CONFLICTED
A TTRPG about community, choice, consequence and sacrifice.
Overview/TLDR
Role: Writer
Duration: Feb 2021 - Present
Team size: 2
Gritty, sci-fi TTRPG made to spite murderhobos. Power comes from your connections with communities and you have to balance their well-being with your own goals.
Still in progress
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Conflicted is a game with systems that challenges the player to attempt to help everyone but puts their other goals at risk in the process. Reputation scores which determine how much you've helped a community are directly linked to how effective you are during missions. As a result, players must make difficult decisions balancing the communities around them and their progression towards the game's end. I designed the experience to make players stop and carefully consider the choices they have and their effects.
Designing Conflicted
Summary
Conflicted started as a TTRPG school project with three core rules
1. Fit on as few pages as possible
2. Have a consistent theme and tone
3. Self-imposed rule. It must be as simple and as roleplay heavy as possible.
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Originally, this game was a novel that I abandoned novel for being too frustrating to read. Readers would say that they would do x or y differently whenever characters made tough decisions. I figured why not let them try? The game is set in a sci-fi world where nothing goes right for the protagonists and their actions had direct consequences for others which came back to bite them later. Players were to be constantly challenged with choices pitting their own interests with those of the communities around them.
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Narratively, the player characters' ultimate goal is to gain Citizenship and the right to live in the dystopian City. Until then they are forced to do dangerous and morally gray mercenary work to earn their place. At the end of their journey, their last task is always to kill someone, a crime the rules constantly reinforce is punishable by banishment off-planet.
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Mechanics and Gameplay Loop
I. Reroll-Based Actions:
All consequential actions in Conflicted are rolled on a pair of dice with Snake Eyes being the equivalent of a Critical Failure and a roll of 12 being the same as a critical success. Players would go into two segments of the gameplay loop with a bank of rerolls they can pull from if they don't like their roll, but negate the last roll. If a player rolls Snake Eyes, they cant reroll except in particular circumstances.
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Ideally, this is meant to give the players a feeling of having just barely pulled off a mission every time. Statistically, the odds are stacked in the player's favor but the draining pool of rerolls and the chance of rolling Snake Eyes gives a sense of growing pressure.
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II. Rank Trackers:
The game revolves around two rank-based "level" systems.
Citizenship Progress: A scale from 1-10 that tracks progress towards gaining Citizenship. Determines the Mission difficulty and skill level of the player character.
Reputation: A scale from 1-10 that tracks how well like you are by communities. Tracked on a per community basis. Determines how effective the number of rerolls a player has
Ranks can be gained and lost throughout gameplay and the player running the game is encouraged to award or take away Reputation as they see fit.
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Citizenship has several stages where the player cannot progress without betraying the community in which they have the highest reputation. However, by achieving a significantly high enough reputation with a community, they will help you raise your Citizenship, even bypassing the halts in one's progression. However, focusing on building up a reputation in any one community will inevitably make that character hated in others, which will make working in those other communities much more difficult.
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Essentially, players are forced to choose between being mindless mercenaries for the sake of their goals or focusing on protecting one community and sacrificing others. This is meant to double down on the idea of forcing hard narrative choices through gameplay mechanics.
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III. The Gameplay Loop
Recieve Mission
- ​Players would be offered several missions (unless they had a special or follow-up mission) and had to pick one based on the current party's skillsets​
- Scout out Mission
- Players would be tasked with splitting up and finding out more information about the mission and possibly getting special equipment, tools, or even alternative means of completing the mission.
- Execute Mission
- Players would be tasked with executing the plan they formed with the information they acquired and set up they performed.
- Results of Mission
Players would be told if they succeeded or failed and changes to their Citizenship and Reputation.
Post-Mortem
Lesson #1: Overwhelming Options and Intensity
Initial feedback concluded that there was too much pressure and too little agency. In early versions of the game, the odds were unforgivingly against the player in an attempt to recreate the narrative's futile odds. Additionally, players being allowed to roll any action ironically reduced their sense of control. The infinite abundance of actions overwhelmed them, especially when the system discouraged taking action.
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Ironically, l found that limiting player actions was a viable solution to the issue of overwhelming players. Specifically, making players focus on what they specifically could do and making those actions easier to do. To capitalize on this idea, I added character races, classes, and tools. All three had very clear distinct uses and allowed players to make more distinct and intentional character-driven decisions.
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Also as a blanket solution, I switched to a 2 dice system instead of 1 die. This ended up working out much better than I thought due to the pre-existing connotation of Snake Eyes. This also made the odds feel much fairer while still keeping the pressure of a bad roll.
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Lesson #2: World and Tone
Another thing that the world didn't come through in gameplay. The intensity came primarily from the difficulty of rolling an action well and not from the narratives being created. However, adding too many details only seemed to bloat the size of the rules document.
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There were no easy fixes for this one, through rewriting and editing I was able to fit more details in but not too many. However, I realized that if I couldn't change the words in the document, I could change how they were formatted. By formatting the rules as a contract that has been forced onto the player with mechanics and lore embedded as "job details", I was able to better deliver the game's tone without much bloat.
With this format change, I also hired an artist! (Hi Gian!) Once completed, I'll update the version here with a version that contains art and even further delivers the game's tone.
Lesson #3: Player Agency
I saved my worst mistake for last. It turns out players HATE doing things they don't want to do. In a game that is entirely focused on that exact idea, issues were inevitable. This led to systems that I already described earlier, which have since become core systems that players ended up loving. When forced to choose between two evils, the player might just choose to play another game.
While that core idea is still there, just introducing the idea that players can investigate a situation and try to find a solution where everyone wins had huge effects. Players were much more engaged in roleplaying segments to try to get information out of NPCs, and much deeper inner party conversations took place on what they planned to do if they couldn't find an alternative. On top of this, giving players a means to alternate means to progress by focusing on their reputation in one community achieved its goal of making it easier for players to choose which sacrifices they were willing to make. As an unexpected but great side effect, players were much more willing to bond with NPCs in the areas they chose to defend AND it was easy to make recurring villains of NPCs from other areas.
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Going Forward
My big takeaway from making this game is that players WANT to be immersed in the worlds of their games. Immersion doesn't always mean being able to do everything but it doesn't mean being forced to do a specific thing either. The idea of creating immersion by providing players with an end goal and asking them to subvert it might not always be possible but I CAN always start by defining the ways the player can interact with the world and aligning the tone with those interactions instead of providing a world and watching players flounder as they think of how to interact with it.
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If a player can seamlessly interact with a world and that world expresses itself through those interactions, the player's story and immersion are only a few tweaks away.