Influence and the Stars of War

Excerpt from Interaction & Conflict:

When you are influenced in an interaction, in addition to accepting some of your friend (another person in the interaction)’s beliefs, you receive a star of war. Stars of war indicate your distressed, clouded thinking, and your ability to undertake extreme measures to accomplish something. This means:

In an interaction where you have more stars than your friend, he can have an extra secret agenda, and thereby apply extra influence on you. I wonder how this applies to interactions with ≥3 people that have different numbers of stars?

Performing certain acts puts your mind at ease, which extinguishes your stars of war.

• For 1 star or more, decisively seize the advantage in a conflict and place a chip under its conflict marker if there are fewer than six chips. When you do this, you must harm someone in keeping with one of your beliefs. If the conflict has as yet lain undecided, this costs only 1 star. After that, it costs 1 star plus as many stars as there are chips underneath it. Each decisive movement should be an escalation over the last. If you paid 4-6 stars, then your action seizes the advantage in another conflict as well, as a consequence, but this does not add chips to that conflict.
• For 7 stars, decisively and conclusively seize a conflict. Take its marker off the board.

When something is decisive, it means that if events are allowed to continue unperturbed, the conflict will resolve itself in that person’s favor. That might be because a chain of events are set in motion, or because a temporary resolution has occurred. If it is conclusive, then a decisive event occurs to which there is no response. That decision cannot be changed.