anyway.

This is beautiful...

Indeed, this is very good.

A note on "dynamic situation":  Another way to word this, which I happen to like, is untenable situation.

Do you have any comment on how to handle dynamic interests?  For example, if the Order decides in the middle of play that they'd really be happier if the shrine doesn't fall?

Many of the games I've seen handle this haphazardly at best.

Roger: "Do you have any comment on how to handle dynamic interests? For example, if the Order decides in the middle of play that they'd really be happier if the shrine doesn't fall?

Well, in this particular game, the interests themselves don't have any mechanical significance - their purpose is to drive the characters into conflict. If they change in the middle, no biggie, they change. If they change in such a way that they still drive the characters into conflict, albeit different conflicts, that's cool. If they change in such a way that they're lining up with others' interests - your example, or if the junior magician-monk decides that he too really wants to have sex with the priestess - that's cool too, that's the situation resolving.

The Riddle of Steel is a game that handles changing interests non-haphazardly.

TSOY counts too. Key buyoffs are an elegant way of handling changing interests with a mechanic.

Heya,

This makes alot of sense to me, Vincent.  I think I see several ways in which I can use this.  Thanks.

Peace,

-Troy

Super. Thanks for the write-up.

Question: How would you go about applying these principles to a long-term game? Like, a situation that spans several sessions of play? Would it simply be a matter of making a more complex situation, or are there different principles at work in a long-term game?

Ethan: "How would you go about applying these principles to a long-term game? Like, a situation that spans several sessions of play? Would it simply be a matter of making a more complex situation, or are there different principles at work in a long-term game?"

Great question.

First: the size, the scale, of the characters' interests.

In my example above the characters all have wicked short-term interests: screw the guy, screw the girl, toss the girl into a hole. An hour from now all those questions will be answered.

But consider that each of those characters has interests simultaneously of at least three sizes: the immediate, the intermediate, the ultimate. The trickster god's immediately interested in waking up, but what are His longer-term interests? Accumulating a body of worshippers? Restoring the world to its pre-civilization chaos? Throwing down the current pantheon? Becoming incorporated into the current pantheon? Embodying Himself as a mortal? Could be any!

So now we're creating conflicts of interest that span months, years, decades, lifetimes, right? But that by itself isn't going to make the game longer, so...

Second: the size of the character's ability to act.

What makes the game longer is the ratio of action to interest. How much doing does it take to resolve the conflicts?

GM: okay, Mitch, what do you do next?
Mitch: I need a body of followers, so I attract a body of followers.
GM: roll for it!

vs.

GM: okay, Mitch, what do you do next?
Mitch: I need a body of followers, so I start by finding an old woman down on her luck.
GM: roll for it!

1. Small-scale actions + short-term interests = short play.
2. Large-scale actions + long-term interests = short play.
3. Small-scale actions + long-term interests = long play.

Make sense?

Now this game I'm envisioning? You can't tell it from just the post above, you have to read this comment too from the parent thread, and extrapolate, but this game I'm envisioning, it's a long playing game. How?

Because as these wham-bam situations go by, a set of recurring characters builds. Those recurring characters do have long-term interests, which develop over the course of the early game, and which have their expression right here:

So now we start the next story. We look at the first name under "we owe": the priestess. She's automatically in it! You choose to represent her thus: "A novice priestess, untried but good-hearted." (And we're like, dude, this story is totally happening in the past! Rock!) Plus you get to choose another element to be automatically in, and let's say that you choose "Events: The flight of a prince and his forbidden lover into hiding. (Wilderness)"

You get to contribute elements to your character's short-term situations that are relevant to her increasingly long-term story.

One thing I particularly like about this is that there's a quantified, mechanical link between the short-term conflict and the long-term story: If I pick easy fights, I'll probably gain control over the current scene but lose control over the next entire situation/adventure/chapter; if I pick hard fights, I'll probably lose control over the current scene but gain control over the next whole situation. And that dilemma is lovely, but more important to me is the very fact that "small, here, now" is linked to "big, there, later." Chapter links to story, tactical to strategic.

Here's my rant: In most RPGs, this link is pretty weak—even Indie RPGs.

In D&D, as the ur-example, "I kill this baby kobold, right here, right now" is linked by the XP/levelling up system to "eventually, I become uber strong and have a castle! Whoot!" Which actually works great as long as you're all about the killing of things. But often people try "do I save the kingdom from the Dark Evil of Badness?" And there's no system to link "I hit the baby kobold with my shoe again!" to "I save the kingdom!"—except GM fiat, aka "poor Herbie has to wing it again because the written system doesn't help."

In Prime Time Adventures, to take a really great Indie game that also fails to do this, I know my character's Issue, I know when that Issue is going to be secondary to other peoples' (low screen presence) and when it's going to be the center of attention (my spotlight episode). And I know to frame every single conflict in terms of that issue. I can even earn Fan Mail now that I can spend to help me later.
But! Whether and how I lose or win the current conflict has no mechanical effect on my chances to lose or win the next conflict, or to choose what the next conflict will be about. How do I determine what winning or losing this conflict, right now, means for the resolution of the whole episode, let alone the whole season? I wing it. The good news is that it's no longer just Poor Herbie the GM, it's the whole group working together in that amazing PTA-induced group brainstorming vibe, but if that vibe breaks down... you're on your own, because the written system doesn't help you.

I'm speaking from recent experience, having had exactly this kind of breakdown at the beginning of the last episode of an otherwise rockingly cool PTA season. We're contemplating The Mountain Witch next, and I'm looking forward, but I don't think Witch has a robust mechanical link either: There's this wonderfully crunchy Trust system where I can see, by glancing at the piles of chips, who trusts whom how much and how that's changing—and then there's some minimally structured Drama of "here's your Dark Fate, introduce it and keep the pressure on, you're ready for your final confrontation when, y'know, you know you're ready."

By contrast, Capes links now-to-then very well: Win or lose, you get Inspirations out of a hotly contested conflict that give you big bonuses to win later conflicts. But Capes doesn't give you much help on small-to-big (chapter-to-story, tactical-to-strategic). That's in part because Capes emphatically does not care about scale and treats "I make it to dinner on time with my love interest" exactly the same way as "I save the universe," which is actually a lovely thing, but there's no way for me as a player to choose some overarching goal across multiple conflicts and make it stick. (Tony did try to nest conflicts and scenes inside larger "Issues" in early versions of the game but never made it work to his satisfaction).

By contrast, My Life with Master makes this link very, very tight: Everything I do potentially affects the Love, Self-Loathing, and Weariness scores that determine my ultimate fate. Neither the GM nor the group as a whole has to wing it, because how small things, here and now, affect the ultimate big thing is absolutely explicit. No other game I've played does that, although I know With Great Power...'s Story Arc system is all about this kind of linkage.

Then again, Master and Power are each designed to produce one, specific kind of story ("minions are brutalized, minions find love, minions overthrow master and are transformed as people" and "heroes are smacked around by bad guys, heroes rebound, heroes defeat bad guys—or, well, not—and are transformed as people either way"). But I'm not sure that's a necessary limit of systems with tight tactical-strategic linkage, just a limit of the state of our art.

Note that traditional wargames actually do this pretty well: This engagement between these units on this part of the map, on this turn, affects the whole game—and a moderately skilled player can see how, just by looking at the board. I'd love to have this kind of clarity about how "Story Now" emerges in an open-ended narrativist RPG. I don't think anyone's done it, yet, not even Vincent, and even this idea is not-quite-there yet.

This, of course, assumes anyone but me cares...

Sydney, I like your remarks at the end of that thread. But then, I would, huh?

You would, you macho-Nar-pushy-yanger, you.

For the mystified: Vincent's (presumably) referring to my conclusion that "this experience suggests that 'Nobody Gets Hurt' is a fine philosophy but impossible to implement in Actual Play, precisely because two people of good will (i.e. no 'dickery' going on) can honestly disagree on what they want to happen and, without realizing it until it's too late, come to want incompatible things....real greatness depends on a willingness to get hurt—and, even, to inflict hurt."

I'd love to see what Meguey thinks, seeing as she discovered the distinction between "nobody gets hurt" and "I will not abandon you"—and seeing as she also wrote a whole essay on how an apparently quibbling creative difference came near to a game-breaking moment.

Personally, I think my desire for "strategic" mechanics linking here-now to everything-eventually is about wanting the possibility of being hurt: I don't want to have a subjective decision as a circuit-breaker between "I do this thing here and now" and "as a consequence, I lose what I love most in the big picture." It's also about wanting the risk of hurt to be systematized and depersonalized: If the here-now linkage to everything-eventually is subjective (Drama, structured or un-), then the person making that subjective decision—the GM in a traditional game, the whole group in Prime Time Adventures, my character's "underwriter" in the notional Ars Magica knockoff, whoever—is really on the spot and likely to flinch away from the "unsafe" outcome, deciding not to hurt me for pure social-decency reasons even if I'd honestly prefer it.

If I wanted to control the potential outcomes, then I'd go write a novel by myself. If I'm playing a game with other human beings, the greatness comes when I give up control and let them surprise me, and themselves.

This is hardcore stuff you're saying, Sydney! I'm going to take it to its own post.

James, Marhault, did this post answer your questions?

Firstly, thank you for this post, Vincent. Too often people in this field make bald statements without explanation which make no sense to those of us groping around the fringes of design. This post makes things very clear. Thank you.

Secondly, it feels like a dynamic situation in which character interests either contain "if so" statements or are open to their development would be impossible to resolve to a static situation without imposing artificial limits, setting victory conditions, limiting time, defining an end state, etc. Is this a misread? In other words, now that I understand how to create situation, how do I stop?

Hey NS. I'm glad you're still around.

Secondly, it feels like a dynamic situation in which character interests either contain "if so" statements or are open to their development would be impossible to resolve to a static situation without imposing artificial limits, setting victory conditions, limiting time, defining an end state, etc. Is this a misread? In other words, now that I understand how to create situation, how do I stop?

Here's the handwavey magical partial answer: people crave static situations. We do as the players of the game, and our characters will as made-up people too. There's this sense of relief and satisfaction we feel when a dynamic situation resolves.

So dynamic situations resolve into static situations because, although we could introduce a new conflict of interest for every one that resolves, we don't want to.

Here's the reassuringly mathematical partial answer: figure that for every conflict of interest that resolves, 50% of the time it kicks off an "if so" followup conflict. We start with 4 conflicts; as we resolve them, on average we get 2 new conflicts, so now we have 2; as we resolve those, on average we get 1 new conflict, so now we have 1, which maybe resolves into a new conflict but eventually won't.

So dynamic situations resolve into static situations because the math is on our side.

But here's the real answer: escalation. When the resolution of one conflict of interest sparks a new conflict of interest, invariably there's more at stake than there was originally. Check it:

The order of magician-monks wants to test the priestess; she wants them to let her off the hook of her practice. What's at stake is the order's short-term power over the priestess' fate, like. We resolve that in the order's favor: they pitch her into a hole with some poisonous critters. Now the new conflict of interest is, the poisonous critters want to kill and eat the priestess; she wants them to wither before her righteousness or something. What's at stake is more serious than whether the order decides what happens to her or she does - it's her life and well-being.

So when the resolution of one conflict of interest sparks a new conflict of interest, what happens is that the situation develops upward, until nothing more can possibly be at stake. "Possibly" depends on the genre etc.: in Middle Earth, the subjugation of the whole Earth under evil can possibly be at stake; in Sideways, even people's lives can't be, only their relationships.

Anyway once that happens, once as much is at stake as can be, the final resolution has to be final. There's simply nowhere else to go - losing that conflict, a character can't any longer have the capacity to act on her interests. If she does, it wasn't the final conflict after all, there's still more she can stake.

Followup questions please! I don't figure I've fully covered it.

Oh and you should - everybody should - check out Ron Edwards' game Trollbabe. It's all about the scales of conflicts and stakes.

Hi, Vincent. Great Stuff! (So great that I "borrowed" a great deal of the earlier post for Play Right!, my Game Chef entry.)

But what I'm really curious about is the relationship between the "conflicts of interest" you talk about as being the things that make the situation unstable, and the "decisions across a moral line" bit that always winds up in the definition of thematic play (can't find a reference at the moment). Are they the same thing? If not, how would you say that they're different?

[bouncing up and down]Oh! Question! Question![/bouncing]

"When the resolution of one conflict of interest sparks a new conflict of interest, invariably there's more at stake than there was originally."

What about "escalating inwards"? I'm thinking of the second half of the Wizard of Earthsea books, or the standard superhero trope, where the heroes save the city/kingdom/world and then have to deal with their relationships and souls—which is arguably "more at stake," from a certain perspective.

Escalating inwards: absolutely totally 100%.

In fact that sets me up perfectly for my answer to Michael: the moral line depends on how things escalate, more than on the conflicts of interest themselves.

Sauron at Mt. Doom, for instance, doesn't represent a credible moral choice, even though he's one side of the conflict of interest. Instead, we look at what the protagonists are willing to do, and what they're not willing to do, to serve the interests of their side.

Thank you for the followup, Vincent.

It leads to one more question. The mathematical limit and the "just don't want to" limit are clear, though the latter might conflict with the feeling when you get to the end of a book and wish it would keep going forever, but escalating stakes are slippery.

No one's initial interest was "survive a snake pit", and survival is a very high stakes conflict. What stops the characters interests reverting to their previous lower stakes state once survival is successfully resolved, other than possibly artificially stating that the survival situation creates a new superceding conflict of interests? Also, how does this apply when a short term "survive a snakepit" interest overlaps a very long term "I need a body of followers" interest? Perhaps I am looking for a mechanical solution when it really comes down to players choosing what they like best? I think I am asking, what happens to lower stakes interests when a higher stakes interest arises and is resolved? Do games which end after the highest possible stakes preclude traditional semi-openended campaign play? Is a campaign merely a series of situations arising and resolving with new (but possibly related) interests shaping the next situation?

One last thing; when you say conflicts of interest arising from conflicts of interest have higher stakes, do you mean they do or they should from the standpoint of good design?

That is far more than the one more question I thought remained. All my conflicts of understanding resolve into higher stakes conflicts of understanding.

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.)

the moral line depends on how things escalate, more than on the conflicts of interest themselves.

So you're saying that the conflicts of interests provide the opportunity for a moral decision to be made, right? Because the situation is unstable, it has to become stable in some form. The form that stability takes is the moral statement of the fiction, and by pushing the situation into that particular form of stability (e.g., "We shoot the Steward and the town'll be fine) the players have made a moral choice. A moral is simply a directive of if X situation happens, you should (or shouldn't) do Y action to achieve (or avoid) outcome Z, right?

Would you say that a thematic game must give the players the opportunity to make that moral choice? (I think I would.)

Michael: right on.

"Would you say that a thematic game must give the players the opportunity to make that moral choice? (I think I would.)"

Yes. Well, a thematic+participation game (that is, a narrativist game) must, and that's the kind of game I'm interested in. (I suppose a game where the GM makes the moral choices up-front would still be thematic, but that's only half of what I care about.)

Significantly, though: I feel very strongly that a thematic+participation game need not give every individual player the opportunity to make the moral choice for him- or herself. Only the opportunity to participate meaningfully.

NS: "No one's initial interest was "survive a snake pit", and survival is a very high stakes conflict. What stops the characters interests reverting to their previous lower stakes state once survival is successfully resolved, other than possibly artificially stating that the survival situation creates a new superceding conflict of interests?

So here we have the priestess. Her interests are a) to stop practicing her obscure deprivations, and b) to have wild blasphemy-sex with the junior magician-monk.

Before she can accomplish either of those things, the magician-monks grab her - she tries to reason with them but they're resolute - and pitch her into a hole. Oh no, will she survive the snakes?

She does! She climbs out of the hole unscathed and shoots the magician-monks a withering look. Until she makes eye contact with the junior magician-monk, and her look ... changes.

That's what you're asking about, NS? Because as you can see, it works just fine. They've had their chance to win what they wanted, now it's her turn - and furthermore, now her turn is even more awesome. Resolving "do they get to test her?" and "does she survive?" contributes all kinds of oomph to "does she screw the guy?" when we return to it.

It works in the other order, too. Rewind to the opening situation, and:

The priestess steals the junior magician-monk away in the night and, man, he never even imagined. But the next morning, the couple wake to find themselves surrounded by most of the order. The magician-monks look very, very serious. The chief lecturist and one other are digging the pit nearby and rounding up the venomous spiders.

Will they get to test her? It's waaaay more oomphy than it used to be.

See how that works?

I think I see. High stakes conflicts, once resolved, raise the stakes of all other interests. The character may return to their original interests after a high-or-highest stakes conflict, but in a way they can never return to prior interests since those interests have been changed by the experience and will be modified by the likewise-changed interests of other characters. Frodo ultimately goes home, his earliest primary interest, but home is no longer home because conflict has changed him, and because Saruman, changed by conflict, has taken a new interest in hobbits.

Is this the same as what you said?

The basic process makes perfect sense to me.
Step One - Identify characters and setting elements
Step Two - Create the conflicts of interest
Step Three - Create scenes that highlight the conflicts, and allow the situation to resolve.

Step two is the part I am having a little bit of trouble with.  What would you do to create a dynamic situation for a game with a different reward system?  For instance, let's say I'm using the Cheap & Cheesy Adventure Generator for inspiration for a Burning Wheel game.  The players have a set of characters all burnt up, and have decided they're heading for a particular location, and I've decided that what they find there will be this Situation that comes from these elements.  Obviously, I'm going to tie the PCs BITs into the Situation as I imagine it (that's where the games reward system comes in), but that by itself probably won't produce a dynamic situation.

I guess what I'm trying to ask is "How do you produce a dynamic situation where the PCs aren't already an integral part of it?"

NS: I don't understand your statement, "So when the resolution of one conflict of interest sparks a new conflict of interest, what happens is that the situation develops upward, until nothing more can possibly be at stake. [O]nce that happens, once as much is at stake as can be, the final resolution has to be final. There's simply nowhere else to go." The priestess' life is at stake but, when resolved, play continues.

Aha! I see what you're asking.

Each conflict of interest escalates and resolves independently. The priestess has escalated to "I'll stake my life" in the "will the magician-monks test her? Will she pass their test?" conflict, but she hasn't yet shown us how far she's willing to go to sleep with the junior monk. That conflict gets to escalate to crisis and resolution too, either in parallel or afterward or whenever.

Notice also that the resolution of one escalating series of conflicts of interest can change the characters' interests, too, if that's what happens to happen. Maybe after her ordeal in the snake pit the priestess hates all magician-monks and doesn't want to sleep with the junior one at all. That's fine.

Marhault (Jamey): How do you produce a dynamic situation where the PCs aren't already an integral part of it?

How do you make spinach quiche where you leave the spinach in a bag in the fridge?

Here's how Dogs in the Vineyard works. Dogs in the Vineyard's town creation makes a bunch of npcs who already have conflicts of interest wrt the Dogs in the abstract, it doesn't matter who the Dogs actually are. Every named npc comes pre-created with a conflict either a) directly with the Dogs-as-authority-figures, or else b) with another named npc, and presuming with all her heart that the Dogs-as-authority-figures will take her side, so that if the Dogs don't take her side that becomes a conflict between them.

That works okay to make one fun session, and that's what I'd recommend for your Burning Wheel + C&C charts game. Give the priestess, the monks, the antique god interests that either conflict with the PCs' or else depend on the PCs' total support.

But that's only part of how Dogs works, and it won't sustain your Burning Wheel game either.

The real situation that Dogs in the Vineyard cares about is the one between each of the PCs and each other and the Faith. (Joshua BishopRoby, listen up!) You know how the real situation that The Mountain Witch cares about is the one between the PCs with their trust and their dark fates, and the GM throws grief at them to simply just apply pressure to that situation? Dogs is the same. It's better to understand a Dogs town with its sin and judgement as an encounter along the way, an attack by Oni or a freezing cold night, than as the thing that really matters.

In other words, Jamey: there is a situation the PCs in your Burning Wheel game are an integral part of, or there will come to be one over the first few sessions: the situation between them. In the Burning Wheel as in Dogs, it's the players' responsibility to create it. As long as the characters have interests, the players will create a good one, and the Burning Wheel does a great job at creating characters with interests.

My advice to you as GM is to notice what the characters' individual interests are, where they overlap and where they conflict, and not make a big deal out of it. Just notice, apply pressure via priestesses and sinners and oni, not targeted pressure mostly but just grief, and watch what happens.

Vincent:  "How do you make spinach quiche where you leave the spinach in a bag in the fridge?"

Yeah, I thought you might say something like that.  I was really thinking more along the lines of (and please forgive me, I know jack-all about quiche.) "what do you do to prepare spinach quiche before you actually add the spinach?"  It works either way, though, I suppose.

So, if Dogs (really any RPG) is the story of PCs over the course of the whole game, then each session/adventure is like an encounter on that road, right?  So why undirected pressure?  Wouldn't it be more effective to really apply stress directly to the player's flags?  Like the Dogs advice on GMing between towns, y'know?

Jamey (Marhault): "So, if Dogs (really any RPG) is the story of PCs over the course of the whole game, then each session/adventure is like an encounter on that road, right? So why undirected pressure? Wouldn't it be more effective to really apply stress directly to the player's flags? Like the Dogs advice on GMing between towns, y'know?"

To the players' flags? No way. We players are generally stupid about what really matters to us. I'd never take our word for it, especially if we're creating those flags during character creation. Talk about a shot in the dark.

Here's what instead:

If you're trying to create a bloodbath, apply pressure to where the characters' interests are incompatible. Obviously, this is against the rules in Dogs; the GM should not go into the game saying "how can I turn the PCs against one another?" In some games, this is very much by the rules - The Mountain Witch, notably, but some incarnations of The Riddle of Steel too.

If you don't have any particular resolution in mind, apply pressure wherever and let the players find their own characters' faultlines.

I think you'll find that the characters' faultlines line up with their players' declared flags only about as often as you'd expect by chance alone.

Oh, I should maybe say about the GMing between towns rule in Dogs - that's the GM's job wrt the players, it's not an identification of what's important in the game. The GM's saying "even now? even now?" is as much to keep the GM from manipulating outcomes as it is to accomplish anything positive.

The real situation in Dogs is the players' to create, escalate, and resolve. The GM gets to watch and be amazed.

"We players are generally stupid about what really matters to us. I'd never take our word for it, especially if we're creating those flags during character creation."

Yes! "Flags" are a great idea, but the flags the players run up before they start playing are only indicating what they expect they'll care about (possibly further distorted by peer pressure and/or limited prior experience of things to care about). The best test is what happens during play: The flags that really matter are the ones the players plant firmly in the soil of the emerging fiction and shout "I claim this land for Spain!" (Or for my character, or whatever). Hence the beauty of what I believe Vincent calls "positioning mechanisms."

(And apocalypse girl is my attempt to create a game almost entirely out of positioning mechanisms....)

(When it comes to "positioning mechanisms," I am guilty of wicked bad terminology drift. Turns out Ron meant something entirely different than I thought he did.)

Flags can make the space for what emerges, though. I find this happens in PtA & BtI.

Okay, I'm with you.  One more question for anybody still reading this.

What makes the game longer is the ratio of action to interest. How much doing does it take to resolve the conflicts?
and
1. Small-scale actions + short-term interests = short play.
2. Large-scale actions + long-term interests = short play.
3. Small-scale actions + long-term interests = long play.

What games (if any) have addressed this explicitly?  Trollbabe touches on it somewhat, at least as far as the scale of actions are concerned.  It's something I'd really like to explore further.

Explicitly address it I don't know, but implicitly, practically any game you could name. To see it, compare the game's resolution rules with its reward rules. How much resolution per reward cycle? From there you can easily figure out how much action it takes to resolve a character's interests.

You know how irritated some people were by Battlestar Galactica's season finale? It wasn't just a big jump in time. It was more importantly an abrupt departure from how much action the show had, up until then, allowed per conflict of interest.