[IaWA] Breaking Bad Habits
Eero Tuovinen:
As I understand from listening to Vincent, the game's system doesn't actually resolve conflicts in any explicit manner. It merely allows characters to take actions and resolves those, assigning mechanical packets of damage to the characters. There is another game that works like this. It's Dungeons & Dragons. The only difference is that here the combat is paced forcibly (somebody damages somebody by necessity, so there's no whiff) and players are allowed to negotiate detached from character motivation (which allows things like a character stumbling and failing by player permission). Of course the fight coreography is also enforced differently: in D&D you have to differentiate between armed and unarmed attacks and such, while in IWAWA you need to describe how characters threaten each other and how they have an advantage against their opponent.
The reason that conflicts get resolved in D&D, or in IWAWA, is that players will either back off or characters die at some point. IWAWA supports characters striving to win while players back off for dramatic reasons, though, which opens up the range of possible conflict resolutions that do not work in D&D without special rules for knocking characters out, making them fall down, etc. In IWAWA players do not need to have their characters die for their convictions just because they're paladins - they can go behind the character's back and negotiate that the character drops down a cliff or whatever, and thus can't insist on continuing on to the bitter end.
Perhaps the system would be easier to understand if it was not considered as a "conflict resolution system" in the forgean sense, but rather as just a fighting system ("system for resolving armed or other conflicts of interest between characters", eh?). It certainly is a task resolution system, theory-wise, resolving conflicts only by the virtue of pressuring players to negotiate a resolution to their conflict. Even sticking to the resolution is not enforced, except for the threat of new violence. So there's a conflict resolution system there only insofar as "you have to negotiate to resolve conflicts" is a "system".
Seems pretty clear to me. My game-in-development Eleanor's Dream has a pretty similar negotiation system, actually.
Brand_Robins:
So... late to the party, but, doesn't Sorcerer more or less work like that?
I mean, I could've sworn there was a discussion about exactly that somewhere on Storygames a month or so back. Cues, pressure, building advantage that doesn't force you to lose your authorship unless it kills you... sounds like the same conclusions.
Or am I remembering wrong?
jburneko:
Brand,
Sorcerer and In A Wicked Age are kissing cousins in terms of resolution. I maintain that they ARE conflict resolution but they resolve only momentary action driven clashes between characters, not chunks of plot.
Jesse
oliof:
Eero: That's why Vincent likes to call rounds 'action sequences'.
Eero Tuovinen:
Rereading what I wrote last night, there's probably an argument there about task/conflict resolution for anybody minded to uphold those two as polar opposites. That's not the case, however: as I'm fond of saying, all games resolve tasks and all games resolve conflicts somehow, for any other way lies madness. It's just a matter of how you resolve them, and it seems to me that in IAWA that resolution always happens by player consensus egged on by imminent bodily harm to the underdog character if the player doesn't find an equitable compromise. The matter of who happens to have the ring at any given moment is a red herring in this, as no conflict is actually being resolved and set aside by the players, unless they make a deal and hold to it: a player can always come back and try to get the stakes again, thus no conflict being resolved simply by utilizing the combat mechanics. This is just like D&D or other games that do not respect conflict stakes: you can hit each other all day long in D&D, but it doesn't actually prevent a character from trying the grapple mechanics for the seventh time to get the ring. Only one party backing down or being incapacitated does that.
And yes, Sorcerer has a lot of the same action going on, although my understanding has been that in Sorcerer you're supposed to have tacit agreement with the other players about there being a conflict of interest that is being resolved, with the current action as a crucial turn in the events. So if the conflict was about getting the ring, for example, then the one resolution procedure would resolve who is being locally in control of the ring, and that's that, unless we go into the fight mechanics. Somebody with more Sorcerer wrangling in their history can probably outright say whether this is so or not - could a player in Sorcerer just come back and demand a reroll? I don't think so. Definitely they could if it was a complex conflict with harm and all, but not in a normal one as far as I understand. So in that regard Sorcerer does explicit conflict resolution: stakes (implicit ones) are being won or lost, and players are expected to honor those stakes.
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