[OrcCon][Sorcerer] Winter of Discontent

[jburneko]

Hello Everyone,

So this weekend was OrcCon here in L.A. and it was the first con I've attended here in about three to four years.  I got to meet Paul Tevis and Joshua BishopRoby which was an extreme pleasure.  I got to play Dogs in the Vineyard one-on-one with Josh.  Since he was GM, I'll give him first crack at posting.  I'll post individually about the games I ran, starting with the small Sorcerer game I put together.

I was inspired by Ron's demo game at GenCon where he had just one PC shared by the players.  I really wanted to give that a try and constructed a scenario around that concept.  It's funny but when I went to review Ron's demo post I discovered that the PC he constructed and the PC I constructed were very similar.  I don't know if that's because I had his PC working in my subconcious or because the core concept works so well for a single PC.  The biggest similarity was that both the characters were females dealing with an arranged marriage.

The setup I used was set in my Gothic Sword & Sorcery setting.  The basic setup was that the PC (Myra Van Holten) was once engaged to a man named Kurt, whom she loved very much.  The wedding was attacked by bandits and Kurt and Myra's mother were both killed.  Myra tried using her sorcerous powers to bring Kurt back, using his cloak as a necromantic token.  It failed and instead she ended up with the cloak as an object demon, which she calls Kurt anyway.

That's her Origin story.  Her Kicker is that a few days before the anniversary of the disasterous wedding her father has announced that he's arranged a new marriage for her.

I had this set up as a scheduled 2 hour game Saturday morning but I had no takers.  I had put in the description that there would be just one PC shared by the players so everyone would know what they were getting into.  It's funny how that got read when I overheard things about it a little later.  I went to turn in my blank enrollement sheet to HQ and the person who took it from me looked at it and said, "Oh, this is the game with multiple-personalities."  Another responded, "Oh yeah, I remember hearing people discuss that.  Most were affraid it would just disolve into a bitch fest."  Interesting, I thought.

Fortunately, I got to run this scenario later in the open-gaming room with Josh and two of his friends... Paul's friends...mutual friends...who were those people?  Curse my memory.  Anyway, it was Josh, another guy and a woman.  They did a great a job of sharing Myra.  I did pick up on a tendancy to play Myra up to the point of a major decision and then pass control to the next player.

Interesting bang: I revealed that the person her father had chosen for her was Kurt's best friend and old romantic rival Heinrich.  But that wasn't the interesting bang.  For some, really deep seeded, intuitive reason I had decided that Myra's mother had favored Heinrich over Kurt but had wanted to honor Myra's wishes.  When Myra chose Kurt, Myra's mother gave Heinrich a locket with Myra's picture in it.  When I brought that locket out and explained where it came from it really registered on the faces of the players.  It was one of those, "Well, now, that changes everything," looks.

It's funny how when you plan a scenario weeks in advance you spend some time speculating on what might happen... and inevitably the players choose the one thing you didn't think of.  I remember it was the woman who did this, she had Myra ask Heinrich to prove his love for her by murdering her father.  First (of many) Humanity Checks.

Game Observation: I see why Sorcerer makes such a crap con game even if you get past the "GM makes up the character" problem, which from the way the players latched onto Myra I don't think was a problem at all.  With time being so tight you have to make a very tight situation which is already at maximum crisis.  This leaves very, very, very little room for Humanity Gain since Sorcery and Awful Decisions start flying pretty fast.

Rules Question: Speaking of Humanity drain.  At one point I revealed that Myra has a half-brother that her dad fathered on one of the servants long ago.  He exiled the servant and the child out into the forest.  Myra found out about this half-brother through the servant who came to house looking for him because he had gone missing.  One of the players, the other guy, not Josh, wanted to use his sorcerous power to locate the half-brother.  Great.  So I explained Contacting, Summoning, and in this case, Pacting.  The player gave me a nice description of capturing a fly to go "be my fly on the wall."  We agreed the demon really only had one ability a form of Perception.  With a Will of 3 that gave it a Power of 4 and with a series of BAD rolls promptly drained Myra to zero Humanity.

Before I explain how I handled this situation I do have a rules question.  I remembered later that & Sword (which technically this was a game of) gives rules for basically "one trick" magic items.  Since this was just an information gathering scene and since Myra's Lore descriptor was "Birthright Apprentice" it struck me that having something like a crystal ball (like in "The Scarlet Citadel") or a magic mirror (more appropriate to my setting) would have been just fine.  Would that have been a Past roll, to see if such an item was handy, followed by a Lore roll to activate it?

Humanity Zero: I simply applied the rule I usually use in this setting.  Kurt gets banished, player enters a disoriented nightmare state in which BAD THINGS happen, I normally do the drop the scores by 1 thing but I forgot in this case.  When Myra awoke she found her half-brother alright, and the Power 9 vine demon named Vilosh that was keeping him in a nightmare coma with Psychic Forces and applying Vitality to Myra's mother's corpse keeping it well preserved.

Vilosh has a nasty perception ability defined as, "Memories of the Dead." plus warp, meaning it could shape it's vines into the facial features of Myra's mother and pretend to be her.  It was through Vilosh that Myra learned that her father was trying to raise her mother from the dead.

It was from here that things got very interesting very fast.  Myra confronted her father about speaking with mother.  To which her father replied, "Whatever you saw, or thought you saw, know that it wasn't your mother."  At that point I reminded the players that Sorcerers can attempt to command any demon.  Josh had Myra go back to the tomb and order Vilosh to explain exactly what it was and what it's agenda was.  He earned some bonus dice for adding the nice touch of threatening it with a torch and despite Vilosh's Will of 7, earned a whoping 6 Victories.  To which Josh asked, "Can I use these six victories to attempt to rebind Vilosh to myself?"  At which I smiled and nodded and said, "Yes, sir, you may."  Very nice Sorcerer moment.

Bug is really Feature Moment: At that point the players wanted Myra to go dig up Kurt and have Vilosh preserve, and if posssible, revitalize his corpse as well.  Vilosh only had the Vitality ability once and in my mind it was never defined to affect multiple targets.  I had one of those stutter momments but then quickly recovered when I realized, what a great bang.  Vilosh can only preserve one, you must CHOOSE!  Muahahah!  They chose mother for the time being since Kurt was already quite decayed.

A lot of little events happend in here like Heinrich showing up drunk to confront Myra's father and Gustav, the half-brother, beating her/his father senseless.  These moments provided the few Humanity Gain opportunities for Myra as she tried to stop the brawling men.

Towards the end, the players had decided they wanted to use the family's (Myra, her father, her half-brother (lore 1)) united sorcerous power to raise mother and Kurt from the dead.  Myra persuaded her father to let her in on his plans.  She suceeded and her father took her down to his secret ritual chamber where he revealed that he has, for many months, been sacrificing many local peasents to turn his wife's wedding ring into a necromantic token.  He also reveals that the final grand sacrifice was going to be Myra and Heinrich when he was going to recreate the disasterous wedding.  Her father thought that perhaps with the combinded family sorcery as Myra suggested perhaps Heinrich's death alone would be sufficient.

I saw real horror register on the players faces.  It was particularly clear with the woman player that this was rock bottom.  There was no way she was going to go through with this.  So the players confered and agreed that this was just too much.  So instead, Myra lures her father back to the tomb with the rebound Vilosh and orders Vilosh to kill him.  We have one final Humanity Check which drops Myra back to zero and we agree that's a good ending point.  Vilosh eats Myra's father and Myra walks away a sociopath forever.

The other guy, not Josh, comments: "I think the world is a better place without both of us."  Nice.

More Game Observations:

1) I can Talk-the-Talk about Sorcerer's system but I still can not Walk-the-Walk.  I find the complex conflict system still very difficult to use properly.    I especially have trouble shifting from "just playing" to "now this is a conflict."  I particularly have trouble discerning when something is the actual stated intention of the player and what's just color actions leading up to the intended stated action.  Within a multi-round conflict I get choked up over what counts as describing the outcome of the previous round and what counts as the next action in the sequence.  Bleh.  I need to practice this in not such a crazy environment in a con and take things more slowly.

2) Josh pointed out that in Sorcerer the GM does a lot of rolling against himself.  It's true.  In a three way conflict between one PC, one NPC and one Demon two thirds of the rolls are on the GM's side.  There's also things like does an NPC Sorcerer spot a Demon's telltale?   When Vilosh broke the binding with Myra's father is another good example.  The complex fights between Myra, Heinrich/Gustav, and her father is another good example.  I think another thing I need to practice is giving each of these rolls more flare in their narrated setup and outcomes.  I think that would midigate the "book keeping" feel for them.

Hope that was interesting.

Jesse

[Josh Roby]

Sara and Ryan were the other two players. :)

This was a nice, compact con-setting situation that went from start to finish in less than two hours, and it played out in a pretty interesting fashion.  Our hand-off narration that we sort of fell into was entertaining enough that I'll have to keep it in my back pocket for some later game design.  What it turned into was "get the girl into a really bad situation and then hand her off to the next player" and that turned out some awesome "poor choices" that really drove the story in ways that purely player-centric play does not.

I'm still sketchy on the dice, though.  As Jesse mentioned, he did a lot of rolling against himself, and I can't imagine what happens when my PC sends a demon to go fight another sorcerer's demon -- that's a lot of me watching dice roll.

[jburneko]

Hey Josh,

The Demon vs. Demon situation is often refered to as the Pokemon problem.  There are quite a few threads in the Adept Press forum about it.  From my experience playing Sorcerer this situation is actually extremely rare.  But when it does happen it happens under two conditions.

1) Offscreen.  "Fly, Fly my pretty and bring me the head of Azergoth!"  In this case I don't do a whole round-by-round encounter.  I just roll once.  Harsh but that's Sorcerer.  All the player ever sees is the outcome.  Erie silence, the head of Azergoth, or a beaten deamon pleading for forgiveness from its master.

2) On Screen with the PC present.  In such cases two Sorcerer's throwing demons at each other in isolation is WAY WAY WAY rare.  Usually, there's something else going on in the scene that's interesting.  Let's say Myra still had Kurt the Cloak when she met Vilosh and decided to throw Kurt at Vilosh in tangled battle of vine and cloak.  Kurt's desire is Love of which Myra's mother and Gustav (the half-brother) and Kurt's corpse all represent threats to.  Chances are I would have thrown in Kurt trying to use the opportunity to destroy any of those things in the heat of battle.  Thus the player stays engaged trying to keep the damn demon under control.

Now, that's more of me, Talking-the-talk.  Would I have thought of that during actual play?  I don't know.

Jesse