thread: 2006-10-02 : Conflict resolution sans stakes
On 2006-10-04, Vincent wrote:
Michael: I like randomness when it takes me to unexpected places and makes me consider different options then what I had originally planned for a character or a game however I dont like randomness to determine who my character is or what he does.
Me too! Exactly right. Those two mechanisms you mention in particular, Pendragon's and Vampire's, suck bad. (There's some reason to believe that that's a misreading of Pendragon's rules that's so persistent it's become "the way to play Pendragon," but whatever.)
So let's accept as given that you and only you get to choose what your character undertakes to do. But now let's suppose that your character's undertaking to do something that's genuinely difficult - that maybe she can't pull off. Is that okay with you, or do you need to know at the start of the game that your character will defeat the villain, save the world, and win the girl?
Sam: Otherwise, what would you need a GM for?
Well now THAT's a good question.
In Dogs and the many games like it, your job as GM is to create a backstory and then play the NPCs - NPCs with understandable, even sympathetic, human motivations, and no special loyalty to any pre-conceived plot. From the moment of "go!" as GM you're an equal participant in what happens. You've got some different responsibilities, but no more power over the emerging plot than any of the other players.
I'd have to watch The Usual Suspects again before I'd be comfy talking about that flick in particular. (Last time I tried, I got bored after about ten minutes - does the movie reward rewatching?)
One game to check out for its handling of who-controls-the-backstory is Tim Kleinert's Mexican Standoff. The backstory in that game, including just who is Kaiser Soze, seems to be all up for grabs. I haven't played it, though, so I might be wrong - particularly, the urgency and the prisoner's dilemma might be so compelling that the backstory isn't a real concern and doesn't develop enough complexity for those kinds of reversals.
Ian: Pre-playing conflicts through stakes-setting is a problem all on its own. Here I'm just talking about conflict resolution and leaving talk of stakes-setting aside - that is, I'm trying to talk about why conflict resolution is cool however you do it procedurally. Your procedures might include functional forms of stakes-setting, or not, or whatever.
I feel some responsibility for how "conflict resolution" came to be synonymous with "preset stakes." In my earlier writing contrasting conflict resolution with task resolution, I left implicit the fact that in this exchange - "I crack the safe." "Why?" "To get dirt on the guy." - on the guy is the most significant part. "To get dirt" is just a higher-level task; "to get dirt on the guy" establishes the conflict of interest currently up for resolution.
Anyhow no, I don't figure that preset stakes vs. non-preset stakes has any implication on the scale of resolution.
