The Historical Importance of Ron Edwards' Sorcerer [+]

[AbdulAlhazred]

We were talking about this, so I figured I'd post something quickly. If you look at Apocalypse World's collection of the below (among other things...but these specifically), you can see the DNA of Sorcerer Bangs:

Look through crosshairs

Ask provocative questions and build on the answers

Be a fan of the players’ characters

* Everything is a target.

* There are no status quos.

* Care about what the players care about...through their PCs...by aggressively attacking it via premise-relevant, provocative, aggressive situation-framing.


Relevant Sorcerer Text:

Bangs are those moments when the characters realize they have a problem right now and have to get moving to deal with it. It can be as simple as a hellacious demon crashing through the skylight and attacking the characters, or as subtle as the voice of the long-dead murder victim answering when they call the phone number they found in the new murder victim’s pockets.

In order to get to the Bangs if the players are being dense, or if the gm is letting them flounder around, the gm should begin to ask leading questions.

Certainly presages AW's "ask questions, use the answers" principle. Slightly different context, but definitely key to booting up the game, and suggesting scene framing.

 

[Campbell]

I wanted to address kickers specifically as they contrast to inciting events. There were certainly games before Sorcerer that include inciting events. The novel feature of kickers is that addressing them is the entire focus of play. Every scene/bang the GM frames is meant to address the premise of the characters' individual kickers. These bangs are specifically events in characters' lives that are intended to present a choice between different underlying desires related to whatever their kicker might be. Every moment of play you are driving towards these conflicts.

The other novel element is that it has a designated ending point. Once a kicker is resolved you either pick a new kicker or the character is removed from play.

These structural elements in combination are what form the beating heart of Sorcerer's play style and the games that trace their lineage back to it. If anyone knows of any games prior to it that feature this every moment drive play towards conflict and all conflicts must address the characters' core premise I would love to see them so we can celebrate their contributions as well.

Does anyone know of any such games? I honestly want to know. @overgeeked do you have any examples? You have my attention.

 

[kigmatzomat]

I have to say "none afaik". I checked and no one in my group read it, played it or bought it. (And since one guy is a pathological game acquirer is surprising) I had to google it. (And I own 2 editions of Kult)

I am guessing that it was completely overshadowed by 3e/d20, Earthdawn 2e and nWoD in our world.

 

[pemerton]

A question for @Campbell @chaochou and others familiar with Sorcerer:

Is it an early pioneer, or the pioneer, of emotional/social conflict generating debuffs that apply if acting against contrary to the emotion/influence (similar to how Seduce/Manipulate in AW can lead to Acting Under Fire)?

In Prince Valiant (which is earlier than Sorcerer) there can be emotionally-based buffs and debuffs, and these can be the consequences of action resolution, but there is no systematic approach to that. (What it does have is systematic social conflict a bit analogous to a HeroWars extended contest - but that's a self-contained conflict rather than a wider source of debuffs.)

Rolemaster introduced a Depression critical strike table in RMCIII, and in our RM games in the 90s when a player thought that their PC would be adversely emotionally affected by an event, they would roll on the Depression crit table to see how it affected their character. But (i) these would normally be generic debuffs (typically penalties to all actions, or rounds of stun, or both), not "carrot-and-stick" ones; and (ii) these were not part of a systematic resolution framework.

 

[Campbell]

A question for @Campbell @chaochou and others familiar with Sorcerer:

Is it an early pioneer, or the pioneer, of emotional/social conflict generating debuffs that apply if acting against contrary to the emotion/influence (similar to how Seduce/Manipulate in AW can lead to Acting Under Fire)?

In Prince Valiant (which is earlier than Sorcerer) there can be emotionally-based buffs and debuffs, and these can be the consequences of action resolution, but there is no systematic approach to that. (What it does have is systematic social conflict a bit analogous to a HeroWars extended contest - but that's a self-contained conflict rather than a wider source of debuffs.)

Rolemaster introduced a Depression critical strike table in RMCIII, and in our RM games in the 90s when a player thought that their PC would be adversely emotionally affected by an event, they would roll on the Depression crit table to see how it affected their character. But (i) these would normally be generic debuffs (typically penalties to all actions, or rounds of stun, or both), not "carrot-and-stick" ones; and (ii) these were not part of a systematic resolution framework.

If another character (player or NPC) succeeds in a social contest extra successes over your character's become bonus dice for actions that line up with the intent of the contest and penalty dice for actions that are contrary to the intent. You can always choose what your character does, but there is a point where you might be rolling a single die.

These sorts of exchanges are pretty common with your demons.

 

[pemerton]

@Campbell Is it the first game with this carrot/stick approach?

 

[chaochou]

Is it an early pioneer, or the pioneer, of emotional/social conflict generating debuffs that apply if acting against contrary to the emotion/influence (similar to how Seduce/Manipulate in AW can lead to Acting Under Fire)?

Probably! As @Campbell said, you carry over dice as bonuses from one piece of resolution to the next until a conflict is decided, which is a neat piece of tech in a couple of ways.

First, it creates a snowball effect ('moves snowball') in which you can smooth-talk someone and use that as a bonus to knock them unconscious - buffs and debuffs can just ebb and flow.

Secondly, knowing that things can snowball creates some temptation to play dirty - ie getting in first with some demonic aid! Temptation is a key element of the game by design... you have the power... you have a demon... just use it... what's the worst that could happen?

Everything is built around a core idea - in this case temptation and corruption. You can see a simalar ethos in Burning Wheel (built around 'Fight for what you Believe') and Apocalypse World ('scarcity' and 'no status quos').

 

[pemerton]

This thread prompted me to buy Sorcerer and a couple of other Ron Edwards RPGs. For anyone interested, the shopfront is here: Adept Play

 

[pemerton]

This is from the annotations to p 13:

[A] core feature of playing Sorcerer . . . is that pre-play setting is reduced to the barest possible minimum, strictly at the service of making characters enmeshed in crisis. More about the setting is established through specific preparation and play.

A lot of games shoot for the initial, necessary inspiration by providing a detailed setting. However, Sorcerer begins with building characters. And since the character creation process necessarily wraps them into in a crisis situation, you only need a little bit of setting to make this go. In other words, setting exists at the outset only to supercharge the characters’ immediate hassles, not for the characters to explore. Play itself will make lots more setting (the “complete” setting if you like), which is fine.​

That's a nice, clear statement of "no myth".

 

[Campbell]

I have to say "none afaik". I checked and no one in my group read it, played it or bought it. (And since one guy is a pathological game acquirer is surprising) I had to google it. (And I own 2 editions of Kult)

I am guessing that it was completely overshadowed by 3e/d20, Earthdawn 2e and nWoD in our world.

I think games can be important from a historical standpoint even if they were not the most widely played. For instance the Second Edition of Vampire the Requiem and especially Fifth Edition of Vampire The Masquerade present approaches to Humanity that are much closer to how Sorcerer portrays it. as something more defined by the play group and actively incentivize skirting those lines. The vastly different approach that Vampire the Requiem Second Edition takes to frenzy is very inspired by how demons were handled in Sorcerer. While they are still phenomenally different sorts of games Sorcerer's critique of Vampire ended up making it [Vampire] a better game overall.

We can also see how a small game can help to popularize something like emotional safety techniques to the point where those techniques are referenced in the second most popular roleplaying game in the world [Pathfinder Second Edition].

In any medium there will be examples of the craft that were not in of themselves massively popular, but were influential to the designers of other games. You can see that in the blog I linked up thread by the lead designer of Earthdawn who is a big fan of indie games. I have heard similar statements from Onyx Path designers who worked on Chronicles of Darkness games.

Even popular games like Vampire The Masquerade can have an outsize impact on the hobby beyond those who played them. Games like Vampire, Champions, Legend of the Five Rings et al. helped to popularize stronger connections to the game's setting than had been the norm previously. We see that reflected in more recent takes on game like D&D and Pathfinder.

Other examples of games that had a much larger impact than the people that played them include games like Ars Magica, Over The Edge and Pendragon.

I'll probably cover Vampire in a similar thread soon.