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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 8086886" data-attributes="member: 16586">[USER=21169]@Doug McCrae[/USER]Kickers should be something like disrupts the characters life and demands action in some way. They are meant to be personal to the character. You might like try to link them together, but it's not like mandatory. Sometimes you will play an entire Sorcerer game where the characters never meet although their actions should usually affect each other.The following explains it a bit better than I do.[spoiler= Annotated Sorcerer]The KickerThere’s two issues to discuss about starting Kickers.1. Go back to that point about the distinct differences among the three levels of a Sorcerer player-character: a person, a person who’s a sorcerer, and a sorcerer who faces a Kicker. Don’t mix them up or fold one into another. Most especially, “I just bound a demon!” cannot be the solecontent of a Kicker.2. Simplicity and honesty matter here too. An excellent Kicker from one of the earliest Sorcerer games was, “Just released from prison.” At first glance, it may seem ordinary – and yes, that’s the strength of it. I’m not saying that the player had real-life prison experience. I’m saying that he could relate to the situation in ordinary human terms. I certainly can; I am close friends with at least two people who’ve served hard time.The Kicker is defined as a fictional crux point, meaning, this will be a crucial moment for the character. Therefore in this case, prison did make a difference to him in some undisclosed way, and now is the time to see whether that difference is going to work out for him or not.Sometimes that crux-point concept can be sticky too. For example, a player made up a great initial character concept, a former child star with a drug habit, married to a politician, strategically using his sorcery to eliminate his wife’s political opposition. For the Kicker, he proposed a couple of situationsin which his wife’s political enemies were investigating him or her, one of which included something really bad the demon had done, but my point to him was that the character had clearly been successful so far, and therefore must have handled any such situations well in the past. In other words, the proposed Kickers were simply “more of the same” material that we’d expect to be part of his back-story anyway. I asked him to think laterally: what sort of situationwould throw a rock into his character’s life which could not be solved simply by sending his demon as usual, but would rather upset the assumptions that he’d been so carefully protecting? He instantly said, “My wife puts me in detox.”That’s how to get a Kicker.[/spoiler]That's the starting Kicker. When you get to the point that a character's Kicker is resolved Ron recommends sitting down and discussing if there's like more story there. Sometimes the game simply ends when everyone's Kicker is resolved. Sometimes you introduce new characters at the end of a character's shelf life. Sometimes create new ones.Ron talks about creating Kickers as a shared activity. Just like creating characters. Both the player and the GM are involved in process and must be happy with the results.</blockquote>

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