conflict, its the one bit that I cant 'get'

[stefoid]

Hi, Ive visited this forum before asking about this aspect of PTA.  I love nearly everything about the game, except this bit.  I just dont get it.

Specifically, I dont get when the GM is supposed to call for a conflict resolution.  In the games I have GMed, everybody gets on a roll and agrees that it would be cool if such and such a thing happened, and they all agree and the person whoose turn it is narrates it.  There doesnt seem to be any cause to use the conflict resolution mechanism. 

Often I let scenes go without introducing the conflict mechanism, and other times I am thinking to myself - the rules say that most scenes should have a conflict resolution, and its up to me to introduce it... so I try to pick something and have it 'resolved' but it mostly serves to interrupt the flow of the game and seems very contrived.  because it is contrived.

But it occured to me that maybe I was looking for conflict (in all the wrong places).  I was of the opinion that the conflict being resolved is an in-game thing between characters....   But is that true?  it might actually start making sense if the conflict being resolved is  between players.  a meta game conflict?  am I onto something, or do I still fail to get it?

Perhaps it will make sense if someone (matt?) can tell me why the game has a conflict resolution system at all.  ?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Nope, you should resolve player-disagreements by negotiation and leave the conflict mechanics for in-game character disagreements. If players are genuinely disagreeing about something, drawing lots about it doesn't exactly help resolve anything.

Now, what you should be using the conflict system for is structure, inspiration and pacing for the game. Here's what the conflict system does for you:
- It helps the group pinpoint important turns in the fiction.
- It helps the players make decisions about arbitrary matters.
- It allows players to concretely invest resources according to what they consider important.

The latter one is probably the most important one in your case, considering that you seem to be quite happy playing without a conflict resolution mechanic at all. So consider this: one of the great enjoyments of playing PTA is that players have an opportunity to choose an issue for their character and declare their stance on that issue. This is premise-full roleplaying, narrativism, if you will. However, the actual action and activity of the game happens when the players make hard choices about how their characters stand upon their issue in any given concrete situations they may face.

Now, you can get a lot of game out of the above ideas even without a conflict resolution system, but regardless, that's what the system is there to faciliate: when you spend fan mail in an important conflict, you're saying that the outcome of this conflict is important to you. Likewise, when you choose to use your "soldier" edge, you're saying that this is something your character is willing to grab a gun for. All these crunchy decisions in the conflict resolution system are intented to highlight the values and choices of the character and the player in ways that support the players in creating engaging drama.

You could think of the conflict resolution system as a kind of a frame or spotlight in an important event: when the cards are drawn, everybody knows that a character is doing something important. It's like a distinct ritual space inside the play activity, helping players focus on a key point of play.

Now, how to find that conflict: my suggestion is to start simply and always give your NPCs motives that are directly tangled with the issues of the main characters of the episode. This way the conflict is always just a hand's width away.

Whether any of the above seems compelling to you is another matter; some people genuinely like freeform play, the reasons for which I won't go here.

[Georgios Panagiotidis]

I can't give you any definitive answer as to how conflict and the resolution mechanisms are supposed to work together, but this has been how I've come to handle it.

Let's say my group has a scene in which a cop character chases some criminal. The first question that I pose is: does he catch him or not? This is what we build the conflict on. Then we look at the character's issue and determine how it might be tied to the conflict in the scene. Let's say the cop has the issue: Self-worth.

The follow-up question then is: does the character prove he's worthy of being a cop? We use conflict resolution to answer this directly. But the fate of the criminal (which served as the basis for the conflict) isn't determined by the cards, but by the narrator instead.

It doesn't matter whether everyone at the table agrees what should happen to the criminal beforehand. The narrator gets to decide what happens to him and his narration is constrained by the result of the cards. So if the player won the conflict, the narrator explains how the cop proved himself worthy of his job. If he lost, he'd explain how the cop failed to do so.

The cop might catch the criminal and this might boost his self-worth. But it'd be perfectly alright to have the criminal get away and the cop still proving himself, by maybe rescuing a passer-by, that the criminal has endangered during his escape. Or the cop might catch the criminal through sheer luck and happenstance, and therefore feel like he doesn't deserve to wear a badge. But this is just how I handle it and I don't know how close this is to how the game is designed to be run.

[stefoid]

Hi G, thanks for your reply.

Ive thought about it some more, and in the way we have been playing it, I think our problem comes from collectively mapping out a scene, rather than winging it.  By that I mean, when the scene is being set, when it comes to hammering out the agenda, it generally involves the whole group kibutzing for 10 minutes :

"wouldnt it be cool if the cop was just about to catch the bad guy when an old woman stepped out from a doorway and was knocked to the ground and the cop had to stop and help her"  and
"yeah, because later, back at the preceinct, he could catch some heat from the seargant for failing to catch the criminal", and so on...

basically we would be almost mapping out the entire scene at the agenda stage, even to the point of seeding future scenes.  So having gone through this process, we end up with a good story, with lots of group involvement in concocting it, but really nothing much left to resolve conflict or naration-wise.

having re-read the rules for scene-setting, basically all we should be saying is more like "in this scene which is character development for the cop, he chases the criminal on foot through the back alleys of china town"  and leave it at that?

is that more like it?  if so, how would you proceed from that point?  Who says what and when?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Yes, that sounds like a problem. Your latter example of "in this scene which is character development for the cop, he chases the criminal on foot through the back alleys of china town" is right on mark; nothing more is needed, just establish who is doing what when the scene opens and continue playing from there.

As to how to play, it's easy: every player tells the others what their own characters say and do in the scene. Not as conditional suggestions with ample justification like you'd need the other players to agree with you, but as direct declarations of intent: my character runs fast, wanting to catch that criminal, my character looks everywhere for a hiding place, and so on.

When these declarations of intent by players cross with each other or become otherwise outrageous, throw in the conflict resolution. That's what it's for. Conflicts are resolved when characters struggle to achieve their aims.

[Georgios Panagiotidis]

The whole "kibitzing"-thing is pretty much what we do as well. It's just that we do it as part of the scene, instead of the agenda. The other difference is pretty small, but I've seen it have big consequences. Once the kibitzing (what a fun word) starts, we don't talk about what could, might, should, would possibly happen... but everybody pitches in with descriptions and explanations of what is going on. It'd be something like this:

"He chases after him and turns around a corner..."
"...almost running into a cart..."
"...music is pumping and he's muttering under his breath..."
"..."Why don't they ever stop when you tell them to?"..."
"...and then the criminal pushes an old woman aside into the street..."
"...right in front of a moving truck..." And so on.

Since the scene sort of belongs to a player, he gets a kind of veto to how his characters fairs in the scene. So if another player suggests, that the Cop stumbles and causes a big Clouseau-esque scene, the player could just object and it'd be considered to not have happened. Although, this is a bit simplified, as in my group player's enthusiasm for a scene, group dynamics and the like have an effect on this as well.

This back-and-forth goes on until the Producer (but sometimes the group) picks up on a conflict. As a Producer I can in theory turn any of the lines above into the scene's conflict and try to built the character's issue into it.

a) Does he chase after the criminal or not?
b) Is he muttering under his breath or not?
c) Does he catch the criminal or not?

It's obvious that (b) is not only trivial, but it also has no interesting connection to the character's issue.
(a) is only a little bit better, but so small in scale that it feels like a waste of a scene. Though other groups might find it perfect for their series' style.
(c) is the obvious choice in this case. Its scope feels meaty enough to warrant its own scene and you can easily tie the character's issue into it.

So basically, it breaks down like this:
Player requests a scene (Focus, Agenda, Location).
The Producer sets the scene and gets the ball rolling: the obligatory "what happens then?"-question.
The group kibitzes and develops the action in the scene through description.
Producer picks up the conflict of the scene and ties the issues into it.
Cards hit the table.

When it comes to recognizing the scene's conflict, I ask myself what is the important decision or action that has to be made in this scene? What does the group want to see happen, so the story develops wherever they want it to go? That's the conflict. Tieing this back to my earlier post, the Narrator still gets to determine if it happens or not, but now the issues was tied into it and the cards revealed more about the character.

A potential drawback of this approach is that the story can feel predictable. But that's easily fixed, by tieing a specific outcome of the conflict into the character's dealing with their issue. In this example, you could tie the criminal getting caught, with the cop boosting his self-worth. So if the player's cards are beaten by the Producer's, the criminal gets away and the cop feels worthless.

I find that playing a couple of those "safe" conflicts (where the cards only determine how the character deals with his issue) first really helps to focus everybody on the issues, instead of the plot which is what almost every group I've played with naturally leaned towards. Once this has been seen in action and the players *click* into it, I occasionally switch the conflict-types back and forth to spice things up. It's been my experience that the story can get very erratic and unpredictable, if you only play "hard" conflicts (where the cards determine both issue and action). Some groups like that, some don't. I like to use them sporadically and only for big decision points, which usually occur towards the end of an episode.

[stefoid]

ah yes, kibitz is different from kibutz, isnt it...

Lets pick on the cop scene some more.  What if the whole group recognizes that the cop failing to catch the criminal because he stops to help the old lady  is the best way for the scene to play out.  What if everybody feels it would be lame if the cop just caught the criminal?  then when you make a 'conflict' out of it, you have the situation where everybody, including the player of the cop, wants it to go one way, so why bother with the cards?  Everybody is going to stack the cards to get the desired outcome anyway....

but then we're back to the situation where in most scenes, everybody generally does agree with a particular scenario... a collarborative writing experience to produce the best script.  and so we're back to the situation where any kind of conflict seems contrived. 

I feel like there is conflict within the game rules (not just PTA, but RPGs in general)... the conflict between

a random decision that turns the story in a direction that none of the players wants , or
turning the game into a collaborative script writing session with contrived conflict resolution

perhaps there is a fine line there that I havent maneged to find yet.

[Glendower]

What if everybody feels it would be lame if the cop just caught the criminal?  then when you make a 'conflict' out of it, you have the situation where everybody, including the player of the cop, wants it to go one way, so why bother with the cards?  Everybody is going to stack the cards to get the desired outcome anyway....

Everybody BUT the producer.  The producer has to strongly push against what the players want, so as to make an interesting conflict.  That's where he pours on the budget.  I usually frame the conflict as a question, like "Does the criminal get away?" and leave it at that, with additional details to be filled in by the winner. 

The producer can answer that question with a "yes, But..." or a "no, And..." if his cards are high.  In fact, even the player can answer in either of these two methods. 

The conflict is to determine who gains narrative control.  The producer has to ensure that the players don't want him to get that control, otherwise there isn't any tension in the conflicts.  Then it becomes "collaborative story time" which is cool, but not what you seem to want.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Lets pick on the cop scene some more.  What if the whole group recognizes that the cop failing to catch the criminal because he stops to help the old lady  is the best way for the scene to play out.  What if everybody feels it would be lame if the cop just caught the criminal?  then when you make a 'conflict' out of it, you have the situation where everybody, including the player of the cop, wants it to go one way, so why bother with the cards?  Everybody is going to stack the cards to get the desired outcome anyway....

Ah, but in that situation you shouldn't look for the conflict in whether the criminal can get away. If everybody thinks that that's how the story should go, then that's how it goes.

However, this does not mean that there is no conflict in the scene. There might be any number of other conflicts, including the following examples:
- Does the cop ruin his reputation among the neighbours during the chase?
- Does a civilian get hurt because of the chase?
- Does the cop get hurt during the chase?
- Does the criminal getting away lead to some horrid crime later?
- Does the cop lose his job because of his kind heart?
- Does the cop recover the loot, or did the criminal get away with it?
...which conflict is actually played out would ideally depend on the group's collective vision of what's important in the scene. In practice this can be seen by comparing character Issue with scene content: how does this scene impact the issue? That's the conflict. The chances are that if no character's Issue is really affected by the scene, then there is no reason to have a conflict (or the scene) to begin with.

A key idea is that if you're all really agreeing that the scene can only go one way, then don't make it a scene! Make a short mention of it in between scenes that actually have some unresolved, exciting possibilities. Surely you people would much rather concentrate on playing out scenes that have uncertainty and possibilities, instead of cut and dried through-scripted pacing scenes? That kind of scene can be easily dealt with by a short Producer aside, no need to make it a fully played-out scene.

Not all scenes have conflicts in them, but ideally you'd only start a scene that has a potential to have a conflict.

[Georgios Panagiotidis]

What if the whole group recognizes that the cop failing to catch the criminal because he stops to help the old lady  is the best way for the scene to play out.  What if everybody feels it would be lame if the cop just caught the criminal?  then when you make a 'conflict' out of it, you have the situation where everybody, including the player of the cop, wants it to go one way, so why bother with the cards?

For me, the thing that is essential to playing PTA is using the game's procedures not to produce plot but to make the character's internal struggle the centre of the game. That is to say the cop's show is not about how he solves crimes while dealing with his self-worth, but that he's dealing with his self-worth, which is illustrated by how he solves crimes. In other words what happens in a scene, in an episode and during the course of a season is in a way an expression of a character's struggle with his issue.

You know how in a game like Shadowrun or D&D, as a player you're totally free to describe the physical appearance of your character? How you can use these descriptions to give the other players a mental picture of what your character is about? If he's a heroic, stalwart guy you could maybe describe him being broad-chested with a sympathetic face and a trust-worthy smile. Or if he's a little shifty, you might describe him as being lean, unshaven and fidgety and wearing a lot of dingy clothes and so on. (I apologize for using this ridiculously broad strokes.)

Now imagine that in addition to you describing the characters' looks, wardrobe, equipment and behaviour you're given free reign of a plot or situation that lets you show who your character really is and what he's about. The game procedures in PTA are about this last point specifically. They let you arrange a scene and its consequences in a way that allows you to shine a light on the character's stuggle with his issue by way of plot or action. That covers everything, from whether he succeeds or fails at what he does, how the other characters in the scene react to this, what kind of consequences it has for the character and so on. If you're really wild you can start toying around with flashbacks and flashforwards to do that.

What threw a lot of the people I played PTA with (and me as well in the beginning) was that unlike games where the players could decide their character's stance on their internal struggle ("And then he overcame his self-doubt and tried to shoot the bad guy in the face. Let's see if I hit him." *draws cards*) the decision is handed over to the cards. Much like in D&D, where you can't just decare your sword hitting the opponent and giving him 42 points of damage; in PTA you can't decide if the cop's self-worth suffers or improves in a scene. But once the cards have hit the table and everybody knows the score, it's up to the narrator/group to use descriptions of action, reaction, consequences and style to establish how the story continues.

At least "that is how we roll".

[Matt Wilson]

I'm going to butt in and make a suggestion.

Do the kibbitzing after the conflict. I wouldn't decide all that stuff before playing the cards. I'd decide what you want to resolve, as Eero points out in his last post, as in does someone get hurt, etc, before the conflict. But not anything else. That's all part of the narration.

So there's a chase going on. Jump right to conflict. What's most important to each character? Resolve that. Everything that's left is kibbitzing with final stamp by whoever got the highest card.

[stefoid]

So the scene setter says "this is the scene where the cop chases the bad guy through the alleys - its a character development scene"

The director frames the first shot - alleyway with fire-escapes coming down the wall, garbage cans at the back of restaurants, cobbles stones, etc...

cop player:  I take out my gun and draw a bead on the bad guy "stop or Ill shoot"

director: an old lady steps out from a doorway ahead of the bad guy - her attention is focused on feeding a cat.  if you shoot, you might hit her.  the bad guy turns to see if you really are going to shoot, and careens into the old lady, and stumbles on.  the old lady is knocked against the wall and seems out cold...

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NOW at this point, lets say the cops issue is he has tension between getting results for his superiors - arrests and so on, and being a bit of a softy - gives kids a second chance rather than pushing them through the system, is often 'wasting' his time with non-official duties, etc...

people are seeming to indicate that its not WHAT happens that is important - stop or dont stop - thats up to the narrator.  whats important is the fallout of this scene that probably flows into future scenes.  is that correct?  can you give me a good example of what you would use as the stated conflict in this scene, and what the progression of the rest of the scene might be - who says what.  because at the moment, following Matts advice, this scene has jumped straight to the conflict and has only taken a minute or so of real time to create.
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[stefoid]

What if everybody feels it would be lame if the cop just caught the criminal?  then when you make a 'conflict' out of it, you have the situation where everybody, including the player of the cop, wants it to go one way, so why bother with the cards?  Everybody is going to stack the cards to get the desired outcome anyway....

The conflict is to determine who gains narrative control.  The producer has to ensure that the players don't want him to get that control, otherwise there isn't any tension in the conflicts.  Then it becomes "collaborative story time" which is cool, but not what you seem to want.

this is what I was refering to initally when I suggested that the conflict mechanism was about conflict between the players (the producer also really being a player in this sense).    I can see that working from a gamey perspective - for there to be real tension about the result of the conflict, the players have to care about the result.  If nobody cares which way the conflict goes, or everybody wants the conflict to fall the same way, then why have a conflict resolution at all? 

so how do you ensure that the prodcuer and at least one player are at odds during confict resolution?

the only way I can think of is if the players are rooting for their own character, and the producer is there to supply the kryptonite that prevents the story from being boring... once again, superman wins.

is that where you are coming from?

[Warren]

OK, this is how I would handle this kind of situation if I were Producing this game. This is only my personal viewpoint, but I hope it helps:

So the scene setter says "this is the scene where the cop chases the bad guy through the alleys - its a character development scene"

The director frames the first shot - alleyway with fire-escapes coming down the wall, garbage cans at the back of restaurants, cobbles stones, etc...

cop player:  I take out my gun and draw a bead on the bad guy "stop or Ill shoot"

(Notice I've dropped the 'old lady' part; I tend to put the conflict close to the start of a scene, and you'll see why in a bit).

Now how does this situation intersect with this character's Issue, and what does everybody think is best for the story? Let's assume that having the bad-guy get away at this point in the episode is what everyone thinks is best. So the conflict can't be "Do you catch the bad guy?" -- we already know the answer to that one (No, he won't).

Now let's recap on the cop's Issue:

lets say the cops issue is he has tension between getting results for his superiors - arrests and so on, and being a bit of a softy - gives kids a second chance rather than pushing them through the system, is often 'wasting' his time with non-official duties, etc...

You've got a guy who wants to reform criminals, rather than just arrest them. Shooting a bad guy goes pretty heavily against that, I reckon. You could have a conflict like "Do you shoot the bad guy in the back?", but as a producer, I think you shouldn't really dictate PC intents, so let's drop that one too.

So it has to be an action the bad guy (or other NPC) will take as/after he gets away from the cop. The cop is not really the violent, arresting type, and there is conflict over his superiors about results. One thing that springs to mind is: "Does the cop's boss think that the cop didn't do everything he could do to catch the bad guy?" But that could be another scene, maybe? (You could cut straight away back to the police station and cop explaining what happened to his boss, I guess.)

If we wanted to stay in the alleyway scene, you could have a conflict like "Does a bystander get hurt as the bad guy makes his escape?", as I'm guessing that the cop wouldn't want innocents to get harmed. But that only kinda ties into the cop's Issue. Maybe if instead of bystander, it was a streetkid who he was trying to straighten out (one of his Connections, even!). That would be neat! So I settle on:

"Bobby, your 'reforming streetkid' Connection, will get caught up in this situation. The conflict will determine if he gets hurt as the bad guy makes his escape."

And then instead of introducing the old lady, I introduce Bobby instead, and maybe have the bad guy grab him or something.  Anyway, that's my thought process for this kind of thing. And although it looks a lot, it actual play, I haven't found it too bad. Having clear, focused Issues helps a lot, as it makes it easier to find where the Issue and the situation "collide".

[Matt Wilson]

What Warren says is awesome.