How to Keep Stakes Non-Maximal?

Question

Say there's a verbal fight breaking out in school (that is extremely unlikely to be interrupted), or political candidates are having a particularly mudslingy debate. Either way, a Mental/Social Conflict begins, with both participants ready and willing to absolutely demolish each other's mood and reputation. And so it begins, Attacks are exchanged, Consequences taken, but it's only the beginning, and one of the belligerents clearly has much better offence and defence than the other.

What's keeping the winning side from wanting a complete victory (e.g. the politician utterly undermining the other's campaign and pressuring the other to drop out of the race entirely), thus making Concessions largely moot/impossible given the way the goals of the two sides are completely incompatible? What's stopping most such Conflicts from becoming like that?

I'm assuming that there is an immediate urge to answer 'whatever makes sense' non-answer, but that just kicks the can down the line and dodges the matter of finding by what metric one figures out what makes sense. Concession seems like a default button to reach for, but a concession cannot prevent the winning side from achieving its primary goal, so isn't applicable either by RAW.

What would be good metrics by which to estimate the limits of stakes available in a given Conflict, ensuring they can't be just ramped up to the maximum willy-nilly, but in a reasonable/sensible/fair way?

Answer 1

Characters don't concede or accept concessions. Only players do that.

Concession, as a mechanic, specifically faces outward to the real people playing. It's explicitly about the parsing of narrative authority over the fate of the character post-conflict, and nothing else.

Characters do not concede. People do.

-- Fate SRD, "Conceding the Conflict"

So, Dangeresque and Perducci are out for each other's blood, having a knock-down drag-out fight in the bowels of the ship.

Perducci shoots Dangeresque in the gut with a harpoon gun, pinning him to the hull and punching through a weak point. As the ship lists, taking on water, Perducci escapes with his life rather than confirm his old enemy's death.

This is the result of a negotiated concession between a player and the GM. It is not, and I need to stress this, the result of Dangeresque turning to Perducci and saying "hey man, you're kicking my ass real bad here and I'm not up for dying right now, so how about instead...". That would be comical. Farcical, even!

The players of the game are coming together to make a decision about what happens next that temporarily sets aside apparent character motivations. You'll see this even in the example conflict in the Fate Core book. When it's time to pick sides, it's the fairly pithy and straightforward "Og and his buddies want to do in the PCs", but when Landon concedes? "[Og] knocks you out, spits on you, and takes your sword."

Characters don't really pick an absolute, immutable goal on their way into the conflict, so there can be some flexibility in how they exit it, in success or failure.

"But my character would accept nothing less than your character's broken, lifeless body/reputation!"

Easy there, cowboy. Your character is not an immutable being separate from yourself. That way lies My Guy syndrome, and that's not a good time for anybody, even you.

You get what you want out of the conflict because you won it, but crucially, there wasn't a time where you made a secret note before the conflict about what you wanted, and now its contents are binding for everybody. There also wasn't a time when you made an open note before the conflict about what you wanted and everybody agreed to it, and now its contents are binding for everybody. There are systems where you do pre-set stakes, like Shock and pretty much the entire Burning Wheel family, but Fate isn't one of them.

When a concession happens, or when one side takes the other side out, then it's time for you, as a player, to decide what your character will accept. You do make informal statements prior to this, usually as part of taking sides for the conflict, so that everybody knows the rough scale they're heading into, as suddenly finding out you've been in a bake-off TO THE DEATH often offends. But now is when you decide.

And if somebody's conceded out of the conflict, they also get to decide what they'll accept happening to their character. That's the benefit of conceding instead of hanging in until you're taken out.

Everyone Writing A Story For Everyone

Fate is a game that's a little more explicit about how you're both the player of a character and a contributing author of an interesting story that involves everyone's characters. The entire Fate Point economy, particularly the part of it that's compels, makes use of that author stance - as the author you're aware that your character is going to make things harder on themselves and the payoff is a point for you. As a character you probably don't think you're doing anything particularly awful but then things suddenly turn south.

Concluding conflicts involves working together with your fellow players as authors to mark out a little space for the concessions and plot a course for the winners. So all you really need to do to stop this resolution from going for maximalist stakes is to find literally anything at all that the winners want more than to end the losers' story. And there's an entire universe full of things to have, some of which probably make a lot more sense to take now that you've proven yourself superior to the person who previously had them.

Just look at Og. It turns out they wanted to take a trophy more than they wanted to be a cold-blooded murderer.

Answer 2

There's some good insights in the answers to this question that address the ways concession interacts with maximal stakes. In the case of that question, it was character death, but the examples can be extrapolated. Based on the text on page 167 and the game play excerpt that follows, conceding protects the conceding party from "the worst parts of their fate" — the victor achieves their primary goal (winning the debate) and describes what happens afterward (humiliation) but doesn't get the most extreme parts (withdrawing from the political campaign).