Last time I talked about the Setup, in which the Solo player first encountered the threat, acquired the McGuffin and (hopefully) progressed onward. By now the agent should be well on their way out of town, or at the very least approaching the exit point.
So what makes a good Confrontation?
Well, we have one pointer: III of Pentacles. From last time:
III of Pentacles: lack of teamwork, disorganized, group conflict, when inverted. From Labyrinthos: it shows that people are working against each other and undermining the project along the way. There seems to be too much competition between them - each person is trying to display superiority. This results in scarcity of resources - too many people are viewing their project partners as competitors.
The great thing about Solo Ops, and one-on-one sessions in general, is that they share a central tenet of Film Noir: the situation is always bigger than the protagonists. No matter how skilled, worldly-wise or tough the protagonist is, there's always more dangerous threats out there. So the protagonist has to commit themselves to a course of action: no sitting on the fence when the fence is being shot out from under you.
It's all very existentialist; there's no higher power, no greater meaning. Just you, a cold, dark alleyway, and what looks like certain death at the other end of that alleyway. Which fits in very nicely with the spy genre, particularly that kind of passionless double-cross style of spy story beloved of Le Carre and authors like him.
Three Days of the Condor, Sydney Pollack, Eureka
What this means in-game is that while there may be several actors none of them can be trusted. Just because the agent works for the CIA it doesn't mean the CIA has the agent's best interests at heart. This is a setting in which a shadowy enemy might wipe out a station full of people to cover up one secret. Or to gain one bit of information.
So, in-setting, the Conspiracy definitely wants the McGuffin and so does, say, Edom, or China's Room 452. It doesn't follow that Edom can be trusted to bring the agent to safety, any more than Room 452, or the CIA, or even the Conspiracy. In fact there are circumstances in which the Conspiracy might be more trustworthy than Edom, if the Conspiracy thinks it can deny Edom the McGuffin by saving the agent's life.
However as the III of Pentacles points out there's a lot of competition and all those powerful forces rubbing up against each other is bound to cause problems. This is the kind of situation in which ordinary people get killed just because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Mechanically, this is the point at which the difficulty curve goes up. In the Setup you can afford a few easy victories; they help the player feel empowered and move the plot along. From this point forward, it's all Medium difficulty at best, and often Hard. Advances should be difficult to get, and most results should be Hold. The player should feel the need to spend some of those Edges.
Moreover there ought to be at least one double-cross, but it doesn't necessarily have to happen to the agent. There's a lot of pull in having an agent's contact on the receiving end, and the agent finds the bloody remains all over the carpet - or however it plays out.
Or, suppose that same contact walks into the Conspiracy and becomes one of ... them. Or perhaps was one of them all along.
The chief thing to bear in mind is this: by the end of the Confrontation the agent should be:
- Battered, and perhaps holding one or more Injury, Shadow or Heat cards;
- Potentially the not-so-proud owner of a fatal Problem that must be solved for the agent to survive the Resolution;
- In possession of all the knowledge they need to get to and even survive the Resolution;
- Not necessarily in possession of all the resources they need to survive the Resolution, but at least now they know where to get those resources.
The Confrontation exists to fill in the last pieces of the puzzle and to smack the protagonist across the chops at least once if not several times. The Resolution exists to give the protagonist one last hurdle before they crawl, near-eviscerated, across the finish line.
By the end of the Confrontation the agent may or may not have the McGuffin. In fact it's often better if they don't have it, because then the motivation becomes 'recover the McGuffin before whoever has it does something hideous.' The Bond thrillers are often good at this. Scaramanga, say, gets hold of the solex agitator and plugs it into his personal Golden Gun. Nobody really cares what happens to the solex agitator after that, just so long as Scaramanga doesn't get it.
Mind you, watching that again makes me wonder if the planet wouldn't have been better off if James Bond had been shot to death by Scaramanga. At least then we would have had workable solar power in the 1970s, which would have considerably blunted global warming. As it is, the Brits seem to have thrown the agitator in the bin after Bond recovered it. Or perhaps Harold Wilson stepped on it by accident and was too embarrassed to admit it.
So by the end of the Confrontation the agent should know where, geographically, to go next, who has the McGuffin if it isn't the agent, and what they intend to do with it. Which is bad things. It's always bad things.
Maybe Edom intends to assassinate key figures in the European parliament to advance the UK's agenda. Maybe China's Room 452 wants to rejuvenate the Chinese economy through blood magic that will, among other things, liquidate Hong Kong. The Conspiracy almost certainly wants something much worse, and for all their plans to work they need that McGuffin at this Location probably at a specific Time, since it's much more dramatic and thematic to have the final act kick off on some kind of blood solstice than, say, just another Tuesday. Or to shoot De Gaulle on Liberation Day, or whatever the goal may be.
Now we move into the Resolution.
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