# Your Resolution System Doesn't Matter - Reply tags: #thoughts/game-design , #thoughts/rule-of-carnage Honestly, I just couldn't help myself. I know, I know. People say something ridiculous online, then spend 30 minutes not actually supporting their point even though they are clear and well educated on the subject, and I can do nothing but write a long, rambling reply. Welcome to my world. Here you go.  The problem with the central conceit of this video is – it's patently untrue. We all know it. We all experience it. In particular, the resolution mechanic controls the player experience of things like established expectation (which allows for the ability to make a plan and then executed), regularity, breadth of deviation, and generally the mechanical experience of engaging with the buttons and levers of the game. In a very realistic way, the resolution mechanics ARE the game. You can take away the miniatures and replace them with dots. You can take away the map and replace it with zones. None of those things make the game except in as far as they interact with the mechanics or aesthetics. There literally is nothing else to the game but the game. Whether those mechanics are based on randomized numbers within a specific range coming up cumulatively, acumulatively, a selection of numbers from your hand which are a subset of an entire set which you can choose to deploy at a given moment, or even no randomizer at all but something like a hidden bet mechanism which has occurred earlier in the turn sequence – they all make a huge difference to every game. The only time you get to say "your resolution system doesn't matter" is if you have no experience of resolution systems and how they impact the experience of gameplay – and I doubt anybody involved with or watching this video feels like that. Though I will say that, no matter the situation, no matter your intent, a D100 system sucks balls, pun fully intended, and a 100 step linear response is good for absolutely nothing. It's objectively worse than any other option. For myself, I'm not fond of the buckets of dice solution because it's just unwieldy. Wushu has a great mechanic where you roll somewhere between one and six D6 less than or equal to a given Trait which count as successes and achieving your intent requires a certain number of successes either instantaneously or accumulated over time. 5150 goes a different direction and has you rolling two D6 less than or equal to a unit's Reputation for the vast amount of resolutions, which allows you to have a failure, a partial, and a full success as an outcome. Sadly, there are very few examples of deterministic/randomizer-free wargames of a modern vintage out there, which just tells me that's a field ripe for exploitation if someone can come up with the right mechanic. Reader, get right on that. Resolution systems make a huge difference. They control in a very literal sense how your player experience is the game and the kind with the decisions they can make which will make a difference. Which is, ultimately, why we play games. ## 2023-12-09 10:58 > Well, there's always The Woods as a deterministic skirmish game. Its one of those tricky things to judge though, does something not being done mean there's an amazing opportunity, or that its just a bad idea. Let's put it this way then, if you're not sure which resolution system to use, it doesn't matter. If things are close enough that you're vacillating, either is just fine. There was [[Wehrmacht (1998)|Wehrmacht]] from 1998 which gave us giant robots stomping around dicelessly with deterministic resolution but we did rip that guy apart on USENET pretty aggressively – not because the core mechanic was bad but because he was an ass of the most magnificent value. Ironically, it's not terribly hard to get your hands on the first edition of the game but good luck finding anyone who's even seen a copy of the 2nd. Everything not being done is an amazing opportunity. If the argument is "but it might not be done well "or "it's hard to do well" – that applies to everything else worth doing. It's a line of reasoning that goes straight into "do nothing; it's the only safe choice." You've already decided to sit down and design a tabletop wargame. The worst decision has already occurred. You might as well finish out the run. I would counter that if you are not sure which resolution system to use, it absolutely matters the most. When you're sure which one to use – it probably just means that you only know one resolution system and think of that as an ideal situation. If you don't care enough about the outcome to be concerned about the methodology, maybe this is in the thing you should be doing? The people who only know one game and use it to play everything, whether or not it's reasonable, affective, or even playable for that end, never vacillate on what mechanic to use. Then they bitch about it online and wonder "why aren't my games what I think they should be?" You definitely should not be sure and you should know that it makes a difference. You should go out and learn that there are a lot of different resolution mechanics and that they have different qualities and natures, and come to some sort of grasp of understanding how and why each of them is best deployed. Otherwise you're just telling me that if I have a screwdriver and a chisel, it doesn't matter which one I use as long as the screw comes out. I reject that categorically. ## 2023-12-09 11:39 > The issue isn't whether something hasn't been done much because its hard to do, the issue is identifying whether something hasn't been done much because its not worth doing. The conclusion that something must be good because other people aren't doing it doesn't seem to follow. > > The thing is, its not about a choice between a chisel and a screwdriver, sometimes its between several, different, Philips head screwdrivers. The belief that there's one right answer to every single design question is one that traps many people in never actually finishing anything. Its absolutely fine, and I think good design practice, to say about certain parts of your game that they're not what the game is focused on or concerned with. If you can tell before a project is done and in front of an audience whether something hasn't been done because it's not worth doing – you are better at psychology, engineering, writing, and design than any other human being that has ever walked the earth. And still probably wrong because there's always room in the fruitful void for something cool to fall out. I didn't say something MUST be good – I said it was worth poking around in, playing with, and making something good out of. Something in there is good. It's a big black hole full of lots of things no one's done. You can pull something out of it. I would argue that the converse, "something must be good because other people ARE doing it" is obviously untrue to the most casual observer. There are bad games. There are bad designs. Most of them use mechanics that somebody else has used successfully. That's no means of judging a winner. You've successfully moved the goalpost on me from "your resolution system doesn't matter" to "there may be a spectrum of resolution systems which work for you and your project," which is, I hope you don't mind me saying, a pretty vast fucking jump. The latter statement a sensible person can't argue with; especially since it's exactly what I was saying myself. The former statement is obviously ludicrous and untrue. Click bait is one thing but it's clearly indefensible. I shouldn't have to ask "is that rain?" in the course of this discussion. There is, literally, one right answer to every single design question, but the further understanding is that there is not ONLY one right answer to every single design question. Odds are very good all of the right answers are very similar, however. There is definitely a right answer because there are definitely wrong answers. Your resolution mechanic should reflect, precisely, what parts of your game are important and what parts are just not what you're talking about. Your resolution mechanic is part of communicating exactly that to the players. If that's not important to you, you're probably not a good designer. If it is important to you, you've at least got the groundings of being a good designer. Understanding the difference in being able to communicate the difference is a big deal. "Your resolution system doesn't matter" communicates that it doesn't matter if you reflect what the game is about and focused on in the absolutely biggest way the player will interact with it over time. Does that make sense? I don't think it does. ## 2023-12-09 13:59 > And I'm not saying that because no-one is doing something its therefore a bad idea, or that if lots of people are doing something that its a good idea. But it is often true that successful ideas perpetuate and bad ones die off. I'm saying that telling the difference between something that no-one is doing because its a terrible idea and one that's not is tricky. > > I'm not shifting the goalposts, I'm trying to communicate an idea that you seem to be struggling with. Clearly there are wrong answers, but that doesn't mean that there is a single right answer. Not every choice is going to significantly communicate what your game is about, some are just going to be between a handful of absolutely fine answers, and thinking that fiddling between them is going to mean that your game is therefore going to be good, or even better, is a mistake. This may come as a shock but there is no way to tell the difference between something no one is doing because it's a terrible idea and one that is not. It's not tricky – it's impossible. There is no way to differentiate. It was impossible to fly – until it wasn't. It was impossible to scan atomic structures with electrons – until it wasn't. It was impossible to resolve conflicts between unit elements based on statistical analysis of real-world war events based on easily accessible randomizers and movement and scale, thus requiring human mediators to decide the outcome of individual engagements – until it wasn't. The entire structure of wargames, the automation of resolution, the very idea that you might need a resolution mechanic was impossible and nobody did it – until they did and it wasn't. If you want to find and build new and interesting things, you do it by looking where people aren't and saying, "maybe I need to explore this big open space on the map that says something about dragons." There might actually be dragons out there. You'll never know if you're spending time sailing around and around the archipelago of 10,000 Warhammer fistful-of-dice derivatives. You're absolutely correct when you say that someone can come up with 16 versions of rolling a fistful of dice in under an hour. I could just glance at my shelf for that. You can't just come up with something people haven't been doing but which might be absolutely exactly the right thing for the game you're designing unless you say aloud into the black. Your position would imply there's no reason to build any new wargames at all. Telling the difference between a wargame no one's playing because it's terrible and one that's not is tricky, by your argument. Ergo, you should stay to the safe shoals of systems/games you know and not strike out into the black. Again, a position I categorically reject. We appear to be in terms of design inclination of oppositional natures. There is a single right answer that is perfect. There are some answers that are "good enough" and will do for now, get you off the ground, get you moving, and maybe be sufficient for people to enjoy your product enough to move some copies. But if the fit of of a mechanical resolution system is represented by a sufficiency gradient, then even if you are in the "good enough" territory you very well may be quite well served by fiddling with sufficient answers to move uphill in the solution space into "better" and toward "perfect." The only question is what will get you up that gradient more efficiently, tinkering with the resolution mechanic right now or working on some other portion of the game? The law of diminishing returns always kicks in – unless you discover that you're in a local minima and with sufficient jiggling you end up in an entirely different hill, going up an entirely different gradient, that just happens to be a lot higher. Even if the difference from where you were isn't a lot, the new peak can be higher. I have yet to meet a good game designer who published a game, put it aside for a few months, picked it back up, and said "no, that's perfect. No jiggling will ever improve that. I've definitely learned nothing since I put that together." Part of being good is being unsatisfied with what you've done and looking for new ways, new things, and new improvements. If there's anything that new designers need to understand it's not that there resolution mechanic doesn't matter. That's just untrue. It's that they're trying to go up a gradient and there are a lot of variables to tweak, some of them more important at any given time than others. One of the big ones is your resolution mechanic. It's not the only one. Remember there's more to your game. Just – realistically, not a lot more.