Does Conflict Res = No Roleplaying?

[S'mon]

That is, what he really wants is more likely task resolution. Since task resolution can sometimes be used to replace dialog, as mentioned, then he worries that that there's that either/or dichotomy. That is, if you go to resolving, there's no way to have the player's skill come into play.

In fact, that's generally true. A lot of Gamism in RPGs comes down to using the correct series of tasks. Cast this spell, use this weapon with this maneuver. Then finish him off with a shove into the fire pit. Task, task task. When you resolve a dialog, there's just one step, meaning no chance for player tactical ability to come to the fore - you just roll the dice and see what happens. So the gamist, with dialog, often prefers to talk their way out of a situation as the way of demonstrating their skill. Basically these situations become technically "puzzles" which the player has to indicate his character as saying the right thing to get out of. Thus system is avoided in order to enable gamism.

This is fascinating - I'm not sure if it describes Ravi (though it seems to fit) but it certainly describes me!  :)  I pride myself on being able to talk the hind leg off a donkey in-game, and I _hate_ it when I'm forced to roll a die and make some number stand for the result of my impassioned speech.  I usually play D&D, and D&D doesn't generally support the kind of charismatic warrior PCs I like to play, not unless I play a Lawful Good Paladin.  The Bards and such are supposed to be the Diplomatists, but I want to play a tough guy with a big sword (the "Real Man" school of RPing, though many of my PCs are female), not some foppish minstrel with a feather in his cap.  So I get pretty frustrated when I'm doing "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers..." and the GM makes me roll on my non-existent Diplomacy score.  :)

[S'mon]

To be very clear, conflict resolution in narrativism has little to nothing to do with "protagonism." That is, the players ability to make a character look good or generally to be a protagonist tends to come all before or after contests in the narrations leading up or following the resolution, or use of mechanics at these points.

I do get this - from reading Sorcerer & Sword, actually, which had a big impact on my GMing (as well as helping to split up my D&D group when Kerstin realised There is another way...) ;)
So nowadays running D&D swords & sorcery style I put considerable effort into ensuring that the PCs are just the damn coolest bunch of roughnecks imaginable, and the world is there making them look good even as it's inflicting all kinds of misery on them.  When the Jackal rolls a '1' with his sniper shot and misses General deGaulle it's not because he's incompetent, it's because the General moved his head at  just the wrong moment; when the PC swordsman rolls a '1' he didn't fluff the blow like a schoolgirl, the vile orc desperately parried and just managed to set the deadly thrust aside...

[droog]

almost every human being understands character to character interaction and the basics of how it functions

I don't mean intentionally to be contentious, but I do think this point is highly arguable.

[Vaxalon]

Leaving out autistics, infants, and others who I am sure we will agree we're not talking about, who do you have in mind?  Remember, he's talking about the basics of human interaction.

[droog]

If 'basics' is opening your mouth and letting something come out, then I agree. But I've seen a lot of dysfunctional communication both in games and out. I don't think that being able either to speak well or to act is something that comes by nature. Neither is it easy to empathise with a different mindset; ie it takes sensitivity and training.

Hence, the SWd20 game I just played; not to mention many games I've been in in the past. What passes for IC dialogue in many cases would get the rotten tomatoes flying elsewhere.

[Vaxalon]

Have you seen the latest SW movies?  My guess is that the dialogue is right on target.  :)

[droog]

Well, my point was that a lot of people have no more idea how to interact with others than to swing a sword. So 'roleplaying' or 'IC dialogue' is not necessarily an ideal I strive for. That said, I agree with Mike (obviously) that HQ's conflict resolution by no means precludes dialogue.


And no, I gave up after The Phantom Menace. Actually I gave up after Return of the Jedi, but I was drunk in the city late one night and ending up going to a 1am screening of tPM....

[Mike Holmes]

Moot point.

As I say, it all comes down to the group's level of requirement. Which can be anywhere from simple description ("I get him to give it to me by talking to him") to improv Shakespeare.

The relevant point for the thread is that there's nothing about conflict resolution - or even task resolution, for that matter - that forces players not to do dialog. It's all in how the rolls are called for. If the player is allowed to call for a role to replace dialog, then it may happen. But one can still require dialog, and then roll at the key moments, if one wants.

Note that the groups that I play in have moved, if I might be so presumptuous, beyond this dichotomy. That is, sometimes they do, in fact, narrate around dialog, and not do it. But they do so only when it's, for lack of a better term, artistic to do so. For example, I remember this scene in the show Six Feet Under where at one point one character tells another that he's terminally ill. But we don't hear the dialog. The camera is pulling back, and they're "out of range" of hearing, and all we see is the looks on their faces. A very moving moment done this way. Well, my players will often do things something like this, describing the conversation instead of actually doing the dialog. Done thoughtfully, I think this is actually better in many ways than actually doing dialog that we all know how it's going to go.

The best example that I can think of is the "buying a sword" dialog. Sure we could do the haggling back and forth, but, I don't know about you, but I've done that scene enough times in my life that I don't have to do it anymore. Especially if it's tangential to the plot - the player just getting a power boost before moving on. In fact, using these techniques, you can say stuff like, "You haggle for no less than four hours before settling on a price - now roll." Don't know about you, but I don't want to hear the actual four hours of haggling.

Characters speak a whole lot more than what comes out in actual play, on the whole. We gloss over hellos spoken to travelers on the road, the pardons spoken to people on the street, the thank you's to the servants, etc, etc. What you choose to speak is, well, a choice; not the product of doing the dialog for absolutely everone you run across. As such, I think that it's just fine to use all sorts of narrative voices to describe such interactions.

Put anther way, the imperative to speak dialog first person seems to stem from the desire to try for the sorts of immersion that come from actor stance play. The point being to realize what your goals are, and play to them actively instead of doing so based simply on tradition.

Mike

[Darcy Burgess]

Not to sound like a whiny whinerson, but I'm so confused (about a great many things, but also specifically some stuff in this thread).

And before worrying about the whole big picture, I'd really like a little clarification on one topic that has me really befuddled.  (An "example of play" or similar explanation would be great).

Mike made allusion to the fact that you can "roleplay" a scene along, speaking in character (or narrating away, or whatever vehicle your group uses), and then "everyone will realize that it's time for a roll".  I just can't wrap my head around how this works.  What elements pop up to notify you of the roll?  Is it strictly a "feel" thing?

Arg!

[Vaxalon]

Take this link first, as an example of the *IC* portion of play:

http://random.average-bear.com/ShadowWorld/Session38

Take a look at the first scene.  Scroll down a bit...

Okhfels goes over to his men.
Okhfels: "You are thinking, now, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to join up. You're thinking, maybe, it's time to go back to your old comrades."
Okhfels: "Think hard about that."
Fahja stands looking at the man bleeding his life out on the ground. His robes rustle slightly as he clears his sword hilt.
Okhfels: "Think what it is that makes you think that."
...
Okhfels: "Because if you think it could be you over there someday... I don't WANT you here. This band is for MEN. Not dogs. So if you want to go... go now."
...
Okhfels glares at his men. "No?"
...
Holmes: One of the men in Okhfels line wavers for a moment, considering taking off. But in the end, they all stand, all committed to the Hero Band.

The response Mike made there, last, was a result of a conflict... "Will Okhfels men desert as a result of this discipline, or will they be stronger for it?"  I was the one who called for the conflict.

Does that illustrate things better?

[S'mon]

If 'basics' is opening your mouth and letting something come out, then I agree.

Well, that plus some idea that eg certain kinds of speech get certain kinds of reactions, eg being aggressive usually gets fight or flight.  Maybe even that is asking too much of some people, certainly some RPers show autistic tendencies, perhaps moreso than in the general population.  But almost everyone is capable of 'opening your mouth and letting something come out', while when it comes to a swordfight they may not be able to describe what they're trying to do, or even know what they should be trying to do.

[S'mon]

Moot point.

As I say, it all comes down to the group's level of requirement. Which can be anywhere from simple description ("I get him to give it to me by talking to him") to improv Shakespeare.

All I ask for is Schwarzenegger level:

"Give it to me now." or "Please give it to me." is fine.  :)

[MarcoBrucale]

originally posted by Mike Holmes:
The best example that I can think of is the "buying a sword" dialog. Sure we could do the haggling back and forth, but, I don't know about you, but I've done that scene enough times in my life that I don't have to do it anymore. Especially if it's tangential to the plot - the player just getting a power boost before moving on. In fact, using these techniques, you can say stuff like, "You haggle for no less than four hours before settling on a price - now roll." Don't know about you, but I don't want to hear the actual four hours of haggling.

I'll chime in briefly just to say that I strongly agree. I was very confused at the beginning when I tried conflict resolution. Then I realized something that made it all clear for me:
In-character improv is *difficult*. Very difficult. We're used to watching to movies, reading books, etc, in which every line said is the product of the hard (and slow!) work of very talented people who devoted their lives to doing that. This sets a sort of aesthetic-threshold in us (well, in me at least) that the average improvised in-character monologue by the average person I play with does not reach... The sword-buying example is just perfect here. I know a dialogue about the haggling could be written in an interesting way... I just think that it's extremely difficult to improvise something meaningful about it, *using only dialogue lines*, and in real-time.
OTOH, describing things as opposed to dramatizing it is a lot easier for me, and I also can include a lot of details that pure dialogue don't support. Finally I can play, for example, meaningful and characterful taciturn characters without having to be a taciturn player also...

I hope I managed to convey my idea. Sorry for my approximative english.

MB

[S'mon]

To me the problem with the sword-buying is that it's not inherently interesting; usually nothing much hinges on it, therefore it should be abstracted.  A desire to play _everything_ in character seems as undesirable as a refusal to play anything in character.  I've just spent the last 4 hours or so roleplaying sundry kings & emperors negotiating with PCs High King Sigurd & Archmage Elaith as they try to gain vital knowledge and forge alliances that will determine the fate of Humanity (and Elfdom) - which was big important stuff, but we still abstracted large chunks of it.  And if I hadn't been so tired it would have been nice to RP some more of the little stuff, like the Archmage Elaith's blossoming friendship with the elven king's female Paladin-champion.  The requests for magic items from the elves, OTOH, were resolved with me reading out what was available and asking the PCs if they wanted it or not.

[S'mon]

Mike made allusion to the fact that you can "roleplay" a scene along, speaking in character (or narrating away, or whatever vehicle your group uses), and then "everyone will realize that it's time for a roll".  I just can't wrap my head around how this works.  What elements pop up to notify you of the roll?  Is it strictly a "feel" thing?

I also have a bit of a problem with this.  Running D&D it's fairly simple - either the player requests a Skill check for the PC, or the GM demands a Skill check by the PC.  The GM can also make skill checks for the NPCs if he's unsure about their behaviour.  Heroquest can function similarly. From my very limited experience with The Anti-Pool though the group seemed pretty much in the dark about when we should be making rolls.  In fact AIR the GM Kerstin got a bit annoyed with me over how I didn't 'get' the conflict resolution system - basically I recall being keen to use dice to resolve non-critical stuff, get a 'fail' and thus get more dice to increase my Pool, whereas the system seemed to discourage using dice rolls to resolve critical events.  As I understand it regular Pool encourages success rather than failure, that might work better - it presumably would encourage making lots of conflict resolution rolls but this time with the aim of getting successes to build a bigger Pool...
What I don't intuitively understand though is how any of this exercise in dice rolling really relates to roleplaying, how it supports the roleplay.