So, I am a huge, huge fan of Dogs in the Vineyard, and I was thinking today that, with Urban Shadows’ feel, that it would be an awesome setting for the Escalation mechanic.
For those not familiar with Vincent Baker’s amazing DitV, Escalation is a mechanic where you can escalate a situation from Talking to Violence to Gunfighting, in order to get a boost to your action. Basically, if you’re losing the argument, you can throw a punch to make a point. Its about how far you’re willing to go, because Escalating will block “damage” and give you a healthy advantage. But it asks the question of whether or not you’re willing to shoot someone over a simple argument just to win.
Urban Shadows already captures a bit of that with its Corruption mechanic, but rather than asking you to push the situation and your morality, it asks you to inch closer to oblivion for a taste of power.
I was just thinking about how things would play out with the addition of a single Basic Move: Escalation: If you escalate a situation/confrontation, take +1 forward.
The move basically encourages you make situations more complicated/dangerous for the sake of not wanting to lose.
Additional thought was adding: “You may also mark 1 Corruption to ignore the results of your last miss in the scene.”
More a thought experiment than anything else, but I figured I’d throw it out there!
Interesting stuff. My gut is that the +1 forward and ignoring the results of the miss actually make moving the story forward kinda hard. Since the MC really only gets to “talk” on misses, too many bonuses ends up in a weird space.
Stras Acimovic has some awesome thoughts on this (if he deems us worthy to share them!)
Maybe “When you miss a roll and have a hard move coming your way, mark corruption and escalate from talk to force or force to deadly violence to force the MC to make it soft. If you’re already doing deadly violence, you’ve got whatever’s coming to you.”
Mark Diaz Truman My main argument there would be that “Golden Opportunity” is also a chance for the MC to make a move. And a character deciding to haul off and attack someone when a conversation isn’t going there way is a pretty big Golden Opportunity.
The idea doesn’t make the Miss a hit, it just negates the Miss. A Miss provides a chance for the MC to do something to the character–this provides an option for the character to do something to themselves that isn’t mechanically binding.
What does it take for your Werewolf to decide, after hitting the streets and finding his contact is too busy to help, that he might as well just beat him into submission? Yes, the MC lost the chance make a move on the missed Hit The Streets, but if the Werewolf player beating a contact into helping him isn’t a chance for the MC to do something else, I don’t know what is!
But it does change things, and I’m not suggesting it be added to the game, it was more wondering how that decision point would effect play. Corruption as it is gives you the chance to be more powerful in exchange for years off your life, essentially, but it rarely ever tempts you to kill someone when you weren’t already planning to.
Scott Arnone – I agree, but I’m not sure why you need to mechanize it. When someone rolls a miss in my game, I try to find ways to offer dark paths that will solve the problem. If you find that your contact is too busy, maybe killing the people that make him busy will make him… not busy.
That’s definitely an option, but not quite the same. Going after people you don’t care about, that’s one thing. Going feral on someone you do know, because you really wanted to get what you want? That says something totally different about a character.
Obviously you don’t have to put mechanics into that, but the mechanics do create that temptation.
The game isn’t designed to handle escalation in the way you’re proposing, but it does it in another way already. And the trigger you’re proposing is squishy (unless you make it clear how you decide what counts as escalation – because there’s no fallout or process of escalation to separate types of actions).
There’s an inherent mechanism for this right? Like if you Hit the Streets and your contact is busy someone high on Heart could try to persuade them, but if you need your stuff NOW then the Wolf has very little option other than to resort to spirit (let it out, try to terrify the shit out of them, then try the discussion again) or Unleash. A Wolf is strong in a Blood scene, not in a Heart scene. That mechanism is there already. The +1 not only won’t change it, but makes the 10/12+ far far far more likely with little interesting recourse (if they crit on a 12+ pulling a hard move goes a bit against principles).
Someone like a Fae sucks at Blood and if they couldn’t hit it on a +3 they’re probably better off not trying with that +1 (making their Blood roll roughly 50/50 with likely poor side-effects). So that’s not really a temptation.
DitV is pointed at the mechanisms of escalation and fallout – *World is a slightly different beast.
And in general in the conversation between players/storytellers you want to hand out plusses only when you’re sure you also want to hand over the reigns of the conversation, as more plusses usually mean the players dominate the narrative (hence why aiding is in some ways a spotlighting mechanic – where at least 2 players agree on wanting something).
I really doubt adding a mechanic that encourages resolving conflicts with violence to a game that strives to be political would be a good idea. I played in a lot of VtM campaigns that never got to be political because the rules made violence the most attractive option (a party of oWoD vamps with some XP on top becomes virtually unstoppable rather quickly if they focus on fighting skills and disciplines, so why bother with intrigue?). I’d prefer US not to encourage turning politics into all out war. There are systems out there that are better suited for hacking and slashing at supernatural threats than the Apocalypse Engine.