[Azureflame] Conflict Resolution & Imaginary Content

[Calithena]

So I gamed all weekend with my friend Del. There are a bunch of thoughts percolating but I want to focus on a particular scene: not the pivotal scene of the adventure, which was having a whale translate a book of shells which had ebbed back from the future to a dragon's library, but the one which seemed most interesting theoretically.

So, we're, like, playing this system that's kind of in progress. There's a Karma mechanic for calling for conflicts and modifying them and then a Fortune mechanic for resolving them once you're in them, with some connection between the two. It works awesome sometimes and just OK other times. That's not what I care about for purposes of this post. What I care about here is that it's most definitely a conflict resolution system, in both senses: it pits the imaginary agents involved in a conflict against each other, and one engages that system on the basis of player-level interest in having a conflict at this particular point in the narrative.

So I'm playing my namesake character, Lady Calithena Gildenclaw! I'm still in love with her after 27 years or so; in Jungian terms she's my anima. She's a sorceress. Anyway, here's the scene I want to talk about: she's got her ship, with her apprentice and one of her ex-husbands on board, and she's sailing west along the southern coast of Eblor, planning to head to White Fang Bay in the far frozen north, where she's supposed to fertilize the eggs of a female dragon, to pay off a debt she accumulated in play in about 1982 or so.

She wakes up hung over and the sea's kind of black. Inky black. Ulfgar puts his hand in the water and then tells her to flee as fast as she can, and she does, calling up a magewind to drive her ship forward. Behind her, a kraken, described by Del with an attention to gigantic detail worthy of Michael Shea, rises out of the water behind the vessel.

Anyway, some stuff happens. Calithena freezes the water, the kraken breaks out. Calithena conjures a wall of fire half a mile across from the ship's brazier; the Kraken submerges.

Here's where it got sort of interesting. My next inspiration was to take the ship airborne, and so I did.

Except, like, we're in conflict resolution mode. I don't win until the Kraken's beaten. We've both been taken down a peg or two in the conflict, but it's not over. In a task resolution system I might win here: I'm out of range or whatever.

Anyway, it was a nice combo, setting the ocean on fire to drive the kraken under it and then conjuring the mother of all magewinds to drive our ship into the air. If we get up fast enough and the Kraken takes long enough rising, we're "out of range". But this is all mostly (not entirely, but mostly) color relative to the system we're using, in the sense that mostly rolls are determining forward progress in the conflict rather than 'whether you can do  this'.

But now, here's the interesting thing. Del was GM and he basically said "well, the Kraken's giving it a last shot here, he's going to try to drive you back to sea with a wave of water, but if he doesn't win that, he's going to give" (that's not what Del said exactly but the gist of it) in the conflict. I just barely held him off that round of dice rolling, so we escaped, and the kraken was behind us.

In CR terms Del totally didn't have to do that. We hadn't whittled the Kraken all the way down. He could just as easily have narrated the tentacles shooting out from under the sea just in the nick of time to keep us from flying away, and then we go to the next round of the conflict. I think it's cool that the driving the kraken down/us going up imaginative content got his appreciation in a way that made him want to concede there, but it's totally optional from a rules point of view.

But that was the thing I posted to talk about. In Sorcerer there are these bonus dice for nice color contributions in complex conflict. In Dogs you can just give if you decide the other side of a conflict is OK with you, or if you decide it's not worth the price to continue. I normally think of giving in Dogs in terms of narrative weight. When I give in a Dogs conflict it's usually because this character would accept this outcome rather than escalating; it's a statement about the situation. But now here's something interesting: maybe, say, the gunfight at the end of Pale Rider. Maybe the player of the Preacher sets up all these amazing tactics and I the GM say, damn, that's good enough for me, you fill him with lead. I give. No more dice rolls. That's kind of what Del did in this scene, in a way: thought about what was going on, took a last attempt for the Kraken, and then gave when it didn't work out.

I guess what I'm wondering about is the ways interesting manipulation of imaginative content can engage with conflict resolution. In TR this is actually the best approach to play in many 'old-school' systems, in certain cases of a gamist and even a simulationist CA. But in CR, understood here now in the imaginative content sense, it's less obvious what the point of it is. The GM is certainly within his rights to say 'nice move, now roll', or whatever.

Anyway, this is a very broad question, but I think it's a meaningful one. It's about the relationship of 'local' imaginative content to CR. In Sorcerer the GM's discretion on bonus dice is what handles this; in Dogs you can pick up some extra dice for using the scenery as possessions, but you can also blow the other player away with your mastery of the situation to the point where he just gives.

Or another way to put it maybe, some say that in Burning Wheel Revised Luke figured out how to 'stretch' TR so that it would do CR. This question here is about how the kinds of things that are centrally relevant to TR enter into CR. I've got basically two choices at this point: (1) modifiers and (2) player level concessions, up to and including the whole conflict. Anything else? Am I thinking about this right?

[Callan S.]

Were you dissatisfied with the GM just giving up to you?

What did you care about in play? For you it seemed not to be the Krakens defeat, but instead A: To drive him under the water then B: To get your ship airborne.

Was conflict resolution based on 'Beating the Kraken' on target?

[Calithena]

GM initiated conflict (this was a formal event, involved playing tokens). What was at stake? GM wins: my ship's destroyed. I win: continue onward towards White Fang Bay. (I could have proposed counterstakes but didn't want to spend any tokens on that.)

So the Kraken was the agent in the conflict, but 'beating him' wasn't the stakes exactly: they were more specific than that.

What I cared about? That was a big fuckin' kraken - I wanted to get away to finish the deed I had been charged with. I was totally fine with the GM giving it up to me in this case. In other cases I would not be, but here it made me feel good.

[Callan S.]

I see conflict resolution as a sort of 'tug of war' shared story writing tool. Two people want to co-operate on making a story and want to benefit from the way they want different story directions.

But here someone is giving up in the face of your tactics. How much did you stop to consider how cool that was, rather than thinking about how the story has gone your way?

[Calithena]

Hi Callan - thanks for being interested in the thread!

OK, about the tug of war thing. That's true, but the kind of mechanic we have in mind here isn't only for resolving tugs of war. As Vincent said to me once, it's about when you want conflict. One reason you might want conflict is because there are different ideas about how the story might progress; another reason is that there's some implicit or explicit goal in the game and it's someone's, usually a GM's, 'job' to provide conflict en route to it; another is that people feel there ought to be a contested or uncertain outcome to create drama; another is that the players don't want responsibility for the outcome, they want it to be mediated by some outside mechanic; another is that a lot of time resolution is more interesting if you slow it down and inject elements at a measured pace instead of just deciding what happens up front; and so on.

(To have conflict, you need conflicting entities. The most straightforward way to do this is to have those entities represented mechanically directly in the conflict, with situational modifiers. But you can do it with traditional RPG mechanics too.)

Now, in this case, I'm pretty confident Del didn't want to kill my character. (In fact, I know he didn't, because the token-bidding system we use to initiatite conflict has three levels: short-term consequences (something at stake in the scene), long-term consequences (a permanent change to some important element of the gameworld), and cosmic consequences (the creation or destruction of an important element of the game world, such as the death of a player character). Del only bid for short-term in the scene.) The reasons I think he wanted it were twofold: (a) it was 'time for some adversity' in the adventure in that inchoate GMs sense (we had been going along freeform for a while at that point), and (b) to get to White Fang Bay, Calithena had to sail over the Outer Deep, which (it is part of the mythology of this gameworld that) almost no-one ever returns from: even the Araki give it a wide berth. So in that sense Del was 'representing for the Outer Deep': it has big-ass krakens in it and even a sorceress of great power had better respect that if she goes that way.

In that sense this wasn't really a 'deep' encounter, it was just one of those things that happen during adventures that contribute to the rising action: we're going into a place of danger with people we love and a lot at stake.

You ask me this follow up question about the momentary rewards of the scene. I think honestly the big momentary reward I got out of that scene was the mental picture of the ship, hurtling ahead under the magewind, leaping over the waves and into the sky; that was a cool visual. So I guess if we're going to do the crappy thing where we try to atomize the GNS categories I was simming it hardcore, but I don't really think that's a good way of talking or thinking about it.

What interested me though is the thing I said in the first post, which isn't really super GNS related. Let's say you have a conflict resolution mechanic in play. Let's get even more specific and say you're playing DitV because that one's super-clear.

Now, in DitV, you can Give any time. I'm interpreting what Del did in our system as a Give.

You can also, in DitV, use bits of the scenery to help your cause in interesting ways. You might pick up a big pitchfork while you're fighting in a barn and get a d8 to roll for it, added into your narration out of nowhere. This is the Dogs version of stuff like trying to push the ogre off the ledge in D&D, but much more evenly integrated into the system.

So maybe there's really not much to my idea here, but the idea there was goes like this. The decision to Give in Dogs, when I've played it, has generally been motivated by questions like "How much does this mean to my character? Is it worth going to guns? Am I willing to kill for this? To risk killing for this? To die for this? What about him? Why does what I want matter here more than what he wants?" (And all of these questions have a certain resonance at the player level as well, they're not _just_ about the character.)

But this was a case where the decision to Give (interpreting our system in Dogs terms, and Del's action as a Give) was motivated mostly by the imaginative elements of the scene. Kraken down; ship flying; the sorceress sails off into the sunrise. Del could have given me bonus dice or something instead of Giving, but he didn't.

Hm. I guess it's all imaginative stuff, really, the character's actions no less than the character's psychic transformations and engagement with theme. So in that sense there's not much weird going on here at all.

[heraclitusagain]

Hey guys. I had to make a new username since it's been awhile.

One thought on this: The rationale for the kraken to "give" stems from the both the logic of the scene & my sense of the kraken's capabilities--it is mostly a physical combatant. Yes, it has all sorts of psychic powers, but those are not tough enough to threaten a sorceress of Calithena's magnitude. After she engineers sufficient physical separation, the kraken has no further obvious recourse. And since it's only cranky at being disturbed rather than 'on-task' inimical, the baddie will skip other believable options--say summoning something to pursue the boat.

That said, the kraken was minimally represented from a system standpoint--though you could say the same for Calithena. It's options to take action were--in a sense--both very 'open' & very circumscribed. Here's what I mean. In a traditional game, actions are largely defined by a prescriptive/proscriptive binary; i.e,--you can do x,y, or z; but not q or v. This yields the amusing "you can't sneak by the dragon--you're not a thief!" discourse of old school D&D. In highly narrativist models, very little is formally proscribed, but not much is prescribed either. That is, it's basically assumed that a character can do things unless she is actively opposed.

But of course this is not the case. There are many things that are simply impossible for characters to accomplish, even in a fantasy setting, without prescribed supernormal powers. Sean & I call this the "flap your arms & fly to the moon paradox." How is a character prevented from doing this? Is it handled formally, or just dealt w/ via common sense?

In the case of the kraken, my sense of the baddie & the scene led me to rule that it had no further viable options to delay or endanger Calithena. But Sean is quite right when he says that, from a formal standpoint, the rules we were using in no way necessitated my stance. I could have invented a pretext & kept us rolling--the kraken was doing pretty well! Yet to do so defied my sense of plausibility relative to both the scene & the larger narrative.

There you have it--the key issue: plausibility.For me, what you're calling imaginary content dictates the logic of the scene. I guess what I want are mechanics that allow entering & exiting conflicts upon the basis of narrative plausibility and/or dramatic value. Is this a token mechanic? (In Azureflame it probably is.)

Thoughts?

-del