Playing to the Players (2)

I mentioned the Forge-style games in the last post and I want to zoom in on one of them, Sorcerer, and its designer, Ron Edwards.  While some games that come out of the Forge culture (not necessarily the Forge alone, but the broadly system-matters culture it inspires) strike me as fairly socket-locked, Sorcerer does not.  Reading through it the last few days, alongside some of Ron’s postings about play, makes me think Ron already had a wicked tight grasp on this problem.

For one, Ron seems keenly, keenly aware that play is about, well, players (whether that includes a GM or not).  When he talks about making Bachannal work, he spends a lot less time talking about its mechanics than about interpersonal dynamics involved in a game about sexuality, namely about how you need to be addressing your own and others boundaries, not the imagined boundaries of your characters.

In Sorcerer, he is quick to dismiss any one way of playing out a scene, instead establishing that there are very different rhythms of narration and die-rolling for different groups.  Arguably, the mechanical core to Sorcerer could be fit onto a few tightly worded pages and wouldn’t be all that impressive. 

However, the suggestions for how to adjust the game for different types of play, for different types of stories, forms a priceless nugget of ideas that really changes how the game gets run.  To toss out a distinction of which I am fond: the book comes with wisdom and not just intellect. 

This isn’t to say that system doesn’t matter, only that ‘matters’ has some subtle complexity to it.  What is most important for Sorcerer, to my mind, is that the system has been stripped down so that it more easily accommodates wisdom, more easily can be adapted to alternate play styles. 

Clearly, it doesn’t accommodate *any* play, but it retains a real flexibility, one that adjusts to ’system’ in the broad sense of the Lumpley Principle, the system as the sum total of actual group play.  Ron couches this as not hand-holding, but there is much more to it than that.