054 - Counter Coercion & Giving Coercion Fangs

Optional Rules: Counter Coercion

Risk freaking out, be traumatised enough to take it in stride, or roll over. Those are the three current reaction options under Unknown Armies’ coercion rules when threatened. However an alternative resolution when someone backs you up against the wall and things turn ugly is to make threats of your own.

When confronted with a coercion attempt if you have means to coerce that person in turn you can invoke the doctrine of mutually assured destruction to short-circuit their threats. Your estranged sister shows up at your wedding and threatens to ruin the day with tales of your sordid past if you don’t lend/give her a bunch of money? You’ve got grandpa’s ear and if she wants a snowball’s chance of any inheritance when he dies she’ll keep it to herself. You’re standing on the brink of respective Isolation and Helplessness checks but if you both back down things can proceed undisturbed, uneasily.

A tense situation in which the threats go unresolved is probably worth a rank 2-4 stress check on Self, Isolation or Helplessness depending on the circumstances. It’s a stop-gap solution in which both parties have tipped their hands and are left uncertain about whether the other will be able to seize the advantage (or blow up and wreck the whole thing in which case everyone gets to face the consequences).

Optional Rules: Giving Coercion Fangs

A standard success on a coercion check yields a rank 1 stress check (assuming no passions come into it). Everyone has at least 1 hardened notch in every meter (unless you hold GMCs to a different standard) and given how gauges and core abilities work in 3e it’s not unreasonable for them to be much higher, so is the juice worth the squeeze?

One interpretation is: yes, absolutely, if you want to ding someone’s meters you need to put the work in and find a way to incorporate as many of your and their passions as possible and if that doesn’t work then up the ante. Escalation is entirely possible, you just have to be willing to actually go through with it. That works and is well in line with the game’s themes. It’s also a fact that imposing a stress check on someone whether they succeed or not has ongoing consequences to their gauges and may be worth limiting.

On the other hand it’s important enough to merit an identity feature per gauge all to itself and you may feel that threatening someone with a gun is worth more than the rank 1 violence check which everyone can pass by default. Social combat might also be more important to the themes you and your players want to run with, higher powered coercion encourages it over other forms of conflict resolution.

If you find coercion lacking consider bumping the base ranks up a point or two for each tier of success (ie. success 2, matched success 3, crit 4) plus the default 1 rank per passion of the involved parties invoked. Alternatively (or concurrently) grant circumstantial boosts of 1-3 ranks: a gun is more threatening than a knife and photographic evidence of infidelity pushes home the point that someone could wreck your marriage over just mentioning that they know about your affair.