[Sorcerer] Length of run?

[James_Nostack]

Sorcerer, or maybe Sorcerer & Sword, talks about figuring out a rough estimate of how long you're going to play for.  My recollection is that there's a specific comparison to a short story, a novel, a whole long series of novels, and so on.

What's the longest Sorcerer "arc" you've ever played through?  What's the shortest?  (I know In Utero is specially designed to play through in about four hours at a con, but it's kind of a special case where a hell of a lot of stuff got front-loaded and then handed to the players.  I believe Judd has played some Dictionary of Mu games at cons, though I'm not sure if they went to completion.)

The reason I bring it up is that in my somewhat limited experience with Sorcerer (but extensive experience reading the forums) it seems like nearly all Sorcerer arcs hover between 4-8 sessions in length.  Which tends to work like, "Session 1: Heavy lifting as the pieces are placed on the board; Session 2: pieces begin moving around in all kinds of crazy ways; Session 3: local hell breaking loose; Session 4: immediate aftermath, breath catching; Session 5: hell breaking lose all over again."  Give or take.  I'm curious to know if there was a Sorcerer game that wraps in 2 sessions, or in 12.

[Jesse Burneko]

I've run 4 hour con slots that did character creation to pseudo-resolution.  I usually do this with Sorcerer & Sword because the color to buy-in time is faster.  For demon creation I do not give the players the list of abilities.  Instead I have them tell me what the demon looks like and does.  I ask a few pointed questions and then construct the demon for them.  I say "psedo-resolution" because I can usually throw hard and loud enough bangs that escalate to an interesting confrontation that at least partially resolves major pieces of the PC's Kickers but it really isn't anything like what happens when you play for real.  You definitely leave hungry, unlike real play which leaves you so full you usually don't want to touch Sorcerer again for 3 months.

My longest game ran... uh... 8 sessions I think.  I ran it via Google+ Hangouts and it more or less fit the pattern you describe.  I was being very deliberate about not worrying about "reaching" for a climax.  I just let shit happen and kept building until we hit a point and said, "Yeah, I think that's it guys."

I think Christopher Kubasik ran a game that ran 9 or 10 sessions.  It was set in prison.  That's all I really know about it though.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

I've played a lot of Sorcerer. The number of sessions per story is variable.

First is the one-run, rather forced-resolution situation, which can work with as many as three characters if everyone is settled in for a long, solid session. It worked really well in the Living Tattoo game in Hamburg, less so with the gangster-Catholic game in Bertinoro, and not at all in the rust-belt game at Forge Midwest a few years ago. The most extreme version is the In Utero scenario, which is OK for how-to-play purposes but quite limited regarding the game's range.  I've decided that such play is a poor convention choice, which is why my convention play is now limited to a demo-style, two-meeting exercise as with GenCon 2011.

Second is the more traditionally structured game which happens to get to Kicker resolution pretty soon, which I have learned is a function of too-minimal preparation in terms of the diagrams, and too little honoring of NPCs' flexibility and integrity. The Tattoo game represents an extreme case of this, but two-session versions are possible too. There's nothing wrong with it, but the resulting stories tend to favor trippiness over genuine in-fiction causality, and also rapid-fire reactivity on the characters' parts rather than reflection, development, and nuanced moral choices. I am convinced that most current Sorcerer play falls into this category, partly due to habits that favor GM story-prep on everyone's part. Put simply, people plain don't know, in their guts, that they can actually play the character in terms of consideration, development, and action. So the GM throws stuff at them like an AK-47 of Bangs, and the players react-react-react, and eventually the smoke clears and there's nothing left to do. It's kind of Dust-Devils Sorcerer, actually, although I'm convinced more nuanced and measured play of Dust Devils is possible too.

In this sort of game, Kicker resolution for all the characters and the end of "the story" are typically synonymous.

Third is the long-form game, where characters' actions tend to re-frame the situation into new and interesting forms, relationships develop and transform, new information gets considered for its own sake, sorcery's unique identity for this particular story becomes deeply known to the players and GM, and especially, relationships and contracts with demons go through some serious changes. In my experience, this kind of game lasts four sessions at minimum, and can easily go to eight - I think I've broken ten at least once, but that's probably the most I'd expect.

One of the interesting features of this kind of game is that Kicker resolution doesn't have to be coordinated among the characters. It can be, and if so, is typically tacitly coordinated among the players, as they pace their characters' actions and development relative to one another. But when it isn't, some very interesting arcs can appear in the context of the larger (emergent) story, typically that one or more characters "settle down" through preliminary climaxes and one or more turn out to be the centers of a final or "the" climax. It reminds me of Pulp Fiction if you consider the story in in-fiction chronology: Jules actually leaves the story entirely at just about halfway through.

Best, Ron

[Jesse Burneko]

The "AK-47 of Bangs" technique is exactly how I run Sorcerer one-shots at conventions.  I don't really like it for the reasons Ron outlines but it does generate enough fictional chaos to highlight a few genuine moments.

When I ran my Google+ Hangouts game with Joel, Justin and Hans I put a lot of effort into not using the "AK-47" technique.  Things that helped.

1) I didn't use the Relationship Map technique from Sorcerer's Soul.  All prep work straight from the diagrams.  This avoided distractions with trying to "reveal" the map.  It meant I just "played" the NPCs.

2) Only the PCs demons and very minimal NPC Sorcerers.  I remembered Ron giving this advice in a forum post and it might be in the new annotations.  This avoided any idea that there was a villain or monster to be defeated.  It actually made the game very tense because the very worst of my NPCs were nothing compared to the scariness of the PCs.

3) Remembering to use bangs that were not necessarily horrible crisis moments that needed resolving RIGHT NOW.  I remember some of the most emotionally tense moments were when I had Hans's character's wife would call just to ask whether or not he'd be home for dinner.  I didn't even play her as pressuring him to BE home, she just wanted to know if he was or not.  And I would end every conversation with a very tender, "I love you, honey."

Combined these made for a much more leisurely paced game with a lot of mounting tension.

Jesse