Cluing In on Sorcerer Actions....

Neat stuff here...
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=21236.0 (If that works... I can't bring up indie-rpgs all of a sudden...)

"I'd really like to emphasize that narrations in Sorcerer are not about what it will look like if the character succeeds, but rather what it looks like when he or she goes into action."

Ooh. OK. That means your narration of your action is not going to get shanked by a failure on the dice. Cool.

Christopher K adds:

"We _declare_ what we want to get done, but we get _Bonus Dice_ for what we're actually doing right now."

Beyond that...

In some indie games, you have three or four people who propose different ways the story can go (which may or may not be related to what different characters accomplish). You roll dice to see whose idea about where the story can go goes into effect in the game's reality.

In Sorcerer, that is not the case at all. You get to say what your character does and how he does it. You roll dice to see how that works out.

In "Indie Game X" you might have two people who propose the two possible story directions, "My character grabs the vase successfully," and "your character fails to grab the vase because of the interference of my character," and there's a roll to see whose goes into effect.

In Sorcerer, that's not it at all. Not at all. You are declaring intent for your character and narrating the actions that will be taken to achieve that intent or not. It'd be like, "my character reaches out and takes hold of the vase" and "my character knocks your character down before she gets to the vase."

If that's all there is to it, you could just roll Stam vs Stam to see how it all plays out, but in a complex, combat-type situation, you'd consider each of those actions separately.

Dude A may or may not grab the vase. If Dude B knocks dude A down, it's going to make it a lot harder to grab that vase. Victories = defense dice for the vase. But Dude B knocking dude A down doesn't settle the matter if Dude A still has actions!

The problems in the thread arose from reading a Sorcerer conflict as if it were an Indie Game X conflict, which it isn't.

Jared Wins!

I don't really read rpg.net, but I still found this funny... Jared Sorenson got permabanned. And I'm not laughing at Jared, I'm laughing with Jared.