The game is really good, and I'm really looking forwards to playing it with people. There will be a limited edition available (well, all the editions will be limited, but thats another post) at DexCon. That's in, like, 2 weeks! Holy crap!

Also, here's the website. Let me know if any egregious errors or painful formatting is happening.

Why do I keep doing this to myself again?

The Saturday sessions were great-- I played Brennan Taylor's awesome game called "How We Came to Live Here." It's set in a flavor I've never really had the taste for, but the structure of the game made it such that I'd love to play it again, and I was actually really drawn in by the color. (Although that night at Meg's, I talked to him briefly about how great it would be to play a game of it with some Celtic color, because it'd work really well. Shreyas threw up a little in his mouth at the suggestion, but whatever.) I ended up winning a copy of Caper! for the JiffyCon superlatives contest-- "Best character name: She Births The Dead." (My character was known for having stillborn children.)

In the afternoon, Meg, Don Corcoran, and Nathan all joined Shreyas and I for a game of It's Complicated. Nathan said it best: "Worst. Moon Festival. Ever." It was a ridiculous game about virgins and unicorns that was a cross between Shakespearean comedy and porn. It went really well though, and I learned that although you might only be able to get through a round of play a session online, you can get through an entire gameboard in 2-3 hours in person. I really enjoyed it, and everyone has expressed a desire to play it again sometime, which makes me really happy.

On Sunday, we playstormed my new game Homecoming: One Soldier's Story. The premise is something I came up with when Shreyas and I were driving to visit my family in Ohio, since my nephew just got back from a year and a half of bouncing between Iraq and Afghanistan. Meg, Emily, and Nathan were my playstormers, and holy crap, those Imagination Sweatshop people know what they're doing. I've got more than enough material for a first draft, and thanks to Nathan, a super-hot conflict resolution/resource management system I'm really excited about.

It was so great seeing every single one of my favorite people! I wish every day were JiffyCon.

Oh right! I said "Other Awesomeness." It looks as though I'm going to be doing some photography for one of the versions of Nathan's amazing game Annalise, which is way exciting! I'm also doing the art and cover for Emily Care Boss' highly-anticipated, much-beloved Under My Skin. Yay for projects!

I think I failed at planning, so I'm not on the sched to run anything, but I'm bringing some options for pickups if we need more games. Also, I have no other things I need to do this weekend, so I'm looking forwards to spending real-person time with you folks out there.

Also, there should be some exciting announcements about Annalise coming soon. The last playtest went really well, and things are developing apace.

I should have pictures upon my return.

So we're all familiar with the idea that, the farther away a given group is from the designer along the personal-experience-with chain, the less likely it is that they will play a game in the way that the designer intended it. There's a degradation of experience. And the response to this idea is that rules, if well-designed AND well-explained, will make this degradation less. If I play Burning Wheel with Luke, I'm getting the experience as he intends it; if I then go and play Burning Wheel with other people, they're getting it "second-hand" through me, but the rules are good enough and the book is well-written enough that the experience should be pretty close; and so on.

However, as a subjective experience, no game is ever played the same twice by strict application of the rules. I mean, even when playing my own games, there's some nights when some parts of the rules just aren't emphasized, or don't apply, or I forget them, or whatever. Rules application in play is subject to so many factors that I think many (not all, or even most, but many) games never see their rules applied consistently across groups and across time.

This train of thought leads me to two conclusions. First, the growth of this concept that you can play a roleplaying game simply by applying the mechanics. I've played in games like this, hell I've run games like this, particularly oneshots, where the game consists of make characters, set a scene, identify a conflict, resolve the conflict, repeat until mechanical triggers change your characters stats, and so on. I've left some of these games feeling unsatisfied, because I wasn't doing any roleplaying. To be more specific, I was all the way out on one end of the participant-audience spectrum (either end, doesn't matter).* I think this is a trend, like fortune-at-the-end stakes setting, that we'll all get over soon enough, but I think the origin of the trend can be traced back to what I'm talking about in the first paragraph.

Anyway, the more interesting thought that I'm having is that a well-designed game isn't aimed at enabling any group to apply the rules in the same way that the designer does. A well-designed game is aimed at enabling any group to share the experience that the designer wants the players of the game to share. But - and here's the tricky bit - enabling an experience may require actually placing different and non-complimentary sets of procedures in your game, depending on how accessible you want the game to be to players of different playstyles and backgrounds. This is something that Jonathan Walton, among others, is aware of (whether he knows it or not). Read his blog with this in mind, and there's some really exciting things that he's doing.

So, in concrete terms, Annalise is being written with a guide to how different people should approach the book. I don't care whether people apply the rules in exactly the right order, but I DO care about whether they have a rockin' time making a gothic horror story with their friends. Cuz in the end, that's what matters.

*This is referring to how I define roleplaying, way back in this post from the early days

[wpvideo dIpUC6uj]

Whenever you get into a moment in the game, the group generates an array of possible achievements and consequences that could come out of the moment. If you read down the paper, you can kinda see the flow of the game based on which achievements and consequences were on hand for the various moments. Which is hella cool!

I plan to revise it into something a little easier to parse at the table (probably with little circles or boxes for assigning dice, with the chart at the bottom that tells you which number means which either relegated to a different play aid kinda thing, or integrated into the sheet in a less obtrusive manner).

Anyway, something I've been meaning to post for awhile. In general life news, we're at the end of the season at the shop I work at, so we're in the big final build crunch. Lot's of overtime in the next two weeks, but no free time a'tall. I am waiting on the proofs for the next printing of carry, though, so that is probably the next thing I'll be posting about.

Also, news soon about my booth at Gen Con!

While at the Mike Doughty concert tonight, I wrote a miniature game, and I thought I'd share:

Carrying a Torch

an autobiographical roleplaying game

So, you remember the first person you really loved? The first person you really hurt or hated? The way it changed you? That's what this game is about.

Carrying a Torch is a story about how your relationships can have really pervasive, intense effects on your psychology, even long after those relationships have changed or moved on.

To play, you need a group of people who are pretty close, and some writing instruments, a number of smallish moveable markers such as Parcheesi pawns, and character sheets. The character sheets are laid out to support at most six characters, but in principle there's no reason not to play with more. Each player will have one character; you get to say what that character says and does.

Start by describing a close-knit group of people. Fill out the top part of your character sheet; write down the character's name and something about him. Then, choose an archetype card for each of the other characters; don't tell them which archetype you chose. In the bottom half of the archetype card, write the character's name. This card indicates what that character means to your character; it's a lens by which he looks at their interactions.

Take a look at an archetype card if you haven't already; you'll see that it has a name on top, a meter down the right side, and two halves labelled "Heal me" and "Hurt me." The meter tells you how good you're feeling about that character at the moment; it starts in the centre point, at equilibrium. When you interact with this character, if they do the thing in "Heal me," it makes you feel good, and if they do the other thing, it makes you feel bad. It doesn't so much matter what else they do. When an archetype card says, "me," it means you, not the archetype. It represents what you say to the archetype.

So, when they heal you, first nudge the marker on their meter one notch upward. Now, if the marker's in the top half of the meter, then move the big meter on your character sheet toward the good end as many spaces as the marker is distant from the center, and if it's in the centre or in the bottom half, only move it one space. That is to say, if you're in a pattern of healing interactions with that character, then they affect you more, and it has more influence on your holistic well-being.

That's what the big meter is, by the way, and notice that I didn't decide for you which end is the good end, so you're going to have to make that decision and record it ASAP.

Now, when they hurt you, it works a similar way; nudge their meter down and read it like the heal meter, but reversed; if it's in the good half, then it only takes you down a notch, but if it's in the bad half then you can go down several notches.

Now you'll see that your meter has some big Os on it, at the ±5 and ±10 marks as well as the dotted-O at equilibrium. If an interaction makes you cross just one of the fives, then your character does something big in his life. If it was +5, then it's a thing that improves your life. If it's –5, then it's a decision that's ultimately bad, but it looks fine for now. The next time someone hurts you, they'll let you know why it wasn't such a great idea.

That's not the only thing that happens! You reset your meter to 0, and the character that caused this turn in your life turns over. You choose a new archetype to represent him, or you choose a different character and a different archetype to occupy that spot in your character sheet.

Finally, you imprint that archetype. Set the turned-over archetype card to the side; now all characters can heal or hurt you in that way, to the tune of their own relationship meters. If they're a character that doesn't have an archetype for you, then their meter always reads 0. If you have to decide whether a character's healing or hurting you because an imprint and their archetype disagree, then follow their archetype.

If an interaction makes you cross two Os, which is to say that it goes from less-than-ten to ten or more, or makes you cross 0 and a 5, then all that stuff above happens, but you imprint asymmetrically. If you were healed, cross out the hurt on that card. If you were hurt, cross out the heal. Only the interaction that remains affects you.

You might run out of archetypes eventually. Maybe you should, like, stop playing.

Annalise, by Nathan Paoletta: I hate horror games for two reasons-- I'm easily scared, and horror games either are scary or stupid. I don't like cheesy suspense or ridiculous tropes, and I don't want to be up all night freaking out or have nightmares. I'd heard excellent things about Annalise, including stuff about the "secret" mechanic which I thought might be a great jumping-off point for an issue we've been having over at Two Scooters with Thousand-Leaved Grass, so I decided I'd risk being scared silly or bored sleepy and sign up for the playtest. The system sounded cool, and I figured even if the game wasn't my thing, I'd get to see something interesting in action.

The game was an obscene amount of fun. Obscene.

Annalise isn't just a vampire game; it's hard to describe what it is. It's a puzzle, it's dark and lovely but not sad or spooky: it's suspenseful without nailbiting, introspective and badass at the same time. There's a surprising amount of revelatory moments for a GMless game; you never know what's going to happen, or how things will turn out. It was one of the finest play experiences I've had in a long time, and I want to play again soon, and badly.

Mist-Robed Gate, by Shreyas Sampat: You might claim that I am biased when it comes to this game, since its origins are rooted in me tugging on Shreyas' sleeve and saying "Could you write me an Exalted game without all the suck and superpowers? You know, something sad and wuxia based, all tears and kung fu?" And you'd be right. But as anyone who was at JiffyCon (or anywhere in Central Square, I think) can attest due to the insanely loud, boisterous playtest, any bias I have is totally irrelevant in the face of the awesomeness that is this game.

What is there to say? There's a knife-passing ritual with an actual knife that is one of the most viscerally affecting experiences I've had in a roleplaying game. The game generation system creates stories which are complex and nuanced and still familiar somehow. The color is astonishing. The game needs a combat system, but other than that, it was essentially completely finished out-of-the-box, which is a hell of an accomplishment for a first playtest. That was the single best playtest I've ever experienced, and one of the best game sessions of my life, period. I want a weekly game of Mist-Robed Gate so badly I can taste it.

This my first time co-sponsoring an event (along with Dev) and it went pretty darn smoothly. We had a good attendance of 30+, including peeps from far-flung NYC and New Jersey (thanks for making the trip, yo!) as well as locals and many representative from Western Mass. We even had more people than games in our morning slot, and Dev got to run a playtest of his game The Dance and the Dawn. So it was, like, Boston designer playtest day, between that, my Annalise, and Jonathon's Geiger Counter.

I facilitated a very solid playtest game of Annalise in the morning, and played Misspent Youth (again, a playtest) in the afternoon. I think Rob got some good feedback out of that game, so that's a nice feeling.

And I saw friends and had a good solid chunk of social time! Shreyas and Elizabeth were wonderful houseguests, and it's always exciting to see the friends I've made since getting into this fragment of the hobby. Thanks everyone for coming!

And, without further ado, the pictures:

Jonathon and Shreyas have introspective moments while playing Annalise. Prominently displayed is our third sponsor and official morning fuel of JiffyCon, Dunkin' Donuts. In the background are Melissa, Kat and someone I can't make out playing the Dance and the Dawn.

Adam Flynn winds up for another knockout punch while running Spirit of the Century! for a full and (from what I was overhearing at the time) enthusiastic table.

There were some kind folks present who have been filming a documentary on Pandemonium, the game store that graciously provided our venue for JiffyCon. They came by and filmed a couple games and did a couple of interviews, and were generally cool people. Yay, JiffyCon on film! I'll be sure to put a link when the thing is available.

Two friendly fellows whose names I, unfortunately, don't remember (sorry guys! though, they were playing characters by the names of Sam and Cornelius, respectively) flank Eppy as he poses for me. Ah, always posing for me, thats my Epidiah. We were playing Misspent Youth, by the way.

My Misspent Youth character sheet and notes.

Emily Care Boss playing Shooting the Moon with John and Deanne Adams. John is aghast at the dastardly deeds of Emily's shootin' fingers.

Shreyas runs a playtest of Mist Robed Gate for a packed and super-boisterous table. There were tears AND Kung Fu. Most excellent.

So, again, thanks everyone for coming! It was a blast!

And it's something that I always toss out after playtesting, because it always feels weird and forced to me, and I don't actually like playing with that dynamic!

So, in Annalise, the downward pressure is now purely mechanical, I think. Even getting a lot of what you want out of a given moment will drain your resources (heh, drain, vampires, get it?!), and I think you will always have to be measuring your replenishing resource against whats happening in the fiction. I hope. Play will tell.

Anyway, I'm working on finishing the current draft for JiffyCon, and I think a last piece that I really like just fell into place. See, in the first (well, technically second) part of play, it is certainly possible that you will hit 0 in at least one of your core stats. What that means in the fiction is that the Vampire gains some kind of hold over you (be it mystical, emotional, mind control, whatever). This can potentially happen multiple times, though I don't see it happening much more than twice unless you want it to happen to your character.

The last (well, technically second-to-last) part of play is about confronting the Vampire. And I was all "so, how should that thing about the Vampires hold over you matter once you actually confront the bastard?". And I came up with this little slightly baroque thing where you have a consequence (any moment has both consequences and achievements) that is automatically added to any moment during your confrontation with the Vampire. This consequence says "You give in to the Vampire." Mechanically, if you have no holds on you, it's present but it is guaranteed not to happen unless someone else at the table rerolls it on purpose, and it becomes more mechanically likely the more holds the Vampire has over you.

It's a little pure system thing that I think (and hope) will really push the core arc of the game without having to force the people at the table to compete with each other. You can all get along great and really wanna help each other out, and it's still a possible threat to everyone, all the time.

I hope it works! We'll see soon!

It's kind of nice being around a bunch of people who are designing out on the fringe (Walton & Dev & Shreyas, for the record). It makes me feel warm and safe in my standardized/normalized design and business practices. But then I look back at the people setting those standards (Vincent & Evil Hat & Luke), and go "holy crap, I am doing something wierd and strange, aren't I?"

I hope y'all don't mind when I name names. It's a response to the nethabit of never specifying who or what you are talking about. Particularly when yer yelling about trends in game design and publishing.

In happy news, Annalise playtest at JiffyCon Boston! Once that's over, I should be able to finish up the current draft and get in touch with you poor bastards who have indicated interest in reading/playtesting. Then, once my current Wednesday D&D game wraps up in a couple weeks, full playtest with that group. Super exciting!

• theft
• iPod
• Jenny's vulnerability
• car
• Piercings
• Heavily Tattooed
• "Victim of Society" type store
• Mr. Mysterious (used a lot)
• Crush (used the most, I think)
• could have been suspended (used)
• Blood (used, I think)
• The Tattoo Parlor
• Your Most Reviled Teacher (used one, maybe?)
• warning from a teacher

So, this little list makes me happy, in the "oh I totally remember where all those things came up in our game!" way.

Second: In an hour or so I'm leaving for Dreamation. Unlike years past, I'm only there for a couple days, and I didn't schedule anything. I'm looking forwards to treating it like a vacation, hanging out, playing informal games and seeing friends old and new. Yay Dreamation!

Third: Annalise is going well! I'm happy with the new new rules. The only problem is I'm having some language problems. I played with Shreyas over the weekend (oh, yeh, it's actually really good as a two-player game, by the way. Super-exciting!) and was all "so, this thing I call a conflict, that's not what it is, right?" and he's all "yeh, that's not at all what this is at all". The best we could come up with is calling it an Event, because at least it's not wrong, but I'm still trying to come up with something thats right to call it. Maybe this weekend will be helpful in that regard.

Anyhow, I need to clean up the text and rewrite some examples, but I think it's almost in shape for sending off to people who aren't me! I have some people specific I wanna send it to, but I'll also be doing a public call (? ugh, such a gross word) for readers/playtesters in the near future. Stay tuned.

So I have this new thing now, that doesn't break conflicts down as much, and has a different way of using the dice, and it inspired (like so many other things) by Otherkind. Basically, you'll have some number of dice in a trait, and you'll be rolling that many dice (say, 5) against some number of dice rolled by your Scene Guide (say, 6). You roll em and order them in ascending order, then match the orders to create pairs. So, like, if you roll 6,5,4,2,2 and the SG rolls 5,4,4,3,3,2, the pairs will be 6-5, 5-4, 4-3, 2-3, 2-2, naught-2.

Then, then owner of the higher die in each pair assigns the pair to either Victory or Growth.

Then, you get to use claims to reroll stuff and sometimes shift pairs from one pool to the other.

Then, whoever has the highest single die in Victory wins and gets to say how, and then the winner of each other pair in Victory gets to add additional stuff, complications, etc. Then all those dice go back to the traits and pools they came out of.

Then, each high dice in each pair in the Growth pool feeds into the individual characters experience economy, and the lower dice in each pair goes back to the general shared Scene Guide effectiveness pool.

I think this will be easier to grok. I hope it will, at least. It keeps all the dice on the table for the entirety of the conflict, which should help. It makes conflicts a little more totalizing that I know that I'm comfortable with, but at the same time, the pair-by-pair narration in the older system was something that often got skipped over in play, so maybe expanding the scope isn't worst idea in the world.

* * *

Anyway, the interesting part: the Annalise soundtrack thus far tonite:

• Healer - Falling Whispers
• Orgy - Pure
• Depeche Mode - Judas
• Goldfrappe - Oompa Radar
• Bush - Machinehead
• Rammstein - Amerika
• Depeche Mode - Only When I Lose Myself
• Healer - Yailly
• Bush - Chemicals Between Us
• Lords Of Acid -Hey Ho!
• She Wants Revenge - Sister

There were some serious driving adventures, what with getting stupid lost trying to get to Stow to pick up Dave Younce (who is cool and I hope to see more of in the future) on the way out, and getting pulled over (but only given a warning!) on the way back. If you haven't yet, you should check out the pictures put up by Bret and Shreyas. Here's what my morning Annalise game looked like (sans players):

The game went very well, I thought. We managed to get through the whole thing in the 4.5 hours or so of the morning session, with three players. This is a fairly accelerated pace, as the game is designed to go for maybe 3 or 4 sessions with 4 players, but I think we made it work just fine.

Our story was a small one. We played three high schoolers in a small town in middle America, two girls who were friends and thought that they were better than everyone else for different reasons, and a geeky guy who felt like he had to to handle everything important by himself. He has a crush on one of the girls. They all end up going into the big city to see a KMFDM show, with some stoner goth friends. At the show, they see their Con Law teacher, all gothed-up, who doesn't seem too happy to see them. Over the course of the show, a Mysterious Stranger appears, and it becomes apparent that a segment of the crowd is very, very enthusiastic. Blood begins to pool on the floor. The Mysterious Stranger is very interested in the girl that the guy has a crush on.

The show ends, and the kids are kept from leaving by a number of tattooed strangers who seem to be taking orders from the Mysterious Stranger. The other girl is taken to an abandoned office by a "bouncer", and the guy and girl (who has started to reciprocate the crush) are stopped by their teacher, who had tried to warn them, and now says that he'll get the other girl if they think they can make it out on their own. The Mysterious Stranger stops them as they try to leave, the guy (who reveals that he hears voices in his head) ends up taking him out by stabbing him in the neck with the inverted crucifix worn by one of the tattooed guys. They run for it.

The teacher takes out the "bouncer" and frees the other girl, and tells her to run for it when he gives the word. He gives it, and she starts across the club, and sees her goth friends tied up in chairs and bleeding out of open wounds, with a bunch of creepy tattooed people dancing and, uh, partaking. She reveals that she doesn't think that anyone is actually good enough to be her friend, and she escapes before anyone can stop her.

The next day, their Con Law class goes as normal, except that they get one significant eyebrow from the teacher. The guy and girl have an awkward "hey-you-like-me-huh" conversation, and kind of end up asking each other out.

I still have some work to do on the game, specifically with messing with the main conflict mechanic so that it makes sense to people other than me, but I'm amazed with how solid it is. We had a really fun game, and many thanks to Kat and Melissa for playing with me!

In the afternoon, I played Jeff Lower's Giants with Jeff and Shreyas. Here's the map from our game. It's really cool. I played a fire demon giant and Shreyas played a giant Wolf lord, and we stopped the Eternal Winter from coming by laying waste to a human city with an insane king. The game is fun, and I want to play a long-term game of it, maybe after the holidays. I mean this as a total compliment, though it may sound bad: The game is like being a Giant. Simple, direct, big (in scope and character), and without a lot of extraneous material. And making the map is super-fun.

Dinner was big and fun, and I got to catch up with people and just spend quality time.

After dinner was also big and fun. I ended up splitting off from the Baker's and going over to Julia's with Dev, Dave Younce and Eppie, and later Other Nathan showed up. We hung out and petted Julia's beautiful cats and played Murder Ballad Blackjack. It's like Baron Munchhausen for folk song nerds. I liked it!

And then homewards, with misadventures.

I feel...not recharged, per se, but more just reassured that the people I know from this community rock, and that I can depend on them to have a good time sharing a hobby I love without needed to engage with all the shit on the internet that I hate. And that's a good feeling.

Can't wait 'til the next one.

I'm running a weekly Aberrant game for some friends, which is going well and is scratching all my long-term-established-setting-high-character-immersion itches.

I was playing in a weekly GURPS game with rotating "campaigns", but I'm sitting the next cycle out. I need time to work on Annalise. It's, as my buddy who's playing in both of these games with me and who playtested Darkpages and Annalise with me aptly said, "A different kind of fun".

Speaking of, I'll be running it at JiffyCon, and shortly therafter have it available for interested readers, I expect. This is the first game I'm writing while listening to an extensive soundtrack (or any soundtrack at all, really), which has been a very rewarding ritual. So far tonite:

• Depeche Mode
• Goldfrappe
• Rammstein
• Oingo Boingo
• Lords of Acid
• Healer
• Evanescence
• The New Pornographers
• Rilo Kiley
• The Cure
• Sisters of Mercy
• Bauhaus

Though, the single theme song for the game is definitely Bat for Lashes's 'Sarah'.

How the game works is, each player has a scene for their character in rotation, and when it's your turn you pick one of the other players to be your scene guide. The other people get to have a hand in your scene, but it's basically you and the scene guide until you're done. Anyway, we have four people, so it could maybe be really effective to have two pairs going at once, until all the characters are up to speed. We shall see.

Anyhow, I recorded the session, which I hope turns out to be as useful as I think it'll be. We discovered that there's some kind of creepy occult group centered around mystical glyphs that get carved on people's teeth, which may or may not be in the service of the vampire. My character isn't willing to let anyone or anything get the better of her, and she's trying to figure out what's up with this cult; Jesse's character keeps on getting these messages, through various channels, that someone or something is "watching him", and he's trying to figure out the cult as well, using math; and Can's character is rapidly getting absorbed into the cult, though he may or may not end up fighting against it. Pat's character is the unknown equation - so far, all we know is that he's on someone's trail, though not for what purpose.

This game centers around my favorite part of roleplaying, and it's working in that way really well. It needs some economy fixing, and we have yet to see how the second half of it plays, but I'm feeling really positive. Really, really positive.

Yay!

From my current intro:

The games is about creating Vampire stories from the perspective, not of the Vampire, but of his victims, servants, enemies, and others affected by his appetites. This is creating the story of Dracula by playing Van Helsing, Mina Harker and Renfield; it is the story of Lost Boys by playing the younger brother, the two vampire hunters and the grandfather.

We did character discovery and the first scene of the first phase of play, and it was solid. I mean, I took a ton of notes, and I have an idea of stuff to start carving away now, and we obviously have just barely began to engage with the economy and reward cycles, but my group seemed pleased with the core stuff and we're looking forwards to continuing it (or at least I am).

Anyway, I'm polishing up my notes and procedural rules text into a more human-readable document. The stuff for the first phase of play is all done (with copious examples!), and the second "half" of the game is mostly elaborations and modifications of the mechanics for the first part, so it shouldn't take so long to finish up.

The point being, by next weekend I should have a fairly usable playtest draft. So, if anyone's interested in checking it out, lemme know!

Oh, and here's a first draft of the "first half" character sheet. It's looking like you'll need a different sheet for the second half, and this one is actually already out of sync with my latest rules revision, but whatever. I'm digging how it looks so far.

Annalise Character Sheet

I'm excited.

"Once the active player and the scene guide both have dice, they roll them and order them sequentially. Look at the highest single result for each person; if the active player is higher, then he "wins" the first volley, and he describes how his trait and actions get him closer to his goal. If the scene guide is higher, than the active player loses the first volley, and the scene guide describes what this means in the fiction. If they are a tie, both dice are returned to their owners and you look at the next highest pair. If all pairs are ties, then the contest is interrupted by something that means it will have to continue on later. This something can be declared by anyone at the table, and that person automatically claims the conflict (as it has become a discrete repeatable action)."

That's right; ties mean that the conflict gets broken off before it's resolved, and turns into a resource that someone can bring back at any time in order to influence a different conflict. That's hella cool, no?