Keep Them Talking

Someone has locked themselves in a room with something they took: a ledger, a film print, a case of seed, a painting due under the hammer at ten. You're the negotiator on the other end of the line, and you have six beats to talk them out. Your polyhedral set is your voice. The d4 is Patience , the d6 Honesty , the d8 Leverage , the d10 Empathy , the d12 Authority and the d20 is the Gambit . Each beat you roll a d12 tell to see which approach they'll hear and which one they're braced for, choose a die, and roll it against the Pressure die. Win and the Pressure steps down a size. Lose and it climbs. Use an approach and it's burned for the call, unless they were open to it and it landed. Step the Pressure off the bottom and they open the door. Push it past the d20 and the line goes dead. The Gambit doesn't face the Pressure at all: it swings two steps either way, and on a 1 or 2 it ends the call. In the book (30 pages, A4 and US Letter): the rules on five pages, and a full call played out beat by beat the tell, want, offer and ultimatum tables for the other voice six calls that make one night shift, each with a brief, a beat sheet and three endings a desk sheet for your dice, a blank call to write your own, a shift log and a quick reference a six-sided-dice conversion, if you don't have a full set A call takes about fifteen minutes. The dice were checked over 5,000 simulated calls: about four in ten end clean and three in ten end badly, and the last call is the hardest. Every call is a standoff over a stolen thing. Nobody is hurt.