(no subject) [benlehman]

This is an RPG design post. It isn't a Forge post simply because it isn't focused enough to be. You have been warned.

As Vincent points out, we have the whole form of conflict resolution and resolution mechanics in general pretty much down. This is a monumental amount of work over a monumental amount of time, originating in the murky depths of the 80s and carrying through until the present day games of Dogs, HeroQuest, and Primetime Adventures. There is still a lot of work to be done, of course, but now we can classify it and really make it work.

But that doesn't mean that RPG design is done, or that it is all about refining conflict resolution mechanisms.

I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about non-conflict, non-task mechanism.

It is a sign of how hideously underdeveloped these mechanics and the theory surrounding them is that I cannot think of anything to say about these sorts of mechanics. RPG theorists (and here I am using a broad category) have, for a very long time, reducing RPG systems into their resolution systems (whether conflict or task resolution isn't really important to this point) and dismissed other aspects of RPG system as unnecessary cruft, or simply didn't recognize their existence entirely.

And I think it is time that we start to analyze them.

Here are some examples:
The chart in Polaris, and it's predecessor diagram in Sorcerer.
The Random Dungeon generation tables of AD&D1
The direct "use this game for this" instructions
Town generation in D&D3, and its predecessors in Spelljammer system generation charts and Thief's Handbook guild and city generation rules
Oriental Adventures (1st) random events charts
non-combat movement and maneuvering rules, including travel but also swimmingly, climbing and flight.

How can we categorize these things? How can we study them? How can we make them more graceful? How can we make them more fun?

Right now we are groping in the dark. We have no idea what these things mean. We throw them together, and see if they stick. Sometimes they are awesome, sometimes they aren't, but there is no understanding, yet. We are monkeys with typewriters.

Anyone want to start?

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It seems to me that when you talk of non-conflict, non-task resolution, you're talking of randomizing or automating worldbuilding in some way.

Correct?

( as an aside - I don't know if movement really needs a *system*, per se, as usually it's either a) common sense or b) you're actually talking about movement in some other context - either combat or experience-gain. q.v. Rolemaster's Movement& Maneuver charts and their Travel Experience charts )

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A large chunk of that is world-building, setting-building, or situation building in some manner. Uhm... have you ever read Sorcerer? The relationship map, the kickers, and the funky little character sheet diagram are all this sort of system.

In Amber, the character quiz is exactly this sort of mechanic.

When I talk about the movement abilities, well...

The ability to fly has a certain value in terms of conflicts (combat or otherwise). But it also has a basic non-combat value. If you can fly, you can do things which you couldn't otherwise, no contest (conflict resolution rules are not invoked). In a point based system, it should be worth more points because of this.

There are other abilities like this. Not just movement. The same way that being blind is a worse flaw than how much it penalizes your resolution effectiveness, because it takes away basic functionality.

So really what it is is the addition and removal of "basic" functions. Whatever they may be.

yrs--
--Ben

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Pardon me, I haven't been keeping up with the Forge lately, so maybe this is a rehash:

What perhaps we should focus on is that system is holistic even if we don't intend for it to be. The presented system of resolution mechanics (of all sorts) interacts with the game world, and more importantly the unfolding of events in the SIS, at every level. There are certain assumptions which are made but rarely announced about how that will be taken into account. For instance, if you play an orc in a traditional D&D setting, your character will generally suffer some social stigma. It is generally assumed that the player who makes the choice to play such a character A: knows what they're getting into and B: wants it that way. As such, there is a perception that it's not worth points because it's strictly a 'roleplaying restriction' and otherwise. This may be a reaction to things like the absurd characters one sometimes ends up with in GURPS, who have too many social restrictions to shake a stick at but get enormous amounts of points for them.

The problem is that often those assumptions are different on different peoples' parts - what may seem like a painful restriction to one person may be an actual boon to another's experience. 7th Sea did a pretty good job of working around that. They explicitly stated that the game was supposed to be about heroic characters and thus, if you wanted a flaw, you could take them but you would only get a benefit from taking a flaw which was in theme (many of which were laid out in the book).

One of the things I like best about HeroQuest is that it takes this into account somewhat - the basic assumption is that if you care about a particular aspect of your character, or their interaction with the world, you'll put it on your character sheet. The corrolary is that the GM is responsible for putting _everything_ that will potentially affect your character specifically into the system somewhere, either on your character sheet or the sheets of the entities you're interacting with. Everything becomes integrated into the system.

In terms of character traits, Dogs has this sewn up pretty good. If you want to play an Orc (or a Mountain Person, more coloquially), you take Complicated History as your basis and probably have things like 'I'm a damned halfbreed - 2d4' on your sheet.

It's so much better than the GURPS system (which I loved for so long, and still love provisionally) at creating characters with built-in hooks that I've bailed on GURPS completely.

How can we categorize these things? How can we study them? How can we make them more graceful? How can we make them more fun?

Start by asking what they provide for the game experience.

The issue, I think, is that what you are looking at is non-conflict resolution mechanisms of all sorts. However, you never need system unless there is a conflict. If there's no conflict, at least among the players, then you're all in agreement and you can just narrate. I see here that you have listed:

- Guidelines for 'use the game for this', which seems mostly useful as a mechanism for goal creation among the players (this is what you should be striving for if you are using this system, etc.) As such, I think it should be well-written and thorough, but apart from that I don't think it needs to be further examined.
- Mechanisms for resolving what happens in the SIS when you don't care what happens next.
- Assumed descriptions of a particular setting or group of settings.

Both of the previous _look_ like the same mechanic: world-creation charts, and at first I think they look like a method for randomly generating a setting. However, you're going to use them in only a few situations. Situation 1 is to verify setting authenticity of some sort - the chart says that there's a 10% chance of there being a village in this map hex, etc. so the world these rules are designed for includes a village in 1 of 10 hexes of this type... Situation 2 is to determine randomly what happens when no one can think of or cares what happens next. This is when you actually roll on the charts above, and I think it happens more rarely.

What do people get out of these things? A feeling of authenticity and a shared perspective on the SIS, at the expense of freer creativity (not necessarily a bad thing). They're setting information, no more, no less, provided in a convenient format.

There's work to be done integrating these things into a story, but that part of the system is rarely written down. Which is a shame, 'cause I'd love to see it, but it's much like writing down the process of coming up with a novel, for which as yet I've never seen the Single Right Way to do it, or even quantify it.

The issue, I think, is that what you are looking at is non-conflict resolution mechanisms of all sorts. However, you never need system unless there is a conflict. If there's no conflict, at least among the players, then you're all in agreement and you can just narrate.

Holy crap did you just open a can of beans.

If car manufacturers thought like this, they would never have invented airbags or locking doors or GPS. This is the kind of design thinking that keeps us in the Dark Ages.

So, I've gone through my designs, thinking, "Where is the stuff that Ben is talking about?" and what I have found is all really interesting stuff. Begin lengthy ramble.

Every so often, someone looks at Torchbearer (email me for a draft) and says, "This game's resolution system is really wonky; why do you have to use it when players agree on the outcome they want?" Well, duh. Its primary purpose isn't to resolve conflicts between the players about what is in the SIS. It's supposed to force a certain structure onto the sequence of in-game events. Similarly, its Torches aren't about conflict resolution at all; they're a tool that allows the players to not only manage the visual motifs in the imagined world, but also to embed information into those motifs. This stuff is completely unlike any game I am familiar with, but without it, you wouldn't be playing Torchbearer. You'd be playing some crappy game.

foreign_devilry and I have been, slowly, working on various systems that try to encapsulate the wuxia genre. Now, the problem with most games that try and talk about genres is that they shy away from formalizing anything that's not a resolution mechanic, so they have to wrestle and twist to make their genre emulation tools (Hey, maybe all that racket about genre emulation being nonexistent has to do with its being assumed that emulation and resolution have to live in the same mechanic...) a part of this unrelated thing. When you're willing to step away from that, you can formalize things like, "At this point in the story, Broken Sword has to freak out and do something radical because no wuxia character can handle being ignored." I am not sure whether I am getting at a point here or not...perhaps Jonathan will be so good as to elaborate.

It occurs to me that character-creation systems are an important and common mainstream "not resolution" mechanic, too. They restrict input to the SIS in very structured and interesting ways! My wuxia system Limitless (http://www.wiki.stryck.com/pmwiki.php/Limitless/Limitless) is all about this; managing Passions forces you to treat character-generation in a fairly unusual (heavily collaborative) way. Polaris, too, makes a big deal of character generation...you can't just make a character, you have to give him a social and familial context, some antagonist, and weave this cast together with the casts of the other three Knights.

The waypoint/journey rules in Exalted: the Fair Folk are a pretty heavily formalized movement system, in which locations are nodes on a graph of some arbitrary connectedness, which can be manipulated. As a result, it is possible to describe some fairly unconventional spaces with it, because the system doesn't (generally) care about how far apart things are, but rather, whether or not they are close together. Does that make sense?

So I guess what I am saying here is that it's pretty much bizarre to say that roleplaying games don't need anything but resolution rules. I mean, they're games for crying out loud. They don't really need much of anything! I want to make some analogy here about the German school of boardgame design, but I don't think that that's really very applicable...German boardgames seem to just recombine previously disparate elements into freshly harmonious wholes, rather than introducing new elements. For instance, Carcassonne is just dominoes played in a couple of dimensions at once, with resource-allocation controlling scoring. Crap! Digression over! Very seriously, all roleplaying games have, informally, a lot of rules that don't have anything to do with resolution, and I think the idea was to locate and formalize these.

I think I'm defining 'conflict' more broadly than you are. By conflict I mean any point at which two players have different expectations. Most of the stuff that Ben was mentioning seemed to be an attempt, in various ways, to provide a baseline for people to start from while imagining so they didn't imagine things too far separated from each other (towns are like this, the world is like this, this game goes like this, etc.)

I'm not sure that it's very useful to define conflict like that because it means that it automatically includes everything under its banner. That's bad for categorization, and, as a result, exploring spaces that are neglected.

As far as I'm concerned, that Torchbearer or Wuxia yaya stuff about 'enforcing a particular narrative structure' goes directly into that pseudo-worldbuilding stuff I was talking about. You're aiming to get the players to have an SIS that specifically works in a particular fashion, with a particular structure, and I don't know how useful it is to differentiate between the structure internal to the gameworld and the structure external to the gameworld. It's just another way of saying 'The conflict is: What does Broken Sword do in response to this situation? The resolution system says it can only be some variety of flipping out.' I don't see that as intrinsically different as saying 'Your characeter got hit with a Confusion spell. You can decide how they flip out, but the rules say you have to flip out.'

In other words, "I am not convinced that it's very useful to make distinctions."

I think we may as well agree to disagree.

Y'know, it occurs to me that, while what you and Jon are working on is cool, it is ultimately a conflict resolution system, in that it tells you how conflicts resolve. Dave's point about the equivalence with a spell effect is a good one.

When I talk about non-conflict mechanics, I'm really talking about non-conflict mechanics.

yrs--
--Ben

Very seriously, I think that's because it makes the "all things are resolution" error. But, you are indeed correct, it's written in such a way that it is resolution.

Well, it's conflict resolution because the genre we're emulating is arthouse wuxia, which is structured around a family drama, which is, in turn, structured around interpersonal conflict. And more than a few people have argued that conflict is what drives all stories, which is why roleplaying focuses on resolving conflicts and trusts the rest to take care of itself.

However, what Ben nailed here is that telling good stories or emulating genres or creating fun instances of play is about much more than creating and resolving conflicts in an interesting way, since there's a lot of play that doesn't directly involve conflicts.

Character creation is a great example. Town creation in Dogs is a great example. Setting and color is also HUGELY important. What would Nobilis be without all the laws, including both the in-game law of "Thou Shalt Not Love" and the meta-game Monarda Law that encourages you to say "yes" to player requests? These things form the boundaries within which stories are told. They're about limiting the possibile choices so that the decisions players make seem to have a consistent feel.

Yes. And further, just because it's a conflict resolution mechanic doesn't mean it's bad.

I'm trying to say that there is unexplored territory out there. I'm not try to say that everything we've explored is shit.

yrs--
--Ben

Not quite.

It isn't a "towns are like this" (or, it could be, but it isn't all that.) That's just setting. It isn't mechanical at all.

A town generation mechanic says "This town is like this. That town is like that."

Do you see the difference?

If you want to see everything in terms of conflict, you could look at this set of mechanical things as tools for creating conflict, rather than resolving it.

yrs--
--Ben

Virtually every character generation system I can think of fits your description. Likewise the rarer but still relatively common systems for designing vehicles, weapons, spells and the like. They mostly exist so that the things created satisfy certain requirements (being "balanced", or "realistic", or otherwise appropriate) and can be described in a standardized manner. Often, they also exist to produce results that you might not come up with on your own, which is why they are often partially random.

I think a key point is that all the Explorative Elements(System, Situation, Setting, Character, Color) are basically building blocks, or lenses that can be used to focus play and give momentum to the group. For example, a detailed setting, or the generative tools you are describing, serve as ways to focus what the game is about. Some folks, when handed GURPS, or Story Engine, or whatever your favorite non-genre specific game is, get completely lost because they need to have more focus to build upon.

In general, people have figured out how to apply setting in a good focal manner, usually in conjunction with Character and Color(Whitewolf's various splats and politics in their games). The particulars you are talking about apply to Situation and Setting, but are still worth developing further.

I think that's pretty insightful, yeah, although it still doesn't cover "flat-out abilities."

Hi! Didn't know you had a livejournal.

yrs--
--Ben

P.S. I have this idea for an L5R character now... still don't know if I'll be in town.

I think a key point is that all the Explorative Elements(System, Situation, Setting, Character, Color) are basically building blocks, or lenses that can be used to focus play and give momentum to the group.

Exactly. I find the elements extremely helpful to analyze mechanics & play, though a single mechanic, of course, can affect/interact with more than one (or all 5!) at the same time.

There's some talk about what's a conflict resolution mechanic and what's not. If we step back a bit, we can see that all mechanics are tools used by a group to help them determine what they want to establish into the shared imaginary space/stuff that makes up the in-game world & events. Mechanics and source materials are processes that assist groups in creative collaboration.

Rules may resolve a conflict (social--between two players) or they may head off a conflict. For example, the choice of setting in a particular game helps cut down on long, drawn out discussions and potential conflicts about what the background & setting should consist of. That's just one way, of course. The people could just talk it out, or there could be a mechanical procedure by which everyone's input is incorporated and concensus it built. Mechanics and rules can also coordinate players's inputs such that tension and drama is built (eg kickers, Dogs in the Vineyard conflict resolution). But what all of them are doing is giving people cues and processes that help them create things together.

Ack. I missed this. Sorry for the redundant post.

Its primary purpose isn't to resolve conflicts between the players about what is in the SIS. It's supposed to force a certain structure onto the sequence of in-game events.

This is a major new category of mechanic. Spotlight in Primetime Adventures. Endgame in My Life with Master. Escalation in Dogs in the Vineyard.

Yup. I really want to talk about those mechanics sometime.

yrs--
--Ben

P.S. (Modules in T&T and D&D)

Here's hoping that I get what you're talking about, Ben, because it seems like a potentially very fruitful topic to me. If I understand you right, these might be some examples:

FLOWCHART NARRATION

Some rules structure the narration of a specific process, and can create encounters and mini-adventures of their own. These rules mould specific parts of the game, often to emulate genre, or to make very abstract situations easily manageable. Examples are:

- The flowchart for investigating unknown high-tech artifacts in Gamma World
- Lifepaths in character generation systems (if players can interact with what goes on at different stages)
- The car chase flowchart in Indiana Jones

GAMES WITHIN GAMES

Some rules provide competitive mini-games to be used within a role-playing context, mostly just to add flavor, as these games don't necessarily have an effect on the story. Examples are:

- The car-racing game in Ghostbusters' "Hot Rods of the Gods"

BATTLE EXTENSIONS

Several games have rules for larger-scale battles. They change the scale of events in the game, and usually have very different resolution systems. Examples are:

- Ship combat in "Privateers & Gentlemen"
- D&D "Battlesystem Supplement"

REWARD SYSTEMS

Ranging from experience points to tables for loot generation. Systems that determine how much game-effective currency characters get, and when.

There must be heaps of other systems out there, I think.

- Matthijs Holter

I think it's interesting you can use these mechanics without the results actually showing up in your gaming session. For example, I must have generated dozens of towns which where never visited by any of the PCs.

-Jasper Polane