Sorcerer Friday!

[Calithena]

Okay, so I'm going to sit down with a friend and play Friday. Finally! I'm very jazzed about this.

Realization: Relationship Maps and Kickers go together. It's a kind of alchemy. I've used the RM technique before in the context of established characters, where we already sort of knew what was going on. But this adventure wasn't coming together because it's a new game and a new character. I was like: OK, I have a cool setting, some cool NPCs, and some serious skullduggery going on behind the scenes. But why should the player care about this? And then I realized that the answer was the Kicker. The player cares about that: it has consequences for what's going to happen. You just work one or two pieces of the kicker into the edge of your relationship map and suddenly you've got an adventure instead of a setting.

Having words for these things is both helpful and confusing. My most successful recent use of the Relationship Map technique, which I ran for a homebrewed game, was in a 'stop the murderer' adventure called "The Strange Death of Serwat Vishvakarma". I thought I was just making a list of NPCs! But the players knew some of the NPCs from prior adventures, cared about some of them, and I knew about the relationships between the NPCs and what they cared about. So I was effectively inferring the party's kicker from past experience in play and then using that to organize the Bangs.

I had none of this language at the time but that was one of those great adventures where the players were totally thrilled with what was going on. Then I wasn't able to duplicate that excitement later, though the game was OK until it ended in August. So on the one hand I like having the terms because it reminds me of what I need to do to make the game fun -  I think it might have made it easier for me to get back to what mattered to the PCs in the later adventures - but sometimes I miss things that might have been intuitively obvious to me in previous periods because I wind up atomizing the concepts that go with the words and forgetting how they relate to the role-playing experience as a whole.


Frustration: The Sorcerer demon design rules qualify as elegant design, and I intend that as a term of high praise. However, the elegance sometimes gets seriously in the way of things I want to do. In particular: Power is a function of the number of abilities a demon has, and dictates how well that demon can do those things. I find this frustrating, I suppose because two of the demon concepts I've been working with violate the framework: a powerful, narrow demon and a relatively weak one that can do a lot of different things. The former you can handle just by giving it high Stamina, but the latter doesn't work in the system as written.

Also, the reqirement for narrow and specific definitions of Perception, Shapeshift, and Travel create situations where a demon has to take several different abilities in order to do things that seem like they ought to go together, again boosting Lore and thereby Power to higher levels than I might think are appropriate for the powers in question.

I wonder if anyone could recommend any methods for dealing with this stuff. I'll just house rule on some of this stuff and then fix it later if I screw it up, which is what I always wind up doing anyway, but I thought I'd mention these issues and fish for advice.

[Valamir]

If were going to try an cobble together a weak demon that could do a variety of things, I think what I'd do that would require the least amount of rules fiddling is define the demon as several different demons.  Instead of 1 demon with 10 powers and a power of 10, you could have 5 demons with 2 powers each, each at a power of 2.

For descriptive and narrative purposes you can treat it as one demon with a single name (perhaps with the disconcerting practice of refering to itself in the plural), but for mechanics each of its abilities would have only a power of 2.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Sean,

Like this!

two of the demon concepts I've been working with violate the framework: a powerful, narrow demon and a relatively weak one that can do a lot of different things. The former you can handle just by giving it high Stamina, but the latter doesn't work in the system as written.

A powerful narrow demon is best handled as follows: Stamina X-1, Will X, Lore X-Y, and Power X, where Y > 1.

I'm not sure what you mean by "giving it high Stamina" because that necessarily increases Will and Power, so I suggest instead thinking about it as a big demon with low Lore. This doesn't violate any sort of framework; it's perfectly legitimate demon design by the rules.

However, I suggest that the only reason a person conceives of a low-Power, high-Lore demon is through "role-player logic," and I specifically built Sorcerer not to permit it.

Before house-ruling your way through what you perceive "ought" to be allowed, please consider the playtesting experience that went into the game and also that this is a deliberate design feature. You are, not to put too fine a point on it, messing with Things You Don't Know when you so casually say, "oh, well couldn't a demon have all sorts of abilities but not be very big & tough?"

A much better demon concept is built as follows: Stamina X-Y, Will X, Lore X-1, Power X, where X > 1.
Yes, it has high Power, but low Stamina. Hence, a "weeny" demon with high Lore. Note that Stamina does act as a limiter on demon abilities-use, which means that effectively, the demon will keep its usage of the abilities small and infrequent in order not to burn out. It can do a real blowout if it has to, though.

Which, I think serves the purposes for play quite nicely.

Also, the reqirement for narrow and specific definitions of Perception, Shapeshift, and Travel create situations where a demon has to take several different abilities in order to do things that seem like they ought to go together, again boosting Lore and thereby Power to higher levels than I might think are appropriate for the powers in question.

Again, what you "might think are appropriate" is not something to wave around so quickly. Based on what? Experience with other games? That isn't quite as 1:1 translatable to Sorcerer as one might think. The multiple-combinations for abilities like Perception are there on purpose, forcing high Lore and therefore high Power.

It's hard to discuss all this without knowing more about the demon concepts you're working with, but I'd like to help out more. If you'd like to keep the demon information private, then get in touch with me by email.

Best,
Ron

[Calithena]

Thanks, Ralph and Ron.

Ron, I think I get some of the general design things you're alluding to, though I'm sure I'll get them better as I play. (I actually played a version of the game once already, but it wasn't a 'real' Sorcerer run - the protagonist had no demon, though he was getting chased around by one - we had a blast in four hours at the coffee shop and I got to figure out how the cascading die rolls etc. worked in play, so that was a good warm-up, but it wasn't exactly Sorcerer.)

I want to finish working some stuff out with the player before I post the game specifics that are pushing me in certain directions, so I'll just confine myself to generalities here. What I meant by 'giving it high Stamina' was just what you said, so no problems there. The issue comes up with the lore/power connection. In Sorcerer the more things a demon can do, the better it can do them; Stamina only limits how much it can do them. Whereas you might think "well, this demon can Boost Stamina, but only by 3 points, even though he's got a Power of 8". Or let's say you had a whole bunch of 'little' abilities like that: you wind up with Lore 6 and Power 7 but you really didn't want the thing to be able to apply all that power to its abilities.

I do get that the more a demon can do and the better it can do it are both aspects of how much power the demon can get you and consequently need to be reflected in the demon's scores to preserve the game's core logic. What I don't know is why a demon who has Lore 6 because he knows six things necessarily has to be able to power them all to 7. OK, so he doesn't: just limit the demon to only being able to do those things at the 1 or 2 level, say. But then you might say, well, maybe this guy really ought to be Power 5 or something instead, since even though he has 6 abilities he can only power them to 2. (Argh! There's that 'really ought to be' again! Help me, I'm melting...my Simulationist Possessor is demanding to get his Need fulfilled...)

You wrote: 'Again, what you "might think are appropriate" is not something to wave around so quickly. Based on what? Experience with other games?  That isn't quite as 1:1 translatable to Sorcerer as one might think. The multiple-combinations for abilities like Perception are there on purpose, forcing high Lore and therefore high Power. '

I think this is a GREAT conceit, actually, speaking in the general case, since Perception, Travel, Shapeshift, Hint, etc. - type abilities are often gamebusters. Let the people have what they want, but make it cost. It's just that I'm wrestling with some funny particular issues that are making this hard to deal with - more on which later. (It's that multiform shapeshifter guy again, actually - we found a different way of conceiving Humanity that made the whole thing fall into place as a Sorcerer game, based on the setting and the character's likely adversaries.)

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

Yeah, a lot of this will snap together better when the specifics become better understood among us. But I can wait on that.

Let's see ...

What I don't know is why a demon who has Lore 6 because he knows six things necessarily has to be able to power them all to 7. OK, so he doesn't: just limit the demon to only being able to do those things at the 1 or 2 level, say.

Right. And by "limit," all that means is, "as you see fit." You're the GM; you edit the use of Power as it suits that particular demon's concept. I do strongly recommend reserving the ability to rack the Power up to 7, because I can bet you that it will be an important feature for play one of these days.

But then you might say, well, maybe this guy really ought to be Power 5 or something instead, since even though he has 6 abilities he can only power them to 2. (Argh! There's that 'really ought to be' again! Help me, I'm melting...my Simulationist Possessor is demanding to get his Need fulfilled...)

Yeah, there you go, jumpin' all around the place in some funny way. I don't see where the "you might say" stuff comes from, except in a sort of "talk myself into a corner" way. Sometimes, just because verbs go with nouns, doesn't mean the sentence actually means anything ...

Anyway, thanks for all the input so far. I'm looking forward to seeing how it's all coming along.

Best,
Ron