[Vesperteen] Creeping to the Finish Line

[GaryTP]

Jonathan,

You ever play Diplomacy? Your resolution could work a lot like that.

You said:
So, say you roll your dice and the result doesn't come out the way you want. You don't impress the boy you like, the bully punches you in the face, whatever. Or maybe you succeed, but lots of your Self dice come up really low, meaning you're going to lose confidence from the encounter. Not good. This is where Sin comes in. If you are willing to up the ante in the situation, if you are willing to hurt other people to get what you want, you can call on the power of Sin and re-roll a certain number of dice, trying to get a better roll than you currently have. Both players have this option, continuing to up the ante and re-roll to try to get a more perfect score.

---

If your scores were "points you had available" to act, and you simultaneously devoted points to the action, then you could resolve it in a diceless fashion. "Sin" could be the one attribute that can be spent "after the fact". As in, your upping the ante. Who wants to sin more... What's it worth to ya...

Just a thought.

[Jonathan Walton]

Good thoughts, folks.

Perhaps a person higher in the Sin-hierarchy can foist off the unpleasant rules-effects of their actions on another person.

Nice.  Not sure quite how that might work though.  Let me post the Lessons stuff that I developed a bit last night and see if we can figure out a way to work that in.  As it is, Consequences may be a critical part of the school of hard knocks, the experiences you have as part of the process of gaining sin.  But hold that thought...

1. I don't like the idea of capping Self bonuses.
2. rules that govern increase and decrease in Self investments.
3. I also think that the Sins should be very broadly applicable...
4. Self crashes
5. Vesperteen may be a good candidate for a "win condition".

1. I think I'm beginning to agree with you.

2. Maybe.  I think Self investments should follow the rules of drama, but it's hard to know how to get people to do that.  I'll think about this.

3. Me too.  That's why Sloth also serves as "Slick," so you can use it to do a whole host of things that are only related to Sloth in a very abstract sense.  Maybe I need to stop saying that those abilities are "associations" of the Sin.  Maybe I just need to go ahead and say that they ARE the Sin.  So your sheet might say something like "Sloth (Slick): 4" or whatever.

4. Okay, Self crashes are a cool idea, where losing a lot of Self in a short period causes severe repercussions in your life, but that might be a cool way to handle Monsterizing.  The extreme stress of being cut off from your sources of support causes you to go monster until people can restrain you.  But I was thinking, now, that you don't have a pool of univested Self.  All your Self has to be invested in something else.  But I could rethink this.  What do others think?  What would be the point of keeping some uninvested Self?  What would that represent?  Your own self-esteem, the part of you that didn't require reinforcement from others.

As a side note, I was thinking recently that the reason adults are so effective at taking down monsters is because they have a huge Self investment in the Status Quo, a big part of which is the phrase "I don't believe in monsters."  So your English professor draws on his Self investment in the Status Quo when forcing the Vampire to finish his calculus test.  Sorta Mage-like, in that way, I guess, but I'm already stealing tropes from a whole bunch of games, so there's no real reason to stop.  

5. The win condition you're talking about might just be growing up. The way you become an adult, as per the description above, is to start investing Self in the Status Quo, which would give you great monster-fighting powers, but cut you off from your peers and the world of your youth.  There should probably be some requirements for investing in the Status Quo, maybe based on a set of general Self-investment guidelines like you recommeded above.  I can see cliques like the Young Democrats and Young Republicans and Student Council and Future Business Leaders of America being the first to invest in the Status Quo.

1. One leader of a clique.
2. They should be able to use the invested Self however they want.
3. I would guess that cliques have some way to increase their Self pool by exemplifying their sin somehow as a group

1. Of course.  Though they could be disposed by a formal (or semi-formal) challenge.

2. Interesting.  I think they should have some special powers as clique leader, but I don't know about drawing on the invested Self.  I was thinking that they would gain the bonus of invested Self (and they would, presumably, have a lot of Self invested in the clique) whenever they draw on their leader status, and could use this to intimidate their underlings into doing what they wanted and generally ruling the school (I'm definitely imagining the cliques from Volcano High School [badass Korean movie] now, with the Weight-Lifting Team and the Girls' Kendo Team and having Team Captains who command legions of followers and such).

3. This idea I like, but I don't see how it fits into the system yet.  Another thought to hold onto...

Well, actually, it's a combination of "I'm not really interested in that direction" and "Jonathan seems to be doing well on his own".

I'm sorry about the former, but I don't know what I can do about it.  In the end, we can only design the games that we want to design, and not those that other people want to play (well, at least if I'm following through on the ideals of creator-owned games).  You've been one of the biggest sources of real assistance and encouragement in the process up until this point, and it's unfortunte if the design ends up heading in a direction that you're not as excited about.

Honestly, I don't think joining cliques is going to dominate the game in the way you seem to think it is.  This is just me following your advice of developing interesting subsystems.  I hope that, once the entire game is assembled, that people will be given a variety of system-supported play styles that they could explore.  If you want to delve into the clique hierarchies, you can.  If not, you just form a support network among a group of fairly independent friends and do your own thing.  I never joined a real clique in high school and there's nothing forcing Vesperteen PCs to go that route.  It's just one of the most obvious paths to power.  There are plenty of others too.  The major established cliques do not monopolize knowledge of Sin like they'd like to believe they do.

You ever play Diplomacy? Your resolution could work a lot like that.

That's like asking, "Do I eat rice?"  Diplomacy is probably my favorite board game of all time (though it does have to compete with Go).  The resolution style you propose seems much closer to the diceless one used in the recent Marvel Universe game, though, with a few more opportunities to negotiate and raise states.  A nice thought, but I'm kinda on a roll with what I have now, so I'm not sure about going back through and gutting the system all over again.  Maybe if I hit another bump in the road, I could reconsider and fiddle with that sort of a design.

----

And, finally, here's some basic thoughts on Lessons, from late last night:

Antediluvian Requirements for Increasing Sin
(showing my Continuum influences)

1. You must have Consequences accepted for raising that particular Sin that are at least equal to the rank (or twice the rank? three times?) that you are seeking.  For example, if you had Lust 2 and wanted Lust 3, you would have to have a stack of Lust Consequences cards that was at least 3 (6? 9?) high.  This means you have to have been in a conlfict where you chose Lust as your method of assault, and over-extended yourself, going deeper into Lust.

2.  Find a willing Teacher.  You can only teach levels of a Sin that are less than your current one.  So people with Wrath 1 cannot teach someone else Wrath 1.  You have to have Wrath 2 or higher to teach Wrath 1.  This means that only the King/Queen of Wrath can teach Wrath 5 and that only a Werewolf or Demon can teach Wrath 6 (Good luck finding a willing teacher among the Wolves and the Damned!  They'll probably just eat you, unless you can prove your worthiness...).

3. Accomplish a deed that your Teacher chooses, proving the strength of your Envy (or whatever Sin it is).  This is always something that is a crime against the great Status Quo.  The severity of the crime is suggested by the level of Sin that you're trying to gain, but the Teacher you've found has an awful lot of leeway, especially as far as picking something WORSE than would ordinarily be required.  After you've done the deed, they can also choose to find it unacceptable for the slightest reasons.  And most deeds require some form of proof.  If you don't like it, find another Teacher.  Monsters are especially fickle, often forcing mortals to be their slaves for a couple of years, accomplishing a wide variety of demeaning and terrible deeds, before teaching a ranks 5 or 6.

4. And then there's the actual Lesson.  This is the only part that I'm stumped about.  There's all this build up, so something big has to go down here.  Maybe the Teacher takes you aside and gives you a personal Lesson, but I guess public Lessons could happen to, especially if you were learning from a person high up in a clique hierarchy.  How should this work?  Maybe they get you to invest Self in something, an idea, a person, whatever fits the Lesson, and then they destroy it right in front of you, an obvious sign of their superiority and a lesson in the cruelty of the world.

Maybe we should go the Eero-suggested route and let each Sin have it's own antediluvian regulations for how Lessons should be carried out.  They could be heavily ritualized things, and each of the major established cliques would be the keepers of these rituals (well, along with the Monsters, but you don't want to have more dealings with them than you have to; though the Monsters would have given the cliques the rituals in the first place).  There would be some independent parties and groups who knew the secret rituals, stolen away by toppled Kings and Queens or those that broke off on their own.

Anyway, there's a lot of stuff there.  Have at it.  I'll be off working on guidelines for consequences...

[Eero Tuovinen]

Well, actually, it's a combination of "I'm not really interested in that direction" and "Jonathan seems to be doing well on his own".

I'm sorry about the former, but I don't know what I can do about it.  In the end, we can only design the games that we want to design, and not those that other people want to play (well, at least if I'm following through on the ideals of creator-owned games).  You've been one of the biggest sources of real assistance and encouragement in the process up until this point, and it's unfortunte if the design ends up heading in a direction that you're not as excited about.

Heh, no reason to get miffed about it, stuff happens. The only way to get the game you want is to design it yourself, and Vespertine is your game, not mine. So no reason to "do anything about it".

Then again, I'm probably posting less about the project as my understanding of it's goals and priorities lessens, so no need to wonder about that. Doesn't mean that I'm sulking, just means I have nothing more to say.

4. And then there's the actual Lesson.  This is the only part that I'm stumped about.  There's all this build up, so something big has to go down here.  Maybe the Teacher takes you aside and gives you a personal Lesson, but I guess public Lessons could happen to, especially if you were learning from a person high up in a clique hierarchy.  How should this work?  Maybe they get you to invest Self in something, an idea, a person, whatever fits the Lesson, and then they destroy it right in front of you, an obvious sign of their superiority and a lesson in the cruelty of the world.

Well, my opinion is that you've overextended somewhat on the whole production - if getting sin is that difficult, who would bother? The extraneous step seems to be number three; I don't see what it brings to the game, apart from a weird hampering of the Lesson stuff. As far as I'm concerned, doing sinful stuff is learning sin, so why have two different steps? By having that you give me an odd disconnection about the whole lesson thing: apparently a sin lesson is something else than doing the sin, which would mean some ritualistic thing in the broad sense (everything that's not doing is ritual, so this is ritual). A weird viewpoint on what the sins are, like they're some kind of alien viewpoints impressed through a most arduous process.

Furthermore, I fail to see the motivation for step three, if it's optional. It seems more sensible to me if sins are something one wants to teach and spread. It's lonely to be the only sinner, and teaching grants authority. Going even further, I don't even think that a teacher is such a great requirement. I could see having it as an optional part of the lessons, especially at lower levels.

By contrast, I distinctly remember writing a long while ago about a much simpler lesson plan: have the lessons be color scenes initiated by either participant and exploring everyday teenage life (shopping for greed, hanging out for sloth, making out for lust, dissing others for envy and so on, the grand metaphor of teenager life, the whole point of the game). Roll dice for how "staining" the lesson is based on the willingness of the participants, their sin levels and what they're actually doing. Degree of success is compared to the current sin levels of the participants, so it's possible to gain sin or not, even if you're supposed to be the teacher. Much simpler, and achieves the requirements IMO.

Overall, I'm thinking that you are overdesigning. Did I mention that already? Go out and play this before it gets out of hand!

[LordSmerf]

A couple of notes.

It was my understanding that you didn't actually lose Self through investment.  I thought that investment represented a risk of loss.  So if you have 9 Self then you can invest 9 Self in anything, but if any one of those things were lost then you would lose 9 Self.  This prompted my suggestion that Self loss could cascade your investments down.

Additionally, I'm with Eero on this one: Lessons should not be nearly so complex.  While I think the idea of terrible and abusive teachers is pretty cool, I think it's important that you can learn Lessons simply by doing.  I would take a look at The Burning Wheel for a good way to handle this one.  Everytime you attempt to use something to accomplish stuff, take not of the difficulty of the task.  Once you have attempted enough things of enough difficulty compared to your current ability (this is on a non-linear scale) then you advance.

So, my read on this is that you should take your really cool stack of Consequences and use that to allow people to advance their Sin simply by commiting Sins.  Those two ideas are far more interesting to me than some sort of invested pool of points.  Risk is cool, self teaching that is handled by self-assigned "evil" tasks is cool.

Like Eero, I am a bit confused about what exactly this is all supposed to look like.  I'm having trouble seeing exactly how your system works, other than the fact that there are cards involved somewhere.

Thomas

[Jonathan Walton]

It was my understanding that you didn't actually lose Self through investment.  I thought that investment represented a risk of loss.  So if you have 9 Self then you can invest 9 Self in anything, but if any one of those things were lost then you would lose 9 Self.  This prompted my suggestion that Self loss could cascade your investments down.

We're on different wavelengths here.  In my mind, it works like this:

Bob has 9 Self, as follows...
2 Self in his abusive single-parent mom,
2 Self in his football coach,
1 Self in the homecoming game vs. Central Academy,
1 Self in his best friend Paul,
1 Self in his secret love for the head cheerleader,
1 Self in the Football Jocks clique,
1 Self in a neighborhood gang of boys that he's a part of.

Then, a Self crash would occur if he lost a whole bunch of Self in a single session, by people taking out the things he cares about.  Say his team loses the big game because he misses a critical fieldgoal (-1 Self for the homecoming game), his coach yells at him for a hour (-1 Self for the coach), the Football Jocks refuse to talk to him anymore (-1 Self for the clique ditching him), the head cheerleader starts dating the quarterback and he misses the chance to do anything about it (-1 Self for his secret love of her), and his mom gets a new boyfriend and doesn't have as much time for him (-1 Self).  That's more than half his Self (he's now at 4, from 9), so he turns into a monster based on his highest Sin (a Zombie, if he's a typical high-Gluttony jock) and begins terrorizing those that have hurt him, maybe hungering for the brains of the quarterback and his mom's new boyfriend.

I'm pondering simplifying the process of gaining Sin, but I really like the Teacher aspect and having to go to the monsters to gain the highest levels.  I'll get back to you guys on that...

[Eero Tuovinen]

I'm pondering simplifying the process of gaining Sin, but I really like the Teacher aspect and having to go to the monsters to gain the highest levels.  I'll get back to you guys on that...

But you can have those without complexity. Consider an example utilizing a  stand-in die mechanic: die pools are rolled to gain successes. Lesson dice are garnered from
- Teacher's sin: each point one die
- Action: 1-6 for the actual action of the Lesson scene
Each participant rolls separately, and the "teacher" is simply anybody else participating in the scene, even if they have a lower rating in the sin. Successes are compared to your own current sin rating, and if higher, up you go.

The result of this is that you can in theory learn high levels of sin alone, but only in theory, as the die pool only gives about 50% (say) successes per die. Likewise, this way it's possible in theory to learn more sin from just teaching sin to another. Also, you learn best by hanging out with those who have more sin than you. And the worse the things you do, the likelier it is to get sin. Result: an extremely simple mechanic supporting everything we want here.

The problem of your late notions is that you're handling sin as a kewl power instead of a near-unavoidable part of teenage life. The original impact of the Vespertine idea is in the impossible contrast of the medieval morality system with teenager life, especially when it makes sense on a moral level. This idea is diluted by having sin be something unnatural from beyond, gained through a formal system of teacher-student relationships.

[Jonathan Walton]

Okay, not off the page yet, so I'm going to keep chugging along, trying to bang this into something that's playtestable, so come January we can really get rolling.  Let me see if I can turn my coffee shop notes into something articulate:

So I was thinking about clique creation, and thinking that each clique should have to choose one or two Sins as its virtues of choice, and that you could never invest more Self in a clique's hierarchy than the amount of their associated Sin that you have.  So, that way, the King of the Jocks, with Gluttony 6, would have 6 points invested in the clique which he could bring to bear on any matters involving it (which is a hell of a lot of points).  This also leads me to wonder if all Self investments should be capped by Sin, but I tend to think not, as that would complicate things.  This also limits the ability of low-Sin people to become really involved with cliques, which means they're really only a part of the game at higher levels of Sin, just like the Fraternities in Continuum.

And then I was thinking about this Status Quo thing that most adults have a huge investment in.  And I was doing some Mage-like pondering and thinking "hey, isn't the Status Quo just a big clique for adults?"  "Sure is."  "Then what Sin is the cardinal virtue of the Status Quo?"  And the obvious answer was Maturity, but then Maturity isn't one of the Seven Deadlies.  But, you know what?  Maybe it should be.  So right now I'm pondering adding Maturity as another Sin (Maturity makes you more "adult," in the same way Envy makes you more cool).  This brings in the possibility of adults (or, at least, some adutls) just being monsters.  They turned into monsters by indulging too much in the Sin of Maturity.  And that idea just seems really declicious to me.  So your teachers and parents and police officers and child molestors or whatever are all just monsters, as alien from the teenage mindset as werewolves and vampires.

So the only non-monsters in the world are children (ala Little Fears) and teenagers (ala Vesperteen) and the few people who manage to have a healthy adulthood (the "cool" old people who aren't just agents of The Man).  Speaking of The Man, you know how all the Sins in Little Fears each have a demonic overload who looks over them?  Well, maybe the Lord of Maturity is really just The Man himself.  His agents are the school principles, military recruitors, drug control officers, bible tumpers, and other similar forces in the world.

And I was thinking about writing consequences, and wondering if something as simple as this would work (where the number is just the level of Sin that you pushed yourself to):

1-2: an inconvenience
3-4: a serious problem
5-6: a nightmare
6+: hell

And I was thinking about pushing Sins in conflicts, and coming up with a set of general guidelines, such as:

Envy falsifies.
Gluttony disgusts.
Greed impoverishes.
Lust sullies.
Pride isolates.
Sloth calcifies.
Wrath destroys.
Maturity debases.

And then having a general chart, ala Nobilis, though I'm not sure what that might look like.  I tried creating one for each specific Sin, but the only one I could do easily was Wrath:

1 - outburst
2 - destruction
3 - violence
4 - injury
5 - cruelty
6 - murder

But you could try to generalize from here, as in:

1 - yell a lot
2 - break something someone cares about
3 - hurt someone's feelings/body
4 - injure someone's feelings/body
5 - cruelly injure someone's feelings/body
6 - totally destroy someone's psyche/body

But that still doesn't look all that appetizing to me.

Still I was also thinking that you could increase things still further by sacrificing Self investments.  So if you have a 3 Self investment in your girlfriend and you totally destroy that relationship in the process of winning a conflict, you gain +3 to whatever you're doing, in addition to any crimes of passion that you commit.  This would let you sacrifice the things you care about for temporary gains, which I think should be an important aspect of the game.

And then I was thinking about the attraction of Maturity and selling out to the adults (and the adult monsters), and thinking that maybe Maturity (out of all the Sins) would actually give you real world benefits for choosing to resolve conflicts that way, by debasing yourself before the power of The Man.  For example, if someone is giving you a hard time and you go to the principle about it, you gain some sort of benefits or status from the adult world.  Like maybe you get good grades or get a nice letter written home to your parents or something.

And I'm thinking of dropping all the Sin requirements except the first one, just gaining enough consequences to equal the amount of Sin that you want to have.  This way you can gain Sin quickly by trying hard, but it will also be something inevitable, unless you just want to keep getting squished under the boots of people who are willing to do shitty things to you.  I think the teacher-student thing and the "do something bad for me" parts might still be retained though, but as part of a kind of arcane magic system, where certain rituals are passed down from the monsters to the cliques and they can use them to basically take Director Stance and make major changes to the narrative environment (like bring someone back from the dead, change events that have already happened, or set up opportune situations).  Of course, the adults have their own evil magic, based on Maturity (hello, Technocracy!).

And those are my thoughts recently, which move this thing a few steps closer to being playable.  Thoughts?

[Eero Tuovinen]

And those are my thoughts recently, which move this thing a few steps closer to being playable.  Thoughts?

Well, yeah. I'm coming up as a horrible naysayer, but just disregard to taste. Or, if you feel that negative vibes are unhelpful at this stage, tell me to shut up.

Check out my last post, last chapter for my essential opinion on the sin of Maturity. IMO this theme has been pretter represented by the lack of self (joining the grey masses, etc.) rather than a specific sin, because that leaves the adulthood as an essentially unknown step: you can't know which parts of the stuff they're selling are real and which are lies, you have to make your own selections to grow into some kind of adult. In contrast, the idea of Sin of Maturity represents moral absolutism, which guarantees the players a mechanically safe and "correct" solution into growing up: if you get Maturity, you're doing "bad" growing, if you don't you do "good" growing. Not very deep. Compare with the earlier conception, where a central question of the game was: What part does sin have in my adulthood? The ambivalency recedes further and further with these classifications of moral condition.

The stuff you're pondering is good per se, but it's slanted heavily towards modern occult action adventure. You do see that you just defined the whole adult world as just another splat? If that kind of traditional characterization-based stuff is the goal, then go to it.

As for consequences, you don't need that much of those. I find the idea of controlling consequence intensity problematic, because of the central narrativistic idea that the significance of the event is defined by the player. How about this:

The numeric value of the consequence defines how many points of invested Self are put to risk in a follow-up conflict/something. The narrator picks the points, and can choose any combination that can be justified. So a two-point consequence can be about one two-point investment, or divided between two one-pointers, or might be just a part of a larger one. Define "put to risk" to taste, whatever is the appropriate mechanical conclusion. Could be that the character might lose those points or something, don't know.

Sins in conflicts: you don't necessarily need an objective set of guidelines as long as you require the next act to be worse than the previous one. That way the ambient situation gets to affect how easy it is to gain power from sin: it's easier to push it in a civilized, adult situation where even relatively minor things (say, showing up with an irokese perm) can be scandalous, than in some twisted tribal cannibalistic monster party. That's appropriate, I'd say, because the ambient sin level will be more or less the same to all participants of one conflict anyway.

[Jonathan Walton]

Well, yeah. I'm coming up as a horrible naysayer, but just disregard to taste. Or, if you feel that negative vibes are unhelpful at this stage, tell me to shut up.

I winced when you started out that way, but the comments you made afterwards are actually really constructive and helpful (even more so that some of your recent criticism, actually).  Keep it coming.  I won't necessarily do what you suggest, but I obviously respect what you have to say.

Compare with the earlier conception, where a central question of the game was: What part does sin have in my adulthood? The ambivalency recedes further and further with these classifications of moral condition.

I guess I'm struggling with how to keep the moral ambivilency with systematic and setting elegance.  I like having (at least) some adults be systematically defined as "monsters" even if they don't turn into giant, hairy beasts.  I like the simplicity of having adults be another splat, but you're right that it destroys much of the thematic potency.  I'll keep thinking about this.

The numeric value of the consequence defines how many points of invested Self are put to risk in a follow-up conflict/something.

Hmm, that's not a bad idea, actually, but not quite something usable yet.  I like the idea of getting points in this conflict for increasing the difficult of the follow-up conflict afterwards.  That works real well.  I don't think it ties especially well into the Self mechanics (at least as I'm conceiving of them right now), but that gets into a lot of the scene framing stuff that I've been struggling with of late.

What if you can accept points of consequences in order to raise your current Stat, which must then be spent in various ways once the conflict is over, or even during the conflict.  Maybe you spend points to create bad situations for your character or those they care about, or, if you have a position in a clique, you can funnel your consequences to your minions or something (as was suggested earlier).  Or you could get rid of points of consquences by burning relationships, for example: letting your younger brother take the rap for something you did.  

Sins in conflicts: you don't necessarily need an objective set of guidelines as long as you require the next act to be worse than the previous one.

You know, I think you may be right.  Maybe I just need to write an example conflict maybe (or even stage one in IRC) and try to apply some appropriate mechanics as we go along, based on what makes sense for the players to be doing.  It should be a fencing match of crimes, where you escalate and manuver to different Sins and attack your opponent's attachments, all in an effort to win.  If I can capture that without structuring everything too much, it'll do the whole system a world of good.

[Eero Tuovinen]

I guess I'm struggling with how to keep the moral ambivilency with systematic and setting elegance.  I like having (at least) some adults be systematically defined as "monsters" even if they don't turn into giant, hairy beasts.  I like the simplicity of having adults be another splat, but you're right that it destroys much of the thematic potency.  I'll keep thinking about this.

Keep the step from youth to adulthood systemically undefined and mysterious, especially as concerns becoming a monster adult. Self clearly has something to do with it, as well as your other choices, but there need not be clear statistical way to become a something or other adult. That's for the sequel game Seeking Rede to define ;)

Then just name a suitable sin for each adult monster. Lust for the paedophilic rapist, Envy for the cubicle rat, Gluttony for the redneck savage and so on. Handle the adult monsters exactly like the corresponding actual monster rules-wise. The only difference being the degree of sublimation, really: the adult version is perhaps even more awful, as it contains the essence in a human form. But like all adults, it has lost the sense of purpose and self: while the vampire is aware of the hierarchies of sin and the world of monsters, the adult cut of the same monster (social climber with a heart of ice, essentially) is inexorably tied to human society, and is essentially blind to it's own purpose and meaning.

This way you can have two monster "archetypes" for each sin quite nicely.

[Jonathan Walton]

Nice solution, Eero.

Also, just talked with Shreyas and he helped me nail a solution to the consequences + scene framing issue.

You build up consequences points during conflicts by overextending yourself and these, in turn, are given to the other players, who spend them to make your life miserable and frame follow-up conflicts.  Not sure how this'll happen yet, but I like the idea.