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<article id="dri-aido">
  <articleinfo>
    <title>Mood-based Events Resolution Mechanics</title>
    <subtitle>The DRI/AIDO Events Resolution Taxonomy</subtitle>
    <abstract>
      <para>In this article, the author propose a taxonomy of
        resolution mechanics in role-playing game.  The objective of
        this taxonomy is to provide a basis for orienting the choice
        of a resolution system not based on the action being
        simulated, but instead on the mood that the GM want to create.
        For this, the taxonomy will be compare to other existing model
        of events resolution, such as the DKF hierarchy, and especially
        its subelements, which are FatS, FitM and FatE.</para>
    </abstract>
    <keywordset>
      <keyword>resolution mechanics</keyword>
      <keyword>Drama-Kharma-Fortune (DKF) hierarchy</keyword>
      <keyword>Fortune-at-the-Start (FatS)</keyword>
      <keyword>Fortune-in-the-Middle (FitM)</keyword>
      <keyword>Fortune-at-the-End (FatE)</keyword>
      <keyword>DRI resolution taxonomy</keyword>
      <keyword>AIDO events taxonomy</keyword>
      <keyword>role-playing game</keyword>
      <keyword>system design</keyword>
      <keyword>play flow</keyword>
    </keywordset>
    <author>
      <firstname>Fabien</firstname>
      <surname>Niñoles</surname>
    </author>
    <copyright>
      <year>2003</year>
      <holder>Fabien Niñoles</holder>
    </copyright>

    <revhistory>
      <revision>
        <revnumber>0.1cvs :</revnumber>
        <date>2003-01-01</date>
        <revdescription>
          <para>Initial release (incomplete).</para>
        </revdescription>
      </revision>
    </revhistory>
  </articleinfo>
  <section id="intro">
    <title>Introduction</title>
    
    <para>I try for a long time to create a truely generic
      role-playing system, able to handle a large range of both scale,
      but also genre or atmosphere of role-playing game.  Those goals
      were often considered like a chimera impossible to reach, since
      some playing goals are just complementary to each other, as
      opposed to each other by their very own nature.  Still, I was
      sure that it was possible although the idea were very vague.
      Although some people will put this confidence as a symptom of my
      great stubborness, pointing to the many failures of so-call
      generic role-playing systems in the market to prove it, I think
      I have an asset on my side: I GMing myself for more than 15
      years in the same world with a very high variety of genres and
      settings that I must mixed together for the pleasure of my
      players.  So, if I can do it, why no other people could?
      Except, if from words to practice there is a big step, the step
      backward is often as harder!</para>

    <para>Looking back at other role-playing systems, and on my many
      tries to adapt each of them to different settings, I find out
      that the same settings elements (like magic, combat, health,
      etc.) but with very different mechanics depending on the mood
      they want to create.  Also, in most role-playing game creators
      forums, if you ask people what is the most important thing in
      creating a role-playing game, it's the mood, or the flavour of
      your role-playing game.  Not the system or the setting, but the
      mood, the genre.  Too often, mood and settings where mix
      together, but is it true?  In this case, shouldn't we stop to
      create mechanics based on specific settings and instead, goes
      directly to the mood, the real thing that make all the
      difference between an interesting role-playing game experience
      and a boring one?</para>

    <para>This paper is a first attempt to elaborate on what such a
      role-playing game must contain.  In fact, it goes a little more
      farther than this, as well as a little bit narrower.  We will
      study a single aspect of role-playing game, tough an important
      one, which is the events resolution system, but we will study it
      in depth, questionning even the way GM treat this aspect of
      role-playing game, but keeping our focus on how the mechanics of
      events resolution can be used to create a specific mood.</para>

  </section>

  <section id="whatisit">
    <title>What is events resolution?</title>

    <para>What's events resolution?  Ask in the role-playing community
      and you'll end up with a lot of answer which more or less
      resumed to something like <quote>It's when you're rolling
      dice.</quote>.  Well, this may be exact for some rpg but clearly
      not for all of them and especially this is a little bit short to
      define what's a major component of all role-playing games.  For
      the purpose of this article, I want to use a little more broad
      definition, which will be develop a little more later but we can
      be first state as:</para>

    <blockquote>
      <para>The process by which the players decide on the follow-up
      of the current role-playing situation.</para>
    </blockquote>

    <para>This definition is quite broad.  In fact, a whole
      role-playing game session can be resume with it: a situation is
      described, some options are offered and players decide, in
      accordance with their common judgements, rules, and/or some
      randomization mechanism, what will happen next.  This new
      situation can then create another resolution events, forming a
      long chain of events, or, sometime, the resolution itself
      include it's own chain of more specific events.  For example,
      the initial situation can be that the players families where all
      kill in a monstruous carnage.  Players decide to investigate and
      get some justice for their family.  The possible outcome is that
      either the players get their revenge or not.  Which one will be
      chosen call for a whole chain of events that make an adventure
      by itself, including a lot of different resolutions.</para>

    <para>Some people will disagree with this very broad approach, too
      generic to correctly representing a role-playing game session
      with its non-linearity, multiple subplots and surprised events
      coming into play.  On the contrary, I find it important to
      concentrate on such details.  Too many role-playing session have
      seen its players lost their first goal and often, concentrating
      back to the primary goal of the game help GM and even players to
      focus back on the game and add some coherence to the whole
      story.  We will see also how this can help GM resolved events in
      a more meaningful way by opening their usual methods of
      resolution for typical situations.</para>

    <section id="previousworks">
      <title>Previous works on event resolution</title>

      <para>Although I doesn't pretend to make a complete presentation
        of every studies on events resolution, I should at least
        mention the work of others that influence a lot this
        taxonomy.</para>

      <para>First of all, the most popular model for events resolution
        is clearly Johnathan Tweet's Drama-Kharma-Fortune (or
        <abbrev>DKF</abbrev>) hierarchy.  First publish into Everway
        RPG, the work was taken back by Ron Edwards which make it an
        important part of his role-playing game theory.  The DKF
        hierarchy is mostly concern with the resolution mechanics
        itself, defining the choice of resolution mechanics as a
        hierarchy where more and more control at give from the players
        to the rules and some randomizers like dice.  So, the
        principle of the hierarchy is to emphasis on players control
        instead of rules, an approach I will also try to
        follow.</para>

      <para>Children of the DKF, the Fortune-at-the-Start (or
        <abbrev>FatS</abbrev>), Fortune-in-the-Middle (or
        <abbrev>FitM</abbrev>) and Fortune-at-the-End (or
        <abbrev>FatE</abbrev>), is another taxonomy of resolution
        mechanics that try to study more specifically how Fortune
        resolution can be used to favorised players control over rules
        or fortune control.  It is slightly different of the DKF
        itself, but kept mostly the same point of view, that I will
        try to include in this taxonomy.</para>

      <para>Finally, I want to include the excellent work of Hunter
        Logan in the Impossible Dream column of RPG.net.
        Specifically, M. Logan talk about Play Flow, in a very similar
        although more detailed approach as I used to describe events
        resolution, as well as Balance of Power, which explain how the
        Play Flow can influence the balance between players, GM and
        rules.  I will compare the work of M. Logan with my own work
        in a later section.  M. Logan also get back the three ladders
        of the DKF hierarchy but used it in a more
        <emphasis>dissecting</emphasis> way to describe resolution
        mechanics.  He has however the good taste to used a different
        naming so that we not confused his definitions with those of
        misters Tweet and Edwards, calling his Three Means Chance,
        Ability and Intent.  Currently only used to describe different
        resolutioons mechanics, by the time of this writing, we still
        don't know how M. Logan want to use it in correlation with his
        Play Flow and Balance of Power.</para>

      <para>Another interesting reading is <ulink
        url="http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/collists/ruleslaw.html">The
        Travel of Mendes Pinto</ulink> by Sergio Mascarenhas.  This
        amateur role-playing game is not only excellent but a very
        good reading for all the notes and explanation that the author
        give on his design.  The section 4 about action is especially
        relevant here, since the author elaborate his own theory about
        game action resolution, which consist in a context, a goal, a
        performance and an outcome.  I will also try to respond to the
        elements appearing there and to the excellent ideas that
        populate the game.</para>

      <para>This resume quite briefly what I consider as the most
        important elements of actual Role Playing theories about
        resolution mechanics.  This is by far a complete survey since
        such survey is very hard to done (must libraries doesn't keep
        a good set of role-playing theories books, or even magazine,
        and also, must of the litterature on the subject was done in
        either commercial rpg, special editors magazines, and other
        difficult to consult elements).  I will be please to heard
        about different approach to events resolutions, especially
        those that break with the current tendancy to consider events
        resolution strictly in terms of rules mechanics.</para>
      
    </section>

  </section>

  <section id="DRI">
    <title>DRI Events Resolution Taxonomy</title>

    <para>What the DRI stand for?  DRI stands for Definition,
      Resolution and Interpretation, the three steps involved in every
      event resolutions mechanics.  The view of DRI on event
      resolution makes it very near the definition of play flow, as
      specify by Hunter Logan in his RPG.net's column <quote>The
      Impossible Dream</quote>, and as such can be considered the
      central element of any RPG, whatever freeform or rules-light it
      can be.  However, although this taxonomy take good notice of
      some narrative aspect of RPG, it doesn't explore as in depth it
      could have.  Doing so, it neglected an important part of RPG,
      part which can play a great role to the immersion of the player.
      However, the interest of the method are more into the
      interactive elements of narration, as well as of the decision
      process in RPG, a very different topic.  So, to avoid to mix
      thing too much and having a too broad and often useless tool,
      the taxonomy accept to be less general than other method and
      keep focus on its primary goal: offering a good understanding of
      the resolution mechanics of RPG, so that the designer as well as
      the game master can choose the best fit for the system or the
      situation at hand.</para>

    <para>So, DRI is a mean to classify the process of events
      resolution in RPG.  The taxonomy identify three important part
      in events resolution: the Definition of the events, the
      effective Resolution and finally the Interpretation of the
      results.  Each of them happen in order, and different games or
      play style will put a different emphasis on different steps,
      putting more or less details in one, taking more time in another
      or according more or less power to the players, the GM or the
      rules in another part.  We will see how all those aspects affect
      the role-playing experience in a <link
      linkend="DRIFortune">later section</link>, but let just
      consider the definitions currently:</para>

    <variablelist id="dridefinitions">
      <varlistentry id="definitiondef">
        <term>Definition</term>
        
        <listitem>
          <para>Each events can be defined using a set of parameters.
            Some parameters are mundane, or in game, such as the event
            description, who's involved and in which manners, what's
            the possible outcomes and what are the odds for each of
            them, and which parameters can influence them, like
            difficulties, materials or skills.  But another important
            aspect are more on the narrative, or meta-game, level: How
            important is the event to the story? Are they any outcome
            that is necessary for a good continuation?  Are they any
            outcome that is unwanted?  And what are the general
            purpose of the event for the game?  Which atmosphere such
            events must create?  Those narrative elements are often
            more important than the mundane ones.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>
      <varlistentry id="resolutiondef">
        <term>Resolution</term>
        
        <listitem>
          <para>The next step is to determine the resolution mechanics
            used to resolved the event.  There is many way to
            determine the final issue of an event.  The taxonomy here
            doesn't aim to describe them in details but instead try to
            precise which caracteristics such mechanics should have to
            handle the event just describe previously.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>
      <varlistentry id="interpretationdef">
        <term>Interpretation</term>
        
        <listitem>
          <para>Finally, the resolution mechanics give just the choice
            of an outcome, but this in fact let to the players, again
            both GM and role-players, some liberties of
            interpretation.  The interpretation can contain two parts:
            the effective performance (what happen) and the outcome
            (the result).  This last one doesn't need to be choose
            from the possible outcome determine in the first step and
            can even be completely different.  Don't hesitate to
            create new situations from it, it will just add to the
            story.  Also, as for the <link
            linkend="resolutiondef">resolution</link>, the goal of
            this article is not to describe them but instead to make
            them in relation with the two previous elements.</para>
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>
    </variablelist>

    <section id="DRIFortune">

      <title>Fortune and DRI</title>

      <para>The control on the game events can be seen accross two
        dimensions: who have it and for which part they have it.  The
        current RPG theory currently have two models for it: The
        Fortune model, describe through the <acronym>FatE</acronym>,
        <acronym>FatS</acronym> and <acronym>FitM</acronym> acronyms,
        which is related to when the players control the game, and the
        Balance of Power (<acronym>BoP</acronym>), which is more
        concern about balance between the players, the GM, and the
        rules.</para>

      <para>DRI provide a model based on the Fortune one, and so is
        more concern about the when then the whom.  Although I
        consider this issue very important, is just that the current
        model doesn't add anything very useful to it.  We can all see
        who are in control at which moment, but it's less clear how
        the exact balance is affected.  I let's this to the BoP
        model.</para>

      <para>The original Fortune model include three different models:
        FatE, FatS and FitM.  FatE, which stand for
        Fortune-at-the-End, is the most popular one: players describe
        what they try to achieve and roll the dice (or enable any
        resolution mechanics asked by the rules) and see if they
        succeed.  This model is the one where the players have the
        less control on their character's destiny, since although they
        can decide what they do, they can't do anything to oriented the
        game after a bad roll, leading to PC die, etc.</para>

      <para>Fortune-at-the-Start try to give more power on the players
        about the issue of an action.  The player roll the dice first,
        and seeing the result, decide what to do.  This is most often
        used for initiative rolls, although some games try to use it
        for their resolution system, for example by letting the
        players draw cards and choosing their actions based on the
        cards in hand.  FatS let you more control on the issues, and
        so on the story.  FatS allow you to avoid most bad situation
        without need to fudging the dice, although it gives players
        less freedom on what their characters can do.</para>

      <para>Fortune-in-the-Middle, you guess, is a mix between both
        the precedent.  The players choose their actions, call the
        resolution mechanics and, based on the results, describe their
        actions.  This is the model which give the more narrative
        control on the events by the players.</para>

      <para>In DRI terminology, the three model can be describe using
        camel-cased variations of DRI.  The use of uppercase signal
        players' control for this part of the events resolution, where
        a lower case letter signal rules control.  So, FatE will be
        Dri, FatS drI, and FitM will be DrI.  One will remark that the
        three models don't contain an uppercase R.  It's may be seen
        obvious, giving this, that the reason for this it's, as long
        you are using fortune, calling to the resolution mechanics is
        always giving the control to the rule.  Elsewhere, the game is
        no more contain Fortune element and so, can be better describe
        using either the Drama or Kharma mechanics. Well, I choose to
        say no to this hypothesis.  Player cans have the control here
        too.  Usually, players or GM let the rules describe which
        resolution mechanics used for a specific action: used this
        dice roll under this statistic for combat, or roll this
        statistic that number of time until you succeed thrice or
        more.  A R system will offer you to choose the mechanic based
        on what you want the action to look like, not what's more
        appropriate.  Used open roll for cinematic action, used
        extended roll to put more thrill, used simple roll on
        unimportant issues.  Briefly, based your mechanic on narrative
        factors, instead of descriptive ones, since what you really
        want it's a good story and good atmosphere, nor an objective
        description of events.  Although this look like a very
        narrative statements, credible simulations can still be
        achieve by such system.  Currently, RPG used only one or two
        universal mechanics for most of their events resolutions.
        Simulation is often reach more through fine-tuned parameters,
        detailed tables or statistics or other related parameter, not
        through the specific resolution mechanics.  Also, most
        resolution mechanics can be easily modified to give the same
        probabilities but with a different overall feeling.  Since
        only the probabilities are essential for good simulation, this
        part is untouched and so can mood-based simulation system is a
        possible dream.</para>

    </section>

  </section>

  <section id="definition">
    <title>Defining Events</title>

    <para role="todo">Explain how to define elements.</para>
    
    <section id="narrative">
      <title>Narrative Elements</title>
      
      <para role="todo">
        Must find how to determine narrative elements
      </para>

    </section>

    <section id="mundane">
      <title>Mundane Elements</title>
      <para role="todo">
        Actors
        Issues
        Decisions
        Outcomes
      </para>
    </section>

  </section>

  <section id="resolution">
    <title>Resolution</title>

    <para role="todo">
      Example on how to use the resolution mechanics.
    </para>

    <section id="DKF">
      <title>The DKF Resolution Model</title>

      <para role="todo">How the DKF is related to all of this.
        Including what's DKF and how it complement the taxonomy.</para>

    </section>

  </section>

  <section id="interpretation">
    <title>Interpretation</title>

    <para role="todo">Frankly, I don't know.</para>
  </section>

  <section id="history">
    <title>History of the ABC/DKF model.</title>

    <para role="todo">Historic of the taxonomy.</para>

  </section>

  <section id="ack">
    <title>Acknowledgements</title>
      
      <para role="todo">Acknowledge Mason, HighlandGreen and Pat
        "Sleeper", as well as Ron Oswald and the author of Everway.</para>

  </section>

</article>
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