OK, I'm intrigued but not completely understanding. If I were to use a familiar story to try this;
KICKER:
Luke was a young man living with his Aunt and Uncle on the forbidding Desert planet of Tatooine. Eager to be away he constantly whines (well, he did didn't he?) to his Uncle to let him put his application into the Imperial Academy to be a Fighter pilot. One day while looking for a lost Droid, he meets an old man, Ben Kenobi, who explains to him the wonders of the Force, a somewhat mystical power as far as Luke can tell.
BANG:
On returning to his Uncle's farm, he finds they have been killed by Imperial Stormtroopers.
Don't sweat theme. I find it will often take care of itself. (If you like sweating theme -- good. Please ignore me on this issue.)
A concern with family is enough to start riffing on.
If I were you (and I'm not)...
"I wake up one morning, my formerly estrange brother is gone -- and so are the gateway pieces."
(I'm guessing the two other charcters are PCs... but I'm tossing this out as an example from what you've offered me.)
See. From this point on we've got a PC who might hunt down and kill his own brother, might try to help him escape, and might flip flop through the story, as well as confront a million other hard choices about what to do when is obligations to his order are in conflict with his obligations to his family.
Christopher
Last edited by Christopher Kubasik; 05-20-2004 at 01:27 PM..
I'm sorry, I set this thread up for failure by not setting it up at all. Let's give this thread some shape. Please format your Kickers in the following ways.
Game: A one sentence campaign trailer.
Themes: The themes the game is addressing
Character: A two to four sentence character description.
Relavent NPC's: Give the DM something to work with.
Dictionary of Mu site: Pulp Fantasy Sorcerer with Blood, Demons and Hope
ENnie Nominee 2007 for Best Writing and Product of the Year
Winner: Indie RPG Supplement of the Year
Well, I am lacking a kicker for a major NPC in my upcoming M&M campaign, so...
The game explores what would happen if you gave teenagers superpowers that would fully mature by their 18th birthday (PL10 by 18.). Ripping a page more or less from Aberrant, the powers manifested have something to do with the personality, background, and/or subconscious thoughts of the kid. So I need a kicker.
The character's name is Jamie Martinez. She sort of follows the same sort of pattern as say... Superman (Cosmic power, flying, super-strength, hard to hurt, etc). Jamie is a senior in high-school, and is known for being President of the Powers Club. She dresses in black shirts and torn blue jeans, has black hair that is somewhat dyed purple, wears black lipstick and mascara. She's also naive and expects the best of people.
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Dictionary of Mu site: Pulp Fantasy Sorcerer with Blood, Demons and Hope
ENnie Nominee 2007 for Best Writing and Product of the Year
Winner: Indie RPG Supplement of the Year
Well, let's say my story is taking place in a 17-century English village.
Joshua was married, had kids, worked as a county magistrate. One evening, Joshua came home from adjudicating a case in a neighboring town to find his family mauled. Some of the villagers said it was wolves. Some said it was a tinker that went by the previous day. Despite the efforts of Joshua and a priest, the mystery is never solved.
Six years later.
Joshua is remarried, and has a 2 year-old son. He has tried to forget what happened to his previous family.
One evening, he hears screams from one of the villager's houses. He arrives to find them mauled, just like his family.
If we can imagine that the movie Star Wars never existed, that the group of players had someone concieved of everything you wrote in some sort of mystical creative accident, and they were ready to play it out not with a preset idea of making the story of "Star Wars" happen, but really open to finding out what Luke's adventure would be at that that moment, then yes. You've got it.
PS If anyone is confused about the defintion of Kickers, please go to the Kicker & Bangers thread. You'll find a summary on the first page. And then a gazillion pages explicating that afterward. But the first page should help a lot.
I'd also like to point out something which might have been missed in all these Kickeresque threads.
A Kicker may be as sketchy as the player who writes it desires.
If it is not sketchy, then it draws heavily on the established background of the character or setting or both, and upon reading it, anyone in the game has pretty much everything they need to work with in running the subsequent events, as player of that character, as fellow player of another character, or as GM.
If it is sketchy, then the player is essentially handing the GM a whole lotta room to add stuff to the character's situation that the player doesn't know about. If the GM has stuff in his prep already to do that, then great; if not, then that's great to (although it's also "go and prep more" homework).
My favorite example: "A guy tried to kill me with a hatchet on the bus today."
Kicker? You betcha. The sketchiest kind. If I read that as a GM, then hoo boy, I gotta go back to my notes and maybe make up all kinds of stuff such that this is a big deal to at least some of my NPCs. That's actually why I consider GM prep for Sorcerer to be a multi-stage process.
What sort of story are we talking about? What's up with this hatchet job? Hey, that's what the player wanted - sudden, fierce adversity, which can't be ignored, and a desperate sense of what the fuck?? That's my job, I say? OK, that's my job; busy GM-prep, here I go.
Whereas another player in the group has already decided that her character's demon is the ghost of her lover, killed in the car crash that paralyzed her. The whole Binding situation for this character is very emotionally heavy-duty. And she tells me that her character's Kicker is that the demon has just discovered that she (the character) had been having a hot affair with another guy before the crash.
Whole different thing! Her character prep has included many relationships: the original boyfriend, the dead/demonic version of the boyfriend, the affair-boyfriend both before and after the crash, and this guy's wife. I as GM have simply been handed a new piece of information acquired by one of these NPCs, and been told "role-play the snot out of all of'em," really break down and challenge every relationship my character has.
The one thing both of these Kickers have in common is their Kicker-ness: that (a) yup, the stated elements are going to be major features of play, and (b) nope, none of us have the faintest idea of what the character will really do, in play, when the shit hits hard.
That reminds me of another thing about Kickers which may have been missed in all this discussion.
A Kicker initiates, by definition, the single most important thing that happens to this character, as currently conceived. Ever. So the hatchet-guy can't be a random psycho, or even if he is, the encounter has consequences that are astoundingly important. Everyone at the table is committed to this, in playing Sorcerer. Players and GMs together know this.
(So how can you play a character that experiences multiple Kickers? Easy. The "as currently conceived" part, above, accounts for this nicely.)
That's another reason why Kickers are not merely melodramatic hooks flipped 'round. A melodramatic hook is by definition a way to get from the water into the already-prepared boat. If my character's over-eager would-be journalist little sister, in Feng Shui, always lands me in the middle of fights among the Ascended vs. the Hand vs. the Architects vs. the Jammers, then she can do it 100 times, for 100 different fight-scenes, and it's no big deal. My desire is to be in the boat that's already built and waiting for me, so I seize the hook, every time. Not doing so is literally breaking contract, in playing Feng Shui.
A Kicker, on the other hand, is essentially one person's contribution toward what the boat-to-be is going to include, and it's an expectation toward another person who's working on the boat (the GM) to incorporate this contribution in a way that really matters. To beat this metaphor most thoroughly, I hope it's clear that for this sort of play, the boat is literally not built yet as play begins.
Originally posted by Christopher Kubasik Hi Barticus,
If we can imagine that the movie Star Wars never existed, that the group of players had someone concieved of everything you wrote in some sort of mystical creative accident, and they were ready to play it out not with a preset idea of making the story of "Star Wars" happen, but really open to finding out what Luke's adventure would be at that that moment, then yes. You've got it.
Christopher
Specifically why I used the Star Wars description. Having a common point of reference helps me to understand.
Originally posted by tetsujin28 Well, let's say my story is taking place in a 17-century English village.
Joshua was married, had kids, worked as a county magistrate. One evening, Joshua came home from adjudicating a case in a neighboring town to find his family mauled. Some of the villagers said it was wolves. Some said it was a tinker that went by the previous day. Despite the efforts of Joshua and a priest, the mystery is never solved.
Six years later.
Joshua is remarried, and has a 2 year-old son. He has tried to forget what happened to his previous family.
One evening, he hears screams from one of the villager's houses. He arrives to find them mauled, just like his family.
* A letter arrives from Joshua's mother asking that he use his magistrate contacts to find his brother, who has fallen in with some Tinkers and left home.
* The local pub is filled with gossip as a Prison Hulk has crashed ashore nearby and some prisoners escaped. The Magistrate knows that a murdering fiend he sentenced to death was on that hulk.
* Despite his grief, a trial was called in a nearby town that he must see to. It seems a wolf was killed by several villages and they are arguing over who get's to keep the skin.
* Joshua hears two men talking within earshot of how they believe the Magistrate got what was coming to him, that he had brought these murders onto himself.
Dictionary of Mu site: Pulp Fantasy Sorcerer with Blood, Demons and Hope
ENnie Nominee 2007 for Best Writing and Product of the Year
Winner: Indie RPG Supplement of the Year
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