Evading the Color-Mechanic Disconnect

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Evading the Color-Mechanic Disconnect
« on: February 05, 2011, 06:02:32 PM »
So, this topic is largely continued from "The Problem(s) With In a Wicked Age" but a) the most recent post to that topic seems to be from a spam bot, and b) I wanted to touch on a wider scale here. I wasn't positive which forum this should go in, so please move it somewhere more appropriate if this is off topic. But enough introduction:

Vincent has mentioned that "In a Wicked Age" suffers from the resolution mechanic not having enough connection to the fictional events of the conflict. You *can* go blow by blow and you *should*, but you don't *have to*. Dogs and Apocalypse World both do pretty good at this in a couple different ways, as Vincent has talked about elsewhere: Dogs conflicts plain don't work if you don't describe your raise actions, because it leaves the other side with nothing to respond to, and AW roots the moves in concrete fictional cues, and then has mostly fictional consequences that are spelled out rather than straight mechanical consequences.

So, my question is: what are some other games that *succeed* in tightly linking the fiction to the resolution (and other) mechanics, and how do they do it? Also, if anyone wants to delve deeper into how AW does it, I'd love to hear that too. I'm starting to get a rough idea for how this works, but am having trouble visualizing what it looks like other than the specific examples of moves and DiTV resolution.

Re: Evading the Color-Mechanic Disconnect
« Reply #1 on: February 19, 2011, 03:53:55 AM »
A move is a specific thing that happens or it doesnt.  "provide covering fire": either the enemy is pinned or it isnt. 

"rifle skill" doesnt achieve anything of itself.  You might roll it to hit.  You might have the gm roll the enemies cool vs your rifle to see if they  are pinned.  thats task res.

moves are fine grained conflict res.