Trust, heat and standing
Three quantities carry the politics. Trust is private and pairwise, heat is how much attention is on you, standing is what the room thinks of you, and only trust can buy an alliance.
The three
| Who holds it | What moves it | What it buys | |
|---|---|---|---|
| trust | a pair, privately | time spent together, favours, betrayals | the only road to an alliance |
| heat | one person, publicly | loud moves, being exposed, being talked about | visibility, good or fatal by room |
| standing | one person, publicly | toasts, refusals, being seen to win | how seriously a move of yours lands |
Trust is slow and asymmetric
It drifts upward between people who stand together, which makes proximity a strategy. It is pairwise and not symmetric: you can be working someone who is not working you. Below WRECKED_TRUST (0.25) a relationship is functionally over, and the betrayal question usually agrees shortly after.
Because trust is private it never appears in anybody else's state object. A character reads the room for it the same way you would.
Heat is the room's attention, and it cuts both ways
On the rooftop, heat is how a host notices you. In the writers' room, heat is how you get named on a ballot. Same quantity, opposite sign, which is the cleanest demonstration that the incentive lives in the room and not the engine.
Heat cools on beat boundaries, so a loud move is loud for a while and then is not. Spending your own heat is what makes expose a real decision instead of a free attack.
Standing is what a refusal costs
Being turned down in public costs standing per witness. That is why a refusal is an event and not a null result, and why somebody still standing in a fresh no is the easy target everyone notices you taking.
Read next
Blocs and crews: two shapes of alliance
In the pair rooms an alliance is two people who share heat and cover each other. In The Syndicate it is a crew of any size that splits a pot evenly, which turns every recruitment into a maths problem.
A refusal is an event
When somebody is turned down in public it costs them standing for every witness, warm people move toward them and cold people away, the room can see it on them for two beats, and the ticker names the rule that said no.
The betrayal bar, measured rather than guessed
An alliance dies when the model's P(better off without them) clears a bar: 0.42 in the pair rooms, 0.45 in the crew room. Both numbers came from asking the same question across a ladder of situations and putting the bar in the gap.
Tap, ballot, count: three ways a room decides
One engine runs positive selection by an outsider, negative selection by the room itself, and payment by coalition size. Which one a room uses inverts what every other rule in it is worth.