thread: 2012-06-25 : "Conflict" "Resolution"
On 2012-07-02, Josh W wrote:
Some pondering has occured:
One of the interesting things about bringing down the pain vs normal resolution is that you are stepping from one minigame to another, one mode of resolution to another, on the basis of your character's intent; nothing else might change:
The fictional situation might have a load of people hold you at swordpoint, and if they beat your roll and you don't bring down the pain, then you just do whatever they wanted you to, get chucked out of the building or arrested or something.
Whereas if you go to bring down the pain, then the consequences for the situation change.
In apocolypse world, there isn't the same obvious escalation, the same "more effective but more high consequence" minigame. There's just different tactics, with different levels of consequence.
So resolution doesn't do moments of briliance, doesn't do "short fuse" story now play. It's more longform and soap-opera-y, which is probably why monsterhearts works so well.
You can't just roll the dice to get what you want, with significant immediate cost or known delayed cost, which also means that we can't immediately see what it is you want. You can't go for broke and directly get what you want, yet because of how the GM principles and turn structure are wrapped around the players, this doesn't remove story-direction agency, just sort of puts it in a smokey long-form situation.
I wouldn't be at all suprised if the big moral choices that apoc world supports either revolve around "acceptible means", the classic overlap between tactical mechanics and moral considerations, or the crunch points of personal relationships between PCs, thanks to the triangles moves. But that's wandering into Actual Play teritory..
