The Windkey and the Lamplighter

We tried out [Nobilis][] recently. It’s a very attractive game. We
had some serious problems with it, though. Some are our own fault:
character creation can take a long time, we knew it, and we still
tried to do creation and run a short game in one session. Maybe with
more emphasis on alacrity, we’d have had more luck. But some are due
to mismatches between the game’s intent and the way we were playing.

For all that Nobilis is an avant-garde, indie RPG, it still uses a
task-resolution system. The mechanics provide support for answering
whether your character can perform particular miraculous activities,
and for answering questions about resource management. They don’t
provide good support for answering which of two debaters convinces an
audience. I screwed up: I ran a game about convincing a doubting soul
to either reject his faith or to confirm it. And I presented the
central conflict as being about convincing him. This left us without
mechanical support for the central question of the game. Whoops!
Now we’re playing Convince the GM, a boring game at the best of times.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have left things there. I should have
pushed the players harder—rather than letting the bad guys give them
an easy time, playing by the rules, the bad guys should have cheated.
Abduct the guy they’re all trying to convince and don’t let the PCs
have access. Then I can assume that, if given access, the PCs will
win the war of words—they just need to get there in the first
place. That gets us out of Convince the GM, and into territory
supported by the game’s system. From this experience, I set forth a
law for conflict-based games with task-resolution systems:

The only conflicts playable in the game are composed of tasks
supported by the game.

If something can’t be done with tasks supported by the game, it can’t
become a subject of conflict within the game—it has to be resolved
by GM fiat. For example, the ultimate outcome of a Flower Rite in
Nobilis can’t be resolved with miracles. So it has to be done by
fiat. Therefore, any conflict around the flower rite has to come from
something else, like getting to the center, finding it, or removing
opposing elements. No moves in the game can lead the players to
occupy the winning position in the central conflict, so they must
already occupy it—and the question becomes how to secure that
victory.