No time for a Long, Rambling Introduction™ today. This article covers a lot of f$&%ing ground. Sorry.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Conflict

Sit down and shut up. The lesson I’ve got for all you buttheads budding storytelling GMs is about conflict. If you don’t know why this article is happening, go back and read the introduction to this series. The one I posted last week. I don’t have time to recap you. This is a long, f$&%ing article. Because conflict’s a complicated thing. Way more complicated than most of you think. Trust me. I’ve seen the games you run.

Conflict’s also pretty much the most important narrative element in role-playing gaming. And that ain’t because D&D is all about fighting. It’s because conflict is pretty much the most important element in any narrative. But also because conflict’s got this unique role in how role-playing games work. It’s basically the screw that holds the narrative parts of the RPG to the gameplay parts.

Conflict’s also the narrative element that changes the most when you take it out of a nice, passive story experience like a movie and cram it into the weird, open, interactive experience that is a role-playing game.

In short. This one’s important. So pay attention. There’s gonna be homework at the end. I s$&% you not.

Part 1: Conflict in Boring Old Traditional Narratives

Before I explain how conflict works in RPGs, I’ve got to make sure you understand how conflict works in traditional, non-fun, non-RPG narratives. Just so we’re on the same page when we talk about how weird conflict gets in RPGs.

Conflict. What Is?

It’s easy to define conflict. It’s the struggle between opposing forces in a narrative. But, simple as that definition is, there’s a Blood War’s worth of devils hiding in the details.

Conflict’s usually understood from the perspective of the narrative’s protagonist. The main character. The person—or personages—we’re cheering for. The protagonist wants something but something is keeping them from having it. Bam. Conflict.

Sometimes, though, it ain’t the protagonist who wants sometimes. Just as often—especially in stories about big damn heroes—it’s the antagonist what wants the something. You know, the antagonist? The other person in the story. The one we want to lose. The antagonist wants something terrible or harmful or whatever. And the protagonist stands in their way.

Conflict can get more complicated than that even. Sometimes, the protagonist and the antagonist both want things. Sometimes the same thing. Sometimes different things. But they’re exclusive things. The pro can’t have his thing if the anto gets theirs or vice versa. So conflict. And sometimes, conflicts arise between protagonists and other gonists besides the antagonist. Other characters. The character is not opposed to the protagonist philosophically or morally or anything, but their wants still don’t work together.

I’ll give an example of that last because it’s one lots of people forget. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the titular wizard wants to find out what’s hidden under the school. What the bad guys are after. Hagrid, Harry’s friend, knows the titular mineral’s down there, but he doesn’t want to tell. He wants to keep Dumbledore’s trust and keep Harry out of danger. They ain’t enemies, but conflict still arises.

That example demonstrates two things. First, conflicts aren’t always fights. Hell, most conflicts aren’t fights. Especially when conflicts occur between people who aren’t disposed to kick the s$&% out of each other. Sometimes characters even end up in conflict with themselves. And that never leads to fighting. Except in Fight Club. Spoiler alert.

Second, when it comes to character-on-character conflict—which ain’t, by the way, the only kind of conflict there is, but I’ll get to that—when it comes to conflicts between characters, the conflicts are usually driven by motivations. Hell. They’re always driven by motivations in good stories. In fact, it’s smart to think of the opposing forces that I mentioned in that definition above as opposing motivations. Opposing needs. Opposing drives. Opposing desires. Whatever.

But, for now, just keep that definition in mind. Conflict is the struggle between opposing forces in a narrative. Got it? Good.

We’re making good time here.

Conflict. Why Want?

I said that conflict’s pretty much the most important narrative element there is. And I wasn’t being hyperbolic. Conflict’s the thing that creates drama. It creates tension. Stories without conflict are boring. And people who think otherwise only think that because they have a narrow-a$& definition of conflict. Because even those supposed narrative structures without conflict have conflict. They might not have character-on-character conflict. They might not have a central conflict. But they have conflict.

Conflict creates tension because it creates uncertainty. The audience sees the opposing motivations. They see how they’re incompatible. And they get all emotionally involved in which motivation—which force—gets what they want in the end and which force gets suck-all. And even if the outcome’s pretty certain—because usually the good guys win and the bad guys get to suck it—even if the outcome’s certain, there’s still uncertainties. Mostly in terms of what it’s going to cost the good guy to pull out the win. What sacrifices the hero will have to make.

But conflict does other stuff too. It’s not just there to create Schrodinger’s Narrative. Even though that’s enough. Because tension’s the thing that keeps most people in narratives. But conflict does more. For instance, conflict’s the primary way by which characters reveal themselves to the audience. When characters resolve conflicts—especially internal conflicts, which I’ll get to—they reveal something about who they really are, what they really want, and what they really value.

Remember when Luke Skywalker refused to kill Darth Vader after he defeated him in front of Emperor Palpatine? Remember when Anakin Skywalker totally did kill Darth McKellan in front of Senator Palpatine? Right there, we saw the difference between the two characters. They were defining moments. Revelations.

But conflict doesn’t just reveal characters. It also drives character growth and character transformation. Remember in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? when Eddie Valiant threw away his booze? When he decided to stop numbing himself to his pain and care about the Toons? That was so he could overcome Judge Doom. And remember when Scott Pilgrim had to clean up his messes and turn into something he could respect? That was the only way he could beat Gideon Gordon Graves. Remember when Luke Skywalker turned off the targeting computer and surrendered himself to the Force? That’s how he beat the Death Star.

That’s why conflict’s so important. Because it creates tension in the audience which leads to emotional investment. And because it shows the audience who the characters are and then forces them to become something more. Or something else.

Conflict. How Describe?

When it comes to narrative conflict, people sure do love their f$&%ing lists. You can find thousands of articles talking about the X Different Kinds of Conflict where X is usually a number from five to seven. Inclusive. And the fact that the number varies should tell you just how useful those articles really are. Hint: not f$&%ing very.

See, I like to keep it simple. First of all, I distinguish between internal conflicts and external conflicts. Internal conflicts happen entirely inside one character’s brain. Usually a protagonist. When a character’s different beliefs, desires, ideals, goals, needs, or preferences end up in opposition, that’s internal conflict. That kid in the Sixth Sense is torn between his desire to help others—specifically, ghost others—and his desire to just be left the f$&% alone by creepy ghosts. Well, it’s like his desire to help and his fear are in conflict. But whatever. And Simba and Hamlet both have this need for revenge against their murderous uncle on one side of their brains and a desire to just put all that s$&% aside and stop dealing with life’s troubles on the other. The hakuna matata philosophy is just a kid-friendly version of Hamlet’s “… or not to be” option. You know. To sleep the big sleep. Maybe dream. But who knows what kind of f$&%ed up dreams come with that sleep. Makes ya’ think, no? Internal conflict.

External conflicts arise when there’s a struggle between a character and something else. Anything else. As long as it ain’t the same character. Like those pro-versus-antagonist things I mentioned above and other character-on-character s$&%. But, as those lists love to f$&%ing remind us, character-on-character ain’t the only kind of conflict. Characters can end up in conflict with nature like in Life of Pi and every survival and disaster movie ever. They can end up in conflict with society like in the good, original Mulan and Toy Story and Christmas with the Kranks. Characters conflict with technology in lots of modern, sci-fi, and cyberpunk stories. Jurassic Park’s a good example. Characters can end up opposing fate like in the Matrix and in lots of classical mythology. Or supernatural forces. The lists can go on and on and on.

Basically, whenever a character runs into some kind of resistance or obstacle that ain’t a voice in their head, that’s external conflict. And you can define them if you really want to, but that’s a liberal arts parlor trick. It ain’t actually that useful.

Apart from separating the internal from the external, I also divvy up the central conflicts from the secondary conflicts. Most stories—but not all—have one big conflict at their heart. One struggle the whole story’s about. And once it’s resolved, the story’s done. Voldemort née Quirrell wants the sorcerer’s stone. Harry Potter wants to keep it out of his creepy hands. When Harry has the stone, Voldemort’s a disembodied cloud of vapor, and Quirrell’s dead or comatose or whatever, the story’s done.

The central conflicts are the ones that drive the story. The ones that underlie everything. The ones whose resolution we see coming a mile away. “Well, this can’t end until we see how that issue plays out.” They’re the last, biggest obstacle in the protagonist’s way. Whatever it is. The central conflict in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is actually all in Scott’s head. When he chooses to go off with Ramona instead of staying with Knives, he resolves that conflict. And the story’s over. Did you think the central conflict was with the League of Evil Exes? Or with Gideon? Sorry. The last conflict was the choice between Knives and Ramona. And it’s actually the conflict between living a simple life as a child with no responsibilities or living a meaningful life as an adult even if it means taking actual responsibility.

And yes, I’m talking about the movie. I know the little comic book had a different ending. It was a different story. Get off my f$&%ing back.

Even if a story has a central conflict, there’s also a bunch of other conflicts going on too. Usually. Scott does have to defeat the League of Evil Exes and Gideon. Harry has his rivalry with Draco Malfoy. He fights a cave troll. He has to find a place in the wizarding world and get his s$&% in order. Those are secondary conflicts. Secondary, but also important. The central conflict provides the biggest point of tension in the story—and drives the most investment—where the secondary conflicts provide a constant undercurrent of rising and falling tension, reveal the characters, and then drive the characters to grow and change in preparation for the final conflict.

Of course, some stories do really complicated s$&% with this conflict thing. Take the film version of Jurassic Park, which was a f$&%ing masterwork of storytelling. The central conflict comes from two ideas in opposition, each with its own champion. The champions don’t struggle against each other for most of the film. And, in the end, the conflict’s resolved when they meet in the middle.

But that’s a story for a more advanced course. Or a later paragraph, at least. The takeaway here’s just that you can describe conflicts in a lot of different ways, but it’s most useful to know the difference between internal and external conflicts and between central and secondary conflicts. And just remember that external conflicts can come from opposition with other people, with places, with things, and with ideas. Basically, any noun can be a source of conflict.

Conflict. When End?

Stories are driven by conflict. And they end when the conflict ends. But what does that mean? How do conflicts end? Well, when we’re talking about narrative conflict, we talk about them being resolved. And it’s important to think in those terms. As you’ll see later.

Obviously, nothing resolves a conflict quite so definitely as when one force is destroyed, defeated, neutralized, or nullified. Quirrell’s dead and Voldemort’s a powerless fart cloud. Doesn’t matter what they want anymore. They can’t get it. The Ark of the Covenant’s safely locked in a government warehouse. Hitler’s most capable goons got melted by the fury of God. The Third Reich ain’t getting their hands on that divine WMD.

But, like flaying a feline, there’s lots of ways to resolve a conflict that don’t involve dead, defeated, or neutralized characters. Sure, that’s often the best way for character-on-character, hero-on-villain conflicts to go, but that’s not the way every conflict should end. When you get away from good-on-bad conflict, things get murkier. It’s possible, for example, for one side to give up what they want. To stop wanting it. The most famous example’s probably the one at the end of War Games. Ferris Bueller convinces Skynet that its desire to win a nuclear war is futile. That the best it can get is a stalemate. Skynet realizes there’s no point in pursuing it anymore and calls off the apocalypse. And then, once time travel’s invented, Skynet can send an evil robot back in time to kill Mama Bueller before Ferris is born and then it can win the war. Somehow. The sequels kind of invalidated the ending of the original.

It’s actually way more common than you might think to end conflicts with understanding, compromise, reconciliation, or rejection of desires. Hell, that’s the only way internal conflicts can get resolved. Unless you take the Hamlet option, that is. In Toy Story—you heard me—Buzz Lightyear struggles in turmoil because his self-image—space ranger—doesn’t match the role society or fate or the natural world has assigned him—child’s plaything. You can decide which type of conflict you want to call that. I don’t personally care. In the end, Buzz Light year incorporates his self-image into the role he was born into by using his heroic Space Ranger-ness to get himself and Woody back to Andy.

In Jurassic Park, Alan Grant rejects technology, progress, and the future. He even hates children because they represent progress and evolution. John Hammond believes in the power of technology over nature and his ability to bring people a better life through technology. And, in the film version, he ain’t doing it for money. He loves his grandkids, shows genuine remorse for the danger he’s put people into, and has a heartfelt desire to entertain and delight people. Especially kids. Both have their good points and their bad points. That’s the hallmark, by the way, of a good story. One that doesn’t provide an answer, just arguments.

At the end of the film, Grant and company escape from the raptors first by reactivating the door locks—embracing technology—and then by running away while the tyrannosaur attacks the velociraptors—using the kill-or-be-killed reality of nature as cover to escape it. After that, Hammond agrees that Jurassic Park was a bad idea. Then, Grant sits comfortably on the helicopter that he previously struggled with, hugging the kids, and staring out the window at the birds that evolved from the dinosaurs. F$&%ing brilliant.

So, there’s lots of ways to resolve a conflict. Destruction, defeat, and domination work for certain kinds of conflicts, but the most meaningful resolutions usually involve understanding, reconciliation, and compromise. That’s one of the many, many reasons why old Mulan was a work of art and my second favorite Disney movie ever, and the new one’s such a steaming pile of s$&% that it’s not even worthy of flushing down my own toilet bowl.

End of Part 1

That’s everything that makes conflict conflict in nice, normal, traditional narratives. Now I’m going to tell you how RPGs change all that s$&%.

Part 2: Conflict in Totally Fun Role-Playing Game Narratives

If you’re smart, you’ve picked up on just how important conflict is in a narrative. And if you’re not, well, maybe running games ain’t for you. Conflict provides a lot of the drama—the tension—in a story. It reveals the most important character details. And it drives all the growth and transformation the characters undergo. All super important stuff. And you’d think that conflict would be super important in role-playing games. And you’d be right. It is. But not quite the way you think.

See, conflict is actually the most important narrative element RPGs have… from a gameplay perspective. Conflict is the thing that brings the game and the story together. From a narrative perspective, though, conflict’s kind of a muddy, bloody mess. Partly because people don’t even understand narrative conflict in non-interactive fiction, so how could they not f$%& it up when they bring it into RPGs. And partly because the gameplay parts of conflict and the narrative parts of conflict don’t always play well together. But mostly because RPGs really twist the hell out of conflict. Conflict’s way more complicated in RPGs than it is in movies and books and things.

Conflict. What Is… In RPGS?

In a narrative, conflict’s the struggle between opposing forces, right? Someone—like the protagonist—wants something and something else is getting in the way. Simple, right? Seems like that fits right in with the whole role-playing gaming thing, doesn’t it? I mean, an RPG adventure is basically just a goal with a series of obstacles in the way.

Here’s the problem, though. Well, one of the problems. The biggest problem. You—the GM or adventure writer—you can’t control what the protagonists actually want. You might not even know what they want. Authors and screenwriters have it easy when they set up conflicts. They get to decide what the characters want. And thus, they know exactly what kind of s$&% to fling in the way. But you don’t have that kind of power. The players decide what the characters want. Players pick the protagonists’ motivations. Maybe. And maybe they’ll pick good ones. And maybe they’ll even tell you what they are. But maybe they won’t pick any. Or maybe they’ll pick sucky ones. And maybe they won’t tell you what they are. Or they will, but they’ll be wrong. It’s a total crapshoot.

See, players aren’t writers. They aren’t storytellers. They don’t know from conflict or motivation or character or tension. They’re the moviegoers who don’t really know why they’re cheering for Buzz Lightyear or Luke Skywalker. They don’t know why the Disney remakes and Star Wars sequels seem so much less engaging. Just that they do. And in RPGs, those are the people who’re trusted to figure out half of what drives the single most important element in any narrative.

That’s why GMs and adventure writers have to spend so much extra time and energy trying to figure out how to motivate the characters. Or understanding what the hell motivates them. And most GMs don’t actually put in that time and energy. And most players can’t help. As a result, motivations are usually pretty straightforward and conflicts are usually simple. Usually, there’s a goal like “plunder the tomb for reasons” or “rescue the princess for reasons” or whatever. And there’s an antagonist or enemy force that opposes the plundering or the rescuing because that’s their job. And they’ll oppose it to the death.

Yes, the main reason why most RPG narratives involve simple goals defended by boss monsters and gauntlets of minor obstacles is that the players suck at understanding narrative motivation and the GMs don’t know how to help them.

But that’s not all. Further complicating this s$&% is the fact that the protagonists have two different sets of motivations. The characters have motivations and so do their players. The uncomfortable truth most GMs can’t cope with is that the players themselves are part of the story. The idea of a separation between player and character is completely horses$&%. And no, you are not the lone exception. Neither are your players. It doesn’t work like that.

The players aren’t just portraying characters in a story. They’re also playing a game. And that comes with its own motivational baggage. They might be playing games to feel powerful, to look cool, to do things they’re not allowed to do in real life, to hang out with friends, or to watch a fictional world burn. And the players are just as uncertain and unable to explain this s$&% as they are to explain their character’s motivations most of the time.

It’s like this: it’s hard to set up a decent internal conflict between the desire for revenge and the belief that killing is wrong when the brain controlling the character also wants to look like an utter f$&%ing bada$& in front of his friends. Especially if he just got out of a really crappy relationship and is a little predisposed toward revenge at the moment.

And if that’s not enough to piss in your brilliantly structured narrative soup, there’s also the fact that role-playing games are emergent, reactive, evolving narratives. The story changes in response to everything the players do. To make that work, you—the GM—have to present a world that behaves kind of like a real-world that’s full of characters that respond in believable ways. This means, when conflict does arise, you don’t get to actually decide how it’ll be resolved. All you can do is decide whether a conflict has been sufficiently resolved at any given moment based on the latest crazy action some player pulled out of his a$&. Sure, it’s easy when the conflict arose because the kobolds wanted to keep their treasure and be alive and now they’re not alive anymore. But it’s a lot harder to decide whether the players created a sufficient understanding between the nature priest and the wizard who built a menagerie full of dinosaurs for the delight of the commonfolk.

Point is, once you try to move past the good-guy-and-bad-guy dynamic, you really only have a vague idea of what the player-protagonists’ motivations are. And those are mostly guesses. And you’re pretty much inventing everyone else’s motivations in response. So it’s really hard to see the resolution of a conflict if all of the parties are still alive.

On a foundational level, conflict’s a f$&%ing mess in RPGs. At least when you move beyond good guys and bad guys and kill or be killed. And there’s nothing that’ll help you sort that s$&% out because all the awesome fantasy stories that have gotten you excited about running your own games? They don’t have these problems. Even video games don’t have to deal with this s$&% since you, the player, either accept the pre-programmed motivations or you don’t play the game. You can’t get off the rails.

This issue’s so big, so complicated, such a f$&%ing dumpster fire, that motivation will be the topic for the next article in this series. Player motivation, player-character motivation, GM motivation, non-player-character motivation, and the motivations that arise from the personification of forces and ideas. And until you wrap your head around all of that s$&%, it’s hard to deal with complex conflict in RPGs.

Conflict. Why Want… In RPGs?

In traditional narratives, conflict creates tension, thereby keeping audiences emotionally involved in the story. And conflict’s the medium through which characters are revealed and the impetus for character growth and transformation. And it’s the same in RPG narratives. Except some of that s$&% just doesn’t matter as much because of the way people play RPGs. But that’s okay because conflict has another job in role-playing games.

In RPGs, in addition to providing tension, and revealing and changing characters, conflict also helps out by providing the lynchpin that holds the story parts of the RPG to the game parts of the RPG. In other words, conflict literally makes it possible to have a story you can play or a game with a narrative. However you want to say it.

Stories need tension. Games also need tension. We usually call it randomness or surprise or uncertainty when we’re talking about games. But it’s the same f$&%ing thing. It keeps us from knowing how things will turn out until the game’s over. Now, most RPGs use dice and action resolution mechanics to provide their surprise and uncertainty. Action checks. Attack rolls. Skill checks. All that s$&%. So, by the transitive property or the law of syllogism or modus tollens or whatever—I don’t f$&%ing care—conflict and dice are synonyms.

Okay. They’re not synonyms. But basically, conflict tells us when to roll the dice. If there’s a conflict to resolve, roll the dice. No conflict? Boring, weak-a$& conflict? Don’t roll dice. If you can’t point to struggling forces in the game’s story, but you roll the dice anyway, you’re bad and you should feel bad. And no, trying to overstate a weak-a$& conflict as an excuse to roll dice doesn’t count.

Today—the day I’m doing this rewrite—I got drawn into a long discussion in my patrons-only Discord server about when to roll dice. And that discussion is going to be a big-a$& article in the very near future. So I won’t belabor this point right now.

But that’s not all. Conflict’s not just about when to roll dice. Remember how I said that it’s the central conflict in a story—or at least the last conflict—that tells you when it’s time for the story to take its ball and go home. Well, games need goals. And they’re only fun until there’s nothing stopping the players from accomplishing the goal. So, conflict tells you when the game’s done. When the players have won. Or lost.

But there’s more. An RPG is a whole set of nested narratives, right? Campaigns are made of arcs are made of adventures are made of scenes are made of encounters, right? And each one has one or more conflicts. And when those conflicts are done, so are their scenes and arcs and encounters and adventures and campaigns.

Conflict is so central to the RPG experience—and remember kids in the comments that conflict doesn’t mean the same as combat—conflict is so central to the RPG experience that you can define each and every part of an RPG in terms of its goal—the player-protagonists’ motivations—and the conflicts that keep them from it. Which means conflict represents 50% of the tools you need to plan your adventure’s or encounter’s or campaign’s narrative.

But apart from keeping the gamey parts of the RPG stuck firmly to the narrative parts by defining goals and surprise and motivation and tension, conflict does also drive some of the character action in RPGs. And this is where s$&% gets weird. Because this is also something you’ve got no control over. Well, you have an itty-bitty bit of control. But it’s mostly on the players.

The sad truth is most RPG characters don’t grow. They don’t change. And rarely do they even reveal themselves through play anymore. Part of the problem is, again, that most players are sucky storytellers. They don’t have the skills. And even when they do have the skills, they’re usually really impatient storytellers. And there’s a cultural shift making the whole thing worse that I can’t talk about without being told “okay, boomer” even though I’m not a f$&%ing boomer! I’m 100% pure-bred Gen-Xer. The boomers were giving me s$&% before you little millennials and zoomers were even zygotes.

The reason doesn’t matter though. What matters is that character growth, transformation, and revelation aren’t big parts of RPGs anymore. Hell, they aren’t parts of most media lately. Which is why most people hate the new stuff and keep watching the s$&% I did when I was a kid.

“But Angry,” I can hear you glomphing out around a mouthful of avocado toast, “people still reveal their characters to each other. Showing off your character is the biggest part of RPGs these days.” Yeah, that’s true. But here’s the problem. No one cares.

See, players are both protagonists and audience. And each player is most interested in—most attached to—their own character. When you watch a TV show or movie or read a book, you have favorite characters, right? The ones that resonate with you. The ones you care about the most. Every discovery you make about that character recontextualizes your relationship with the character. It’s a deeply personal, emotional thing.

Most players don’t leave themselves anything new to discover about their character. Which means the power of conflict to reveal new dimensions about the characters is greatly diminished. It’s like watching a show where only the extras get any real character development.

There was a great moment in my for-fun, personal game recently wherein a player-character—let’s call her Zappy the Great because she’s a wizard—ended up in a heated non-combat conflict with a non-evil NPC. And when she stuck up for a character she’d previously found obnoxious and annoying in the conflict, she surprised herself, me, and everyone else at the table. She discovered that, for some reason, she cared about this NPC. Hell, it was such a great moment of character revelation that I’d love to share a supplemental little story about the whole thing. If I can get permission.

For similar reasons, transformation’s a pretty rare thing. Rarely do players create characters without knowing exactly what they’re going to be tomorrow. They usually create the character they want to play forever. And this is a major f$&%ing flaw in RPG narratives that really needs to be addressed at the system level. But we can worry about that when I get around to talking about characters as narrative elements. Because that’s really the problem. Players don’t create characters. They create avatars.

With all of that said, I’ll admit that RPGs do feature a lot of growth. At least, they have a lot of mechanical, gamey growth. But growth is growth and you have to take whatever the f$&% you can get sometimes.

Thing is, character growth is another one of those places where conflict unites the mechanical and the narrative. If you’re a smart GM, you dole out experience points. That’s how characters grow. And if you’re a really smart GM, you recognize that conflict and XP are inextricably connected. When the players resolve a conflict—be it through violence, negotiation, physical fortitude, mental cleverness, cunning plans, or crazy capers—they deserve experience points. Conflict’s how you know what’s actually worth XP.

At the very least, therefore, conflict helps you design—and define—encounters, scenes, adventures, and campaigns. It helps you run them. It helps you end them. It tells you when to roll the dice. And it tells you when to give the characters an experience point award. But if you can resolve the motivation and character issues—issues for future discussion—conflict also lets the players learn more about their own characters. And drives character transformation.

Conflict. How Describe… in RPGs?

In traditional narratives, you can describe conflicts as internal or external. And you can classify external conflicts based on what’s on either side of the conflict. And you can distinguish a story’s central conflict from its secondary conflicts. Simple, right? But here comes our old friend RPG to f$&% all that up.

First, it should be pretty obvious that internal conflicts are really hard to handle. That’s because, again, the GM has no control over the player-character’s internal motivations. That sucks because internal conflicts are usually the most revelatory and transformative conflicts of all. They’re the meaningful choices people won’t shut the f$&% up about. As a GM, though, there’s no guaranteed way of setting up an internal conflict. The only way to do so involves either understanding the character’s motivations better than the players themselves do or by incepting the right motivations into the fictional character’s skulls and setting them on a collision course.

Second, though, there’s two other crazy kinds of conflicts that exist only in RPGs. They come between internal and external. I call them intraparty conflicts and metaternal conflicts. Yeah, some of you are going to point out that I’m misusing the meta- prefix here, but I don’t give a f$&%. Everyone else twists the f$&% out of every word’s meaning just to win fights on the Internet. At least I’m doing it to teach you something useful.

Intraparty conflicts are conflicts that arise between two of the player-protagonists. Between two PCs. “But Angry, isn’t that just a character-on-character external conflict.” Well, yes. Technically you’re right. But remember, being technically right just means you’re only right in the a$&holiest sense of the word. You win the fight, but you missed the point.

See, intraparty conflicts in RPGs are actually much more like internal conflicts than external conflicts. Part of the RPG metagame is that the party primarily acts as a unified whole. RPGs are party-based, cooperative games where the party behaves mostly like a collective. Individual actions are taken on behalf of the party unit and the characters pursue the same goals. Moreover, when the fellowship breaks, the story’s over. At least for some of the characters. You don’t run a game for five individuals all doing their own thing. You run a game for five members of a single party. Thus, intraparty conflicts are just internal conflicts where each player plays a different voice in the collective protagonist’s head.

Now, intraparty conflict can be just as interesting and revelatory and transformation as any real internal conflict. But it’s just as hard for a GM to set up because of that whole motivation issue. And it’s also super dangerous. The metagame—the nature of the game—puts a limit on how much intraparty conflict can happen and how such conflicts must be resolved. And most players and GMs understand those limits implicitly. When groups go beyond those limits—when intraparty conflicts get resolved through violence or get resolved bitterly or can’t get resolved at all—something in the game usually breaks. Usually, at least one player ends up making a new character. And if the party does stay together with the pall of a badly resolved intraparty conflict hanging over it, then it’s the suspension of disbelief that gets broken. That’s how you end up with those PC parties wherein none of the players can really understand why they’re sticking together anymore. They’re only a party because the game says they have to be. That’s the slow death of a campaign right there. At least of a narrative-heavy campaign.

Speaking of the metagame and players maybe retiring their characters because of character actions, let’s talk about the complete insanity that is the metaternal conflict. That’s what I’m now choosing to call it when a conflict arises between a character’s motivations and their player’s motivations. Like the aforementioned situation wherein a character totally wants to abandon the party and strike out on their own, but the player doesn’t want to quit the group or retire the character. Metaternal conflicts are technically internal conflicts. The conflict is happening inside a single player-protagonist’s brain. But they’re different because the motivations are coming from two totally different worlds and are based on completely unrelated things.

Oh, and they’re usually game-breaking. At least for the player in question.

There’s no avoiding metaternal conflicts. They happen. And gamers can be really stupid about them. Some gamers—who I’ll politely call narrative purist a$&holes—will tell players they should always be true to their characters even if it means they’re not having fun anymore. Some people think I’m saying that every time I say players need to learn to suck up a certain amount of momentary disappointment, frustration, and un-fun because that’s part of playing games. Meanwhile some gamers—who I’ll call f$&%ing morons—take the opposite tack. They say that, as long as the players are getting what they want, anything goes. Some of those f$&%ing morons actually believe that I’m saying that. And then there’s the f$&%ing GMing martyrs out there who think the GM himself should give up his own personal desire for enjoyment for the sake of running the game the players demand. Yes, that’s a metaternal conflict too.

Thing is, though, that no one continues to play—or run—a game that’s not satisfying their needs and wants as a player. And if you think anyone should, you’re a f$&%ing sadist. All that leads to is burnout and depression. It ruins the game for everyone. And that’s why, whenever a metaternal conflict does arise, it has to be resolved in the player’s favor. There’s no other way. Even if it means changing the character. Technically, that’s a kind of character transformation. But it’s not one that arises from the narrative. It arises from outside the narrative.

But I digress…

Conflict. When End… in RPGs?

While there’s lots of ways for traditional narrative conflicts to end, it sure seems like there’s only one way for conflicts to end in RPGs. And I don’t just mean D&D. I know you think the only thing I play is D&D and its clones. But I play—and have played—lots of different kinds of games over the many, many years I’ve been wasting my life with this s$&%. It seems like there’s only one end to every conflict in most RPGs. It’s kill-or-be-killed. Well, it’s kill-or-defeat-or-neutralize-or-be-killed-or-defeated-or-neutralized. Even in social situations, it’s usually down to cowing the NPC to just give in. Or refusing to give in and walking away. No one seems happy to bypass a trap or go around an obstacle. They have to break the traps. They have to overcome the obstacles. And the players sure as hell never give up on their goals, propose or accept compromise, or settle for partial victories.

If you were attentive—and you sure as hell better be paying attention—I already explained a lot of this. Players and GMs usually have a piss-poor understanding of how motivation works. Players rarely think beyond “win the adventure or die trying” and GMs rarely think of the living, breathing creatures of the world as anything other than obstacles for the players to tromp over on their way to success.

But it’s not just a lack of thought about—and a lack of system support—for motivations as a narrative and game design tool. There’s also the fact that GMs, players, and the games themselves don’t know how to handle anything other than winning. They can’t even handle anything as simple as losing. So the idea that they might be able to handle pyrrhic victories, compromises, surrenders, withdrawals, and win-win solutions is just f$&%ing ludicrous. But a good GM could make this s$&% work—and help the players make it work—without any help from the system. It’s just the damned motivation thing is such a hot mess.

And so, until I plow deep into an analysis of motivation as a narrative tool in RPGs, I really can’t help you move too far beyond the kill-or-be-killed conflict resolution that underpins most RPGs. So that means I’m pretty much just at the…

End of Part 2

To be continued…

Part 3: Homework

While you’re waiting for me to come back in a month and help you wrap your head around this motivation s$&%, you’ve got some homework. You heard me. Shut up. I need to make sure you actually understand this s$&%. That you’re not just nodding along or pissing and moaning about my utter and complete wrongness in the comment section.

Over the next few weeks—over your next several game sessions—practice identifying and describing the conflicts that arise. What’s the central conflict in your campaign? In your current adventure? What needs or desires are driving the conflict?

Write it down. Write. It. Down.

Also, over the next few weeks and several sessions, whenever you ask a player to use the dice to resolve an action—ability check, skill test, characteristic roll, move, or whatever the f$&% mechanic your game uses to separate success from failure—whenever you use the dice to resolve an action, identify the conflict in play. What’s in conflict? Why are they in conflict? Can you spot the motivations driving the conflict? Is the conflict a good, strong conflict? Are they powerful motives? Is there a chance for revelation, growth, or transformation? Is there a positive impact on the game’s tension? Or is it just another die roll for the sake of a die roll? Are you just grasping at straws to find a conflict to excuse a die roll?

You won’t be able to answer all those questions every time. You might not like some of the answers you do come up with. Doesn’t matter. You’re just practicing. So go out there and actually f$&%ing practice. Don’t just think about it. Don’t just talk about it. Actually f$&%ing do it for once. Do something I tell you without giving me any lip.

You might actually grow. Or at least reveal something about yourself.