• The Sixth Bullet - Zach Tucker
  "Do you know me, Tucker? Do you know me?!?"
  
  As the rules suggested, we started with a protagonist without much in the way of background. We decided her name was Laurie Burk, and we also decided that in keeping with the Italo-Western theme of the game, there'd be a rape somewhere in the back-story once we got to it.
  
  The scene starts in Mexico, as Laurie busted in to a rickety bath-house to confront Zach Tucker keeping company with a pudgy border whore. Tucker's drunk as a skunk and he doesn't recognize Laurie. Even so, when he goes for his gun, Laurie blows him away. We closed the scene with the bathwater draining from bullet-holes in the wooden tub and the whore screaming hysterically.
  
  
• The Fifth Bullet - Bully Mullins
  "Bitch, I'll break your head in!"
  
  Because we didn't have a lot to work with, either rules-wise or players (there are two of us), we could afford to play a little fast-and-loose with the structure of the game. Maybe we took some liberties we shouldn't have, maybe not. At any rate, Laurie dropped Vengeance by one and gave herself The Gun.
  
  I worked from a list of randomly generated names, kind of mixing and matching as needed. The next ne'er-do-well was Bully Mullins. We were still a little iffy on scene-setting and getting used to the game, so the scene started in a grubby cantina somewhere along the border. Bully Mullins was a burly drunkard (Fisticuffs 1).
  
  Laurie came in straight-on and confronted Bully in the bar. People cleared out of the way when they saw she had a gun, but Bully just went wild with his fists. This is the one of only two scenes where we made more than a single roll to resolve events, and maybe if we had more experience with the game we might have been able to eliminate even those two.
  
  Whatever the case, Laurie lost the conflict because she didn't have an applicable trait to offset Bully's Fisticuffs and rolled poorly. So Bully used Laurie as a punching bag for a little while -- broken furniture, smashed bottles, etc. -- until Laurie got her pistol out and gunned him down. Six dice (The Gun, plus Vengeance) certainly get the job done.
  
  
• The Fourth Bullet -- Neil Lucas
  "Can't we talk this over?" -- "No. We can't."
  
  At this point we'd had two scenes that consisted of busting in and shooting somebody, so I framed this one differently: Neil isn't as much of a dirty scum as the other two (Charm - 2), and plays cards in a decent saloon. Laurie couldn't just blast him without severe repercussions (all those witnesses). Even so, Laurie took another point of The Gun when she dropped her Vengeance.
  
  A note about that: it seemed easier to track changes scene-by-scene than to wait and suddenly say, "Oh! Stop! I want to define one of my traits!" So we just did it each time we transitioned to the next bullet. Again, I'm sure that's not what the designer intended, but it seemed to work for this session, at least.
  
  Anyhow, because Neil was playing cards and the place was pretty much a man's playground, Laurie decided to bribe one of the working girls to let her into Neil's room (Vengeance vs. Charm -- I figured Neil was popular enough for people to want to watch his back and Laurie had the intensity of her quest behind her).
  
  Late that night, when Neil finally came to his room, Laurie was there. But first a moment to discuss Vengeance. We thought it might be interesting to try another game where Vengeance was a scene-by-scene pool where dice could be pulled individually or en masse to assist with various rolls throughout. Most of the time it doesn't matter, obviously, because there's only one roll, but in this case it would have been nice for Laurie to be able to draw on her Vengeance again.
  
  As might be expected, Neil tried to talk his way out things. Charm vs. The Gun. The Gun wins.
  
  
• The Third Bullet - Dave Bennett
  "You? You're supposed to be dead!"
  
  This scene turned out a little... strange. Because the game's structure requires that the antagonist in a given scene must die, it seemed somewhat counterintuitive for Laurie to lose her roll (as she does) and still see Bennett die. In the end we worked it out narratively, but we actually had to stop and mull it over for a little bit.
  
  "Let's start this scene in church," I said. Laurie's taken a break from the vengeance trail to get right with God in a little whitewashed church somewhere in Texas. When the service lets out, Dave Bennett (Guns - 3) comes riding in, liquored up and blazing mad.
  
  Laurie killed Lloyd Bennett, apparently, and Dave wants his own revenge. When he recognizes Laurie, he proclaims that she's supposed to be dead. Guns blaze.
  
  At this point Laurie took Quick at one. We decided this could mean both physically and mentally adept. Either way, it played into the confrontation, so we had Dave's Guns vs. Laurie's Vengeance, Quick and The Gun. And she still lost the roll!
  
  Laurie can't die. And she can't be crippled or anything like that because it would make no sense in the context of the scenes that came before. Oh, and Dave has to die. What the hell do we do?
  
  In the end, I decided that Dave winged Laurie and she went down. Her gun was empty and Dave closed in for the kill. At the last possible second, he's shot down by the pastor: two barrels of 12-gauge to the chest. Laurie has her revenge (sort of).

Posted By: Andrew KenrickOk, that's interesting, and something I've seen happen, too. Although the rules don't limit you to the number of conflicts, it does seem to be a piece of emergent game play that you narrate an escalating situation, then roll a single conflict that ends in death and closes the scene. Did this work for you? Would you additional conflicts have worked or would it have diminished the tension?