thread: 2006-03-20 : Creating Situation: a practical example
On 2006-03-22, John Laviolette wrote:
What prevents characters reverting to previous lower stakes isthat those stakes are resolved. The magician-monks have already woncontrol over the priestess's fate; that's how they were able to toss her in the pit.
What you may be thinking of is a story where, after one side has won their conflict and forced the other side to struggle for survival, the other side wins this second conflict and then pursues another conflict with the original opponent. The priestess escapes the pit and presents herself to the magician-monks, demanding that they acknowledge her righteousness. Or, she hunts down the order to extract vengeance.
What's happening here? One of these things:
1) After the second conflict, which is between the priestess and the critters that would kill her, she escalates the stakes to the next level, say as before. There's no higher level on the personal level, so the scale of the stakes jumps to the small group level: the magical monastic order. The stakes here either could be to control/alter the order (make them acknowledge the priestess's righteousness) or could be about the survival of the order (she seeks vengeance.)
2) If the priestess seeks vengeance against only a few individuals in the order, the stakes are still at the personal level, but now the magiciam-monks' (personal) survival is at stake. Will she kill them before they kill her?
3) If the magician-monks continue to test the priestess, maybe the scene with the pit was just that: a scene, part of a bigger conflict, and we have just misidentified the first conflict. In other words, the scale of the first conflict wasn't personal (what happens to the priestess) but small group (what happens to the order of magician-monks.)
