Battle of Wills

Battle of Wills is a clear rip off of clearly inspired by the Duel of Wits mechanic in Luke Crane's Burning Wheel. The idea for both of these mechanics is to provide an interesting way to resolve social conflicts that encourages roleplaying througout the scene. Battle of Wills is designed to be a generic mechanic that can be applied to any game system that has social skills used for task resolution (skills like 'Intimidate', 'Bluff', and 'Diplomacy'...coughD&Dcough).

Battle of Wills uses 2 identical decks of 6 cards each. Each card represents a strategy you might use in an arguement or debate. Each card is also related to an associated skill.

Chose 3 skills from your game system related to how a character would approach using these strategies : :

a skill for using agression in a social conflict (like Intimidate)

a skill for using deception (like Bluff)

a skill for how well spoken or social the character is (like Diplomacy)

Write the appropriate skill onto each card in the space provided. Each skill should be used twice.

One deck is given to the participants on each side of the social conflict. Both sides should agree to the stakes of the conflict (what will happen if either side wins) and agree to how many 'points' or successes are needed to win the conflict (2 out of 3 or whatever).

The conflict will be resolved in rounds. During each round, a participant on each side of the conflict will select one of the strategy cards and place it face down in front of them. Both strategy cards are revealed at the same time. Use whatever initiative system is appropriate for your game. Whoever goes first will roleplay using the strategy on their card to try to make the strongest arguement. The other side will then do the same based on their own strategy card. The cards are then compared to see it one strategy automatically defends versus the other. If it does then that side wins the 'point' for that round. If not then opposed skill checks are made, based on the associated skills for each side's strategy. The winning side of the opposed check would then get the 'point' for that round.

Those cards are then discarded (they are NOT put back into your hand) and play proceeds with the next round until one side has enough 'points' to win the conflict.

If you find these cards fun or useful please drop me a line.

The cards are copyright 2008 by me, Justin Evans through SinisterGame.com, but feel free to print them out and use them as much as you want for personal use. If anybody is interested in publishing them commercially please contact me.

Printing:

There are two PDF files available. Each is 3 pages long. One is designed to be printed on Avery 8871 double sided business cards. The other has crop marks included in case you want to print the cards on regular card stock and cut them yourself.

Make sure 'Page Scaling' is set to 'None' in Adobe Reader otherwise your cards won't line up correctly with the pre-cut business cards.

Also, don't print the entire document since the last page is intended to be the back of all the other pages.