Sorry if I'm being dense, but I've read Sorcerer and Sword a couple of times now and can't seem to get past one simple point, perhaps best exemplified by Conan.

In the book (and in threads on this site), Conan is a sorcerer. I.e. has a lore rating. This makes sense to me. However, as far as I can see, that's all Conan has. He might be able to banish a demon, but doesn't start with one. In the stories I've read, he never gets one.

Imagine I run a game with two characters: Conan and Bob (a sorcerer with a demon). Both are good fighters, and they fight each other. What stops Bob from kicking the crap out of Conan? And if he can, every time, hasn't that undersold the Conan concept?

I guess Conan could summon his own demon, but that doesn't seem in accordance with the fiction as I understand it. But if one player chooses to play a straight lore-only "fighter", what prevents his character being underpowered relative to others?

The Conan player has to be really good at managing the three (four if you include the Sorcerer & Sword stuff) die tricks.

1) Roll over victories: Carrying the momentum of success A into action B.

2) Double Descriptors: Actions which nail more than one Desciptor (Usually Past + Something but sometimes Lore + Something) so that you can roll one descriptor first and then carry the victories over to the primary roll in a single action.

3) Bonus Dice.  There are up to 5 available and they're for pretty concrete things.  1 die for dialogue.  2 dice if the action is really going to alter the situation at hand.  2 dice for a particularly unusual version of an action.

4) Sorcerer & Sword Only: The save victories to cancel non-victories trick.  I don't have much practice with this one.

In other words the "fighter only" compensates by being very smart and very dynamic.  If Bob is a PC he can do all of these but his NPC demon can't really do 2 or 3.  If Bob is an NPC he can't do 3.

Jesse

Don't forget Destiny, too. That's another source of dice.

I recommend looking over the source material too. I can think of very few instances in which a sorcerer is standing there with his pet, specifically trying to kill Conan. I'd welcome help from the forum participants, but at the moment ...

Conan vs. Thoth-Amon's baboon-dog demon - basically, it can and will kill him, and would except that he utilizes a sword that had been marked by a sage in a dream to kill it. In game terms, this can mean about a zillion different things, but effectively, he had access to Special Damage himself. As I see it, and I want to stress that I'm using reversed logic because the story is a story and was not written to accomodate the Sorcerer rules - Conan's dream was itself a Contact. Or if you want to preserve theme (which posits the sage as a pro-Humanity type), then it could even be an angel scene using the rules from The Sorcerer's Soul. The point is that that story is in no fucking way the stereotype of "muscle-y Conan vs. wizard." It makes that if it were, Conan would be slaughtered.

In fact, I think the real point is to take that very idea that Howard is all about grunting-muscle man hacking his way through smarty-pants wizards, and kill it dead. Yes, there's a certain amount of oiled-muscled he-man rhetoric in the Conan stories which to some readers may suggest gay porn. But there's a lot less of it than in the pastiche fiction, and I should stress that Conan clearly learns and uses wizardly foes' behavior against them. His second fight against Tsotha-Lanti is a good example.

Another example: Conan vs. the winged-ape demon (or sorcerer? works a bit better that way, in fact) in Queen of the Black Coast. It defeats him. He only survives because Belit's ghost saves him, and secondarily because that permits him to get free of the marble column that fell on him - in fact, that literary moment was one of the many sources I used for the Will roll to supercede the damage system (along with Salome's post-sword-stroke scene in A Witch Shall Be Born). But that's a digression; my point is that Conan defeats that demon specifically and only because of necromancy, and whether he performs it or Belit does is a matter for unresolvable debate (see their dialogue before they arrive at the island, and also her death-haunted demeanor once they get there).

Ummm ... I'll have to revisit the original The Black Stranger as written by Howard (and hideously butchered by others into The Treasure of Tranicos), and see how the silver-and-fire demon was beaten, or if that scene even existed in the original. I should point out that it was not published by Howard and I'm generally not inclined to hold him/Conan responsible for stories he did not finish or perhaps did not want to.

I am a little rushed for time but will return to the discussion. I want to repeat my point here, too, that I do not consider the widely-held notion that Conan is all about muscles being better than magic (intellect).

Best, Ron

Well, some of this is besides the point.  The OP asked if a "straight lore-only fighter" is, or isn't, underpowered in comparison with regular sorcerers.  The short answer is that these questions of game balance, at least in a combat-only scene, aren't central to Sorcerer's design. 

You choose a lore-only guy for a very specific reason: you want to have a character who's working from a rules-mechanical disadvantage, but who isn't bogged down by having to manage a demon.  Conan isn't about confronting demons and sorcerers as an equal-in-power: pretty much every NPC he meets in these stories is like, "Yikes, Conan, this sorcerer dude will kill us all!"  Conan is about overcoming these challenges with courage, wits, and skill.  Unless he starts from a disadvantage, the accomplishment means nothing. 

As the others have mentioned, the disadvantage isn't as steep as one would suppose, since Sorcerer rewards courage, wits and skill.  (And it seems like none of the demons Conan fights have the Armor ability, which ties into one of Howard's themes that steel and willpower can match anything in the universe.)

But Conan isn't un-balanced when you look at him in a broader context than just killin' stuff.  Conan doesn't have to be looking over his shoulder all the time, wondering how his demon is going to act up.  Conan doesn't have to worry about incurring massive Humanity loss rolls for satisfying his demon's needs.  Conan can just be a cool dude to everybody he meets, and as a result he's got a whole passel of friends who come to his aid at the climax of most of the stories. 

Most significantly, Conan isn't underpowered because the concept of character power doesn't apply to a game that is not about protagonism-via-force. In principle there is nothing, except perhaps player preferences, preventing one from playing and enjoying a game where your character loses all the time because he is noble and right and natural and good, and thus does not truck with demons that give you power. The real question is not whether Conan is underpowered in Sorcerer, but whether Sorcerer promises or should deliver equal power to all character concepts. To my understanding it does neither; power happens or does not happen, but that is verified only after the fact, not bestowed upon your character as an inherent right.

Thanks for the responses. I think I'm near to getting it, but I'm not there yet. I particularly appreciated Ron's answer about what would be happening in the fiction if I was running Conan as Howard wrote it. After that answer, if I was to run a single-protagonist Conan game, I reckon it would be fine. My problem, I think, is a multiple protagonist game.

Here's one place I have difficulty:

Eero wrote: In principle there is nothing, except perhaps player preferences, preventing one from playing and enjoying a game where your character loses all the time...

Eero wrote:
The real question is not whether Conan is underpowered in Sorcerer, but whether Sorcerer promises or should deliver equal power to all character concepts.

jburneko wrote:
In other words the "fighter only" compensates by being very smart and very dynamic.

Also, sorry to double-post, but there doesn't seem to be an edit button and I reread this and thought it a key point:

James_Nostack wrote:
You choose a lore-only guy for a very specific reason: you want to have a character who's working from a rules-mechanical disadvantage, but who isn't bogged down by having to manage a demon.

Another thought: Demon doesn't *have* to be defined within the fiction... at all.

A demon can simply be played as a stack of abilities, a need and a desire. Sometimes those abilities will fail if the need and desire aren't met. The need and desire shouldn't be too easy to meet.

Sure, it's more *fun* to play a demon as a personality, but it's not required. Conan could have a "demon" whose abilities are shown as extraordinary feats of heroism, and whose need and desire are the character's own vices and addictions.

At least, that's the way I remember it.

I'm going to nitpick one phrasing here because it might be illuminating: you do not "scale Bangs" to characters, because Bangs are not about challenges, but choices. The only way character strength is involved in Bangs is in that the character's positioning in the fiction determines the choices he can make, and therefore a lowly slave can't effectively make the same choices the king can (and vice versa) - the choice of killing or not killing a begging brigand is one Conan can make only if he can first disarm the man, for example. So Conan's strength will only matter for Bangs when the Bang concerns a situation Conan can't get into because he's too weak.

As for heroic fantasy, Ron actually writes about this rather well in &Sword; he discusses the importance of creating heroism and competence for the characters not by making them win conflicts, but by describing their circumstances and struggle in admirable ways. Thus you might not even roll dice for scaling walls and beating snakes if these activities did not carry interest beyond the prospect of victory; if there is no meaningful way of playing the defeat, then do not roll the dice, but instead just describe how heroic the character is. On the other hand, most of the time you do have many meaningful ways of having the character lose while preserving his heroic mien: instead of the character being too weak or clumsy or stupid, how about the opponent is too fierce, the conditions conspire against him, his virtues trip him up or simple ill fate takes him down? There is no reason for defeat to equal deprotagonization.

To elaborate on that in a multi-character context, Sorcerer is not a team-based game. This means that you never need to compare character achievements against each other in any measurable way. Furthermore, what makes characters cool in this sort of game is not their strength, but their humanity and the difficult choices the character makes when confronted with difficulties. The weaker character can quite easily be just as cool or cooler than the other guy because we do not measure coolness by whose character can pawn the others in a cage match. Conan can be cool for being able to beat the sorcerer without stooping to the same depths of depravity, he can even be cool for trying and failing - I see no contradiction.

Furthermore, a point about the relationship a roleplaying game like Sorcerer has to fiction: we can't read a Howard short story directly into Sorcerer and demand that our characters succeed in the same string of struggles Conan does because one of those things is a roleplaying game while the other is a story. Specifically, Sorcerer belongs in a category of roleplaying games that presume that your character's particular brand of heroism and its consequences - his very protagonism - is up in the air to some degree when we begin play. You can make Conan as a character in the game, but you can't expect to be entitled to flawless success beforehand; the game's methodology when correctly applied will ensure that the story outcome of play will be interesting and meaningful, but it won't ensure that Conan will succeed in the same places he succeeds in a given story. This time around Conan might fail heroically in his fight against an evil sorcerer, which might then lead the story into even greater heights, or perhaps a grim closure. The story will be good (insofar as the methodology of the game is correctly designed and applied), but we won't know in advance what it will be like, or even whether Conan will be the flawless hero we might wish him to be.

Finally, for what it's worth, it seems to me that Conan would win his various struggles in the Sorcerer rules by the virtue of his high Stamina, Will and Past values, at least in part. I find the trade-off in playing Conan entirely reasonable from a strict character efficiency viewpoint: you might give Conan less Lore because he "doesn't need it" for what you have in mind, allowing you to give him more Stamina and Will. Conan can also bind a demon for himself later if he feels like it, and he will in fact pay the exact same price for it that the other guy did in character generation - except that Conan gets to hunt for bonus dice when he does it in-game, and he gets to pick the demon to suit the occasion. If anything, I'd say that playing Conan is slightly more attractive than playing a demonologist, that much the prospect of being a hardcore no-demon protagonist in Sorcerer entices me (and that's how much trouble the demons are, really).

In practice sorcerer Bob and Conan can well adventure together for a while, provided that they both have solid, discrete motivations for what they're doing, moment to moment. Conan won't be reduced into a sidekick not because of comparative strength, but because he has motivations and goals worthy of a hero in his own right, regardless of Bob. (Note how the chargen procedure ensures that this is so; you never play Sorcerer with a character who's just along for the ride out of simple greed.) The choices he faces will be ones Bob cannot make for him for all of Bob's power: Conan needs to decide whether he'll go help his girlfriend from a deathly peril, not Bob - Conan needs to decide whether to skim the reward money, not Bob - Conan needs to decide whether to spare the pretty enemy spy, not Bob - Conan needs to decide whether to turn against Bob when he goes crazy, not Bob - the job of the GM in the game is to cater to each character's specific concerns whether they're together or not, and thus each character will have their own story regardless of who might or might not be more powerful when the dice go down.

One more viewpoint - this thing goes to the roots of the game's philosophy, that's why there are so many points to this. The last point is that sorcerers always pay in Humanity for their demonic ways. It is not power without cost. If all we cared about was the power, then Bob could grow even more powerful by summoning even more demons, uncaring of the consequences. This is an absurd logic, surely, for ultimately Bob would come to his end as a Humanity zero wreck - powerful in his way, perhaps, but no longer a hero or protagonist of a story. You might view the Conan choice of starting without even one demon as an extreme form of prudence in a world filled with inhuman wretchedness. You're giving up some power, yes (I for one wouldn't claim that there is some objective advantage in immediate strength in not having demons at your call), but you're also hoping that what power you have is enough for facing what is ahead regardless. If it's not, then you need to decide whether you'd rather fail or dip a toe in sorcery - and that's what the game is about. Bob and Conan are on the same path, just at different points of it. You don't play "just a fighter" in this game, you just play a sorcerer with above-average standards for debasing himself.

(For what it's worth, I'm not satisfied with the "play better" answer to game balance here, either. I'd rather question whether losing more is really that terrible a fate - we have the methodology for playing weaker and stronger characters, and for having characters win or lose, and making play meaningful nonetheless. Enjoyment of the game does not need to hang on how well your own character does in the game in comparison to other characters or some abstract prior expectation.)

Summarizing what Eero is saying, I think, I see you going into this with a very D&D-based mindset: everything must be balanced, it's all about the mission, fight-the-monster, team-based play.

To put a different spin on it: you're thinking about D&D when you're being offered Tolkien, and you're confusing them because of this.

Consider: the Fellowship in LotR isn't all well-matched in terms of power, are they? Not at all! Heck, it is the two weakest characters in the entire group, in a D&D-kind of measure, who are the ones who destroy the One Ring and defeat Sauron. It is not the destined uber-warrior heir, the godling wizard, or the supernatural elven archer...all of whom had abilities and powers and skills far beyond a couple of run-of-the-mill midget farmers.

And that is what Sorcerer is like.

(And why "he has a demon and I don't" is a red herring when thinking about play.)

This thread has fallen into two minor traps, or actually three.

1. The dogpile. Let the guy talk before jumpin' on. As you all know, despite the fact that we are all different people participating in a discussion equally ... it doesn't seem that way to a new poster, it can seem more as if one is being confronted by a united phalanx.

2. No connection to actual play in the points being made. The concern here will not be addressed by abstractions or psychology, but by example.

3. Failure to distinguish between two levels of an issue. We have to concern ourselves with whether (a) there is a legitimate issue which Sorcerer contains a solution for, or (b) there is actually no legitimate issue and therefore the "lack" of a solution is not a problem.

I'll be back to it when I can.

No problem. Let's see ...

Ron wrote:
1. The dogpile. Let the guy talk before jumpin' on. As you all know, despite the fact that we are all different people participating in a discussion equally ... it doesn't seem that way to a new poster, it can seem more as if one is being confronted by a united phalanx.

Ron wrote:
2. No connection to actual play in the points being made. The concern here will not be addressed by abstractions or psychology, but by example.

Ron wrote:
3. Failure to distinguish between two levels of an issue. We have to concern ourselves with whether (a) there is a legitimate issue which Sorcerer contains a solution for, or (b) there is actually no legitimate issue and therefore the "lack" of a solution is not a problem.

greyorm wrote:
To put a different spin on it: you're thinking about D&D when you're being offered Tolkien, and you're confusing them because of this.

Consider: the Fellowship in LotR isn't all well-matched in terms of power, are they? Not at all! Heck, it is the two weakest characters in the entire group, in a D&D-kind of measure, who are the ones who destroy the One Ring and defeat Sauron. It is not the destined uber-warrior heir, the godling wizard, or the supernatural elven archer...all of whom had abilities and powers and skills far beyond a couple of run-of-the-mill midget farmers.

From the description you gave of how you've been playing the game it sounds like you may be having a more general issue with the structure of a Sorcerer game.  May I suggest you take a look at this post by Christopher Kubasik that does an excellent job of breaking down the flow of a Sorcerer game, very very well.

http://story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=11710&page=1#Comment_261789

Maybe if we clear up some of the larger conceptual issues, it will shed light on this issue.

Jesse

Yeah, I find myself thinking that the Balrog wasn't Frodo's bang. It was Gandalf who had the kicker about leading the fellowship through Moria and wakening the sleeper within.

Frodo's kicker is about not killing Gollum because of the bond they share and taking him with him into Mordor.

Woah, guys, slow down. What whose Kickers were if they were Sorcerer characters is not at all helpful (especially if it is going to sow further confusion by confusing plot arcs with Kickers, and gods know what else). I'm sorry to have brought it up since it is causing this kind of confusion: the idea was solely to showcase how characters with vastly disparate power levels are not an issue because Sorcerer is not D&D and the ways in which it is not. It was apparently poorly thought out on my part, and it should be removed from the discussion table: no more talk about it, please.

Aw, shucks. You're right. I was just having a little fun, but really the issue is that the players create characters and kickers to go with them. The GM's job is to take those kickers and build bangs around those kickers that demand in-game responses that drive the game forward. The game springs from the kickers that the players authored.

If you just take all the characters, put them down a hole and throw them up against a big ol' critter without regard for what stories the characters were designed to tell, it's not likely to be very satisfying.

Bringing it back to Conan, you can make Conan without a demon and the game will be about a big strong dude with an axe that kills sorcerers. You can make Conan with an inner demon that's driving him and express the "powers" as his feats of heroism. Then the story will be about a big strong dude with an axe that is driven by his inner demons to kill sorcerers. Either way works, what's important is what character does the player want to play, what's kicker did they author, and how has the game been shaped to address that kicker.

Just a quick question from something earlier on in the thread. How is 'Destiny' a source of dice? I just had a quick re-read of &Sword, and I couldn't see any indication of that.

Hi Steve,

It's on page 69, under "Ego assertion." Looking at it now, I can see how I was posting in shorthand - my practical take on those rules is that a character with Destiny has a particularly good profile for utilizing the ego-assertion bonus.

Best, Ron

Thanks - that makes sense.

Thank you very much to everyone who contributed to this thread and helped me understand the game better. I've spent the past week rereading Sorcerer and a number of threads on this board, and I think I have an answer to my question. As well as the posts here, the following threads were really helpful (put here in case they help anyone else):

http://story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=11710&page=1#Comment_261789
... which taught me how important it is that the players author their character's story, through the kicker, by making the play character-relevant:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html
... which explained what we're trying to simulate in narrativist roleplaying - fictional representation of stories, not physics.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/
... which cleared up a lot of misconceptions I had about play balance. In particular the line:

Narrativist character creation in some games requires a fair amount of back-story, just as some Simulationist play does, but in the former, it's about establishing a chassis for conflict, metagame, and reward, and in the latter, it's about Coloring the character and providing oppportunities for GM-created hooks.

White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade is a game about the brooding affairs of immortal vampires and their clan disputes. It's moody. It's horror. It's about personality and character. For some bizarro reason, there's space in the rules devoted to distinguishing between the damage done by shotguns and that of Uzis.

Hi there,

You've got the right idea. For further clarification, one of my views on role-playing is that there is no point to playing with people who do not share your own creative priorities, for this game, at this time, and with you personally. Those priorities are what I call Creative Agenda, and this agenda is the one thing that holds together everything else about play. I suggest that mere neutral compatibility among persons was not sufficient - genuine and reliable fun in play required active compatibility and ongoing person-to-person reinforcement.

When I first introduced this viewpoint in an essay in 1999, the response was overwhelming horrified - I had shot one of the most sacred cows of hobbyist role-playing, that social concerns were supposed to be irrelevant, that anyone could play with anyone, and that the first priority to bring to the table was that you had to get along with everyone and anyone, no matter what.

I remember playtesting early versions of Sorcerer; people would often say, "This is excellent, but you'd have to be playing with really good players." My response was, "Why would I play with anyone else?" Now, in that anecdote, "good" was a code-word, because it meant "plays for the same reason." But that clarification aside, my viewpoint has remained unchanged. My response to your (b) point is: That's correct. Being attentive to what you want and to what everyone else wants is a crucial behavioral requirement for enjoying any group, leisure activity, and role-playing is no different. And by "being attentive," I don't mean endless downgrading of everyone's expectations via compromise - I mean attentive in the sense of assertiveness, mutual support, and willingness to say no, either to one's own inclusion or someone else's.

Best, Ron

I have run a short Conan campaign using Sorcerer and Sword, and it worked perfectly well, especially if you consider that in this setting Pacts should be the main way of interaction with a demon. I had one sorcerer player (i.e. his character had Lore greater than 1; 3 IIRC) and he used Pact only twice in the campaign; most of the time he used Lore to perform mesmerism tricks and similar. The other players played a Nomad and a Thief, respectively, and they had higher scores in Will and Stamina w.r.t. the "true" sorcerer (which was, besides, an "inhuman" spawn of Dagoth Hill), and these higher scores made the difference most of the time.