We started playing Nathan Paoletta’s Imp of the Perverse last week. It’s a funky, specific horror game that evokes Edgar Allan Poe vibes in 1830s-1850s Jacksonian America. Playing the first session reminded me about how hard I find conflict resolution games. Imp of the Perverse is squarely in that camp of design.
Conflict resolution is where the entirety of a “conflict” gets resolved at once, typically a single roll/draw/pull/moment of fortune. The relative inverse is action or skill based resolution, where each resolution re-positions objective elements of the fiction (somebody is hurt, a spell is cast, you jump over a hole) but doesn’t address the “conflict.” It’s a deep rabbit hole, and folks have argued (stridently!) about what “a conflict” is. There are lots of specific ways games go about resolving a conflict. The interesting/aggravating commonality is how resolution always revolves around the table arriving at a common understanding of the “conflict.”
Conflict resolution is indie-style roleplaying on hard mode.
Why It’s Hard
I’ve played conflict resolution games on and off ever since the first ones showed up, games like Dust Devils, Sufficiently Advanced, and more modern designs like Goblinville, The Clay That Woke and Primetime Adventures. Old or new, they feel hard to me in related ways: you need to think critically and abstractly about every scene, you need to carefully frame scenes based on that evaluation, you have to know when to engage the system, everyone has to be on board with the difference between authoring and advocating, and everyone has to be transparent. And all this happens with very few check-ins from, or with, the system itself.
Any one of these elements feels like it requires advanced, 400-level experience just to execute, much less to make fun. So let’s unpack them all and see if the work:fun ratio makes conflict resolution worth it.
Abstract Critical Thinking
This is the hard one, and it’s been hard ever since the earliest days of indie design: what is the salient point being argued over in this moment of play? Roleplaying is a conversation, and disagreements are where the conversation gets interesting. Sometimes those disagreements are around the details of a shared understanding of the game state, which is easy. We all agree the Stormtroopers got the jump on us, but do we get away? But sometimes players disagree about the premise of the conversation itself.
The game design may or may not have a specific idea of what “conflict” means for itself. Is “conflict resolution” just large-scale abstract action resolution? Totally fair and reasonable interpretation! A game might totally view many small moments as adding up to “a conflict.” In those games, the GM needs to apply critical thinking to the question of how much can one resolve in a single moment. The game might have guidelines to how much one can resolve, but I’ve never seen a system put hard limits on that. There’s always the need for authoritative human evaluation, which is laborious relative to, say, players reaching for abilities to resolve actions, or moves to resolve fictional triggers.
Another necessary critical thinking skill is being sensitive to the “about-ness” of the scene. Why is this scene happening? What’s at stake? A scene might be happening because prior fiction mandates it, or because the players are excited by the implied uncertainty of it, or because someone wants to make an aesthetic or ethical statement. And each of those scene types need a different evaluation of their about-ness.
I don’t have a good formula for any of this. But I know that, when I’m playing a game with conflict resolution and/or “very abstract resolution,” I need to spend a lot of juice thinking about every scene’s about-ness, so I know how to guide the players toward a common understanding.
Scene Setting as Sales Pitch
The next step to applying one’s critical thinking to the about-ness at stake is that the GM needs to set really clear scenes. And this needs to happen not only because everyone’s at the table/Zoom meeting/chat and are eager for things to happen, but because scene-setting is the GM’s primary sales tool.
When the GM has a clear sense of the themes, disagreements, metaphors, or stakes, the way they explain their sense is via how they set a scene. In a lot of cases the GM might not know what’s at stake, and has to work it out as a scene plays out. Also legit. But the scene as a facilitator (or fellow player, in a GM-less conflict-resolution game like Durance) initially framed it is still preparing the eventual sales pitch. Call it marketing if you want: you’re creating a fertile field for future sales.
This is all pretty instinctual, I fear. I’m just highlighting the fact that if you want to bring players onto the same page in a conflict resolution game, it starts with how you set scenes.
When To Pull The Trigger
There’s always a tricky balance to strike when you’re playing a conflict resolution game: how long do we keep talking, and when is it time to stop and resolve the conflict?
This bit is especially hard on me, personally, because I greatly prefer to keep the action grounded in the fiction. I prefer to keep players in-character than let them slide into a planning fugue. I actively dislike the tendency for argumentative/competitive players to avoid engaging with the system (i.e. uncertainty) by sidestepping it in the just-talking step.
Old-style conflict resolution games like Dust Devils (second edition came out in 2006) typically included a whole essay about what “conflict” entailed in this specific game. Dust Devil’s very short version is: “Conflict is any point in the game where at least two players (and usually more!) have different ideas about ‘what happens next’ in the story.” As a practical matter, though, there was always a lot of talk leading up to that moment. To be clear: Dust Devils is one of my favorite-favorite indie RPGs! But nailing down exactly when to stop talking and start drawing cards is a skill I needed to learn.
Sometimes conflict resolution-type games, like Imp of the Perverse and The Clay That Woke, provide the trigger. But they’re still quite abstract relative to the precision of a PbtA style fictional trigger.
Imp first says “Whenever your protagonist takes risky action or engages in struggle,” and later “When your protagonist imposes their will upon the world.” But then there’s an admonition to not roll merely when an outcome is uncertain. So when do you roll? It’s up to the GM, ultimately, to decide what risky entails. And if they’ve sold the scene correctly, there should be something clearly at risk in a scene. It’s pretty good, and more explicit than many “to resolve a conflict…” type language in older games.
Clay is a bit more specific, calling out four “inflections:” dangerous situations, violent conflicts with beasts or NPCs, unnatural encounters, and interpersonal disagreements with NPCs. Cool, pretty specific, but there are still several paragraphs further clarifying when and how to engage the game’s resolution system (a chit-draw, set-building minigame called the Krater of Lots), with the most actionable-yet-subjective advice being “You know you’re using it too soon if your situations don’t feel dramatic.” So, really, hit an inflection and wait within that moment for it to become dramatic. Fair, but subjective.
Player Authorship vs Principled Character Advocacy
Because of the necessary abstract thinking needed for the GM and players to engage with conflict resolution (and/or “very abstract resolution”), I’m always sensitive to the players being pulled in different creative directions. On the one hand, the abstraction can help you shape scenes in a very authorial way: this scene is about the two brothers’ longstanding rivalry coming to a head, this scene is about whether the Bandit King drives the old regime out of the castle, this scene is about the impact of a long journey on the fellowship. Conflict resolution is a great way to give players a lot of authority over a scene, in no small part because there aren’t so many smaller moments that may derail their vision for the scene.
But there’s something to be said for the immediacy and investment of advocating for What Your Character Wants. Or if you’re feeling iffy about the player/character split, What You Want For Your Character. It’s exciting and competitive and sometimes it just feels good to embody a character’s drives. It can also feel good in a pattern-completion way to watch a well-designed character’s needs play out in the fiction.
I’ve found those two impulses frequently hard to reconcile: player-as-author and player-as-advocate. If you’re constantly authoring scenes with an eye toward advocacy, are you really making an interesting story? Is “interesting” even on the agenda?
Radical Transparency
Last bit, mostly an issue for trad/conventional players being introduced to conflict resolution or “storygames” in general: if you’re going to even begin the conversation about the about-ness of a scene, what you or your character want out of it, everyone needs to be very transparent. No playing close to the vest, no trying to outsmart each other. It’s a very collaborative play style, in contrast with an adversarial-GM play style and adjunct at best to an impartial-GM play style. Old habits can be really hard to break, is all I’m saying.
System As A Validation Tool
My theory about players interacting with systems: Each interaction is a validation for the player that they’re on the right track, that they’re adding something tone-/canon-allowable, that they’re reinforcing and meaningfully enlarging the table’s common understanding of the fiction. It can be reassuring to do a small thing, earn a small currency perhaps, or see a small shift in the fiction. It can feel less fraught to make some progress toward your goals, action by action, than have everything ride on a single moment of uncertainty. When a player resists engaging with a conflict resolution system, their desire for system-validating moments is something I feel out.
Three Conflict Resolution Tips
These are all pretty old conversations if you’ve been in storygaming spaces for a while. But if you haven’t, here’s some advice:
- Have a firm sense of what meaningful conflicts look like in this genre, setting or situation. Meaningful, in this case, being “the fiction takes an assertive new direction.” Sometimes your instinct about meaningful conflict disagrees with when the game tells you to resolve: this is the designer’s opinion, their take on the subject matter. Followup: frame scenes really hard, ideally with more than one player character, with a conflict-rich situation already in mind. Don’t preprogram the conflict! But think about situations that can (probably) only be resolved by eventually going to the game’s system. Many conflict resolution games have external economies that rely on engaging the system at some point, so you can’t bop along freeforming forever.
- Say yes an awful lot more than you’re accustomed to. Conflict resolution games are, I think, very freeform most of the time. That means the players need a clear sense of their own agency most of the time, because there’s no validation of their choices coming back to them (see above). The only way I’ve come up with, as a GM, is to say yes a lot. It also means gently, conversationally redirecting if a player suggests something that’s off-tone or violates what I feel like is the shared understanding of the game state. There’s still a need for facts to become part of the game’s permanent record even when we’re not invoking the system. And everyone needs to agree that the fiction can be positioned outside of the system.
- Be uncomfortably up-front about what’s at stake, win or lose, in this conflict. Well, I mean: maybe you won’t personally be uncomfortable with that level of transparency. But if this is a new thing for you, expect discomfort. Talk about not only what Your Character or The Situation stands to gain, but describe your own understanding of what Your Character or The Situation stands to lose. Make sure both sides of that equation feel equitable to both parties.
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We wrapped up a short run at Nathan Paoletta’s Imp of the Perverse this week. Strap on the air tanks and headlamps, we’re taking a deep dive.
Quick Overview
Imp of the Perverse is a horror game set in the early America of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s called “Jacksonian” but most of the period (1830-1850) takes place after Andrew Jackson’s presidency. The Poe bit provides the supernatural and tonal flavor of the game, and the Jacksonian bit provides the actual horror of this stretch of American history. The more you know this history, the more rewarding, but Paoletta provides a ton of excellent essays both about tone and aesthetics (the Poe) and the history (the Jackson).
The language is period-stylized, which was a slog when I was making sense of the systems. A modern game-reader might look for investigation but here we get ratiocination. You might expect a section called advancement but you get ontogenesis instead. Player characters are Protagonists, the GM role is called the Editor.
The Protagonists are such because they each exhibit a perversity, another old-timey word. It doesn’t mean, you know, being pervy. It’s a behavior the player feels is unseemly in excess. In our game, our Protagonists’ perversities were entitlement, morbidity, melancholy and meddling. Normal human stuff, but your Imp – a literal, personal supernatural presence – eggs you on to overindulge in those things. Those perversities also provide the Protagonists their Greatest Strength, the positive version of their perversity. So the entitled perversity is also an expeditious mind, the melancholic perversity provides poetic insight, and so on.
The Protagonists’ Imps can provide strength and knowledge, and later supernatural Edges. You might speak with the dead, or mesmerize the unwitting, maybe literally smell deceit. There’s no, like, magic or spells or anything. It’s not Call of Cthulhu in any way.
The game is about what happens to the Protagonists as they investigate and eventually defeat monsters. In this setting, monsters arise from perversities given too much sway. They started as people, alive or dead (“beyond the Shroud,” an anachronistic idea for the early 1800s but rationalized by the massive upheavals and brutalities of post-Jacksonian America) or even returned from beyond the Shroud. Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.
Imp isn’t really about that investigation, though. The Protagonists will always succeed. The more interesting emotional and thematic experience of the game is tied into what these investigations cost the Protagonists. They may find themselves slipping ever-closer to themselves becoming a monster, or shedding their Imp entirely and returning to mundane human life. Characters use up their resources faster than they can refresh them, further driving them toward their eventual monstrosity. The slope is so slippery that it’s nearly impossible to stop once you’ve started, but the promise of redemption is always there.
This is a game squarely in the storygame mold of indie gaming. Characters are measured by personality traits rather than professional capacities, most of the game plays out as a talky-talky freeform, and you only roll dice to resolve conflicts, not actions or skills.
Protagonist Setup
You use a questionnaire to create each Protagonist, Mouse Guard style. The questions are flavorful and interesting, and provide your various starting values as well as a list of relationships. Relationships are important and embed you into your community. Just add up the values, invent a few NPCs, maybe pick a supernatural Edge if you decide this isn’t your first brush with monsters.
You end up with a colorful, not especially deep, biography of your Protagonist’s implied past. The game-mechanical values can help guide play but since you arrive at them via questionnaire, I didn’t feel like the players were especially invested in playing toward them. I suspect if you know how the game works, you play toward your qualities so it makes organic sense to use them when it’s time to roll.
Monster Setup
The meat of the game is prepping the monster. It’s a big GM-facing job with lots of secret stuff you prepare in advance to unleash on the players later.
Setting up the monster was harder than I expected. You start by picking a perversity, just like for a Protagonist. But then you extrapolate way, way out from there.
There are a slew of example monsters in the book, which is a good way to go if you’re just going to dip your toes in. For example, there’s a reporter whose thirst for investigation and nosiness has led her to become a manipulative blackmailer. That’s an example of a living person whose Imp has turned them into a monster. But you can also go past the Shroud and select a monstrous spirit (a ghost that saps your self-worth, for example), or even returned from beyond the Shroud, a physical, supernatural entity (a dead philosopher obsessed with decay). In any case, the monsters are people. Ultimately, the monsters are us.
I found the monster-creation process super interesting and indirect. The process extracts a thematically interesting monster with clear through-lines back to the core “why is this a monster?” decisions. After picking a perversity, you think about the web of characters surrounding the monster — not just its targets, but folks with an interest in serving and protecting it. By the book, you actually do this before you make characters. The important bit here is establishing the monster’s status quo, the bad stuff it does without the Protagonists interfering. The next thing you do is think through how and where it operates at the start of play, as well as a couple steps ahead (its Escalations) in terms of its area (the physical or social circles it attacks), its horror (the supernatural stuff it does) and its emanation (terrible things NPCs are compelled to do because of the monster’s influence). This is all in service to having solid, consistent answers at hand when the Protagonists start observing the monstrosity and asking questions.
I say indirect because once you’ve gone through its web of NPCs and Escalations, transferring all that to the official worksheet is not a clear 1:1 process. You have to look at your answers and once again reframe and reinterpret what you’ve come up with to fit the worksheet. And then you’re done.
During my prep, I ended up with two relationship maps: One representing the community as the characters understand it, with their relationships and interconnections. The other is monster-centric, with the bad thing in the center and all the other stuff re-arrayed around it. You don’t need to maintain two r-maps, but I always like to present an r-map as a table centerpiece, something for the players to look at. Since we were playing online, I used Miro and shared a link. Then I kept the monster-centric version private, on a piece of paper.
Starting the Chapter
Imp offers only a weak holding environment for the Protagonists. While the purpose of the Protagonists is quite clear – defeat a string of monsters – the rationale for them to work and spend time together is only as strong as the players make it. There is one tool that helps: every PC “admires” another PC, and gets a free (ie not-at-risk) black die in their Exertion pool whenever a scene involves them. If I were playing with system expertise I’d contrive any reason at all to drag my admired PC into scenes with me. Every die counts! But at our table that just wasn’t part of their calculus. I assume they didn’t really sense how the economy of play would end up wrecking their characters’ abilities.
Without the players contriving reasons to have their admired Protagonists with them, the Editor is responsible for scene-framing. It can be a heavy lift! One pressure I felt against forcing Protagonists together early was that engaging the system pours on the gas: Anxiety skyrockets, investigating becomes too expensive, and the monster’s Escalations start showing up before I had even put its initial effects into play.
What Play Looks Like
Imp is a low-contact game. The majority of play time is pure freeform, with nobody engaging the system. But once you do start engaging, the game accelerates fast. I didn’t realize just how fast events would escalate in the game and was caught by surprise.
Players have only four mechanical affordances available to them. They can spend their Empathy to either make realizations about the monster or create new Relationships (which in turn can become additional black dice). They can spend their resources, community standing or their reasoning for Ratiocination (buy ever-more-expensive answers to things they’re investigating). And when a Protagonist does something involving deadly force, meaningful risk, or any use of their supernatural Edges, they make an Exertion roll. And that’s it, as far as the Protagonists go: connecting with the monster, investigating, doing meaningfully risky stuff.
The fourth system is aimed at other Protagonists. Each player has a pool of red Weirding dice. When it’s another player’s turn, you can speak in the voice of their Imp and negotiate a deal to give them one of your Weirding dice. This reminds me a lot of the Shadow role from White Wolf’s Wraith: a fun, scary, possibly boundary-violating chance to be the bad guy.
Ratiocination (the investigation aspect) is quite good: each Protagonist has a budget for asking questions, which get more expensive as Anxiety increases. There’s an incentive to ask early and often, but it’s hard for the players to even know what to ask about before Anxiety has made the questions unaffordable. But even after the questions become too expensive for you to answer, they can always get an answer straight from their Imp…at the cost of one red check. Those checks become important during Ontogenesis, the character-changing phase that comes after the monster is defeated.
Exertion is conflict resolution but for only very specific conflicts: when lethal force is involved, when they’re using their supernatural Edges, or when they’re doing something meaningfully risky. You assemble a pool of black dice from your relevant Qualities, Relationships and your Greatest Strength, all of which will be reduced by one unless you spend successes to protect them after the roll. You also get a red die if the conflict reflects your Perversity, and another if you accept one from another player speaking to you in the voice of your Imp. The GM can also swap your black dice for red dice, which is a bastard move that drives the characters toward becoming monsters.
There’s some hint that succeeding at Exertion means the player gets to narrate their own success, an old conflict-resolution thing I haven’t heard about in years. But only a hint! It’s not spelled out in the rulebook. There’s also some talk about additional successes being “better,” but if it’s on the player to narrate their own success, I’m not really sure how that works. But as a practical matter, nobody ever used extra successes for anything other than keeping their at-risk qualities/relationships/Strength.
Two dynamic values drive play: Lucidity, which represents your connection with your Imp and sets your target number (lower is better!), and Anxiety, which represents how bad things have gotten as the Protagonists battle the monster. Lucidity only goes down during the investigation, as players make Exertion rolls and want to generate more hits on their rolls. After a roll, each die equal or greater than your Lucidity is a “hit,” which you use to either succeed at Exertion or protect the qualities and relationships you put at risk to buy dice. You can then Embrace the Imp after a roll, lower Lucidity once, and count hits using your new, lower target number. Meanwhile, Anxiety only goes up, each time a Protagonist Embraces the Imp but also the first time they see the monster or its horrors, and the first time they face it directly. Each time Anxiety goes up, Ratiocination questions get more expensive and everyone (Editor included) gets an additional red Weirding die.
As the text makes clear, the point of Imp isn’t beating monsters. The Protagonists will beat the monsters every time. They literally can’t “lose” in that regard. The real game is managing your Lucidity, keeping it below 6 (at which point your freed of your Imp and go on to live your life) and above 1 (at which point you become the game’s next monster). That management mostly comes down to the checks you make along the way – black for your human-ness, red for your Imp-ness – and how quickly you use up your various stats.
Once the Protagonists defeat the monster, the game enters the Ontogenesis phase. Those red and black checks become pools of red and black dice, which the player rolls and tallies. Whichever color’s total is higher either lowers (red) or raises (black) Lucidity by one step. Then the players spend those checks on refreshing their various pools, maybe picking up a neat new supernatural power, or authoring new facts about the Shroud.
The system is an elaborate clockwork, and it can be hard to see how things will play out the first time.
Story Time!
I set our game in the Republic of Texas, 1840. Imp‘s default setting is either Poe’s Baltimore/Boston/some other East Coast city, or the plantation-era South, like Richmond or Charlotte. The pre-Old West western frontier fits into the game, but the vibe is quite different: big open spaces, long travel times between homesteads, and deep cultural divides. We chose San Antonio as the farthest-west frontier between American and Mexican societies. I have a personal fondness for the time and place, and fell down a research hole anyway to flesh it out for the players.
Our Protagonists were: a scion of a wealthy Irish empresario family, a former officer of the Mexican army, an escaped slave turned journalist from Back East, and a Methodist circuit rider arrived to convert the locals away from Mexico’s mandated Catholicism.
In terms of setup and then play, I should have more tightly entwined everyone’s relationships and NPC triangles, as well as the monster’s immediate connections. I had to weigh that against the time I wanted to take establishing the setting itself. The not-Old-West Republic of Texas was hugely fun to research but, I think, hard for the players to hook into. So I spent a lot of time trying to paint that picture when I should have been engaging them with the investigation.
Because of Imp’s weak holding environment, I had to work hard to contrive scenes for the Protagonists to show up together. The setting was novel, and I wanted enough one-on-one time with each character to get a sense of what their status quo looked like. That’s just good horror facilitation. But that takes time, and it leaves the other players with not much to do other than listen and enjoy. That’s a lot of freeform just-talking, at least at first, so the other players don’t even get a chance to speak in the voices of each other’s Imps and hand out Weirding dice. Later, when folks are making Exertion rolls with some frequency, that can happen much more. Unfortunately, at our table, it just … didn’t. I’m not sure why, but I speculate our online play environment makes it hard to telegraph when you might want to get impy.
We played two sessions. The first session was spending some time with each Protagonist to get a sense of their life in San Antonio. I ended that session with an inexplicable situation on an Irish homestead: a widow and her children barricaded inside their own home, every door and window sealed shut from the outside. The empresario and the circuit rider arrived to discover this weird scene, did some Ratiocination, and started feeling out what the heck was going on.
The second session, we engaged with the actual system quite a bit more. As the Protagonists spent time in the presence of the monster, they started spending Empathy to get solid answers about the monster’s about-ness. It was motived by the need to protect, interpreted protection as ownership, and eventually decided the only way to protect the things it “owned” was to destroy them with fire. The finale of the session featured all four Protagonists arrived at another homestead set ablaze by the monster. The Mexican army officer realized (via Empathy) the only fire that could have consumed an unsettled spirit was…the siege of the Alamo itself, a few years prior. And the officer had been tasked with burning the bodies of the Texian dead. Pretty great, very personal, grim! They defeated the monster when the Methodist priest consecrated the grounds of the Alamo where the Texian dead had been burned.
In retrospect, I really like the shape of the fiction that came out of the game. In practice, though, everyone had a heck of a time locking into how the systems worked, what they were capable of doing, and maintaining a clear player/character split. One big point of confusion was that there are lots of ways to “get answers” in a game that’s largely concerned with investigation. Ratiocination is the main way, but you can also use Empathy to understand the monster’s backstory, and several Edges are also good for getting information but require Exertion rolls to use. That all felt blurry on the player-facing side. What kind of information-gathering are we doing here?
Probably our greatest difficulty was Empathy use. The players can use it when in the presence of the monster or its horror, but I frequently had to say, non-diegetically, that yes this is a time you can use your Empathy. Or even recommend they do so. It produced good results but the players never felt comfortable invoking the system on their own. Now is a good time to get clues, now is a good time to use an Edge, now you’re going to need to Exert, now someone should offer the player a Weirding die.
We wrapped up the chapter so we could see the Ontogenesis cycle in play. Turns out Ontogenesis can knock a new character out of play immediately! I think this is because players weren’t cognizant of how the black/red checks would play out at the end of the chapter. In our game, the Methodist circuit rider mostly did black-check things and only called on his Imp once. But he was also a first-time monster hunter, and his Lucidity started at 5. He only had one red check but three or four black checks, so of course his Lucidity went up to 6, which freed the preacher from his meddlesome Imp. If I ran this again in long-form play, I would mention this early to the high-Lucidity folks so they could aim for extra red checks in play and keep their character in the game.
Last Thoughts
I really dig the aesthetics and themes of Imp of the Perverse. Love the period, even though I’m usually scared out of my gourd about getting historicity ”wrong” in play. I really like that you can dig into hard topics – slavery, racism, sexism, all the bad stuff – because of the period. Talking with my buddy Jay about how he’d run it during playtest, he name-checked The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I totally didn’t get that vibe, but I think I can see how one might end up in a more high-adventure mode evolving out of moody Poe-style psychological horror.
The clockwork of the game, with early Ratiocination leading to Empathy and eventually to Exertion and then Ontogenesis, is formally quite clever. I never had a player try to bypass the investigation by cashing in Empathy and just asking “how do we defeat this thing?” They did, in fact, eventually ask that. I think this process works so well because the players don’t know what they don’t know. In our game, I was even able to give the players that answer – find the remains of this damned soldier and consecrate it – but doing so wasn’t straightforward. The whole thing felt organic.
I found it hard to guess at what a good tempo might be. An entire session of establishing characters and setting was probably too much. Not responding more strongly to the players’ need to be in scenes together was a technique failure on my part, but I think not a universal one: some players just get more enjoyment out of listening and watching each other’s scenes for a while. I’m quite sure a second run at the game would go a lot better on that count, mostly through harder framing of characters together in scenes and tying the relationship maps together much tighter.
It’s an interesting game! And such a pleasure to play something that isn’t sitting atop any of the big indiegame platforms. It’s not PbtA or FitD or Fate. It is very much a conflict resolution-style storygame with a clear lineage back to earlier storygames. It also has some of the features and problems of those earlier games, like the need for players to take an active interest in other characters’ efforts and the need for the GM to push them through the session rather than, say, having Moves pull you along.
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One of the most interesting play-aesthetic gaps in gaming to me is the chasm between how players want to resolve in-game social conflicts. You can prefer natural, normal talking, or you can prefer going to the dice. Maybe some folks don’t feel strongly about social conflict resolution, but I haven’t met them. It should come as no surprise that conversational conflict in a conversational medium is a fraught space.
So which are you? Do you prefer the cudgel? Or the contract?
The Cudgel
The cudgel refers to mechanized social conflicts. This might be the Duel of Wits system of Burning Wheel, or social combat rolls in Year Zero Engine games, or “following the fiction” moves applied to other players in PbtA games. If social conflicts can be addressed with a system (conflict resolution or skills/actions, whatever), that’s a cudgel.
Here are some arguments in favor of the cudgel:
So much of tabletop gameplay is procedurally mediated conversation that leaving arguments to just-talking puts too much emphasis on the conversation side, and not enough on the procedure side.
If you’re not good at arguing, pleading, weaseling, manipulating or browbeating in real life, you can’t play toward any of that in a game.
Just-talking is classist and ableist, heavily favoring well-educated, neurotypical players in and out of play.
The Contract
No rules, no masters
The contract refers to the social contract at the table. A game may mechanize physical player-facing risk (combat, jumping over chasms), maybe even proceduralize social interactions with NPCs, but the moment player agency comes into play, leave it to the players.
Here are some arguments in favor of the contract:
Talking and arguing are some of the richest moments of play for the players to really express and embody their characters.
Arguing between characters can feel like arguing between players, and that visceral thrill is powerful.
Maybe most important is the fact that the social contract – spoken or unspoken – provides a lot of structure we may not even know about.
The Tradeoffs
As in all things, every choice you make comes with tradeoffs.
Contracts are Tribal Ritual
Every time we fall back to our social contract, we reaffirm it. Where rolling dice to win a character argument may drive players apart (particularly a bad-faith player who won’t respect the outcome anyway), forcing the players to agree to their characters’ outcomes can help build camaraderie. If social bonding is an important part of your play, elevating the social contract can help that.
Cudgels are Democratizing
It’s hard to play a smooth-talking rogue when you’re a clumsy dork. The cudgel evens the odds against the real-world talkers, particularly if those players didn’t bother building their character that way.
Contracts Are Unfair
Not everyone can make an impassioned argument that actually convinces anyone. Or sometimes the GM just likes another player more and is more sympathetic to their needs. I know this is shocking and let me say right now, completely untrue: GMs don’t have favorites. (Narrator: GMs have favorites.) Contracts are unfair because there are no objective procedures to which everyone has agreed.
Cudgels Require Good Faith
So you went to the dice to get what you wanted, you won, and now your opponent is just ignoring the outcome. Sucks! What’s your recourse? Roll more dice again? In the real world, not all players are skilled at playing their characters at arm’s length, or happily accepting outcomes that didn’t go their way. Every “system,” whether procedural or interpersonal, has a fail state. I have never seen a cudgel that could overcome an opponent who simply refused to accept the outcome.
Contracts Maximize Agency
The appeal of never being forced into action by another player is real. You may have a vision of the narrative truth of your character, and outside influence on that may rob you of that. It’s a bit of authority that no other authority can override.
Cudgels Are Surprising
Sometimes a social conflict victory comes as a surprise to everyone. That’s exciting! There are few more thrilling moments in a game than when I get surprised – within the bounds of acceptable surprises, that is. Same goes for fiction, right? Who expected Hades’ heart to withstand Orpheus’ appeals in Hadestown? Don’t know about you, but “I don’t know…” was not what I was expecting out of the big Broadway finale.
Contracts Demand Consensus
Because nobody wants to threaten the social contract, interesting interpersonal conflicts can be bleached of their excitement. Talking is good, don’t get me wrong. But constant cooperation means you’re leaving out whole realms of play. I have found that players tend to temper their characters’ needs and play toward consensus. Is consensus always the best and most interesting fiction?
Cudgels Egg On Conflict
When you have a cudgel, the whole world looks like heads to bonk. The phrase “social combat” is commonly invoked. Social combat can be exciting but it can also be the wrong tone. I’ve also found an unfortunate tendency for cudgel-preferring players to actually just want mind control. Every rules text I’ve ever read clearly calls mind control out as bad play, and common sense should cover that as well, but here we are. If you’ve got a cudgel, what’s to keep you from bonking heads to get what you want?
How To Choose?
I think social contract-level PvP is pretty great, still, particularly in high-trust groups without any big gaps in real-world social ability, leverage, or neurotypicality. If everyone’s pretty close, knowing you can’t fall back to dice produces fundamentally different outcomes. Ideally the players reach some kind of compromise because they’re committed to playing together in the future. Social pressure works.
That said? When we’re just talking I really miss the tension of not knowing how a conflict is going to come out. I also have a lot of respect for the position that shy players deserve to play social monsters too. Unfit nerds have eagerly pretended to be bodybuilder-warriors since the earliest days. And sometimes even the best-intentioned players still arrive at loggerheads about deeply held positions.
For me, where I fall on this comes down to the game I’m playing. If there’s a lot of internal tension – that is, the characters are expected to disagree about things, even strive against each other from time to time – I prefer the cudgel. But if the game relies on, or is about, the characters sticking together, I like the contract.
…And The Twist
Here’s the stuff nobody talks about.
The so-called cudgel of rules-based social conflict? They make an excellent basis for a functional, healthy social contract. When everyone agrees to follow the same rules, that means everyone agrees to the outcomes. If they don’t, well, that’s a quick way to flush out the bad-faith players. These are the rules, you agreed to the rules, and now you aren’t abiding by the rules. Where do we go from here?
And that nice-sounding social contract you think you can fall back on? Can totally be used as a cudgel by bad-faith players who will leverage goodwill and the geek-fallacy “the game must go on” stuff to get their way. This is a toxic fail state I wish/hope more roleplayers were aware of. This sort of social-level manipulation is often not apparent, either. If a player threatens the accepted social order of the table because they didn’t get their way, that’s a bright red flag.
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