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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9227404" data-attributes="member: 42582">It's definitional. <a href="http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">Here's the definition</a>:In task resolution, what's at stake is the task itself. "I crack the safe!" "Why?" "Hopefully to get the dirt on the supervillain!" What's at stake is: do you crack the safe? In conflict resolution, what's at stake is why you're doing the task. "I crack the safe!" "Why?" "Hopefully to get the dirt on the supervillain!" What's at stake is: do you get the dirt on the supervillain? Which is important to the resolution rules: opening the safe, or getting the dirt? That's how you tell whether it's task resolution or conflict resolution. Task resolution is succeed/fail. Conflict resolution is win/lose. You can succeed but lose, fail but win. In conventional rpgs, success=winning and failure=losing only provided the GM constantly maintains that relationship - by (eg) making the safe contain the relevant piece of information after you've cracked it. It's possible and common for a GM to break the relationship instead, turning a string of successes into a loss, or a failure at a key moment into a win anyway.Harper's diagrams, posted by [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER], represent the same thing using visuals rather than words.The difference between task resolution and conflict resolution consists precisely in the sort of relationship that obtains between succeeding on the check, the GM's authority over the fiction, and what happens next. If the GM the mediator between success on the check and achieving intent/goal, then we are talking about a system of task resolution, and it doesn't cease to be that because the GM often maintains the relationship.(If it is understood that the GM will always maintain the relationship then the GM has no relevant mediating authority, and the system is one of conflict resolution. See, as an eg, my excerpt of the Burning Wheel rules not too far upthread.)I don't follow this at all.For a start, where does better come from? White Plume Mountain is a perfectly good classic D&D module, and it only works if the resolution framework used is one of task resolution.The failure needn't be known in advance; but the parameters within which it will be narrated need to be settled - in particular, no retries ("Let it ride") and no squibbing (eg having the documents be in the waste paper bin). I posted the principle from DitV upthread. In Burning Wheel the core principles are on a failure, the player doesn't get their intent and when the GM introduces content, it is to put pressure on a Belief, Instinct, Trait or Relationship.Obviously secret backstory play is completely different from this. White Plume Mountain, again, provides a completely straightforward illustration. When playing WPM, the GM is not obliged to always drive play towards conflict; does not actively reveal the dungeon in play (bits of it only get revealed when appropriate fictional "triggers" occur); does not have regard to the fact that the players want their PCs to find the magic weapons.And 2nd ed AD&D setting-tourism type play, where the players have their PCs move through the setting, engaging in relatively small-stakes encounters to gradually learn things like what the (GM's pre-scripted) power dynamics are, where the treasures might be, whom they might ally with, etc - this is, again, obviously completely different from (say) DitV or BW.</blockquote>

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