Sorcerer and dysfunctional play

[Fabrice G.]

Hello,

Yesterday I GMed my "convention scenario" for the third time. It's amazing how fast Sorcerer expose dyfunctional play for what it is !

To recap a bit... The scenario was written for a convension play (about 3 to 4 hours). The characters where pre-generated as their demon and kickers.
The first group was me and four totally strangers to whom I presented the rules for the first time. The second time, I played with two good friends (one who already had played in a two session Sorcerer game with me). Last, I played again with two people, but this time one good friend who already played a two sessions Sorcerer game with me and one of his friend who I barely knew.

The scenario is far from perfect, in fact I've made the mistake to make possible to have it open as a search for someone. So in every group, the opening was heavy on this "chtulhu mode" (seach for clues or for monster/sorcerer/demon...). And as the players got that the search wasn't the real thing, and as they started to play their characters like sorcerers, it went along nice.
But, because there's a but, even if in two of three groups, we had a blast. In the third group, my friend's friend didn't had fun... but we, the other players had a blast.

What is telling about dysfunction in the last game is that one of the player was proactive, using author stance a lot and even director stance to set up part of the background. And the other did nothing. I gently explained to him that, if he wanted, he could "request" scenes, that he also could use out-of-character knowledge to have his character do something...
Yet, he didn't use that oportunity.

I'm going to give you some details, as it was a very hard time for me to be the GM.

At the begining of the game, I opened and set up the scene to be during the bonding of each character's demon. When I asked him how he envisioned the binding of his demon, that player -- lets call him Alex for ease of future reference--... Alex's response was : "I don't know".
Telling him that everything he'll find out and found cool was good for us, the other player and me, we didn't received more that : "I really don't know !"

Well, right there, right then, I thought that it was gonna be hard with this player.
And I was right. At first he didn't do much, but I kept him engaged in the story, by switching back and forth between the two players, by asking for what he would like to do or what he would find cool to see happen... Still, by the middle of the session I could clearly tell that he wasn't having much fun and so I asked him if he was. He was honest and told me that no, he wasn't. The thing is, the rest of us had huge fun. The story the other player produced was fun, the decisions he had to make were... interesting. So I found a way to end the session as the unease of having a player who doesn't enjoy himself at the table was starting to be much of a weight t to my enjoyment of the game.
I asked him why he didn't enjoyed the game, and he said that he had nothing to do, that the game was an investingation and he didn't like investigative game. Well, I told him that HE didn't do a thing. The hard thing for me is that I did everyting I could to get him do something : criss-crossed a lot, proposed him to play a more physical NPC when things where more oriented toward action... I even refrened the other played, to let Alex decide what to do next. The only response was : "hey, where together, you're the one with investigative skills". But even when his character was clearly the reference in one domain (as in when dealing with sorcerous things - he had a Lore of 5), he wouldn't do a thing. Letting the other player do it all, following him.

So the session  was over ten hours ago, and I'm still thinking...

Was the character he chose boring or ill-fitted to the story ? It could be, but then how to explain the huge amount of fun that two other players had while playing him, clearly enjoying the game and the character ?

Is the scenario so lame ? Nope, I don't think so for the same reason as above.

So, maybe that player's expectation for what should be in a rpg session is not mine, that his kind of fun is not mine. He was clearly here for exploration (of what ? character I guess) but to be fed a story, not to make one.
I deroged to my rule of really discussing my expectations of rpgs and how I GM with the players beforehand to please everyone so that we could play "faster". I won't in the near future.

I don't plan to play with this player again.

I will play the outcome of this story in another session with the other player.

I'm just amazed how fast Sorcerer made it clear that 1) Alex didn't had fun and 2) we shouldn't be playing together.
This is part a revelation and part a confirmation of things. A revelation, because that's the very first time that it's happening to me. A confirmation because, after my first game of Sorcerer I had a discussion my a very prolific player, and our conclusion was that the game was really not for people with not much imagination nor for the follower-kind of players (those who do nothing but follow the others, who don't have ideas except when told to do something precisely).


Any comments or similar experiences ?



Fabrice

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Fabrice,

I've had similar experiences a couple of times. One of them occurred during early playtesting back in 1996-7, and it was a real issue for me: here is my new role-playing game/idea, here are three good players, and one of them is really not enjoying himself at all. Yet everyone else is loving it.

I really suffered over it, because I couldn't fall back on the usual excuses: (1) the guy was not a Gamist, which at the time was the usual reason to call someone a "bad player"; (2) he was strongly committed to "the story."

What I finally figured out was that he was committed to enjoying my story but not to taking sides in order to make a story. Oh, if the "sides" were well-defined, that would have been easy, but forging his character's own moral stand in a sea of emotional conflicts was simply not what he wanted to do.

I also had to learn that his stated reasons for deciding not to continue to play, after three sessions, were not going to make sense to me. He cited that the other players were not "his crowd" and that his character "didn't care" about the scenario. I thought about that a lot ... at face value, they work fine for me as reasons not to play. But it seemed to me, looking at his actual play behavior, that he was passing up the opportunity for his character to care. It was about this time that I decided that "my guy cares" is a player choice, not a constraint.

The text in the section "The players," on page 74 of the main book, was written after this experience.

Now, all this said, there are GMing techniques to encourage those players who (unlike the fellow in that long-ago instance) might well like to enjoy Sorcerer but simply lack the habits of play that will permit them to do it.

1. Do provide more external conflict, adversity, and information for these players or groups. Disclose the back-story relatively quickly through in-character dialogue and out-of-character chat. Subvert the players' efforts to find or await the pre-existing story by simply giving all the "story bones" to them, through a fairly short set of events in one, maximally two sessions.

Violence is a great tool for this purpose, but it's also a dangerous one - many players are entrained to think that "fight scenes" are pretty much an interlude in the GM's story, the moment when they, the players, are "freed" to roll their characters' powers and  revel in the violence-release fantasizing. Then when the fight's over, and the player-characters always win such fights, they all return to the GM's story.

Sorcerer combat is frankly nastier than The Riddle of Steel unless the characters utilize their demons wisely. I have seen this feature of the game literally stun players - the "fight scene" is not a gratuitous romp of power-fantasy, but rather ... a fight. The character is not dispensing whoop-ass among the weenies, but rather is in mortal danger.

2. Play the demons hard and nasty. This is where I've fallen down a couple of times - while trying to baby a new-ish player into the game, I tend to overlook situations in which his character's demon would probably turn on the character and even possibly kill him. Every time, I've regretted it badly.

The reason I shy away from it is that it looks like "GM punishes player for not playing right," whereas this event, in the situations I'm thinking of, is actually "GM delivers consequences." It's a game-respect thing: some people have to learn not by opening a door, but by seeing which doors are shut.

The real secret of GMing Sorcerer is that the characters' demons are fascinated with the scenario's potential, even to the extent of not knowing how or why. So they really, really want the character to get involved, just as much as the NPCs in the scenario want him or her to be involved.

That's what I mean by playing the demons "hard" - hard in terms of their insistence, scheming, or independent actions which do bring the NPCs' and other player-characters' concerns right into the sorcerer's lap.

The point of #1 and #2 is that they work for people who aren't inclined to request scenes and take on a more proactive role toward the metagame. That's perfectly all right in Sorcerer. It'd be disastrous in InSpectres or My Life with Master, but in Sorcerer, it's all right.

If the person really doesn't want to "make Theme" but rather wants the story to be fed to him, then there's nothing you can do. But if it's merely a matter of habits getting in the way of something the player might like, then these techniques are handy.

Best,
Ron

[Fabrice G.]

Hi Ron,

What I finally figured out was that he was committed to enjoying my story but not to taking sides in order to make a story.

If the person really doesn't want to "make Theme" but rather wants the story to be fed to him, then there's nothing you can do.

I think that fundamentally that's where the problem was this particular time. Alex clearly came to be fed a story, without having to provide story content. Now, I can't blame him (and for that realization alone I'm glad and thankfull to the Forge), as this style of play is not to everyone taste. The thing is that it's my top prioriti when I play.

The text in the section "The players," on page 74 of the main book, was written after this experience.

And now, after having this experience myself read it with a new eye. Before that, it was like what you wrote in that text was stating the obvious. Now, I'm really thinking of translating it and bringing it with me each time I'm about to discuss Sorcerer with a potential new player.

Finally of the two techniques you suggest, I've come to often bring up n°2 quite often, and clearly not using enough n°1.
Playing demon the hard way came naturally, during my first Sorcerer game, as I clearly saw that the demons had this huge potential to become "instant super-NPC" with direct links to the PC. But I've mixed result when the demon is not a Passer or of such independant type.
Regarding the technique n°1, I should max out the external conflict. I wait too much on the player to provide his own conflict... so for some they maybe feel has if there's no conflict, thus nothing to do. As for the information thing... I blame my White Wolf GMing years ;). But it's a reality that I do give more away (way more than most of the GM I know)  but I've this trend to keep the backstory some kind of secret that the players have to discover - witch only detract them and lure tehm in the Chtulhu mode of play.

Anyway, thanks for your answer.


Fabrice