2. The demon's actual impact on play will be defined by its abilities, and upon its Power score. One might have a Sherman tank demon, but if it has a Power of 2, so what?

I split the above post from Why would I even want to play this game?

Hi James,

The solution is very simple: use the rules. I'll go through several of the angles on the question.

1. Here's a small one. Jesse didn't need the Big ability for the space station because he realized he didn't need or want the mechanics of Big to apply to that demon. Taking that one step farther, or more accurately, taking it to the level where it matters most, you should conceive of a demon as always being at the default effectiveness of a human with its scores, in addition to its abilities.

2. Here's a demon tank with Power 2. It's an Object demon. Let's say it doesn't have the Special Damage ability. Can its cannon shoot? Sure it can. What sort of damage will it do? Check this out.

a) If there is a physical tank involved in the demon's presence, i.e., the summoner started out with a real tank and "demonized" it in the process of summoning, or summoned the demon into the tank, or however you want to say it, then the tank can indeed shoot just like a real tank, because at baseline, without the demon, it is in fact a tank.

b) If, prior to summoning the demon, there was nothing there, and now that you have the demon, goodness, you also have a tank, then the damage will be based on the dice of a Stamina 2 human using the Fists table, at close range only. That's the default striking damage of any demon, and that's all it gets without a damaging ability. You do indeed have the object called "a tank," but it isn't really putting much of a footprint on reality with the Power and abilities to back it up.

Is there a grey area? Yes, there is. I mentioned in another thread that if one turned into a wolf using Shapeshift and bit someone, with no other ability use involved, that the bladed weapons damage table should be used. I also mentioned the grey area that applies to changing into a bird and whether the flight should be as good as the real bird's. In the case of the tank, I freely admit this is the same grey area, especially as it might apply to the range of the tank's cannon - I'd probably not be such a hard-on as the above paragraph implies, and go ahead and acknowledge that the tank's blast is ranged.

Here's a really, really good way to look at this, though! Again, it all goes back to the fundamentals of the system, which is that the dice are only used to resolve conflicts. OK, it's a tank, and it's an Object demon, and so it's really a tank. Got it. You can put it through any tank paces and blow the shit out of the target in your back yard and whatever ... as long as there's no conflict involved. When a conflict is involved, though, you must work with the capabilities of the tank as a demonic entity, and that entity has a Power of 2 and a Stamina of 1. Good luck.

(The trick in such a case lies with narration. In describing actions and what happens, everyone has the interesting task of describing actions that a tank could indeed do, but having the effectiveness even of a successful strike be limited to the wussy-level. How one does this depends on the look & feel of sorcery in that game. I can imagine three or four ways off the top of my head.)

In the case of Jesse's space station, this issue didn't really come up. I answered Jesse's concerns as if the space station had already existed prior to being demonic; i.e., it was haunted or something. The key point was that he didn't want the mechanics of Big, so he didn't need the ability.

3. So let's look at that demon Lamborghini.

Your insecure teenage sorcerer summons a demonic Lamborghini with the ability "Cover (confers to master): Totally Hot Guy" with, say, Power 2.  No "fast," no nothing.  As a GM, my take would be that the demon, as a car, is a perfectly ordinary Lamborghini unless the demonic stats say otherwise;

Well for me the discussion was a big help.

I will probably run the game straight, and I will probably do a game where you can get away with the incredible, summoning tank, demon and all... but as early in the going as it is, I think I'll stick to the default setup for now.

Better than knowing how it is, I feel much clearer about why it is.

Hey thanks: it's been an issue that crops up reliably, if infrequently, on the forums, and I figured it'd be good to nail it down.  The answer is a little more doctrinaire than I'd expected, but I'm happy to get an answer on that.  I think that's basically how I would handle it too once, if the issue showed up in such a bald way, but like you say it's a grey area.

For anyone following along at home, note what the system is actually resolving, once there's a dice-worthy conflict: you've got your Power 2 "purely demonic" tank that doesn't have the Special Damage ability.  It's cruising along doing "Fists" damage based on its Stamina 1 when there's a meaningful fight.  But you can narrate that in a lot of different ways -- including, a real no-fooling blockbusting cannon that just happens to never get a solid hit on its intended target.  Even if your demon-tank is Power 2, that doesn't have to mean it's impotent: the other guy is just really lucky/agile/something else comes along and screws up the shot so that the target only takes an insignificant amount of damage.

Sure, you could do it that way, depending.

Given that this conversation isn't arising out of an actual instance of play, my next comment needs to be understood in its most general form, based on past games of default (our world right now) Sorcerer. It is, I'd go ahead and say a Power 2 tank is one limp dick of a tank, and its performance will reflect that in an obvious way.

Maybe I'm just mean today.

Best, Ron