Noodling/Resolution RPG

Misc notes on action resolution and granularity and stuff.

Action Costs

Related to the stuff in Noodling/Permissions RPG, you can note a couple things about costs/prerequisites for actions:

• Reliability: It can be a thing where if you can do it, you just do it, or it can be a thing where you have to do a skill roll to see if you can do it
• Character creation resource: It can be a thing where doing it requires having made some investment at character creation (presumably buying a relevant aspect)
• Game play resource: It can be a thing where doing it requires spending some at-playtime resource (ie, fate point)
• Game world resource: It can be a thing where doing it requires additional in-world support, like having the right tools

Where it gets interesting is there can be some fungibility here: you can say either you need the aspect or you need the right tools; or either you make the skill roll or you spend a fate point. Or "and" instead of "or" - if you make the skill roll, you can spend a fate point to also do X.

Granularity

The new 7th Sea book has some nice stuff that endorses acting at a slightly larger granularity that people might otherwise - "spend a fate point while hiding to decoy a guard over to you and knock them out", "spend a fate point to lure someone off into a room with you and subdue them". I don't know if these sequences should be sort of specifically called-out larger grains than usual, or if there is some principle here that can be identified, or if this should just be the default resolution granularity.

I think maybe what's going on is if the player comes up with a plan, and it involves doing A then B then C, then first see if it's ok to just do one roll for the whole plan. This is especially true if failures at any stage scrap the whole plan (in that case having multiple rolls mostly just decreases the chance of success for the plan).

Combat Granularity

Most combat is too small a granularity - maybe things should be resolved in three rounds or so.

On consideration I think it's not correct to codify things in terms of number of rounds in the rules. Rather, the issue is something more like this:

• Minor injuries to PCs usually don't change their behavior in the current fight
• Partially-injured NPC opponents don't really change their behavior and don't make you want to change yours
• Therefore both successful attacks (where you damage your opponent) and unsuccessful ones (where they damage you) are uninteresting the first couple times they happen, and often when your action in round 1 is "I attack the guy with my sword", that is also your action in round 2 (and often when that's one PC's action in round 1, it is also every other PC's action).

Brute squads are basically a way to disguise the problem - "you're making a difference, honest! you just took out two guys!" but of course the real guy is the five-person brute squad and that is basically acting the same after you take out some of the brutes (albeit at a lower strength).

So I think the principle here is basically like this, which doesn't have to be specific rules because it's part of the general bucket for skill resolution principles: if you've got a situation that is too big to resolve with a single roll, and the player's action is "I try to resolve the entire situation", then whether they succeed or fail (and change the total number of checkmarks in the victory column), there has to be a corresponding story situation change too, and not just a cosmetic one. Furthermore, "let it ride" applies if you try to roll the same action in the same situation, and both people know this. That is, if there is a five-person brute squad and the player says "I charge in wildly!" and the PC strikes down two brutes, then, unless the PC is already beaten up and the damage the remaining members of the brute squad might do before dying matters, the brute squad has to change tactics. Otherwise the correct resolution to the original roll isn't "you take out two guys", it's "you quickly strike down two of the guards; the others charge at you, but soon the other three are also on the ground". So instead, the guards should change tactics (resulting in a story situation change): "You strike down two of the guards; the other three panic, and turn to flee. You strike down one as they run, but the remaining two make it to cover in a doorway, shouting loudly for help". Derived principle: on the second round, either it shouldn't make sense to roll the original skill again, or rolling it should clearly produce a different outcome (say in the first round you were sparring for an opening, and now in the second a success has a real chance to end the fight; or maybe in the first round you pressed on despite exhaustion, and now the second round is about seeing if you can take them out before you're too tired to go on).

Note that by getting more details about the PC's actions ("I attack her" "How more specifically?" "I feint left and then charge in, past her defenses") you can get it so the situation is different each round (in round 1 the PC and opponent are far apart; in round 2 they're closer together) but this may just be a cosmetic difference in many cases, which isn't good enough.

Resolution

Given the previous sections, it seems like the right sort of thing is the GM decides how much in-play weight a problem should have, and then when the player proposes actions that'll resolve it, the GM can figure out how to size the resolution of the action. Given that, they can decide on the right success/failure effects. Couple implications of this:

• There's no explicit rules things about brute squads vs regular people - the GM can decide that this fight against five people gets resolved in the same number of die rolls as a fight against one, and separately they can decide whether it's an easy challenge or a hard one.
• Part of the GM's job is also to map the mechanical effects to the necessary story transitions that have to occur when the action succeeds/fails, and there are two ways to do that - with some skill check at point X, the GM can decide to just give the player what they're asking for on everything in the story up to X, or they can say that the skill check actually covers everything in the story up to X - this distinction matters when you're looking at what's true if the check fails fails; in the former case only X itself is up for grabs, but in the latter case the failure could be anywhere up to X.

Effects

Bumping in here six years later or whatever to comment that another kind of slider to adjust is the effect of the rolls. I guess this is an expansion of the let it ride comment about the brute squad. Like, it's also possible that instead of changing the situation, you (the GM) can yield the point and make it about something else - "Ok, you'll defeat them, roll a fighting check to see how much damage you take in the process." Or you can up-front add a separate rider on the outcomes of the roll, like "Roll to see whether your wild charge wins you the fight or not, but either way you'll take damage." So I guess then the question is how you decide whether to run this as one roll or multiple.