Sorcerer Combat

[jburneko]

Hello There,

This might end up to be one of my thinking out loud posts.  So, I ran a session of my monthly Deadlands (yes, this will get around to Sorcerer) game this last weekend and I ran what I think amounts to one of the best action sequences I've ever experienced in an RPG.

Okay, so the players are toting barels of gun powder across the Arizona desert in a Roman War Chariot while being chased by Medeval Knights in full plate mail. (Don't Ask).  Now I've pulled this from a prewritten scenario in one of the sourcebooks but I've modified it heavily to suit my needs.  In the book, the Marshal is instructed to essencially 'ignore the rules' and just, 'make the players' sweat.  I hate when games tell you to do that but I put the book down started making fake die rolls and just directing the scene in the most exciting way I could think of.

Whoa!  What a DIFFERENCE!  Now, since I was just making this stuff up I let the players basically do the same (something I'm trying to encourage in them, anyways).  One guy wanted to know if the chariot had a shield.  (Right idea, now if I could get them to stop asking me and just DO.)  So, sure, why not?

Anyway, it was a BLAST.  It was one of the smoothest most exiciting chase sequences I've EVER run.  We were still using the rules for various things like keeping control of the chariot, deflecting arrows, leaping from the chariot to the horses...  Still fairly task based in it's nature.

Thankfully, my resident rules lawyer wasn't present and everyone just rolled with the punches so to speak.  But the whole experience got me thinking about action sequences in systems with other design considerations.  The most readily available example I have on hand is Sorcerer.

Now Sorcerer really has 4 things in it you don't find in your standard RPG.

1) An open announcement phase in which all actions are freely declared and amended.  This is presumably to encourage a cooperative narrative in a collaberative effort to produce the most exciting scene possible.

2) The dice resolve conflicts and not individual actions.

3) The die that resolves your conflict ALSO determine the 'initiative' order.

4) You basically can't defend yourself until you've taken your action.  Otherwise you lose your action.

It seems that these three result in some strange and possibility contradictory manner.  Now, obviously I haven't actually TRIED this so maybe some of the situations I was thinking about don't really apply but how do you deal with the following situations:

1) Player X wants to have his action immediately follow Player Y's action.

a) Player X gets a higher initiative than Player Y.  Not so much a problem since I assume that Player X can simply wait until Player Y goes.

b) Player X gets an initiative lower than Player Y with other characters going in between.  However, Player Y wanted to go immediately after Player X.

c) Player X would like to apply the victories from Player Y's roll as added dice for his roll since his action flows from Y's.  However, all die rolls are made at the same time.

2) What exactly is a 'conflict'?  Is jumping from a moving chariot to the horses a conflict?  How about retrieving a cigar that has fallen amongst several powder kegs?  What about controling a high speed moving vehicle?

a) Theoretically a player can take an infinite number of non-conflict based actions before needing to roll dice.  Obviously this is silly and common sense can be used as a guide.  However, what happens to that player if he or she is taking non-conflict oriented actions that can impact a scene while other players are resolving conflict based actions?  Where does their action go off in the initiative order if no dice rolling is needed?  How soon can they defend themselves without losing said action?

All these came to mind while pondering the Sorcerer rules.  Any thoughts?

Jesse

[Mike Holmes]

Hi Jesse,

For point 1 I'd personally just say that the resolution can be stated in any order just as long as someone who has initiative over another says its OK. That is that having initiative over another might allow you to say that you get to decide your portion first, but if you agreed to do something simultaneously, or in a certain order during the declaration that it just happens that way. Initiative between characters is most important for when they are facing off against each other (like in the GenCon demo where we all blew each other to smithereens).

For point 2 you have it right. Common sense. And there is quite a lot of flexibility. Just realize that if you chuck a whole lot into a particular resolution that if it comes out bad, it may be worse, as you're gambling more on that one roll. Even if the GM decides not to hose you for that particular action when you fail, he may be totally justified in hosing you hard elsewhere to keep your charcter interest high.

Make sense?

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jesse,

SITUATION ONE
"1) Player X wants to have his action immediately follow Player Y's action.
"a) Player X gets a higher initiative than Player Y. Not so much a problem since I
assume that Player X can simply wait until Player Y goes.
"b) Player X gets an initiative lower than Player Y with other characters going in
between. However, Player Y wanted to go immediately after Player X.
"c) Player X would like to apply the victories from Player Y's roll as added dice for
his roll since his action flows from Y's. However, all die rolls are made at the same
time."

Well, this whole situation is a lot riskier in Sorcerer than in a traditional RPG which (a) sets the order of announcement/action as a unit and (b) permits "saved actions" as a way to tweak that order during the resolution phase. So the first thing is attitude adjustment - Sorcerer works differently and imposes different limitations.

The main thing to realize is that the basic, fundamental goal of #1 is NOT guaranteed. In fact (and this is going to hurt!), (a) is incorrect. That's right - if X gets a higher roll than Y, X is screwed! His action goes off BEFORE Y's, in a classic fuckup of interpersonal timing. This result is going to horrify gamers who are not used to it. (Of course, these same gamers are used to crit-hit tables which irreversibly maim their PCs, which I consider far more abusive; that's why this is a familiarity-issue rather than an abuse-issue.)

In the (b) situation, this is no big deal unless the intervening characters' actions nullify X's action. Y's action worked, but X takes a shot to the head before his action comes up, and  thus X's planned action might be hosed. If X chooses to suck-up the damage and continue with the planned action, that is OK (the action might end up with lots of penalties though). If X chooses to defend and abort the planned action, that's OK too.

The (c) issue does get tricky. What I do is simply give the PC the extra dice right then and there, which may change his highest-value but does NOT change the order of action. This actually does a fine job of expressing the "wow!" of an especially well-done shot in a cinematic action sequence, during play. It's unexpected and dramatic.

SITUATION TWO
"2) What exactly is a 'conflict'? Is jumping from a moving chariot to the horses a
conflict? How about retrieving a cigar that has fallen amongst several powder
kegs? What about controling a high speed moving vehicle?"

All of these are tasks. They may be embedded in conflicts; I assume that the player (and character) generally care about WHY he is jumping to the horses, WHY he does not want the kegs to blow up, and WHY the vehicle is travelling from or to somewhere at high speed. Once you have that "caring" going on, then you have conflict and the task becomes a logistic piece of it.

If the task is a CRUCIAL piece of the conflict resolution, then treat them as synonymous.

"a) Theoretically a player can take an infinite number of non-conflict based actions
before needing to roll dice. Obviously this is silly and common sense can be used
as a guide."

Sigh ... where that "infinite number" comes from, I don't know. This conclusion is not supported in the rules, which do NOT support the idea that a non-conflict task takes no in-game-world time.

"However, what happens to that player if he or she is taking non-conflict
oriented actions that can impact a scene while other players are resolving conflict
based actions? Where does their action go off in the initiative order if no dice
rolling is needed? How soon can they defend themselves without losing said
action?"

But even that issue vanishes when a big, group-type, shared crisis is occurring. Here's the logic. Say we have a big fight scene going on. You ask, what if a character wants to perform something which is "non-conflict oriented"? I confess to being boggled at this - what the hell could that be? Anything he or she does is occurring in the context of the fight. It might be to hit someone; it might be to call mother. No matter what, the fight is the extant conflict (or its logistic "task" anyway), and any actions in it are going to have to get rolled, even if it's only to set the order of actions.

Jesse, a lot of these questions are arising out of the difference between the traditional RPG announce/resolve paradigm and the one in Sorcerer (which is imitated in part from Zero, by the way). Each one follows its own logic and puts player decisions in particular places; each one works fine for its purposes. But neither satisfies or corresponds to the assumptions and decisions of the other.

Best,
Ron

[jburneko]

The main thing to realize is that the basic, fundamental goal of #1 is NOT guaranteed. In fact (and this is going to hurt!), (a) is incorrect. That's right - if X gets a higher roll than Y, X is screwed! His action goes off BEFORE Y's, in a classic fuckup of interpersonal timing. This result is going to horrify gamers who are not used to it.

Ouch, that did hurt.  And yes, I can hear the distant sound of bitching players now.  But thanks for the clearification.  I didn't realize that the initiative point was FIXED in Sorcerer.

The (c) issue does get tricky. What I do is simply give the PC the extra dice right then and there, which may change his highest-value but does NOT change the order of action.

Hey, I scored!  This was the exact solution I thought up.  

Sigh ... where that "infinite number" comes from, I don't know. This conclusion is not supported in the rules, which do NOT support the idea that a non-conflict task takes no in-game-world time.

What I was refering to was non-conflict actions within a surrounding conflict.  Let's say that we have three players.  Two players are keeping a couple of thugs occupied.  A third player is towards the back of the room out of harms way of the two thugs.  Okay, so players 1 & 2 are engaged in conflict but player 3 is not.  Player 3 wants to knock a lantern off a table and set the room on fire in an attempt to scare off the thugs and allow the three players to escape out the window.

Player's 3 action is not a conflict and does not normally require a roll.  She just wants to knock the lantern off the table onto the carpet and start a fire.  However, it would be important to know when exactly this occurs as it MIGHT affect the four characters engaged in the fight.

Your solution of making a roll simply to see where the action takes place seems perfectly acceptable.

Although!  I guess you could in some sense say that her conflict is that she's trying to scare off the thugs.  So this would be her stamina vs. the will of the thugs, maybe?  

See, on a greater level this all comes down to level of abstraction.  Some game designs ask, 'What is the quickest possible thing a person can do?" and that's how long an initiative 'action' is."  Other games go in the opposite direction (like Story Engine) and asks "What's the point to this scene?" and the dice resolve that point in one go.  I understand these two extremes very well.

However, Sorcerer exists in the middle.  It doesn't resolve individual actions and it doesn't resolve entire scenes.  It instead resolves large chunks of sub-conflicts and that messes with my sense of timing.

Example:

Take a moment in my Deadlands chase scene.  The driver had fallen off and was holding on for dear life to the bottom of the chariot and was being unpleasently dragged along the bottom.

At this point there are two important questions?  1) Can someone rescue the driver? 2) Can the drive hold on long enough to be rescued?

There are two ways we can do this.

We can go task based:
Action 1:
 Rescuer rolls to jump from chariot to horses
 Driver rolls to hold on.

Action 2:
 Rescuer rolls to climb down along the side of the horses to reach the driver.
 Driver rolls to hold on.

Action 3:
 Rescuer rolls to catch hold of the driver.
 Driver rolls to hold on.

Action 4:
 Rescuer rolls to pull driver up to safty.

And so on to clean up any remaining details.  The second method, and I assume the way that it would be handled in Sorcerer, is to resolve all of this in one go and narrate the details.

Conflict resolution:

Rescuer rolls to see if she saves the driver.
Driver rolls to see if she holds on long enough.

The interesting thing about this is that the rescuerer's roll can impact whether the driver's roll matters or not.  If the driver rolled a failure but the rescuer goes first then I would assume that the rescuer made it in time regardless of the driver's roll.  Or perhaps the driver shouldn't roll at all and if the rescuer comes up with a failure, saying that he didn't make it in time is a narrative option?

But!  This is where I start having problems.  All of this is fine and dandy but there are other things going on while all this rescuing is happening.  Namely, other players are shooting at the pursuing NPCs.  It seems to me, and perhaps this is where I'm misunderstanding, that the Sorcerer damage table is laid out in a fairly straight forward blow by blow manner.  That is, the damage listed for a gun shot is the damage you take for being hit by a single bullet and not an abstract volley of bullets of an abstract segment of conflict resolution.  I'm in all likelyhood wrong.

The main point being is that it's going to take LONGER in game time to resolve some conflicts than it is others.  Rescuing a fallen driver takes way more time than attempting to injure your pursuers.  I'm just wondering how one deals with these more abstract conflicts in terms of duration when each round is a round of conflict resolutions which may be of vastly differing units of time.

Perhaps it doesn't matter to the people who enjoy this game. And the more I think about it the more I realize it doesn't matter much to me, especially if you think about each unit of initiative like a camera cut in a movie.  However, I KNOW it's going to matter to some of my players, at least at first, so I'd like to try and anticipate their questions and objections.

Jesse, a lot of these questions are arising out of the difference between the traditional RPG announce/resolve paradigm and the one in Sorcerer (which is imitated in part from Zero, by the way). Each one follows its own logic and puts player decisions in particular places; each one works fine for its purposes. But neither satisfies or corresponds to the assumptions and decisions of the other.

Oh I know this.  But this is why I speak a lot about transcripts and translation guides.  If I hand you a prose paragraph describing an exciting action scene one should be able to produce a game transcript (no matter how improbable the transcript maybe) that duplicates the events in the scene.  Then, by comparing the resultant transcripts between two different games, you can translate the abstract concepts at work behind each game.  

A system ultimately changes only what is likely and how things are organzied but NOT what is possible.  If the resultant transcript is highly improbable within the system then the system isn't designed to support the NATURE of the original scene but a good system will support all the EVENTS of the scene.  Perhaps the scene is highly cinematic and you've translated it to a very gritty realistic system.  An indication of this would be a chain of events where the odds of the character surviving every one of them would be VERY VERY VERY low.

Jesse

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jesse,

ONE
"I didn't realize that the initiative point was FIXED in  Sorcerer."

That's correct. Announcement is announcement, and resolution is resolution. Admissible choices during resolution are only for defensive rolls. No saved actions!!

I think one "filthy secret" of unreconstructed role-playing is that Drama methods are the bread-and-butter of combat, in the form of changing one's action during the moment of resolution. This is where the role-player gets to twiddle and fiddle with what's happening, all under the guise of formal mechanics but actually using informal Drama.

Well, Sorcerer puts the system-monkey's money where his mouth is. You want Fortune methods and system to be involved? Here you go. You've got plenty of free time, with no commitments, to settle what it is you want to do. After that, the system speaks. When it speaks, you listen. THEN, for the reactive rolls and so on, you get to twiddle again. (That's why it's Fortune-in-the-middle.) But while the system speaks, no fiddling.

That's why the player who's used to Champions, GURPS, Rolemaster, and even Feng Shui is going to be disoriented. His prized moment of power is utterly gone, or rather, transferred into the announcement phase and put out into the open.

TWO
I'm quoting a lot here because it's important.

"What I was refering to was non-conflict actions within a surrounding conflict. Let's say that we have three players. Two players are keeping a couple of thugs occupied. A third player is towards the back of the room out of harms way of the two thugs. Okay, so players 1 & 2 are engaged in conflict but player 3 is not. Player 3 wants to knock a lantern off a table and set the room on fire in an attempt to scare off the thugs and allow the three players to escape out the window."

"Player's 3 action is not a conflict and does not normally require a roll. She just wants to knock the lantern off the table onto the carpet and start a fire. However, it would be important to know when exactly this occurs as it MIGHT affect the four characters engaged in the fight."

"Your solution of making a roll simply to see where the action takes place seems
perfectly acceptable."

Although we're seeing eye-to-eye on the solution, I want emphasize that I see this entire situation as one big fight ... I draw no distinction between what 1&2 are doing and what 3 is doing. Calling 3's action "not a conflict" is utterly bizarre to me - of course it's a conflict, or embedded in the conflict; it represents her role in the opposition with the thugs.

THREE
"Some game designs ask, 'What is the quickest possible thing a person can do?" and that's how long an initiative 'action' is." Other games go in the opposite direction (like Story Engine) and asks "What's the point to this scene?" and the dice resolve that point in one go. I understand these two extremes very well.

"However, Sorcerer exists in the middle. It doesn't resolve individual actions and it doesn't resolve entire scenes. It instead resolves large chunks of sub-conflicts and that messes with my sense of timing."

That's a fair assessment. It's also a source of satisfaction to me, because the system works and results in phenomenally exciting, enjoyable play once the players have realized that their precious "how it's done" assumptions about role-playing are not set in stone.

I dream of the day when someone's FIRST experience with role-playing is Sorcerer, with a GM who's comfortable with the resolution and combat system. I would really like to hear what that person thinks when, later, he or she plays a session of, say, GURPS or D&D3E (to pick two very different examples).

FOUR
Talkin' about the stagecoach rescue/firefight.
"At this point there are two important questions? 1) Can someone rescue the driver? 2) Can the drive hold on long enough to be rescued?"

... [accurate description of task-based resolution snipped]
"The interesting thing about this is that the rescuerer's roll can impact whether the driver's roll matters or not"

Sorcerer is built to handle this exactly. The bonuses from the first roll may roll onto the second roll as bonus dice. So far, I'm not seeing where the problems come in ... not at ALL.

"But! This is where I start having problems. All of this is fine and dandy but there are other things going on while all this rescuing is happening. Namely, other players are shooting at the pursuing NPCs. ... The main point being is that it's going to take LONGER in game time to resolve  some conflicts than it is others. Rescuing a fallen driver takes way more time than attempting to injure your pursuers. I'm just wondering how one deals with these more abstract conflicts in terms of duration when each round is a round of conflict resolutions which may be of vastly differing units of time."

I'm still not seeing the problem. Think cinematically and let the dice be your cameraman. Go ahead and roll for everyone, with all the stated actions and Stamina and bonuses and whatnot. If the rescue happens first, then it just means it gets seen first. Movies do this all the time, stretching and contracting time for individual sub-conflicts within a larger action sequence. Written literature does it too.

I am thinking that you are coping with one of the most fundamental Simulationist priorities: that game time is fixed and "real" in the game-world. That is a fine priority, but it CANNOT be the first priority in Narrativist play. No story-creation mechanism I know of places it as the first priority. It becomes one priority among many, and as such, it can be stretched and twiddled within the bounds of plausibility for that particular story. Sometimes time is horribly significant, but at other times it is re-shaped like silly-putty, even within the same story.

All that said, this important point must be made: if the act in question is TOTALLY out of the time scale of the combat actions, then it should be played as a concurrent scene. The whole combat finishes (including shots at the rescuer/rescuee, who may make defensive rolls) before the other two characters' actions resolve. In this case, I'd save their rolls until the end. They literally "aren't in the conflict," as their actions do not feed back upon it.

"Perhaps it doesn't matter to the people who enjoy this game. And the more I think about it the more I realize it doesn't matter much to me, especially if you think about each unit of initiative like a camera cut in a movie. However, I KNOW it's going to matter to some of my players, at least at first, so I'd like to try and anticipate their questions and objections."

Hoo. Maybe it's time to talk about movies and stories with your players entirely separately from the context of role-playing.

Best,
Ron

[jburneko]

Hello Ron,

Sorcerer combat is MUCH clearer now.  Thanks a lot.  The Dice As Cameraman analogy is really good I will definitely save that away for future use.

Thanks again,

Jesse