Paul Beakley Okay you asked for it…

Sorry for the long post in advance:

Ok, so “A Song of Ice and Fire RPG” has three major Conflict Resolution Rule Sets. One is for Skirmish Style Combat (regular RPG combat I would say), one is for Warfare (large scale battles), and one is for Intrigue.

Intrigues are divided into “Exchanges” where one Exchange can be very fluent in time from a few seconds to a day or more depending on the Intrigue in question and the actions taken. An Intrigue to argue in front of a judge and jury that you are innocent and try to outwit your accuser is short, while an intrigue to plant rumours that the King’s Hand is a traitor might take longer. You get the idea.

During one Exchange all parties get to take one turn to act. On that turn players get to roll Abilities etc to try to manoeuvre and somehow shift the Intrigue in their favour. Once all parties have taken an action, the exchange ends and the intrigues either resolves OR another exchange is initiated.

The Goal for every Intrigue is to gain enough Influence to make your counterpart do, say, reveal, act the way you want. So this system can be used for anything from as simple as trying to bed a young Prince, to convince someone you are not the droid they’re looking for or simply change someone’s mind about something, to more complicated matters like dethroning a lord etc.

In a sense Influence acts a lot like Damage. And as in Combat you roll an Ability test, but in this case you use skills like “Deception” or “Persuasion” and instead of targeting the opponents AC you target his Intrigue Defence. Success generates an amount of Influence that is applied towards your opponents Composure (social Hit Points), and once your opponents Composure drops to 0, you defeat him or her and decide the consequences.

That is the basics. From there they add things like, it’s easier to convince a religious person to act if you use religious arguments… and if you are IN the church when you argue with him you might gain an even bigger advantage. (basically these things act as Damage bonus/penalty etc.)

HeroQuest uses the same conflict resolution mechanic for ALL types of conflict. Basically it doesn’t matter if we are talking about one corporation trying a hostile takeover, a weapon thane in a village trying to convince the elders to send out a war party, or a Barbarian trying to kill a Troll. It’s all the same thing. The only difference is whether you run it as a Simple or Complex Contest and/or if more than one player is involved. If it is a Simple Conflict it s ONE Opposed roll and then straight to result. If it is Complex opponents compete to get the 5 Victory Points first, and then you compare the difference. The difference in Successes tells you how severe consequence you have to take.

So how they deal with Consequences here is interesting, because like you said in MY0 you could get “impaired” or even “killed” socially, politically, economically or… physically. What HeroQuest does is simple, yet works. The Consequence you get is only applied to “things related to the defeat”. Basically if you get beat up socially, that might be that you are now shamed and your father despises you and your clan looks sideways at you. (Had you been killed in that conflict, you might have been declared an outcast or similar, basically reducing your Social life to “dead” status.) The consequence here is that you have a large penalty in ALL upcoming Social Conflicts where your family and clan is involved. You are fighting an uphill battle due to your previous failures. “Healing” this type of consequence is done over time. If you were killed in an Economic Conflict you just lost your entire fortune in a bid for power over a company… you are now living on the street… and any economic challenge that comes after that is going to be though on you… but over time you can slowly rebuild, you can base entire adventure sessions around players trying to regain what they have lost.

I hope I’m making some sense in all this and I know it was a long post… not completely wasted I hope?