[Sorcerer] Multiple runs with the same character(s)?

[James_Nostack]

I've run Sorcerer maybe 4 times for a total of about 25-30 sessions.  None of these runs have involved the same fictional people or the same fictional premises.  But the rules do specify that this is possible.

I think Judd must have done this in Mu - a zillion years ago he had three or four threads about Mu's Bed on RPG.Net - Clinton may have done this in the Clicking Sands setting, and I imagine Ron's done it at least once or twice.

What's the game like when the same folks come 'round for a second (or third, or fourth...) pass?  Is there a point where the shared history of the characters becomes its own backstory / R-Map, relieving the GM of having to do all that heavy lifting at the start?  What's been the fictional rationale for these sorcerers sticking together / bumping into each other again?  What's happened to those poor merely human bastards plugged in the back-of-the-sheet crosshairs as multiple arcs pass through?  Has anyone ever done the "prequel" or "out-of-sequence" play alluded to at the end of the core rules and referenced more substantively in Sorcerer & Sword?

[Jesse Burneko]

I've never done multiple runs with the same characters in basic Sorcerer.  At the end of the last game I ran we talked about what that would entail but we didn't do it.  It took me a while to catch on to why Ron was always so excited and proud of the fact that you get to rewrite your character as part of the "reward" of play.  Then I realized, you HAVE to rewrite your character to keep playing.  Sorcerer finishes off a character so completely *as written* that you need to put in new work and effort if you want to keep going. 

That's why I think most people don't do it.  "But the character is done!" they think.  I think people are used to getting to the end of a "run" and still having a lot they could/want to do with a character as they are currently playing them.  That just doesn't happen to Sorcerer.  Your character is done.  You either stop or recommit almost as if you were starting over.

That said, I did play a couple of back-to-back Sorcerer & Sword games with the same characters.  But we only time jumped forward.  Then we played a third game in the same setting but with fresh characters.  So I'm not sure that really counts.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

HI James,

We might need to nail down the terminology a little. Kicker resolution is a defined in-fiction effect with mechanical consequences, per character. And a session is a given get-together time for playing, for the group of real people. Whereas "story" is less defined, and is obviously some combination of the two - Kicker resolutions for the characters, which may or may not be simultaneous, and one or more sessions.

I'm pretty sure what you mean is playing a character after a Kicker resolution and re-write, although I'm not sure if you mean while other characters are still unresolved or more generally, for all of them. It looks sort of as if you mean the latter, with terms like "next pass."

Assuming that's right, I've done it a couple of times, but not as often as I would have liked. It's very significant to Sorcerer's design that you play a given character only insofar as he or she is thematically unresolved. The notions of playing the character so you can see how he or she improves or powers-up, or so you can experience the very big sweep of the GM-created or -managed epic, simply don't apply. It's totally about "playing my character," and in the logic/vision of the game, that only means "address Premise."

Once resolved, whether you want to reboot the character in a newly unresolved way is up to you. Nothing's stopping you. But nothing's inducing or prompting you either. I think of this part of Sorcerer's design as one of RPG design's few test-cases of the supposition that "just doing it" is so fun and rewarding that people "just keep playing" because it's so awesome. (Prince Valiant is another such test case.) Needless to say, I think that supposition is false. If you really want to "play your character," then Sorcerer says, "OK!" with no mis-appropriated, mis-leading, and generally goal-subverting reward mechanisms in place.

That ties right into your other concern about the rationale for these characters to stay together or to be together again, which is nonsensical to me. If the players (i) all want to play these particular characters again, and (ii) want to play together themselves, as this particular group of people (including the GM), again, then whatever fictional justification gets put into place is simply sufficient already, by definition - no matter how thin.

Let's talk about protagonist-centric fictional material, putting aside gaming notions. Sorcerer does not apply to characters intended for serial fiction, but rather to characters written for, or discovered in, an especially compelling work. Such characters sometimes exist only for (or in) that one story, and sometimes they take off and become a recurring character in more stories (in whatever in-fiction chronological order. Sometimes this is Teh Awesome (Conan), sometimes it's ass (Tarzan), and sometimes it's in between (John Carter). The rules are there to permit this to happen, again, if and only if that's what people want to do. It's not treated as the gaming notion that "play forever, ongoing" is the ideal.

Everyone has their ideas about how The Wire might have been better, and mine is maybe a little unusual - I would have liked to see more discontinuity among seasons, rather than less. As far as I'm concerned (pure viewer, independent of my knowledge of the constraints shows actually have), the Barksdale saga should have finished with the first season, with perhaps Stringer being central later as a breakout character, and McNulty should have become a minor character much as he was in season 2, or even more so. To be fair, The Wire did do this vastly more than most multiple-season shows do, but as I see it, the tension between central/starring cast and seasonal story-integrity occasionally diminished the show's strengths. Unlike a number of viewers, I really liked season 5's focus on a non-McNulty protagonist and think that McNulty should have been merely an initiator of a crisis, as he was in season 2.

I bring this up to answer your questions about the NPCs: some fade out, some are wrapped up, and some breakout into new roles relevant to the current diagrams. Given that this what happens to NPCs during long-term, during-Kicker Sorcerer play anyway, I don't see the problem.

One of the things I'd like to see develop as a result of the new annotations is to remove this misplaced perception and practice of "heavy lifting" for the first session. Yes, there is some GM preparation, but very little compared to most traditional gaming and not even all that much compared to a number of games which don't receive this criticism (e.g. Monsterhearts, which procedurally is Sorcerer). Part of the problem certainly arose historically from people seizing upon the Relationship Map method from The Sorcerer's Soul before they had learned the basics of play using the player-characters' diagrams alone. Some people were ready for this (Jesse, Christopher) and many were not.

Best, Ron