[Sorcerer] learning by doing

[Joshua Bearden]

Third session tonight.  Amazing!  I really felt we all had a breakthrough into FUN!  We started to get a certain flow.  We still stumbled over mechanics from time to time but I really felt the characters and their stories were taking life.

Full recent play report (in a very raw form) here:
http://higs.motd.org/2014/03/06/sorcerer-ground-zero-in-the-public-gardens/

One GM lesson I think I learned tonight among others was about secrets and plots.  Secrets and mysteries are most interesting in small quantities. That is to say rather than maintaining a complex mystery in the face of player investigation, I tried to give up almost everything as soon as they asked for it.  I tried to let their hunches pay off as quickly as possible.  This leaves me with less to keep in my head. It immediately rewards their investigation and kept their interest.  It did not "spoil" anything as each revelation opened up new questions.  An example of this was when I sent my favourite NPC Kyla, (an MD from the coroners office) to meet Stephen, the sorcerer who had recently killed a man.  Rather than playing coy at all I had her lay her cards out  on the table. She suspects something paranormal is going on and has kept his name and connection to the corpse out of her report but in return she wants "in" on the secrets.  His decision to confess everything and even put his demon on display for her lead to some great drama and tension. If I had just kept on having sly innuendo filled dialogs in character I expect the player would have turtled up in an effort to avoid falling into a trap or something.

On the other hand, without me planning it, I have an interesting intra-player secret growing. A mysterious unbound demon that Tasha Garien (the cop) found lurking in the cell with a murder suspect she suspected was innocent. The demon immediately asked to be bound by her, in order to seek revenge on his killer and offered to solve the murder for her if she did. Prudently, she got it to agree to a snap contain (in her badge) until they could negotiate further. The demon agreed, thus setting up for the events described at the end of today's session.  Tasha's player has since guessed that this demon may be the ghost the Stephen's victim.  In the final scene tonight, that demon broke out of her contain and convinced Stephen to bind him.  Tasha's player now realizes that Stephen has bound the very demon that was seeking revenge against him.  Stephen's player doesn't seem to have noticed this, despite no real effort to keep him in the dark.

Funny how unbound demons in search of a sorcerer have proliferated in this game. Vincent King, also in an attempt to impress a woman, summoned a passing demon and contained it. It escaped its contain, came face to face with a second sorcerer who attempted to banish it, and ran off into the city. Playing this demon to me suggests that I need to frantically scour the city for a sorcerer to bind me before my need overwhelms me or I simply expire.

[Ron Edwards]

Fantastic. Everything you are saying about secrets and plots is absolutely correct. Planned, they are typically horrible ass, until you realize that the whole point of a secret is to be brought to light; emergent, they're great because you as GM don't have to do a damned thing about them.