Diplomacy in Wrath of the Autarch

I'm still thinking of ways to make the diplomacy mini-game in WotA a little more flexible.  Currently, what I have involves the players taking turns trying to gain support from leaders of an opposing group, while under time pressure in the form of a hard limit on the number of turns.  The more outlandish the request, the more support is needed from the leaders.  This is monitored by a support track that each leader is placed on.

The WotA diplomacy mini-game has been pretty fun, but it has a number of tricky elements.  One is that it's pretty rigid, since it involves only opposing leaders with whom you are trying to gain support.  I think that element will always be there - diplomacy is about coming together and gaining support.  However, there are occasionally other people involved (third party antagonists), who serve mainly to gum up the works and create obstacles.

The other element that is tricky is balancing the mini-game for different numbers of players.  As it stands, if there are more leaders than players, they can use the Create an Advantage action to make it very difficult for the players to succeed.  I accommodated this by adding extra turns if there are fewer players, but they still can get overwhelmed pretty easily.

There are other options out there - for instance, Fate Core's conflict rules can handle social conflict.  I'm not as fond of using the conflict mechanics, because it just feels like "fighting with words", and I would prefer a different aesthetic.  What I have does feel a little more like diplomacy, since there are issues raised and addressed, and overall support levels calculated.  I also feel like it's close to being right, so I may do some more fiddling before looking at larger overhauls.

Really, the "third party antagonist" issue and the "scaling for players" issue may be closely related.  It might need to be solved by having a limited pool of actions for the GM rather than one action for each character the GM controls.  If the number of actions was based on the number of players, that might scale it pretty well, while also giving flexibility to having different sorts of opposing characters.

All the players could take their turns, then the GM gets to activate one character for each player - either leaders raising issues and debating or a malevolent third party intent on obstructing the character's intentions. Or, actions could be taken in order of the Society skill as they are now, but the GM would still only get some number of characters based on the number of players.

So, setup would consist of selecting opposing leaders as well as interested characters from third parties (like the Autarch).  Each leader would still be placed on a separate track, and if their support is gained, some amount of Influence is added to the total support.  Depending on the mission, the amount of total support gained after the number of turns has elapsed determines success or failure.  The key thing about diplomacy is that it's less about success or failure than about building relationships and setting up potential future problems.