We’re playing Sorcerer, online. Social context: I’m GMing and T, D, and P are playing sorcerers. I’ve played a good amount of 1-on-1 stuff with T, and a decent amount with T and D together. P joined us for a game of Hero’s Banner that didn’t get off the ground due to scheduling issues.
My history with Sorcerer: I played in 7 or 8 sessions of Sorcerer last year but the game didn’t finish. Before that, I played in a game (oh, “reviews!”) that Jesse Burneko ran, like, 12 years ago, and not long after that I ran a short game of Sorcerer & Sword using the Dictionary of Mu setting supplement. That game was a struggle, because I think none of us at the table really knew what to do with the tools the game offered us, plus we weren’t riding the learning curve well. I wish the post-Forge Adept Press forums hadn’t been killed by spam, because I documented the game there somewhat, and I’m now curious what I said.
Anyway.
The Two Statements for our game, which are the initial aesthetic and thematic push into character creation and then from there to play:
Environment: City and country in close contact; multiple biomes condensed into one place.
Sorcery & Demons: Aggressive elementalism: fire, freeze, shock, and radiation.
The environment has further shaken out in play to be Central/Northern Europe, some hazy place that’s neither/both Denmark and/or Germany. Two of the three players are currently in Denmark, they’re all from Denmark, and I’m in Germany.
The Characters
Robert Lange, aka “Long Bob”
Robert is a park ranger and spends most of his time on his pet project, Sincerity Park. We decided this is an extremely large park, not quite Central Park-sized but nonetheless a significant “biome” within the city. He likes to take care of it and make sure it’s clean and all in order. His demon Chit, a Passer that looks like a squirrel, helps with this. His Coven is a disparate group within a Discord server for Prog Rock devotees.
Kicker: His teenage daughter showed up on his doorstep after them having no contact for the last five years.
Sven Getz
Sven is ostensibly a private eye but puts those skills to use primarily in the service of local organized crime. He has connections with a Coven through his country club. His demon is Red Tie, an Object that notably has Special Damage: Firestarter. Great for setting cars on fire, as happened in the first session.
Kicker: Two of his crime colleagues are escorting him to the Deadwood, an area within Sincerity Park known to be a spot for dumping bodies. It’s time for Sven to be retired.
David Shulz
David is a former gangster from down south who escaped the life and was put into a witness protection program. He’s friends with a paralegal who knows his history and has helped him get set up in his new city, which he’s been in for a while now. He’s an Apprentice to Stephan, a psychotherapist. We established before play that David is not particularly aware of Stephan’s demon(s) (that is, how they manifest and what they do), but Stephan definitely knows all about David’s demon Slade, since he helped him Contact it. Slade is an Object, a switchblade, whose role pre-Kicker has been about protecting David.
Kicker: Andreas, an old buddy from his gang life, has showed up in the city and had a chance run-in with David.
So, about the name of the post: Despite having some experience with Sorcerer, the dice can still be perplexing to me: what exactly can they resolve, and how? I have been paying close attention to the text, the commentary from the 2012-2013 version, and some of Jesse Burneko and Chris Kubasik’s writings. I have also been trying to pay good attention to the dice in play, and curb my own instinctive reactions.
I find that I have been challenged and delighted by the dice. Two examples:
1.
Bob’s daughter Helen is so far settling well into life with her estranged dad, cleaning the house, ready to look for a job, needling him into taking her to work with him. Bob seems happy to let her do what she wants, so far. But the morning that she is supposed to go with Bob to the park, over a breakfast that she’s cooked, she brings up her mother, saying that they will have to call her eventually. She’s pushing to get the matter settled, to be proactive so that she can stay with her dad.
Bob tells Helen that it’ll be no problem, he’ll tell her mom that everything is fine. “Great,” Helen says. “So call her. Now.” Robert demurs. We roll Will vs. Will. Helen wins with 1 die.
I remind T, Bob’s player, that this doesn’t mean that he must give in. “So what does it mean?” He asks. Good question. Well, if you want to do anything else that is not that, you’re doing it with 1 fewer die, I say.
He doubles down and Helen says that if he refuses, she’s going to leave and go find somewhere else to live. We have another roll, and although it is again Will vs. Will, and again about the phone call, can’t you see that the situation has shifted significantly, so they are not simply recapitulating the prior roll? That in fact the conflict itself is changing and deepening because of the prior roll and how it leads into this one?
If we had played this contra to the rules, with some sort of “wrap up the scene” conflict roll–will he or won’t he call–which is somehow what my gut says to do, all of the above nuance and possibility and player agency (including me as GM playing Helen) would have been lost.
2.
I have to set it up a little; bear with me.
We move pretty swiftly into direct action regarding David’s Kicker: Andreas comes back to him and says he’s been thinking over whether to let Cem, the head of the crime family, know that Andreas has found David. Andreas is merely up here to do some information-gathering on the activities of another gang they are affiliated with, who handles the handoff of shipments of drugs from the south and oversees them up through Scandanavia (this happens to be Boo’s gang, which Sven is affiliated with). Boo’s gang has been recently heavily increasing their own cut, and finally made the move to take over shipments altogether.
After running into David, Andreas has decided this is a golden opportunity. Cem’s brain is going, and his son Christian has a good bid to take over the gang. Christian is a little wild and flashy. Andreas is sure that if he and David can kill Boo, he’s assured a rock-solid place in organizational leadership. So David has a choice: come out for one last hit (one last one, that’s it, swear on the red letters), or be ratted out. David takes Andreas at his word and agrees to do it.
So much for the set-up. Later, at night, Andreas is driving them to a house where a meeting is happening. He has an in with the kitchen; they’re going to pretend to be cooks and figure out how to get to the Boss man from there. David tries to convince him that not only is this not any kind of plan to speak of, but that they don’t have to go through with this–there are ways out.
Will vs. Will, with David winning with (I think) 1 die over Andreas. Andreas is silent for a while and says that he’s listening, if David has any good ideas. David says that Andreas can go to the cops, or just disappear, do what he did, etc. We have another Will vs. Will roll, and David again wins, with 3 dice over Andreas this time.
This is where it got very interesting for me as Andreas’s player. His will to go through with this is literally eroding before my eyes. But also, from his perspective, no really compelling arguments have been made. Go to the cops? He’s a hardened gangster, c’mon. He’s not gonna break down in this moment and do a complete about-face. But also, the dice do mean something. And I decide, based on nothing but the fictional circumstances at hand and what I know of Andreas, and what it feels like to play him, that they mean that he knows David is right. This is not going to work. And, perhaps, there could be a way out for him. He is backed into an emotional corner within himself.
What is a guy like this going to do when he’s backed into an emotional corner, when he’s actually contemplating that there is a way out of this life, with David right before him as exhibit A? He’s going to be terrified. He’s going to suppress his feelings and try harder. Instead of breaking, he toughens up. He has David get him a baggie of cocaine out of the glovebox, and he sniffs it all up and hits the gas.
Consequences spin out from there (see header image; apply imagination).
4 responses to “I love the dice”
I’m always hesitant to jump into posts about Sorcerer or a couple other games, because there’s something weird or critical about it, as if I’m delivering a big-J judgment.
So there is something I want to go into about the second roll in each case you’ve described, but it’s more about questions on my part, not about grading you on your Sorcerer test. Or I hope anyway. Let me know if it’s OK to proceed.
Please do.
The first thing is simply appreciation – yes, yes, and yes, generally, regarding these dice.
It ties back to the complete confusion I encountered twenty years ago, when I started talking about conflict resolution, but that’s for some squinting Ph.D. candidate to unravel at some future date. What matters is that you’re cracking it.
The second thing is a note of caution: whether to roll again, i.e., although resolution of the first roll has not done the job in the wrap-up sense of “oh, it’s all over, next scene,” it has in fact done a job and now we need to play in that context. Whether to roll again in an immediate, no-time-passes way, depends upon whether new criteria for rolling are in place. So we have to look at what is said and understand right at that juncture.
I remember a conversation with Jesse a long time ago, in which he was channelling a frustrating time playing Sorcerer with people who frankly had no intention of doing so. The played situation was almost exactly the same as the one you’re describing. The guy he played with was able to tie him in knots regarding “what happens next,” given a first roll exactly like the one in your game.
I identified the problem immediately. The guy was pushing for repeat-rolling, which is to say, basically pressuring Jesse to roll until the woman did what the player wanted her to. It follows the logic of “run her out of dice,” or similar systems.
Therefore, I asked, what did the guy actually do next? Did he grab her, did he threaten her, did he storm off: how did he respond concretely to what was, in the fiction, a flat refusal? That clicked it for Jesse. What the other guy wasn’t doing was saying what the character did next, which would or wouldn’t warrant another roll. And by “did next,” I mean, stating an action, playing in the most literal and specific sense of that word for our activity. Not staying in the roll as if it hadn’t been rolled, merely shoving at the person he was playing with, lacking any played-content.
Let me know if this is making any sense. Again, I’m not identifying a flaw or error. This is intended to be a relevant thought regarding the system, however it may apply and whatever use it may be.
Yep, you’re making sense regarding the criteria for re-rolling and the absolute importance of a roll creating an actual outcome as seen in characters’ actions.
Regarding my first example above, between Robert and his daughter Helen (I clarify so that we can all follow along with what occurred here in relation to your points, not to justify): something that didn’t make it into my write-up was how me reminding the player that he was not forced to do anything, and his further inquiry about that, fed into the fictional moment. What I’m trying to say is that he had a moment of going, “okay, I don’t have to go along with her…hmm…okay…yeah, I double down–Helen, this is my house, and I’ll call her when I’m ready,” or something like that. It was a clear moment of the character committing. It wasn’t a big fictional change, per your point about responding concretely, but it was a change in that before he was simply refusing to do it and now it became about him standing his ground in HIS space, which led to Helen saying fine, she’d leave if he didn’t want to do it…hence the next roll (any of the players in that session feel free to speak up if you’re reading and I’m misremembering).
Regarding the second example, having lost the roll I had Andreas position himself as open to at least listening, by saying so.
Part of the reason I used these examples in the post is that the changes in the fiction between rolls were small, which makes them interesting to dissect in a “well, how LITTLE can a roll resolve?” sort of way. And while they did and do feel like appropriate rolls, looking back on these moments I can also see room for my own growth in using the tools of roll outcomes to push things further.