Fluff vs Crunch

It is very common these days to divide RPG material into fluff, text that focuses on the description and story, and crunch, text that focuses on the mechanics and action. When developing the game, it is important to separate the two as cleanly as possible. When actually playing the game, though, the two need to be brought together.

You say you want a resolution.... part 5

When taking an action in an RPG, there are five stages: intent, declaration, resolution, effect, and description.  We've already covered intent, declaration, resolution, and effect.  The action ends when someone, most often the GM, describes what just happened.

Harkening back to the discussion on declaration (and foreshadowing the discussion on fluff vs. crunch), there is a difference between the effect and the description of that effect.  Boiling it down, the effect works on the mechanical level, and the description works on the character level.  The description is also important to tie the whole action together, much like the summary section at the end of a paper.

You say you want a resolution.... part 4

When taking an action in an RPG, there are five stages: intent, declaration, resolution, effect, and description.  We've already covered intent, declaration, and resolution.  Now we get to the effect.

The effect is usually pretty simple, and predetermined by the system.  If you hit with an attack, you deal damage.  If you succeed with a perception check, you find something.  However, there are some nuances here that both separate one style of gaming from another, and are areas where a good GM can introduce extra layers of awesome.

You say you want a resolution.... part 3

When taking an action in an RPG, there are five stages: intent, declaration, resolution, effect, and description.  We've already covered intent and declaration, so today is resolution.

There are a dozen ways to slice and dice types of actions and types of resolutions.  If the action is either obviously going to succeed, or failure is not interesting, the resolution should simply be the GM saying, "OK, it works."  If there is no way the action can succeed (e.g., the character attempts to leap across a forty foot gap with normal human abilities), the GM is well within his rights to give the player a dirty look and say, "Come on, play seriously."  But most of the tasks in an RPG fall in the big grey area between, in which both success and failure can lead to interesting stories, and it is not clear which path our hero will go down.

You say you want a resolution.... part 2

Continued from part 1...

Yesterday we discussed intent.  Today, we'll discuss declaration.  For those joining us halfway through the woods, this is a series of posts of task resolution, breaking it down into five separate stages: intent, declaration, resolution, effect, and description.

You say you want a resolution.... part 1

Yesterday I talked about dice.  Today, I'm going to unpack task resolution in some detail.  Specifically, I'm going to look into the nooks and crannies between intent, declaration, resolution, effect, and description.  We make a lot of assumptions about how those all fit together, and I think the differences in those assumptions are largely responsible for the differences in our gaming styles.

[Ed. note - The words just kept pouring out of me.  I'm breaking this post up into several sections of its own.  This first one will deal with intent.]

My worst GMing mistakes

In the way of these things, the topic of fudging die rolls has come up on a number of the podcasts and blogs I follow lately. I'm not going to expound on my personal opinion here. Instead, I want to tell about two of my greatest GM failures. It's relevant because both of them came about specifically because I refused to fudge the dice.