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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9749751" data-attributes="member: 6779196">You’re confused because you’re trying to treat “the task” and “the intent” as two different things that can be resolved independently, but I am not. There is only the action. What you’re calling “the task” (what I usually call the approach) and what you’re calling “the intent” (what I usually call the goal) are both part of it. Without both, there can be no action and no resolution (in my games, that is). I’m not calling for a roll to see if the rock hits the tree. I’m not calling for a roll to see if the rock hits the tree in a particular way that would be distracting. I’m not calling for a roll to see if the guard gets distracted when the rock hits the tree. I’m calling for a roll to see if the PC successfully distracts the guard by throwing the rock at the tree.I don’t know what these “task resolution” and “conflict resolution” principles you’re talking about are, but neither of them sound like what I’m doing. If I had to give what I’m doing a name like this, it would be “uncertainty resolution.” The roll is not to resolve what happens in the fiction, it’s to resolve uncertainty in the outcome of the PC’s specific attempt to accomplish a goal by the means they described. It’s to determine if the approach succeeds in achieving the goal, or fails to do so, and incurs a cost or consequence as a result.Let me unpack our working example. The player declares “I try to distract the guard by throwing a rock at a tree,” or something along those lines. I’d say that’s reasonably specific and includes both goal and approach, so it’s a complete action declaration. Now, I need to determine the results, so I ask myself, “can I reasonably imagine the character throwing a rock at a tree successfully distracting the guard?” Yes, I can. If I couldn’t, I would just rule that it fails and move on, because there’s no point rolling if it can’t succeed. Next, I ask myself, “can I reasonably imagine the character throwing the rock at the tree and failing to distract the guard?” Yes, I can. If I couldn’t, it would just succeed because there’s no point rolling if it can’t fail. But I can imagine it failing in a few different ways, actually: the throw could miss the tree, or it could hit the tree but the guard might not hear it, or it could hit the tree and the guard could hear it, but instead of being distracted, he might recognize that there’s probably someone sneaking around throwing rocks and become more alert rather than distracted. Next, I ask myself, “would this action have a cost or a consequence for failure?” Another way to think about this is, does anything stop the player from trying over and over again until they succeed? Now, in the case of the rock missing the tree, I don’t really think there is. I guess the player could run out of rocks to throw, but we probably haven’t established how many rocks are on the ground in the character’s immediate vicinity, and even if they did run out, they could move on to throwing twigs, they could throw random objects from their pack… at some point, this becomes functionally indistinguishable from a task that can’t be failed, which is why I said earlier that hitting the tree with the rock is trivially easy. However, in the case that the rock does hit the tree, there is a potential consequence for failing - the guard might become more alert. So, now we have a goal, an approach that could reasonably achieve it or fail to achieve it, and a cost or consequence deterring repeated attempts. So, we need a die roll to resolve this uncertainty and determine which outcome we move forward with.After breaking that all down, I do kinda think that a better roll might be a Wisdom (Insight) on the guard’s part rather than a Dexterity (Deception) on the player’s part.</blockquote>

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