Simulationism and Conflict Resolution

[Valamir]

Andrew's spot on.

I'd take his recommendation even a step further and suggest that while you write your rules you keep that paragraph in mind and be ruthless about cutting out everything that doesn't have anything to do with "getting to choose how they go out".

Take, for instance, shooting a gun.  From what you wrote the important question would be "are you shooting the gun to ease the suffering of others?  Or are you shooting a gun out of selfish base desires?"

After that its easy to see that what calibre the gun is or how much damage it does are much more trivial (potentially irrelevant) issues.

Similarly firing a gun on full automatic is interesting not for how much extra firepower you get, but because of the greatly increased risk of collateral damage to others.   Do the character care about that, or not?

[ironick]

Wow, I'm really pleased with the reaction to this idea!

Lee - yeah, I'm getting that picture ;)  I will definitely track it down.

Andrew - I was actually toying around with some sets of dichotomous (sp?) traits in this very vein, like Grace vs. Despair, Love (or Hope) vs. Apathy.   I was also maybe thinking about the Seven Beatific Virtues vs. the Seven Deadly Sins, but that's a lot of traits and I also wanted to stay more secular than religious.  Although...I could definitely see Buddhism becoming more popular--after all, life is suffering, and now it's patently obvious to everyone how little the material world means.

Damn, I just might have to make time to work on this game!  Thanks for all the inspiration, guys, and I will definitely check out HQ.

Nick

[M. J. Young]

Thanks to everyone for their words, as well, but no one still has addressed my original question, which is (reworded): "Is task resolution more suited to Simulationism than conflict resolution, or is the lack of CR in Sim purely due to the fact that no one explores the option because, well, no one does it?"

In other words, is TR inherently better suited for Sim than CR, given the goals of the Agenda?

Well, give us a chance. I'm not usually here more than once a day.

Conflict Resolution is often counter to cause-and-effect treatment of the world. CR says "This happens this way because of what it will mean," and "what it will mean" doesn't really enter into a logical cause-and-effect treatment.

Perhaps, though, I can shed some light on the subject in doing so.

Task resolution in essence says that we're going to resolve the details at a very basic level, and build from the details to the outcome. Combat done this way essentially determines whether A hits B, how much damage the hit does, how much damage B can take, whether B hits A, and so on. In a different circumstance, we would roll for detecting for traps, roll for searching the room, roll for looking for secret doors--each task individually determined according to its own probability curve, combining together to create the total picture through the accumulation of detail.

Conflict resolution does not have anything to do directly with "what it will mean". It merely puts the picture together the other way. It says, "A defeats B, and now that we know that we can decide how it happens."

What conflict resolution does otherwise is trust the players with the details.

Thus simulationist use of conflict resolution would involve determining the absolute probability of a positive versus a negative outcome in this situation, rolling the dice to determine which it is, and then allowing those involved in play to explain how and why it proved to be positive or negative.

Any "meaning" that is found in this is created by the players. If you're already in a narrativist frame of mind, it might be an opportunity to address premise ("concern for his brother drove him to overcome the odds and defeat the emperor's evil henchman"). If you're already in a simulationist frame of mind, it becomes an opportunity to create detail ("using the reverse parry, I knock his sword from his hand, and pin his shirt to the tree behind him with my rapier, then holding my dagger to his chest I demand, 'Do you yield?' and he surrenders").

Early simulationist games didn't expect that ordinary players would be able to do correct simulation of the details, and thought that the details mattered, so they used task resolution. (You can't say that conflict resolution had not been invented--Risk used it, for goodness sake.)

If what you're trying to simulate is larger scale, though, there's no particular reason to sweat the details. Provide some guidance on how those details are to be handled, and let the players do it.

This of course assumes you actually are thinking in simulationist terms. As Ron says, there's a strong hint of narrativism in your description.

I really want to highlight the fact that in the face of a looming world-ending disaster, none of the petty shit that people normally worry about even *matters*.

I understand the point, but I think you're missing a major part of the big picture.

Someone visited St. Francis one morning. He was working in his garden. They asked him, "What would you do if you knew that Jesus was coming this afternoon?" He said, "I would finish my gardening."

There's a fair segment of humanity that has been expecting the end of the world for a long time, and have lived with the understanding that today could be the last day. There is good reason to think that a substantial chunk of these people would continue doing what they're doing right up to the end, because they're doing what they think they should be doing and they've always known it was going to end sometime.

I'm not sure how you work them into your simulation, but you should at least account for that possibility.

--M. J. Young

[ironick]

M. J. Young wrote:

There's a fair segment of humanity that has been expecting the end of the world for a long time, and have lived with the understanding that today could be the last day. There is good reason to think that a substantial chunk of these people would continue doing what they're doing right up to the end, because they're doing what they think they should be doing and they've always known it was going to end sometime.

I'm not sure how you work them into your simulation, but you should at least account for that possibility.

I didn't mean to sound like I wasn't; I fully intend to. The two sides that I mentioned are just the opposite ends of the reaction spectrum, with most everyone else falling in between.  I guess I was writing with the assumption that most players would want to be at one pole or the other--if you just go about your daily business, there's not going to be much exciting roleplaying.  Also, I've just been giving really basic facts about what I've got in mind, since we're not in the design forum.

Any "meaning" that is found in this is created by the players. If you're already in a narrativist frame of mind, it might be an opportunity to address premise ("concern for his brother drove him to overcome the odds and defeat the emperor's evil henchman"). If you're already in a simulationist frame of mind, it becomes an opportunity to create detail ("using the reverse parry, I knock his sword from his hand, and pin his shirt to the tree behind him with my rapier, then holding my dagger to his chest I demand, 'Do you yield?' and he surrenders").

Ah, I see your point.  Since I have rarely, if ever seen conflict resolution mechanics outside of Narrativist games, I always associated it with creating meaning of that sort.   If I'm reading you right (and please correct me if I'm not), one could say that in Simulationism TR can be equated to "micro-resolution", while CR could be equated to "macro-resolution".  Certainly seems like a good way to tone down the crunch.

Nick

[charles ferguson]

Hi Nick

From memory the Big Model explicitly states that no CA is defined by a particular type of mechanic (techniques & ephemera). So there's no reason you can't consider any kind of mechanic for a game regardless of its potential CA. There's a bunch of design considerations that will (or should) limit your choice of mechanics, but according to current thinking at the Forge (please jump in here if I have this wrong, anyone) CA isn't one of those.

In other words: CA is about agenda, not about mandationg which techniques & ephemera you can use to drive toward that agenda. Will any technique work equally well with any CA? Possibly not, but IMO all we can say with any certainty right now is that not every technique will work with every game (disregarding those that don't work with any game :). Finding out which is which is what the fun's all about...

You might want to check Gamist Advice for D&D from the Actual Play forum. It has bucketfuls of very cool play examples of GM'ing a CR/TR mix in D&D, with some detailed & insightful discussion on when & why the GM's choice of CR/TR was made, & how those choices panned out in play. As you'll guess from the title it's focussed on Gamism, but it does give a another angle on what's possible re: resolution techniques in a non-Nar game. And although it's heavily Gamist, a lot of the conflict resolutions presented are entirely faithful to in-game causality.[/i]