ewilen: An interesting read, sort of

Elliot Wilen (

ewilen) wrote,
@ 2006-09-03 04:39:00

An interesting read, sort of
Massive story-games thread on stakes-setting (and why it's a perversion of conflict resolution)

Some of the stuff there is highly relevant to recent actual experiences I've had playing Dogs and Burning Wheel. Some of it is personally annoying, at best.

Some of it is dispiriting: the articulation of the idea behind CR has now (apparently) been refined to mean that it's something that gets invoked whenever we identify a conflict, but it doesn't include defining the stakes of the conflict. However, CR does guarantee resolution of the conflict. Huh?

What happens when I Give in Dogs, again? I lose the conflict. What does losing the conflict mean, if not that the preset stakes go against me?

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jimhenley
2006-09-03 03:33 pm UTC (link)

Hunh. I've only read Ron's initial double-post so far, but, yeah. When the man's not chasing after some mental butterfly like "brain damage" he really can make extraordinary amounts of sense.

I've more or less said for a couple of years now that if you scratched the archetypal Forgie, you'd find a Guts-Challenge Gamist underneath the narrativist paint.

Now if I read your second two paragraphs right, you're disagreeing with Ron's argument and even dismayed by it. Is that true? Because I think I have the answer to your question, but I want to be sure your question is what I think it is.

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	immlass 2006-09-03 04:59 pm UTC (link)
	I'm not sure how I feel about the arguments. The initial stuff was so off-putting to me that I'll have to process it. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	jimhenley 2006-09-05 07:56 pm UTC (link)
	I have a better sense of the off-puttingness now that I've read your own LJ entry, thanks. Ironically, I think Ron argument about stakes bravado is very close to our own reservations about "macho nar." Perhaps I'm finding in it what I want to discover, but that's how it reads to me. (Reply to this)(Parent)

ewilen
2006-09-03 09:02 pm UTC (link)

I'm confused by Ron's argument.

On one hand you can have explicit preset stakes such that the winner of the conflict wins the stakes. As well the process of CR can generate side effects that may overshadow the stakes--such that one side might decide "it's not worth it" and Give (in Dogs terms). This clearly resolves the conflict, but it's not, apparently, what Ron is advocating.

On the other hand you can identify a conflict, play it out with side effects, and thereby produce a "winner" who then has narrative control over the outcome of the conflict. That also works, but it depends on a great deal of goodwill or shared understanding over the scope of conflict. I see this as equivalent to preset stakes; or if the goodwill/shared understanding aren't particularly strong, I don't see how it doesn't get very messy very fast.

Finally you can have a conflict and play it out to generate side effects...but then there is no guarantee the conflict will be resolved. Is there? This would be like playing Dogs except that Giving just lets you avoid Taking the blow, with no further consequences.

Please don't get hung up on answering any of these three cases--I'm just elaborating so you can see the nature of my puzzlement.

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jimhenley
2006-09-05 08:39 pm UTC (link)

Here I go not only getting hung up on your three cases but ignoring them entirely. ;)

The context for that thread is a bunch of threads on the Forge and in the diasporasphere much earlier this year when capital-S Stakes!^TM were all the rage. These included threads started by Judd "Paka" Karlson, Tony Lower-Basch and others, including big contributions from Luke Crane et al, about the thrill of "setting stakes" in conflict resolution. It was feeding Trollbabe's "Free-and-Clear stage" steroids and then setting it loose among all kinds of games. People talked about "setting stakes" in Champions, e.g. "Okay, if you win this combat, Doctor Destroyer's machine will be ruined, but if you lose, he'll discover all your secret identities! Ooh, intense!" (A real example.)

The added wrinkle is the concept of counter-stakes that came up. It started as, "In any conflict, both outcomes should drive the story forward rather than balking its development." e.g. let's set the stakes such that, if our Dogs don't get this Sinner to spill, *something active still happens*. (This is not actually how Dogs by-the-book works, and we'll come back to that.) In PTA, for instance, if your goal for Xander's conflict is to impress Buffy and you win, Xander impresses Buffy. But then counter-stakes get added to the other side of that, in advance of resolution: The Producer doesn't just say, "If you lose you DON'T impress Buffy." He says, "If you lose, Buffy hates you and kicks you out of the Slayer's Club." (Caution: I've never seen an episode of Buffy.)

The logic of counter-stakes is that "Everyone has a right to know exactly what will happen if they fail, and if the consequences on either side of the success/failure divide are intense, our gaming experience will be more enjoyable."

What I read Ron saying is that the process is structurally prey to "machismo drift." The setting of stakes becomes a plumage display. I haven't decided if he's also implicitly making my other complaint about PTA specifically and games/campaigns where PTA is a big influence on the conduct of play: the stakes-driven conflict resolution system leads to what, in fiction, we'd call bad writing: "on-the-nose" in screenwriting terms; a show-don't-tell violation in classic writing instruction; a kind of Use-Mention confusion.

So "stakes" and "goals" as Ron uses the terms are different things. DITV conflict resolution is pretty clearly built around goals, I think. My Dog wants this Faithless bastard to convert to the Faith. I initiate a conflict. It's not intrinsic to Dogs that the GM say "If you lose, your character's Mom will disown him!" Indeed, Dogs wants to keep the intent focused and let the dimensionality of the Conflict system determine an awful lot of the consequences of not just failure but even success as it goes. Hell, you may convert him -succeeding - but, thanks to Fallout, he dies, right? Hell, you may convert him but you die.

There's a sense in which a "goal" imposes certain baseline conditions on a failure outcome, and that's why it looks like stakes at first blush. Say your goal in the conflict is to KILL the other guy. That implies strongly that if you lose the conflict, the other guy lives. Depending on conditions obtaining in the fiction, it may imply other things as well, at that time.

"Stakes"-setting as a formal, Forge-y term, implies adding specificity to the failure condition that is, in the strictest sense, superfluous. And since it's superfluous (not necessary to the story in the way we think of a fictional event as "necessary"), it's especially vulnerable to social pathology. People start setting stakes to show how cool they are, or how daring, or to intimidate the player across from them, or to dominate the table.

At least, that's how I read Ron's point.

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	ewilen 2006-09-05 09:10 pm UTC (link)
	Thanks, Jim. Man, if that's all there is to it, I once again have a feeling of a bunch of people struggling against a problem of their own devising. I'm not sure you've captured the entirety of Ron's point, but I'll have to reread. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	ewilen 2006-09-08 11:19 pm UTC (link)
	I see that discussion continues on S-G However, theRPGsite is closer to an answer, I think. (Note: at least one post is cross-posted between the two sites, by warren.) Here it is. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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