Spectrum between Task and Conflict Resolution

[RosenMcStern]

As requested, I will re-phrase here the question posed in the Wiki forum: "Why is there no spectrum between Task and Conflict resolution?"

First of all, I will assume that we all agree that the definition is clear, and that identifying what is CR and what is TR is not an issue: it all boils down to having something, a person or an impersonal force, trying to oppose what you are about to do, or not having it.

However, I think that the different implementations of CR and TR offer a wide range of gaming experience, where TR may acquire some of the "positively perceived" characteristics of CR, while remaining TR.

Here is what Ron wrote about Conflict Resolution:

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.

I want to focus specifically on the last sentence: "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".

Let us try an example of Task Resolution that produces the same result, while still being TR. I will use an Italian game, Sine Requie, as the sample ruleset.

Assume that you are a Converse (the equivalent of a Dog in the Sacnctum Imperium of Sine Requie, uhm, ok, not exactly but you get to police villages and punish the evildoers) and that you are riding along a dirt trail towards a village that requires your attention. You describe that your character wishes to relieve some tension, draws his pistol and shoots at a nearby tree. Does the gamemaster call for a to-hit roll?

Answer: no. The task is really trivial [I am not considering the case when the GM is a dick and decides it is not trivial: the rules of Sine Requie give you clear instructions about what is trivial]. As a Converse, your character is supposed to be a gunslinger, one of the few citizens in the Sanctum Imperium who can bear firearms, so he should be at least 3 scores in firing his gun. With 3 or more in the Use -pistol- ability, the rules simply say "you succeed with no roll". You mark off the bullet shot from your ammo and your character continue his ride.

The above is strictly task resolution: Sine Requie has two distinct mechanics, one for Task and one for Conflict resolution, and the above one is an example of TR.

So, while this is not yet an application of Robin Laws's principle of  "if there is no interesting consequence of failure, you succeed" to Task Resolution, it is several light years away from the "one shot one roll" implementation of Task Resolution that many groups practice. In my opinion, this constitutes "spectrum" [].

We may discuss other TR systems if anyone wishes. Some work similarly to what is described above, some do not and are still in the "your All-knowing Gamemaster will determine the Difficulty Rating and then You Will Roll" camp. I chose Sine Requie simply because it allowed me to portray a scene similar to the example provided earlier.

[Ron Edwards]

This is a valid topic and full of interesting opportunities. This thread is closed to posting, however, until exactly one week (to the minute) has passed from the initial time it was posted. After that point it will resume.

Best, Ron

[Josh W]

Here's my suggestion for the spectrum:
How much does the weight of the mechanics for any given set of events, depend on how much those events affect disagreements between characters, or the furtherance of a character's main goals?

If it affects it very little, then you have task resolution, if it affects it a lot, then you have conflict resolution. This suggests that you could categorise games according to how they are affected by other things too.

If you consider "say yes or roll the dice" in more verbose form, it becomes "have what a player says their character does happen directly, all the way from intention to effect, or implement a more complex resolution system".

This can be compared to heroquest's three layers:
"Have players say what happens, but look for opposition with an interesting alternative path for their story.
If it is a minor deviation, run a normal conflict rather than going all the way to effect.
If it is a serious deviation, run an extended conflict instead".

Personally I find this approach slightly inelegant, as it involves the GM trying to discern how important an event is to the characters story, something you'd expect the player to have a better view of. I'd rather have something closer to "bringing down the pain", where the player decides how much it effects his character's path, and so whether he wants to make a big deal out of it.

You could say that mechanics of this type are even more conflict resolution-y than burning wheel, because they now have three layers, and a new game could be made with more etc.


I think there is also an implicit assumption here, that the rules mechanics, in their complexity, supply a minimum detail level to resolution, so that the event, as described, will have more bits to it, moving parts etc. and so the conflict mechanics will elevate the profile of these events.

Of course, that doesn't have to be true, as presumably under the "say yes resolution system" players could just start going for it and describing bullets peeling through bark etc. really emphasising how they shot at that tree. This approach just says that the rules system doesn't have much to say about the non-conflict events, not that the players don't.

I don't think I've ever seen that happen, and I'm not totally sure why.

[RosenMcStern]

Thank you for your reply, Josh. It took some time to answer because I wanted to have my HQ manual at hand before posting.

First of all, what edition of HeroQuest are you talking about? I cannot recognize your "three layer" formulation of the guidelines for contest type determination in my HQ2 book. The graph in that edition (page 70) is more complex than three layers.

Secondly, I doubt HeroQuest is the best discussion ground to find an example of spectrum between TR and CR. HQ is firmly in the CR camp, and no rolls are ever made if there is not an identifiable factor that is trying to stop, hinder or harass you. Hero Wars still contemplated the possibility of rolling to check your ability only, but that option was removed after the first edition because it really did not belong to the spirit of the game.

Still, at least two steps of the page 70 graph I mentioned, specifically the "Does failure offer an interesting branch?" and "Would failure seem peculiar?" ones, could IMO be applied to Task Resolution, thus providing a form of  TR that starts sounding a lot like CR, and yet is still TR. Note that these two branching points refer to one point, that is "What happens in the story if the character does not succeed in the task/conflict", that has nothing to do with either opposition or emotional investment. It is just about "What happens next, does it sound both plausible and exciting if the characters fail?" Of course, if emotional investment exists in the contest, then the question "Does failure offer an interesting branch?" has a high chance of having a positive answer. But it is not automatic.

Coming to your suggested criterion "How much is the weight of mechanics affected by the importance of the roll for the PCs". Uhm, it links mechanic complexity to resolution type, something that is definitely not in line with the currently accepted criterion, which is linked to why you roll, not how you do it.

The game I used as an example, Sine Requie, totally defies your criterion. It has a CR system that is extremely simple - you draw one Tarot and the gamemaster consults a result table, period - and does not contemplate any changes due to the importance of the conflict. Its TR system, on the other hand, is rather complicate, and has several hooks in which the gamemaster can to grant "second chances" if the player characters have something important at stake. And before you ask: yes, the game is too gm-centric.

Yet one couple of games is not enough to talk about. Can anyone find other examples of games that confirm or disconfirm Josh's idea?

[Eero Tuovinen]

It is unnecessarily confusing to consider task and conflict resolution as alternatives to each other. There is no continuum between the two, merely games that invest more or less systematic focus on resolving either. Even games that are roughly called "conflict resolution" because they're so very concerned with resolving conflicts will, in fact, resolve tasks, even if that resolution method is as simple as having whoever is currently narrating decide how each individual task goes. Similarly the most traditional task resolution game will presumably involve some sort of conflict resolution methodology, even if it is unwritten in deference to a long tradition of silence, and possibly amounts to nothing more than "the GM asks you for a sufficient number of task resolution cycles until the fictional position is sufficiently tightly established for the conflict resolution to become obvious".

To develop the theme further, consider Dogs in the Vineyard. That game actually has two task resolution procedures, so it's actually really good illustration of how it's wrong to say that a game is either conflict-resolving or task-resolving:

• If the task happens within a conflict and for the purposes of the conflict, then you select your dice and the opponent looks at their dice and they'll either take the blow or block or counter with their own dice, which tells us whether the task was at all successfully completed.
• If the task happens outside of conflict and it is not conflict-worthy per se, then you just say that your character does it, and the other players acknowledge your contribution.

Almost all games use that latter task-resolution method at least sometimes out of necessity, the games where you literally have to fight for every little action you wish a character to take are extreme exceptions. The former method of tying conflict-resolution to a series of tasks is also very common, it's present in everything from D&D to Sorcerer to Heroquest to The Shadow of Yesterday: all of these games have certain rules, especially in combat, for how individual tasks transform into wide-ranging conflict resolutions. You take attack actions until your opponent runs out of hitpoints, and that's when you know to establish defeat in conflict. I call this "conflict resolution through task resolution", and often use it to illustrate how these two concepts are not at odds.

All this is not to say that the old (well, relatively) fight about task vs. conflict resolution is entirely insubstantial, but I do have to admit that I've personally viewed it as pointless ever since 2005 or so. The basic question is good: do you want your game to involve formal, systematic conflict resolution, and if you do, what types of conflicts are you resolving, and how? Also: do you actually care about individual tasks sufficiently to resolve them mechanically, or are you just doing task resolution out of habit? However, the step beyond this point always seemed to take the discussion into useless nitpicking about the illusionary categories of "conflict resolution system" and "task resolution system" as if they were somehow equal ways of accomplishing the same thing. I might as well compare scene framing vs. pacing; both are necessary functions that are getting accomplished somehow by a given game, but only one of them has traditionally been acknowledged as an existing thing. Regardless, it would be insensible to say that you've got to choose either scene framing or pacing for your game.

[Josh W]

Rosen/Paulo, I went to look for my Heroquest Pdf too when you mentioned it, and embarrassingly, I don't seem to have one. It's entirely possible I learned everything I know about the game from previews, conversations and supposition without ever actually reading the full document! So yeah, my description is a bit suspect. Looking through a summary on moon design's website, it looks like there are a lot more gradations, than I remember, but the basic category system I remembered can be created:

So the first category includes auto-successes, although it seems there's more GM narration of the player character's activities than I remember, (do any GMs actually echo the player's description of their action rather than saying yes or "you do that"?)

Then the second category is all the other simple conflicts with the potential for interesting branching.

Then there's the extended conflicts, which you pull out when it's a big deal, but I could be totally wrong that it's meant to be applied only to serious, especially consequential branching points of the story.

Not a perfect fit really, but there we are!


More generally, here's how extend specifically on the idea of "why we roll dice".

Rolling or not is an uptick in mechanical complexity, and probably of player focus, usually based around something we are withholding personal decision from, despite (or because of) it's importance. More explicit system is being applied, possibly with moving more physical stuff about and generally making more of a fuss about it.

So going to increasing levels of generality:
"we are rolling because what the characters want is at stake"
"we are applying a more weighty mechanism because what the characters want is at stake"
"the mechanisms become more weighty the more what the characters want is at stake"

Of course I did a cheaty thing here; instead of trying to find "half conflict resolution", which I think is your interest, I first tried to find "double conflict resolution". I mean, if we make a spectrum, there's no reason to assume that existing games are strongly at either edge!

Does that mean that a partial conflict mechanic is one that only sort of cares if things affect the character's story, but does a little?


Thinking about what you said Eero, I suppose you could consider it in two different layers:

Task resolution system - How does the game mediate what actions characters do?
                         (and equivalently, that moment of recognised rule application when certain tasks are attempted)

Conflict resolution system - How does the game mediate what character purposes can be accomplished?
                             (and the moment where there are recognised rules when character purposes are in doubt)

Then you could say that the game has a very light or unspecified task resolution system, with a strong conflict resolution system, and vice versa.

Example:

I'm trying to build a house in a 4e game. In a normal battle, we see an underground creature with the capacity to shape stone. This is discovered through a knowledge check in the surprise round, that sets up a conversation with the GM to explain what it is and what it can do. From there, we use the rebuke violence power on him, so that he cannot engage in battle, and start to run a parallel social challenge during the combat using minor actions, in order to get him to leave the troll king's service and join ours. We are successful, he goes off-map, and later we find out he has gone and rebuilt our castle so we no longer have to live in the basement.

The combat system, as we used it, only allowed us to kill our opponents. The skill challenge system allowed us to achieve everything else.

That's the conflict side of things, and the task side of things is that diplomacy or skill use is a minor action in combat, and it is that, (along with the power) that enabled us to mesh the two conflict resolution systems into each other.

Note that we only roll for our own actions, and it's generally assumed that if we convince someone to do something within their power on reasonable terms, then they achieve it.


But on the other hand, I think the difference is one of ethos, priority etc.

"Say yes or roll the dice." etc, are a way of doing things, where instead of rolling for everything that applies (in terms of matching the task), you only roll within the frames of certain objectives or conflicts, which not only gets you to mark out moments of choice but also to ask the question of when a conflict is happening..

It's one way of trying to insure that the game is made of intentions, not simply actions.

In the same way, thinking in terms of pacing can implicitly assume a methodology; ways to make certain moments happen faster, rather than considering that you can just skip to the moments that actually interest you. Equally, when scenes move slowly, you could consider that a bad choice for a scene-frame, rather than considering the ways that you could adjust narration style etc to make it work better. Or indeed, ways that you can adjust the positioning to suggest more interesting scene framing (which is something often kept in the "pacing" toolbox).

So putting that all back together (and I don't think I'll be saying anything particularly new here); you can have games without conflict resolution in their rules text, but a functional conflict resolution mechanic in play, in the sense that these tasks are strung together into something that does actually resolve conflicts! However, that impromptu conflict mechanism might have difficulty resolving certain kinds of conflicts, or not do them very well.

In my example, we had to fight a load of guys to save the world, but we wanted a better house while we were doing it. The modules provided by my friend provided the conflict resolution mechanism for that:
Objective? go to kill troll king, opposition? bodyguards in the way. But while playing the part of heroic individuals, we were also scouting the world for stuff to use to our own ends, positioning for a more traditional "build the keep" objective.

Tying that back to what I said earlier, I think that D&D combat (especially as we play it) is a kind of half hearted conflict mechanic, as it assumes an arena of conflict, a certain kind of disagreement with certain rules, and the intentions of the characters can only be part of supporting that. Whatever they were disagreeing about a moment ago, we assume it is enough to potentially die over, and now they are fighting, and you die or you run.

Adjusting the morale rules to consider what each character is actually fighting for would go a way towards fixing that.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi,

I have very little to say about this which is nice, but I do have a lot to say. I'll go person by person.

PAOLO

Your initial characterization of conflict-vs.-task resolution is so wrong it's not even arguable. The "opposed vs. unopposed" dichotomy has been a staple of RPG texts for many decades and has literally nothing to do with the concepts of task vs. conflict. The classic dichotomy fails because by definition, if an attempt at something can fail, then it is opposed in some fashion. This fact has led to much tortuous and annoying text in RPGs about trying to explain opposed vs. unopposed rolls, then also instructing the GM to permit automatic success for things which "have no chance to fail," as if that weren't a tautology trying to disguise the fact that their real rule is, "when opposed in any conceivable way, then roll." Since most RPG texts are merely rewrites using the existing texts as boilerplate, this same up-one's-own-ass logic proliferated throughout the 1990s game texts right along with such gems as "when you get good at role-playing, leave the dice behind." This is not my topic. I am discussing something else, which has the virtue of being an actual phenomenon.

What also seems to be escaping you and everyone else is that I'm not discussing any shred, not one little bit, of the fiction in question. When it comes to resolution, we take it as given that something situational is occurring; otherwise we would not be talking about resolution at all. In the fiction, that's happening, period. When I talk about task vs. conflict resolutions, you do not go to the fiction to "see what's happening" in order to decide which kind of resolution is either called or, or being done. I am talking strictly about the real-world behavior and techniques of the fictional resolution, something real human beings are doing. Sir Gobstopper is trying to kill that hobgoblin, is a situation of the sort I'm talking about, and Sir Gobstopper is served up for hobgoblin dinner with a side of hobbit, is a resolution. There is not one single bit of that fiction which tells us which way the people at the role-playing table went about establishing that resolution.

I have no idea whether anything I'm writing here is penetrating your skull. Your own writing displays a remarkable talent for missing others' points. We will be sharing close proximity for a few days in Lucca and I'd prefer to find out what you think there, in person.

One last time, for Jesus: when the people in the table engage in task resolution, the cumulative effect may or may not result in conflict resolution. It almost always requires extreme results (slaughter of one side, e.g.) or some degree of imposed content which negates the further application of task resolution ("OK, after taking that last hit, she surrenders") or some narration of consequences which reveal that it was conflict resolution after all ("You picked the lock? OK, you can go through the door"). That latter item is the most important, especially in so many games which offer mainly fighting rules, when fights typically resolve social problems by dictating behavior to the losers as a consequence. The rules are all about critical hits and movement rates, but the unspoken rule being followed - at the table - is something like, "if we win, the king will free the prisoners."

All conflict resolution means is that the procedures, whatever they are, will in fact feed into the fiction as resolution of the existing situation - guaranteed. No need for jumping in which revisionary or additional fiction to make that happen; no need for hitching spoken content onto the end of the task process to make it happen. These limping and easily-abused methods have permitted many groups to engage in (limited) conflict resolution without ever admitting or understanding it. Explicit conflict resolution, as a technique (or rather category of techniques) means it reliably happens without opening doors for confusion (Murk).

EERO

My final point to Paolo goes double for you. No, conflict resolution cannot be broken into "little tasks." That is not what is happening in Dogs in the Vineyard or Sorcerer. You are mistaking "tasks" for "particular fictional actions," falling into the trap of thinking this is all about scale. I am talking instead about what the techniques in question can reliably do. Task resolution techniques will reliably resolve tasks, but how those resolutions factor into closing out the fictional situation is left up to secondary techniques, not at all reliable. That reliability is the key. In Dogs in the Vineyard, when you get those dice rolling, the situation at hand will be changed so drastically that it simply cannot be called the same situation - no matter what. Sure, you address many little components along the way, but they do not exist except in the guaranteed systemic context of getting that situational shift to occur. Same goes for Sorcerer, and for many other games in that particular camp of design.

I'll choose three games to talk about which are pretty much triplets separated at birth. Jake very nearly solved this problem in The Riddle of Steel because the consequences of the rolls in that game were so ferocious, making anything that happened along the way so consequential that the situation was generally hacked into a new shape after a few of those anythings had occurred. I noted that during play, "ordinary" skill use outside of problematic and consequential circumstances was generally resolved quickly without rolling. Sorcerer is pretty similar, although I maintain that my stated context for rolling in the first place is sufficiently specific to make the technique more reliably conflict-oriented. Luke solved this problem in Burning Wheel in the second version of the game (hardly anyone remembers the original 2003 books any more ...), with his phrasing of Let It Ride, which means, your Sneak roll is a means to resolve a conflict, not a mere instance of sneaking. Such a roll does not resolve whether you "could" sneak, but rather whether your sneaking got you safely to where you wanted to go. You failed? It means you didn't, and in the case of Burning Wheel, whether that was due to bad luck or bad skill-use is left to Color-narration.

The reason you consider the task/conflict discussion pointless since 2005 is very clear to me: that was the year when a lot of raving bullshit flooded the Forge by a lot of people who really should have been reading their first-year college assignments rather than wasting my time on-line. People who knew what they were doing - Kevin Allen Jr. immediately comes to mind - expressed their positions mainly via game design instead. Further noise was added by far too many echo-chamber posts at Story Games about what these terms meant, accomplishing nothing but filling the discourse with fog. I'll cut through it for you right now.

1. If the techniques in question will reliably and surely alter the existing fictional situation irreversibly into another one, then it's conflict resolution.

2. If they don't, then it's task resolution. The confounding factor here is that so many groups, for so long, covertly turn #2 into #1 using unacknowledged techniques usually pseudo-labeled "good GMing."

Josh, I don't have a big category for you, but effectively, most of what you wrote flounders in the whole "there must be a spectrum" conundrum, possibly because for some reason, in our intellectual environment, dichotomies are supposed to be bad things, and one is always supposed to seek the spectrum instead. With any luck, what I wrote above shows that there is indeed a dichotomy operating here, in terms of real people and techniques at the table.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

You're not saying anything I disagree with substantially, Ron. At least nothing I can discern. After reading through your post twice I can pinpoint your point, though: you're saying that I should not call a concrete fictional action a "task" if it happens within the framework of e.g. a Dogs in the Vineyard conflict. It's not a task then, but rather a "particular fictional action" as you say. Furthermore, you're saying that it's only proper to call fictional activities "tasks" if they don't belong in a conflict resolution system. So e.g. D&D attack rolls are not task resolution but rather mere fictional actions because they're part of a conflict resolution system, while an attack check in a WoD game almost certainly is a task resolution check due to how the game's GMing technique preempts combat as conflict resolution. A skill check to climb a cliff in D&D is task resolution because it does not reliably resolve anything at all, while a skill check to climb a cliff in Burning Wheel is conflict resolution because the game mandates that such checks (almost) always may only be called to resolve conflicts.

That's a confusing way to use pretty ordinary words, but nothing I can't wrap my head around. Using your terminology, then, we can easily see that task and conflict resolution are opposite phenomena: conflict resolution procedures move events forward, while any procedures that do not do so are termed "task resolution". Fair enough, they're exclusive opposites by definition. Much of the confusion on the matter probably originates in people not realizing that "task" and "task resolution" as you use them are technical terms that are not really related to how the terms are historically used in rpg texts. Not exactly an unique occurrence in Forge business ;)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eero,

Clarifications and development.

1. I think a more positive definition of Task Resolution can be considered as well, not merely "rolling without anything going on." There are in fact ways to play which privilege reductionist thinking, i.e., that if you resolve at a very fine grain, you produce emergent resolutions at coarser grains. I'm not sure I think it's entirely productive or even functionally exists except as a beautiful ideal, but that doesn't stop people from liking the ideal and wanting to play this way. So in that case, Task Resolution can be considered as an identifiable desired entity and not merely the lack of an alternate one. Ralph Mazza mentioned long ago that this was his prevailing ideal in role-playing for most of his early history of play.

2. Arguably highly situational play, in which the characters are ipso facto embroiled in dangerous or complex circumstances, might well be so charged with obvious consequences that actions can't help but kick the circumstances into new shapes by applying ordinary narrative logic, with no annoying stench of forcing them into the fiction. I think that a lot of RuneQuest play probably went this way, especially among groups which took Glorantha very seriously; and I know for damn sure that it's exactly what my groups did with Champions (see [Obsidian, Champs, Babylon Project] Incipient Narrativism and its discontents) as did those run by similarly-minded GMs like the famous K. C. Ryan. Such play frequently relies on a deep genre buy-in including the fundamental values of the story; although very robust among the core group, it's very fragile in the presence of guest players, often to the consternation of the regulars. Looking back on a lot of games I played in the mid-2000s, I find myself giving credit to Arrowflight ([Arrowflight] Pixies, poison, and duty), which was built on this idea as far as I can tell, and managed it pretty well without treading too far away from traditional-fantasy RPG tropes.

Further confounding factors.

3. I wish I could go back in time and spray Flit on one particular thing which generated such enthusiasm from talking about Primetime Adventures play. This thing is captured in the phrase, "You're fighting a zombie, but the conflict is about whether Bobby falls in love with you or not!" I can see where it comes from. It comes from trying to emphasize to people that the game is explicitly not concerned with Task Resolution at all, but only Conflict Resolution, and that actions within it are basically Color (not trivial, but not Techniques-resolved either beyond simply assigning their creation to the high-die narrator). But it feeds right into a toxic desire that I see as both early D&D generated and mid-90s Vampire/Shadowrun generated, to find windows of opportunity to narrate stuff you really want into the fiction for free in a socially-immune way. In other words, to railroad and to grief without anyone telling you not to. This phenomenon emerged specifically due to shifting details of narration into pre-roll dialogue rather than leaving them for post-roll narration where, in that game, they belong. It also feeds into a less toxic but utterly distracting desire we geeks sadly too often have, to make things far more fucking complicated than they have to be. (To paraphrase Philip K. Dick from Valis, neurotics never keep it simple, they go for the baroque.)

I want to address this thing in some detail. The trouble with it is not that it identifies an emotional conflict in action - that's actually pretty cool - but rather that it implies you can ignore fictional content that really ought to get addressed too. The vampires are not nothing, fictionally; for them to operate as situationally relevant, a roll is called for, and no one should suddenly be handed the ability to resolve that fight off the cuff simply by shouting it into play during a pre-roll debate about what the conflict is going to be, and even how it's going to turn out, in detail. Unfortunately the 2005 edition of PTA was vulnerable to this exact problem because it so strongly emphasized constant kibitzing and consensus-based decion-making. People know this, it's one of the main reasons why pre-roll discussions in badly-played PTA get so tedious and so eerily reminiscent of Force-based wrangling in more traditionally-constructed play (too many threads to link to at the Forge to count ...).

I expressed myself pretty strongly about it in my play-advice regarding The Pool ("Understanding The Pool" at my Other essays page), because that's the game which is basically the grandparent of PTA, and for which a lot of this confusion of narration and authority originally arose. In that essay, I suggested that the best thing to do was to treat the fight as a bona fide conflict and then the emotional response/conflict would be its own thing just afterwards.

Sorcerer is especially harsh in solving this issue, because in that game, there is no "Say Yes or roll the dice." Instead, if there is no conflict, you do not roll ever, ever; if there is one, you fucking well roll, no ifs or buts. It is utterly functional in this regard.

Speculations.

4. Looking at the harsher Gamist play of the late 1970s (to be fair, also some of role-playing's funniest), I speculate that the CA of play was so strong and obvious to everyone at the table that technical Task Resolution could not help but feed into Conflict Resolution. Here I'm thinking about resolutions which weren't combat, because combat in those games resolved conflict by definition; one side or the other was butchered, period. So effectively, they were doing Conflict Resolution with big whopping handfuls of Task Resolution moments, just staying on track so well and with such a fully-bought-in reward system at work, that no one thought twice about it. But translate that situation into the CA-mess that AD&D play often became around 1981 and going forwards ... and you have a system paradigm that generated hopeless Murk. As I conceive it, you can actually watch the GM-as-Story-Man appear and evolve in the adventure modules of that time, publication by publication, as the only apparent means to manage the system's utter lack in regard to moving fictional events forward through dangerous/interesting situations.

5. It may be that Task Resolution is sufficient for the needs of play if a substantial amount of other in-fiction and procedural details are well in hand and not Murky. What might those be? Perhaps my #2 above could point the way toward design of this kind, or perhaps actual-play reports regarding games which are unswervingly Task-y but which produced emergent Conflict Resolution. I bet CA lies at the heart of it, and a very socially-positive reward system.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

Good points, all. I agree about Primetime Adventures, say; I specifically warned readers about this matter in the Finnish edition of the game. Also, about your points 1 and 5:

1. I think a more positive definition of Task Resolution can be considered as well, not merely "rolling without anything going on." There are in fact ways to play which privilege reductionist thinking, i.e., that if you resolve at a very fine grain, you produce emergent resolutions at coarser grains. I'm not sure I think it's entirely productive or even functionally exists except as a beautiful ideal, but that doesn't stop people from liking the ideal and wanting to play this way. So in that case, Task Resolution can be considered as an identifiable desired entity and not merely the lack of an alternate one. Ralph Mazza mentioned long ago that this was his prevailing ideal in role-playing for most of his early history of play.

If you would, consider what I wrote about our D&D campaign at Story Games a while back. I attempt to define in theory terms what exactly it is we're doing in our campaign. The game in question was played over a hundred sessions (exactly so at this writing) beginning in the spring of 2011 and going to hiatus at the end of this summer. The nutshell of the campaign is basically that I took what I'd read about old school D&D and OSR, produced my own specific rules system for it and started a completely open sandbox campaign. This has proven to be the largest and probably socially most successful roleplaying campaign I've ever played.

As you can see in that discussion, my own take of what we've been doing in that campaign is that we resolve conflicts by resolving individual character actions. I've called this "task resolution" because it sure looks and feels like what people usually understand by that. The reason for why conflicts get resolved as well is basically similar to the case of the Burning Wheel "let it ride" rule: the GM is required to follow a certain agenda derived directly from the game's creative goals, and thus all of his task resolution choices drive towards the resolution of major conflicts. There's no logical certainty that conflicts get resolved, but just like Burning Wheel, as long as the GM actually does let it ride, conflict resolution necessarily follows from how individual tasks define and redefine fictional positioning.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eero,

I think that is Task Resolution in your game, continually given context and relevance by the other factors - most especially the unifying presence of a Creative Agenda.

The more I write about this - including a bunch of notes I scribbled earlier today and decided they were best kept as notes rather than posted - I think there's a real boundary between "tons of Tasks given enough context to work anyway," vs. "actual Conflict Resolution which happens to includes a hell of a lot distinct in-fiction actions." In practice, it may be easy as pie to cross that boundary once you have larger-scale and throughout-Model stuff like CA in place, but at least for me, I struggled in that borderland for a solid ten years of play, and it sounds like you did too before the game you described.

Small wonder those who didn't really grope and kill their way to a Sorcerer / TROS / Burning-Wheel solution gravitate so fast to a completely different mode of play best exemplified by My Life with Master. That was your go-to game for about five years, wasn't it?

Anyway, back to that claim of mine about there being a boundary, and therefore sticking with my stubborn insistence on a dichotomy rather than a spectrum. I tried to emphasize the cutoff with my continued use of terms like reliable and guaranteed in my previous two posts. In your current game, I don't think that's the case. I think that you've framed the frequent task-resolution in play so thoroughly that it is, if you will, saddled and broken to the bit, toward the end of getting conflicts resolved. Based on my experience, though, robust as play is among the group who's committed to it, you might be facing an upsetting, sudden, and disorienting breakdown of play if someone were to join or briefly play - and in using precisely the same overt rules as everyone else is using, gum shit up something fierce. I'm not criticizing your game or even advising changing it one little bit; 100 sessions is 100 freaking sessions, so what you get is a gold star. I'm only speaking from my own experience of being a very successful Champions GM who looked forward to impressing the guest players, but afterwards looked at the shreds of a horrible session in consternation, and who kept saying to himself, "But we used the same rules, what could have gone wrong?"

So that boundary exists, I think, in the existence of an explicit buy-in which is a priori demanded of everyone who plays, not merely an emergent happy-accident buy-in for a particular group's application. I'm not necessarily saying it should be textual, although if we were analyzing texts instead of play, the boundary could still be determined as present or absent in terms of instruction.

To do that for a moment, Burning Wheel differs from TROS in that Let It Ride is explicit, in black and white, demanding buy-in from everyone at the table; whereas in TROS, the link-up from resolution-driven in-fiction result to "now this situation has irrevocably changed" is still in the hands of a specific GM and the immediate group's buy-in to that GM's judgment. That's why I said Luke solved the problem whereas Jake almost did (again, in terms of instruction).

Let me know if that makes sense to you. I appreciate the dialogue; it has been incredibly helpful  and I hope to see threads in the other forums which spring up to address the points we've worked out.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

I think that is Task Resolution in your game, continually given context and relevance by the other factors - most especially the unifying presence of a Creative Agenda.

I think I understand what you mean. The distinction you're making is that while we have conflict resolution via task resolution (that is, conflicts are getting resolved and resolving individual tasks plays a big part in the how of it), we don't have a conflict resolution system. This might well be the case, at least the fact that I don't yet entirely understand the process of what the heck we're doing in analytical terms indicates something like this. (I almost get it, though - just haven't had the time to sit down and clarify my thinking, as I'm still stuck writing Eleanor's Dream.)

I'm not sure that the boundary is as important as you make it seem, though. People utilize rules systems in vague ways in the real world, so even if there is a theoretically clear line between when somebody is following a good system and when somebody is just making the right decisions, in practice this difference is not nearly as clear. People can slip between the categories. For example, it is somewhat arbitrary to say that somebody using "Let it Ride" in TRoS is just playing well while somebody using it in BW is utilizing a well-written rules system. It's just as fair to say that the TRoS guy has evolved the system presented in the book into his own application, and that application includes this useful feature. The reason we can say that he's using a conflict resolution system is that his way of play systematically (reliably, intentionally) resolves conflicts, and not because his system is written down.

That being said, I want to emphasize that I'm not arguing that conflict and task resolution are ends of a continuum. Rather, I find it useful to think of them as separate concerns, just as I wrote in my first post here. Both can be systematical or haphazard, and it's just accidental that we're used to seeing only one or the other being emphasized. Some extremely minor changes in how a task resolution system is applied can turn it into a conflict resolution system, which indicates to me that it's the context of what you do with your ability to resolve tasks that matters, not the fact that you have rules for task resolution.

I mean, as a hypothetical scenario on how arbitrary it is to treat these things as opposites: the D&D combat system is a conflict resolution system due to how it tracks hit points, and losing them all makes you helpless, which pretty much inevitably resolves the fictional situation. Thus we say that the individual attack rolls in the system are part of the conflict resolution procedure. However, remove the hitpoints and you suddenly have a bog-standard task resolution system: players declare attack actions, dice are rolled to find out whether the character hits, GM determines whether the hit has any impact on anything. The exact same thing that wasn't "task resolution" just became task resolution not because it was itself changed in any manner, but simply because something else was removed. What makes the D&D attack roll not task resolution is its context, and nothing else. This to me indicates that I might as well call things by the names that belong to them: the D&D attack check is a singular task resolution that is utilized as part of conflict resolution when it's allowed to impact hit point totals. This is a game that resolves conflicts by stringing tasks together and defining mechanics for measuring the impact of each individual task on the conflict. If climb checks did HP damage, then those would be conflict resolution mechanics, too.

This is, of course, just quibling about terminology. It has some slight theoretical meaning due to how I've been exploring the D&D way of resolving conflicts lately, but ultimately words are just words. We're getting conflicts resolved, and I think that I can write a game text out of how we're doing it, so it's sort of secondary what the proper theoretical name for it is.

Small wonder those who didn't really grope and kill their way to a Sorcerer / TROS / Burning-Wheel solution gravitate so fast to a completely different mode of play best exemplified by My Life with Master. That was your go-to game for about five years, wasn't it?

Indeed! I've tried to play a lot of different games over the last decade+, though, ever since I found the Forge.

Anyway, back to that claim of mine about there being a boundary, and therefore sticking with my stubborn insistence on a dichotomy rather than a spectrum.

I think that there is a dichotomy, too, but it's not between task and conflict resolution. Rather, it's between having a reliable conflict resolution system and having an unreliable one - or not having a system, however one wants to phrase it. Dragging task resolution into it seems to me like a red herring in this context as it's easy to e.g. conceptualize a game that works just like a task resolution game insofar as conflict resolution is concerned, but also does not have any sort of task resolution system, either. For example, a Nordic freeform game does not have either types of resolution systems: both tasks and conflicts are resolved by fiat or narrative cooperation.

What we really have is four types of games, not just two:

• Games that don't have systematic task resolution or systematic conflict resolution. They resolve both tasks and conflicts, both those resolutions are effected e.g. indirectly via narration mechanics (Once Upon a Time for example) or by fiat (an auteuristic Nordic game where the GM allows everybody to speak a lot and interrupts and pronounces resolutions as pacing dictates).
• Games that have systematic task resolution but no systematic conflict resolution. A traditional tabletop rpg is often like this: there is a universal skill system that exists for the purpose of defining any task a character might attempt, and then finding out whether the character succeeds, and how well. Whitewolf games, for example. Typically conflicts are again resolved by fiat, this is the case that gets talked about all the time by the name of "task resolution game".
• Games that don't have a task resolution system but do have a conflict resolution system. Primetime Adventures is a favourite example of mine; you can squint all you want, but that game genuinely doesn't have any way of resolving whether your character manages to climb over that wall or not. My Life with Master is another one. All task resolutions are made by e.g. pure narrative declaration by whoever's talking, while conflict resolution has very exact and strict rules.
• Finally, games that have clear and umambiguous system treatment for both task and conflict resolution. Saying that for example Burning Wheel doesn't have a task resolution system is a very counterintuitive way of using words, as the game certainly gives me a system that is very similar to task resolution systems in many games. Much easier to say that this is a game that does, in fact, systematize both task and conflict resolution. What's more, almost all games like this have a task resolution system because it is used as an element of how conflicts are resolved in that game. Making a game that has a task resolution system for some other reason is actually something I've been mulling over; it'd be interesting to figure out if there's ever any reason to resolve a character's climbing attempts aside from conflict resolution.

I tried to emphasize the cutoff with my continued use of terms like reliable and guaranteed in my previous two posts. In your current game, I don't think that's the case. I think that you've framed the frequent task-resolution in play so thoroughly that it is, if you will, saddled and broken to the bit, toward the end of getting conflicts resolved.

Yes. But, I'd like to ask whether this is really that different from how any conflict-resolution-via-task-resolution game works. One could easily say that Burning Wheel just has broken the task resolution monster down so well in the game text that it's unlikely that anybody'd manage to take the game and not resolve conflicts with it. But that's just a text, take a gamer who wants to ignore the key parts like "Let It Ride" and there goes the conflict resolution. Is there a difference between the two games here except that Burning Wheel has a written text and my game doesn't?

This is to say, would it not be useful to say that both my D&D campaign and Burning Wheel and TSoY and Sorcerer (partially), too, they all rely on task resolution procedures that are leveraged to make conflicts resolve. Some other games like MLwM or Primetime Adventures... they just don't. I find it a pretty interesting difference, and have gained much from observing it over the years. For example, if you read my Solar System text, I pretty much interpret TSoY in these terms: the game clearly involves a task resolution system that sometimes utilizes its task resolution procedure for the purpose of resolving conflicts, but then there are also the times when it just doesn't - it's possible to make Ability checks in TSoY for all sorts of purposes that have nothing immediately meaningful to do with conflict resolution.

Based on my experience, though, robust as play is among the group who's committed to it, you might be facing an upsetting, sudden, and disorienting breakdown of play if someone were to join or briefly play - and in using precisely the same overt rules as everyone else is using, gum shit up something fierce.

Yeah, I'm aware of this possibility. In practice the game has proven very robust, but I recognize that this is largely because I'm a pretty overbearing (and easy to understand) instructor and we affirm the purpose of play constantly - nobody gets to forget what we're trying to do, we're not kidding around at the table. The most difficult visiting players we have had haven't really slowed the game down so much as they simply haven't enjoyed themselves; players not on the dungeoneering performance train tend to get sidelined savagely by the OSR table dynamics. We've had quite a few visiting or experimenting players, and some fall in love with the game while others excuse themselves politely after a sample session. So yes, the game definitely relies on CA concordance for a player to enjoy themselves - but then, what game doesn't?

So that boundary exists, I think, in the existence of an explicit buy-in which is a priori demanded of everyone who plays, not merely an emergent happy-accident buy-in for a particular group's application. I'm not necessarily saying it should be textual, although if we were analyzing texts instead of play, the boundary could still be determined as present or absent in terms of instruction.

Yes, you address the point I'm making up there in the beginning of the post about recognizing that the game is not the text. As I describe above I'm not convinced that merely being a text vs. being an oral tradition is a compelling point of difference between task resolution and conflict resolution, but you have a deeper point here: explicit buy-in for the group to put the power to advance situations (resolve conflicts) into systematic hands instead of reserving it somewhere. This sure sounds like my own conception of systematic vs. fiat-relying conflict resolution.

I started to argue that our campaign is actually a conflict resolution game by this definition because the game most definitely does bestow the power to resolve quite clearly as part of the resolution package, but the oral nature of the game hampers me on this. The game system is pretty stable after a 100 sessions, so much so that it's now being played in a completely independent campaign over in Helsinki, but I can't actually quote a specific rule here. Fortunately we don't really need to figure out whether my unpublished D&D homebrew is part of the category of "conflict resolution games" or not.

And yes, this is interesting. If there really is a meaningful difference between a game with conflict resolution and a game that just happens to resolve conflicts, then that casts a challenge at games like say D&D. This interests me because I'm currently pretty convinced that properly reduced to its component parts D&D just about perfectly accomplishes being the exact game it attempts to be. Understanding what that actually is intrigues me, as does finding a potential flaw in the game: does D&D gain something from not having a conflict resolution system, if it actually doesn't have one? (Outside combat I mean. The combat system is solidly conflict-resolving, no matter the nuances of terminology.)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eero,

Too much to talk about in this thread. Can you start a new one specifically about your D&D game? I see a couple of points in your post that I'd like to dig into, but we are far away from the games that Paolo introduced.

Best, Ron

[stefoid]

Hey Ron, I have my pet 'understanding' of task and conflict res, which is pretty brief.  Id like to hear your thoughts on whether it is flawed in some way.

So players have intentions - conflicts - they want resolved.   the system gives them tools to do that. 

If the system resolves whether those intentions happen or not, then the system is performing conflict res.
If the system requires human interpretation to resolve whether those intentions happen or not, its performing task res.

Thats pretty much it.  A simple example:

Character intention is to stop the hobgoblin from murdering the princess.  the tools this example system gives the player are to "attack the hobgoblin with a sword and do damage".
So the player hits the hobgoblin, doing significant damage, but failing to kill it.   Is the damage sufficient to stop the hobgoblin killing the princess?  Only the GM can answer this.  This system is doing task res.

A second system gives the player a tool which enables the player to state "my guy tries to stop the hobgoblin from killing the princess by hitting it with my sword".  this system promises that if successful, thats what happens.  This system is performing conflict res.

[greyorm]

Character intention is to stop the hobgoblin from murdering the princess.  the tools this example system gives the player are to "attack the hobgoblin with a sword and do damage".

So the player hits the hobgoblin, doing significant damage, but failing to kill it.   Is the damage sufficient to stop the hobgoblin killing the princess?  Only the GM can answer this.  This system is doing task res.

A second system gives the player a tool which enables the player to state "my guy tries to stop the hobgoblin from killing the princess by hitting it with my sword".  this system promises that if successful, thats what happens.  This system is performing conflict res.[/i]

This is what I went with in describing how expressed actions were supposed to function in ORX: it wasn't "what you were doing", but "what you were doing to try and accomplish something". And if you succeed, you accomplish the thing, and if you don't, you don't accomplish that thing. How the action taken fit into that was left to narration and various iterations of how the dice fell and what the other players were doing in the meta-game: I X'd successfully and did the thing; I failed to X but did the thing; I failed to X and didn't do the thing; I X'd successfully but failed to do the thing.

Tangentially, the scope of "the thing" feels like a separate issue, and I'm not sure I ever verbally worked it out to my satisfaction (it always felt a bit fuzzy in play, I tried to go with more "immediate steps/consequences" as a guideline).

Anyways, I'm mentioning this specifically because much the of thread upstream reads a bit incomprehensibly to me and I'm not sure how the above ties into that, if that's NOT conflict versus task, if it's a failed attempt at it, or not -- if it's an example of Burning Wheel or an example of PtA (neither of which I have any experience with, I only mention them as apparent touchpoints of success or failure in dealing with the distinction).