Connection between target numbers and purpose of dice resolution

[ewilen]

Um, just want to correct my last post and say that I should have written "instant", not "instance". Essentially, I've read threads where people have said they're quite happy to know that their GM is faking die rolls, using Moving Clues, etc. some of the time. They just don't want to have it shoved in their faces, and they don't want it to happen all the time. So when the GM starts rattling dice with an evil gleam in his eye, it can enhance their sense of risk, believability, whatever, even though they don't know for sure if the roll really means anything. Personally I'm not sure I'd enjoy this--I think I'd prefer to have the GM be more up-front about when he's guiding play.

(Mike Holmes provides some examples--search for his name in this thread for his experience in a game set in Middle Earth.)

[ewilen]

And again, here is a plea to not use "deterministic" to mean "determinative".

[Josh Roby]

Yes, they really are selectors... I'm looking at the System (as in the Lumpley Principle) layer of things - "what mechanics are for." ... We use mechanics to decide what happens because we've agreed to beforehand. We think that the mechanics are more fun than just arguing about it, or the mechanics help us create a particular kind of play experience that we desire.

If we want to raise the stakes up into Lumpley territory, the 'System' outputs not just 'success/fail' or perhaps degree of success/fail but also who gets to articulate that success or fail.  What the System does not do, and will never do, is articulate its own output.  The System does not describe the sword swing, the double entendre, the navigation error, or the like.  It may dictate it, but it does not describe it; it may set boundaries for the ensuing description, but it does not do the description.  At least for my purposes, I don't find this to be a determinative selection process.  Otherwise, one crit fail narrated by fellow player Joe is the same as another crit fail narrated by Joe.

The System will never say that the blood is pumping in your character Mishaka the Inconsolable' ears as she swings her daiklave named Glory and skewers the Hierophant on the steps of the Cathedral of Saffron Jade.  The important stuff is and always will be the domain of the players involved, not the set of rules they are using.  The rules will guide the players (as you say, 'the mechanics help us create a particular kind of play experience'), but that's different than communicating to the players.

To drag this back into the realm of target numbers and dice resolution, the GM can't be setting the target numbers in the hopes of forcing the System to do the dirty work for him.  "Gee, guys, you didn't make the roll -- the horsemen flank you, so you'll have to return to the hidden cave."  The System isn't selecting that; the GM is.

[ewilen]

Well now we're getting into a slippery area in theory since the Lumpley principle can be interpreted descriptively as saying that System is everything that goes into establishing credibility and setting "facts" in the SIS. Which could conceivably swallow up the players as part of System.

Maybe that would be useful in some analyses. However, Joshua, I think you're right to argue that it isn't very useful here. So I agree that even an established mechanic doesn't really do anything unless and until the participants decide what its inputs are (and these inputs can be established elements of the SIS as well as player declarations and metagame abstractions), how to convert these inputs into the "stuff" the the mechanic literally operates on (if necessary), and how to take the output of the mechanic and convert it back. But the System can regulate all of this, as you say, by establishing who gets to do the selection and conversion (interpretation), when the selection and conversion happen (FitM vs. FATE, for example), and limitations (establishing Stakes or providing parameters/guidelines for interpreting inputs and outputs).

The System isn't going to say that Glory skewers the Hierophant, but it might say that Glory has to define both the success (priest-kabob) and failure (whiff!) before rolling dice; it could equally leave interpretation until after the roll but at the risk of making the resolution mechanic meaningless. To recover the meaning you might need some strong paramaters. And of course a resolution mechanic can be far more than a die roll--it could entail the optional addition of resources to fix bad rolls, or raising stakes with rerolls, exotic mechanics like interpreting pictures on a card, etc.

[Paganini]

If we want to raise the stakes up into Lumpley territory, the 'System' outputs not just 'success/fail' or perhaps degree of success/fail but also who gets to articulate that success or fail.  What the System does not do, and will never do, is articulate its own output.  The System does not describe the sword swing, the double entendre, the navigation error, or the like.  It may dictate it, but it does not describe it; it may set boundaries for the ensuing description, but it does not do the description.  At least for my purposes, I don't find this to be a determinative selection process.  Otherwise, one crit fail narrated by fellow player Joe is the same as another crit fail narrated by Joe.

But... I don't think we're disagreeing about anything! You sound like you want to... but we're not! Not only do the mechanics not articulate the output, they also do not define the input (i.e., the set of potential "things to happen" that we're selecting from). One crit fail narrated by fellow player Joe is indeed the same as another crit fail narrated by Joe *in terms of mechanics.* But one crit fail narrated by fellow player Joe is decidedly different from a crit success narrated by fellow player Joe, which is what the mechanics help us decide.

Eliot, hold your horses for one second there. The players can never be part of LP System. Basically, what the LP is saying is that the really indispensable part of role-playing is that some people are making some stuff up together. System is the process that takes them from "a bunch of people who want to make stuff up" to "a bunch of people who have agreed that *THIS* is what we've made up." That's part of the point. A mechanic on its own is useless. It has to have some made-up stuff to select *from.* The mechanics never make stuff up themselves. They can never tell the players what to make up. All they do is help the players decide from some possible made-up stuff which made-up stoff to actually use. And they only even do this because the players agreed ahead of time about using those particular mechanics (instead of just negotiationg, or something).

[ewilen]

Okay, horses held. I still think there's something slippery there if someone wants to pursue it, but I don't think it's germane to this thread.

Here's what I think we have so far, in a nutshell: resolution mechanics are (or ought to be) selectors, in the sense that to be useful they must be distinguishing possible alternatives from impossible ones and then assisting in selecting among genuinely-possible, genuinely-distinct alternatives. But how they select (in all kinds of ways) has a big effect on the interactions between the players and the game.

Are we leaving anything out, John?

[Josh Roby]

I'm going to be nitpicky, Eliot.

Here's what I think we have so far: resolution mechanics are delimiters, in that they must be useful in distinguishing acceptable alternatives from unacceptable ones, and then assisting the players in selecting and articulating among the likely, distinct, and interesting alternatives.

Needless to say, how the system delimits alternatives has a big effect on the interactions between the players and the game.

I say delimit rather than select because the mechanic does not determine the development of the SiS and story, it only offers a narrower range of possibilities, from which the players choose.
Because not all systems are realistic, mechanics do not necessarily select possible and impossible alternatives.  The operation of the mechanic does, however, make some alternatives unacceptable -- the strongest example of this is the common 'throw the result out if you don't like it' rule.  Alternately, once you get that critical success and everybody around the table sees it, it's unacceptable to narrate into the SIS that you screwed up.  That said, I'm not sure if I like acceptable/unacceptable, either.
And lastly, it's is always and fundamentally the players who do the selection of what happens, and the articulation of how the 'what happens' plays out in the SIS.

But all of this happens after the mechanic is used.  This is all a matter of outputs, and while having an eye for the end product is important when talking about the inputs (ie setting the target number), we may be straying a little off-topic.  The rights on who gets to articulate the system's results and how that validates the players' interests are fascinating to me, but belong in another thread.

A mechanic on its own is useless. It has to have some made-up stuff to select *from.* The mechanics never make stuff up themselves. They can never tell the players what to make up. All they do is help the players decide from some possible made-up stuff which made-up stoff to actually use.

Exactly.  It should also be noted that that 'made-up stuff to select from' can as easily be the shared understanding of genre conventions as it is the individual elements within the SIS -- that is, the villain gets away at the end of a pulp serial inspired game, for instance, because the villain always gets away at the end.  It has nothing to do with the abandoned warehouse, the slaughtered mooks, or the characters' abilities -- the villain always escapes until the Big Finish.

The system also determines which imagined elements are relevant to the situation it is arbitrating -- or to be more precise, it determines who gets to say what's relevant and what's not.  In the above, the principle that the wiley villain escapes is more relevant than the layout of the warehouse.  Others include your +9 against Ogres dagger, the social milleu in regards to your character's political intentions, the height of the cliff the characters would have to jump off, et cetera.  Some of these the system will deem 'relevant' and some of them the system will functionally ignore (ie no game effect),

A lot of this goes into the determination of the target number (the responsibility for which the system typically bestows on the GM).  Deciding what elements of the SIS are relevant to the roll is a biggie -- because the target number determines how likely a set of alternatives is, this basically boils down to a question of inclusion.  How likely do you want it that the player jumps the ravine?  How likely do you suppose the players want it to be?  What does that say about your conception of what's happening in the game, and theirs?