In Silent Heaven, characters can’t die (for spoilery reasons). There are many ways to have a contest, but one of the fastest ways to defuse a situation is with a little violence. There aren’t many downsides to engaging in combat, although the downsides scale slightly higher for more experienced characters that have a greater chance of winning (longer recovery times, and so on). I often encourage players with combat-capable characters to resolve things by fighting out their differences and calling it a day. It really does reduce tensions to have a climactic beat in the story.
Conflicts aren’t supposed to fester passively. In the game’s policies, it’s a social contract of all players to ensure feuds are resolved in a timely manner that’s agreeable to all parties involved.
Additionally, there are factions for players who are into combat, and they can effectively throw hands whenever they please, for the fun of it.
It works, for the most part. The biggest flaw is one I never expected. There have been players who have agreed to fights but say they “won’t fight back.” This completely sucks the fun out of any conflict. You need to nip those anti-fun practices before they spread. Once, in a medium-combat faction, I had the boss NPC of the faction desire a spar with one of the PCs as a way of making up for the PC’s transgression against the faction. The idea being that they fight and all is made right in the end, regardless of who wins the fight. The PC decided to be a pacifist, passed all his combat turns, and said things like, “This won’t solve anything.” (It literally would have solved everything.)
That kind of play makes victories feel hollow, and losses inconsequential. It almost feels like metagaming.
In order for conflict resolution between players to be amicable through contests (strength, art, cooking, and so on), I feel like players have to agree to do a few things:
- Use the tools available to have such contests.
- Actually try to win.
- Make the reward for winning and the penalty for losing feel small. (This one is largely enforced by the theme and occasionally STs.)
There are probably more things I’m forgetting. But it does feel pretty similar to playing a board game with friends.