benlehman | (no subject)

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?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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