tasks, conflicts, and a room full of Boggles

[stefoid]

We have this HeroWars game which has been going on for some time.  The GM is inventive and improvises well, but his methods are strictly old school.  Another player and I have been looking into conflict resolution, etc...  as a way of improving our combined game experience.   But its difficult trying to get a handle on exactly what is the people have been talking about -- even on this forum they dont agree or they offer up imaginary scenarios which make sense because they know what they are talking about, but dont serve to adequately explain it to someone who doesnt.

  Another discussion in the indie designer forum, plus a recent game experience I think has dont the trick for me, ut id like to run i by people to see if thats all there is.

room full of boggles.  A boggle is an absurd caricture of a character, something like a black and white era Looney Toons character.   Our party has to get through this castle of boggles in order to proceed.  One of the rooms is a bar full of bogles, sitting around playing cards, drinking etc...  but there is no roof.  Its just endless open sky.  the twist is that the room is upside down and the boggles are all happilly going about their business upside down, sitting on furniture fixed to what looks to the party as the roof.  It quickly becomes apparent that if we enter the room, we fall down into the sky -- whatever is keeping the boggles rigtly oriented doesnt work for us.  To make matters worse, they talk backwards, too.

So its a puzzle scenario. Come up with a plan on how to cross the room without fallng to our deaths.  Obviously the GM and the players dont want that to happen.  what we want to happen is for everyone to make it, as entertainingly as possible, given the humourus possibilities of the situation.

How this played out was old school task resolution.  come up with a plan and roll for every seperate action in sequence.  One character - a good climber - wanted to climb acorss using the fixtures, another player wanted to use concentration to ignore the illusion that the room was upside down and simply join the boggles in walking on the ceiling.  My character, who had speaking different languages magic, wanted to convince a fat boggle to tie a rope to himself and haul me accross - a situation the GM quickly and cleverly improvised as dragging me around for 10 minutes proudly showing off his new human 'balloon'.

so roll for communication magic, roll for throwing the rope, etc... roll for climbing 1/4 of the way across, now 1/2 etc...  this played out in something like 40-50 minutes.  any spontaneous improvisational fun to be had was swamped in a sea of dice rolls -- and inevitably there were occasions when players failed critical rolls and the GM had to improvise reasons why they didnt fall into space and die.  It could have been done with some chuckling all around in under 0 minutes, and most of that would have been players throwing ideas around.

So the upshot is, it served to illustrate to me that we were rolling to resolve the wrong things.  we didnt want to resolve WHAT happened.  We know what happened before we started - the players were going to get across that room, by hook or by crook, without any character falling into space.  What we wanted to know in this situation is HOW it happened.  human balloons, jedi mind tricks, clambering around etc...  and we wanted to laugh heartilly at the best laid plans of mice and men going awry in a humorous way, yet still managing to succeed and get on with the show.



(end of part I)

[stefoid]

...part II   sorry for the crappy typing, but I am nursing a cat and a sleeping baby while typing this on my laptop.

so the boggles according to conflict resolution should be ONE roll per character crossing to determine HOW they get accross.  If they roll well they do it in style and if they roll badly they do it with major inconvenience and perhaps embarassing but not life threatening consequences.  this is after all a humourous puzzle situation, not really a mater of life and death.

So Im thinking that you dont specifically need rules to support task resolution (however nice it would be if they did).  Conflict resolution isnt a mechanic, its a concept.  You should be able to use conflict resolution in any rules, as long as you let the concept guide you - 'why am I rolling?'   (It may be that you are abandoning the rules by doing this, I suppose)

However, supporting conflict resolution in a ruleset is simply a matter of making the rules flexible enough so that they can accomodate any type of resolution with a single execution of the resolution mechanic. 

Going back to the example of the boggle room, the rules should allow the players/GM to decide what is most important about the situation that needs resolving, and then let them resolve it in one go.

I can think of several scenarios where the WHY are we rolling is diferent depending on the context:

1) it isnt important to anyone how the characters get through the room.  it is a given they all do and it is completely irrelevent to whatever is going on.  The GM could just narrate a humerous scene in passing, without any resolution at all

2) getting through the room isnt important to whatever is going on, so it is assumed they all do, but it may be important, or at least fun, to determine how they got across.  this is the way I believe that our example should have played out, because it would have been funny.  It may be in a similar situaiton that a character was scared of heights or something, so there could have been dramatic reasons to play the 'how' as well.  - do they freak out or do they conquer their fear etc..  Anyway, in ths situation, you roll once to determine the how.

3)  getting through the room is important to whats going on - maybe there is a giant boggle chasing the group that could catch them, or maybe the GMs entire scenario is based around the players puzzle solving abilities, and hence the question becomes not 'how' but 'what'  which is the same question that task resolution answers,  WHAT happens?  'CAN they cross the room or not?' is the question that the roll answers.  In this scenario, it is possible to use task resolution on an incremental basis, as we did, or simply define the task to be 'getting across the room'.  One player would test their climbing skill, another their meditation, and the other their powers of communication.   However, there is still no possibility of the players falling to their deaths.  In this situation, that is still a no-no.  So the 'stakes' - the consequences of success and failure - still need to be presented in a way that does not allow characters falling.  They either succeed or they fail in a non-fatal way, and the GM must have ways of offering viable alternatives (allowing the payer to try a different apporach, or maybe another path through the castle is available).  What you dont want is getting into a situation where the player has no option but "I try again..." and again, and again...

4) getting through the room is the be all and end all of the scenario.   I cant imagine this being the case in my example, but lets go with it anyway.  In this case player death might be an option, as might be total abject failure.  In this case using one roll to cross the room or not might be a little anti-climactic.  You would probably want to break it into tasks or sub-conflicts.  I think a sub-conflict is different to a task in that a task is still about WHAT happens - are there any examples of sub-conflicts that are different to tasks in breaking this down for an ultra-dramatic scene?

[stefoid]

ooops, typo.  Should have said you dont specifically need rules to support _conflict_ resolution, because its a concept, not a mechanic. 

[Kesher]

2) getting through the room isnt important to whatever is going on, so it is assumed they all do, but it may be important, or at least fun, to determine how they got across.  this is the way I believe that our example should have played out, because it would have been funny.  It may be in a similar situaiton that a character was scared of heights or something, so there could have been dramatic reasons to play the 'how' as well.  - do they freak out or do they conquer their fear etc..  Anyway, in ths situation, you roll once to determine the how.

I think you might want to include the iteration of "You get across the room, but you do it with or without specific consequences" to this.  Like you get across, but you accidentally knock a boggle into the sky, or make one your enemy, or cause one to fall in love with you, etc.  A lot o' indie games out there these days are building in that kind of result to CR.

As an aside, if you're using HeroWars, isn't the whole resolution system based on conflict resolution?  I mean, I guess you can always scale CR down to task resolution (Bringing Down the Pain in TSoY springs to mind), but in this case it seems like backwards Drift, if that's possible.

And, I'm interested in the social stuff going on here.  How did you all react to the endless rolling?  Did you get bored?  Did the GM notice?  Would some of you prefer to move things out into pure CR?  Have you approached your GM about it?  If not, how do you think he might react?

Aaron

[stefoid]

I assumed that 'how' comes with consequences, but you are right to spell it out.

yeah, we play hero wars with the gms homebrew rules which are straightlaced task resolution.   

I am trying to get us playing PTA.  its hard work, but I have at least 3 other players so far.  I figure if I can pull that off successfully, then I wont need to say anything explicit - everyone will jst go "ohhhhhh..."

[Walt Freitag]

Have you considered the possibility that task resolution vs. conflict resolution isn't the real issue here?

This is a puzzle room. By which I mean, an in-game problem that is unrelated or only distantly related to the characters' strengths and weaknesses within the system.

When as a GM I confront players with a puzzle room, I'm looking for one thing: impress me with a solution. It's not about the characters, it's not about the story, it's about them and me. Any resolution system that gets in the way of my being able to say, essentially, "You've impressed me sufficiently; move on" or "You haven't impressed me; try again" is counterproductive. (This is true whether the puzzle has a specific solution designed into it, or not, though I personally only use the kind that do not.) The main problem with task resolution is that a good plan can come to grief with bad rolls. The main problem with conflict resolution is that a poor plan will suffice if the players are willing to accept the adverse consequences (and if the adverse consequences are too severe to be acceptable, then it can't really be conflict resolution; that's part of the problem you're seeing in this case). So what's important isn't whether it's task resolution or conflict resolution; it's whether I can manipulate it.

Bad, naughty, illusionist GM, you say? I'll accept that. But without a bad naughty illusionist GM, I don't see any point to having a puzzle room in the first place.

- Walt

[stefoid]

No I didnt say bad naughty GM.  The GM was looking for exactly what you described, and Im sure it played out that way in his head as he was inventing the situation.  Its just that the execution of the scene by the group took waaay to long for the kind of situation it was, and thus became more of a "will we ever get through this bleeping boggle room and get on with the show?"

your point about good plans and poor plans is taken, however.