thread: 2005-03-23 : Strong Stuff Indeed
On 2005-03-25, Andrew Norris wrote:
Okay, that's enough of me trying to facilitate. I want to talk about the topic as Vincent posted, before we got into a couple of pages of trying to understand it.
Vincent, I totally agree with you. When I read Dogs, I went, "Holy shit, the players only put down stuff that matters to them on the sheet, and then those are the resources they have to solve conflicts—they can't avoid those issues." It tickled my brain the same way HeroQuest did, except it even more to the point, because it was like looking down at your character sheet for augments, except you have to do it.
When I read Sorcerer at first, I figured it was a nice little rules-light engine. But when we got together to make characters for a campaign, I started realizing that everything on the sheet meant something, not in the sense of properly recording some element of the shared imaginative space, but in terms of the theme. Everything on that sheet addresses how your character's screwed their lives up in the pursuit of power. (Yeah, it sounds like Stamina isn't relevant, but point allocation plus descriptors leave you with things like "Yeah, he's a weak, bookish person, because he stays in all the time and pores over old tomes" or something.)
Also—the back of the Sorcerer character sheet is not optional. It's just a diagram of things in the PC's life, organized roughly by importance and category, so you can certainly generate a PC without it. But I couldn't actually finish constructing the game (Bangs and such) until they were filled out. I had players giving me five pages of backstory that helped far less than that one diagram. And if they update the diagram, moving things to positions of greater or lesser importance, I am supposed to adjust my future Bangs to suit.
So I'm totally on board with what you're talking about, and I'm hoping we can talk less in this thread about what this is and whether it exists, and more about how to do it. Because now that I've done it, I say, screw the other systems, I'm only playing like this from now on.
