Aiming?

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hey Ron,

This may have been covered elsewhere.

Now, I think I've finally gotten my head wrapped around the broad concepts of Sorecerer Conflict Resolution.

And then I go check out James' Wiki description.... And I see things like penalties for no aiming, and even taking a whole round to aim...

And I don't know. It just jarred me. It seemed sort of micro-managing the event level, and the penalty seems wierd in a game where I get Bonus Dice for pulling "I do the Flight of Three Cranes my master taught me," out of my ass.

Is this a vestage of some "I wrote it years ago, my thinking has clarifie on a few matters thing," or am I missing somethting here.

I guess my point is, ultimately, "aiming" doesn't sound like very much fun in a game designed to punch out has much color and fun as possible.

I ask because if "aiming" is a whole action in a conflict, my imagination just went *boink* and combat seems very stutter-step rather than this mroe fluid thing of cool actions in conflict with each other.

Or I may be just missing something and have to play it again to see.

Christopher

[Christopher Kubasik]

Oh, one more point...

I could see a moment where "aiming" was a really big deal... if at a distance, and there's a sniper rifle, and the target's only going to be available for a moment... if someone might be able to warn the target or stop the shooter if the initiative rolls go one way or another....

It's the everytime you shoot you aim part... It's seems weirdly old school.

CK

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Actually, I've always liked those rules and I wish I'd been more careful about them in the Sorcerer game I played earlier this year, which was very gun-heavy.

I'll tell you what was on my mind at the time, and which I still support: the point of those rules is mainly about shooting as a highly significant action. It's something a character really wants to do, not some snap-action hurt'im "move" they have in their back pockets when their "to-hit" roll comes up. That also ties into some of my preferred and generally-supported notions about the pacing of Sorcerer announcements and actions. At the most basic, I think people are expecting too much from single rolls in the game.

You see, the whole anime "leapy jumpy kick now!" type announcement really isn't much like raw, street (or corporate) Sorcerer of the core book. Most really effective action in the basic game, or more accurately as I playtested it in the early days, took a couple of rounds to set up. The mention of aiming actually brings guns into line with everything else, rather than slowing guns down relative to everything else.

But times, preferences, and applications changed fairly soon. A lot of people came to Sorcerer via Charnel Gods, which was more oriented toward insta-dice right this second, and my own Demon Cops tended to speed things up and pack more leapy-now moves into single dice rolls too. I think a lot of folks have PTA, My Life with Master, Universalis, The Shadow of Yesterday, and so on all kind of mixed in their heads, and thus the smaller-scale "chunks" of Sorcerer narration (which match very nicely to the most nuanced Pace in the Trollbabe rules) tend to get lost. Which is too bad because the dice mechanics do wonderfully good fight choreography - and allow for significant Humanity-relevant decision-making during the fight - when you apply them at that level.

Best, Ron

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Ron,

Actually, I buy that.

Looking around earlier for clues, I found a thread between you and Jesse about "tasks" and "actions" and such.

Jesse summed it up by saying it was better in Sorcerer to think about shots in a movie instead of moving through time in a lock step physics engine.

The shots and cuts in a movie metaphor obviously jibed with me!

Do you see the same pacing issues in S&Sword as you do in Sorcerer? (You made a distinction in your last post about the "core" book.)

Christopher

[James_Nostack]

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how Sorcerer works & what the design goals might have been.  It seems like there are a few general principles:

1.  You'll never have enough dice to be comfortable, unless you scramble like a fool for modifiers.  (Even then, you won't be comfortable.)

2.  One of the easiest sources of modifiers, is the rollover action thing, either from last round's "real action" or (under special circumstances) a helper-roll this round, like using your Cover or a special descriptor. 

3.  The basic philosophy of the dice thing seems to be, you could roll Anything vs. Anything, if you can figure out how to explain it (and, I guess, if the GM lets you or there's a house rule for it). 

One thing that emerges from these principles is that, in the really Big Conflicts, the ones you just gotta win, it makes sense to take it slowwwwww.  Break that sucker down into all the component parts, so they all feed into each other.  If there's any way you can figure out how to snag a roll-over bonus, or how to roll Anything vs. Anything, do it. 

Thus, the scenes that are do-or-die for you, ought to be foreshadowed with preparatory scenes, and maneuver/manipulation scenes, and so on.  You, as the player, have to give it the weight it deserves in order to stand a chance.  In a way, it's like Bringing Down the Pain in SOY: for the big stuff, you have to slow down to pull it off, and--if you're going to slow down--take a second to think about it, and make it cool.  (I didn't understand that about Sorcerer until a few days ago, and tried to run the combat like a slightly more quippy D&D thing: I hit, no he hits, etc. pacing.  It was kind of lame.  Now I understand it better, and plan to do it very differently.)

So, aiming a gun is probably a handy way of doing this.

(Note that there's probably a lower-limit to the slow-mo, because the rollover bonus is usually only going to be 1-2 dice, which help but are hardly determinative. So if you're chaining a bunch of things together, odds are pretty good it will fall through somewhere along the line, and you've 'wasted' several rounds setting yourself up.)

[Christopher Kubasik]

Ah. That's really smart.

Thanks.

Christopher

[Ron Edwards]

James' answer is well-placed to help with my reply regarding Sorcerer & Sword.

The primary dice-relevant changes in 'Sword are ...

1. Some possible higher scores for a starting character

2. Multiple Pasts rather than just one Cover (extreme example is "Immortal" with tons of Pasts, with the exclusion of the Present) - this is more dice-relevant than it looks due to the modifying rolls James mentioned

3. Necromancy - a new bank of dice in a pool that can keep growing

4. Binding that has a concrete finish-point (Pacts)

5. Bonus dice for ideological spouting-off

6. Annnnd ... (cymbals) - the ability to save and trade-over victories, to modify the results of later rolls

Most of those boil down to "more dice, more of the time," and that's fine, but James is right - more dice just doesn't ever really make you truly comfortable in this game, especially after some experience with it. So that last one is a big deal. It means that the nuanced action of a series of rolls, whether through the course of one conflict or through the course of an entire story, is now manipulable in a way that merely-more-dice will not provide. This is how a character can take on eight foes and win, or bite off a vulture's head while hanging on a cross.

This is a tricky topic because the "size" of a given dice roll, in story terms, is a relative thing. If the story-units involve whole armies clashing over the course of twenty years, then a single roll might be a battle (hypothetically; I've never played Sorcerer at this scale). But for most actions and story-scaling in practice, for Sorcerer, the actions represented by specific rolls occur at a smaller scale than (say) a scene-resolving roll in Primetime Adventures. And it matches very, very nicely to the kind of pacing we see in cinema, not because Sorcerer emulates cinema, but because both it and cinema tap into the same "mental pacing" we use in our minds, for story-telling in general (I think, anyway).

So all that is the long answer, to say that scale-of-action in Sorcerer & Sword is built on (and modifies) the same principles in the core book. Not too surprising, considering that for all intents and purposes, the ideas in the supplement were my starting point for the game.

My emphasis on the core book in my post was aimed at distinguishing my early design thoughts and fundamental features of the system (which I've been at pains, here, to say that I continue to support), from later applications of Sorcerer which haven't really focused on those features.

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Oh yes, and to see where Jesse learned what he was talking about in that instance, see Sorcerer combat. Five years ago ... jeepers!

Best, Ron