Mental Conflict

[Jay Hatcher]

Greetings all,

I haven't posted in forever and lurked very seldom because being in a Ph. D. program has really kept me from having much time for the hobby.  That said, I had a thought that I felt might lead to some interesting possibilities.  I've been noticing rules for social conflict as well as the more traditional physical conflict in a lot of games, but there is another category that I don't think has gotten the attention it deserves, mental conflict.

I'll try to clarify what I mean.  I'm not talking about winning an intellectual argument to convince someone of something.  I consider it reasonable for that kind of thing to fall under social conflict resolution.  I'm talking a full blown battle of wits between two masterminds.  For example, Sherlock Holmes vs Prof. Moriarty or L. vs Light Yagami (Death Note).  Alternatively, it could be an individual vs an organization, such as Frank Abagnale vs various authorities (Catch Me If You Can / real history), Lelouch vs Britannia (Code Geass), etc.  These kinds of battles involve long term interactions of deduction vs. misdirection.  Social skills may be involved, but reasoning ability and manipulation of other people through misinformation are at the forefront.

I'd like to provide a way for mental stats and/or mental skills to mean more than "I know about stuff" or "I can invent stuff" or "I can find out stuff" like they so often do.  I'd like this kind of battle of wits to be a plausible choice for players' characters.

As a brainstorming exercise, how might a game support these kinds of mental conflicts?  Are there any games that do (not to my admittedly limited knowledge)?

One possibility I've thought of is to give players with high mental stats or skills some kind of retroactive scene creation/editing power to demonstrate how they were previously manipulating events for use during a climax.  This might allow their covert manipulations to remain secret until the results of their plans come to fruition.  I'm not sure how this would work, I'm just trying to get people thinking.  Other approaches may work just as well or better.

As a possible starting point, how might you go about this in Universalis (which gives you more power then most games I know of regarding what's going on in the background)?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

[chance.thirteen]

I think that would be hard to use except in games that deal with conflcits on a larger than player level, such as the way Burning Empires handles larger conflicts. That said, i think it is also more widely applicable, because it deals with knowledge of your foes tools and methods, and how to counter act them. In that light it can also apply for con artist vs con artist, stage magician vs stage magician (think The Prestige, or Carmen San Diego, or this one manga I forget where the main characters were stage magicians), AND similar measures and counter measures apply to spy masters, and to tactical conflicts (SWAT vs experienced bank robbers eg Heat, most special forces operations eg Ghost in the Shell). In a way this is also related to martial artists understanding the strengths and weaknesses of an opponants styles and technique range.

One challange to me is including enough detail in habits and techniques to allow for use of counter techniques. I suspect it would mostly have to be flavor, with the core contest being a trait vs trait contest.

Two things I would want to include would be that many tricks come from investing in one tactic, but distracting the opposition as to where you are investing that effort. Another factor I would love to see is some means of producing a land mine of a sort, a trap that you leave for the other to waste time, effort, resources, or again misdirect, distract, or waste time.
I suppose part of it all is the question of what is the real conflict here? Showdown or escape? Get revenge, or get the money? Make a stand, or make them look bad? And so on.

[Jay Hatcher]

Thanks c.13.  Its fine with me if this works only higher than "player level," though I would appreciate a little clarification on exactly what constitutes "player level" conflicts.  I agree that this kind of conflict would be a applicable to a large variety of characters and situations, and many of the ones you mentioned I had thought of, such as Special Forces vs Terrorists, con vs con etc.  I just didn't want to go too broad initially to help focus discussion.  That said, pick whatever type of mental conflict you like for examples if you have any ideas of how to actually pull this off.

Regarding level of detail, could Flaws, Traits, or Aspects (such as in FATE) be used as a source of detail for manipulation?  Such things certainly add flavor, but they might serve other purposes as well.  Perhaps a smart character could tag other people's vulnerabilities in order to manipulate them somehow.  I'm still thinking that some kind of retroactive editing power might work best, so long as it did not contradict any previously established facts by removing them (but altering them might be ok).  For example, you use your mental ability to claim that the MacGuffin the antagonist has just gloatingly stolen from the heroes is really a fake with a built in tracking device placed by yours truly.  That's probably not the best example, but something along those lines might be made to work.  You might make such a claim only after beating the antagonist in a skill roll against strategy or whatever (fortune in the middle).

  I'm fine with the actual mechanics boiling down to some kind of trait vs trait contest, I just want the result of said contest to mean something in terms of the scene/situation/setting rather than the typically passive use of mental skills to see if you know something or are smart enough to solve a puzzle.  I would like for mental capability to have its own niche of usefulness, just as physical and social capabilities do in many other games, rather than the bonus or support role that mental ability is often relegated to.

I'm not really sure how to approach misdirection, but I have definitely liked the idea of setting "mines" of some sort as a way to draw attention away from what you are really up to.

Regarding the nature of the conflict, it depends in part on the nature of the intelligent character.  Heroic or antiheroic types will often be going for a confrontation in order to apprehend the villain, but this need not be the case if you are, for example, trying to escape to safety or infiltrating enemy lines.  I was originally thinking more along the lines of a showdown or making a stand, but confrontation avoidance can be just as dramatic and relevant to a story.

[DWeird]

Cool! I know I'd definitelly want to play a game where I get to (try an') outwit my opponents. But, there's a question... What are you trying to achieve? The sort of narrative where characters get into the sort of situations that you described in the initial post? Or a game where the players (including the GM, assuming he's there to begin with, maybe?) get to actually try and trick each other? Personally, I'd find a game most interesting if it combined the two in some way, as that would pro'lly help with immersion.

The way I imagine it... Lets say this is a game that's parceled out into different scenes. Lets say that, depending on who/what your character is, you get a number of tokens of varying colours. The colours, dunno what number of them would be best, have a rock-paper-scissors-like relation to each other. The starting number of tokens may or may not be known to the opposing players, but their actual number during play should not be (put them in a bag or pocket, or something).

Now, when a scene comes, it's narrated in one way in another, establishing what's happenining... Or assumed to be happening, at least! At the end of a scene, or maybe at any point of it, a player can take a paper cup, put a token in, and place it on something representative of that scene (a sheet of paper with a number on it?). Another player can then do the same. You could also put in an emtpy cup, trying to lure out tokens from your opponents. Maybe you could also throw in a way to call on an opponent's bluff... Spend a token to reveal the contents of a cup - if it's empty, you get your token back and some sort of token from your opponent (or knock some health or stamina or whatever from your opponent? or stop the opponent from bidding on the next scene? Maybe any one of these things, at your choice). If it's not empty, it's owner gets the token used for revelation, and his own back (and/or something else?).

At some point, you uncover the cups, showing what was underneath. Some tokens beat other tokens, empty cups beat everything - representative of a stone-cold bluff, with no resources involved. The loser of the conflict begins the narration, showing what tricks he tried to pull, and then the winner tells his story on how he saw through those tricks and used them to his advantage. (It's the winner whousually  get first dibs on narration rights, but I think it'd be more thematically appropriate to reverse this... Not too sure, though.)

Um... Just thought that this could easily get difficult with more than one person at the table. Maybe, instead of tokens, dice? White dice beat red dice, red dice beat black dice, black dice beat white dice (d6+6 versus d6, mechanically). The question of which bonus gets involved is solved by, I dunno... Total (of the dice on the table) most prevalent colour versus least prevalent colour? Could mean a crushing victory (i.e., prevalent whites vs. minor reds).


...well, this is getting wordy and contrived, so I'll stop here. Haven't yet learned how to pitch an idea in a concise manner. Hope this was of some help.

[Jay Hatcher]

Thanks for the suggestion.  I think any number of resolution mechanics could probably be made to work.  Keeping tokens/points secret from other players certainly has merit for creating misdirection.  I guess I'm more concerned with "what does it mean when you win/lose?"  I want players to be able to use some kind of secret planning to bring things into a situation to throw off the opponent's plans (upon winning a mental contest), and a Thirty Xanatos Pileup could be a lot of fun if multiple protagonists and antagonists are doing this to each other.  Basically that means everybody has secret plans that start messing with everyone else's secret plans, resulting in a chaotic mess.  That kind of thing is usually comedic, but I'm fine with allowing it as a possibility.

One way to make this work in terms of misdirection is to allow diversions.  Upon winning a mental contest, you have the ability to introduce some kind of external threat (e.g. a series of explosions at the front gate gets the attention of all the guards, while you sneak in from another place).  The system I'm designing already accounts for this sort of thing.  If you win a skill contest, this does not necessarily mean you actually do some kind damage (perhaps their armor is too strong for your attack to penetrate), but you success does mean that you opponent is forced to deal with the threat you pose, as opposed to other threats.  This allows a character to keep the attention of an enemy through witty banter, fast but largely ineffective attacks, or other diversionary tactics, allowing other characters to sneak up and do real damage or sneak away to safety.  Stealth is much more effective when something loud and annoying is drawing the attention of everyone you are trying to avoid.

I could see this working even with mastermind vs mastermind scenarios, in which case it becomes more like a chess match.  For example, your bishop may not pose much of a threat, but by putting the opponent's king in check with it, you force your opponent to respond to the threat posed by the bishop, which then allows your queen to do some real damage.  However, on the next turn, your opponent may beat you in a mental contest, allowing them to introduce something that you and/or other players must respond to, allowing the opponent to escape or strengthen their position.  This kind of exchange might continue until one of the competing geniuses runs out of mental HP or something.

I'm just brainstorming here.  If anybody has other suggestions or sees potential problems with this approach, please share them.

[DWeird]

Honestly, I don't see any big problem doing what you're proposing when only a single genius is in play. Make a roll, win, you get your explosion, poison, unforseen backstabbing, whatever. What's giving you trouble in that area, specifically?

As for the "mastermind chess" aspect of it...

Well...  Perhaps you could "anchor" the results of a mindgame check to a thing/person/place? Make a mental check, you get to infuse, say, a NPC henchman with a single "plot point". "Ah hah! But that henchman is actually my brother, and he will undo you readily and well, good sir!". The opponent then gets to counter this, at increased difficulty - "Why yes! But you see, I control his mind! *Obligatory evil laughter* Now, dare you kill your own BROTHER?" And this can go on, with "I have the anti-ray-thingy right here in my back pocket!", until someone fails a counter(?) or runs out of "mental HP" or whatever.

Basically, whenever an element is used in a "master scheme", it gains value for whatever effect you're trying to use it for. So you have an incentive to try and twist your opponent's plans to suit your own - as per the tradition - rather than just letting completelly random things fly. The higher it's value, the more difficult it'd be to jack it.

I'd also suggest the "mental HP" to be some sort of meta-currency, seeing how usually a scheme isn't hatched on the spot, but is rather thought out well before it comes into play. Refresh it each session, make the players work for every bit they get, I dunno.

Anyway. All of this can be pretty much useless to you (I'm just pretty excited about the idea, so I'm blurting stuff out at near random...). If you're looking to give your current system an ability to do this sort of thing, it'd probably be of benefit to find out something about what you already have, so we could know how to fit all this scheming and brooding with what you have already.

[Tom Garnett]

I'm actually thinking of the anime Spiral, here - the first half thereof. Of particular note is a three-episode plot arc on the premise "groups A and B are competing to try and get across the city to meet up with each other, defuse a bomb strapped to one of them, and generally look like they have more 'power' than the other".

(The climax is roughly "Actually, the entire fake detonator setup was a triple-bluff; the point was to have a confrontation here, in order that we would be underneath the train-line, and the key to this bomb could be thrown out of the window by someone you thought couldn't be here yet, since the train doesn't arrive until two minutes after it is supposed to explode.")

So, you have a series of 'reveals' - each person in turn saying "Actually, I anticipated that, and did the following."

"Ha! I have you at gunpoint."
"I swapped the ammunition in your gun with blanks half an hour ago!"
"Oh, this is my spare gun."
"Good thing there's a giant invisible perspex wall across this room."
"Yes, shame about the hole I had cut in it."
"I knew you'd do that, so I arranged that it would cause an optimal acetalene-oxygen mixture if the airtight wall was breached; fire that gun, and we both blow up, along with the entire airship."
"Hmmm... Seems you get away with it this time, drat you!"

System to taste. Drama (with resources), Karma and Fortune all work.

What you miss out on, of course, is the opportunity to genuinely anticipate things, and throw in 'teasers' for your solutions. Might be possible to work that in, if you like it.

(As a GM, I love anticipating the PCs reactions to situations, having appropriate NPCs anticipate likewise, and prepare - and then drop hints to the PCs about said preparations. The moments of "Oh, damnit, I should have known they would do that!" are great fun, with the hints there to keep me honest. Not appropriate to every game by any means, but...)

[Jay Hatcher]

@DWeird: As far as the single genius situation is concerned, I don't think there is any particular problem with that.  Several Pulp and Superhero games have had a similar ability for their mega-geniuses that seems to work.  I just wanted to make sure there wasn't anything I was obviously overlooking.  I know from experience (I'm an engineer) that its easy for a designer to be blind to flaws in his own design.

What I'd really like though is to capture the terrific thrill of the duel of wits as evidenced in the media I referenced in my first post.  The example you gave leans toward a comedic angle as measures and counter-measures continue to escalate until things threaten to get ridiculous.  I'd like to allow for limitations on what is possible to prevent absurd counter-measures without overly limiting creativity.

I agree that mental HP should be some kind of meta currency given that schemes are planned ahead of time.  Concerning that, I had a thought.  If a genius is going to introduce something they have prepared in advance, I think whatever they're introducing should be introduced regardless of whether they fail or succeed against their opponent mastermind.  Instead, success means that your opponent didn't see this coming and has to draw on existing resources to deal with it.  Failure means your opponent did see it coming and gets to turn it against you or otherwise twist it to their own advantage.  In other words, spending a plot point introduces something to the scene, but narration rights on that something are determined by the role result.  I think this fits with how intelligence often works in fiction, where it is often used to predict the actions of another person.

I think that might avoid the constant escalation of counter measures.  I also think that powerful effects should be so expensive to produce that the mastermind can only pull a huge effect maybe once per session (typically), but smaller things (like happening to have a useful gadget) aren't as expensive and can be bought with fewer plot points (as if they were planned).  I think this kind of thing would allow for Batman-like crazy-preparedness without allowing the smart characters to dominate.

I haven't talked about my current system much because it's still in the works, but had planned on having this kind of capability from the get-go.  I can say this much.  I'm using a unified set of resolution mechanics for simplicity.  So social, mental, and physical conflict should be resolved with the same mechanic.  The way my system currently works, one d6 determines success/failure and another degree of success/failure (there is more to this, but I don't think its relevant).  Players have plot points with which to affect/create things, and a GM is optional.  This is why I brought up Universalis in my original post, as I was curious if anyone knew if it could handle something like a duel of wits with its plot points (coins).

So basically, I want to know what kind of limitations might be necessary to create the effect found in fiction.  I want over the top comedic countermeasures to be optional, not inherently available in the system.  I would like feedback from the community to try to come up with good ways to approach this, as I'm not sure I will think of everything by myself.  If I'm not being clear about something, please let me know.

@Tom: I would love to incorporate teasers of what someone is planning.  The problem I think is that RPGs, being interactive, are created on the fly.  Thus, no one can truly anticipate much.  Of course you could still drop teasers in the hope that things would work out the way you anticipate, and if they don't, you just forget about them and move on.  I remember (I only remember the beginning), and I'm already planning to rent it for insight into this kind of battle (even though I know it doesn't exactly end).  I just don't want the counter-counter-counter-measures to get out of hand, as I stated above, because I think it can break the tension of a dramatic confrontation.  I welcome your thoughts.

[Jay Hatcher]

I remember (I only remember the beginning), and I'm already planning to rent it for insight into this kind of battle (even though I know it doesn't exactly end).

Sorry about that.  I meant to say  I remember Spiral...  That's what I get for typing quickly and not proof reading before I submit.  Tom's reply came in while I was still working on my post, so I got sloppy trying to finish it up.

[dindenver]

Jay,
  I would suggest using rules based on the bidding process from ditv. The ability to inject clever ploys/ruses in a sub-element of the conflict without having to resolve a task/sub-conflict seems key to making this kind of struggle work.
  Does that make sense? Is that where you are going with this?

[Jay Hatcher]

dndenver, would you mind giving me an example?  I haven't played DitV, though I've read reviews of it, and I'm roughly acquainted with the resolution mechanic, but an example of injecting a clever ploy or ruse in a sub-element would definitely help me.  Otherwise I'm not sure I can answer your question confidently.

[dindenver]

Jay,
  No prob.
  Are you familiar with poker (like 5-card draw)?
  Basically, each side of the conflict rolls a pool of dice.
  Then the players take turns playing two dice at a time in the form of Bet, Call, Raise, Fold maneuvers.
  Each time you play two dice, you get to narrate actions that are consistent with the traits that generated the pool of dice and the other actions in the scene.
  Play continues until one side or the other folds (either voluntarily or because they ran out of dice).
  I can give a more detailed example if you need it.
  Let me know either way.

[Jay Hatcher]

Ok.  So your not talking escalation (which I'm not sure would work well), but just the bidding process from a single roll.  That sounds interesting, but I would need to abstract it a bit, as I'm not using a dice pool mechanic and I would rather avoid fist-full-o-dice syndrome.  I'll give it some thought.  I've trick-or-treaters to deal with for the next few hours (its Halloween night now Stateside).  I could see a pool of points being spent in a similar manner.  Something like Hero Wars' Action Points perhaps?

[Tom Garnett]

Sure, I can see the counter-counter-countermeasures not fitting in with every genre at all - they're what I immediately thought of when the idea came up, though.

Something that might take the same idea (what's done is done, but anticipation still gives you occasional reversals) to less insane lengths, and therefore less inappropriate comedy, is to strictly limit the number of reversals. Arranging the system to put an absolute cap of two reversals on any given situation might well do the trick. (The Princess Bride, for example, did very well at that, I reckon - well, if you discount the Sicilian's speech).

And as for teasers... yes. They're the one genre staple you just can't do properly. Faking them might be worth it, though.

(Well, that or mechanising them - arranging that they be recorded when they happen, and are then required to be worked into the upcoming story. Not, of course, appropriate to every style of game).

[soundmasterj]

Why would you resolve mental conflict in any way different from any other kind of conflict?
Actually, I would say that "mental vs. physical conflict" is a false dichotomy. Say my goal is to stop you from marrying my loved one. I might strike you down, I might outwit you, why should there be a rule difference?

I´m not saying there shouldn´t be one, I am asking for a reason.