We should ban Sorcerous Working from our vocabulary

[Carl.ollivier]

We should stop talking about sorcerous workings. Or at least change the way we do so. Hear me out.

I don't mean the mechanic, which is great. But it's a great abstraction, a way of unifying many different occult methods and processes into a simple set of rules. Sorcerors in creation don't do Sorcerous Workings, they bind spirits or grow clones in genesis tanks or construct monoliths to affect the dragon lines. I think that when discussing the setting, glossing over that stuff as 'sorcerous workings' elides a tremendous amount of interesting content- not least of which is that you can have fights amongst said clone tanks.

One rules consequence of more specificity is that workings do become more fragile. Of things are achieved by bound demons or geomancy rather than localised reality editing then it is easier to disrupt them. I'm okay with this outcome, since wrecking shit is still a plot hook with a high potential for unexpected outcomes.

Increased specificity also makes adjudicating low-finesse easier for the storytellers, and creates more hooks for unintended outcomes in general.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[satoshi]

That specificity for many workings is covered by the Means portion of a working. Only the most powerful sorcerers can do serious workings without them and in that manner the system is functioning as intended: Most sorcerers have to include "Vat of Clones" as a means that becomes a weak point in the working, while the most powerful can just use "I Enchant it to do X." Given the vast array of possibilities I'm fine with using the catch-all term "Working" just for clarity.

[Kelly Pedersen]

I don't mean the mechanic, which is great. But it's a great abstraction, a way of unifying many different occult methods and processes into a simple set of rules. Sorcerors in creation don't do Sorcerous Workings, they bind spirits or grow clones in genesis tanks or construct monoliths to affect the dragon lines.

Thing is, that's exactly what sorcerous workings are. They're not just "localized reality editing", they're already a catch-all term for the hundreds of weird practices that sorcerers get up to to do Weird Shit (TM) without directly casting spells. The higher the Finesse of a working, the more choice the player gets in what kind of Weird Shit they do to achieve the effect they want, but it always does have to be Weird Shit. Finesse 5 doesn't mean the player gets to say "I sit in the lotus position and meditate for 10 weeks, and when I'm done the universe just reshapes itself to my desires, with no drawbacks or consequences". It's the player having a specific vision of how they want their Weird Shit to play out, so they go for max Finesse to make sure it does.

[JohnDoe244]

I mean, this is the setting presentation. Workings, like Charms, aren't an in universe thing. It's a mechanical representation of the weird stuff sorcerers do.

The problem is... language exists so you can talk about stuff. Ban the word "Working" and you just use a different word.

[Isator Levi]

It probably helps to think of "working" as an easily parsed descriptive term for when a sorcerer does something that lingers.

[Heavy Arms]

While I get the appeal from the perspective of wanting a more immersive role-playing experience, most groups find individualized jargon to be too much of a headache to bother with.

My feelings on this come strongly from a long time playing the WoD games, some of which have up to a dozen in-setting names for the same mechanical thing. Mage is a good example (also haha sorcery): all of the nine Traditions, The Technocracy (with a few extras), and the plethora of Disparates and Crafts all have their own historical language for the same exact concepts. Remembering them all is a pain in the ass for players, and in-setting? They all came to the same conclusion centuries ago and decided on a common jargon, so the PCs have learned a shared terminology that lets mages effectively communicate with each other (which is also what is used for the mechanical terms to make it easier for people to remember what's what).

The setting detail is nice. If you're playing in a single-faction game it can be good flavor to use the faction terminology over the common terminology to help add to that atmosphere. But in general, it's not worth the effort. It's a much, much easier Creation to play in if after the thousands of years since Sorcery was discovered, that certain concepts have a common terminology even if not what's used internally within a given mystic soceity, rather than one where each method of Initiation insists on its own thing being entirely different from everyone else's things even though it really isn't.