Sorcerers vs. fighting men

[tavis]

On first making a character for the online Carcosa game, my immediate reaction was "Obviously, I should play a sorcerer since they get everything a fighting-man does, plus rituals too." This seemed weird to the part of my brain devoted to new-school game design & its obsession with balance.

On further reflection, though, rituals are not really a character ability so much as an adventure hook / roleplaying element. The former because actually performing a ritual is likely to involve either devoting a bunch of game time or off-screen resources toward mustering the necessary components. The latter because just being the kind of person who'd have this knowledge, much less contemplate doing one of these rituals, says a lot about your character.

My initial impression of the Carcosa supplement was that it was unusually focused on actual play, whereas my usual problem with campaign settings is that they have a lot of information with no way I can see that it would ever get expressed at the table. So the realization that the sorcerer class is also a way to drive a specific kind of play (and tie PCs into the world, as with JamesM's comment about guild debts in Runequest) fits with that impression. Nicely done!

[geoffrey]

Thanks for the kind words, tavis.

In my Carcosa games, FAR less time gets spent actually performing a sorcerous ritual than in acquiring the necessary knowledge and components to perform the ritual.

You have it exactly right about adventure hooks. If a sorcerer wants to perform a ritual, he's going to have to travel and adventure extensively. Most of the travels of my old group consisted in searching for material components. Side adventures were had along the way.

On another note, don't forget that sorcerers require 50% more XP to gain a level than do fighting men. Plus the fact that sorcery is so dangerous to the sorcerer. (It was indeed my intention to ensure that sorcerous rituals were rarely performed, and therefore all the more awesome.)

If I were a player in a Carcosa D&D game, and I simply wanted to have a PC of maximum power, I'd certainly roll-up a fighting man and concentrate on acquiring Space Alien technology. While a sorcerer is in the midst of his 6-hour ritual, just pull your laser ray rifle and fry him in 6 seconds. ;D

[tavis]

I don't want to re-open the debate about whether the Carcosan rituals needed to be explicit, but I think it's important to their gameability that they are specific and concrete, which is kind of synonymous.

If I decided to use Supplement V in my 3LBB-only White Sandbox game, I wouldn't allow sorcerers as a PC class. There are lots of things I'm comfortable reading about that I don't want to roleplay face-to-face, and we often have players who aren't old enough to see a R-rated movie, so a player focus on sorcerous acts drives the game in a direction I don't want to go.

But it would nevertheless be very useful for me to know exactly what my NPC sorcerer-antagonists would be plotting to obtain, where they were going to go, and what they'd want to do when they got there. A vaguely handwaved "generic evil ritual" wouldn't serve the same purpose.