from [1]

It happens that I think "Stakes," as currently discussed in a lot of blogs and forums, isn't really as big a deal as a lot of people are making out. In fact, in many cases, I think they are mixing up several distinct things:

1. Resolution of an at-hand conflict of interest in the current situation 2. Mechanical effects of a given outcome of the resolution system (score changes, etc) 3. Larger-scale implications for relationships among other characters, outcomes of other events 4. Consequences for the next significant real-person choices (new scenes, turn changes, etc)

Now, there are a lot of games out there in which a more generalized combination of all of them is fundamental to play. My Life with Master is probably the core system which has influenced many of them, including The Mountain Witch, Primetime Adventures, The Shab al-Hiri Roach, With Great Power ..., and others. If you roll to gain Love in My Life with Master, you know (a) that the minion will or will not successfully appeal to his or her Connection character; (b) that the minion does gain a point of Love, but will or will not gain a point of Self-Loathing as well; (c) that the Master or a hostile minion may well turn his or her nefarious attention to the Connection character; and (d) that the scene is effectively over, because this game typically sees one roll per scene.

However, I think people are confounding combining all of them with conflict resolution by definition, which is, as I see it, a bad case of synecdoche at the Techniques level.

The Sorcerer resolution rules are only concerned with #1 and #2. This is a big deal. You don't have to announce or account for or otherwise deal with anything about #3-4 prior to the roll. So, it's perfectly OK to announce "I cow him with my fierce gaze," or even, "I convince him to stop exploiting the factory workers," as a Sorcerer action, but there's no need to

Furthermore, and this is important for the kinds of actions I just mentioned, there is no final/guaranteed outcome for a given stated Sorcerer action. In the factory-workers example, the targeted character may lose ... and yet continue to exploit the workers, just operating with an inflicted penalty based on the dice-defeat he just suffered. That is just the same as announcing "I kill him!" in a fight scene, but hey, the dice, even on a successful roll, don't kill the guy, so he doesn't die.

See the difference? In a game like Dogs in the Vineyard, if my stated goal is to kill a guy, and we're rolling, and the other player/GM gives ... then he's dead. Because I'd stated that as the goal. Same goes for My Life with Master, with slightly different dice - if I'm going to use Violence to kill some poor Townsfolk schlub, and I succeed in my roll, he's dead - because I'd stated that as the goal. These games use "Stakes" in the broadest, #1-4 sense.

That doesn't happen in Sorcerer. The statement prior to the roll doesn't have that kind of "weight" (which I associate with #3, above).

So yes, do use "stakes thinking" if you want to, but focus on #1-2 as what the resolution system actually does, with #3-4 being the province of post-dice, post-conflict, post-scene decisions. And in fact, I suggest not using the "stakes" terminology, for now - instead, I strongly recommend this phrasing instead:

When fictional characters encounter a conflict of interest, the players/GM must roll dice When fictional characters are not encountering a conflict of interest, then the players/GM must not roll dice

That's perfect for Sorcerer.

And from [2]

Quote ""Are "Conflicts of Interest" at the character level, or at the player/GM level?""

The former. The absolutely most accurate way to up it is that we are talking about fictional conflict of interest. Put all notions of "people roll to resolve disagreements about how they want things to go" completely aside.

So, when we're talking about conflicts here, think the fiction, the fiction. The imagined events. The SIS. The "story," whatever you want to call it.

As I type, I am fearing that people think by "fiction" I am talking about Lit 101. I'm not. I'm talking about any stuff that we are making up. The imagined stuff.

Quote ""just to make sure I get what you're saying with this point, does "Conflict of Interest" specifically refer to a conflict of interests between two characters? To use my game as an example, when Guerro was battling the horde of mook-soldiers, instead of coming up with a difficulty level I should have rolled, say, the Commander's Will vs. Guerro's stamina, or in the example of Iuuma vs. the truck, Iuuma's Hold Power vs. the Power of the creature that had driven the truck's driver into a crazed panic? Essentially - a roll only happens when two characters are in some way working in opposition?""

Now you're still on the road, but teetering along the edge with a wheel spraying dirt over the cliffs to the side. The basic answer is "yes." But there are two problems I can see looming. You say "two characters" in a very iconic way, and I'm going to fix that. And you are suddenly contrasting all these points with the issue of "difficulty level." OK, your car just lurched.

Stay with me. First of all, yes, you are on the right track that rolls only occur in Sorcerer when fictional conflicts of interest are on the line. And that for those rolls, the scores of the interested parties are utilized.

About 80-90% of the time, all of your examples would be totally correct. Look for the other character. Find the score of interest. Roll.

What about that other percent? It's when a thing that in reality is not a living thing and cannot make decisions, operates in the fiction as if it does. The ledge strikes out at your shins, or seems to. The catwalk looms high up, higher than you're sure you can leap (think of camera-work that establishes this). The videocassette retreats further from your grasp, and then, maliciously, tumbles down behind the dresser.

These things suddenly need scores of their own. Back in 1996, I was completely unable to articulate these points well, and found myself reduced to describing them as "difficulty." In the table of suggested opposed dice values, I was striving to express difficulty as "inconvenience level" rather than a model-reality kind of probabilistic difficulty. Neither my mind nor the reader's mind of the time was able to midwife the thing struggling to be born on those pages; it's taken 10 years and a multitude of minds and game designs to do it.

Bret - are you with me? Use that character-on-character logic at all times, just as you describe ... and then take the extra step and realize that in many cases you'll have to assign scores for "characters," i.e. things that are not people or other entities in reality but here, in this fiction, at the moment, they are.

Let me know how this is going. My concern is that just as you grasped the fundamental issue of fictional conflict, two things happened as your gamer-neurons tried to interfere. First, the wild spectre of real, actual-person disagreement loomed up. Kill it; that's not what we're talking about. Second, the whole notion of "difficulty" as a non-conflict entity in role-playing, the whole "how do I roll to jump the fence, how do I roll to tie my shoes" mind-set, tried to shoulder its way into your mind. Kill that too ... but don't think all of a sudden that therefore the intrusions of environmental factors like cliff ledges are to be ignored - when they act as characters, then keep them and treat them accordingly.