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First the bad news. Total Victory does not indicate any sort of mechanical bonus or benefit. Nor does it guarantee an instant or total defeat, necessarily. The only default requirement of Total Victory is that its narration be exactly perfect for the announced action - you nailed what you wanted to do, visually/narrationally.

The good news is that Total Victory does have a concrete effect through an indirect mechanism.

a) Sorcerer conflicts very often turn into complex, interesting situations, via play, in a way that's hard to describe. Particularly in a complex conflict with tons of people doing tons of stuff - two rounds into it, a dozen actions have been attempted, some have been aborted, some have succeeded to minor effect, some to major ... all at breakneck speed. But the important thing is this: the bonus dice mechanic lends itself to people narrating detail into this situation. Handy objects, features of the environment, spatial positioning of characters near to or far from one another ...

b) ... and all those details become meat for Total Victory narration. You blocked his arm as he swung the crowbar, and rolled Total Victory? Ha! Take the crowbar away. See? No automatic mechanical benefit, but the situational mechanical benefit (i.e. the weapon) has just shifted places.

And that's an easy, rather boring example. Given those dozen actions that I just talked about above, imagine that none of them so far had yielded Total Victory. For those of you who've really played the game without butchering the resolution mechanics, think of all the incredible details and relative positions and even reversals of loyalty that have occurred by now in this conflict. And now, the next roll for some action (offense, defense, whatever) does turn up with Total Victory. That's an immense amount of change that whoever narrates can have on the SIS, for just that one action.

c) This takes on gruesome, even horrifying effect when you consider the victory-trading rules in Sorcerer & Sword. I cannot emphasize enough that people who aren't sure about the basic mechanics should not trouble their heads with these. But for those who have, making use of Total Victory is what gets your hero onto the high ground, or behind one of the two opponents who thought they'd boxed him in, or into the prince's bed in a surprise move. With the victory-trading rules, the player can bank and time such actions instead of waiting for a lucky roll.

And to finish up this point, let's take a really easy situation, with bog-standard basic Sorcerer and a single roll - you convince Bobby to take your side. You win. Well, the GM plays Bobby to not take your side, but he gets those dice he lost by (your victories) as penalties. OK, so how does Total Victory play into this?

1) The GM may well use the Total Victory as a signal to say "screw it" and have Bobby just plain take your side. He doesn't have to, and he could have done that without the Total Victory, but it can act as a useful signal to remind the GM of this choice. That can be more significant during play that one might imagine without having played.

2) The Total Victory can, as I described, permit whoever's narrating to spin the success into some interesting usage of the current situation. Bobby coughs up a name or otherwise makes some kind of social tactical error that makes this current victory into a new opportunity as well.

Better?

Let's move onto and past the problems created when people bring other role-playing assumptions into Sorcerer. This whole business about "Total Victory is a critical, so why is it harder if you have more dice" is bogosity. Throw all that crit-hit thinking into the kittybox.

Instead, think of Total Victory as a little gimme that anyone can get once in a while ... and furthermore, that tends to benefit the underdog with only one or two dice. See? It's the reverse of the whole "I'm better so I get more crits" thinking. It means the guy with a weenie single die actually can bust out the situational advantage for the next move a little more often. It's a built-in desperation or luck mechanic.

(And the Sorc & Sword reverses this trend back more toward the traditional approach, on purpose. But as I say, that's for the ahead-of-class applications.)