[Solar] Complex Conflicts with Spam
Eero Tuovinen:
Yeah, it seems to me that you're getting it. In your example, though, we should be remembering that in normal play scenes rarely build into the sort of simultaneous three-way you describe. A much likelier sort of progression is one where the character goals and crucial turning points for them come up in disparate order and get resolved chronologically. So it might well be, for example, that we've already rolled about Alice's curse or Jerry's crown-stealing before Bob's player even declares that he wants to shoot Jerry dead. This affects how the overall scene goes down fundamentally, and might even bring an already resolved issue such as ownership of the crown back into play, should Alice get a change to get his crown back after Bob shoots Jerry, for example.
Assuming that the situation comes up totally simultaneously, though... if Alice rolled the highest result, the whole situation would basically resolve to fulfill her intent, which was to curse Bob. If she's also adversial towards Jerry, then she also successfully resists him stealing her crown. However, if this is a backstabbing situation, then it's completely fine for the SG to declare Jerry's action to come as a surprise, in which case Jerry just needs to make a simple Ability check to succeed, regardless of what Alice rolls. He simply takes the crown, blindsiding Alice. Also, Alice would only stop Bob from shooting Jerry if that was why she was cursing him to begin with - at the very least I'd consider it bad form on the player's part if he only revealed after the roll that he wanted to curse Bob so as to protect Jerry - I mention this as too shallow stakes setting in the booklet.
I think I understand your general question now, though - you're wondering whether the winner has complete control over the situation, especially when we're resolving things with very generic stakes and loose framing. My answer is that the winner rules all in this situation, his limits only come up when we're playing things in a more detailed manner, setting the requirements for leverage and scope much lower. If we're doing pre-loaded scene framing where the characters are already positioned and the players already know what the issues are before the character positioning is under way, then the conflict check is there pretty much just to establish who gets his way in an abstract sense. On the other hand, if we're being very detailed in character positioning and had a simple frame, then we don't usually even know what the goals of all these characters are before we're well underway to resolving some of them; in that situation individual conflict scopes are usually much smaller and they usually don't dominate so much.
(If this all seems vague, it's because Solar System has inbuilt flexibility in the relationship of scene framing to free play. The game doesn't have firm rules or practice on how scenes are framed and characters positioned in free play. In practice I myself tend to play with solid free play portions that establish where characters are, what they're doing moment-to-moment and so on. In this sort of interaction it is pretty rare that multi-party conflicts even surface; we just deal with individual stakes us they surface, so usually each character is on one of two sides in any individual conflict, even if they switch sides between conflicts.)
But yeah, if we had the situation you describe, with all characters in neutral position and poised to take the other two down, then the one rolling highest would basically get everything to go their way, while the others would only get the parts the winner had no stake in. Alice would cast her curse and save her crown, Bob would shoot Jerry and avoid the curse, Jerry would steal the crown and not get shot. But insert even a little bit of chronologically flowing play into this, and pretty soon you have a different situation in which we'll be resolving these three conflicts in any order, depending largely on who declares their intent first.
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For the situation with ties, that's pretty simple. Assuming that Alice wins and the other two tie, then Alice gets her thing (keeps her crown and curses Bob), while Bob and Jerry neither overcomes the other. This could be narrated as Alice's curse taking them both out, for example, as she turns it against Jerry as well when he tries to steal her crown.
If Alice rolled lowest and Bob and Jerry tied, then Alice loses the crown to Jerry (because Jerry won over her) and fails to curse Bob (because Bob won over her, too), but the two fail to resolve their disagreement. Perhaps they both drop into a canyon while wrestling for the crown? Or Alice might get knocked unconscious in the struggle, leaving the two men in a showdown, one clutching the crown with bloody fingers. Sounds good to me.
Ultimately the conflict resolution system in the Solar System is very organic, even simplistic, in that the Ability checks are just used against other characters to find out who gets his intent in situations. It's like an aura of heroism - you have an Ability, add a bit of random factor to account for the phase of the moon, and then bash that aura with the others. Whoever is left on the top of the hill gets to reign it for now. Extending this to several characters conflicting at once is just about slotting the characters into a totem pole of awesomeness, nothing more.
Paul T:
Eero,
That's very clear, thanks!
My experience with that kind of mechanic and relatively "free play" also confirms what you're saying: generally, this sort of situation doesn't come up, since we can resolve conflicts in the order in which they come up.
Much thanks, again. You've been extremely helpful.
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