[WoD 2.0] Why the Supernatural? Why Now?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Robin,

I have seen any concrete event or realization be an effective Kicker - the only requirement is that both the player and GM were honestly jazzed to see it become important in play (and therefore would play the character accordingly).

I often advise people to establish some certainty about this "honest jazzing" through communicating with one another about it.

Since many role-players are trained in way that I can only describe as "anti-Kicker," my advice often takes the form of writing a Kicker which is absolutely explicit and very clearly connected to the player-character's background and various ethical dilemmas.

That is not definitional. A Kicker can be as vague and seemingly disconnected to the character-as-written as an ordinary morning which ends, "and then my cat told me, in plain English, that my fly was unzipped!"

This is a suitable Kicker because there's really no way to react neutrally to such an event. However, whether this is a good Kicker depends entirely on whether the real people involved, i.e. player and GM, take the ball and run with it, in terms of Humanity and other features of the game (talking about Sorcerer).

You know your players, and I don't. You know, relative to a given piece of player-written text you're looking at, whether [insert name of player here] will take the ball (which is to say, whatever you as GM do with that text) and run with it or not. As long as the answer is "yes," then all is well.

Best,
Ron

[Robert Bohl]

You know your players, and I don't. You know, relative to a given piece of player-written text you're looking at, whether [insert name of player here] will take the ball (which is to say, whatever you as GM do with that text) and run with it or not. As long as the answer is "yes," then all is well.

Understood.  That's very clear.  Thank you.

The players in this group tend to view good roleplaying as having their characters do what is most realistic for the personality they've constructed for them.  They seem to enjoy and appreciate when players make their characters do what their characters would do, whether or not the players would (and in at least one case, there seems to be a perverse glee in doing things that the player thinks are really bad but which he can make work for the character).

That tells me that they will most enjoy having the opportunity to fully explore and realize the character's core personality, so that ideally Kickers and other Bangs should somehow enable them to immerse themselves in the otherness of the character, or give them the opportunity to make choices that the player would not make, but the character would.

Hm.

[Monosodium Glutamate]

Perhaps the characters are having what appear to be different and unrelated supernatural experiences... but they're just hallucinating.  Maybe there's a supernatural cause, or maybe they've been exposed to something that causes vivid delusions at unpredictable times.

The implication would be that whatever's causing the problem would be responsible for most claims of supernatural events.