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Contest scenes

Introduction

This page is about how I run a Contest scene to resolve a situation in the story we are telling. A situation resolvable by a Contest would be when two or more sides' goals are in direct opposition but none of the sides' goals is to actually hurt the others. The usual examples are a race, a debate, or arguing a case before a judge. They may be willing to hurt the other side, but that is not necessary to attain their goals.

I am outlining just the simplest case here. There are many more complicated situations which can be handled by a Contest scene using modifications of this process. I will make those modifications for those more complicated situations as they come up, and try to document them here.

A Contest is a scene broken up into exchanges. At the end of each exchange, each side of the Contest makes an Overcome action to determine a number of successes towards their goal they achieved. When a side reaches the total number of successes needed to win, then they reach their goal, and the other sides do not.

In each exchange the characters in the scene may also take a Create an Advantage (CaA) action to make the Overcome action easier for their side. There is a risk associated with taking a CaA action, detailed below.

Steps for a Contest

  1. What are the character's goals?:
    For each character, determine what they want to get out of the scene. These are the characters' goals for the scene.
  2. What are the sides and who is on each side?:
    Determine the sides of the Contest based on the goals of the characters, by grouping the characters together based on common or compatible goals.
  3. Is the Overcome Action's Opposition Passive or Active?:
    Is the Overcome roll result compared against a static difficulty or is it compared against each of the results of all the sides of the contest?
  4. Who goes first?:
    Determine which character goes first in the contest. This is usually determined based on what makes sense in the fiction.
  5. Number of successes:
    Usually three, may go higher if the situation is more complex, or if you want to spend more time in the session on the scene.
  6. Exchanges:
    All Create an Advantage (CaA) actions for all sides in the exchange are resolved before any sides' Overcome action is resolved. Any character in the scene may Defend against the CaA action if it makes sense.
    • The players for each side should determine who will make the Overcome action for their side.
    • CaA
      • Ask each player if they are going to attempt a CaA action for their side in this exchange. (Note risk of failure if any players might not be clear on the risk.) All CaA actions happen simultaneously.
      • If a player attempts a CaA action, ask them to narrate their action, using the ellipses trick.
      • Decide on and narrate any CaA actions that NPCs on each side will attempt.
      • Once all characters' CaA actions are narrated, resolve each of them as normal. If another character is in position to Defend against the CaA action, they may do so. Narrate the result for each; remember that the all the actions happen simultaneously.
        • If a CaA action fails, their side's Overcome action is forfeited for the exchange. (Note: They may Succeed at a cost by giving an opposing side the free invoke on the Aspect created, allowing their own side to roll their Overcome action.)
    • Overcome
      • NOTE Remember that sides where any CaA action failed forfeits their Overcome action for the exchange.
      • Ask the Overcome action player for each side to narrate their action.
      • Characters who can help in the Overcome roll for their side may narrate how they are doing so, per the usual rules about helping. This is in addition to successful CaA actions they took in the CaA exchange.
      • Resolve the Overcome action for each side for the exchange. The Overcome actions for all sides happen simultaneously.
    • Count and record successes
      • If no side's total successes are equal or greater than the number of successes for the Contest, run another exchange.

Threats in a Contest

It is possible that there are narrative elements in the scene which can cause harm to the contestants, such as artillery fire, eruptions of lava, a hurricane, or attacking lava men. These threats do not have any other goal in the scene.

If there are one or more threats in the scene, each threat should be allowed to act once in each Overcome action exchange, after both sides have completed their Overcome action.

If the threat can make an Attack action against contestants, their player (the GM) narrates and resolves their Attack action.

If the threat is passive, i.e. they have a static difficulty rating, then treat that rating as their Attack action result on their turn in the exchange.

All characters on all sides whose Overcome result is lower than the threat's Attack takes a hit. They must absorb the difference just like in a Conflict. If they cannot absorb all the shifts of the hit, they are taken out and can no longer act in the scene.

References