Resolution is a concept that’s not often considered by designers, but which is often the driving force of the games we create. In this article, I’ll talk a little bit about how to construct a resolution system, and will give several examples of different resolution systems.
What is Resolution?
Resolution is how the rules of the game resolve a conflict between two opposed forces. The following examples below are all those where resolution would come into play:
- A knight moves into a bishop’s space in Chess.
- A creature attacks a player in Magic.
- A player invades a territory in Risk.
- Two players engage in combat in Dungeon Twister.
- Two players are attempting to hit one another in BattleCON.
In each of these situations, the resolution system is what decides who wins the conflict and to what degree.
Chess – No Resolution
In some games, resolution is not important. In the Chess example, we see that the attacking piece always wins the conflict. Since the winner is pre-determined, this is not resolution at all, and certainly not an interesting resolution. However, sometimes it is the right move. In Chess, resolution arises in more complex ways, which I’ll talk about a little more later on.
The takeaway from this part of the article, though, is that a resolution system is optional, and including one is not always the right choice for a game designer.
MTG Creatures – Numeric Comparison
Now we come to interesting resolution–situations where either player can potentially win. In Magic the Gathering, creatures has power and toughness. A creature destroys the other if his power is greater than his pair’s toughness, and is destroyed when his toughness is less than his pair’s power. We’ll ignore in this example the possibilities of multi-blocking and instants, but will come to those later. If we ignore those variables and just consider creatures, there are four outcomes: neither creature dies, only A dies, only B dies, or both A and B die.
This kind of resolution is determined by a simple numeric comparison. That is, it is not the rules of the game that explicitly state the winner (like in Chess, attacker always wins) but rather the instance of the combat itself.
You might say that this is identical to the resolution in Chess, since the outcome is known before the conflict begins, and you’d be right to some degree. What makes the direct numeric resolution interesting is not the resolution itself, but the decisions that lead up to it (which creature will be used to block, which instants will be played, and how each player weights the desirability of the four different outcomes).
The important takeaway here is that a resolution system doesn’t have to be interesting in and of itself to be a good resolution system. Sometimes a simpler system, like the one that has powered Magic for nearly twenty years now, is not a bad pick.
Risk Invasion – Playing the Odds
So let’s consider another possibility. Let’s say that you don’t know what numbers your opponent has. Maybe you only know your own numbers, and maybe you don’t even know those. In a Risk Invasion, the attacker can roll 3d6 and the defender can roll 2d6. The attackers’ highest die is paired with the defender’s highest die, and the second highest dice from each side are paired together. Higher number wins, defender wins ties.
In this scenario, a random factor has been added to the numeric comparison. The random factor is one that cannot be pre-determined, so the attacker has no way of knowing whether or not he will win the conflict. The only informing factor that the player can use to make a decision is how badly he wants to conquer the territory in question.
One thing you might realize in this example is that it’s not so different from the others–just like in Chess and Magic, the outcome is already decided. Since neither player’s choices will affect the outcome, the only difference in Risk is that the winner of the conflict is not known before resolution begins. That is, the random factor obscures the outcome, and forces the player to make his decision based on a valuation of the potential outcomes (that is, how important the territorial conquest is) and not on his ability to calculate the end result of the resolution.
Is Risk resolution more interesting than Chess or Magic (our abbreviated Magic from above)? I’d say yes. Forcing the player to choose based on his valuation rather than on knowing whether he will win or lose provides a more interesting experience for the player. In this case, what we see is that obscuring the outcome (by introducing randomness) forces the player to make a more interesting decision than resolution without the random factor. This is also called a Single Blind Selection, since the player must make his choice without knowing the outcome of the choice.
Dungeon Twister – Double Blind Trump Resolution
I realize not everyone reading will have played Dungeon Twister. If not, it’s an excellent game, and I’d recommend it to you for a look at how very deep, tactical two player games are built. In Dungeon Twister, two opposing players meet in a corridor, and so they decide to fight. Each player has a hand of cards marked 0 through 5, and the player who plays the highest card wounds the other, and in a tie neither loses (some characters have bonuses to attack, but we’ll glaze over those for now and assume we have identical characters). After the resolution ends, the cards used are lose forever (except 0, which returns to your hand after each fight).
What becomes immediately apparent is that as a single resolution, the game isn’t interesting. Both players should pick 5, end of story. However, taken as multiple resolutions (say we are going to do 5 different combats), then conservation matters. The player will wish to beat his opponent by 1 (the minimum to win) or to play zero if he believes he will lose. If A uses 5 and B uses 0, then B automatically wins at least one combat later in the game (because A can no longer win if he plays his five). In the scope of the entire game, this is important because it changes the weight of the different plays. My best play is based entirely on what I believe you will do, and no play is actually better than another play.
This is also an example of a Double-Blind Decision, since two players are making selections based on their beliefs about their opponents. If I believe you will choose 5, you want to choose 0, but if you believe I will choose 0, you want to choose 1. The other thing to realize here is that if you’re playing with identical payoffs and beliefs (1 is as reasonable to play as 2 for both me and you), then double-blind decision is actually identical to single-blind resolution. It is the external conditions of the game (how many more conflicts will there be? How much do you want to win? How much do I want to win?) that alter valuation, and the understanding of my opponent’s valuation that makes the trump resolution here interesting.
Shifting from a single-blind to a double-blind decision has moved the focus from our own valuation to an assessment of our opponent’s valuation (and also to the opponent’s assessment of our assessment of the opponent’s valuation, and so on). David Sirlin, the designer of Yomi, has an excellent series of articles about this topic on his own blog, so you can read more on those if you want to learn all the in’s and out’s of double-blind decision making.
The big idea with a trump (and even more so with a circular trump, like Rock-Paper-Scissors) is that it is the external conditions of the game as a whole that make this resolution different than simple random resolution.
BattleCON attacks – Multiple Axes of Resolution
So we’ve talked about a few different kinds of resolution systems, but none of them have really been big enough to constitute a deep game. In fact, each of these resolutions has been a smaller game inside of a much larger game.
I’m going to talk for a bit about a game that’s near and dear to my heart, and that’s BattleCON. BattleCON is a dueling game where the entire game is essentially one large resolution system–rather than a resolution system being a small component of the game (contrast Risk, where you take a turn, and sometimes there’s a conflict, in BattleCON, you have a conflict, and sometimes there are turns).
In most of the game’s we’ve discussed so far, there is one axis of resolution–the higher number (or the attacker, in Chess) wins. In games where resolution systems are more prominent, there are multiple axes of resolution. That is, multiple variables or decisions that the player has to make. In BattleCON, there are four major axes of resolution: Range, Power, Priority, and Stun Guard. Each factor alters the payoffs of the other factors, and the payoffs (the winnings) for a particular play are the amount of damage you do to the opponent, minus the amount of damage you take from the opponent). For the sake of the example, I’ll explain the stats briefly in terms of these winnings.
- Range – If your attack is in range, then it will hit. Otherwise, you will do no damage. If you don’t have range, you don’t have anything.
- Priority – Higher priority gets to execute their attack first. Since you can stun your opponent and prevent his attack, priority is a big deal.
- Power – Determines how much damage you do and thus how much closer an attack brings you to winning, also useful for breaking Stun Guard.
- Stun Guard – Stun Guard lets you counter-attack if you’re slower. Now priority doesn’t matter, you just need higher power to win a trade.
So there are multiple strategies a player can take, based on what he thinks his opponent will do and what he knows his opponent is capable of. Each axis trumps another axis, while at the same time being trumped by others. As one player stated, “Priority is everything… until its completely meaningless.” You can have a priority of 10 to your opponent’s 1, and they can still beat you just by stepping back out of your range. You might have the range to cover the whole board, but if your opponent can make the fast drive in to hit you first and stun you, it doesn’t matter one bit.
I’m not going to break down all the intricacies of BattleCON’s resolution, as there’s another long article on all that, but suffice it to say that to create truly complex and interesting resolution systems, you will probably want to integrate multiple axes of resolution, each with a subtle impact on the others. This makes valuation and strategic decisions more intricate, and also allows you more design space to work within while designing your game.
External Repercussions
Another compelling aspect of a rich resolution system was something I stumbled upon almost by accident. A playtester mentioned to me when working on BattleCON: “One of the things I like most… is that there are repercussions beyond just whether my attack hits or misses.” It was a happy accident of ranges and rotating discard piles that every possible game state definitively favored one player over the other, so much so that even if you could land a solid hit, it might be more useful to choose a move that set up a better tactical position instead. As we saw with Dungeon Twister, the external conditions of the complete game bleed into the resolution system, and in most cases this can only be a good thing.
Even in Chess, where the resolution can’t get simpler, it becomes apparent that pressure chains (sequences of pieces all defending the same square) form a more complex system of resolution than our first look at resolution appeared to facilitate. That is, even a dull and straightforward resolution system can become quite compelling when the game surrounding it provides an interesting enough macro-resolution.
In Conclusion
- The resolution system is the control panel by which a designer manipulates how decisions will be made within the game.
- There is no right or wrong resolution system–each facilitates a different kind of player-experience, and is well suited for a different kind of game.
- An unknown element can create tension in resolution systems. If that unknown element is an opponent’s decision, the game can become extremely intense.
- A resolution system is important not only in how it resolves conflicts, but how those conflicts integrate into the larger picture of the game.
- By adding more dimensions to your game’s simulation, both inputs and outputs, you can create a system where the decisions made by the players can force them to formulate new valuations and make decisions that will affect not only a single instance of resolution, but the game as a whole.
- The formation of new valuations–discovering new solutions to new problems presented by the opponent (and in turn their discovery of new solutions to thwart your solutions), is what keeps resolution-oriented games focused.
For your next game, you might be faced with the question of how to resolve conflicts between players and obstacles, or between multiple players’ interests. Before you make the decision too quickly, think hard about the kind of experience your game aims to create and how your resolution will accomplish it.
