Dice Exploder Aftershow: Do Games Need Conflict?

Follow-up to a Dice Exploder episode with Michael Elliott

First off: if you missed it, the Dice Exploder podcast officially launched last week! Each week on the show I’ll talk with a rotating co-host about a new RPG mechanic and break it down to its nuts and bolts.

On this week’s episode, I talked with Michael Elliot (@notwriting in most places) about Antiquarian Adventures. And while editing it, I was reflecting on our discussion on conflict in games and stories. We talked about how providing mechanical motivations for players to lean into conflict is a great thing to propel your story go forward. Failure and disaster are great because they give your story something to react to. Without conflict, story is boring, and at that point what are we even doing here?

...right? Is that true?

There’s all kinds of writing out there about whether story requires conflict and change, especially if we leave a Western framework. I don’t want to dwell on that because I’m super Western so I don’t friggin know. I think so? Whatever. I do want to talk about whether RPGs require conflict or even story to be a good time. I think the answer is firmly no, but that a smidge of conflict can add a lot to games that are mostly uninterested in it.

This is mostly gonna be a post looking at a bunch of examples, but I wanted up front to note that all these games are GM-less and they’re all slice-of-life adjacent. I think the latter is because I’m doing some conflating of “low conflict” with “low stakes,” but the former is really interesting. I think there’s something to the idea that the presence of a typical GM role infuses some conflict directly into the structure of the game.

Anyway, let’s look at those examples.

Stewpot

I specifically started thinking about low conflict games ~5 years go when I was running a bunch of Stewpot by Takuma Okada (great game, it’s getting the full Evil Hat treatment soon, keep an eye out). As the game puts it:

Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern is the story of a tavern run by a party of former adventurers. It’s about hanging up your weapons, selling off your armor, and integrating back into society.

This is very much a slice of life game. It often feels like playing Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon.

Gameplay is a Firebrands style system where you take turns picking minigames, each about one scene long, which are largely about chilling around your tavern. They have titles like “Market Day” and “Romancing a Stranger” and “A Distinguished Guest.” They’re all chill as hell. Basically you just vibe.

There is still conflict in this game. In Market Day, you barter for what you need. In A Distinguished Guest, you frantically prepare the place for the arrival of some (ahem) distinguished guest.

But of note here is how low stakes all of this is and how much the game goes out of its way to steer you towards chill outcomes. The minigame “A Friendly Tavern Brawl” has players decide if they are brawlers or de-escalators. It gives you this immediate conflict (a brawl has broken out) and then at every moment pushes you towards resolving it and chilling out. They’re all like that.

On a macro level, Stewpot characters have a bunch of Adventurer Skills that are things like the wizard’s “mastery of flame” or the paladin’s “treat wounds.” Over the course of the game, you slowly swap these out for Town Skills: the farmer’s “make food taste better and last longer” or the poet’s “tell enchanting stories.” There’s implied internal conflict here as you turn your back on your previous identity and build up a new mundane sense of self, but this too gives a feeling of putting conflict in your rearview mirror.

Would Stewpot work without any conflict at all? Maybe not. But it’s certainly a game that encourages you to steer away from conflict.

Wanderhome

Another game of pastoral fantasy, Wanderhome probably doesn’t need any introduction. But for posterity, this a game where you are a bunch of animal-folk traveling from town to town hanging out. That’s the basic pitch, though it’s clear once you dive into the text that there’s a great heartache and traumatic past hiding within. The setting is explicitly a land where there is no war... but there was until not too long ago. Everyone is kind... but people may be hurt and in need of help.

Mechanically, Wanderhome uses a No Dice No Masters token economy where every character has some things they can always do, some things they can do to get a token, and some things they can only do if they spend a token. These range from the universal “get a token whenever you give away something you hold dear” to “spend a token to keep someone safe from the difficulties of the world” to the playbook move “Ask: ‘Can I tell you a story about my home?’ They get a token if they say yes.”

It’s easy to see in even just those examples how there’s still the potential for conflict in Wanderhome. Even in a world of peacetime where people are welcoming to travelers, we know there are “difficulties of the world.” Or on the emotional level, you may realize that someone else could benefit more from something you hold dear, and your choice to give it to them for a token might be a pivotal moment of internal conflict and growth for your character.

But Wanderhome makes that layer of implied conflict and melancholy very much opt-in. It’s easy to play a whole session where all you’re ever doing is telling each other stories about your homes and passing tokens around for the privilege. My go-to gameplay loop in Wanderhome is to get a token for “taking a moment to bask in the grandeur of the world and describing it to the table” and then spending that token to “know something important about the place you’re in and tell the table about it.” This is just a framework for describing the setting as seen through my character’s eyes. It works great! It’s delightful! And if that accidentally becomes two hours of digging into the trauma behind why I ran away from home, that’s a wonderful accident.

My experience with Wanderhome is that games end up becoming a lot like Stewpot in tone: chill, generally with little to no external conflict, but with these aching internal character arcs where characters slowly realize let go of the parts of themselves and their pasts that they don’t wish to hold on to and discover who they’re going to be in the future instead.

It’s a beautiful game! I’ll talk about its amazing location building system some other time. Or if you want to talk about it on an episode of Dice Exploder, DM me.

i’m sorry did you say street magic

As long as we’re talking about location building, let’s talk about games that are entirely that. i’m sorry did you say stree magic is a game where you describe a city one neighborhood, landmark, or resident at a time. It’s easy to see how this might be an RPG without conflict in it: the purpose isn’t to tell a story! Take that conflict-defenders. Where is your god now?

But street magic also has this phase called Hold An Event where you talk about how the city changes. Something happens, and players ask questions about the future, describe various opinions about the event in the community, and show consequences that reverberate through the city. Every Event is a little story, a moment of conflict and change. It acts as a reminder that a city is alive, never static.

I can attest that street magic works just fine without holding events. And there, aha, I have proven the point that you do not need conflict to have a good RPG on your hands! Thought it’s undeniable that it gains something poetic from those moments of conflict and change.

Space Post

Okay this is really the game I wanted to talk about. This is a game where you collectively play a postal agent, their sentient spaceship, and the various people they deliver mail to. It’s delightful. More relevant today is this paragraph from the rules:

Low Stakes

This isn’t intended to be a game full of conflict and adventure. Whenever you find yourself in a situation where things could be smaller, subtler, or less exciting, go with that option. People may disagree or even fight, and there may be big feelings, but let the little things carry lots of weight! Resolve conflicts in favor of the least interesting outcome. This advice may seem counter intuitive but give it a try. When in doubt, deliver the mail and keep moving.

In my experience, Space Post ends up being a game about memeing. You might have some conflict, but for me it has often led to just kinda riffing out weirdness in a manner that feels like shitposting. Here’s a roughly true session report form one of my campaigns: “There’s a guy who lives here and hangs out with his robots, one of whom is an opera singer, and the other of whom is a janitor at a local private school. Everyone on the planet is a deer, except for the sentient volcano down the street and the lady who is two cats. We’re delivering the cat lady’s monthly loot crate or branded perfumes. When we get there, she offers us tea and biscuits.”

The fun of Space Post comes from two places: making up random shit and the comfort and familiarity of returning to a planet to check in on your old friends there. Neither of these things require conflict.

This, more than any of my other examples, is an RPG that I genuinely think thrives with essentially no conflict or story. I don’t fully understand it, but it’s fun. It’s calming. Check it out.

Conclusion

Let’s bring it back to that Dice Exploder episode. For the kind of game we were talking about, I stand by everything we said in the episode. If you’re doing globe trotting action adventures, you want a lot of conflict. You want to lean into that. Mechanics that encourage you to do so are great.

But if you’re a designer (or a player!) who wants something chill, zero stakes, and slice of life, you should make and/or play that. These games are some of my favorites in recent years. They essentially got me through lockdown.

Conflict isn’t necessary in games.