[Sorcerer] First annotations available
Moreno R.:
This is the way I explain it, in the notes in Italian I give the the players:
1) Who win?
The one who roll the highest die.
2) By how much?
Look at the highest die rolled by the loser. Count how many dice of the winner are above that value. This is the degree of success
3) What if there is a tie?
Each one discard the highest die they rolled, and they look again. If they are still tied, repeat until there is winner.
I have found useful to separate the 3 questions for clarity.
The problem with the way the rule is written in the book, is that it's written in the middle of the text, with nothing to make it stand out when you are in the middle of your first session and you are unsure and you frantically skim the book searching for it. You don't find it, so you try to remember it and that half-memory become "how the dice are read in Sorcerer" for your group. (this is a problem shared by a lot of important parts of the book. It's a book made to be read, not to be consulted or memorized. So when you finish reading it everything seem very clear... and when you encounter problems you did not foresee during the game, the specific rule you need seems to have disappeared from the book. See how many GMs ask for rules clarification about things that are right there in the book... if you know where to look inside a long text paragraph)
Ron Edwards:
Hi everyone,
Thanks to all for checking these out. Roger, I'm thinking that the best solution is to include access to these diagrams at the website. And in line with your points, Moreno, perhaps a self-help guide of some kind, or self-organized reference, could become available there. I'll have to think a bit about what I'd like to do. There is literally no way to provide the kind of look-it-up granular information you're talking about in the book itself.
It still shocks me how different the dice are. So much goes against habits at the table, not only in reading them (and seeking complexity when there is very little), but also in physically handling them. I've learned to say, for orthogonal conflicts, "Roll, and don't pick them up." And then, thirty seconds later, I've learned to be prepared to say again, "Don't pick them up."
I'm starting to get a little defensive. I ask that instead of debating about details of phrasing, please look at the larger structure of explanation that I'm utilizing for the annotations, based on the diagram that gets refined chapter by chapter. That's what I need feedback about. I'm also convinced that when it's understood, many of the smaller-scale concerns will actually evaporate.
Best, Ron
Roger:
Notes on the Annotations (and the Source Text) So Far...
The Diagram:
It's great. That's about all I have to say about it.
The *really* great thing about it is that I suspect it provides a very good way to debug a game that has gone awry for some reason. In addition to its educational value.
The scope of actions and effects
I suspect one of the reasons this tends to work itself out is the overall effect of the rollover mechanic. It encourages a certain middle ground where the actions are small enough to provide significant rollover when it gets important, and large enough so that all that rollover can be spent on something meaningful.
The Three-Part Player Character
Wow, this is excellent stuff. It makes me wonder if the timeline typically doesn't work a bit more like:
1. Person.
2. Person encounters Backstory-Kicker.
3. Person summons Demon to handle Backstory-Kicker, becoming a full-fledged Sorcerer.
4. Sorcerer encounters Current-Kicker; play begins.
It makes it explicit, to my mind, why step #3 can't be accidental or any of that weak crap.
Out on an increasingly speculative limb, I wonder if maybe this is related to that common "first session of Sorcerer seemed a bit flat" phenomenon. Are players tending to, by default, deal with their current Kicker as "just people" and not actually as sorcerers? That might explain it.
Example Characters
Okay, that bit in the source text about Harry that says something like "the GM considers forcing me to base Harry's Cover on Will instead of Stamina" is pretty stinky. It contradicts the explicit rules and seems to imply all that terrible old "but the GM of course can break whatever rules he feels like" feeling that is terrible. I think it can be removed with no loss and much gain.
A bit more pedantically, if somehow this hasn't been pointed out in the last ten years, Harry's character sheet has his second descriptor for Stamina missing. So yeah, fix that.
When it comes to Armand, I find myself a bit suspicious of the demon Need of "sincere affection". It just seems problematic to me.
Demons: Abilities
I find most of my confusion here comes from using the term "user" as synonymous with "target", except when it's not. I can't think of any good reason to do this.
What I'd really prefer is these section to be laid out more like the spell list from D&D, with explicitly bullet-pointed user, target, ranged?, etc, entries. But I'm not holding my breath.
Hint
These changes make Hint a lot more useful and interesting in every way, so that's good.
With respect to the "first clarification", the "communicative ability" bit, I find myself wondering what the power actually does. I mean, I can just communicate normally and ask the demon whatever it is I want to know, right? So is this power simply a way of guaranteeing that the demon is not lying to me?
It also makes me wonder how introspective the demon can be when it comes to Hinting. Is it kosher to ask, say, whether the Binding favours me or the demon? Or is this the sort of thing that must be worked out for every setting?
Need
"What matters is that it [...] cannot satisfy it without help."
Does this mean we can finally get away from the (in my opinion) complete nonsense about demons being even theoretically able to somehow fulfill their own Need, in any way, without the help of the Bound master? Because that's always bugged me.
It occurs to me that the Rule of Need (pg 59) might be the only one of those three that we really need, if we're strict about this. An unBound demon cannot get his Needs met in any way, so we don't really need the Rule of Binding. And I think it's consistent to suggest that parasites and possessors need, in a strict way, a Host in order to have their Need met. No Host, no way to meet Need, and they starve that way.
There's Something About Stephanie
The new section "Preparing for demon behaviour and actions", bullet point 3: I'd be inclined to make some mention of Stephanie's Price here, as it seems like it should be relevant to the GM.
Roger's Big Essay About Demons
There's two models I keep in mind when I think about demons.
The first model is machines. Not just any machine, but that particular sort of machine that is inherently dangerous, with an untamed brutality about it. Chainsaws, wood chippers, firearms of all sorts -- indeed, the various instruments of war fall into this category without exception -- and so forth.
The main demonic thing to learn from machines is that they have no free will. It is literally impossible for a gun to care that it's about to shoot your foot or a burglar or your wife. All it can do is exactly what the user tells it to do. If that means cutting off your fingers, so be it.
The second model is animals. Not just any animal, but those of a particularly alien, wild, and violent sort. Sharks, alligators and crocodiles, lethal snakes, the blue-ringed octopus, among others.
Like machines, these sorts of animals also have no free will to speak of. If they do have free will, it is of a sort that is alien enough to be incomprehensible to humanity. It's not that a snake is mean or vicious or angry or any of those human things. It's simply that, given a certain set of factors in a certain context, a snake will engage in the activity of attacking. A human that understands this, and survives, will always blame himself if he is attacked.
Wild animals bring a measure of their fickle, capricious, and treacherous nature to the concept of demons -- although machines of sufficient complexity certainly have their own fair share of this. The human approximations of their psychology and behaviour is only ever a shaky, incomplete model.
Of course, not all machines and not all animals have this demonic nature. Some machines are consumer-grade, and some animals are domesticated.
A consumer-grade device is intentionally designed to be more forgiving and less lethal to the incompetent user. The concept is antithetical to demons. Imagine Sweeney Todd arming himself with two safety razors. There is a sad, neutered quality to these machines.
Domesticated animals, such as dogs, have a psychology and measure of free will that is comprehensible to humans. They are tame in a way that demons never can be. Cats, although theoretically domesticated, are an interesting case -- they behave a lot more like demons than not. They're worth observing.
The whole thing about "Demons do not exist" means only and exactly this: it is strictly impossible for demons to be made consumer-grade or to be domesticated. There are no "Demon Whisperers" around who can talk them out of their Needs or Desires. There's no grand catalogue for a sorcerer to reference and summon a demon built-to-order; no way to reverse engineer whatever is inside them. The whole thing about "There are no utility demons" is just another way to express this. A demon might, for a while, pretend to be a consumer-grade object or a domesticated pet, but it's just a trick.
It is worth mentioning another machine, another animal, which fits these specifications exactly, and with which we are all intimately familiar. That machine is the human body.
Cheers,
Roger
jburneko:
Hey Ron,
I'm really digging this stuff. It provides so many conceptual bridges between things as well as draws attention to really important but easily glossed over areas of the text.
That's not really deep or helpful feedback but I wanted to acknowledge that I'd read it and that I was enjoying it. The little snippets of AP are very inspirational as well.
Jesse
Paul Czege:
If you think Roger's dice diagrams (or something like them) would be useful, you could insert additional pages for them and just number the pages 16a, 16b, 16c, 16d, etc.
Paul
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