whooohoo! it arrived!

[dsellars]

My copy of Sorcerer arrived in the post today :)  Looks like all other books are going to be put on hold for a bit :)

My first impression was, "It's smaller than I expected"  whcih is actually quite refreshing.  I've only had a quick scim fo far but I'm looking to getting stuck in.

Just a quick question.  Will Sorcerer work with just one player and GM?  Or do you ideally need more peopel to get the dynamic going well?

Cheers,
Dan.

[Andrew Cooper]

Dan,

I had the same sort of reaction to Sorcerer when it arrived.  "It's smaller than I thought." However, the key thing here is that the text is very dense.  There's no fluff or filler information.  Every paragraph is there because it needs to be there and is important to the game.  After reading it I discovered that there was easily as much real information in the book as I normally got out of the 300 page traditional RPG books I bought.  I discovered that I liked reading RPGs without the fluff.

[joshua neff]

Just a quick question.  Will Sorcerer work with just one player and GM?  Or do you ideally need more peopel to get the dynamic going well?

I think Sorcerer is actually one of the better "one GM, one player" games out there. For one thing, basic vanilla Sorcerer starts you with at least one supporting castmember (the demon), but probably more (a mentor, perhaps, or any NPCs associated with the Kicker). And with the Kicker, the sole PC starts off with a fistful of adventure. In fact, the game isn't really meant for "party play," so having one PC shouldn't be a problem at all. (Think Hellblazer as one example of a "lone PC" kind of story, if you see John Constantine as the only PC.)

If you do a sword & sorcery game, it's not any less doable, since most S&S lit really only has one featured character.

[Eric J-D]

What Gaerik said.  I've said the same thing to several different people in the past.  Be sure to read everything because its all meat and no filler (sorry if the obvious non-vegetarian metaphor for the game induces queasiness).

And on the question of 1 player 1 GM, I think Josh has the right of it.  I am about to start a game with my 11 year old daughter soon (we're calling demons by a different name and making sure their needs/desires are emotionally and morally provocative without being gory, but it will still be Sorcerer).  I'll be sure to post a thread in the next day or so of all the cool stuff we have created together in pre-game prep so far.

[dsellars]

Thanks for the replies.  I'm sure I will have more idea's when I have read it.

I kinda expect it to be full of really good stuff.  After all it still provokes so much interest round there.  I was just a bit supprised :)

Dan.

[Eric J-D]

I kinda expect it to be full of really good stuff.  After all it still provokes so much interest round there.  I was just a bit supprised :)

Dan.

Speaking only for myself, I think it still generates so much interest for me because it continually teaches me things.  Even after I feel like I've become pretty confident with the game, it surprises me by showing me something I hadn't seen quite as clearly.

I'm not talking rulesy stuff here so much as how deeply interconnected the various elements of the game are.  It is a tightly woven piece of fabric.  And to take the metaphor a bit further, there are some subtle hues woven into it that my eye just didn't register on first or second or twentieth viewing.  Or if it did, it sure didn't give them quite the attention they deserved.

So, I always come back to Sorcerer because it teaches me so damn much that is worth knowing.  I also think that the collaborative aspect of pre-game preparation--something the game doesn't simply encourage but actually requires in order for play to work--actually makes people better as people.  It is a game that requires generosity and power sharing, and that is something the world could stand a whole lot more of.

(Sorry to get kind of sappy and moralizing at the end there but that stuff really reflects how deeply impressed and affected I am by the game)

Cheers,

Eric

[Christopher Kubasik]

Just to pile on the love fest....

I was in a game store picking up dice the other day (for my upcoming S&Sword game, which is slowly building in pre-game prep).

I decided to flip through a few books. One page fell open to a description of electronic communication equipment. A full one paraph describing cell phones, with how long batteries would last. A full paragraph on walkie-talkies, describing how long cell phones would last. And a FULL PAGE of this... amid endless pages of a thick book telling me how thing I touch every day work in the most bland of terms.

I thought: "I used to write this stuff."

That's what freaked me out. I flashed back to days writing source books for publishers, thinking, "Why am I writing this? Who is going to use this? Can't they make this stuff up on the fly?"

Thick RPG books, as Ron rightly points out in Sorcerer, are often more about being a pretty coffee table book detailing someone else's campaign, instead of being a toolkit to help you and your friends build the coolest fucking narrative you and your friends could come up with.

Size? Whatever. Design and Utility trumps all the fluffed descriptions in the standard RPG, as far as I'm concerned.

"What do the players DO?" is the key question as far as I'm concerned. (Not the charcters, the PLAYERS.) And Ron addressed the question in spades.

Christopher