In questi giorni su The Forge c'è un thread di consigli su come fare il GM a Sorcerer.
[Sorcerer] Sorcerers in CasablancaEssendo Sorcerer il capostipite del metodo chiamato "driving with bangs" e del concetto di Bangs in particolare, nonché del concetto di Kicker, questi consigli sono applicabili ad un sacco di altri giochi. Per esempio, sono interamente applicabili a Non Cedere al Sonno (che ha sia bangs che, nella forma delle 5 domande, un kicker) e all'uso dei bangs in Avventure in Prima Serata.
Alcuni brani (ma consiglio di leggersi tutto il thread):
Ron Edwards:
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The very fact that you talked about Kickers as if you could plan their resolutions, i.e., when they will happen, means that you must re-boot your entire attitude toward GMing. You may have taken a step toward doing so due to the comments in the other thread, which is good. But I suggest you'll need to go further.
Not only must you abandon all thoughts of when any Kicker will be resolved, but most especially of how and about what. It's not up to you in terms of planning. You must relinquish control of any such planning. Typically, you realize that a Kicker has been resolved only after it's happened, when you look at the material you're ready to play with (your NPCs and what they're about to do), and say, "Huh, I guess that whole hassle has been taken care of, and we've seen why it was the most important thing ever to have happened in that sorcerer's life. Oh! Hey guys! We just resolved so-and-so's Kicker!"------------------
Of course you prep. What you don't do is plan is the outcome of anything that happens which you or anyone else has introduced during play.
You can write up all the NPCs you want. But you can't earmark one as the worst and most important of the bunch that they'll fight at the end. You can add depth and content to any of the Kickers you want, inventing tons of characters and fifty years of back-story. But you can't commit to one particular reaction or approach that the player-character is going to take to his Kicker, or even to 'nudging' him there.
I'm distinguishing between prep and plan. I said, "let go of planning what will happen." I didn't say, "let go of prepping what to introduce."--------------------------
1. I loathe fully extemporaneous play. I consider that to be a way for someone to tacitly control and bully others into making up a story with them as color men. Nothing I'm saying moves "toward that end." Both ends of your stated spectrum turn into railroading in my experience.
2. Preparing Bangs the night before isn't railroading. It's absolutely required. What's not required are (a) actually using any one of them unless you want to, and more importantly, (b) what cannot work is thinking of a Bang as a means to some desired end. "And after they kill the hyenas, then they'll find the business card ..." It's also important to know that a lot of the time, what a given player-character does is just as good as a Bang, and in fact is a Bang, and it may well negate one or more of your planned ones, in which case you mentally abandon them.Greyorm:
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As GM, all you're really doing is asking yourself, "What would my character(s) do now?" Just like all the other players (the world environment also counts as a character: "I am a desert. Um, I have a sandstorm blocking the protagonist's progress towards the temple of Karnak. Whoooosh!").
So, you don't prep outcomes or potential outcomes, because you don't know what to expect in play. You prep potential situations that may or may not ever happen. You prep interesting potential "how will THIS end?" and "what will they do with THIS" situations based on what you know about the characters, their personal desires and relationships/histories, and the overall situation that has emerged in play thus far. Based on what they want and why they want it.
Here's an example off the top of my head: Chuck is a Catholic physicist with a wife and a daughter. He's been trying to split the atom. It's 1930's Berlin and the Nazis are looking for him because yesterday, he figured it out, and they figured out he figured it out. And they want the bomb. He managed to make it home without Herr Frank and the Gestapo tracking him down...except his wife and daughter were not there. He prayed to God to help him, and God sent him an angel made of fire and vengeance.
Now, if this were a real game, you would have more details about Herr Frank and the Gestapo, the Nazis and the atom-bomb project, Chuck, his relationship with his wife and daughter, and the angel, than I do here. You'll also know where Chuck's wife and daughter are/what happened to them and so forth. And from all that stuff you'll build Bangs.
But here's the thing: he may never find his family. He may never in fact look for them. He may try to get out of Germany first and foremost. Or maybe he won't. Maybe he'll decide to become a crazed Nazi-killing superhero. Or decide to sell the project to them and run off with his mistress. The point is: you can't bank on any of that.
Because who's the uber-bad guy? What's at stake? What's the showdown even all about? We don't know. Not yet.
Yet Bangs are still really easy, easier than prepping scenes and climaxes and plot-points, because we know things about Chuck, and the Nazis, and so forth -- and we'll know more and more each time we play:
[...]
But what you might have noticed is that all you are really doing is prepping is characters. What those characters want. What those characters will do to get it. And where those characters hang out so you have some sets for the action to happen in. Everything follows from this. But note at no time are you prepping what will happen in those sets with those characters as a complete thing. You are not prepping a scene in a movie, you are prepping a set for improv actors to interact with one another in to see where it goes. If that makes sense.
Hopefully you see how that is different from creating a climax and moving towards it, and how prep in Sorcerer works, how it isn't a point on a continuum between railroading and completely freeform play but something distinctly different?Jesse Burneko:
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The HOW, HOW, HOW cry I put out years ago was really based in lack of understanding of what to do with NPCs. Back then I really couldn't conceive of uses for NPCs outside of two functions: things you fight and lock boxes of information you needed to open so you could know who to fight and how to fight them. Both of these things are actually clearly forbidden in the Sorcerer texts. You add in that the rules are very volatile and unpredictable it seemed to me that an NPC you wanted to be a BIG DEAL and kind of scary you couldn't actually do anything with because the PCs might just defeat him "too soon." It seemed like a big giant recipe for either really short games or GM turtle-ing.
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Step one in beginning to realize what I was supposed to be doing in Sorcerer was recognizing the wider social context of the characters. Before encountering Sorcerer my strongest GMing skills were rooted in clue-chain style mystery scenarios where you have a disconnected PC and a disconnected NPC villain and then basically a string of "filler" material between them so that the PC doesn't just walk up to the villain and stab him.
Once I began looking the PCs and NPCs in terms of their wider relationships I began to see other ways to challenge the players beyond simply asking for favors, hiding information and being physical threats. I notice that if a PC has a wife and there are things she wants from the PC then it suddenly becomes exponentially harder for the PC to take certain kinds of actions. You don't need to kidnap her. You don't need to have her betray the PC. You don't need her to do anything other than be a wife with wifely needs.
Similarly, if you give an NPC who is really a bad person in your own estimation it becomes exponentially harder for the PCs just to stab that villain and be done with it. You don't even have to dial back how vile the NPC is. Hell, you don't even have to have him CARE about his wife. He could be out and out abusive to her and that's seriously enough to most players pause about "just killing" the guy.
[..]
I've seen this time and time again. Just having the wider social context to the characters makes even basic actions really complicated.
Lesson Learned: Fill out the back of the character sheets. Ask questions that produce characters, locations and objects of value to the character. If the PC is a doctor ask if they have a favorite patient. If the character is a rich lord ask if they have any servants they admire. If the character is in love, ask if they have a romantic rival. If the character owns something they value ask yourself who might also value that thing.
Step Two: NPCs want things and should be proactive about getting them. So back in the day we talked about a relationship map being "grabby" and how when a PC walks into one the NPCs view the PC as an opportunity. I originally interpreted this in the extremely unsophisticated manner of having NPCs walk up to PCs and say, "Do this for me" and if I was feeling particularly ballsy it would be, "Do this for me or else." Now I realize that you don't have to be that direct. Just having an NPC come to player to cry on their shoulder about something that happened to them is using the PC as an opportunity.
In fact it's better to have the NPCs take their own actions so long as those actions intrude into the wider social network of the PCs. The NPC never need ask the PCs for anything. This doesn't even have to be particularly sinister. Finding out that you best friend just landed himself in jail for drunk driving and that his girlfriend is hitting your wife up for bail money is perfectly fine bang without the need for the friend to even say, "Man, you've got to bail me out of here!"
Step Three: When avenues of pursuit get shut down, escalate everything else. This one is really hard for me. I have tendency to set unconscious behavioral limits on my NPCs. Often those limits prevent me from escalating an NPC's behavior when they face a set back. Some party thinks, "Well, the PC put him in his place. Doing anything else would be extreme and unreasonable and I don't really want my NPC to come off as psychotic." This leads to short very boring games where NPCs get pruned off your relationship map as they get "reasoned" with.
Don't be afraid to pull a gun or have an NPC do something otherwise desperate, bold or risky. If something happens to them that permanently removes them from the story remember the wider social network. Who is upset about his demise? What destruction has he left in his wake that might need answering? Escalate THOSE elements.
Finally let me say this: A Sorcerer game is about the implied situation in the character's Kickers. That's it. A game of Sorcerer is over when the players Kickers resolve. The Kicker is not a recurring element that spans many stories. The Kicker is the story. The GM's primary job is to deepen, test and escalate the situation described in the Kicker.
