The Calligrapher's Sword: Formalizing Conflict

[Shreyas Sampat]

I've been thinking about conflict in a malleable world for a while; it's the backbone of my game The Calligrapher's Sword.  TCS uses a formalization to state conflicts in three ways: as something that upsets the character, something the character doesn't understand, or something the character wants: Laments, Riddles, and Desires respectively.  For an example, suppose that a Taoist sage, Chuang-tse, dreams that he is a butterfly.  You could model this as any one of these things: "I dreamed I was a butterfly, but now I do not know. Was I a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly, dreaming I am a man?", "I have no mouth and I must scream", "I must find the Ivory Lily and drink its nectar to regain my true form".  It also includes a mechanical way of solving those.

Now, this isn't what I'd call 'consistency of conflict', because the conflicts can, with a little good resource control, be solved fairly easily.  What to do?

Well, the game posits that in the dream-world, there is one point that can be reached from all others, in exactly nine nights of travel.  Similarly, from here you can go anywhere in nine nights, provided you know the way.  I thought I'd introduce a little parallel, with the idea of a larger Conflict composed of Laments, Riddles, and Desires.  Each story in TCS is called a Dream-Quest, and focuses on solving this larger Conflict by slowly dismantling it.

How does this work?  The Dream-Quest is composed of nine Conflicts, and is played over no fewer than nine nights of game-time.  Whenever a Conflict is solved, everyone wakes up, or in the case of Dream characters is 'forgotten', and the game continues on the next night.  Meanwhile, the characters can all produce subplots by creating and manipulating lesser conflicts; these do not cause awakening at their resolution.

So, my question: Does this sound like it'll work?  Do I need to provide more information before I can find a useful answer?