Stakes and consequences in action resolution

Lanefan said:

If they're not required to play analytic PCs (in other words, not required to do their own work when it comes to information gathering, risk-outcome-reward analysis, and so forth) then one of two outcomes must naturally follow:

- the analysis is done for them, meaning they're very likely to get information that a) by luck or design they might not otherwise acquire and b) is always improbably accurate, complete and error-free.
- the analysis is not done at all, meaning they are flying blind.

Safe bet that nobody wants the second of these options as SOP. But the first just seems to me like giving away the farm - both in and out of character there's no encouragement to do any independent investigation, thinking, or analysis as it's all going to be done for you anyway; and there's a greatly reduced or eliminated chance of flat-out getting it wrong. As a (IMO unwanted) side effect, if stakes are always set before an action can be declared it takes away any opportunity for a player/PC to now and then just throw caution to the wind and in effect choose to fly blind a.k.a. gamble without knowing (or caring about) what might happen next.

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I tend to think that this is where playgoals come into it. That is, I'm not sure myself that Conflict Resolution is the best way to conduct Investigative Scenarios (or the Investigative Portions of other scenarios), because part of the point of play is to have the experience of putting the clues together. I think that's one of the big (and effective) realizations of the Gumshoe system. That said, much like we handwave fighting into a few die rolls, I don't think we need to require the players to have degrees in biology to RP the steps of getting a DNA analysis.

But this is, IMO, the fundamental design problem/question of quasi-sim rpg design: What do you put in mechanical black boxes and what do you leave to the players to work out with actions and adjudication? A case can be made that in order to facilitate a less-intelligent player's portrayal of a great detective, or a less-charming player's portrayal of a smooth-talker, that mechanics should do the lifting there in the same way that things like Strength scores and BAB aid an unathletic player to portray a well-sinewed barbarian. However, in some intangible way, we tend to feel differently about those, even in play. There's just something less satisfying about a GM telling you "You figure out..." vs. describing combat actions.

Although that's drifting a bit from Conflict Resolution.

pemerton said:

[MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], thanks for the reply.

I think that, in the OP and some of my elaborations on it, I'm putting less emphasis on clarity and cognitive workspace than you. I think that's what follows from my comments about implicit consequences - that in place of the clarity you describe, and the scope for player evaluation of risk/reward, is substitued shared intuitions/understandings of the fiction.

I'm not sure how this fits into constraint. It's true that the Cortex+ Heroic GM is very constrained. The Cthulhu Dark GM certainly has much more liberty. I have to think more about how this might relate to "force".

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DW and AW work off of the "shared intuitions/understandings of the fiction" model above, very much. However, a couple things work in concert to constrain GMs very much:

1) The explicit, focused, clear Principles, Agenda, and Move structure.

2) The fact that the game will push back against you if you deviate from (1).

3) The fact that if you just follow (1) devoutly, the game works beautifully!

I think 1-3 cannot be understated, in particular 3. If a game works, just flat works, and produces the experience it was designed for...then just play it that way! There seems to me to be an inherent assumption in the TTRPG community that 3 is a bit of a unicorn...or perhaps a fleeting phantom that doesn't actually exist.

I obviously disagree with that.

However, I do agree that some/most systems can mature over time and can be subtly improved in ways that (a) decrease edge cases that aren't as beautiful as the rest of the system (even if extremely remote like in DW) while (b) not causing any negative downstream effects. Hence why importing a few potent components of Blades tech into DW would do just that (while simultaneously subtly changing the overall cognitive workspace of the players without increasing the workload or adding undue handling time). It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Adam Koebel was writing DW now (or iterating a 2nd version) if he didn't include the tech/procedures I mentioned.

Interestingly (to your last bit, regarding Force), this would shore up the very tiny space out there where DW/AW is vulnerable to Force (though barely, bare so); the soft/hard GM move on a very few instances of player moves where the locus of the action is significantly (though not fully...because they are interacting with a world and with forces within that world) internal perception.

Ratskinner said:

But this is, IMO, the fundamental design problem/question of quasi-sim rpg design: What do you put in mechanical black boxes and what do you leave to the players to work out with actions and adjudication? A case can be made that in order to facilitate a less-intelligent player's portrayal of a great detective, or a less-charming player's portrayal of a smooth-talker, that mechanics should do the lifting there in the same way that things like Strength scores and BAB aid an unathletic player to portray a well-sinewed barbarian. However, in some intangible way, we tend to feel differently about those, even in play. There's just something less satisfying about a GM telling you "You figure out..." vs. describing combat actions.

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I ran a steampunk game - the system is unimportant, literally, I mostly ignored it - and one of the characters was a Sherlock Holmes type. She didn't get rolls to solve mysteries, rather, when I described things to the player, I threw in details, clues & conclusions that everyone else 'overlooked' (because I didn't tell them). Bit heavy-handed but it generally worked.

This post is a follow-up to some of [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s posts in this thread, and to the idea - mentioned in the OP and taken up a bit since - that consequences can be implicit rather than express. I'm not sure how coherent it is, but it is trying to convey a thought I have.

So, here's something from John Harper about making hard moves in Apocalypse World; I've bolded one sentence for emphasis:


I'm going to compare my experience with two systems: Burning Wheel, and Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic. Based on that experience, I think that BW is better at giving the fiction its full expression.

In establishing consequences in BW - especially consequences for failure - the GM is constrained by: (i) the established fiction; (ii) the player's intent in declaring the action; and (iii) the "meta" elements that are part of the at-the-table context, like PC Beliefs, the agreed-upon genre/theme for the game, and the GM's own sense of the "big picture" of the campaign. Constraints (ii) and (iii) don't create pressures to depart from the fiction, but rather contribute to a sense of what might, in this context at this table, follow from the fiction.

Consequences can be purely fictional elements - your brother is dead - or can also have mechanical components to them - you have an infamous reputation among demons as an intransigent demon foe. They can't be purely mechanical without fictional weight.

In MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic, every check is opposed, and hence consequences are established as GM-side results of what is often a fairly complex set of dice pool manipulations. It's quite possible for elements of the fiction to be merely colour - ie they have no representation in any dice pool. But consequences typically are expressed as a descriptive effect rated by die size (eg d8 Emotional Stress or d10 Wrapped in Webs Complication). Taken together, this is something like the opposite of BW: unlike BW, there are purely mechanical constraints on what fiction can factor into resolution, and how; and unlike BW, there are no purely fictional consequences.

This doesn't (and I think can't) produce consequences that are at odds with the established fiction. But I think it does put a limit on the extent to which consequences give the fiction its full expression. The mediation via mechanics means that the potential for "full expression" is always limited by how the dice rolls turn out. Two situations might be narrated similarly in their framing, but the details of the dice in the GM's pool and the way these come out in the check will have a big impact on what adverse consequences can result.

This makes the game more light-hearted overall (though particular moments can be grim), and it helps the emulation of comic-book heroics, which involve frequent reversals of fortune and relatively few permanent consequences. The focus of the action tends to be on the here-and-now, with a sense of character history or arc being driven not so much by the nuts-and-bolts of action resolution, but by the XP system (which rewards the player for pursuing a thematic trajectory with his/her PC, in many respects independent of the details of the ingame situation).

But I think it blunts the force of the fiction in establishing consequences.