[Snow From Korea] Endgame Dissatisfaction

[TonyLB]

I'm not confused about the parts of the system.  I think I'll have to play it in order to improve my understanding of how the parts work together.

[Shreyas Sampat]

That's excellent, Tony. (Insert suggestion to play the game here.)

Dave, there isn't a specified fictional reason for the relationships to fail before the samurai do; it's just a structural feature.

Guy, here's a rule modification I am thinking about:

When a relationship is severed, black out its name but leave its value undisturbed. This value is raised by scenes that should soothe it, and unaffected by scenes that should tense it. This is "internal" tension. Non-severed tensions are "external."

A samurai crumbles when his internal+external tension is double the greatest sum of external tensions. That way, a samurai severing a relationship is encouraged to put pressure on that relationship in other samurai, assuming the player doesn't want his own samurai to flip out, without winding back the endgame clock.

[Thunder_God]

What do you want to achieve by having severed relationships be pressured upon? How do you sever relationships?

If a character renounces/turns back on another, then yes, it should come up often. For meta-reasons, not for IC reasons.
If the severance is due to death, either the character will keep bringing it up and be admonished to stop it and move on; or he'll ignore it and move on, and be admonished and told to remember it.

I think some social mechanics are in order, and death severance leading to end-game nearing. Severance due to social actions? Make them do something with resources/pacing.

[Shreyas Sampat]

Guy, I think you're misreading on two points:

The samurai isn't pressuring his own relationship; rather, the player is pressuring other relationships to avoid losing his samurai to breakdown. That is, in example form:

Shigeru loses his wife. As a result, his wife isn't there to put pressure on the other samurai (because Shigeru's Truth stat is invisible to endgame calculations). So, unless he wants his character to flip out, Stan uses Shigeru to put pressure on other Truth stats. This is safe for Shigeru, because when he's pressurizing Truth, his wife is not present to be hurt.

On the other hand, in scenes where Shigeru and wife would ordinarily be bonding, it brings back the memory of his grief, which puts pressure on Shigeru.

Second, what sort of social mechanics aren't you seeing? Tension manipulation is social. When you throw down a set to tense a relationship, your character should be moving to pressurise that relationship in some way.