Game in the Brain

Gaming Real Life: Tough Negotiations

Tougher than any Temple of Elemental Evil is the Negotiations or Shakedown of Ruthless or Criminal Business Dealings.

What makes a realistic Negotiation is the stress you get when you are fully aware someone is taking advantage of you and you have to watch and listen to them justify it.

I have a history of panic attacks, even in airsoft I get those shakes. Of course I’ve done a lot to overcome them (hence playing milsim) but there is that tunnel vision when you have to deal with such stressful people.

There is a Battle raging in negotiations. There are maneuvers and tactics as well as distractions and harrying attacks. If I were to use battles to illustrate negotiations, one vital difference is how subjectivity prevents any real winner… unless you have an audience which becomes the 3rd party to grant some objectivity (or recording the conversation to give you political capital to those who would easily see the unfairness or treachery).

There are economics in negotiations. To keep things civil, at least in the beginning, they hear each other out. There is an allotted time and this can be determined by your status, significance in the interaction and the other factors like audience, subject complexity, and chance.

Using the 5 min attention rule. 1d minutes to bring up your points, the GM makes this a secret roll. Status, Significance and many other points add to a the social attribute roll vs the other groups or persons. A contested roll success one more minute, failure none gained, and critical failure 1 less minute.

In a two way relationship leverage matters more than anything else. Three ways and larger groups perception and procedural justice matters. Of course people can gang up on other people making it an “us vs them” thus making it a two-way instead of a more democratic negotiations.

I would role-play most of this, the dice is for determining the time to deliberate and some of the adjudications. The GM and other players should grade how well the other present the points, with the GM the 3rd party and neutral arbiter, and how some points challenge others.

Ex. Who has a stronger claim of being the “victim”, who failed to provide burden of proof, who is being the least transparent, who is making the most barriers to understanding, who is muddying the issues.

Technical considerations, for tracking skill, who best abuses/utilizes fallacies and biases to support their argument can be a side bar. It is used to see who can gain sympathy or political will given their arguments.

Now the time to try to play this… and players who are interested in playing this game. Thats one more big challenge.

sent from my Ipad