Sorcerer & Sword Comments

[Eric]

On 2001-12-24 15:57, Ron Edwards wrote:
Or, I think it's just because I've got the former game on the brain at the moment.

This is what I assumed.  :cool:

What techniques would you recomend for keeping a coherent group dynamic in a general which (in my experience) favors individuals as primary movers, while still maintaining the esential S&S crunchy goodness?

Second.  I want to hear the answer to this one too.  So much of the literature that inspires my friends and I to want to play RPGs is about single protagonists.  

-- Eric, back from a merry X-mas

[jburneko]

On 2001-12-25 15:29, Bailywolf wrote:

What techniques would you recomend for keeping a coherent group dynamic in a genera which (in my experience) favors individuals as primary movers, while still maintaining the esential S&S crunchy goodness?  

I don't have my copy of S&S yet and I never read the .pdf so I can't comment on what is already in the book.  However, I thought I'd take a stab at offering my insight into this since this question can be generalized to "How do you run a multiple protagonist game?"

I've discovered the non-group multi-protagonist scenario is a lot easier to run than it looks.  First of all, as soon as I started throwing non-railroady Premise based conflicts at my play group they naturally fell into two camps.  The first camp I call the Active players.  These are the ones who throw themselves into the fray and DO things with or without my prompting.  This camp of players generally are the actual protagonists.  The second camp of players I call the Passive players.  These are the players who generally don't do much of anything unless I throw something directly at them and then only if it threatens them directly do they actually DO anything.  At first this worried me, however, I began to notice that these players made natural side-kicks for the more active players and they seemed to LIKE it that way and so I stopped worrying about it and things have been fine every since.

I don't know how this will work out for a Sorcerer game since the mechanics themselves assume that the player will be a full on protagonist.  The experience I have above comes from my Deadlands game.

In any event different things interest different players and so the Active players have pretty much broken up although they occasionally enlist each others aid.  They are also in the same location but they are all working with a different set of conflicts that are personal to them.

That's all well and good but how is this all the same story and not a bunch of stories running concurrently?  I personally use a technique I call a relationship tree.  A relationship tree is a little bit like a relationship map but I construct it differently and with a slightly different goal than Ron does.  I'm not comfortable ripping maps from novels for various reasons, so I 'grow' my maps from the players.  Generally, I work from their Kickers backwards.  I take the relationships implied in their Kickers and build layers, driving the relationships back to a root source.  This root source generally ends up 'explaining' each individual character's conflict.

For example in the plain old Sorcerer game I'm putting together I have a psychologist who's Kicker involves a lesbian couple obsessed with sexual violence.  If you trace the branch of the relationship tree that I've grown from this Kicker back to it's root, you'll discover that their obsession with sexual violence comes from a tramatic early childhood experience with a possessor demon.

Another character is a politician.  His Kicker involves cutting funding to religious orginizations including hospitals and as a result he has just received his first death threat.  If you trace back his branch of the relationship tree you'll discover that his stalker is being motivated by the actions of the SAME possessor demon that caused the early childhood trauma in the previous example.

And so on for the other players.  In each case the root cause of their central conflict as outlined in their Kicker somehow involves this possessor demon.

This technique DOES have its pitfalls.  The bigest is that it's REAL easy for this to turn into a Call of Cthulhu style mystery in which the players just have to hunt down the evil and once the evil is vanquished so are all their problems.  But if you notice this is not the case in the above examples.  Discovering the posessor demon and doing away/not doing away with it isn't going to solve their problems.  It's not going to cure the lesbian couple and it isn't going to make the politician's death threat any less real.  They still have to deal with their personal conflicts in full on protagonist mode.  The mystery elements only help them understand their conflict.  It doesn't solve it for them.  My relationship tree has done basically two things.

1) It provides a single 'root' explination for all of the protagonists personal conflicts and thus solidifies the idea that they are in fact part of the same story.

2) It pretty much guarantees that the progtagonists paths will cross at some point.  What that means, who can say, but at least they will get involved with each other at some point.  After all, they're all walking towards the same root.

Hope this was interesting.

Jesse

[jburneko]

Hello Again,

Well, S&S came last night and I got a chance to read most of it.  I simply couldn't put it down and the only thing that prevented it from being a one sitting read was the fact that I started reading it rather late and I was overcome by sleep before I could finish it.  Of course after reading it, I realize that my Relationship Tree comments above were probably not suited to the rest of the discussion.  Damn my over eagerness.  In any event here are my comments about the book.

1) The phrases 'page turner' and 'role-playing suplement' have NEVER been uttered simultaneously from my mouth before now.  THIS is exactly what the role-playing world needs.

2) This is exactly the kind of book I was describing up in my 'Litterary Gamers Guide To...' thread.  After reading it all I wanted was MORE.  I didn't find anything missing but I'm a greedy bastard and I wanted MORE analysis, more food for thought, more of anything of this sort at all.  Just more of everything.  Note: This is a good thing.  It's entirely possible that there isn't any more to be said and that the writing itself was just so compelling that I wanted more of it.

3) Here's my one and only gripe: I still don't understand why Chapter 7(?) The Anatomy of Authored Roleplaying was not moved from S&S into the main rule-book for the print version.  I bought the .pdf of Sorcerer and Sorcerer's Soul basically looking for this EXACT essay.  I had skipped purchasing S&S in .pdf format because I was not interested in running Sorcerer as a fantasy game.  I only purchased it this time around because I discovered through The Forge that what 'fantasy' meant to me and what 'fantasy' meant to Ron were not the same thing.  If it weren't for the interactions here on The Forge I never would have found the thing I was looking for in Sorcerer in the first place.  Namely, the role-playing paradigm shift.

In fact, if I was one of those anoying nay-sayers of the role-playing world, I'd say that that Ron Edwards was leveraging his reputation for having somewhat radical role-playing notions and that spreading that vision out across all three books was a greedy money-grab on his part.  But thankfully, I'm not one of those anoying nay-sayers.

Other than that the book is brilliant and between Sorcerer and Sorcerer's Soul my understanding of Sorcerer and it's goals feels 'complete.'

So, what are the future plans for Adept Press and/or The Sorcerer Line after Soul goes to print?

Jesse

[Paul Czege]

Here's my one and only gripe...

Okay...since you started it Jesse...my one gripe is that the Les Evans artwork is too awesome to have been reproduced so small. The page design is excellent, and the sizing of the artwork layout-wise is excellent, but the artwork itself really demands to be reproduced larger. I think the detail of the artist's work has been done a bit of a disservice.

In fact, if I was one of those anoying nay-sayers of the role-playing world, I'd say that that Ron Edwards was leveraging his reputation for having somewhat radical role-playing notions and that spreading that vision out across all three books was a greedy money-grab on his part.

I don't own the .pdf either, but my impression is that the "Anatomy of Authored Roleplaying" has been substantially written over what it was previously, subsequent to the typesetting of the Sorcerer hardcover. I think Ron has said that it represents his "most current thinking" on Narrativist roleplaying.

Paul

[jburneko]

On 2001-12-27 13:31, Paul Czege wrote:

I don't own the .pdf either, but my impression is that the "Anatomy of Authored Roleplaying" has been substantially written over what it was previously, subsequent to the typesetting of the Sorcerer hardcover. I think Ron has said that it represents his "most current thinking" on Narrativist roleplaying.

Ah, I figured that might be the case.  It's a shame since I'm convinced that there are people who will probably pick up Sorcerer, read it, and not 'get it.'  The "Anatomy" essay goes a LONG LONG way to fixing that fear of mine.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

Paul's right. Sorcerer and Sword underwent a substantial rewrite throughout 2001, and Chapter 7 had entered editing-draft form during GenCon. A number of hotel-room discussions entailed whipping out the scribbly pages and waving them around.

Also, just so people don't get the wrong idea, The Sorcerer's Soul is not being rewritten to the extent that the first supplement was. Lots of new art and a lots of clarifications, but not much difference of content.

Best,
Ron

[James V. West]

Damnit.

Now I have to order S&S. I already have Sorcerer on the way, now I have to get this one too.

You see, I've been working on a sword and sorcery game for a couple of weeks now. I even broke out the old Conan stuff. And now I find out that Ron Edwards has already done that too. (you'd think that by the title I would have guessed that his book was about s&s...duh)

Damnit.

I can't wait to see it.

[Trav]

Before I read Sword and Sorcery I never read any Conan before.  I went to my local used book store and actually found one written by Robert E. Howard, and let me say thank you for spurring me towards reading his work.  

In the book, there is a letter written by Howard talking about how he didn't ever think of Conan chronologically.  I think that Sword and Sorcerer does an excellent job of getting that feel that Howard tried to do with Conan.