task resolution and conflict resolution

I’ve moved on to Ron Edwards’s essay “Simulationism: The Right to Dream,” and whether you agree with the GNS categories or not, there is a lot to chew on in this essay.

Here’s one passage that got me thinking:

“Historically, the [Simulationist] System has been based on task resolution, not conflict resolution, regardless of scale. Don’t mistake ‘conflict’ for ‘large-scale task.’ “

In the more traditional games, task resolution is a big thing. In fact, in games with Skill lists and in which doing a task, whether it affects the narrative or not, comes with a roll, combat itself is really nothing more than a set of tasks (roll to hit, roll to parry, roll to dodge, etc.).

One of the brilliant parts of the moves system as presented and used in the Bakers’s Apocalypse World is that it turns that whole paradigm on its head. In the traditional games, all conflicts are reduced to tasks whereas in Apocalypse World, all tasks are turned into conflicts. No matter what your character does, it is either accomplished without question (the command first voiced (to my understanding at least) in Dogs in the Vineyard to “roll dice or say yes”) or it is a move with the likelihood that new trouble will arise from the situation.