Lincoln High Sorcerer Demo

[jburneko]

So, I ran the Lincoln High demo for a subset of my weekend group.  The results were well, revealing.  This post is divided into two parts.  The first are my thoughts about the demo.  The second is an interesting analysis of the underlying social dynamic/play preferences of my group that Sorcerer seemed to reveal in a facinating way.

First of all, I'm pretty sure that I still don't "get" how to run this demo because the game lasted WAY TOO LONG.  For something that's supposed to run in only a couple of hours our session went for more than five hours.  Part of it may have had to do with the players waffling a little bit but I'm sure a lot of it had to do with the fact that I still don't quite understand what a quality "bang" is in this demo.  I wasn't sure what to do with my NPCs that would goad the players into meaningful action.

My original fear about the scenario was that it sets things up too much like a Call of Cthulhu game and that it would just devlove into a classic, ask NPC for info, process info, find more info, repeat until bad guy discovered and destroyed situation.  Well, it didn't, and for that I was happy.  But it also didn't really go the other way into lots of meaningful action concerning the PCs/NPCs and their lives.

What happened was the PCs all showed up at the reunion and kind of well... stood there and seemed to be waiting for something to happen.  So, I realized I had to make the first serious move with my NPCs.  So, I started trying to have the NPCs initiate interaction but it always seemed to fall into two categories.  Either the NPCs were non-hostile in that they were genuinely friendly and interested in the PC and there was a lot sort of uncomfortable noding and smiling at each other that didn't go anywhere.  OR the NPCs were semi-antagonistic in that they tried to hash out old grudges in which the player did this strange kind of non-comital side-step action where they could throw the conflict back on the NPC as if they were waiting for the NPC to commit to a path of resolution for them.

Another problem was that the whole PAST thing didn't really come into play.  The players seemed to have no problem talking about their characters in terms of the present or the future but they seemed to have NO interest in actually remembering anything about high school, even the night that they became Sorcerers.  And obviously this isn't a problem if it's a clear act of avoidance or surpression, the scenario covers that but the players seemed to simply not care.  It was just treated as a non-issue.  They kept hunting around for what was happening NOW (generally a good thing) but seemed to have no interested what so ever in making any kind of conection between what's going on NOW and what happened THEN, in either the kind of Call of Cthulhu mystery solving sense OR the Sorcerer making ties to Humanity sense.  It was very weird.

Finally after a long while of this kind of waffling, this kind of strange halted romance began to form between Lee Hinton and Alison.  Also Martin managed to succeed in stealing a demon (he'd failed on a couple early occasions but burning hot/steaming trinkets and needy demons didn't seem to spark the players into action either).  Then the Sorcerer mechanics kicked into play and things went smoother.  As soon as the other players saw the whole Humanity Gain/Loss thing in action with Alison they kind of "got it" and started exploring other relationship avenues with other characters and the fact that a demo had actually been STOLEN seemed to intregue them.  In the end the players all sort of made peace with their past and used that new found release from their personal problems as the impetus for banishing Krogh.

I could only get four of my players to come, so I simply treated it as if there were only four parts of Krough.  Not a big deal.  But the general reactions afterwards was very telling.

Two of the players "got it" for the most part and expressed interest in playing more Sorcerer but they felt that they would prefer a "lighter" Humanity definition.  I finally figured out that what they meant was something with more flare like, Emotional Sanity to create a toridness or Honor to create a swashbuckler.  They felt that simply, "not objectifying people" was too dull and heavy and didn't really produce anything with pizzaz.

The third player seemed overly concerned with protecting his character concept.  He said he liked the game but felt that Humanity should be broken down or perhaps that the player should be allowed to list a few exceptions to Humanity.  The reason he suggested this was because he was playing Lee Hinton and the reason he wrote down for not accepting his success as a poet financially was because he saw his poety as an act of mockery.  He considered the whole world fools for attaching so much meaning and value to that litterary hogwash.  So, when I started calling for Humanity checks when he started mocking people at the reunion he felt he was being punshed for, "just playing his character."  So, he wanted a mechanic where he could list, "mocking sarcasm" as being exempt from Humanity rolls because it was so integral to his character.

It was at this point that I realized that Sorcerer does a REALLY good job of bringing attention to repetitious player behavior that is done in the name of "just playing my character."  The reason he felt hit so hard by the Humanity mechanic was because he simply wanted to react to EVERY conflict, NPC and situation with "mocking sarcasm."  It was his version of that weird non-commital side steping that was going on that was esencially "waiting" for the NPC to fight or take flight.  In some sense the Humanity rolls were FORCING him to move on from that one dimentional behavior and he didn't like that.

The fourth player's reaction was, quite frankly, disturbing.  I knew from the beginning that she wouldn't like Sorcerer and was just glad she was at least giving it a try.  The reason I knew she wouldn't like Sorcerer is because I know that she's into RPGs purely for the personal empowerment fantasy.  Something, that I'd always thought was a little unhealthy and am now completely convinced is VERY unhealthy because it goes beyond what I had originally thought.  I knew that she wouldn't like the fact that she had to rely on a needy sentient entity for the source of her power.  I knew she wouldn't like how difficult it was to contact/summon and bind new demons.  But what I didn't know was what she confessed to AFTER the game.

In addition to the above she said that she didn't really like Sorcerer because she couldn't be cruel.  *Blink, *Blink*, *Blinkety*, *Blink*, *Blink*, *Blink*.  Come again?  She REALLY hated the fact that "compassion towards fellow human beings" was the route to banishing Krough.  Now, being a power gamer because you're into strategy and tactics, is one thing.  Fantacising about killing 100 objectively defined evil Orcs as a stress reliever, is another....  But fantacing about being powerful so that you can mercilessly and without consequence or remose manipulate, torture or kill your fellow HUMAN BEINGS who simply look at you the wrong way, just because you can't in real life, is something ENTIRELY different.  I'm not entirely sure what to make of this situation.

Hope that was insightful.

Jesse

[Jared A. Sorensen]

But fantacing about being powerful so that you can mercilessly and without consequence or remose manipulate, torture or kill your fellow HUMAN BEINGS who simply look at you the wrong way, just because you can't in real life, is something ENTIRELY different.  I'm not entirely sure what to make of this situation.

Have her make a Humanity Check.

[Bob McNamee]

..and ... of course she can be cruel!

She will just lose Humanity... her choice... and will highlight the Premise (same with the dehumanizing sarcastic comments poet...)
The story of that character will be interesting...in a "better to Burnout than Fadeaway" crash into 0 Humanity.

Bob McNamee

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jesse,

How horrible - I wrote the RPG I'd always wanted, and it turns out to be a Rorschach test.

On the other hand, I think that's all right. One of my design goals, way back when, was to write a game in which the players couldn't "hide" behind either their stock-characters or the rules. I'd been playing Champions a long time, and it had always struck me as odd that Player A's role-playing could astonish and delight us all with his fairly-standard-powers character, whereas Player B's was a horrid pain regardless of his character's powers' originality or rules-savvy. (I took pains in that sentence to specify the role-playing, not aspects of their personalities.)

Anyway, to clarify, my goal was that role-playing would reveal the role-player, inasmuch as any creative/expressive work reveals the artist. That's not to say such work produces a full personal revelation, but something of that sort is inherent to creative output.

Pacing and jump-starting the Lincoln High scenario seems to be highly variable across groups. I agree that the Humanity definition is a little deep, or possibly a little dry, although I kept my discussion of it to a minimum prior to play.

Best,
Ron

[A.Neill]

One of the problems I had with the demo – which seems inherent in those embarking on narrative play for the first time, is proactive scene creation by players.

In my own Sorcerer game of four sessions(just finished) my players were just starting to fully believe that they had "creative control" and even then, much potential is still to be realised. When I ran the demo, with a different set of players, they struggled to "get it".

I opened the demo (as Ron suggested) by getting players to describe how their demon's need was last met – and this went some way to helping players with scene creation – but they tended to believe they only had (limited) control over the past – not the present.

Any ideas on how to give players an insight into their authorial power in a 2-3 hour demo?

Alan.

[Uncle Dark]

Jesse,

Fascinating.  Specifically, the reaction of your friend who was upset that she couldn't be cruel.  I see this in two parts:

First, what you told us sounds to me like she was interpreting Humanity loss as punishment from the GM.  Look at the logic (as it might appear to a first-time player):

If I violate the ethical dimensions of Humanity, then I stand to lose Humanity points.  If I lose all my points, I lose my character.  Losing my character puts me out of the game.  Being put out of the game is something to avoid, ergo, losing Humanity is something to avoid.  So the Humanity mechanics are a way of forcing me to play within a certain ethical model (under threat of being put out of play).

It's a pretty gamist view of the Humanity mechanics, sure.  But I can see how someone familiar with "roll 8- to avoid attacking your buddy" or "lose 5,000 XP for alignment change" games might see it that way.

The second point is this: why does her desire to run a fictional character who is cruel to other fictional characters disturb you?  In his Danse Macabre, Stephen King admits to feeling a bit of glee at having killed off 99% of humanity in The Stand.  Does that disturb you?  Why is slaughtering 100 Orcs okay, but being a bitch to the people who mistreated you in high school not?  The Orcs are no more fictional than the people at the reunion.

What I'm getting at is this: is whatever it is that disturbs you about her confession affecting the way you apply Humanity loss checks, or other aspects of how you ran the game?

Lon

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Lon asked Jesse,
... is whatever it is that disturbs you about her confession affecting the way you apply Humanity loss checks, or other aspects of how you ran the game?

To butt in ... my answer, speaking both as GM/player and author of Sorcerer, is "Yes." It's also, "Of course," and, "This is desirable."

In other words, the widely-held myth of the objective GM seems to me to be flawed, for the Narrativist and perhaps any role-playing mode. Aesthetic judgments (where "aesthetic" corresponds directly to that group's shared profile of GNS mode(s)) are fundamental to the act at hand, and they are carried out via any number of mechanisms throughout the whole layered framework that I've presented in theory.

Let's take it to the music metaphor. Say I'm in a band and I, for whatever reason, have a distinctive role in the creation of the songs. Maybe I'm the lyricist, or maybe I'm the guy who everyone turns to for "final cut" judgment, whatever. Now, say there's a person in the band whose playing I cannot stand. It doesn't work, in my view, with the principle or feeling or what-have-you that I consider to be central to the music.

Wham, problem. It doesn't matter who's "right" or who's "fair." It is entirely nonsensical to say, "Oh, try to adapt to that person's style." I'm not talking about personality issues or romantic issues or anything like that - I'm talking about the person's playing. It's competent, it's skilled, it's good for another band or aesthetic. But in this band, according to me, it's poison.

What happens? I can't be a dictator any more than the other person can be the specially-privileged dissident; ultimately, such solutions backfire. It comes down to the group, eventually, and three things can happen.

1) The group generally agrees with me (although a fair amount of interesting face-saving or conflict-smoothing behaviors may be involved) and the person has to go, acrimoniously or happily, whatever.

2) The group likes the synthesis produced by the two different styles, and they go into overdrive to minimize the frustration in practice. The band stays as is.

3) The group generally agrees with the other person and a certain coup or ousting or "rebellion" occurs; I either accept my new status of reduced aesthetic authority or go elsewhere.

I see all of these as normal and necessary to any group leisure activity. It doesn't surprise me that it will show up explicitly in Sorcerer. Before I ever heard of the Threefold, when my RPG theory notes were mainly about Currency, getting a group aesthetic out in the open was a primary design goal for me.

Best,
Ron

[jburneko]

Erm... What Ron said.  I'd REALLY rather not get into psychoanalysing my player.  I included the incident to demonstrate the range of behaviors I felt Sorcerer brought out in my players.  I will say that it just isn't this one incident but a cumulations of behaviors over long term play that were just brought to a head by Sorcerer's telling mechanics.

If you're really THAT curious, private email me and I'll explain it a little more.

Jesse