I hope you've had a great Thursday! We're slowly but surely approaching our funding goal, and it's all thanks to you. We've still got a ways to go, and quite frankly it would be amazing to fund in the first week. Keep sharin', yellin', and pointing people our way so we can reach our goal and bring this mythopoetic game of tragic mechs to life!
Today, at long last, we're gonna talk about Conflict.
We've touched on Conflict a couple times as we worked through the systems we've talked about in these updates, but haven't really dug in. I think it's pretty fitting that this has ended up being the last of our deep dives (for now!), given that it's so core to everything else going on.
In fact, if you haven't taken a look at the demo yet, you should! It contains some starter Conflicts and (most of) the final rules for how to actually run one.
Every session in Dragon Reactor features a Conflict, and for most it takes up the bulk of play. Preparing for your first Conflict is the last thing you do during Session 0, and jumping in is the first thing that happens in Session 1. It's where almost all of the die rolling happens, and it's where heroes and villains are made.
To pull from the text again:
Conflict Conflict does not make the world a better place; it only makes it a different one.
Conflict is where players will spend most of their time during a campaign of Dragon Reactor. Every session should involve a single Conflict, with longer battles sometimes occurring over two sessions. Conflict comprises any kind of battle between two or more parties, though that usually means the skies fill with the screaming engines of war machines.
Conflicts are a race to the finish. All sides involved are trying to complete their own objective, and the first group to achieve their goal is victorious.
Conflicts only ever have one victor, and it always comes at great cost.
Structurally, a Conflict has 4 parts:
The factions involved
Your side's primary objective, put as simply as possible
What happens if you win & what happens if you lose
A 10-step Conflict clock for each side
Once you have those details, you're ready to enter the fray!
The systematic goal of a Conflict is pretty simple: fill your Clock before they do. Once a side does that, they're the victor, and play shifts into Aftermath after describing the last moments of the Conflict itself.
It's intentionally light, and very flexible.
To progress the clock, you simply need to succeed an action that has a real, material effect on the state of things and puts your side closer to your objective. This can be something like attacking the enemy, arguing with them, protecting your friends, causing distractions, taking out a leader, blowing up a key point, or anything else depending on what your goal is. The Poet ultimately decides what happens, but it's always to be discussed.
This lets the table set pretty much anything up as the Conflict. We've run rescue missions, base attacks, materiel thievery, defenses, chases, defusals, target-hunts, and even down-and-out slugfests across our campaign & playtests. Each one has been a tense race to victory, and each one has left an impact on the Pilots and their Players.
Why an even race?
We knew from the start that we wanted the core "who's gonna win" system to have a consistent structure and we pretty quickly decided on the "race" style idea of competing clocks. Thematically it works well: a fight is always about who's gonna win first, it's always a race of some sort, and bringing that in helped emphasize Dragon Reactor's themes in play.
Making it consistent took a bit of legwork. We weren't sure at first how many ticks the clock should have, but after a bunch of testing we realized that 10 resulted in a great average session length (1-2 hours on average, less or more depending on how clever or unlucky players are). One of the great, surprising parts of designing this is how creative the Poet can be with minimal actual planning for a session.
This isn't a game that cares about "balance" in a way a lot of other mech games do. You don't have to consider character level, strength of the enemies, how hard it is to do something, or anything like that. For pretty much every session I've run, I've gone in knowing what the objective is and how the opposition is gonna play dirty. I'll have a couple ideas for enemy forces that can show up, and a Rival to pull in if things need a shake-up.
I've been able to run 10 sessions of the game now with essentially no prep, and each one has been vastly different despite the mechanical goal being identical (get 10 clock ticks).
This isn't only thanks to the streamlined Conflict structure, though. It has just as much to do with Burdens and Boons.
What happens after the dice roll
In Quinn's post about Magnitudes, they briefly mentioned Burdens and Boons, and they're the last part of Conflict I want to talk about today. I'm about to talk in a lot of game terms, so again I recommend checking out the Demo for a version of this with delicious layout!
Depending on the result of a Check, the Pilot and Poet get to pick from a set list of Burdens and Boons. This is, basically, a picklist of "good" and "bad" results that affect the Conflict, Pilots, and sometimes side-characters.
As an example, let's take a Magnitude 2 Check. It needs 2 hits for a Proud result, but a single hit will still get you a Pyrrhic. If your check results is Pyrrhic, the thing you were aiming for happens (and progresses the Conflict if it should), but the Poet gets to pick a number of Burdens equal to the amount of misses rolled in the check.
If a Pilot rolls 3 dice on a Magnitude 2 Check and gets 1 hit, the Poet gets to pick 2 Burdens.
This leads to big swings, because you want to get your Hits, but if anything misses you get some pretty nasty return fire.
Burdens themselves are straightforward, but can be used very creatively. Here are some examples:
Progress an enemy Conflict clock
Mark a Negative Moment on an Anchor
Give a Pilot a Condition
The Pilot loses control and makes their next check at Magnitude 4
There are a few others, but I think these draw a pretty clear picture of what we're doing here. The Boons a Pilot can choose from if they reach Proud of Pinnacle are things like this:
Mark a Positive Moment on an Anchor
Gain 1 die on your next check
Give 1 die to a teammate on their next check
Add a word to a Refrain
Again, just some examples, but you can see the difference between these. The Poet's Burdens are as much about affecting the Pilot in a variety of ways as they are about shifting the state of the Conflict itself. On the other hand, the Pilot's Boons are about pushing themselves and preparing for their next big swing so they have a better shot at victory.
I've been asked before, "why not just constantly progress the enemy clock with burdens? Why not just keep dealing damage to the Pilots?"
To put it simply: that's not fun. Often, those are the least interesting results not just fictionally but mechanically as well. The Poet has a lot of toys to choose from, and importantly their role isn't to "beat the pilots", it's to help them tell a satisfying, dramatic story.
Like I mentioned in my discussion of Doom, this is a game about pacing. Burdens and Boons are two of the many tools the table have in their kit to play with that, and it always leads to something satisfying.
Push your luck
I've come to think of Dragon Reactor as a "push your luck" roleplaying game. It's not a new idea, but I think it's an excellent way to describe the core systems here. Pilots are going to be weighing their resources VS how badly they need to get a success and how big of a swing they want to make. You're wagering Modules and Conditions and all these things on your character sheet to hedge your bets and get that win as quickly as possible so you lose as little as possible, but it's never going to be a clean victory.
A perfect example of this is the first check made in our most recent playtest session. One of our players (Kevin Nguyen of Volley Boys and Bro Is It Gay To Dock) had missed a few sessions, and this was their first time back. Fresh character, new archetype, ready to roll and defend his home town.
He wanted to make a good impression, so as the very first action in the Conflict he aimed for a Magnitude 2 Check to find and take out an enemy commander. His odds were pretty good! He worked his way up to 7 dice with clever use of Modules and Conditions, and all he needed was 2 hits. Any 2 of those dice needed to show up with a 4, 5, or 6 and if he got more than 2 hits he'd get a Pinnacle result allowing him to really get some work done.
He rolled his dice, was silent for a moment, and said "hang on, I'm uploading a picture to Discord". And, y'all? This game's really good.
Kevin's results. Only 1 hit out of 7 dice rolled.
That's 1 hit. ONE. Out of 7 dice. Despite how bad this feels, it qualifies as a Pyrrhic result, which means he got what he wanted! Enemy target painted, knew exactly where to go, progressed the clock.
Unfortunately for him, it also meant I got to pick 6 Burdens. I could have absolutely annihilated some health bars or practically assured the enemy victory, but I played with the toys on the table and this session ended up being one of the best yet. It quite literally came down to a single die roll and the destruction of an entire town, and it was one of the best times we've had playing a TTRPG.
And that's what I'll leave you with!
Thanks again, endlessly, for hanging out and reading our long posts about some of the core systems in Dragon Reactor!
As of this post, we're right at 90% funded- so close to funding! If this game, these stories, and the work we do is something you like and want to support, then please back if you haven't already! Tell your friends, share in your TTRPG spaces, and help us cross the finish line.
