Hello,
I will address one question that I think was asked but not answered.
When describing the action during the dice mechanics, I deliberately wrote Sorcerer to be neutral. This was in direct contrast to the way every single role-playing manual had been written before that. In those manuals, all narration was either provided by the GM or was subject to editing and veto by the GM. Even when such concepts were not explicitly stated, they were implied and illustrated through the examples.
Therefore the neutral phrasing in the Sorcerer rules brings equality to the table. I had observed in practice that many groups were capable of unconstructed narration, permitting anyone to speak first regardless of whether they are the player of that character, another player, or the GM; and that whatever they said was subject to group approval, sometimes so subtle that the people involved were not even aware they were doing it. The GM did not have final authority - their statements were just as subject to this approval as anyone else's. Sorcerer is written to accomodate this sort of play, in which whoever is inspired to talk and describe as soon as the conflict mechanics appear, simply does so. If what they say doesn't appeal to someone at the table, or if someone would prefer to speak instead, then that gets resolved. A group whose members cannot understand the normal, human, conversational processes involved is not encouraged to play Sorcerer.
Modern day internet discussion has obscured all these points through a variety of idiot readings. One of them is a mis-reading of "narration" to mean "monologue," another is the notion of approval as some kind of explicit committee consensus process, and yet another is the unfortunate perception that RPG design begins and ends with Primetime Adventures, a game that derives its formal narration mechanics from The Pool, Dust Devils, and Trollbabe. Regarding that third point, PTA is a fine game but its toolbox is a limited and specific thing which should not be mistaken for the refined essence or even functional range of role-playing mechanics.
To get back to Sorcerer, there is nothing wrong with the players providing most of the narrations relevant to their own characters and the GM providing most of the narrations relevant to the NPCs. Nothing stops you from treating this distinction as the default. However, it is not set in concrete.
Let's say I am playing a character who is shooting at somebody, and the dice are rolled; my shot arrives before the target character's action, and that player or GM chooses to abort the character's action and roll full dice against my shot. They succeed; I fail.
I might say "The carpet rolls under your feet," or "The gun misfires," or "You simply miss," or ... anything. Or you might say it. Or the GM might say it, if that's a different person. Or someone else.
The key in Sorcerer is to make use of existing knowledge. "The gun misfires" might be exactly the right narration because we know that particular gun has been dropped and kicked around extensively before my character picked it up. Or it might be a boring narration because it was merely sitting in my character's pocket until this moment. Whether a narration is good or bad in Sorcerer is always, entirely specific to that moment and the conditions of the objects and people in the fiction. If you are fully engaged in play, then your ability to find that perfect narration is quite high. Ideally, it shouldn't matter who narrates because everyone is so entirely engaged that anyone is capable of eliciting the "oh that's perfect!" response from everyone else.
Incidentally, the above point applies to announcing actions in slightly more limited form. Although the player of a character has authority over the character's announced actions, good play in Sorcerer is full of informal suggestions made of sentence fragments and significant looks and gesticulations, because in many cases, the people near you are almost as excited about your character's current choice as you are.
Therefore be ready to narrate for your character as the default. But be ready to listen to others' excited narrations as well - sometimes they know your character or are inspired by the immediate circumstances better than you.
All of the above points may seem risky, especially in comparison to the formal narration mechanics that the readers of this forum encountered in games like InSpectres, Primetime Adventures, Dogs in the Vineyard, and Polaris. For these readers, however, I have a thought to present to you.
The thought is, that the authors of these games (Jared Sorensen, Matt Wilson, Vincent Baker, and Ben Lehman) were deeply influenced by Sorcerer. In order to make the games you are familiar with, they had to overcome the GM-only, GM-centric foundational thinking and to learn to permit everyone at the table to speak. I am not saying that they had not managed some distance already. Vincent, for instance, had been playing in an open-group narration context for years. But none of them had ever seen a game text which explicitly removed all mention of GM narration as the gold standard for the fiction, tacitly opening the talk at the table to ordinary human creative inspiration. Nor had any of them ever seen that idea intimately linked to dice before, in this case, both the bonus dice rule and the choice to abort or defend.
They went through a door that Sorcerer opened for them. Formalizing what they found on the other side of that door is a fine thing, and the pride for recognizing that belongs to Jared and also to James V. West when he wrote The Pool. But what they found does work, even before formalizing it into turns or mechanical signals.
So their progression is: (1) GM-centric, "GM says," as the first and only standard; (2) Sorcerer, opening narration to the table, inspiration-first; and (3) the games I just mentioned, which also include my own Trollbabe. Therefore if you were mainly used to (1), then you responded to rules in Sorcerer for what they were, a tool for liberation. But here in the Italian community, the experience seems to be (1) to (3), skipping the "liberation" step. The result unfortunately can lead to playing one of those games (Primetime Adventures, et cetera) in a way which is not especially fun or interesting at all - merely trading one boring and stupid procedure for another just like it, merely distributed among more than one person. And when you see the liberation rules, you react to them as if they were incomplete.
Best, Ron
