Roll for Effect or Intent?

[BenjaminPey]

I vote "for intent", though I'm more familiar with the "conflict resolution" naming.
I've nothing against task-resolution, it suits some gameplays, especially in the OSR and FKR spheres, where the main point is very often to choose the (or a, rather) good action, in order to achieve the desired intent.
But I'm very much fond of conflict-resolution in general, for the speed and snapinness (is that a word?) it confers.

I just wanted to add something that I found to be interesting in this conversation, regarding D&D 5E, a game I very much enjoy, among many others. It's mostly task-oriented in my opinion, but it can be played with conflict resolution to some degree, as a poster (I think it was @Charlaquin) exemplified by saying that, in order to distract a guard by throwing a rock on a tree, you could ask for a Dex (deception) check.

See, the Dex part is rather task-oriented: by choosing Dex, we're saying that what will be tested is the throwing part, the one requiring dexterity. But by adding that it will be a Dex (Deception) check, the test becomes: did we throw this rock in such a way that it will achieve our intent (which is: deception)? And that's when it becomes a conflict resolution.

I'll add that the other way to do this (it was added later), still conflict-oriented, is to directly test the guard reaction, by making them making a saving throw. This way, we make sure we focus on the intent (distracting the guard), not on the task (throwing a rock).

Wa can maybe deplore the game is more or less mute on this question and don't clarify all this at all, but I think (much emphasis on that) it's really a feature, not a bug, to put the game in this kind of liminal space between old and new school and allow the tables to choose and even to go back and forth between the two, depending on the situations, the scope, the flow. It suits me very well, in any case.

 

[FrogReaver]

I don’t understand this dichotomy at all. Every action should have both an intent and an approach to trying to achieve it. A roll is called for to resolve uncertainty in whether the approach succeeds in achieving the intent or not. You can’t divorce one from the other.

I think there is a big boundary over what counts as valid intents. Like a player in d&d typically won’t have the intent to get to the ship before it sails. That may be his overarching goal but his intent is always the here and now, can I convince this guard to let me past so that I am one step closer to the ship.

In some games getting to the ship before it sails would be a valid intent. What I find is that the action space doesn’t cleanly align with such an intent (persuasion doesn’t fictionally guarantee no other obstacles arise between you and the ship) and as a consequence, resolving that intent tends to involve needing to keep the fiction a lot more fluid than heavily prepped scenarios allow. One cannot guarantee the intent unless all the potential fiction from X to Y can be forced to align with a successful/unsuccessful intent.

 

[Desdichado]

I'm still trying to figure out if I roll for effect or affect...