[Sorcerer] drop-in long-form Fake-Ass Japan?

[James_Nostack]

In the past few weeks I've been starting several threads about "best practices" in running Sorcerer, and this is what they were leading up to.

My current gaming scene consists of maybe 12-20 local folks who hang out on a forum, and when a game sounds interesting, people will drop on by.  This makes it very easy to schedule certain kinds of episodic games, like a Dungeons & Dragons delve or a one-shot of James Bond 007, because all you need is "any 4 out of 12" rather than "these particular 4 people over and over again."  But a lot of early-to-mid-2000 Forge games seem to envision a specific group of players, so that people who played in session X will also be playing in session X+1.

My impression is that Sorcerer is one of these.  But need it be?

Here's what I'm really tempted to do: open-ended long-form game set in Let's-Not-Be-Anal-About-History Japan. 

Inspirations: Tomoe Gozen of course; Kurosawa's samurai flicks; the film Onmyoji.  Also, we did an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Oriental Adventures game six weeks ago which sorta did nothing for us mechanically, but was still a blast to play as a scruffy, lower class Toshiro Mifune type dude, accompanied by his even more scruffy and extra-lower-class miniature yeti, stole an invitation to an aristocratic wedding and had to foil the vengeful ghost of a teenage girl, as well as ninjas wearing Spider-Man costumes.  (The basis for this was Zeb Cook's OA1: Swords of the Daimyo, which has absolutely atrocious railroad adventure, coupled with an absolutely great sandbox hex crawl.)

The game would be designed to be pretty long-form.  The super big picture stuff involves your standard dynastic struggle - in this case, running somewhat in parallel between 4 families and 2 generations.  This ultra-high-level relationship map then trickles down into local politics, which then ramifies into towns with their own set of Dogs in the Vineyard style problems.  None of which any of the players have to give a hoot about, since they'll be doing their own thing and working on their own kickers.

The big problem here would be the drop-in/drop-out nature of play, where somebody might show up randomly - which we can kind of handle by doing char-gen on our forum, but more problematically, when a particular player can't show at all that night.

The way we've handled this in D&D is saying, "Look, at the end of the night you guys have to get back to a safe spot," i.e., a holding position.  (Cliffhangers are rough, because you might start a fight with your best guys raring to go, and then the next session they all have scheduling conflicts and it's your B-Team in the front lines.)

But I'm trying to figure out what the equivalent is for Sorcerer.  Obviously, don't end with a character in mid-bang.  That kinda sucks, because that's my favorite way to end Sorcerer sessions: with the players confounded, amused, and horrified all at once.  But I think it also may imply a more langorous style of play, since if characters are separated in space (as seems likely in Sorcerer unless they have a strong incentive to "party up"), it can become pretty easy for one guy to get separated in time, too.  So there needs to be some careful tracking of time when someone rejoins after a brief absence.

The other thing is that I've got to fight against my "sorcerer's coincidence" impulse, in which there's some back story tying everyone together somehow.  That's nice when everyone's around - but if you don't know who's going to show up, or who might drop in later, it's pretty much impossible and you need to be low key about such things.

What else is horribly ill-considered about this idea?  I feel like I am setting out to void Sorcerer's warranty somehow.

[Ron Edwards]

My only advice: let in-game time be a little vague during play when characters are separate and active, and that permits retroactive ordering as needed. This is surprisingly effective and fun.

I once played a game which had some problems, but did feature this effect very successfully. Two characters were quite active having been thrown together, and the third was totally off in his own space, doing unrelated things. We cut back and forth between this for a while. But then, it made sense to say "hey, all that stuff with the third guy happened twenty-four hours ago," and wham, there he was, right in place to encounter the other two characters (details of why that made so much sense are too many to go into, and it was over a decade ago). All we had to do was retrofit all of his scenes we'd just seen played with the caption "the day before," which turned out to be no problem.

This isn't a Sorcerer-specific technique and I don't really recommend it as an intended feature of a given session. I do think, however, that it bears considering when you're trying to work with the interesting constraints you've set up here, as an opportunistic device.

Best, Ron