-playing of Chuni in the other example; and (iii) the next morning, when the townsfolk decide to try to run Long out of town. It was sort of a bummer not to be able to cut back-and-forth between the two characters, though, and obviously I didn't develop anything about either Kicker from Seamus' point of view.
The core feature of play turned out, interestingly, to be the Spawn, whose lust for Power totally drove its host to lead the mob and destabilize the mayor's authority. But there was one more thing in my GM pocket: a prepared Bang, intended for the end of the session, which I delivered on schedule. It was to have a band of about twenty roughnecks ride into town, led by a grizzled one-eyed man they called "Captain." They simply take over, beating up Seamus' partner and anyone else physical-looking, threateningly calling the mayor their "new best friend," demanding breakfast instantly, and making free with their plans for the local townswomen including Julia.
This is an extreme form of spiking a Kicker, or rather, all the Kickers: introducing a radical shift to the entire environment which throws the Kickers into higher gear. I did this, and have done it in the past, for several reasons: (i) the characters look, at the outset, as though they might just able to squeak by their Kickers-as-initially-written in safety; and (ii) I see that I can dramatize the basic Humanity question for these characters in extremely adverse terms. Here, the Humanity question arises straight from the initial statements - the classic community-vs.-loner conundrum found in all great westerns in their original and derived forms.
I've done this in frighteningly extreme form in other Sorcerer games, but only when it really seems perfect. Otherwise I stick to the as-conceived context for Kickers and situations. In this case, I found myself bitterly disappointed not to see what Jenkins did now via further play.
Nat and I have discussed many a role-playing issue over the years, and I suspected he might have a specific hangup to address with me via play. In fact, he was up-front about it: simply and clearly, when the hell does one roll. If I understood him correctly, the question was whether Sorcerer play was basically same-old, same-old GM-run play with a good hook-concept and a cleaner dice mechanic.
I hope I showed him otherwise, for instance regarding the brief dust-up among Jenkins, Long's partner, and Samantha in the first scene. But I can't speak for him, and I'd like to know. So Nat, speak up if you're there. I have a lot to talk about for this issue.
Conclusions
A little while ago, someone asked me to articulate some core principles which informed all the aspects of the game. Here they are:
Plot cannot be prepped.
No one games the universe.
Nothing is sacred.
I bring them up here because they were front-and-center in my mind as I went through all three of these fun sessions at GenCon. I'm not willing to explain how each of these factors into every single feature of the game in a comprehensive way, mainly because that's the point of all my annotations for the new release and it's a huge job. But if anyone wants to try out any interpretations of their own, or to ask any specific questions about a particular rule, I'm happy to talk about it.
Best, Ron
edited to fix diagrams link
Damn it! Having a little trouble with the file. Will fix ASAP
Done it, I think
James_Nostack:
This is an exceptionally rich thread, equal to the "Art Deco Melodrama" threads (can't find links, booo) and the "Modern Necromancy" threads (one two). Can I, as a reader, request that some of this get taken to daughter-threads?
Here is my pet peeve
Quote from: Ron Edwards
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)
Intellectually I understand the need to avoid pre-play of this kind in my role as a participant, but as an audience member this is always kind if dissatisfying. I keep asking myself, "Why the hell are all these sorcerers in the same place at the same time?!" And it's almost always some dumb-ass little town in the middle of nowhere, too, and the protagonists are just kicking their heels doing penny-ante stuff.
I would think that when two sorcerers are anywhere near each other, that's a cataclysmic event. Either these guys are bumping into each other for the first time, or their extremely unstable modus vivendi looms large in each character's backstory.
I dunno, I'm weird. Never mind me.
Here is my more serious comment/question[/u]
Jesse took the "around / at" distinction in a direction very differently than I would have. 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.
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.
In that sense, I certainly am aiming to provoke a reaction (of some kind, not caring what the player will do). But I'm "lending" my agency to the interested NPC.
David Berg:
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.
If you have designed them imperfectly in prep, then in play, you both play them and manipulate them (e.g. authoring new positions and desires during scenes or right before scenes) to get the most out of them.
Personally, when my GM instructed me on how to fill out the 4-triangle square, he was reading from the book but didn't give me much guidance. I certainly had no concept of what "close to the center" meant. So maybe it's no surprise that he had some damn imperfect NPCs in the mix. Maybe I'll give this thread a more thorough read and try to figure out the optimal NPC-prep technique here (I skimmed some of the long bits).
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