Thoughts on Sitch and Sorcerer

[Ben Lehman]

This is inspired by More Evil Is More Morally Taxing? but it's not about actual play, just shooting my mouth off.

So anyway. The thread got me thinking about the difference in "what you have to do to get narrativism" in terms of GM action and situation planning with Sorcerer versus, say D&D.

What Jesse is trying to do is to create a sort of moral conundrum situation which the players have to account for: "this man is evil but he could help you save the world! What will you choose?" This sort of narrativist situation prep is essential if you want to use, say, D&D for narrativist play. I used to do this sort of thing all the damn time, it's basically second nature for me as a GM to make sure that there are tweaks and little hooks and such all over the situation.

But in Sorcerer, you don't have to do this. Your situation can just be simple, with absolutely no moral vagueness on the part of the NPCs. "The baddest guy in the world is coming after you and your family," f'rex. In D&D, this would fall absolutely flat as a narrativist scenario. But in Sorcerer, it would work just fine, because the premise is internal to the character. Simply putting the character under pressure is enough to create thematic action, because the player is faced with decisions about demon handling basically constantly, and they're of course worse when they're under pressure.

This isn't to say that you can't do messy, morally gray situation prep. Indeed there's a whole book about it. But you don't actually have to, because the messy, moral gray is in the player characters themselves.

yrs--
--Ben

[jburneko]

Ben,

The entire point of that original thread was: I've just figured that out.

Thanks for articulating it a 1000x better than I did.

Jesse