thread: 2012-06-11 : Ask a Frequent Question
On 2012-06-18, Moreno wrote:
Cristoph: if you go to the Forge definition (ok, I mean Ron's definition...), the difference between task resolution and Conflict resolution is only "when you roll": when you have a task, or when you have a conflict?
All the rest, everything else, is crust. People saw the Pool or Primetime Adventures and said "Ohhh, I get it... in conflict resolution you decide the entire conflict in one single roll/draw...", then when they see Dogs in the Vineyard think it's not ConfRes. When they get that DitV is ConfRes too, they are all about "Ohhh.. I get it now, conflict resolution is when you have stakes...". And after that they see another ConfRes game without stakes, and they are more and more confused....
That confusion is caused by the question, not by the answer. When you ask "what ConfRes DO" you are already in confusion. The question is "WHEN you use ConfRes?". Then the answer is clear: "when you have a conflict".
"But..." you could say "...how useful is that division?". These days, not much, as Ben said a lot of games take "you roll only when you have a conflict" as a given, and change the way you use it, or exactly when during the conflict you "roll" and what is decided by the roll or even change the cause-effect and have the conflict happen from the roll and not the other way around.
The concept of "conflict resolution" is useful when you have people used to roll for every tiny task, rolling when a failure would block everything (so the GM has to fudge the result behind the screen). It's useful for people used to task resolution. So it's useful when the player base of these "new strange rpgs" increase and a lot of people used to traditional rpgs meet them for the first time, and cease to be so useful when the player base is stable (or it's expanding to non-gamers only) and the people who hear it didn't roll for a task for a long time.
Question for Vincent (and Ben, if he wants to chime in): do you think that it could be useful to divide ConfRes rules in subcategories in base of "what they do"? And if you answer yes, how would you do it?
More general question: a lot of these dichotomies (task/conflict resolution, FatE/FitM, actor/author stance, even GNS in some ways) were really hot issues at the beginning at the forge, and these days are taken for granted or forgotten. I don't even remember the last Stance or FitM/FiatE discussion, it must be years from the last one. (It's a USA situation because in Italy talking about FitM outside of GentecheGioca is still enough to create a flamewar...) so I would like to ask you if in your opinion this "peace" is caused by an increase of separation between the people who play one kind of game from the people who play another (so the forum discussions are between people who already agree), or if it's caused by the penetration of a lot of these concepts in "traditional" role-playing, or it's simply caused by people having enough of these discussion and stopping talking about "divisive concepts".
Edit: crosspost with Vincent's comment. What I was talking about is the 2005 concept of ConfRes, I am very interested in hearing how you views of these concept changed
