Heya,

This is loosely related to another thread over in the GNS forum: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=15369. I hope I'm not honking off anyone by asking this sort of question here about a couple threads that have a bit of emotional charge to them. Please accept my appologies if I incure your ire, that is not my intent.

So here's my question. Ron Wrote:

1. Conflict Resolution of some kind is necessary for Narrativist play.

2. Cumulative Task Resolution may result in Conflict Resolution, but only with a specific cognitive, social shift at specific times, such that everyone understands it at the time.

Well, I'd guess there'd have to be a point at which you say "okay, enough dancing, now we resolve the conflict."

Look at extended conflicts in HQ: all the bidding and roling is all well, fine and good, and feels very "tasky". Then, bang, someone's lost their last AP's, we resolve the conflict. We've taken a series of tasks, and applied their results to resolve the conflict. Because we decieded at the outset what the conflict was staking, and agreed that the series of tasks would decide the conflict resolution at the end. It's a direct "plug-in" replacement for a bald conflict resolution system.

Why isn't this the same as D&D combat with HP? Because it's only ever about combat & damage, and all it can resolve is "alive or dead". Other results lie outside the combat system (Escape, negotiation, etc.).

Troy,

I wonder if you're looking at the word "task" the way I did before I saw the distinction Ron, Eero and Valamir were trying to make. Whether I've got it now or not I don't know, but here's how I see it now:

I take a step back from the "resolution" part of it, and focus simply on the difference between a conflict and a task. There is a clear distinction: one is thematically charged and the other isn't. So, if I add an issue/theme to a task, I get a conflict. If I remove an issue/theme from a conflict I get a task.

Now if I bring back into play the "resolution" part, it's pretty clear. If the thing I'm resolving is a conflict, it's conflict resolution. If the thing I'm resolving is a task, it's task resolution. The difference is the presence of an issue/them in the situation, not in the type of game mechanic used to resolve the situation.

Again, this is just my (no doubt incomplete) understanding of the issue. In which case, I'd say that the attempt to make task resolution meaningful looks to me like the basic shift from TR to CR.

Or, is there something more subtle in your question that I am completely missing? Are you asking whether it's possible to have a number of meaningless tasks make sense thematically?

Thanks pete; that clarifies things. I'll take it that the answer to my last question is "yes".

Most of my experiences playing in the Supers genre fall into this category. There is some larger meaning to the conflict, but the game pretty much runs along resolving individual "biffs" "bams" and "pows".

I would think it would depend largely upon whether the important issues and themes were related to individuals or the whole group. An important group issue or theme would be easy for a GM to keep in mind and then shift to when necessary (in which case, the GM holds all the thematic cards). Individual issues might get tricky, unless you had a specific currency that allowed players to make the shift from TR to CR. Fate points in FATE can function either way (as +1 to a roll or as narrative influence), though of course you have to have the currency to spend.

paulkdad wrote: I take a step back from the "resolution" part of it, and focus simply on the difference between a conflict and a task. There is a clear distinction: one is thematically charged and the other isn't. So, if I add an issue/theme to a task, I get a conflict. If I remove an issue/theme from a conflict I get a task.

Thanks Tim. I wish others would grab a clue about that.

Best,
Ron

Heya,

timfire wrote:

paulkdad wrote: I take a step back from the "resolution" part of it, and focus simply on the difference between a conflict and a task. There is a clear distinction: one is thematically charged and the other isn't. So, if I add an issue/theme to a task, I get a conflict. If I remove an issue/theme from a conflict I get a task.

I feel the need to make a disticntion here. The only reason Ralph and those guys were discussing theme in relation to conflict resolution was because the thread in question was specifically addressing Narritivism.

More properly, conflict resolution resolves conflicts of interests. In other words, one player/character wants one thing to happen, another wants to see something else happen. In this sense, conflict resolution is interested in a player/character's goals or intent.

I say this because you can have conflict resolution in a Gam or Sim situation, where theme is irrevelent.

Troy_Costisick wrote: -So what do we call Task Resolution that uses the theme as a component of the resolution?

Take for instance, a game about corruption in pollitics uses a PC's Corruption Points as a basis for his debating skill rolls, shmoozing rolls, campaigning rolls, etc. rather than using his Corruption Points to decide if he simply won the debate or and entire campaign in one lump roll. Or is there even a need to name such a thing?

timfire wrote:
I say this because you can have conflict resolution in a Gam or Sim situation, where theme is irrevelent.

Troy wrote: Okay, let's say I wanted to design a system that used Task Resolution to produce a conflict resolution.

Hiya,

John, about Great Ork Gods: yes, absolutely. Bullseye.

Paul, maybe if we try it this way. Given the obstacle race ...

- if we roll for clearing obstacles, with degree of success indicating how well we clear each one, and maybe with a "run" roll too ... and whoever ends up doing best wins the race - that's Task Resolution. Winning the race is an epiphenomenon of clearing the hurdles best and fastest.

- if we roll for winning the race, then backtrack or perhaps have some mechanics-based way of retroactively describing the way the obstacles were cleared, then it's Conflict Resolution. Winning the race is winning the race, and "how" is always going to be a subset of winning/losing.

Again, this is not a scale issue. Either of the above could be handled with one roll or twenty, in one-second increments of game time or whole-race increments, whatever.

Folks will probably note that a certain degree of Fortune-at-the-End and Fortune-in-the-Middle are correlated to Task and Conflict respectively, and in practice, this tends to be the case historically. Again, however, it doesn't have to be, theoretically.

Best,
Ron

Ah! More concrete example, from the depths of time.

Someone once asked me how Sorcerer would handle a character (from one of the published character examples) nailing a bunch of copper nails into the doorframe of one of those side-of-house cellar entrances.

I said, "It depends on what is after her while she's trying to do it. That's what she rolls against."

See? It doesn't matter how good the character is at pounding in nails. The narration takes care of that, because in Sorcerer, narration is not structured and tends to be very faithful to the vision of the character.

So: she succeeds, and someone (whoever) narrates, "Boy does she suck at it, but she's so determined she gets it done in time!"

Or she succeeds, and someone (whoever) narrates, "Expert nailing, hold-wham, hold-wham, hold-wham!" For a different character, obviously.

You can fill in the last two (the failure options) yourself, it's easy. What matters is her Stamina vs. the opponent's Stamina, and the nails are merely the narrative medium of their current opposition.

Same goes for hopping fences, climbing cliffs, etc, etc. Really, there are no Task rolls in Sorcerer whatsoever. They never happen.

Best,
Ron

Ron, I'd like to ask a couple of quick questions to check my understanding of this:

(I'm thinking of games in general when I'm asking this, not just about Sorcerer.)

If no-one is actively opposing the character, does that mean that no roll is made because whether the character succeeds or fails is irrelevant except in terms of furthering the "vision of the character"?

And if no roll is made, then whether the character succeeds or fails is decided by narration, and specifically, by whoever has authority to narrate the success or failure of the action? (Emphasis there because authority won't automatically lie with the character's player or the GM.)

Doug Ruff wrote: If no-one is actively opposing the character, does that mean that no roll is made because whether the character succeeds or fails is irrelevant except in terms of furthering the "vision of the character"?

Heya,

timfire wrote:

Troy_Costisick wrote:
Hmm... The issue here is not neccessarily Task vs Conflict resolution. The difference between your two examples here is one of scale. In the first, the multiple rolls decide little tasks/conflicts, while the latter decides the overarching task/conflict. I think its easy to confuse scale with task/conflict resolution. Large scale task resolution (meaning scene resolution) sorta looks like conflict resolution because you have to abstract individual actions.

But you need to ask yourself -- Are you rolling the dice to see if the character is capable of doing whatever he is trying to do (task)? Or are you rolling because someone is trying to oppose him (conflict)?

Is what I'm saying making sense?

-Okay, I think I'm getting somewhere now. Indeed, I do believe that I was confusing Task vs. Conflict Reso with scale of resolution. I definately see that now. And what Ron wrote also helped out greatly- (paraphrase): Conflict only happens when there are opposing forces.

-So let me see if I can break this down some using Ron's copper nail example and you guys can check me to see if I'm on the right track.

-The girl (we'll call her Emily) has a 60% in Hammering Nails skill. She succeeds on 6 out of every 10 nails and does a decent job of nailing the door shut. [Task Resolution]

-Emily quickly drives nail after nail into the door, being more proficient with each swing than usual since something is chasing after her. She gets in all 20 nails without any trouble. [Multi-roll Conflict Resolution]

-Emily's fear increases her speed and accuracy to such a degree she has no trouble nailing the door securly. [Single roll Conflict Resolution]

-Emily's deepest, darkest fear- the one she's lived with all her life- has come true. And it's chasing her from house to house where she grew up as a child. Frantic, she rushes into Reverend John's house. She grabs his old hammer and bucket of copper nails and somehow manages to nail the cellar door shut. [Themed Conflict Resolution]

-How am I doing?

Peace,

-Troy

Hiya,

Doug, you wrote,

If no-one is actively opposing the character, does that mean that no roll is made because whether the character succeeds or fails is irrelevant except in terms of furthering the "vision of the character"?

And if no roll is made, then whether the character succeeds or fails is decided by narration, and specifically, by whoever has authority to narrate the success or failure of the action? (Emphasis there because authority won't automatically lie with the character's player or the GM.)

[EDIT]cross-posted with Ron, potentially making all that follows pointless. Curses! %$*&@#

Ron wrote: - if we roll for clearing obstacles, with degree of success indicating how well we clear each one, and maybe with a "run" roll too ... and whoever ends up doing best wins the race - that's Task Resolution. Winning the race is an epiphenomenon of clearing the hurdles best and fastest.

Thanks, Ron - and thanks especially for the HeroQuest rant: when I read the HQ rules on conflict resolution I found it hard to get my head around arbitrary trait assignment, and this makes more sense. Although I like the idea that in HeroQuest, the tree could be a "spirit tree" with it's own agenda! (But in this case, the tree is capable of providing active opposition.)

Ron Edwards wrote: Depends on the game. In Sorcerer, the text says the GM. In The Pool, who knows? (Inter-roll narration is unconstructed in The Pool.) In practice, in all games, it's a matter of consensus and open dialogue, more open than most people realize or remember.

Maybe I'm making an overly big deal out of this, but this seems important; if a game relies on conflict resolution, then a lot of the action can actually be resolved without resolution, therefore the rules should support the players in deciding who has the authority to narrate when there is no resolution mechanic in force (ie your "inter-roll" narration).

Heya,

Troy, you're still struggling, and I think this is only going to get resolved for you through actual play. I've seen people try to do Sorcerer or HeroQuest or many similar games from your current perspective, and they flounder. They just don't know "when to roll" or "against what."

So what if there was also a conflict resolution mechanic in the game? Wouldn't that just make all the task resolutions look pointless? As a player, if I know I can roll to resolve a conflict, why roll just to complete a task? Or, to duplicate the example of the cellar door: Let's say you've got two characters in the same game, securing two different doors. One of them has some "handyman" skill and uses it to deftly pound some nails. The other character spends some currency (or whatever) and uses his Stamina vs. the Stamina of the creature/conflict (as in Ron's example) and succeeds in pounding some nails. Isn't the character who used TR to solve the problem going to ask, "What the hell did I put points into handyman for? Or any skill, for that matter?"

Paul seems to be wrestling with the idea of a game in which you can combine task resolution and conflict resolution in the same game.

The problem, to my mind, is that these two approaches don't fit in the same game. They're very much opposed to each other.

Let's look at the idea of someone nailing closed the cellar door. Thus far, all of the examples have focused on someone doing so while being pursued, to prevent someone from coming through.

Let's get rid of the pursuit. Task resolution in essence says we're going to check whether you can nail closed the door, and how well or how quickly you can do that. In this case, why are we nailing the door closed? Well, maybe it's been flapping in the breeze and keeping us up at night, so we want to put one nail in it to stop that; or maybe we're afraid that some neighborhood kid is going to stumble into our basement and get hurt, so we want to prevent that. In those cases, we're not really going to go to great lengths--one or two nails will do the job more than adequately. Oh, but maybe we're nailing it closed because we want to keep out some unidentified something that is going to attempt to force its way in.

Doing this by task resolution gives us the advantage (in such cases in which it is an advantage) that we don't have to know the assailant in order to resolve the task. What we're doing is rolling the dice (or whatever) to determine how secure the basement door has been made by this effort to nail it shut. From that we get a value of some sort (even if it's only some subjective notion of how difficult it would be to open the door), and later when that nebulous something becomes a specific something, it rolls a task resolution check against that value to get the door open.

What if I'm in a conflict resolution system, and I want to nail the door shut against some nebulous something that might in the future attempt to force its way in? At this moment, it's not an issue--I say I nailed the door shut, and the door is nailed shut. That's the end of it. If the wind blows, or some kid comes along and pulls on it, it stays shut, because that's pretty normal stuff. Later, at some point in the future when that nebulous something becomes a specific something trying to get into my basement, I say, "You'll remember that three weeks ago I nailed that door shut." Right, so the door is nailed shut--and that is at least part of my contribution to the conflict. Now when the thing is attempting to get in, he isn't rolling against the door--the door is nothing. He is rolling against my effort to keep him out. The nails in the door are (or may be) a modifier in that effort, and I may in fact be sound asleep in bed; the nails may or may not hold even if I succeed (e.g., the assailant breaks the door and is injured or killed in the process, or he breaks through the outer door but is stymied by the inner door, or as he breaks the door the noise awakens me, and I rush to the window with a shotgun).

Thus in a conflict resolution system, nailing the door shut as a task is completely irrelevant to anything other than that we now all imagine the door held closed by some number of nails. No roll is needed to nail the door shut. Even if I nail it shut while being pursued, my roll is not telling me whether or not I got the door nailed shut, but whether or not I kept the pursuer out. "You nail the door shut, but your adversary smashes through the door and starts ripping pieces of it away" and "You grab the hammer and nails, and grip the handle of the door, but the enemy starts pulling against it, so you use all your weight to hold it closed until he gives up and looks for another way in" are both possible results (for failure and success, respectively) in a conflict resolution system. The nails in the door are in essence an offered explanation for how you might have succeeded in winning the conflict, not a task that is resolved.

I've had several interruptions during the writing of this post; I hope it's coherent and helpful.

--M. J. Young

Hi M.J.,

Totally coherent and helpful, as I see it. Your discussion of the "roll later when it matters" for the cellar door is exactly how Contain rolls work in Sorcerer.

The player doesn't roll when the Contain is made. He or she rolls if and when it is challenged.

Best,
Ron

Okay, Troy started this thread with a quote from Ron saying that Task resolution could sum to conflict resolution under appropriate circumstances. Now MJ says that task resolution and conflict resolution are fundamentally opposed and non-combinable and Ron agrees.

Ron, were you agreeing with the non-combinable claim, or with the fundamentally opposed claim, or simply with MJ’s description of task vs. conflict resolution?

Personally, I agree with MJ's description of conflict resolution, but also believe that task resolution, when appropriately handled, can sum to conflict resolution.

Here is how I see task resolution summing to conflict resolution under appropriate circumstances:

Let's say I have my character nail the basement door shut. It’s nailed shut, but we don’t need to worry about how well until it comes up in play (if its obviously important, then we can resolve it now, and record the results for later).

Later on, a conflict arises. Something is trying to get into the house. My character doesn't want that something to get into the house. I point out that I nailed the door shut, and the GM (or whoever controls the something) agrees that it will have to overcome my nailed shut door to be able to get in. We resolve how well I nailed it shut (or check our prior resolution). We use some mechanic to determine if it overcomes the nailed shut door. If the mechanic determines that it will be able to overcome the door (or alternatively before the task is resolved), I have the opportunity to state other methods I am going to try to keep it out (or I agree that the nailed shut door is the only thing that could keep it from getting in). If it succeeds in overcoming the door, then we either use task resolution to determine the results of the other things I try, or we agree that it got in. If it fails in getting through the door (or before we resolve tasks), the GM (or whoever controls the something) can suggest other ways that it tries to get in, and we can resolve those tasks.

What makes this task resolution summing to conflict resolution is that the conflict (does the something get in/am I able to keep the something out) remains the focus of the resolutions, and it is clear at any given point how the task being resolved relates to the resolution of the conflict. If we have agreed that the one roll against the door determines whether or not it gets in, then we have agreed that once the task is resolved, the conflict resolves based on that one task. If we have agreed that there are other tasks I can interpose to try to keep it out even if it wins the door opening task (or if we have agreed that the something also has other tasks it can try if it loses the door task), then the conflict won't be resolved until both sides have run out of tasks. We may choose to leave this open ended, so I can keep throwing up obstacles as long as I can think of them, and I don't have to have thought of them before hand, or we may choose not to make it open ended. What can't happen if task resolution is summing to conflict resolution is that we resolve all of the agreed upon tasks, and then the conflict resolves in the opposite direction. If this is a possibility, then we are in straight task resolution, with all its problems.

The explicit (or even strong implicit) link between the individual task being resolved and the stated conflict is what allows task resolution to sum to conflict resolution.

The difference between pure task resolution and task resolution that sums to conflict resolution is the framing of the tasks. If the tasks are a conflict broken down into explicit task pieces, then the task resolution will sum to conflict resolution. If the tasks are not necessarily the complete set of pieces of a conflict, then resolving all the tasks doesn't necessarily resolve the conflict. Any time that you can succeed at all the tasks and fail at the conflict the task resolution is failing to sum to conflict resolution.

Ideally, each individual task should be able to be restated in terms based on the conflict.

“Do I keep it out by my nailed shut door?” “No.”
“Do I keep it out by throwing myself bodily against the door?” “NO.”
“Do I keep it out by knocking over the bookshelves, so they fall against the door?” “Yes!”

Does that make sense as a description of task resolution mechanics summing ot conflict resolution?