[One Can Have Her] A new mechanic

[Jonas Ferry]

A friend of mine, Jonas Barkå, suggested that some scenes in One Can Have Her could be a game of chicken, and I thought, "why not?" More precisely, I'm not too happy with the current conflict resolution system, and Ron Edwards rightly asked for a system with more bite to it in his Ronnies feedback. I don't know if this way of doing conflict resolution is brilliant or really stupid, but I guess you'll tell me which, right?

The game of chicken is most easily pictured by using the classic setup with two cars that speed towards each other. The first one to swerve is a chicken, and is disgraced (but both survive). If both swerve nothing is lost or gained, but if both go straight ahead they both lose big time (they both die). This makes it different from the prisoner's dilemma, which is also a part of One Can Have Her. In the PD both gain moderately if both cooperate, win big time if they're the only one to defect and lose big time if both defect. In chicken nothing happens if both defect, they win big time if they're the only one cooperating but lose totally if both cooperate. You always want to do the opposite of you're opponent, but you don't know what the opponent will do until it's too late.

The easiest way to implement this would be to give each PC a number, say 10, and give some in-game explanation what it represents. For now, we can call it their Drive Strength and it's a measure of the character's fighting spirit. NPCs have a similar number, each one perhaps starts with 1, but this can be increased if the GM spends Opposition Points.

When you enter a conflict, the two characters are like the drivers of the cars in chicken. They accelerate towards each other by attacking, verbally or physically, turn by turn. Each turn, their number will decrease as they approach the point where they crash. Let's say they spend 1 point each turn and say what their character is doing to the other person. "I hit you in the stomach, 1 point" and the other answers "I take the punch and hit you in the face, 1 point." Perhaps you can put forward more than one point and force the other to do the same or "swerve" and give up the stakes, perhaps it's only one point per turn.

If one character reaches 0 points he has to "swerve" and give the stakes to the other character, and he's lost from the game for some reason, like being dead. You can always abort at any time, but both characters end up with a lower number than before the conflict. It's still a valid thing to do; you're disgraced by losing the stakes and letting the other person narrate, but your character lives. The player starts with a 10 point character and he thinks the NPC is worth 2 points. He starts a conflict and 4 points later he thinks "this NPC means business, and this is not worth dying for" and swerves. He'll survive, but he'll be battered and bruised physically, mentally or socially, depending on the conflict.

A conflict could look like this, when one character starts at 4 (A) and one at 2 (B).

A: Says "I hit you in the stomach," puts forward 1 point.
B: "I stumble backwards, but drag you with me down to the ground," 1 point.

A now has 3 and B has 1.

A: "I get a hold of you and start strangling you," 1 point.
B: "That's it, I give, and you get your point back."

So they'll stop at 3 and 1 respectively, and A wins whatever's at stake and gets to narrate how the conflict resolves. Or instead:

B: "I reach down and pull a knife, which a push into you," 1 point.

Now we have A at 2 and B at 0. This means that B is out of the game, and A gets to describe what happens, and wins the stakes. So when you're at 1 point left, all you can hope for is that the other will swerve, because that'll get you your point back and you'll survive. Whether you spend a point or swerve has to be revealed at the same time by the two participants.

How many points you have left must be hidden from the opposing player somehow, I think. On one hand, it shouldn't matter if you know how much the others have, since what you're really doing is checking how much they're prepared to pay for whatever's at stake. On the other hand, if you know that the other guy only has 2 points to begin with, perhaps it's not as exciting, and you'll never give after just one turn. I don't know. It's a bit of a hassle to hide your number of points, but perhaps it's necessary to keep the suspense?

I figure you'll keep lowering your PC's Drive Strength throughout the game, perhaps being able to increase it by spending Coolness Points that you'll get the same way as in the original system. In the last scene of the game you won't be able to swerve, and the police will always have a big enough number to kill any PC. This means that if you rat on the others and it's the last scene, they'll be killed or captured by the police, like in the original game. I don't know exactly how this will be handled, if the police would have a really high value or if they should follow some other rules. If you're not being ratted on you'll probably get a conflict that won't kill you, to be able to live through to the epilogue. One think that makes it harder to set the number for the opposition is the Coolness Points that can change a persons Drive Strength, but I can think of some way of dealing with that.

Another possibility is to have different traits that can be used instead of just one Drive Strength. You could have some variant of the standard "physical, mental, social" attributes that you can distribute your 10 points between, and when you go into a conflict you state which one you'll use. You could then "escalate" like in Dogs, to introduce a new attribute into the conflict. That way, something that starts out socially can turn into a fist fight or something. It would be cool to have something more thematically appropriate than generic attributes, but I don't know how at the moment.

PCs could also attack other PCs with this system, doing a chicken race with their characters as a way of testing each other, if they're in the same scene.

Well, that's all to begin with. I have a lot of "probably", "something" and "perhaps", so any questions or comments?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jonas,

My only concern is that this resolution mechanic is so diverting and extreme that it'll overwhelm the overall Rat/Don't Rat point of the game. Why bother worrying about that when I can just hunt down the other guys who're horning in on my Lula, and kill them?

I'm thinking, one game theory conundrum at a time is plenty. I suggest instead a very randomized, very free-wheeling resolution system would be better for within-scene conflicts and resolutions.

Best,
Ron

[Graham W]

Jonas,

I like the idea of some sort of chicken mechanic in general. I'm not sure about that particular one. It's too predictable: I know exactly how many points I can bid and (most of the time) I'll know how many points the other PCs have too.

If you wanted a chicken mechanic, why not do something more like blackjack? Both players get dealt cards and can call for more cards. The player with the highest hand wins, but hands over a particular value automatically lose. So there's an incentive to get more and more cards but an increasing danger of going bust.

Or something similar with dice.

Graham

[rbingham2000]

My only concern is that this resolution mechanic is so diverting and extreme that it'll overwhelm the overall Rat/Don't Rat point of the game. Why bother worrying about that when I can just hunt down the other guys who're horning in on my Lula, and kill them?

Why indeed? It wouldn't be the first time a Femme Fatale's driven some poor bastard to murder somebody in a noir story -- consider Ava Lord from the Sin City story "A Dame to Kill For," who drives the hero Dwight to do just that to her husband Damien Lord.

[JSDiamond]

I like the 'chicken' resolution because it can add a potency to the type of "her" only one can have.  If I pull a knife and kill my rival --or simply wound him to win the fight, what's to say she doesn't hate me?  I win the battle, but my rival wins the war.