Generative resolution

[thefutilist]

I was just rereading Vincent Baker on character sheets and currency: anyway: Things on Character Sheets (2)

In the constable example, there is a currency relationship between position and effectiveness: when you make a Resources test (which is about your character's effectiveness at acquiring stuff in town), you put (what we could call) your town position at stake.

It's mediated by the GM, who does have the power, on a failure, to give you what you want but at the cost of a condition (which, when it comes to Resources, can include a direct hit on effectiveness by taxing Resources). But equally the GM can give a twist - a complicating or worsening of your town position.

This is why I keep coming back to the idea of the implicit.

Consider this example, from Harper:

She stares at you coldly. 'Leave me alone,' she says. What do you do? . . .​

​

'Don't come back here again.' She slams the door in your face and you hear the locks click home.​

Implicit in a cold stare, and a request to be left alone, is the slamming of a door in one's fact.

Similarly, implicit in permitting a cinder imp to escape and burn down the Hedge Witch's place, is being hassled by the town authorities. The fictional causation in this second example is different - it's not internal to a person who's already in the scene. But it is internal to a social structure - a town - that is already in the scene (and towns in Torchbearer do have an orientation towards the PCs, namely, of suspicion tending towards hostility).

@thefutilist, what am I missing here?

I went and thought about it for a bit, especially in the context of more low-myth systems, and there were complicating factors (I don’t appreciate the irony).

If we take very bare bones conflict resolution it works as follows:

One: Triggers when an ACTION in attempted in the fiction that is OPPOSED by another character’s ACTION in the fiction.

Two: Has explicit stakes due to the above.. The ACTIONS of one force win out. ACTIONS can get fuzzy but it’s the same (more or less) as the task, tactics, involved.

Three: Any generation must predominantly be done before the roll. This gets very fuzzy but at the least ‘something’ must exist that allows the conflict mechanism to trigger. Even if that’s a social network and even if it’s decided right there and then that this ‘character’ is implicit in the scene.

So let’s take a haggling scenario. I’m a broke rockstar who has just turned up to L.A with $3 in my pocket. There is a vendor who is selling hotdogs for $8. I haggle with him to bring the price down. I am opposed by his self-interest (let’s say). The roll determines whether the haggling or self-interest wins out. The ACTION RESOLUTION causes a positional change (or not).

Let’s take a counter example.

I’m a broke rockstar trying to open the safe of a pharmacist, by picking the lock, to get to the medications inside. If my roll means I pick the lock anyway but it then determines what is inside, say on a failure there’s nothing there but aspirin, it’s a different kind of resolution than the first kind. Specifically because picking the lock, the ACTION, is orthogonal to the resolution.

I suspect that distinction makes sense to both of us but I want to check before getting into some PbtA stuff and what Harper is saying. I want to put Torchbearer aside for the time being. I think it does some fascinating stuff but I don’t want to muddy the waters.