Quote from: CRKrueger;882514However, if a system does not give me any way to affect the Conflict other then by succeeding at a series of individual task rolls, then it the system has no Conflict Resolution Mechanics, there are no Mechanics to allow me to engage the Conflict directly (or in Ron speak, nothing but Fortune at the End and no Fortune in the Middle mechanics.)

Every RPGs every made starting with OD&D has a way of effecting the resolution of combat other than succeeding at as series of individual task rolls.

People forget that the rules are not what makes a game an RPG. That playing the rules are not the point of playing an RPG. Playing the rules is the point of a wargame or a boardgame. For an RPG is to play a character interacting with a setting with their action adjudicated by a referee.

The rules are just a tool used by the rules to determine the result of the players acting as their a character. What comes first this the fact the players describes what their character is doing.

So even if the referee opts to resolve a fight between mobs with but a single dice roll, the reality of the campaign is that multiple fights are going on for a period of time. It just the details of that fight are not important enough to resorts to detailed mechanics.

However if the player say "Hey, I want to start lobbing Molotov cocktails into the mob.", the referee needs to make a ruling on this. If the Molotov cocktails is that much of a factor then a fair referee would factor that into the mechanics he is using to resolve the fight.

But people are people and some would be uncomfortable with this and because the rules don't have a molotov cocktail modifier or mechanic and rule it doesn't matter.

Which in my view is unfair to the player and violates the primary rule of RPGs which includes the idea that players are allowed to attempt anything that is possible for their character to do.

Conflicts are things that do not need mechanics. They arise out of the situation that the referee and players create for themselves. To resolve any conflict with any RPG requires the players to do one thing first. To say "As my character, I am going to do X."

Quote from: RosenMcStern;882544I can't find it right now. It was on this forum, named "Do we actually need Conflict Resolution?" or something similar.

Then save some time and answer the question as it is germane to the topic of this thread.

Quote from: RosenMcStern;882547It's both. If there is a Conflict and it lets you address it through Narrative Control, then it must be a Conflict Resolution Mechanics, too. If it was not, it would not let you affect the outcome of the conflict, just the outcome of a single task.

Example: I am climbing a cliff. The GM calls for a Climb roll. I fail. I spend a Bennie to force the roll to a success. I succeed. The GM says my progress brought me to a ledge that I cannot pass unless I can fly.

The mechanics is task-resolution and narrative control. Had it been Conflict Resolution, I would not have wasted my bennie.

The GM, on the other hand, is an asshole.

Right, but could have been both, it just wasn't because the GM is a piehole.

Quote from: RosenMcStern;882547Example: I am climbing a cliff. The GM calls for a Climb roll. I fail. I spend a Bennie to force the roll to a success. I succeed. The GM says my progress brought me to a ledge that I cannot pass unless I can fly.

The mechanics is task-resolution and narrative control. Had it been Conflict Resolution, I would not have wasted my bennie.

In what sense did you waste the bennie? You didn't fall off the cliff and break your arm or die. True you may have to climb back down the cliff and get pitons, climbing ropes, gear, and some skilled mountain climbers before you have a chance to ascend the cliff or you may have to find, raise, and tame a hiippogriff to get to fly to the top of that cliff but the bennie has at least kept those possibilities open since you didn't fall to your death.

QuoteThe GM, on the other hand, is an asshole.

Setting aside the problem of a GM who decides there is only one possible solution for a problem, it may just be that you expected to get too much of a benefit out of a single bennie.

Quote from: RosenMcStern;882528Nope. Because no single roll achieves anything in itself. Only the ten of them do.



Exactly. Because each roll determines only whether you open the f*****g door or not, not whether you get the treasure. You cannot even be sure that there is an exit at the end and not a concrete wall with "I f***ed you" written on it. Once the number of doors is known, you have a procedure that tells you how to achieve the goal.

The actual "conflict" is going on in the GM's mind, in fact, while he determines how many doors you need to open. Not in play. Which brings us to the next comment....



Ditto. The big problem is that Conflict Resolution forces the GM to lay down the actual odds on the table and "play fairly", in the exact same way he would not add extra HP to a monster already added to a combat.

With task resolution only, the GM is continually in the temptation of adding "just one more roll to pass" to push the story in one direction. Sometimes even subconsciously. He might even not realize he's cheating. That's why forgies hate TR so much: it is the basis for Wod-style railroading.

Of course, a decent GM does not do such things, Task Resolution or not. But having a defined procedure to clear up "when the guy has obtained his goal" is an invaluable tool for simplification. And it has nothing to do with OOC variables and narrative control. Just think of it as "number of doors" that the GM determines beforehand instead of letting you roll and deciding afterward if that roll was enough.

Which is why I like saying that all new Referees should run a storygame or two first. Then they can go into traditional games:).

Quote from: CRKrueger;882538Because in the end, AsenRG was right, that the thread's point was to explain what sticks in my craw, and RMS is right, it's the meta-aspect.

Well, I think we can write /thread, then;)?

Quote from: CRKrueger;882552Right, but could have been both, it just wasn't because the GM is a piehole.

In a CR model, I could have used the bennie to get my goal, not just the single step. It depends on the specific mechanics whether this counters "GM dickery" completely, but at least it would have made it clearer.

The point is that - as Gronan says - the rules cannot fix stupid. But they provide a good framework for highlighting that the GM is acting stupid

Personally, I prefer Task Resolution, because it's more 'precise' in certain settings and genres.  For example, you're playing a Crime Fighter in a Supers game, and you've just crashed an evil organization's base.  You are being swarmed by mooks and goons with funny green outfits and energy blasters.

In Conflict Resolution based mechanics (as I understand them) you make a single roll to see if the Crime Fighter can clear the room.  Let's say the dice give him a 85% chance of success.  And the player describes that the Batman analog is bouncing from minion to minion, throwing the bolo and boomerangs when necessary, punching them in the goolies when they're too close, so on and so forth.

However, if the roll fails.  So the question becomes an issue of, what happened?  Where did the onslaught end?  Did the hero get captured?  Knocked out/killed and thrown out of the base?  Or simply missed the last goon, and now has to try again, after avoiding all the retaliatory strikes?

In Task Resolution based mechanics, where you have to roll for each individual situation.  It's admittedly more time consuming, but it also allows for adjustment on the fly.  Same situation, 85% chance of hitting all the minions, via the various attacks.  However, half way through the assault, Mr. Batman Wannabe WIFFS his attack.  Well, now it would be the minions' turn to beat on his armoured form.  It's more precise in terms of giving out information, in MY opinion.

To reiterate:  Conflict Resolution tends to quick and dirty.  Task Resolution is slower, but offers a level of precise granularity that I personally like, but some people might find tedious.

I think this is the thread referred to, "The need for Conflict Resolution?"

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=1503

In my experience on the Forge, people were often inconsistent about how they used the term Conflict Resolution. Rather than assuming a binary divide of all possible mechanics between Task Resolution and Conflict Resolution, I think it's better to contrast resolution in a few canonical games - like D&D on one hand compared to Trollbabe, Dogs in the Vineyard, and The Mountain Witch.

In these games, the basic idea is that you have an opponent, and then somehow you define your goal versus their goal (also called the stakes), and you begin some series of dice mechanics to establish steps back and forth to attaining that goal.

This is generally more abstract than most traditional games handle things - the closest equivalent might be Tunnels & Trolls. However, the steps toward the goal are conceptually similar to D&D hit points. If a creature has taken half its hit points in damage, it's left unclear what has actually happened - is it tired, dazed, wounded in the leg, etc. The mechanics only say that it is closer to being defeated.

Regarding the original question,

Quote from: CRKrueger;882464Against 5 Elites, I must win enough individual tasks to kill all 5 before I can win the fight.
Against a 5-man Mob, I can kill them all in a single roll, abstracting all the back and forth.

I call the latter shifting to Conflict Resolution.

One thing missing in the comparison is having the defined stakes. So, for example, if the elites are guarding the secret chamber - and you're trying to break it - you might have a conflict to get past them. You might kill them in the process, but the resolution is whether you succeed.

That might take more rolls than individual task rolls, but in the end you accomplish your goal or don't based on the result.

I usually prefer task resolution for a couple reasons, but I also usually prefer quick task resolution - resolving in just a few rolls.

Again, most combat situations are such that the atomic task resolution and rules for time-and-motion can resolve the abstract "conflict".

As such Christopher's example doesn't really hold since the difference between mechanical CR and TR isn't scale or granularity--it's whether the resolution of the conflict or achieving the goal is more or less the result of mechanical procedures.

Things are also often enormously muddied by clashing assumptions about GM motivation and the role of pre-established facts. The Forge theorists generally assumed the GM was trying to exert a lot of control over the sequence of events--guiding a particular storyline or controlling pacing or protecting a favorite NPC--whatever. They also assumed that the GM would freely make things up as long as they didn't contradict stuff that had been revealed/stated to the players.

So in their examples the CR mechanics result in the GM giving up control of the storyline and sharing the ability to make things up.

For the more sandbox/world-based style that's favored around here, those concerns aren't really on the radar so it's better to posit that the GM doesn't have a story in mind and largely works from preestablished fact. Even if something isn't known in advance it can be extrapolated or determined randomly rather than selected to favor a certain storyline.

What I mean is this should be the baseline for examples of CR--but I can't get into that just now.

Thanks for finding the thread JHKim. I knew it was there but could not locate it.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;882604In Conflict Resolution based mechanics (as I understand them) you make a single roll to see if the Crime Fighter can clear the room.

The problem is that we have spent the last five pages discussing the fact that this is NOT the case. The equation Conflict Resolution = Single Roll for one scene is NOT true. Many games created by CR advocates use a single roll, but this is not a rule, just a tradition (see Arminius' consideration for why this tradition exists - I think he is rather accurate in depicting the facts). CR means simply that you apply a procedure to checke whether a goal was achieved in spite of an opposition. The procedure can be as detailed as the game inventor wishes it to be. As detailed as an old-school combat session, for instance.

So the point is... if you like details ("crunch") and the game lacks them, Conflict Resolution is not the culprit. Other design principles and techniques are at the basis of your dislike for that particular game.

I just treat everything a character does as a task. The more interesting tasks are rolled for. Don't care what the game mechanic labels them.

Quote from: RosenMcStern;882658Thanks for finding the thread JHKim. I knew it was there but could not locate it.

Note: you can search on Google restricted to a single domain by using a search string like

site:therpgsite.com "Conflict Resolution"

The "site:therpgsite.com" restricts the search to just this site, and the quotes around "Conflict Resolution" mean that they're going to turn up in just that order.

Quote from: RosenMcStern;882658CR means simply that you apply a procedure to checke whether a goal was achieved in spite of an opposition. The procedure can be as detailed as the game inventor wishes it to be. As detailed as an old-school combat session, for instance.

So the point is... if you like details ("crunch") and the game lacks them, Conflict Resolution is not the culprit. Other design principles and techniques are at the basis of your dislike for that particular game.

I would say that number of rolls isn't the same thing as crunch. Tactical crunchiness is about having different choices each round.

As long as there are freeform stakes in the conflict (like in Trollbabe or Dogs in the Vineyard), then it's hard to have tactical choices that are specifically connected to what the character is doing. So, for example, in Dogs in the Vineyard, there is a lot of dice rolling and  number of choices - but they're all highly abstract. There isn't much room to have different mechanics for grapple vs. shove, because the stakes could be anything from "get him back over the line" to "make him bleed".

Conflicts in FATE have a similar very abstract approach.

In task resolution, I can be unclear about my goals or change my goals in the middle of the fight. I like that as a feature.

Quote from: Arminius;882531BTW, Krueger, if the GM says "If you succeed on 20 lock-pocking rolls, then you accomplish goal X" then that is absolutely an example of mechanical Conflict Resolution.

The bit about the plans being in the safe or not--and AsenG's question of the princess's personality--are also emblematic of Forger concerns due to past illusionistic habits trained by various GMing handbooks (and I'm guessing, heavily reinforced in the White Wolf heyday) as well as a belief that the game world always runs on pure improv with no facts that are established in secret before being revealed. Again the idea that the GM might know in advance that the plans are or are not in the safe isn't on the radar, so the only options are "GM decides == TR == illusionism" and "dice determine who decides == CR == player agency". It leaves out the possibility that you can have can have conflict resolution through a combination of preexisting game-state plus resolution of a task--but obviously you can. It just doesn't compute when people are obsessed with narrative control.

Quote from: Arminius;882649Again, most combat situations are such that the atomic task resolution and rules for time-and-motion can resolve the abstract "conflict".

As such Christopher's example doesn't really hold since the difference between mechanical CR and TR isn't scale or granularity--it's whether the resolution of the conflict or achieving the goal is more or less the result of mechanical procedures.

Things are also often enormously muddied by clashing assumptions about GM motivation and the role of pre-established facts. The Forge theorists generally assumed the GM was trying to exert a lot of control over the sequence of events--guiding a particular storyline or controlling pacing or protecting a favorite NPC--whatever. They also assumed that the GM would freely make things up as long as they didn't contradict stuff that had been revealed/stated to the players.

So in their examples the CR mechanics result in the GM giving up control of the storyline and sharing the ability to make things up.

For the more sandbox/world-based style that's favored around here, those concerns aren't really on the radar so it's better to posit that the GM doesn't have a story in mind and largely works from preestablished fact. Even if something isn't known in advance it can be extrapolated or determined randomly rather than selected to favor a certain storyline.

What I mean is this should be the baseline for examples of CR--but I can't get into that just now.

I just wanted to thank you as your posts here have done more to disambiguate than the entirety of several topics I've read before on this subject.

Conflict Resolution is about achieving the goal (regardless of directness, frequency, or manner) by nailing down the stakes "outside of possible GM disruption."

Thus the conflict and stakes are inherently player determined because they know best what they want to achieve for their character through their approach. There is no GM filtration of the outcome to the setting because it is all layed out and determined beforehand by player-desires and their interpretations of success. It is a form of authorship by player-side through fixing the stakes as deemed relevant to their course of action/s. The dice (cards, etc.) sound like the arbiter of who wins the temporary tug-of-war of conflict authorship.

How it looks to me:

Task resolution resolves tasks performed by characters.

Conflict resolution resolves conflicts between participants. This conflict is usually no more than one being glad to take a given outcome for granted, whereas another thinks it calls for a roll.

What seems a more usual distinction, though, is that CR determines the "what" of the end mechanically while leaving the "how" of the means or middle just an ex-post-facto story to make up.This requires a larger teleology to be formulated in the first place, so we can identify "the goal" in question. If it's not in Bob's eyes larger than some "tasks" seen as significantly glossed over, then Bob is likely to call it TR.

That CR is a teleological game of "guess when the player is satisfied for their PC"?