Startup questions

[Eric J.]

I have a question too.

As part of the intial binding of the PC's first demon, do they have to make a flat Stamina/Will versus Will roll?  It would seem that that would be necessary considering that you're supposed to start play with the kicker.  However, the details of the first contract (and contact) seem like they'd be important too.

Also, score descriptions: Are those suggestions or options?

May the wind be always at your back,
-Eric

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eric,

I decided to split this into its own thread.

Rolling for the initial Binding is part of character creation, including the chance for Humanity loss. To be absolutely clear, Binding may utilize Stamina, Will, or Lore (you only mentioned the first two). The circumstances of that Binding are indeed important and should be expressed or reflected in some way in the various material written onto the back of the character sheet.

Christopher Kubasik has rightly stated that character creation in Sorcerer is unusually layered:

1. You make up a person
2. You make that person a sorcerer (adding the demon, the Binding, and so on)
3. You alter that sorcerer irrevocably (but you don't know how yet) by introducing the Kicker

The score descriptions are fixed. They are not suggestions. Those are the descriptions you should use. Sometimes they might be tweaked into a slightly different list for a given setting, but in every case, the players should be working from a fixed list during character creation. Do not treat those descriptions as if they were some kind of freeform "oh, describe it" creative writing exercise.

Best, Ron

[Eric J.]

Thanks for the quick reply, Ron.  I don't know why I forgot that lore could be used for the binding.  That makes pretty good sense.  I was also wondering, specifically about the binding roll, though.  The book highly suggests that the sorcerer uses lots of other methods to up their rolls for the contact, the summoning, and the binding.

My players tend to want to have want some pretty big bonuses on their first binding roll.  Sometimes they even make good sense, like when they're an apprentice and their master would help them.

However, at the same time there are usually a lot of penalties that I can only use if we roleplay the binding out.  Using sacrafices or roleplaying bonuses that the book talks about would be good examples.

Because of all of this, it seems like you would either need to roleplay the binding out entirely or not at all.  It seems like if you didn't roleplay it out your initial demon would be weaker than the average one that you'd have.

The only alternative to roleplaying the binding out that I can think of is coming up with an agreement between yourself and the GM about what happened and deciding the bonuses from there.

May the wind be always at your back,
-Eric

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eric,

Typically I have that first Binding roll be just a straight score-on-score roll. It doesn't seem to cause any problems. If people whine about this somehow disadvantaging them, tell'em that the game isn't about playing it safe, and they'll have plenty of opportunities to see bonus dice in action later.

Best, Ron

[Eric J.]

Thank you.  That's exactly what I wanted to know.

May the wind be always at your back,
-Eric