Need? Desire?Huh?

[Zaidaco]

Need and Desire are still giving me grief. The problem lays not so much in how they work (I feel that I have a fairly good grasp of that), but in thinking up appropriate ones.

For instance, in the last play session I Summoned up a new Object demon. It's fairly powerful and Contacting, Summoning, and Binding it nearly stripped me of all Humanity. I had one point by the end.

Cross \ Type: Object \ Need: Sorcerous Study \ Desire: Knowledge \ Telltale: Faint Glow
Stamina: 6 \ Will: 7 \ Lore: 6 \ Power: 7 (a bit over powered, but hey I'm still new at this)
Abilities: (Conferred) Armor \ Boost: Will \ Boost: Lore \ Cloak \ Fast \ Vitality
*note: this is the demon as I thought of it, any changes made are done by the GM
Appearance: A crudely shaped gold cross on a heavy gold chain.

Cross is meant to be a dual sorcery-aid / protection device. Based on the premise I figured that a demon of this type would be very good with a Desire of Knowledge, and the problems began when thinking up something for Need. In the end we decided that Cross needed to be read to, but only from Sorcerous text. At this time that's not too much of a problem as I have a fair library, but I can see in the future (when I run out of books) how this Need will drive me to seek out and obtain new tomes and what not to keep Cross happy.

Now this ended up in a satisfying solution for everyone, but most of the times this is not the case. I'll frequently tear through the creation of the demon on to sit for the next two or three hours trying to come up with that elusive Desire or Need.

Most likely this is because I'm not envisioning what this demons purpose exactly is. But I simply have a hard time getting past the trivial and into the sort of stuff that will really guide the game forward.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Now this ended up in a satisfying solution for everyone, but most of the times this is not the case. I'll frequently tear through the creation of the demon on to sit for the next two or three hours trying to come up with that elusive Desire or Need.

Most likely this is because I'm not envisioning what this demons purpose exactly is. But I simply have a hard time getting past the trivial and into the sort of stuff that will really guide the game forward.

These two paragraphs convey exactly why this is hard for you. First, try thinking of Desire and Need first. Without Need, a demon doesn't exist, and therefore, it has a pretty big effect on what the demon is. Making Need first will help you with the rest of demon creation.

When you see deciding on Need as "the sort of stuff that will really guide the game forward" instead of "getting past the trivial," you'll be playing with gasoline.

[clehrich]

I'm no expert on Sorcerer -- in fact, I haven't had the opportunity to play it -- but I keep reading these threads and I have a suggestion for you.

Remember that the fact that the Demon is not human means that it's not really comprehensible in human terms.  It's inhuman, not just different.

It looks to me like this Desire and Need are kind of close together; they "make sense" as a group.  That, it seems to me, is a place you might want to change things.  Start with something incoherent, something that makes very little apparent sense.

If Cross's basic job is to provide you with sorcerous assistance, why is it, itself, necessarily even remotely interested in doing this?  Because you will feed it, and because you will let it get on with what it really wants.  But there's no reason whatever that this has to have something to do with sorcerous assistance.

Desire: To watch humans suffer emotional trauma
Need: To drink blood -- human, animal, lizard, whatever, but raw

So periodically you have to dunk this Cross thingy into a big old bucket of blood.  Where are you going to get it?  Oh, no problem, you just go down to the local Chinese market and buy a thing of pig blood.  And you keep backups in the fridge.  Of course, what happens when you run low and are on the trail somewhere?  Uh oh....

And basically it would really like you to use whatever means are available to make people unhappy and suffering.  When you discuss sorcerous knowledge with it (if you discuss things with it), it keeps talking about this stuff, which is kind of creepy.  And if you keep trying to be a decent person, it tries to weird you out and make you unhappy, because you know what?  You're human, and if you're suffering, it's happy.  But of course, if you want to be happy and you want the demon to be happy, then you're not going to have -- or anyway, keep -- a lot of friends.

Help you with sorcerous power?  Suuuure.  No problem.  Just so long as I get to watch people squirm.  Hey, any more of that pig blood?  I'm hungry.  What?  More sorcery?  Yeah well, okay, I guess, and....

It can be done, of course, to have the Desire and Need mesh smoothly with the demon's purpose for the PC, but it's tricky and complicated.  I say wait until you're really very confident about how the whole thing works, and you've really gotten used to some nice grief in your life.  Start with something totally insane and incoherent.  Remember that the demon is nothing, but nothing, like you.  It's so alien you cannot begin to comprehend it.  For example, why does it want people to suffer?  I don't know, and I never will.  What does it do with the blood?  I don't know, and I never will.  It's a demon, man.  And if your PC keeps thinking that it's basically a tool, well, pretty soon that PC is going to find out that a pact with a demon just isn't quite what he thought it was.

My inventions here are sort of traditionally evil, blood and suffering, but there's no reason you have to stick to that.  Maybe it desires to be around lots of fine furniture, and you ought to take it shopping and to a museum with a nice furniture collection pretty regularly.  Maybe it needs to listen to shock jock radio, so you have to put it in front of Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh every day... or else.  But there is no reason whatsoever that its desires and its needs are linked, or that either has anything to do with what it's actually good at or useful for.

[Trevis Martin]

Hey Zaidaco,

I think you might look at this post from Ron on Desire and Need because understanding really what the differences are between them is pretty crucial.

best,

Trevis