Soul moves into production

[Ron Edwards]

Hi everyone,

Well, Sorcerer and Sword has winged its way to the printers, so we're now in that weird space in which *I* feel all done, but *you* are still anticipating.

The disconnection is reinforced, I'm afraid, by my concentration on getting Soul into shape. It's not going to be much altered from the PDF version, with the major exception of the all-new interior art. The text changes include expanding the bibliography a bit, providing some more orientation about what to DO with a relationship map (although the new stuff in Sword helps a lot with that, in an anticipatory way). There's also some more stuff about using the BASIC Humanity rules, as opposed to all the advanced/weird stuff that's already there.

So, last chance! Any comments, issues, or questions that could aid me in getting the final text into the optimum shape?

Best,
Ron

[Blake Hutchins]

The only thing I can think of right now is a clarification of what more versus fewer dice in Humanity mean.  Based on an earlier discussion on this forum, a number of people seem to view Sorcerer Humanity as equivalent to Vampire Humanity, i.e., the fewer dice you have, the less "human" you are.  My understanding is that Sorcerer Humanity represents the resilience of your Humanity trait, however the particular group defines it.  That is, how much you can take before you go over the edge.

I'll take another look at my copy of Soul and see what comes to mind.

Best,

Blake

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Blake,

Yes, after that discussion a while back, I decided to clarify it in Soul. That's a good example of what I meant, in explaining more about the basics before getting into the weird stuff (like Grace, or changing from demon to human, and so on).

More!

Best,
Ron

[jburneko]

Well, for what it's worth there are the few standard 'improvements' that I think most games and Sorcerer in particular can benefit from:

1) More of the author's personal biases, goals and asumptions.  Feel free to tell us in great gory detail specifically how YOU handle given situations and issues.  I think most gamers are intelligent enough to know that they are free to do whatever the hell they want with a given product.  I just like gaining a Perspective of Intent so to speak.

2) More clearly marked, compared and constrasted points where you feel Sorcerer breaks the most widely accepted concept of what a role-playing game is and about.  My general formula for such a point is to note that it is different from the standard RPG mold, reiterate what the standard RPG mold is, explain how this point is different from the standard RPG mold and then most importantly explain WHY you chose (prefer) to do it this way.

(I'm having deja vu.  In all seriousness have I written a paragraph almost identical to the one above before?  I know I've said similar things before but the wording feels frightenly familiar.  Weird.)

Example: Remember our discussion about why Chapter 4 of the main rulebook was placed where it is.  It would have been nice if a summary of that discussion was the intro paragraph of that chapter.  Particularly, when you told me that the chapter was for PLAYERS as well as GMs, which is different from the assumptions of most RPGs, I went home and reread Chapter 4 and it COMPLETELY changed my perspective on how the information in that chapter was meant to be used.  When I read it before I was kind of like, "Yadda, Yadda, Yadda, yeah I know, I (the GM) should consider all this at some point.  Why is this here?"  But when you read it as something the PLAYERS should concern themselves with it becomes something fresh and new and far more deep and involved than I orginally suspected.  Before our discussion the chapter was obligatory and out of place.  AFTER our discussion the chapter was revolutionary and placed very apropriately.

3) My personal pet peeve: Annotated In Play Examples.  Your examples are 9 times out of 10 "set up" examples.  That is they show us how a Sorcerer or Demon was initially constructed with VERY good commentary on why it was constructed the way it was and in what direction it was headed in.  It would be nice to see some follow through examples showing us key parts of that journey.  So many RPGs suffer from this problem.  They're very good at showing us how to setup initial conditions and somtimes they're very good at showing us how to concieve potential endings, but they're almost always very poor at showing us how to get from the one to the other.

Now that I think about it the above helps me realize why I enjoy that 'Directors/Writers/Producers Commentary' feature on so many DVDs these days.

Edited Note: These are of course my GENERAL comments of opportunities to look for as you a revising.  Sorcerer's Soul is in fact almost one large instance of #2.  I thought I'd just make that clear.

Jesse

[ This Message was edited by: jburneko on 2001-10-09 15:00 ]

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jesse,

Regarding the view of "me" in the text and so on, both supplements are a LOT more in-your-face than the basic rulebook, and quite a lot more of me-as-person is visible. I've tried hard to keep it at the service of whatever point is being made, rather than just being attitude all by itself.

About your #2 point, I agree that the very existence of 'Soul (and the game as a whole) is one big instance. We differ a bit in terms of how much "orienting" is to be done. People differ in how much they find effective. I have to confess that Sorcerer is written to people who are at the end of their rope with most traditional RPG design, and who are pre-primed to say, "YES! That's what I can do and enjoy." Not so much for people who WOULD be interested if they were walked through every transitional step to get to that point. And - if I may be so bold - your own writings about Narrativism for those who can't "see" it but would like it are far better informed about how to get there than anything I could write.

As I've mentioned before, my presence on-line is my "corrector" or better, my clarifying role at the one-on-one level. There's no way to write something like Sorcerer to render it completely clear to anyone, at any degree of personal development (to ANY focus, not just Narrativism). For artistic and logistic reasons, I wrote it to people "like me" at the time, and now I follow up with a more tailored approach on-line. (Remember, it's billed as a specialty-game, not an "appeal to anyone" game - that stuff about the whiskey is dead serious.)

Annotated In Play Examples. ... You're right. Such things would be wonderful, and I continually find myself craving them in Hero Wars. However, in practice - they are a bitch. They are really hard to write, because they require a reader who is ready for THAT point, at THAT time of reading. I'm thinking that an on-line version of such things on the website would be a great idea.

These are great insights, Jesse. I don't think my responses to them will be showing up as prose in the supplements, but I hope to address them much more carefully and visibly at the site, once the on-line service gets revamped.

Best,
Ron