Originally posted on May 14, 2010. The comments were awesome.
Any time you’ve got two characters opposing each other, there’s bound to be some sort of conflict. How else do you reach a resolution? The thing is, most people think of conflict, and their thoughts immediately flit to physical conflict and the crash of weapon on shield. To quote Flanders and Swann’s Reluctant Cannibal, “Don’t fight people? Ridiculous!” Being somewhat bored by battle scenes, I have a rather low opinion of this, but what else is one to do?
A lot, actually.
- Nonlethal physical challenges. Might still makes right, sort of, but those involved aren’t trying to kill each other; they’re likelier to be racing, or engaged in sports, or the like. (Of course, many of these are pretty similar to “like combat but with rules against actually killing the opponent, so…)
- Arguments and debates. This kind of conflict isn’t exactly ignored; after all, they’re going on near-perpetually in the real world. On the other hand, they can be a challenge for a writer who isn’t equally invested in both sides (leading to debates with a Clear Right and a Clear Wrong who also happen to be intelligent/articulate and tongue-tied idiots, respectively—guess which the hero is?), and in an RPG they’re often either abstracted to within an inch of their lives or resolved in a way that bypasses the character’s skills in favor of the player’s. And of course, there’s the question of whether either side won and if so, how you can tell.
- Riddle contests. Thanks to our good friend Tolkien, they’re firmly in the fantasy audience’s repertoire of plot devices, and for good reason. As conflicts go, they’re on a somewhat different level from the earlier examples, as it’s more a question of “who’s got the twistiest mind and the most esoteric knowledge” than “Who’s more fit to win?” In an RPG, that tendency can make them frustrating for some players and highly desirable for others—in a story, it can safely maintain tension by creating the uncertainty of conflict, with the added bonus (at least, to some) of letting the reader face off against both sides. Twenty questions and variations thereon can substitute if one doesn’t feel like actually creating a variety of riddles, but I prefer riddles for their own inherent poetry.
- Games, usually board games. Given how many of said games, like chess, were war substitutes, it’s hardly surprising. Though if the outcome means something, you can usually expect the game chosen to be at least 50% strategy, usually more—chance tells little unless the attribute being used to decide the conflict is supposed to be luck.
- Dirty politics and gambit-slinging. I will admit to having a bias verging on fangirling for this sort of conflict; I’m rather fond of the level of action-and-consequence understanding, thinking three steps ahead, and juggling knowledge of the nature and exploitation of a number of different plans’ worth of random details while maintaining a big-picture goal into which those are supposed to feed. Squee. Done well, this can get you long and Byzantine plots; done badly, it can look either contrived or pretentious.
- The shifter battle (yes, despite the name). Found in a lot of early folklore, this is a contest of adaptability and quick thinking, with occasional forays into cunning for the character who can think three shifts ahead. In some cases, Character 2 is chasing Character 1, so Character 1 is focused on turning into something that can more easily flee or hide from whatever Character 2 is turning into, while Character 2 is focusing on things that exploit the weaknesses or counteract the advantages of Character 1’s shifts. In others, both are focused on fighting, so each is trying to turn into something which is either immune to what the other can do or best suited for destroying the other, sometimes both at once. (One of my favorite examples, in Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, didn’t quite involve real shapeshifting, just the description of what each form was and why it beat the challenger’s, but the theme was the same.)
How else would you pit two or more characters against each other without pulling out the weapons?
