Topic: [Sorcerer] Musings on Humanity
Started by: Eric J-D
Started on: 3/28/2006
Board: Adept Press
On 3/28/2006 at 9:29pm, Eric J-D wrote:
[Sorcerer] Musings on Humanity
So I was rereading The Sorcerer's Soul the other night and thinking generally about the importance of defining Humanity in the game when it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to start a thread on the subject as (hopefully) an aid to new players. Be forewarned: a lot of this has probably been covered before, but I think there can be a value in occasionally dressing-up old thoughts in new language.
The sentences that really kick-started the idea of this thread were these:
Humanity rolls, whether for gain or loss, rely on actions, not reactions. One does not make a Humanity loss roll upon viewing something appalling, but upon performing something appalling, and the same applies to Humanity gain rolls and meritorious or "good" actions. (pg.18)
Now these are key sentences that draw the reader's attention to the way Humanity in Sorcerer is affirmed or jeopardized by the *activity of the character* as a result of *decisions made by the player*. As I said, this is vital stuff, but it is not what I want to emphasize in this post. Instead I want to draw attention to the issue of how Humanity is jeopardized by doing things considered "appalling."
On a superficial first read, it might look like that sentence on page 18 has a very well-defined sense of what is considered appalling behavior and what is not. It does not. In fact, in Sorcerer, what is considered appalling, line-crossing, Humanity-risking behavior and what is considered meritorious, boundary-affirming, Humanity-raising activity is extremely variable and game-specific. Each group defines where to draw that line, and how Humanity is defined often has a lot to do with the kind of setting and mood desired for the game. What's more, where the line is drawn in the game doesn't necessarily neatly overlay the moral map and the place where that line is drawn among the players themselves. In fact, it might deviate from it significantly.
To make this more concrete, let's take an example drawn from a fairly familiar film: Pulp Fiction . In the example that follows, I am going to imagine that the incident in question was something that occurred in actual play (i.e. that the events depicted in the film were actions chosen by various players). The incident I'm going to draw on is the notorious scene in which Butch (the Bruce Willis character), who is ball-gagged and bound in a chair waiting to be sodomized by Maynard and Zed, is faced with the possibility of escaping from the pawn-shop but instead chooses to stay and rescue Marsellus instead.
I'm sure most of you are familiar with this scene. Okay, so let's imagine that instead of a scene in a film this is an actual event in play. What I want to emphasize here is the way the definition of Humanity in Sorcerer is both game-specific and capable of deviating significantly from the player's own conception of what is appalling and what is not. So, let's say that for this game the GM and players have defined Humanity as "the responsibility that human beings who are in a pit of hell have towards each other." In other words, they define Humanity largely as the way the film defines it: as a kind of loyalty that human beings have towards each other, even between those who have opposed interests and especially at those moments when they are bound together by suffering. So far so good. So let's look at a particular character's behavior in light of this definition of Humanity.
Cut to the scene with Butch picking up and hefting various weapons. First he picks up a hammer and grips it with his tow hands, then he spies a bat and picks it up. Spotting something on the shelf behind him he picks up a new weapon--a chainsaw--and wields it much like a psychotic killer might in a teenage horror flick. Finally his eyes alight on something new and, from the glow on his face, something wondrous: a katana. To return to the film for a moment, as viewers I suspect that many of us watch this scene in a state of slightly embarrassed and disgusted amusement. We titter uncomfortably (or at least I do) because the scene is simultaneously so damn funny and so fucking sick. Of course we know that Butch is going to go back and save Marsellus's ass from the rapists Zed and Maynard, but we aren't quite prepared for the way the scene turns into a revelation of the sadistic pleasure Butch takes in fantasizing about exactly how he is going to kill them. As viewers we want Butch to use violence to save Marsellus, but we are embarrassed when Tarantino extends and draws out the dark-side of our (and Butch's) fantasy.
Enough about the film though. Let's imagine this as an actual moment of play. The player playing Butch goes through the same set of actions, choosing and then rejecting various weapons until settling on the perfect tool for the job: the katana. And let's imagine that the other players around the table are having a reaction not unlike the one I described as a viewer of the film. Given these reactions and given the sadism that appears to be operating beneath Butch's actions, we might be tempted to regard his behavior as appalling. Here's the good part though: this scene, as sickly funny and as transgressive of our moral codes as it might seem (after all, we want justice to be done not just a retaliatory kind of sadism), is actually a Humanity gain moment. Yep, that's what I said. Butch's player is actually settting Butch up to roll for an increase in his Humanity since he is acting in perfect conformity with the definition of Humanity the group has established. It doesn't matter, then, that as observers we are made deeply uncomfortably by the sadistic impulses that appear to be lurking just below the surface (if that!) of Butch's actions. It doesn't matter that this behavior might cross certain established boundaries for us as players either. All that matters is how the game and its participants have defined Humanity for this particular game, and that definition says that we are to regard Butch's sicko moment of weighing his various weapon options--casting about to find the one that corresponds best to his sadistic revenge fantasy--as a Humanity-affirming moment since it is undertaken to save a man who, until mere moments ago, was his mortal enemy.
So, to reiterate: actions that the players might consider appalling if anyone at the table performed them in real life need not necessarily be considered appalling and, consequently, Humanity-jeopardizing in the game, provided of course that the group's definition of Humanity has not in effect already defined them as such. The local, game-specific definition of Humanity is what is paramount, not whether the behavior conforms to or departs from the moral outlook of any of the players.
This is why I find the example of two different western-inspired Sorcerer games so useful when thinking about how variable Humanity can be. In a game inspired by Unforgiven, gun-play--even in the service of what seems like a just cause--might be regarded as highly corrosive to Humanity, while gun-play in a game inspired by Silverado would probably only rarely incur a Humanity check. Players might find their personal morality in conflict with either of these cases, but what matters in the game is the activity of the characters and how it interacts with the game-specific definitions of Humanity.
Like I said, this is probably all fairly familiar stuff to you old-time Sorcerer players and GMs, but if it is useful to even one newbie I'll be a happy man.
Cheers,
Eric
On 3/29/2006 at 7:41am, cmnash wrote:
Re: [Sorcerer] Musings on Humanity
Eric wrote:
Like I said, this is probably all fairly familiar stuff to you old-time Sorcerer players and GMs, but if it is useful to even one newbie I'll be a happy man.
Consider yourself a happy man Eric J-D; I, for one, have found this a highly useful explanation
Cheers, Colin
On 3/29/2006 at 12:59pm, Plotin wrote:
RE: Re: [Sorcerer] Musings on Humanity
For everybody enlightened, there is somebody confused further – in this case it’s me. I always understood humanity as pertaining to the characters, not to the players; if a character does something going against the ethical code of his player but conforming to the definition of Humanity, he is still in for a Humanity gain roll. So I thought, and this is what I gather from your elaborations, as well. But against this I would like to cite Ron from this thread:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18685.0
I have an easy and quick answer to your questions about Humanity - and it is this: the setting is fiction, but Humanity is about you, the real people. Never worry about what a term like honor means to the characters. Although they may use the word and and talk about it in their terms, that is all just fiction. As a game mechanic, the actual Humanity score should only be interpreted as you, the group, during play, find it the most compelling.
That means that a character may talk about honor and do something that every other fictional character agrees is honorable, but you, the real people, consider it dishonorable. In that case, the character must make a Humanity check.
Which to me seems to clearly contradict your and my understanding. But in Sorcerer & Sword on page 43 Ron wrote:
“In this setting, unlike most modern-day stories, Humanity concerns only close relationships. Murder, robbery and rapine are only bad (i. e. prompt Humanity loss rolls) insofar as they harm people the hero knows or has shared danger with. A character can be a pretty bad person to everyone else and not need to check Humanity.”
This seems to go against the quote above. Clarification please, anybody?
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Topic 18685
On 3/29/2006 at 2:03pm, Eric J-D wrote:
RE: Re: [Sorcerer] Musings on Humanity
Hi Plotin,
Sorry if I have contributed to your confusion. Let me take a stab at this and see if together we can't clear up the confusion.
I admit that the paragraph you quote from the FrankT post does on the face of it appear to contradict both what I wrote and (more crucially) what Ron says in the section you quoted from Sorcerer & Sword. Here's why I don't think they really contradict.
In the game FrankT played, Humanity was defined as Honor. This is a pretty loose definition for Humanity, hence in this particular case the very looseness of the definition seems to elicit significant and regular interpretation of what the players regard as honorable. It does this because Sorcerer is a narrativist game that isn't designed very well to support play that centers on the player thinking from the character's point of view. Sure there can be moments when the player slips into Actor stance, but regular use of this stance isn't what the game is designed to do. Everything is always about decisions the players make and the meaning that they attribute to/derive from these decisions. So, to get back to Humanity as Honor. In this particular case, setting Humanity loosely in essence is a declaration that "In this game, we the players are going to keep Humanity purposefully loose so that we can make moral/ethical judgments about whether a character's actions have crossed *our* particular boundaries, not whether they have crossed *the character's* boundaries."
By contrast in the Conan example (and I think in mine as well) Humanity was defined more tightly as, respectively, "how one acts towards those who are close to you" and "loyalty to other human beings, especially those who you are ordinarily opposed to, when you are in a hellish situation together." In this case, the players have agreed to fix the definition of Humanity in order to engage in play where perhaps the gap between the players' moral/ethical boundaries and the characters' actions may be just as pronounced as in the previous example, but where they have agreed to mechanically resolve the Humanity question differently--in this case agreeing for their own story purposes to let what they might regard as questionable behavior by the characters to either: a) not incur a Humanity loss check, as in the Conan example ; or b) possibly incur a Humanity gain check, as I was arguing in my example.
So from my p.o.v. the difference lies in decisions the game participants made early on about how loosely or tightly to define Humanity. That decision, I am arguing, sets up two distinct paths: one in which the looseness of the Humanity definition screams for the players to pass moral/ethical judgment on the characters and hose their Humanity even if the fictional characters would think they were acting correctly, and another in which a tighter definition of Humanity results in stories in which the characters may sometimes engage in questionable activity (from the players' perspectives) but where the players have agreed that--because of the tighter Humanity definition--the behavior doesn't merit a Humanity loss check. In the latter case, the reason behind this agreement may be that the players want to experience more palpably the uncomfortable gap between the character's behavior and their own moral boundaries.
Does any of that make sense? I think that is (perhaps) the reason for the apparent discrepancy between what Ron wrote and what he said in that post. The Humanity as Honor definition has come up before as an example of a loose definition of Humanity, hence my characterization of it as "loose." My understanding is that when players agree to leave the definition of Humanity loose, they want something different out of the game than players who define it more tightly. Exactly what they want is, of course, likely to vary significantly, but I think that my speculations above represent a reasonable guess.
Cheers,
Eric
On 3/29/2006 at 2:43pm, Plotin wrote:
RE: Re: [Sorcerer] Musings on Humanity
Thank you, Eric, for taking the time to expound upon your interpretation of the Humanity mechanic; it seems entirely convincing to me. It makes a lot of sense and reveals another layer to Humanity, which obviously was there from the outset but is not explained sufficiently in the rules and probably frequently overlooked in discussions on the topic, too. The fact that you can use it, in different games, both as a means to distance yourself from the moral decisions and actions of your character and to distance yourself from the values of his society and experience him spiralling downward even though conforming to its moral code is very powerful indeed. By seeing a character fall it thus opens up the additional possibility of judging an entire society by its set of values instead of only judging a character by how well he conforms to them; very intriguing.
But I think that this needs to be pointed out more clearly, not only to allow the full and conscious use of this potential, but also to avoid confusion about Humanity.
To term Honour a very loose definition for Humanity is certainly correct. I am sure that most are familiar with it, but for the benefit of those who are not, let me provide a link to a discussion between Ron and Peter Nordstrand, pertaining to what diverse things Humanity as Honour can entail and what the consequences for actual play might be:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18454.0
Thanks again for the reply, with it the matter is settled for me.
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Topic 18454