IIEE and FatE/FitM

[Christoph]

Hello Ron

I like the entry for IIEE, the explanations and examples are very good. I'm a bit confused why the acronym would stay IIEE if Execution became Completion without any particular mention in the entry (for what it's worth, for the while being I prefer Execution, as action-in-progress, over Completion, which sounds similar to Effect to me). There's a repeat of words in the last sentence of section "Diversity of design".

There's some overlap between Fortune at the End (the shorter article) and Fortune in the Middle (some grammar issues remain). In the FatE article, it says resolution arrives right between Execution/Completion and Effect. In the FitM article, it says that there is still stuff (other than Effect) to be narrated after the resolution mechanic was used, but this could conceivably (I infer), mean that resolution happens between Intention and Initiation, or Initiation and Execution.

Questions (or topics I'd like to explore if they're not answered):
- What about games like Bacchanal (and Capes perhaps)? You roll before narrating Intent, right? That's how I played Bacchanal anyway (Paul makes a comment about Fortune-in-the-Beginning, which I admit might just be a joke I fell for).
- How does the theory handle the notion of when is the appropriate time for a game to handle things procedurally and when not? I guess I could often get away in Sorcerer by saying I slap someone in the face if it's just for color, whereas grabbing a mac-guffin would probably be submitted to a conflict every damn time. Is this where we start going into authority (tentative term) territory?
- What terms do we use for games that allow for "re-rolls if you're not happy with the outcome"? In Ron's reply to Jeffrey in What is Fortune in the Middle, additional rolls are mentioned (also called "meta-game tweaks" FitM extremes). I'd argue Dogs in the Vineyard does this too to an extent, since you can keep ramping up statement after statement if you're not happy with the outcome, at considerable risk. To me, this is more interesting than the distinction between FitM and FatE.
- What do we call techniques that concatenate lots of statements (like DitV or Polaris) for one formal conflict? IIEE with FitM and FatE kind of presupposes a certain type of resolution, at least when you look at the examples.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Christoph,

Now that is exactly the kind of post I needed to help out the project here.

The term seemed to settle at IIEE as the discussions proceeded, and I like "execution" and "effect" better too, so long ago, I relegated the "C" to the status of a historical artifact.

In the FatE article, it says resolution arrives right between Execution/Completion and Effect. In the FitM article, it says that there is still stuff (other than Effect) to be narrated after the resolution mechanic was used, but this could conceivably (I infer), mean that resolution happens between Intention and Initiation, or Initiation and Execution.

Let's start by distinguishing between "resolution" and "physical game mechanic," whatever the latter might be. I used to say the former when I meant the latter, i.e., something the real people do to introduce specific content into play which in the fiction contributes to resolving whatever's happening. I understand now that by "resolving," we really ought to stick with in-fiction unequivocal forward motion, or the potential for it which is going to be subject to further events.

So what I'm talking about in the articles is when the people stop merely talking and do something - whether looking up stuff on a chart, comparing numbers across two character sheets, consulting the Y Ching, turning events over to a designated decider, rolling dice, or whatever you want to name. Obviously they can do this at more than one point, and also obviously, a given "something" to be done can actually be several somethings, classically rolling once to-hit and again for-damage, for example.

Let's see if I can make sense to myself in this paragraph. Despite whatever may have been said or done at individual gaming tables, what I saw through most of my pre-1992 gaming experiences, and how every rulebook was written, was that you talked and you talked and you talked and you talked, and then

Whereas in Hero Wars, something changed: a lot of the dialogue up to and through the multiple die rolls was to be considered provisional, and we only found out how much of it counted until after the conflict was over. The rulebook explicitly explained that you were supposed to narrate during resolution in terms of feelings and possibilities ("Your jaw feels like it might be broken") instead of clinical and definite outcomes. Whether such sensations happened would not be determined until the end - and even more fun, that was at least partly independent of whether you won or lost.

That was fucking cool. I squinted in joy - clearly, this was something I'd been grappling with for ages concerning how to explain violent and confused action in Sorcerer, and related (for sure in Sorcerer and I'm 99% certain for the same in Hero Wars) to the long-ago rule in Over the Edge that after a conflict, win or lose, it turned out that only half the damage you felt in combat would actually count after it was over. I thought about it some more and realized how often we'd applied some version of this idea - not only halving, and not merely to damage, but to all sorts of sequential narrations - to the otherwise-standard rules explanations in Champions which included no such thing. The idea is to explain some local or specific in-game event fully only well after we understood the whole outcome of the sequence it was embedded in.

That's when I decided to call it Fortune-in-the-Middle, meaning that the dice hit the table and they mattered, but exactly how that particular effect was, in the fiction, was provisionally stated at the time and only interpreted in full after the general/final outcome was known. This retroactive statement of in-fiction "facts" is the core concept.
Now to consider your question - I think that if we recognize that by "resolution" I mean something in real life like rolling dice (fill in whatever you want), then you can see that doing this only right before the final E, means that you have basically talked out everything you could possibly talk out.

What about games like Bacchanal (and Capes perhaps)? You roll before narrating Intent, right? That's how I played Bacchanal anyway (Paul makes a comment about Fortune-in-the-Beginning, which I admit might just be a joke I fell for).

I don't think Paul was joking, although he might have been needling me about my prior claim that Fortune in the Beginning wouldn't be fun. Bacchanal's system is as close to Fortune-in-the-Beginning as one can get, as are Breaking the Ice and It Was a Mutual Decision. You roll almost as far back as even framing the scene, potentially, and the dice outcome does indeed carry resolving power. Then you basically play out what you already know, although it's not purely pro forma - the strength of these games lies in what you can bring to the experience in doing so, in terms of nuanced or contextual content, not mere thespianism.

Regarding Capes, I am dubious as to whether I'd even call its dice system a resolution mechanic. As far as I can tell it's a competitive conch game, fighting over control over who gets to say what happens. Groups who've played it differently report complex confusions. (A really definitive thread about this did happen at the Forge; I'll have to look It up.)

How does the theory handle the notion of when is the appropriate time for a game to handle things procedurally and when not? I guess I could often get away in Sorcerer by saying I slap someone in the face if it's just for color, whereas grabbing a mac-guffin would probably be submitted to a conflict every damn time. Is this where we start going into authority (tentative term) territory?

Your examples don't seem to me to address your question. Sticking with the question itself, a great deal of the art of game design is about parsing IIEE in particular ways, and my only comment at this time is, "Much remains to be discussed and much remains to be tried," although the period of 2002-2006 provides a wealth of the latter, perhaps as much as the first wave of RPG design in the late 1970s.

Whereas your examples are strictly about if and when a given set of fictional circumstances call for the resolution system to be employed.  Yes, it's related to the authorities, and it's deeply involved with the origins of The Murk. But it's a totally different issue. All the IIEE stuff and the Fortune-when stuff is about what goes on in using a given resolution mechanic, not whether to use it.

(A minor point: the face-slap as Color applies more to Dogs than to Sorcerer; in the former game, you are permitted to "say yes or roll the dice," but in the latter, no, when anything personal is on the line, you must always roll.)

I am now really wondering whether people have misunderstood this issue, that the I's and the E's are all in the fiction, period. So what we do in the real world is really up for grabs and not dictated by anything whatsoever in the concept - in fact, you don't even have to do them in order, right? The real-world mechanics are not constrained to be in lock-step with the fictional moments.

What terms do we use for games that allow for "re-rolls if you're not happy with the outcome"? In Ron's reply to Jeffrey in What is Fortune in the Middle, additional rolls are mentioned (also called "meta-game tweaks" FitM extremes). I'd argue Dogs in the Vineyard does this too to an extent, since you can keep ramping up statement after statement if you're not happy with the outcome, at considerable risk. To me, this is more interesting than the distinction between FitM and FatE.

No special terms are needed here. That feature is an add-on, and represents yet another way for the resolution system to interact with Currency. Ultimately all such things have their origin in the house-rule, "burn an EP for a re-roll," and have probably been in practice since the earliest days of play.

What do we call techniques that concatenate lots of statements (like DitV or Polaris) for one formal conflict? IIEE with FitM and FatE kind of presupposes a certain type of resolution, at least when you look at the examples.

Not really. Bear in mind that the resolution can be about events anywhere in the coarse-to-fine spectrum, or another way to put it is, a conflict can be conducted as a whole or sliced into parts of any size. Again, I don't see any need for specials, but merely for an acknowledgment of how the scope of a unit of resolution - and hence the necessary fictional context per unit - can vary.
Looking over your question, I wonder if you are falling into the constant trap of equating "conflict" with "scene" or "big complicated fight." A hell of a lot of people insist on thinking in distinguishing between task and conflict, that I am talking about resolving itsy-bitsy things vs. the whole thing. That's not it at all. My most recent attempt to combat this trap was at Gente Che Gioca, in Questo glossario è errato? , with these words:

All of you are making this much harder than it needs to be.

Imagine that you are playing a game, a very ordinary RPG, nothing special or fancy about it. You have a character and this character has a big sword. There is a wooden pole set in the ground in front of the character. You say that your character swings his sword to cut that pole. We will assume for purposes of this explanation that this is, in-universe, physically possible for the character to do.

Now we split into two possible approaches to this situation.

ONE
Always, forever, no matter what, you must roll or apply a given game mechanic of any kind to see whether the character cuts the pole successfully. Or perhaps this "always" exists in vague range of difficulty as judged by the GM, but still, inside that range, the mechanic must be applied.

TWO
You consider whether cutting this pole is opposed by any other character or character-equivalent. Does any current action or pre-established action (even in the GM's notes) act as an opponent to this action? Does the timing of this action play a relevant part in some other circumstances in play? If yes, then you apply the relevant mechanic. If no, then you don't, and the character simply cuts the pole.

The first is task resolution. Tasks are resolved (mechanically) in the presence or absence of conflicts. A given conflict is resolved only if the cumulative tasks involved finally and eventually add up to its resolution, and this is an opportunistic outcome.

The second is conflict resolution. Tasks are only mechanically interesting (i.e. mechanically resolved) insofar as they are relevant to an existing conflict of interest, and that conflict of interest will be resolved through the application of the mechanics, no matter what tasks are or are not involved inside it.

The difference is enormous. It is not trivial, and there is no spectrum between these approaches to play and to rules. This is a binary and real distinction that applies to any role-playing rules ever written and played. All of the above statements that "it makes no difference" or that "once you learn it you can forget it" are false.

It has nothing to do with the scale of the resolution, i.e., how much time or effort or how many tasks are involved. It has nothing to do with whether the potential results are pre-stated ("stakes") or emergent.

Please think about Dogs in the Vineyard. Once the dice begin to roll, whatever problem or confrontation was in play will come to some kind of relevant outcome, and that problem or confrontation will at the very least undergo a profound change. This is what the dice are for. The various actions inside that conflict are not trivial, but they are not considered units of mechanics usage. Or to put it a little differently, this is why you do not roll dice in Dogs in the Vineyard when your character decides to fire a bullet into a tree for fun when he rides by it.

Many people have arrived at conflict resolution in practice when using task resolution rules, simply because they informally avoid using the system unless a conflict of interest is involved. This is a serious change from the written rules to the in-play (real) rules, for that group. The fact that they do not realize they are doing it, or if they do, they merely call it "playing right," does not mean the change is not real.

Best, Ron

Looking back over this post, I find that it seems disjointed. Let me break out the issues that I'm finding to be independent.

1. Murk vs. IIEE: almost by definition, Murky play means that no one really knows when or why we would employ a resolution system. That's why two dysfunctional solutions to it are at either extreme: employ the resolution system for the most godawful trivial nonsense at all times, every time; or never employ it at all. Score extra points for bragging about doing it this way, whichever one you do.

2. IIEE on its own: each initial referring to strictly in-fiction phenomena, which by definition must be in this sequence in the fiction. But how we do it in the real world is remarkably flexible, permitting (for instance) a dice roll at any point: *IIEE, I*IEE, II*EE, IIE*E, IIEE*. And that's assuming there's just one roll involved. (Note that the term IIEE does not in any way presuppose that the method involved must be a Fortune technique. It can be anything.)

3. Task vs. conflict resolution: see above. Basically, the absolute level of "why" we went to a resolution method in the first place, given that there are historically two answers.

4. Fortune at the End vs. Fortune in the Middle: whether a given instance of physical technique, specifically a Fortune technique, decisively concludes any and all information that was unknown or still "kinetic" prior to that technique's use. If so, then it's at the end. If any kind of speaking or further sequential actions afterword revise that information (i.e. what was known prior to the roll), then it's in the middle.

So the problem at hand is how #4 relates to #2, I think. If in fact it does in any meaningful way.

Best, Ron

[davide.losito]

I am especially interested in this paragraph:

I don't think Paul was joking, although he might have been needling me about my prior claim that Fortune in the Beginning wouldn't be fun. Bacchanal's system is as close to Fortune-in-the-Beginning as one can get, as are Breaking the Ice and It Was a Mutual Decision. You roll almost as far back as even framing the scene, potentially, and the dice outcome does indeed carry resolving power. Then you basically play out what you already know, although it's not purely pro forma - the strength of these games lies in what you can bring to the experience in doing so, in terms of nuanced or contextual content, not mere thespianism.

It doesn't look hard to me to think about a "fortune at the beginning" resolution, given the fact that for "fortune" we identify the specific access and use of a named ephemera that insert "alea" (the randomness of a rolled die) into a conflict.
So, as Ron says, FitB would be some kind of resolution in which you know already who can tell what, but the creativity and fun is brought into the game with all the details you can insert with your specific piece of narration the FitB grants you to control.

Let's make an example with Dawn of a New Tomorrow.
when you roll your dicepool in the conflict, you chose your three best results and you deploy those dice on a boar-like markers on your character sheet.
They represent three phases of the conflict: Approach, Confront, Release.
Your adversity does the same and a player wins the narration of the phases he scores higher.

Then, players narrate.
You already know you won 2 phases over three, which means you won the conflict and your objective in the conflict is achieved, and you already know you will narrate - let's say - Approach and Confront.
But you can insert into the fiction so many details that the game is still fun and fruitfull.
For example, in a playtest happened that I was playing the GM and the player won a conflict in which his character reached someone who was escaping. He narrated how his character lead the fugitive to a specific path in the city streets (approach) and how his character was able to take advantage of his city knowledge to reach the fugitive (confront).
I added the release phase, specifying that the chase ended on the entrance of the Police Station, adding a detail that gave to the whole scene a different outcome of what the winning player expected.

So is this Fortune in the Beginning? Or is it still Fortune in the Middle?
Does Fortune in the Beginning really "exists" as an option in game design?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Davide,

It looks like "in the beginning" to me.

When we talked about these terms years ago, no one was yet discussing the mechanics of scene framing yet, or the issue of whether and when to launch a formal resolution mechanic. So we (the people at that time) were all assuming that some kind of in-play situation was occurring without frustrations and without murkiness. Therefore now, we (here) should remember that all discussions of IIEE, and this rather fine-grained issue of when Fortune occurs (which you are right to tag as Ephemera, in terms of its immediate signal), all assume the same thing.

I'm saying this because the beginning of a conflict and the beginning of a scene are two distinct things in the fiction, but procedurally, they can become blurred under certain conditions. The conditions include: (i) reducing the number of rolls (or whatever) involved in the conflict, i.e., adopting a coarser grain; and (ii) placing the rolls at the beginning of a scene even though what they actually apply to is the conflict, itself by definition a subset of the scene. I'm not saying it's a bad thing! But it means we should be extra careful in discussing what the rolls actually apply to: the conflict.

The design of Dawn of a New Tomorrow looks as if it fulfills both of these conditions, so it's a good example for both Fortune in the Beginning and my point about conflict vs. scene.

Let me know if I understood you well enough and if I'm making sense.

Best, Ron

[Moreno R.]

Mmmm.. Ron, this would mean that we are changing what we call "fortune in the Middle". Something I didn't get from your initial post, that seemed (to me) as more an explanation of the existing concept.

What do I mean? That the definition of "fortune in the middle" was this one: (from the provisional glossary) "Employing a Fortune Resolution technique (dice, cards, etc) prior to fully describing the specific actions of, physical placement of, and communication among characters. The Fortune outcome is employed in establishing these elements retroactively."

And the definition of Fortune at the end was: "Employing a Fortune Resolution technique (dice, cards, etc) following the full descriptions of actions, physical placement, and communication among characters"

Looking at these two definition, the only difference is the presence of choices after the roll It was never really about "when you roll", but about "ok, you rolled: do you still have to decide something or not?"

(It's for this reason that I consider the two terms misleading and wrong-headed: if the difference is about when you choose, why are talking about where is the fortune at all?)

Notice that, using these classic definitions, a game where you roll dice at the start of a scene it's not even guaranteed to be Fortune-in-the-middle (even if usually is): if you have only color narration afterwards, or if what it's decided is fixed at the start (for example, if you roll to see how much time passed from the previous scene). It's fortune at the beginning, you don't choose between options after the roll.

So, any roll that you call now "fortune at the beginning" would be a fortune at the end or a fortune in the middle roll, depending on "do you still have a choice afterwards?"

If we start to call these rolls "fortune at the beginning", and we start to look a "when you roll" instead of "when you choose", it changes the entire nature of the classification. A roll to see if you climb a wall would be fortune in the middle, if it's not the last roll in the scene.  A roll in Sorcerer could be fortune-at-the-end, if the GM end your scene right there.

It could be said that these new definitions would be more literal, and that it could be finally the occasion to start using "with choices after resolution" and "without choices after resolution" (or something like that, I didn't really thought a lot about names) for the Real Deal: but isn't too late in the day for that? 

[Moreno R.]

Sorry, the classic error one always find after posting...

Notice that, using these classic definitions, a game where you roll dice at the start of a scene it's not even guaranteed to be Fortune-in-the-middle (even if usually is): if you have only color narration afterwards, or if what it's decided is fixed at the start (for example, if you roll to see how much time passed from the previous scene). It's fortune at the beginning, you don't choose between options after the roll.

What I wanted to write was:
Notice that, using these classic definitions, a game where you roll dice at the start of a scene it's not even guaranteed to be Fortune-in-the-middle (even if usually is): if you have only color narration afterwards, or if what it's decided is fixed at the start (for example, if you roll to see how much time passed from the previous scene). It's fortune at the end, you don't choose between options after the roll.

Please, correct my last post and cancel this one.

[Moreno R.]

Sorry about the multi-posting, I keep remembering things...

I was sure I had read this discussion about "fortune at the Beginning" before. Now I remembered where!

It was at Vincent's blog, Anyway:
http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=31

Sure, that was 2005, and these definitions are not immutable. But it shows what was the "theory" behind FitM/FatE, until today.

[davide.losito]

The design of Dawn of a New Tomorrow looks as if it fulfills both of these conditions, so it's a good example for both Fortune in the Beginning and my point about conflict vs. scene.

Let me know if I understood you well enough and if I'm making sense.

It does make a lot sense to me and confirms what was my idea about it...

But then I'd like to ask you something about Shahida's cards flush phase (is this correct phrasing?)... do you consider it "framing managing", or "fortune in the beginning"?

[Christoph]

Hello guys

I haven't had much time to read and think about this topic, and I'm about to leave for two weeks. Just wanted to let you know I'm not ignoring you.

[Christoph]

Hey there

I would like to apologize for the long absence, I realize it wasn't very cool to start a conversation and then drop the ball on you.

Ron,

I suppose the thread you're talking about concerning Capes is [Capes] Gamism and Narrativism. I've read it and some further AP on various forums, and I agree that the mechanics are not about conflict resolution, so I'll let this game out for the rest of the discussion.

Regarding Breaking the Ice, realizing that Attraction dice were to be rolled (or not at all) at scene framing accelerated play of the game for me. However, Bonus rolls, Re-rolls, Compatibility and Conflict dice are still rolled according to how they come up in the fiction, so there's a component of FitM here as well, at least if one is not outright satisfied by the Attraction roll. The possibility of changing something after the initial roll seems to make it quite FitM in principle, but there's a point raised by Moreno we'd need to address first (see end of post).

I get that all the Is and Es are regarding fiction (in the specific order IIEE), it's a good reminder however that the mechanical procedures do not need to be in lock-step or in the same order as the fiction, I hadn't realized that was a possibility according to the wiki definition. I don't think I fell into the trap of conflating "conflict" with "scene", nor am I writing with a "conflict" vs "task" dichotomy in mind for this post (good thing some specific threads opened for these topics).

For the while being, I'd be interested to know what Ron has to say about Moreno's questions regarding the definition of the concepts of Fortune-whenever.

[Ron Edwards]

Moreno carpet-bombed this thread right when I hit the keyboards with blurred fingers to work on Shahida. But now I'm done!

My response is simple: that Anyway discussion is wrong-headed from the start. My original discussion stated it the way I stated it above, and as far as I'm concerned, it's simple, straightforward, and easy - as I tried to refine further and even more straightforwardly in the Wiki.

So Moreno, my only response to your posts is that you were treating a detour as if it were seminal or definitive, and I'm saying, it's not really interesting or important.

Best, Ron

[Moreno R.]

My response is simple: that Anyway discussion is wrong-headed from the start. My original discussion stated it the way I stated it above, and as far as I'm concerned, it's simple, straightforward, and easy - as I tried to refine further and even more straightforwardly in the Wiki.

That answers my third post. What about the first two?

[Ron Edwards]

I have to get back to this later. I don't think I'd read your versions of those pages until now, and I still can't see what the problem is - it reads like weird schizophrenic talk to me, which probably means I'm unable to concentrate on it when other things are taking such priority in my own head.

My post to Christoph on August 21 exactly reflects my current thinking on the topic, which I am reasonably sure is no different from what it always was, although with more perspective on what game designs can offer now.

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

I realized I'd cheated Davide of an answer. Davide, you wrote,

But then I'd like to ask you something about Shahida's cards flush phase (is this correct phrasing?)... do you consider it "framing managing", or "fortune in the beginning"?

I didn't use the words "flush phase" in English, so I'm not sure what you mean. I'll list all the ways cards are used in Shahida.

1. Prior to a phase of play, in which we find out which Family characters are going to be featured in the phase, and what traits (situations, conditions, motivations, anything like that) they will be displaying. This is scenario preparation, which is even more general and comes before scene framing. It's actually the Shahida equivalent of character creation.

2. During a phase of play, the ongoing round of drawing cards and shifting their positions on the table. This is pure situation creation at first, and as the phase continues, turns into spotlight + ordinary-play techniques. Those ordinary-play techniques frequently include framing devices, conflicts, and conflict resolution. They are barely Fortune mechanics, or rather, they include enough information so that in certain combinations or transitions from player to player, resolutions can occur. In other combinations or transitions they may merely be shifts in spotlight or ordinary scene framing.

3. A subset of #2 is the Crisis, when a War player gets four of a kind - this is a special case of life-threatening conflict for a Family character which is resolved by a cards/bluff technique, and it is the closest thing Shahida has to a classic RPG Fortune-based resolution system. It's pretty close to Fortune-at-the-End, because it's all about whether a Family character lives or dies, and the full circumstances are well-established by that point.

Best, Ron

P.S. For those not familiar with Shahida (yet!), during a given phase, two players are called the War players and everyone else is called a Family player. One of the Family players is called the Witness player as well. Characters are just characters, except for the family members who have been "brought forward" by the technique mentioned in #1 above; they are called Family characters and you can think of them as "active" or "vulnerable" during this phase. There is also a Witness character, who is also a Family character, and is active every phase. One War player shifts to being a Family player every phase (and vice versa), so people rotate in and out of being Family and War players; the exception is the Witness player, who is always a Family player, and who always stays with the Witness character.

[Christoph]

I thought maybe I'd just give some closure to this thread I opened.

Ron's answers do the job for me. I was indeed conflating some issues, which other threads around here have tackled. Also, to some degree, I posted my original message with the idea that FitM and FatE are outdated concepts, that we should tend more to ideas such as "what do we have to decide in the fiction before the roll and what do we have to decide after?", knowing that IIEE and the mechanical procedures need not be in lock-step. But that's more a 2012-questionning of the Big Model, and the wiki, if I understand correctly, is supposed to vulgarize the stuff that was discussed on the Forge, 2001-2012 (and concerning IIEE, arguably not so much in the later years), not push it further.

Ron, and other wiki managers, has this thread been useful to you? Do you think that one way or the other, the various related entries can be clarified (if they need it at all)?