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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LostSoul" data-source="post: 5309168" data-attributes="member: 386">3. Sorcerer.By Ron Edwards.  Probably my favourite game.  You play a sorcerer, a guy who summons demons.  What's interesting about this game, in terms of this discussion, is how the rules are set and how colour influences those rules.We spent a few hours coming up with a setting.  A steampunk world, where sorcerers are mad scientists and explorers and revolutionaries.  Based on this we came up with colour-based descriptions for the rules mechanics.Humanity was "practical empathy".  It might be nice to give a starving orphan a hug and listen to his problems; what's better, though, is to give him a job or a plate of meat and potatoes.That meant that demons and sorcery were transgressions of that.  We came up with specific details for the sorcery mechanics depending on the sorcerous tradition.What that means is that you can't just say, "I Punish my demon" (Punish being a game mechanic); you have to say how you Punish.  We defined Punish as being some kind of physical attack, whether it's burning pamphlets and books, taking the reactor out of your nuclear submarine, or just physically beating your beast/relic that you found on the Plateau of Leng.Punish is a poor example because there is no application of the dice mechanics.  So let's look at combat.One of the PCs, Thomas Crappen (played by a 10-12 year old boy; his first experience with tabletop RPGs) had, as his demon, a steampunk cigar cutter that hungered for blood.  Events had turned out that he ended up fighting one of his fellow chimney sweeps, a lad named "Fast" Freddy. Fast Freddy's first action was to grab Thomas.  Thomas' action was to get Mr. Cutter (the cigar cutter demon) out of his pocket and fling him into Thomas' face.  Mr. Cutter's action was to start chomping away at Freddy.What's interesting here is that, while the mechanics don't change, the details of the actions declared have a lot of relevance.  It's not like you can say, "I roll my Stamina" and just deal damage.  We wouldn't know what that damage means in the fiction.  Is he hurt?  Is he grabbed?  Or what?  What's more, we don't even know if you should be rolling Stamina, Will, or Cover - since all stats can be rolled for physical actions!What we have to do is look at the fictional situation and determine how we are going to apply the mechanics.  And the mechanics - how the dice turn out - need to look at the fictional situation, the description of the actions, so we can determine how to apply success and/or failure.In this case, Freddy was successful in grabbing Thomas; this meant that Thomas could abort his action to try to slip out of Freddy's grasp and leave Mr. Cutter in his pocket (invalidating Mr. Cutter's action!), or he could suck it up and still try to get his action off.  Thomas decided to continue with his action; Freddy had his "victory dice" over Thomas applied to his defence roll; Thomas still succeeded, and added his level of victory to Mr. Cutter's roll.  Mr. Cutter then chomped on Freddy and bit off one of his hands.(One of the reasons Sorcerer is cool is that PCs don't have control over their demons.  Mr. Cutter continued to chomp on Freddy, sating himself on Freddy's blood, while Thomas tried to disguise himself so the coppers banging on the door wouldn't recognize him.  This required a Humanity check.)At each decision/conflict point we are applying the same mechanics - there's no house ruling here - but the specifics of the fiction really matter in how things turn out.  We can't avoid talking about the fiction when we roll dice.  We can't just look at the numbers on the character sheet.  We need to engage with the fiction.</blockquote>

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