Hi folks,

as promised in an earlier thread, I have posted on my blog the One Sheet and player-character concepts (backstories, demons and kickers) (PC 1)(PC 2)(PC 3) for our upcoming Sorcerer game.  The setting is Casablanca Morocco 1940, the characters are rich and detailed, and we're really looking forward to kicking this off!

As this is our first game, any discussion of the One Sheet or chr concepts would be most welcome.

I'm tying the kickers into a relationship map, and am currently generating bad-guys, NPCs, setting detail, and BANGS.  What's the consensus on resolving kickers, do you guys favour resolving all kickers in a scenario (/story/adventure), or just one kicker per scenario?  We have three PCs, and the kickers aren't related (except through the R-map).

Thanks,
-Paiku

A post by The Dragon Master on the Necromancy thread made me realize that I'm still partially thinking about planning a Sorcerer game in terms of planning an adventure, ie. present the characters with threats and watch them fight their way through.

It's not necessarily that the characters want to achieve something, and I throw increasingly difficult obstacles in their path.  It may be that the characters just want to keep something that they have, and I keep raising the stakes.

For example: Perhaps the character posing as Dr. von Braun just wants to live in peace.  Now, how do I threaten that?  Put his false identity in danger of being discovered.  Keep raising the stakes.  Who will he lie to, to keep his secret?  Who is he willing to kill?  Will he call up a more powerful demon?  Will he share his bed with the dead doctor's wife under false pretenses?  Will he kill her to keep his false identity secret?  Although not as cinematic as a grand battle with an uber-demon, a scene in which he must decide whether to kill the doctor's wife or let his secret be revealed would be a climactic moment in a Sorcerer game.  His life wouldn't hang in the balance, but his Humanity would.

I'm currently re-planning my bangs from scratch...

Hi Paiku

After a campaign with mitigated results (check out the "Carnival Bizarre" threads in the AP forum), I can only encourage you to ask yourself two questions: (1) are you as a GM ready to go to a session without feeling the need to offer a story to your players, and (2) are your players interested in playing a game where they are expected to author substantial parts of the story?
It's not just a question of "as long as everyone is on the same page". Sorcerer just doesn't work half as well if not used for what it is intended.

In my case, one player responded "yes" to (2), another one "maybe" and a third one "no" (more or less). This shifted me into the position where I had to bring in the story a lot myself (which amounts to me effectively answering "no" to question 1), especially towards the end. And then... it came out rather flat.

Thus, I would beware of a character who does not really want anything. I don't know if it's absolutely necessary, but it's going to help. Seriously, why would you have a demon if you weren't very intent on getting something in the first place? You can't just summon a demon by accident.

Of course, as the GM you do have to frame scenes like a madman (even the Kickers should not be more than a suggestion that the GM actually "implements" when starting play), so you do actively participate in the creation of the story too.

Check out this discussion between Tony (Dragon Master) and Ron, it's quite informative.

Have a great game!

Hello,

The very fact that you talked about Kickers as if you could plan their resolutions, i.e., when they will happen, means that you must re-boot your entire attitude toward GMing. You may have taken a step toward doing so due to the comments in the other thread, which is good. But I suggest you'll need to go further.

Not only must you abandon all thoughts of when any Kicker will be resolved, but most especially of how and about what. It's not up to you in terms of planning. You must relinquish control of any such planning. Typically, you realize that a Kicker has been resolved only after it's happened, when you look at the material you're ready to play with (your NPCs and what they're about to do), and say, "Huh, I guess that whole hassle has been taken care of, and we've seen why it was the most important thing ever to have happened in that sorcerer's life. Oh! Hey guys! We just resolved so-and-so's Kicker!"

Best, Ron

Also:

You've probably seen this as it's a recent thread, but I think my points in [Sorcerer] How do you play it? may apply here too.

Best, Ron

Ron wrote:
Not only must you abandon all thoughts of when any Kicker will be resolved, but most especially of how and about what. It's not up to you in terms of planning. You must relinquish control of any such planning.

Of course you prep. What you don't do is plan is the outcome of anything that happens which you or anyone else has introduced during play.

You can write up all the NPCs you want. But you can't earmark one as the worst and most important of the bunch that they'll fight at the end. You can add depth and content to any of the Kickers you want, inventing tons of characters and fifty years of back-story. But you can't commit to one particular reaction or approach that the player-character is going to take to his Kicker, or even to 'nudging' him there.

I'm distinguishing between prep and plan. I said, "let go of planning what will happen." I didn't say, "let go of prepping what to introduce."

All of this is reminding me very greatly of Jesse Burneko during the Art-Deco Melodrama. As long as we were making up back-story, he was perfectly happy and excited. But when I refused to say what a given NPC was going to accomplish for the story, or to plan how the story "went" up to three-quarters of an upcoming session, he freaked. "How, how, how, how?!" he screamed, right here in this forum.

Jesse, hop in. Please help P see that this is absolutely nothing Zen, nothing mysterious, and nothing hard. In fact, it's exponentially easier than what some of his prep statements have (strongly) implied. It's not a mystery or a contradiction.

Best, Ron

Um, a little more.

1. I loathe fully extemporaneous play. I consider that to be a way for someone to tacitly control and bully others into making up a story with them as color men. Nothing I'm saying moves "toward that end." Both ends of your stated spectrum turn into railroading in my experience.

2. Preparing Bangs the night before isn't railroading. It's absolutely required. What's not required are (a) actually using any one of them unless you want to, and more importantly, (b) what cannot work is thinking of a Bang as a means to some desired end. "And after they kill the hyenas, then they'll find the business card ..." It's also important to know that a lot of the time, what a given player-character does is just as good as a Bang, and in fact is a Bang, and it may well negate one or more of your planned ones, in which case you mentally abandon them.

3. The endings text in Chapter 4 is quite lousy. I was unable at the time of writing to clarify that such endings can emerge from play itself, causally from played events, and that the GM must be alert to realizing this when it happens. In that section, my attempts to explain good Sorcerer GMing fell back on half-railroading and half-emergent effects I'd generated as a GM for a decade or more.

Best, Ron

Ron wrote: this is absolutely nothing Zen, nothing mysterious, and nothing hard.

Ron wrote: The endings text in Chapter 4 is quite lousy. I was unable at the time of writing to clarify that such endings can emerge from play itself, causally from played events, and that the GM must be alert to realizing this when it happens. In that section, my attempts to explain good Sorcerer GMing fell back on half-railroading and half-emergent effects I'd generated as a GM for a decade or more.

Guys, this is brilliant. Many thanks!  It really does help to have something explained several different ways.  The improv metaphor brings home the idea that the GM isn't supposed to have any sort of grand plan behind his Bangs -- an improv audience certainly doesn't!

GMing is not as random as an improv audience -- the GM does have NPCs with wants and means (and problems of their own) -- but it's a lot less planned than I was thinking before.  I was guilty of planning to use Bangs as a means to an end, as Ron said.  "Once they finish Bang-A, they'll have the clue that leads them to Bang-B..."  This really does require one to let go of any expectation of being able to plan a plot.  Start with enough interesting characters with conflicting motivations, and have faith that plot will happen.  In this sense, Bangs are just things that I have in mind that my characters (the NPCs and the world) might do.

Jesse, it's not too late to step in swinging with another take on this, if you're so inclined!

I feel like I should keep trying to summarize all the lightbulbs that have come on in my head as a result of this discussion, but I think I'm still digesting.  I'll post again with some analysis after I've tried putting this into practice, probably after the first session of Sorcerers in Casablanca (4 more days).

Again thanks fellas,
-Paiku

I like this thread. Be sure to let us know how the session works.

Hiya,

A couple threads for fun: [Sorcerer] By the Sword - First session and [Sorcerer] McCarthy Era, especially the last few posts.

Best, Ron

It seems I have been summoned.  Although Raven's posts and Ron's links do a pretty good job of covering anything I would say.  Let me see if I can hit some basics.

The HOW, HOW, HOW cry I put out years ago was really based in lack of understanding of what to do with NPCs.  Back then I really couldn't conceive of uses for NPCs outside of two functions: things you fight and lock boxes of information you needed to open so you could know who to fight and how to fight them.  Both of these things are actually clearly forbidden in the Sorcerer texts.  You add in that the rules are very volatile and unpredictable it seemed to me that an NPC you wanted to be a BIG DEAL and kind of scary you couldn't actually do anything with because the PCs might just defeat him "too soon."  It seemed like a big giant recipe for either really short games or GM turtle-ing.

Quite honestly, I am still working on thawing my rather "frozen" NPCs today.  See my more recent posts here regarding my reading of Trollbabe and in Actual Play about Burning Empires and Pta.

Step one in beginning to realize what I was supposed to be doing in Sorcerer was recognizing the wider social context of the characters.  Before encountering Sorcerer my strongest GMing skills were rooted in clue-chain style mystery scenarios where you have a disconnected PC and a disconnected NPC villain and then basically a string of "filler" material between them so that the PC doesn't just walk up to the villain and stab him.

Once I began looking the PCs and NPCs in terms of their wider relationships I began to see other ways to challenge the players beyond simply asking for favors, hiding information and being physical threats.  I notice that if a PC has a wife and there are things she wants from the PC then it suddenly becomes exponentially harder for the PC to take certain kinds of actions.  You don't need to kidnap her.  You don't need to have her betray the PC.  You don't need her to do anything other than be a wife with wifely needs.

Similarly, if you give an NPC who is really a bad person in your own estimation it becomes exponentially harder for the PCs just to stab that villain and be done with it.  You don't even have to dial back how vile the NPC is.  Hell, you don't even have to have him CARE about his wife.  He could be out and out abusive to her and that's seriously enough to most players pause about "just killing" the guy.

I saw probably the most extreme result of this in a very recent Sorcerer & Sword game.  This game featured a Lich who was the great-grandmother of one of the PCs.  She was using her Taint ability to drive everyone the PC knew into despair, murderous rages, and suicide.  She was trying to isolate the PC from her friends so that the Lich could bring the PC "back into the family" and most importantly she needed the PC to use her Sorcerous powers to complete the necromantic ritual that would complete the Lich's dead husband into full Lichdom.

Horrible, right?  I mean classic Swords and Sorcery unnatural horror!  The PC ended up using a Contain ritual to lock the Lich in a grave which was awesome but the player expressed a disappointment at the end of the game.  She said, "there didn't seem to be enough opportunity for action.  I really wanted to be a kick-ass fighter."  I said, "Then why did you contain the Lich?  Why didn't you just go kick her ass.  You had the resources to go in there and kill her."  The players response was this: "She just seemed too human."  I was completely shocked because I had gone so far out of my way to make this Lich as unredeemably vile as I could muster.

I've seen this time and time again.  Just having the wider social context to the characters makes even basic actions really complicated.

Lesson Learned: Fill out the back of the character sheets.  Ask questions that produce characters, locations and objects of value to the character.  If the PC is a doctor ask if they have a favorite patient.  If the character is a rich lord ask if they have any servants they admire.  If the character is in love, ask if they have a romantic rival.  If the character owns something they value ask yourself who might also value that thing.

Step Two: NPCs want things and should be proactive about getting them.  So back in the day we talked about a relationship map being "grabby" and how when a PC walks into one the NPCs view the PC as an opportunity.  I originally interpreted this in the extremely unsophisticated manner of having NPCs walk up to PCs and say, "Do this for me" and if I was feeling particularly ballsy it would be, "Do this for me or else."  Now I realize that you don't have to be that direct.  Just having an NPC come to player to cry on their shoulder about something that happened to them is using the PC as an opportunity.

In fact it's better to have the NPCs take their own actions so long as those actions intrude into the wider social network of the PCs.  The NPC never need ask the PCs for anything.  This doesn't even have to be particularly sinister.  Finding out that you best friend just landed himself in jail for drunk driving and that his girlfriend is hitting your wife up for bail money is perfectly fine bang without the need for the friend to even say, "Man, you've got to bail me out of here!"

Step Three: When avenues of pursuit get shut down, escalate everything else.  This one is really hard for me.  I have tendency to set unconscious behavioral limits on my NPCs.  Often those limits prevent me from escalating an NPC's behavior when they face a set back.  Some party thinks, "Well, the PC put him in his place.  Doing anything else would be extreme and unreasonable and I don't really want my NPC to come off as psychotic."  This leads to short very boring games where NPCs get pruned off your relationship map as they get "reasoned" with.

Don't be afraid to pull a gun or have an NPC do something otherwise desperate, bold or risky.  If something happens to them that permanently removes them from the story remember the wider social network.  Who is upset about his demise?  What destruction has he left in his wake that might need answering?  Escalate THOSE elements.

Finally let me say this: A Sorcerer game is about the implied situation in the character's Kickers.  That's it.  A game of Sorcerer is over when the players Kickers resolve.  The Kicker is not a recurring element that spans many stories.  The Kicker is the story.  The GM's primary job is to deepen, test and escalate the situation described in the Kicker.

Hope that helps.

Jesse

Eero - I surely will let y'all know how the session goes.  After all this generous advice, it's how I can "give back."

Ron - thanks for the recommended reading, I'll take them with me on the bus this AM.

Jesse - many thanks for that essay!  I can see there's lots of room to expand my thinking on what can be done with good NPCs.  This is one post that I'll be re-reading after I GM a session or two.

Last night I put all my prior game prep in the "brainstorming" pile, and started again with:

• clear statements of what each PC wants
• a list of the PCs' Demons, their Desires, Needs and personalities - and space to track each Demon's mood - all on one page
• a one-page list of my main NPCs, and what they want
• a list of all the supporting NPCs and Demons, and key locations, some of which I still need to spec' (man, my file of chr sheets is getting thick!)

...and then created a bunch of Bangs based on the above.  I'm much happier with the outcome this time round, and finally feel prepared to run this game.

I look forward to deconstructing our play for you guys on the forum.  I'll start a new thread in Actual Play, and link to it from here.

Thanks all,
-Paiku

Hi Paiku,

Just a final thought -- knowing I fear information overload for you right now.

You wrote: "clear statements of what each PC wants"

Keep in mind that what a protagonist "wants" can change -- sometimes drastically -- during a piece fiction. This happens in movies and novels and long for TV series all the time. 

At the start of Aliens, Ripley "wants" a good night's sleep. Later she wants to help the marines find out why the colony went silent. Later still, she wants to save the life of a little girl... which wasn't at all what she wanted when the movie began.

I just watched the first season of DAMAGES (a great show, and one of those -- "Oh, this could be a Sorcerer game scenarios TV shows"). It starts with a woman wanting to get hired at a law firm. It ends with the same woman struggling to save her live from six different problems. There are a long list of shifting wants in-between.

Luke wants to get off planet and have adventures. Then he wants to return a droid to its rightful owner. Then he wants to rescue a princess... and so on, until he's want to destroy the Death Star in a desperate dog fight...

In all these cases each new "want" grows out of the previous one in ways that are sometimes subtle and sometimes clear. But the key is, the "want" changes.

So, I'm going to tell you to make sure to write down the KICKER instead. The Kicker is the key. (Notice how many times Jesse mentioned it in his post.)

The Kicker is the "launch point" for the tale. It is Ripley being told, "We've lost contact with the colonists on that planet where your crew found the alien egg." It is the young would-be lawyer being warned by a warm, kind lawyer, even before she's hired at her dream law firm, "If you go work for Patty Hewes, she will destroy you."  For Luke it is receiving a message asking for help from a beautiful Princess...

Both of the moments could have been written by the Player has Kickers. 

Because Kickers are written by the Players, they are the Player saying to you, "I want a game about this."  You won't know how it's all going to turn out. You can't. You shouldn't. But you can keep the story being about that thing.

The Kicker is the springboard of the Player's desires.  It MUST matter to the Players. That's why they write it. It must actually interest them, or turn them on, or excite them or something. They should be eager to find out what will happen when the Kicker is activated in play.

Of course, like you, they should not be thinking how it would play out. That's the rule in Sorcerer: Story Now! We find the story as we go.

The Kicker should demand a choice on the part of the Player Character. It should be emotionally grabby... not just to the characters but to the Players. Because, remember, we are creators as well as audience members in an RPG. And we need to be engaged with the premise of the Kicker as much as an audience would have to be caught up in the start of a movie. The Players must be thinking "I want to see a movie/story/comic book/whatever about this -- because this is cool and I care and I want to know what happens..."

As you've noted, every character wants something. Very often, the Kicker provides an opportunity or threat to that want. "I want my happy life to stay the way it is... and my son is kidnapped." "I want a life of adventure... and I receive a distress call from a Princess." And so on...

But once this incident kicks in, there's really no telling where the story will end up or where the character's wants will land. In the two examples above, the tales might end with "I want to raise my son from the dead," and "I want to burn down the whole world with my grief." See?

When we talk about "resolving the Kicker" all we mean is that the thing that jump started the protagonist in a new direction, something emotionally grabby and interesting that demanded a choice on the part of the character when it happened, is arcing across the narrative. The influence of the Kicker, what it means to the the Players (and the Player's Character) might change over time, but the resolution will tie back to that Kicker. That's part of the GM's job -- to keep spinning variations on obstacles and opportunities to the PC's plans and wants that are still tied to the Kicker.

In my prep, and before each session of Sorcerer, I make sure to review:
* Each Character's Kicker
* Demon(s)
* Price
* Descriptors
* Telltale
* And all the items listed on "the back of the character sheet"

I cannot emphasize enough that you MUST continue to review the items on the "back of the character sheet."

In fact, I think that section of the character sheet is so important that I redesigned the sheet and put it front and center.

Remember that the list of Kicker, Demons, Price, Descriptors, Telltale and all the items on the center of the character sheet are the items the Player wanted the game to be about. This is your springboard to review and imagine details for the upcoming session -- whether it is the first or the eighth.  By circling back with your imagination before each session as you prep to these items you can find the unity and variety that will both hold the fiction together and give it strength, while providing variety (the Bangs) that launch the Player Characters off into new, unexpected directions.

***
Here's a link to an article I wrote about the importance of the center of the character sheet. http://playsorcerer.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/a-sorcerer-character-sheet/

In the first paragraph you'll find a link to a PDF of the character sheet I designed.

Don't worry Chris, I went into information overload about two days ago ;-)

That's why I plan on re-reading this excellent thread after our first session, and probably after the second and third and fourth as well.  In fact, I'm glad that we have at least three complete Sorcerer games on the docket.  I can tell that Sorcerer play is something that's going to get better with practice - better and richer and awesomer more enjoyable for everyone.

Wants will change.  Observe what the players respond to.  Riff off the details that the players provide.  Keep going back to the diagram on the back of the sheet which should really be on the front of the sheet (we need a catchier name for that thing: bullseye diagram? story bullseye? Price-Lore-Cover-Kicker (PLoCK diagram?)). 

Got it. *head spinning*

Just 2 days to go.  I'll let y'all know how it goes.  Thanks,
-Paiku

I've actually been struggling with what to call the diagram for over a year now.

I love Story-Bullseye. Thanks.

Actually the term's been around for a bit. In 2005, I cited Michael S. Miller as the author of the term "story bullseye" in Sorcerer: The Tenure Game, but the earliest thread I could find on short notice has me saying it (Demon Cops - character creation).

Best, Ron

Paiku wrote: Wants will change.  Observe what the players respond to.  Riff off the details that the players provide.  Keep going back to the diagram on the back of the sheet which should really be on the front of the sheet (we need a catchier name for that thing: bullseye diagram? story bullseye? Price-Lore-Cover-Kicker (PLoCK diagram?)).

*sitting in corner, giggling madly and pulling out own hair*

Gents, first session was exciting, cool, spooky, dramatic, imperfect, and we're all chomping at the bit for session 2!  I'll post some AP soon (work just exploded), but for now a couple of quick rules questions:

Is it possible to build a Contain without the demon, and then lure the demon into it? 
Perhaps equivalently, Is it possible to perform most of a Contain or Banish ritual without the demon, and then finish the ritual or "trigger the sorcery" when the demon is present? 
Can a sorcerer Summon a demon that is already present in the world?  What happens if he tries?

The characters are planning on ambushing an errant demon.  As far as I can tell, the rulebook doesn't address these special cases.  Perhaps these are peculiarities of sorcery which are open to each group's interpretation.

Thanks,
-John

I know that in the core book it talks about summoning a demon into a contain, so I'd assume that the contain works like building a cage. This is referenced in the section on Dumb Sorcery (listed in the Table of Contentes). In short, yes. Mind you, the standard disclaimer applies here of "it depends on your definition of Sorcery".

The second is about the same. The book defines Sorcerous rituals as taking an hour or more, so I could certainly see them beginning the process and attempting to lure the demon into it right at the end (though I wouldn't expect it to work like a pitfall kind of trap). Again. Standard disclaimer.

There was a discussion on the boards here about exactly that, and I think it was linked here (through the link to my discussion with Ron). Basically there are two "locations" (word used very loosely) demons might be, "here" and "not here". "Not here" doesn't mean "over there". It's a place that no God (assuming your setting has one) would accept as part of any creation. It is Void, Nothingness, the absence of any form of existence. This is where they are contacted from. This is where they are summoned from. Once they are here they can't be summoned away, because they've already been summoned. It helps to realize that "Summon" is the short form of the name of the ritual. The full one is "Summon Into Existence" (my interpretation there). Again. Standard Disclaimer.

Hold on - I'm going to have to answer the questions directly without reference to the posted replies, because I think some confusion's happening. So Paiku, the following is directly to you. I'll deal with why it's different from the first reply some other time.

1. If you have a demon already in existence, and you make a Contain, then the default is that the Contain will keep it out, not in. That's different from having a Contain, and Summoning a demon into it - that's fine. But I don't think that's what you were asking about. I think you were talking about a demon being, oh, right outside the door, and you make a Contain in your living room, then open the door and say, "Here demon demon." And the default for that is that the demon will walk up and bump its nose and not be able to get into the Contain.

I emphasized default because it is, in fact, possible to make a "demon trap" type Contain. But you have to set it up specifically as a trap, in a way above and beyond merely making the basic Contain. Think of the basic Contain as a simple box. If you Summon something into the box, it can't get out; if something's outside the box, it can't get in. Now think of tipping the box at an angle, and propping it up with a stick - OK, now something that's outside may meander beneath the box, and you take away the stick. As long as the player explains how there's a stick to prop it up, then what you're describing is OK. It requires no particular extra use of the mechanics. But the difference in terms of the fiction is very important.

2. I can see this one a mile off:

Is it possible to perform most of a Contain or Banish ritual without the demon, and then finish the ritual or "trigger the sorcery" when the demon is present?

To Ron's reply:
1. Yes that's what we were after, exactly.
2. I admit it, we were trying to dodge the rules.  Sounds like we can do it with a Contain as in #1, but not with a Banish - at least not without being reduced to a single die (plus bonuses).  Well, we wouldn't want sorcery to be too easy, would we.  As long as they can spring a Contain on the beast, then they can take their time with the Banish.  Barring outside interference of course... *GM's snigger*
3. Right, that makes sense, and on this item I think Ron's and Dragon Master's responses agree.  Thanks both for clarifying.

Cheers,
-John

Hi all, I've started the AP thread for Sorcerers in Casablanca with AP of our first session.  Fun, interesting, imperfect, promising.

The Forge - Sorcerers in Casablanca - AP

Cheers,
-John