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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 9226237" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Trying to get my head around what you're saying here.It seems like you're using "framing" here to discuss the post-play framing of an excerpt of play rather than the GMs role/responsibility in framing situations/obstacles for players to engage with/overcome?  Is that correct?  If so, its not clear to me how this does work during the moments of play, where the actual experience of play happens, which are driven by the idiosyncratic processes and structure of play and the individuated roles of each party (including system here among GM and players)How about this.  Lets go with text above which I've bolded to flesh out what it is you're driving at.The spoiled text below is from Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard (p 33) which employs all of the seminal of conflict resolution.[SPOILER="Dogs in the Vineyard Conflict Resolution"]Conflict & ResolutionThe shopkeeper from Back East? His wife isn’t really his wife. He’s the procurer and she’s the available woman (a prostitute). Their marriage is a front.Your brother’s son, your nephew, is fourteen years old. He’s been stealing money from his father, your brother, and taking it to visit this woman.Your brother is in a bitter rage, humiliated by his son’s thievery and grieving his son’s lost innocence.He’s going to shoot her.What do you do?OverviewWe’ll use dice to resolve the conflicts the characters get into. The dice determine not just how the conflict turns out at the end— who wins?— but also how the conflict goes throughout. They provide reversals, escalation, daring advances and desperate retreats, broken bones, cutting betrayals, and all the other juicy goodness a conflict should have.All the players who have an interest in a particular conflict roll their own dice. Your dice represent your bargaining position in the conflict: the more dice you roll, the more say you have in how the conflict goes. This is because your dice give your characters’ actions and reactions weight, consequence. When you have a character throw a punch, you use your dice to back it up. When your character takes a punch, your dice determine whether he shrugs it off or down he goes.To launch a conflict, we begin by establishing what’s at stake, setting the stage, and figuring out who’s participating. Every participating player takes up dice to match the circumstances and throws them down all at once. From there on, the conflict plays out kind of like the betting in poker. One player “raises” by having a character act and putting forward two dice to back it up, and all of the other players whose characters are affected by the act have to put forward dice of their own to “see.” When you use dice to Raise and See they’re gone: put them back in the bowl and don’t use them again in this conflict.Depending on how effectively you See, you might have to take Fallout Dice: dice representing blows your character took— hard words or punches or knives in the ribs or even bullets— and when the conflict’s over you’ll roll them to see how badly your character is hurt.If you’re losing, you can get more dice by escalating the conflict. Someone’s getting the better of your character in an argument? Pull a gun. That’ll shut ’em up.Anyone who has too few dice to See when they have to— and can’t or won’t escalate— is out of the conflict. Whoever’s left at the end gets to decide the fate of what’s at stake. Everybody deals with their Fallout Dice, and then the conflict’s done![/SPOILER]So what happens here is:* The PCs and NPCs in question have Stats, Traits, Relationships, Belongings which have a title and a dice rating. * The situation is framed by the GM.* The players declare what they're intending to do. * Before we launch into the conflict resolution mechanics, we decide collectively what is at stake so its very clear to everyone the implications of what we're getting neck deep in.  This is imperative for the motivations of the characters to be expressed by subsequent play and for the interaction with the game engine at large to be realized.* We muster our dice relevant to this conflict and we roll them out in front of each other so (a) its clear what our individual positions are and (b) we can coherently/functionally perform the back & forth necessary to play out the conflict; Seeing Raises in a strategic/thematic way (which likely includes taking Fallout when we're "just talking" vs when/if we're "getting physical/fighting" or we've "gone to guns/mortal combat"), Helping allies to hopefully Reverse the Blow or to See a Raise that they can't See without your Help die, Giving when it makes sense (possibly to avoid perilous Fallout), Escalating to "physical/fighting" or even "guns/mortal" (and therefore raising the stakes) when/if it makes sense.* Whoever is "left standing" in the end gets to decide the outcome; the fate of what was deemed at stake at the outset of the conflict.Ok, so here is what I want to know.  Take the conflict outlined in the above.  The player's PC's older brother has grabbed his rifle and he is headed to the eastern shopkeeper's store to shoot the shopkeeper's "wife" (who is actually a prostitute in his employ).  The player's PC is the younger brother who is priest armed only with a gun, his holy book, and a sacred duty to uphold the faith an mete out justice.  The player declares that, despite all the Sins of the shopkeeper and the prostitute (Sex, Deceipt, Disunity, Worldliness, Faithlessness) he wants to prevent his brother from committing Violence (killing without just cause is a terrible Sin against The King of Life).  He runs after him attempting to "talk his brother down." Sub in your conception of task resolution for the conflict and structured loop above.  What I'm looking for is for you to show me how we determine (a) the details of the mechanical architecture/process that encodes how we resolve the situation, (b) when the situation is resolved, and (c) if the player of the brother's PC satisfactorily (to the player) resolves the situation...without using the GM to do the heavy lifting of mediation/ruling upon (a) and without using the GM to determine both (b) and (c).(a), (b), and (c) in Dogs in the Vineyard (and like conflict resolution) are all systemitized meaning "the superstructure of play that is leaned upon is system."  I need for you to illustrate how your conceived superstructure of the task resolution you're envisioning isn't "sub GM for system."</blockquote>

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