Stakes and consequences in action resolution

[Umbran]

I can only work with what I've got!

Oh, you had it, you just didn't *say* it.

You say that part of it was implicit. Implicit steps are, effectively, macros - bits of process or logic that are understood to happen, and therefore go unstated, but still happen. In play with folks experienced in how you run a game, this is fine. But you could, if you wanted, unpack the implicit step, and elucidate what it would be, if it were explicit.

I was hoping that people's general familiarity with the Cthulhu genre would do some work in parsing the example. So whether fluid spilled down a grate is going to awaken Deep Ones in the sewers, or send the inhabitants of the house insane by contaminating their water supply, or something else appropriately Cthulhu-esque is an open question, but we can all see - I hope - that these are the sorts of bad things that happen in a Cthulhu RPG.

Yes, they are. However, I think there's a major point that you still might be missing.

There's a ton of "bad" things that can happen. Some are worse than others. You have not set the stakes unless you tell me *how* bad. That's why I asked whether "bad" was a jargon word, or if somewhere in your example there was an encoding of exactly (or even vaguely) how bad things were. From where I sit, you claim to have set the stakes, but I don't see where that happened.

Which is really weird, because we then misses the entire point of having known stakes and consequences. I mean, look at it - you're saying you don't want to have to play analytical, right? And the way to do that is to make sure the players know what they are really choosing. And then in describing an example, you *skip the step where you tell them*?

Compare the butler who knows that "something bad might happen" to the character jumping over the pit. Something bad might happen there, too. But falling 10 feet is a lot different from falling 60', onto spikes that are coated with super-tetanus. "Something bad" does not do enough to stop me from having to be analytic. I'm in a role playing game, something bad might always happen! "Something bad" is not new information upon which I make an informed choice about whether I want to spend my inspiration on this roll, or not.

 

[pemerton]

You have not set the stakes unless you tell me *how* bad.

I might be missing something here: I'm not sure what you have in mind by degrees of badness.

In the particular system I was running - Cthulhu Dark - there are two ways a PC can be removed from play: s/he can try and fight a Mythos creature, which results in character death; or s/he can have her sanity reach 6, which results in incurable insanity. (The latter happened to the butler PC, and the player picked up a (up to that point) NPC as a PC for the last half-hour or so of play.)

Spilling the fluid isn't trying to fight a Mythos creature; and whether or not it triggers a SAN check is not dependent on the details of what might be narrated as a downstream consequence. So there's no possibility of the player having to remove the PC from the game that is being obscured here.

 

[GMMichael]

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. . .

That's, if you ask me, the big problem with task resolution: whether you succeed or fail, the GM's the one who actually resolves the conflict. The dice don't, the rules don't; you're depending on the GM's mood and your relationship and all those unreliable social things the rules are supposed to even out.

Task resolution, in short, puts the GM in a position of priviledged authorship. Task resolution will undermine your collaboration.

In suggesting that this makes analysis a focus of play, I am adding in an additional conjecture: namely, that at least from time-to-time the players want to know what is at stake in a situation, whether for the basic reason that they don't want their PCs to die, or sometimes for more complex reasons that reflect the current circumstances of the fiction (eg they want to know whether they should smash the vessels of magical fluid to stop those from powering the enchanted widget that is sustaining the eldritch field that feeds the ritual-of-whateverness). In such circumstances, the players come under pressure to analyse, because a non-analytic/reckless approach (eg "I run up to the vessels with my battle axe and smash them all!") runs the risk of producing an adverse consequence relative to these important player (and PC) goals in the scenario.

Lots of issues, even more context, so I might be stabbing in the dark, here. If so, feel free to ignore me

One problem here, which I always see as a problem, is trying to put "success" and "failure" into the game world. The problem is that, unless you unequivocally define how each term translates into results, success and failure are 100% subjective. In the Vincent Baker example, a PC could roll a success on cracking the safe, and literally "crack" the safe; the iron door was so rusty that the action of pulling the handle breaks the door in two, or breaks the handle off. This is why success/failure should be limited to metagame/logic concepts, like doing "damage." An opponent either takes numerical damage or does not. There is no middle ground or gray area.

Another problem is confusing simulation outcomes with story outcomes. In pemerton's example, smashing a vessel is a simulation outcome (Vincent Baker's "Task"), while thwarting the adverse effects of the widget is a story outcome (VB's "Conflict"). If GMs and PCs have different ideas about what type of outcome will result from a given conflict, it should be fairly obvious that it will lead to real world conflict.

I have no idea how this ties to the lie-deducing thread, but I hope this helps to clear up one or two issues in this thread: does the GM know what the outcomes of a die roll will mean? What defines a success or a failure? And are those outcomes part of the simulation, or part of the story? Next, what answers does the player have in mind? Finally, are the two people in agreement or not?

My personal solution is to 1) remove the false succeed/fail dichotomy, and 2) hand over, as GM, enough narrative agency to the player to determine what a good or bad roll means, and then I take the yoke back before the plane crashes into the mountain.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I was thinking more about advantage than disadvantage, so I'll stick to that.

What I had in mind is that if my chance of success is 1 in 20, then advantage nearly doubles that (39/400 is near enough to 1 in 10); while if my chance is already good, then advantage doesn't increase it as much (eg if its 50/50 it goes to 3 in 4, which is only 50% more likely; if its 4 in 5 then it goes to 24/25, which is only 20% more likely).

But if I'm following properly, the general experience is that doubling a small chance doesn't, in practice, make much difference (eg because those checks don't come up often enough for the doubling to show through) while the more modest increase in to big chances does make a difference (eg because those checks come up a fair bit and already weren't too likely to fail and now are even less likely).

It's also just kinda in-your-face that doubling a 5% chance of success is equivalent to a +1, while a 'mere' 50%-increase in a 50/50 shot at success is like a +5.

+5 being a lot more than +1 and all.

I still don't see how that's really 'flattening,' either way. I'd expect 'flattening' to mean that chances of success become more similar, so there's some point they'd gravitate towards when the mechanic is invoked... and wouldn't that mean a larger absolute bonus to very small chance of success - and, counter-intuitively, a penalty to a very high chance of success?

The two in combination, I think, because its the relationship between bonuses and DCs that determines the prospects of success, which matter to the viability of conflict resolution for the reasons Ovinomancer has given.

I think D&D (and I include 4e here) has never provided a lot of support to the GM in narrating failure effectively. I don't have a good sense of how much better 5e might be in this respect, but if the general tendency in play is to incline towards making checks with significantly better than 50/50 odds then maybe it doesn't come up too much?

Sure, failure in D&D has often been a matter of nothing happening, unless the DM felt like being mean, then something bad happened (thought, in that case, quite possibly without a check, or regardless of success failure - "oh, too bad you successfully opened that door, there's [insert form of certain death] on the other side!"), and nothing really meant nothing, as in play just ground to a halt.

Thus, 'fail forward' sounded like a real innovation - or abomination - when it finally made it's way into D&D.

The most developed non-combat resolution system for D&D that I'm aware of is the skill challenge in 4e. ...In 4e the standard solution is to just ignore all the quasi-simulationist stuff in the PHB skills chapter (which is mostly dropped in Essentials, for good reason).

Even once they were fixed up, SCs remained too abstract to be really compelling, they needed to be dressed up or filled out (into 'mini-games' in their own right is how I've put it before), to really deliver.

I'm not sure that 5e skills are really even quasi-simulatoinist, though I'm not the best qualified to comment. I think the issue is less about quasi-simulation and more about setting appropriate expectations for players and GMs: eg having a good Investigation skill means (something like) when a conflict involves investigating stuff, than I'm more likely to succeed at that conflict than others. This will cause a lot of players to go ballistic but for culture/expectation reasons rather than narrowly mechanical reasons.

"quasi" indeed. The key in 5e is that players get enough hard numbers and reasonable-sounding names of skills & abilities on their character sheet to create a sense that something is being simulated - while the DM is free to make stuff happen that's actually fun.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I've honed in on these bits of your post because I think they might be the best place to start.

I personally think the issue of telling - if that means explicitly stating as a precursor to the roll - is a bit of a red herring, because in RPG play, especially among participants who are used to playing together, there are many ways to convey information and establish expectations other than explicit telling.

But I think reducing what is conveyed to [/I]consequences for an action are simply bad[/i] is not correct. And that's really what I see as the focus of the discussion. It's not irrelevant - [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] canvassed, upthread, that a consequence of spilling might be good (eg if it stops the BBEG getting the fluid) and that's a possibility that is excluded in the context of my play example - but it's too simplistic. What's the nature of the badness? Who is implicated? What sorts of things might be required to effectively respond to it?

Snipping.

I see what you are saying, but I'm not understanding why all of this applied to the conversation we were having in the other thread.

In that thread, I was specifically calling out Charlaquinn's style of telling the player as forcing them to be more analytical than my style of not telling the players unless that is what their character is doing.

You said that you saw my style as forcing more analytical play, I had assumed you meant in relation to Charlaquinn's style.

However, you seem to be talking about an entire third style that we were not discussing.

And your style seems to edge much closer to mine, since in your explanation even the DM does not know the exact consequences of an action, only the general parameters it falls within. And I can see, how comparing your style and my style, you can see mine as requiring more analysis, since I do build plots and scenes before the characters begin acting within them. There are things that will react certain ways to certain stimuli, whether the players intend that or it has anything to do with their backstories or not. This means players will have to search out hints and clues about what is happening if they want answers.


However, I hope you can understand why I was so confused, since you stepped into a conversation comparing apples and oranges and began comparing everything to Java Juice.

 

[Manbearcat]

There's a ton of "bad" things that can happen. Some are worse than others. You have not set the stakes unless you tell me *how* bad. That's why I asked whether "bad" was a jargon word, or if somewhere in your example there was an encoding of exactly (or even vaguely) how bad things were. From where I sit, you claim to have set the stakes, but I don't see where that happened.

I don't have time to get to Lanefan or produce a post that addresses all I would like to. However, after doing a quick scan of the thread, I think I have something to offer here.

There is a reason why most people who play PBtA games would say that Blades in the Dark is a more finely crafted game than earlier iterations of PBtA games (like Dungeon World). It isn't because these games are poorly crafted. They're beautifully crafted in fact.

However, it deftly and intuitively solves the issue that can arise in a game like Dungeon World when something that isn't absolute success (a 10+ result) emerges.

When a 7-9 (success with cost/complication) happens in Dungeon World, you're making a Soft Move.

When a 6- (failure and Mark XP) happens in Dungeon World, you're mostly making a Hard Move (but a Soft one should be made under specific conditions; fiction pre-move and move made that will trigger the new content introduction).

Blades tightens this up considerably with the new PBtA tech "Effect" and "Position."

Your new content introduced will follow similar procedures and principles in both systems, but a player knowing whether their action is under Desperate (circumstances) Position vs Risky or Controlled understands the stakes of a particular Action Roll beforehand (and can then work to preemptively move that Position or mitigate its fallout...or they can mitigate it after the Action Roll) better in Blades than they do in, say, Dungeon World.

Not by an overwhelming amount, but enough to matter (especially coupled with the other player-facing mechanics to influence the set Position and Effect and/or mitigate the Position pre/post Action Roll) to both the general feel of play and the cognitive space you're inhabiting as you're working through your decision-point.

 

[pemerton]

you seem to be talking about an entire third style that we were not discussing.

<snip>

I hope you can understand why I was so confused, since you stepped into a conversation comparing apples and oranges and began comparing everything to Java Juice.

In the other thread I'd tried to make it clear that I had some things in common with other posters, but also some things different. But some of my posts were quoted, and I was responding to them.

I was specifically calling out Charlaquinn's style of telling the player as forcing them to be more analytical than my style of not telling the players unless that is what their character is doing.

<snip>

And your style seems to edge much closer to mine, since in your explanation even the DM does not know the exact consequences of an action, only the general parameters it falls within.

I'm not 100% sure how you run your game.

What I'm trying to point to is that (i) meaningful engagement and action declaration by players requires them to have a sense of what is at stake, and (ii) this can be established without relying on the players in character declaring actions and acquiring information within the fiction.

For me, this is the approach that underpins creative collaborative RPGing.

 

[Aldarc]

There is a reason why most people who play PBtA games would say that Blades in the Dark is a more finely crafted game than earlier iterations of PBtA games (like Dungeon World). It isn't because these games are poorly crafted. They're beautifully crafted in fact.

Blades tightens this up considerably with the new PBtA tech "Effect" and "Position."

Most definitely agree. Position/Effect is, however, one but layer of the risk assessment process that transpires in BitD. I would also add that BitD also add that players in BitD have additional ways to increase their odds of success than PbtA/DW games, namely how BitD handles dice pools. Plus, the Devil's Bargain is diabolically delightful from the perspective of both players and the GM.

 

[Manbearcat]

Most definitely agree. Position/Effect is, however, one but layer of the risk assessment process that transpires in BitD. I would also add that BitD also add that players in BitD have additional ways to increase their odds of success than PbtA/DW games, namely how BitD handles dice pools. Plus, the Devil's Bargain is diabolically delightful from the perspective of both players and the GM.

Yup. Agreed.

I think what I’m going to do for this thread is take a pair of similar situations I’ve resolved in DW and Blades and contrast them (to suss out why Blades is a “better” approach for what the two games are trying to accomplish). That should work in the service of the thread premise.

I also need to get back to Lanefan’s respobse.

 

[Chaosmancer]

What I'm trying to point to is that (i) meaningful engagement and action declaration by players requires them to have a sense of what is at stake, and (ii) this can be established without relying on the players in character declaring actions and acquiring information within the fiction.

For me, this is the approach that underpins creative collaborative RPGing.

Okay, I don't disagree with any of this.

The players enter a swamp where people are rumored to have disappeared. The stakes are fairly well figured out in a typical DnD game. They know what is at stake, it was established without them acquiring specific information in character. Therefore they will have meaningful engagement