[Conflict] First Playtest

[Landon Winkler]

Ran my first playtest session of Conflict last night, which was pretty interesting, so I figured I'd share my experiences. Hope someone finds something here interesting.

For my summary of conflict, see http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=26058.0

The Setup:
We decided to have a campaign that's basically a follow-up to a previous D&D 3.5 game. The story follows a character from that game who basically decided a particular lich was the best person the run the continent The other PCs include another character who fully succumbed to the demonic taint, a lesser lich who focuses his efforts on creating their army of undead, and an undead war machine of his creation that achieved sentience.

So, we had been planning to run with 3.5 rules again and, since the characters are around 15th level, we had about four hours set aside for math homework/character creation.

Long story short, I introduced them to Conflict, convinced everyone to play it, created characters, and still had time left over to start the game.

Convincing:
The group as a whole hasn't played narrative games at all and obviously none of them had played Conflict. One player was pretty enthusiastic about narrative games, two very neutral, and one preferring the devil he knew.

I really wanted everybody on board, so it took a while. The decider actually ended up being that my implementation of 3.5 would have nothing in common with the version of appearing in the books, so it's a choice of the devil he thinks he knows versus the devil he doesn't. Once we got everyone on the same page, we delved into character creation.

Character Creation:
I split the character creation into three stages: choosing Traits, assigning values to Traits, and choosing Passions. I think the section for choosing Traits was the most fun, because everyone got into it after awhile and were really helping each other out and exchanging ideas.

Passions probably hung people up the most. I think it ended up being a good thing in the long run, though, as people ended up really thinking more about their characters goals and desires than they did normally. One player (whose character was brought over from the old campaign) said "I never really considered this aspect of her personality," when setting a Passion, which I appreciated a lot.

Even our almost new gamer (one campaign previously) was able to work out the character creation system and really showed what she wanted to with the character. With all the characters, Conflict design really diverged a lot from what the 3.5 characters would have been able to do.

In Game:
Once we officially started to play, we had a lot of non-conflict talking, meeting everyone, mustering their undead army, and so forth.

The thing about that I found most striking is that a few times I was tempted to call for dice rolls but I always thought "You know, this isn't worth a Scene, I'll just let them do it." I was surprised how much more people sank into their characters.

Sort of unrelated, but this also forced me to give out clues to the appropriate players without calling for die rolls. I've always kind of fudged difficulties, because the point of the roll is to give out the clue anyway. So, not really system specific, but it was nice to not feel like I should call for a die roll.

The Conflict:
Sadly, we only had time for one actual Scene. They were breaking into the inner sanctum of an elven fortress to steal supplies, opposed by its spirit guardian and a door with scary runes.

So, I started the Scene, intending to draw out people's narration and give a demo of the rules. The players definitely beat me to the punch, though. One narrated, fairly obviously for his character, that he was examining the door looking for a weak spot ("Larceny" Trait.) The spiritual guardian appeared and menaced him a bit (its "Guardian Spirit" Trait.)

The rest of the party really surprised me though. Our "adventurer turned general for a lich lord" tried to remember how these doors worked from her time in the elven military ("Elven Military Training" Trait.)

She left the narration of what she remembered to me, which makes sense, but I want to think about some more. The doors are locked to a password, though, known only to the fort's commanders and the generals he'd report to.

The undead war machine of the party is made up of bits of various dead and took a "Dredge Up Memories" Trait. So she narrated that into trying to pull that knowledge out of the mind of the commander, who she assumed to be part of her construction. The final character seeing this used his "Necrotic Infusion" Trait to boost her ability.

I was kind of dumb-founded. This all rattled off pretty nonstop with people rolling the labeled dice on their sheet and adding them to the Challenge. The Scene also wasn't supposed to be hard, but they really undercut the spirit's Passions by proving themselves as legitimate users of the door.

So they won the Challenge and I narrated how they recalled the password and used it to answer the door. This was a blunder on my part actually, as I should have let them narrate it. Too many years GMing everything else, I'll have to keep an eye on it.

Post Mortem:
Everything actually went really well. The rules for handling Conflicts were obviously pretty intuitive because people were jumping right in after my Reader's Digest version of the rules hours before.  If I had been starting a brand new campaign, I'd probably arrange a big clash in the first session to get everyone grounded in the rules system.

Spoke to the players afterwards and everyone had fun and wanted to see more of the system. Really the only failures were on my part handling the end of the conflict.

As it stands, I was glad to give them their victory because they came up with a really good synergistic way of taking care of it that I wasn't expecting. But in the future, I need to be careful to watch out for places to jump in with more narration for the NPCs.

For example I could probably have tossed in another NPC action with "Before you can speak the password, the spirit..." or even just "When you speak the password, the spirit wavers, but screams 'You are not my true master!' and..."

The only real downside of not drawing out the Conflict was that no one got a chance to use their Passions.

The other bad on my part was jumping on their victory narrative. Should have opened that up to the table.

Next Time:
The army marches to Aven, a small village of druids and elves that has been weakened by plague. I think the actual attack on the village will give a chance to show off the Conflict system.

Cheers!
Landon