Yes, I suppose so. I’ve also had plenty of allegiance shifts in my games. Sometimes a single roll does suffice. There’s something I can’t quite put my finger on about when it feels appropriate and dramatically satisfying to handle something as a single action versus a series of actions.
I agree with your last sentence. But system is also a factor. I remember in a Marvel Heroic RP session Nightcrawler (being played as a PC) teleported one of the B.A.D Girls (I think Diamondback) up to the top of the Capitol Dome to propose to her. She accepted.
First, some context: the session started with NIghtcrawler (under an image inducer), James Rhodes (War Machine) and Bobby Drake (Iceman) going out to a bar in Washington DC (which was where the previous session had ended). Of course the women they ended up hanging out with were the B.A.D. Girls (Black Mamba, Asp and Diamondback) - this was GM sceneframing - and beneath the banter and flirting was an attempt by the villains to get information and assistance - especially from Rhodes - about an exhibition of a Stark Industries vehicle (the M-PORV, or Multi-Purpose Orbital and Re-entry Vehicle) that was on display at the Smithsonian. At a certain point it went from civvies in a bar to costumes in the streets and plazas of DC (I can't remember the details, this was a few years ago now). And somewhere during all that Nightcrawler popped the question to Diamondback.
Second, the system: MHRP uses the same resolution system for fisticuffs, emotional manipulation, trickery, wrapping someone in webs, etc. It is not an attrition system: full victory comes when a condition on a character (be that some sort of stress, or a complication) is stepped up beyond d12. This can happen over multiple rolls (if someone is at d6 stress and suffers another d6 stress, they step up to d8) or a single roll (if the effect achieved is itself 12+, due to the size of the effect die as manipulated in the various ways permitted by the action resolution rules). Now I can't remember if Nightcrawler built up his flirting and proposal over multiple rolls, or if he did it in a single roll (maybe first teleporting to the Dome to generate a Romantic Scenery asset to boost his dice pool, and then including that in the roll to actually pop the question). But a single roll isn't at odds with the system. It means that Diamondback has really fallen head-over-heels in love with Nightcrawler - a notoriously sexy devil!
In the case of the hunter that's been discussed in this thread, the system was The Green Knight, which uses scene-based resolution but not an extended contest system like MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic. Rather, at the top of each initiative count the PCs all suffer a point of Dishonour (narratively, because they are delaying their quest) and then the leader of the party gets to decide whether to continue the encounter or end it. Ending it saves accruing any more Dishonour from starting new action cycles; but keeping it on foot gives the chance to change the fiction that attends the resolution of the encounter, and this feeds into (what the system calls) the Judgement, where the PCs accrue Dishonour or lose Dishonour depending on what they did during the encounter and how things ended up.
So this is not generally a system in which actions are going to be drawn out over multiple rolls, unless that is built in as some sort of particular challenge in the framing - eg <SPOILER ALERT> in the hunter encounter it takes 3 consecutive Vigilance successes to find the magical fox in the woods. But when it comes to the hunter, the key goal of the players - which the scenario author anticipates - is to persuade him from hunting and eating the fox. There are various ways that might be framed as an action declaration, and the jolly bard Jeremiah of Jerusalem approaching it via a scriptural teaching about when it is or isn't proper to eat flesh is as apt as any.
In the MHRP game, when Nightcrawler stands up Diamondback the next day - his proposal was just a ploy, after all, to keep her away from the M-PORV - does she feel betrayed or relieved or a bit of both? That's not a question that needs to be answered until it becomes relevant in the context of framing some time later in the campaign.
In The Green Knight, is the hunter's conversion to vegetarianism sincere and long lasting? Or a momentary idea he adopts under the influence of Jeremiah, that will lapse in due course? We don't know, and don't need to know, and because the game is based around a one-off scenario rather than an ongoing campaign each participant is free to speculate as s/he wishes!
To tie this back to the topic of the thread: there are a lot of different ways of thinking about the outcomes, and finality, of action resolution, which depend on system and play expectations. And these shape what counts as a permissible action declaration - because the approach to
declaration feeds into, and needs to fit, the approach to
resolution; and the approach to resolution in turn feeds into considerations of consequence and finality.
