It's a John Woo moment. Four guys are pointing guns at each other's heads. Every so often the guns move.

How does Your Favourite System™ handle it?

In Spycraft, it's a special case rule. Basically: if a special character is attacked, but before the attack is rolled, another special character may spend an action dice and 5 initiative to make a reflex save. If the save succeeds, the attacker and the "stand-off" character enter a stand-off. From that point on:
- only free actions are permitted; the first character to take a non-free action takes a bullet (and drops to -1 wounds)
- at the beginning of each round, each character in the standoff makes an opposed resolve check. Everyone but the winner takes stress damage.
- when you take enough stress damage to pass a threshold, you must either surrender (no actions without the opponents permission) or take a bullet.

It's a bit of a force fit, but it works.

Initiative. Character with the fastest init can move first. In the StarCluster System, player characters can delay initiative to increase chance or quality, so you sometimes end up with tied initiatives. In this case, the one who has delayed init the longest wins init. They have literally been waiting for this.

-clash

It's funny to me. In "my" system, whcih is usually some form of D&D, it would be intiative that would decide who would go first.

And while the same is, as far as I know, true for the last game I played, in Feng Shui I could see doing something so cool that you'd have to go first. I wonder how that works in that system. I assume it would still be initiative order, malheureusement.

Poison'd: All right, so you're pointing guns at each other and talking. Is anyone going to fight? The system kicks in when you fight. No? Still talking? Right, carry on talking, then. Cowards. As soon as someone says they're firing, and who they're firing at, we'll roll dice.

Graham

It always involves rolling dice to see who acts first. Sometimes we just make up some rules and mash it up with the system we are using. Mexican standoffs are a staple in our games. We houserule before the game.

Regards,
David R

Whoever brought the weed.

It's not my favorite system, but I would so do this in Reign. Why? Because all 4 players have to declare what they intend to do. Then they all roll the dice at the same time. The results of their roll both determines when they get to act and the outcome of their attempt (influenced by who does what when).

edit: great thread idea, btw.

Yeah, it's kind of a cool setup. Honestly, I'd probably roll like this, totally independent of system (so, basically, houseruling it):

If a player says "I shoot", then yeah Their Character Shoots First.
If a player says "I talk them out of it", then I'd have them roll their Speech or whatever to try to talk them out of it, with failure meaning that They Shoot First.

-Andy

I think I'd suggest to play it through a game of uno. Seriously.