# RPG a Day 2026 - 08: Resolve tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2026 ![[ShadowDark (cover).jpg|200]] ![[Ironsworn (cover).jpg|200]] ![[Ensemble (cover).jpg|200]] > [!info]- resolve — [Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resolve) > > **verb** · re·solve **/rɪˈzɑlv/** *also* **/rɪˈzɔlv/**, **/rɪˈzɑv/**, **/rɪˈzɔv/** > *resolved; resolving* > > **transitive verb** > > 1. **a.** to deal with successfully : clear up — *resolve doubts amicably*, *resolve the dispute*, *They haven't been able to resolve their differences.* > "…work through what could have been done … to resolve any lingering issues." — *Amy Morin* > **b.** to find an answer to — *resolve the problem* > **c.** to make clear or understandable > **d.** to find a mathematical solution of > **e.** to split up into two or more components especially in assigned directions — *resolve a vector* > 2. to reach a firm decision about — *resolve to get more sleep*, *resolve disputed points in a text* > "After watching her father put up with allergy shots for 20 years, Ann Bergeron resolved to treat her own allergies another way." — *Corinna Wu* > 3. **a.** to declare or decide by a formal resolution and vote > "The House of Representatives resolved Monday to send the issue of daylight saving time to a summer study committee." — *South Bend (Indiana) Tribune* > **b.** to change by resolution or formal vote — *The house resolved itself into a committee.* > 4. **a.** break up, separate — *The prism resolved the light into a play of color.* *also* : to change by disintegration > **b.** to reduce by analysis — *resolve the problem into simple elements* > **c.** to distinguish between or make independently visible adjacent parts of — *use a telescope to resolve a galaxy into its stars and nebulas* > **d.** to separate (a racemic compound or mixture) into the two components > 5. to make (something, such as one or more voice parts or the total musical harmony) progress from dissonance to consonance > 6. to work out the resolution of (something, such as a dramatic or literary work) > "The way the plot is set up, there's no way to resolve it, and they don't—they just sort of bug-off." — *Pauline Kael* > 7. to cause resolution of (a pathological state) > 8. *obsolete* : dissolve, melt > > **intransitive verb** > > 1. to become separated into component parts *also* : to become reduced by dissolving or analysis > 2. to form a resolution : determine > 3. to undergo resolution — used especially of a disease or inflammation > "Some may resolve on their own, while others may require treatment." — *Carrie Madormo* > 4. consult, deliberate > 5. to progress from dissonance to consonance > > **resolvable** /rɪˈzɑlvəbəl/ *adjective* · **resolver** *noun* > > --- > > **noun** · resolve **/rɪˈzɑlv/** *also* **/rɪˈzɔlv/**, **/rɪˈzɑv/**, **/rɪˈzɔv/** > > 1. fixity of purpose : resoluteness — *unshakeable resolve*, *newfound resolve* > "…even though we can't do anything to stop a hurricane, with resolve and collective action we can greatly mitigate its destructive impact." — *Arianna Huffington* > 2. something that is resolved > 3. a legal or official determination *especially* : a formal resolution > > --- > > **Examples of *resolve* in a Sentence** > > *Verb* > - The brothers finally resolved their conflict. > - The issue of the book's authorship was never resolved. > - His speech did nothing to resolve doubts about the company's future. > - They haven't been able to resolve their differences. > - She resolved to quit smoking. > - He resolved that he would start dating again. > - The committee resolved to override the veto. > > *Noun* > - His comments were intended to weaken her resolve but they only served to strengthen it. > - A naval pilot who has been unwavering in his resolve to become an astronaut. I thought I'd get us off on the right foot because one of my favorite things in the world is resolution systems. There are 10,000 different ways to answer a question in a TRPG. There are 10,000 different ways to ask a question in a TRPG. They all resolve into a single question: > What happens next? You may reasonably argue that there is another question that drives resolution systems in games. > What the fuck is that? At one point in the past, I would have absolutely agreed with you about the bifurcated nature of inquiry. But really, we don't care about literally determining what something is, whether it be a clue detection roll or a random generation check on an oracle. Because whatever it is, it defines what we do next. It all collapses down to what happens next. This is critical to keep in mind because it even applies to answering questions about what happened in the past. After all, the fictive experience has already been established. Things have already been done. But if you ask a question about what happened in the past and the answer recontextualizes it, it only affects what you do in the future or right now. It doesn't actually change the past.[^1] So what does resolution look like when we include the kinds of questions you can ask? Let's start with something extremely classic, at least for my collection: **[[ShadowDark]]**. ## ShadowDark **ShadowDark** has the great advantage of starting with a simple two-page spread, which effectively covers all of the information you might need to do basic resolution. ![[08 - Resolve - SD 2-age Resolution (illo).png]] What you have here is essentially all you need for a TRPG. You've got the description of the characters and what they can do, in particular their stats. You've got what to roll with Checks, and you've got how to determine when they're dead with hit points. That's it. If you wanted to run a pickup game at your local store with a bunch of preteens, you've got the whole game right here. Note what it doesn't resolve, though. What kind of question does it not answer? This doesn't include a method to determine what something is on this two-page spread. The GM (because this is a GMed game) has to bring that to the table with them. Yes, there are an absolute ton of tables in the book to help you decide what perhaps you should have. A vast number of them, in fact. A beautiful number of them. Random encounter tables run from page 142 to 187. Monsters run from 187 to 194, including a section on designing monsters. How do you resolve the question of what the fuck is this? Random tables. There is a mechanism. This is going to set the tone for what we talk about next. **ShadowDark** does a good job of resolving the question of "what next?" It's not a game I would be likely to run, but if someone invited me to sit down and play, I'd be thrilled. Let's say that we are out in the wild, heading out to the Shadowdark, and we stumble onto a goblin camp. There are more goblins than we can deal with right now. It's dangerous. No one would want to walk directly into that unless they were completely self-destructive—which does admittedly describe 90% of adventurers, but not us today. Not today, anyway. We would like to sneak around the camp and go on our merry way. How do we do that? We tell the GM what we want to do, and then the GM asks if we want to do a check. He tells us the linked stat (in this case, probably Dexterity) to keep from making noise and picks a difficulty class, which is conveniently listed inside the front cover, making it a quick and easy reference. The goblins aren't being particularly vigilant because they don't expect anyone to be around, so the GM decides it's DC 9. We roll a d20 plus the stat modifier for our Dexterity, and if we equal or beat the DC, we succeed. We go on our merry way, and everything's fine. If the DEX check fails, things go amiss. We did not sneak successfully, and the goblins are alerted. Next up might be rolling for initiative (d20 + DEX).[^2] ## Ironsworn Let's escalate in complexity a little bit, but not necessarily in complication. **[[Ironsworn]]** is one of my favorite RPGs of all time, and it very well may be my favorite fantasy RPG of all time, in part because of its mechanical system. System rolls to resolve questions are not limited to a binary success or failure. Instead, you have a trinary success. Success is a hit. You can have a strong hit, which gives you essentially what you were asking. You can have a weak hit, which gives you what you were asking, but with a complication or ameliorating factor. You can also have a miss, in which you don't get what you wanted and things have changed. **Ironsworn** is from the *[[Powered by the Apocalypse]]* line of inheritance, so it comes with the idea that failing forward is good. The only thing that can't happen is *"nothing happens."* This is excellent. As far as I'm concerned, it's one of the core axioms of modern game design, along with *"play to find out,"* and it never goes awry. But how does it answer the question of what comes next? The resolution process starts with asking what you're doing in the fiction. You don't start with the mechanics. You start with *"What is my character doing?"* Are they preparing to go on a trip to the nearest dungeon, or are they trying to get supplies from a village that they've stumbled on along the way? Are they making camp, trying to heal up, or have just spotted a group of goblins and are figuring out if they've been made yet? Once you start with the question, you establish the fiction ("I'm trying to sneak around the goblins' camp because there's way too many of them for me to deal with") and then you look to see if you trigger a move. Some people think that there are way too many moves, but that ignores a fairly important distinction: you're never trying to do everything at the same time. What you're doing typically is related to a series of actions or a context. It's important to keep that in mind because it makes it very fast and easy to figure out if you've triggered a move. For example, let's look at the sneaking around the goblins' camp situation. What are you in the process of? Adventuring. Guess what? There's an entire group of Adventure Moves. What's the first one listed in the section? Face Danger. When you attempt something risky or react to an imminent threat, envision your action. Roll. If you act with deception, stealth, or trickery, roll +shadow. What's our core resolution system here, mechanically? Take the appropriate stat, add a d6, and then compare that to each of 2d10 individually. If the total of the action score is greater than both d10s, it counts as a strong hit. If it's greater than one d10, it's a weak hit. If it's less than or equal to both dice, it's a miss. Simple, straightforward, and you get a very nice trinary. We throw the dice and we get a **weak hit**. So we succeed, but face a troublesome cost. We have to pick one: being delayed, losing advantage, or facing a new danger. We might suffer a -1 momentum, or be tired or hurt and forced to endure harm, or be dispirited or afraid and endure stress, or lose resources. We'd suffer -1 supply. We know that we get what we wanted; we are successful at sneaking around the goblin camp, but it costs us something. In this case, we've seen a goblin camp that's larger than we can deal with in the area. We find it terribly disturbing — endure stress, take a little emotional damage, and move on. ## Ensemble Now let's go hit up **[[Ensemble]]**, which I don't often refer to directly. We're going to do something a little different, in part because *all* of the mechanics are extremely minimalist. Lots of high-speed, low-drag here. We're talking fiction first again, so you think about what you want and how you're doing it before you even touch the dice. In **Ensemble**, more so than either of our other examples, we're literally asking a question. Characters are defined by a list of tags with no numbers associated. The system is qualitative rather than quantitative. This is very much different from our other examples, which lean heavily on numbers. Instead, here we are going to talk about tags, which involve qualifications, rather than having a character who has a high Dexterity or a high shadow stat. In Ensemble, a character has a tag of *"Moves Like a Cat in the Night."* This requires a certain amount of interpretation, but that's okay. The mechanical side of the resolution is built on a pool of d6s. You start with a simple action die. Every tag that gives you an advantage in the situation gives you an additional chance die. Every tag that provides a complication or a disadvantage adds a risk die. Chance dice and risk dice cancel each other out, so you'll either have neither or only one type. If you have only chance dice, you take the highest of all the die rolls. If you have only risk dice, you take the lowest. Let's run through our standard example, but we're going to have to be a little more specific because things are going to fall out differently. First, let's make a quick character with a couple of traits and a frailty: > [!info] **Name:** Graham Nythern > > **Concept:** Northland Barbarian > > **Skills:** Talented Axeman, Young Warlord > > **Frailty:** Bloodthirsty > [!danger] **Name:** Goblin Camp > > **Traits:** Unaware, In the Forest Young Graham is proceeding through the forest on his way to dig through a dungeon. By that, I mean *kill everything that's in it and claim it for his clan*. But on a previous question, he has turned up a complication. It appears that there is a goblin camp along his line of passage. Now Graham has certain inclinations. In fact, he's quite bloodthirsty. But in this case, what he'd really like to know is, *"Graham is sneaking around the outside of the camp to avoid it. Is he successful?"* This can be answered. We start with the action die. The goblin camp is unaware of him, so we'll add a chance die for him. It's in the forest, he's in the forest, so sneaking by is going to be easier. Graham is a talented axeman, but that doesn't help him with sneaking, nor does being a young warlord. If it came down to a fight, things would be different. Being a Northland barbarian doesn't help him in the forest either. Being bloodthirsty is a disadvantage, so that's going to add a risk die. So we have one action die, plus two chance dice, plus one risk die. One risk die and one chance die cancel each other out, so it's an action roll with one chance die. We throw the dice and get a 6 and a 4. Because we have more chance dice, we read the highest, which is a 6, and go to the action resolution table. This is the core engine of complexity in this game. 6 gives us "yes, and …" That's great. We get what we want and something more. Graham successfully sneaks around the perimeter of the goblin camp. Along the way, he's able to make careful note of where it's at because he knows someone in the last town he was in was interested in hunting goblins. Perhaps he'll go back there and take up a job with them to get his axe a little bloody and make some coin along the way. If instead we'd rolled a 3, that would have been a "no, but…" You *don't* get what you want, but not everything is lost. Graham might not have successfully snuck by the goblins, but he may have caught them by surprise, and the fight would be on with an advantage for Graham in the first exchange of blows. I know you're probably wondering why I haven't covered *"what the fuck is that?"* There's a good reason. It's because, like Ironsworn, **Ensemble** also has a strong emphasis on random generation tables/oracles to answer that kind of question specifically. In fact, both of them share a mechanic regarding oracles in which you generate a noun and an adjective or a noun and a verb as an inspiration. So if we had no idea what was to come next, we could toss a few d6 and come up with a noun and verb to seek a little kick in the ass to move forward. 2, 4 for the noun gives us "mechanism". 1, 5 for the verb gives us "crumbling". Having successfully stealthed his way past the lazy goblins, it looks like he's got something a little frustrating to deal with. With a crumbling mechanism, maybe the bridge is out over the river ahead. He'll have to figure that one out when he gets to it. Hopefully, he doesn't burn the bridge behind him. That's the sort of thing he might do. ## Exeunt In case you couldn't tell, I *love* resolution mechanics. I appreciate that there are so many out there and so many approaches. But I really have a deep affection for the modern interpretive approach. I think that tools that give us the ability to interpret outcomes based on much smaller resolution architectures lend themselves to better role-playing. The fiction leads the mechanics. The story shapes how we interpret the rolls of the dice. Thus, it's much easier to integrate those determinations, the answers to those questions, back into the actual process of play. Hopefully, you've enjoyed our little trip through goblin camps and modern resolution systems. Hopefully, you'll catch me in the next article for whatever bizarre madness overcomes me. [^1]: Unless you're playing the RPG **[[Continuum - Roleplaying in The Yet|C°ntinuum: roleplaying in The Yet]]**, but we leave that kind of madness to other people. [^2]: As an aside, it's actually kind of impressive that the *entirety* of the combat system essentially fits on a two-page spread on pages 88 and 89. That's it, the whole thing. There are lots of complications if you insert random checks, and magic has influence. But with two two-page spreads in this nearly 350-page book, you have everything you need to play. I consider this a solid refinement of the traditional RPG design, a significant one.