[IaWA] Negotiating consequences based on circumstances
Brand_Robins:
Paul,
Huh, I see.
Okay, to me that ambiguity there is one of the things that IAWA does well, and there are ways in which I think it was a mistake to step away from a fairly straightforward injury scenario.
I say this for three reasons:
1) I don't like best interests that can be resolved directly by winning a conflict, even a negotiated one.
2) When you want to stop someone from doing something, you injure or exhaust them until they either stop or get taken out of the game.
3) Combining 1 with 2 drives story forward, rather than resolving it overly patly.
So if you've a best interest of "Stop him from operating" I don't want the outcome of a conflict to be "I stop you" -- and it seems like you didn't either, as you cut off his fingers instead of saying "I stop you." But because you didn't follow number 2 and use the rules for injury (which, man, cutting off fingers REALLY seems like injury to me) things got hazy. What does it mean to him? To you? To future scenes? Who knows. Where as if he'd been injured, lost the dice, then its part of the fiction.
If he wants to keep operating he can, but he has to explain how he does it, what it costs, and has to know that he's now down dice and you could come back to stomp him again. He can reattach his fingers, maybe, but he's still down those dice -- there are clear and forward moving consequences that everyone can understand and see. And at that point the question of fingers or not, continue to operate or not, becomes something that can be more directly addressed by future actions, rather than a seat of uncomfortable miscommunication.
I think this ties in with what V was talking about in the other thread -- the dice/injury mechanic in this case would clarify that moment of interpretation. You say "I chop your fingers off" and he hears "but I'll put them back on and be back to normal." You say "I injure you, I cut your fingers off" he hears "Oh fuck, he's gonna take out my dice, this is serious and lasting!"
lumpley:
Hey Paul, is there some reason you didn't want to call it "I injure you"?
-Vincent
Paul T:
Thanks for the responses!
(I agree with you, by the way. Were I to play again, I would probably choose the injury.)
Here's how it went down:
1. I didn't want to negotiate for injury because I thought that I wouldn't get to name the terms in that case. The book doesn't say anything about the narration of injury and exhaustion, and we'd assumed that, if anyone, the loser would be the one to do it.
Also, the surgeon wasn't particularly my character's enemy. I would have been happy to be friends with him if he agreed to stop his work. My main beef was with another character.
So, it seemed that reducing his forms wouldn't do much for me, in terms of moving towards my Best Interests, whereas cutting of his fingers was not only very fitting in that action sequence (I was swinging around a super-sharp weapon, he was bringing up his hands to defend himself), but seemed like it would do more for my character's Interests than straight injury.
I can see how the suggestion Vincent has brought up elsewhere ("let the winner describe the terms of injury/exhaustion") would change this dramatically, however!
The problem was that we weren't clear on what the consequences of that would be. The world and the setting hadn't been developed sufficiently for us to know how easy it might be to reattach someone's fingers.
2. I know talking about hypotheticals can get annoying pretty fast, but I can envision many similar situations where injury or exhaustion are not clear answers. For instance, let's say someone is planning murder. I want to stop them, so I break into their house and try to steal their gun (or whatever). Let's say we roll and my roll is higher. I say, "OK, how about we stop rolling now, but my character runs away, with your gun?"
How do you guys deal with this sort of situation? Some kind of communication has to take place between the players to sort this out, or someone's going to feel cheated.
Or is beating people up or tiring them out so absolutely central to the game that this subverts it? So, you really MUST injure or exhaust people to get what you want. That answer would be kind of disappointing to me, in a way: I like the idea of the negotiation being a way to transform potential violence into other cool twists in the story.
Best,
Paul
Brand_Robins:
Paul,
I think exhausting/injuring someone (or shaming, if you're playing a game that uses those rules) is the only sure way to get what you want. Like, if I really, really, really want to murder some NPC and you really, really, really don't want me to... well, the only way to resolve it may be for one of us to get taken out.
I've played a game with the "take your gun" example (it was a sword, not a gun, but same diff, right?). Someone did more or less what you posited, and ran off with said sword -- which in this case happened to be a Particular Strength. At first the guy whose sword was stolen was just going to go kill the guy with a knife, despite not having the PS dice, and the only reason he didn't was because in the next scene something in the world changed and suddenly he had reason to not kill the guy. (Specifically, an enemy empire invaded, and suddenly the two enemies had to work together if they wanted to save their families.)
If, before the curve ball from left field, we'd really really wanted to stop the guy from killing the other guy, we couldn't force him to by anything in the rules. Folks always have agency over their characters, right? He always gets to decide what his character does, unless we take it away from him. However, that curve ball changed everything. Narration is powerful like that, and often the biggest and best ways to stop someone without injuring/exhausting them isn't to beat them in a conflict and negotiate it out, its to frame scenes and narrate story elements that change the relations between the characters.
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