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The Five Pillars of Game Story, Part Two: The Central Conflict

Part One: The Plan | Part Two: The Central Conflict | Part Three: Up A Tree | Part Four: Verisimilitude | Part Five: Meaningful Choice

When I saw the press release for Monte Cook’s massive D&D city/setting Ptolus, I knew I wanted to run it. Ptolus is a city. A huge city. And the book detailing it is massive and filled with a level of detail never before presented in any fantasy sourcebook. Furthermore, the presentation is the best I’ve seen. The art is beautiful, there’s full color work on every page, great use of color in the layout and the information is presented in the most efficient and accessible fashion possible. No effort has been spared to make this massive tome easy to use.

I pitched it to the L.A. group and we immediately started brainstorming ideas for what the Party would be. Who do the players play, and how do they know each other? As is often the case, we talked about running a Thief campaign with All Thieves. That was ultimately discarded, as the idea always is, because it’s too limiting. But we hit upon the idea of running a Mercenary company. This has a special resonance with us because we are, all of us, working on the Mercenaries property at Pandemic Studios. The players are all programmers, designers, animators, artists. Mostly designers.

It resonated with me in particular because I’m a big fan of the Black Company series by Glen Cook. Military Fantasy. A group of black-hearted mercenaries work for the Bad Guys against Some Other Bad Guys until the prophesied “chosen one” who’s destined to overthrow all the bad guys, ends up in their lap and they’re forced to make a moral choice. The most evil, and dark-hearted men in fantasy decide to roll the dice, and try and do the right thing. They’re certain to lose but, as the ad copy on the back of the first book says; “The hard-bitten men of the Black Company take their pay and do what they must, burying their doubts with their dead.”

I wanted to evoke that feeling so I bought everyone copies of the first novel and they all liked it. Some of them had already read it.

Ptolus is over 700 pages long and though I didn’t realize it, the sheer level of detail presented a problem, story-wise. I was looking for the hook, that thing that would drive the story forward and set up all the action to come. I had, sitting around, the new version of City-state of the Invincible Overlord from the Judge’s Guild. This is another classic D&D city/setting though far less detailed than Ptolus.

I looked at Ptolus. I looked at City-state of the Invincible Overlord, and I hit upon an idea. The party, members of the Legion of Dis, a mercenary company, are hired to overthrow the Invincible Overlord. The PCs are Corporals and Lieutenants, middle-management basically.

During the course of the battle to take the City-state, the heroes are betrayed, the leadership of the Legion is killed, and the Legion itself breaks morale, and quits the field. The PCs take the soldiers they’re in charge of, the ones who survived, commandeer a ship at sword-point, and flee across the sea to Ptolus. The campaign will be about how the PCs rebuilt the Legion and, eventually, return to the City-state to try and complete their contract.

This sounded, to me, like a good framework for a story. It still sounds like a great framework for a story. But it didn’t solve my main problem. What do I do with 700 pages of setting? I had chased the heroes up a tree. That’s the subject of the next post in this series and an important element in storytelling. But as I read through literally hundreds of pages of source material, I found that I didn’t know what to do with it. I couldn’t find a way to make all this relate to the Legion.

Storytelling in games is not like storytelling in movies or novels. In those mediums, there’s nothing in your story that you didn’t put there. Nothing you’re obligated to use. In games, you have shit you must fit in. This “shit” is called ‘gameplay.’ In this campaign all the gameplay, the adventures and setting that grants it Verisimilitude (about which more later,) revolved around Ptolus and I had no real plan for how to make the framework I’d created mesh with that massive tome. I couldn’t throw the book out, it was the reason we were playing. If this were a novel, I’d be under no obligation to use anything like Ptolus. I’d be able to craft my own city and probably, like Star Wars or the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, I wouldn’t put anything in there that didn’t move the story forward. This is why I think those settings are sub-optimal for gaming. Everything we learn about in the canonical three installments (the first trilogy of movies for Star Wars, the first trilogy of books for Thomas Covenant) exists solely to move the story forward. Lucas and Donaldson didn’t have any gameplay they had to fit in. They didn’t have 700 pages of Ptolus to make relevant.

The solution came when I was defending the story of Mercenaries 2 to my boss.

We had a lot of problems with the story for Mercs2. The story isn’t complex, it’s in many ways very pedestrian. The action movie, specifically the big-budget American blockbuster of the late 80′s we drew inspiration from, is well-trod ground. Our goal was primarily to use story to provide context for the player’s actions. The Mercenaries property is not story-based, nor should it be so.

In spite of this we still wanted the player to understand who the bad guy was, and why the hero was going after him. My goal here was to create an emotional reaction on the part of the player. Make the player hate the bad guy and want to go after him. So we cooked up a revenge tale. Classic. It was so simple, and so cliche that I knew it would survive the vagaries of development.

My boss, however, did not like the idea of making Mercenaries 2 a story of revenge. The idea of giving the hero, a Mercenary, a personal reason to go after the bad guy was antithetical to his notion of what the property was about. He wanted the player to make up his own reason. Each player, free to decide what his character’s motivation was, or ignore it all together. On paper, this sounds very nice but in execution this means there’s no reason for the hero to go after the bad guy, and that didn’t work no matter how we spun it. We needed to get the hero Up A Tree, for reasons detailed in the next installment of this series.

My boss wanted a massive geopolitical conflict with the Hero in the middle. We needed a conflict that would provoke superpowers into going to war. A smaller conflict wouldn’t result in the kind of hardware on the ground we needed. A revolution in Cuba might be fine for Ghost Recon, but we needed armies. Big ones.

It didn’t take long to come up with that conflict. In fact, like the Bad Guy himself, the Central Conflict of Mercenaries 2 was one of the very first things we came up with, and which survived development:

America and China fighting over Oil in Venezuela.

This is what my boss wanted. Not revenge. I understood why we needed this Central Conflict, I had been a designer on the original Mercenaries game after all, but on its own this is not a story. It’s just a framework for all the crap we needed to fit into the game. You can see where I’m going. The challenge was convincing my boss that we needed both. We needed the personal revenge story and the geopolitical conflict.

He wasn’t convinced at first, but he felt like with that Central Conflict he could ignore the personal story and let us writer people run with it if we felt it was important. Pretty quickly, however, he realized how effective having both was. “A story of revenge and betrayal set against the backdrop of war between America and China over oil” did everything we needed it to do in every situation. Every meeting. It didn’t matter who was asking the question, or why. When someone said “whats it all about?” that answer did the job. People got it. It primed them for the gameplay they were about to see.

It was as I told this to my boss; “Cam, we can have both. We can have the World in Flames and the Personal Story!” that I realized what the problem with Ptolus was.

I knew what the Personal Story was. The hero’s story. The tension that would pull the story through from the beginning to the end. I had got them Up A Tree, and that helped me understand the PCs and their motivations, but it didn’t help me understand Ptolus. I needed a Central Conflict for Ptolus.

As soon as I realized this, the answer was easy. I created the notion that Ptolus is rapidly being pulled apart by two opposing forces; the nobility and the guilds. This is a classic problem that really happened in many real-world cultures. The nobility represent institutional power, hereditary power, the old order, tradition. The Guilds represent material power. Monetary power. The new order. As a further tweak, I cast the nobility as the descendants of conquerors, so that race as well as class became an issue.

Now I was off and running. Every single character in Ptolus, the vast majority of which couldn’t be buggered about the Legion of Dis, fell on one side or another of this conflict. Peasants, beggars, thieves, ladies in waiting, it didn’t matter who you were, even organizations, all had a horse in this race.

Furthermore, the existence of the Legion in Ptolus affected this conflict. The Legion was viewed by everyone either as a tool to employ in this conflict, or a threat for the same reason. Ptolus had been an interesting but largely irrelevant book I was slogging through. Now it exploded with Post-it Notes as I tagged everyone and everything for application in this Central Conflict. Ptolus went from being a barrier to play, to the most exciting element of it.

In your game, you’re not free to throw out everything that doesn’t relate to the personal story. You have things you must include. In Mercs2 it was Tanks and Helicopters and nuclear bombs and whole armies fighting over something. In D&D, it’s your setting, the NPCs, the factions they belong to or fight.

Jared Sorensen insightfully said that when making your own game, you need to know “what’s it about?” It’s easy when hearing this question to get bogged down in the Personal Story. Mostly because people begin casting about to movies they’ve seen, where there’s often only the Personal Story. If you ask John Wick what Legend of the Five Rings is about, he’d probably say It’s about a place where honor is stronger than steel. But that’s a personal answer. The answer that lets you fit all the Clans and Samurai and Shugenja and the Seven Thunders in is The Emperor is poisoned and five clans fight to fill the power vacuum left by his absence. You put them together and you have The Emperor is poisoned and five clans fight to fill the power vacuum left by his absence in a world where honor is stronger than steel. That’s one of the reasons I think the story of L5R is the best story in gaming. It works on both levels.

If you have this Central Conflict, also known as the High Level conflict, you’ll find that all the crap you want to stuff into your game suddenly has a context. Like the False Backbone, this becomes a ready tool in your arsenal for game story. You don’t have the luxury of ignoring everything that doesn’t fit the personal story. You’ve got a game to fit in there, you need a Central Conflict to fit it all in.

Next, we chase the heroes up a tree.

End of Line

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