Conflict as Motivation and Resolution

December 4, 2025

Or: Everyone always says what combat is doing, but nobody ever asks how combat is doing.

The TTRPG community (well, the blogging part of it) sure does love to define combat as one specific pithy thing. Sport, War, My Balls¹, there are others. Save for the last of those, I don’t really care for any of these definitions! For one, I think they very quickly lend themselves to being derisive - Sport vs War in particular feels like it was designed for posts rolling their eyes at people who like interfacing with capital-C capital-S Combat Systems. I would also say that it can also feel a bit thought-terminating in the ways that many labels can. As much as that can hit the broad strokes of why we might do something, I think we can go a bit deeper than that.

Combat’s probably the easiest version of this to pin down because, for better or worse, a lot of the hobby’s not that far from its wargame roots. I’m going to zoom it out to conflict in general, though - in part because I’m thinking/writing more about non-combat conflict in games lately², but in part because I don’t think what I’m writing here is unique to combat itself so much as the fact that it’s usually just the most developed expression of such. This is definitely for games that, well, care about resolving conflict as a game activity though, and generally the GM+player variety because that’s my background for the most part. It probably won’t map to everything and that’s fine.

Disclaimers out of the way, let’s start with why you’d set up a conflict in a game.

Why do we fight with each other? This is what it sounds like when blogs cry #

So “why does conflict happen” and “how do conflicts resolve” are two questions theoretically answered by the classification of “Combat as X”. They’re related but not 100%. The “why” is what I’m calling motivation.

As the aforementioned Combat as My Balls gets into (and as I’ve stated in previous pieces) I think there’s a couple of reasons why it happens. I’m going to try to break it down into the ternary I’d come up with for that quarterbacking post:

• Game state expression: How the mechanical game state changes.
• Character expression: Demonstration of something more narrative.
• Personal expression: The personal preferences and predelictions of the player.

Game State Expression #

I would consider this a big one people are grasping at, intentionally or unintentionally, when they try to set out the aforementioned dichotomy. A classic breakdown here for conflict is if a game cares more about tactics in the moment or strategy on the whole. This isn’t the whole of the sport vs war dichotomy, but it’s at least a large portion of it: the two are certainly not strictly at odds but I would posit that they’re frequently in tension, as anyone who has strong opinions about combat balance/fairness in either direction will intentionally or unintentionally tell you.³

I don’t love the characterization of something as a “puzzle” for this kind of thing, but I’m going to choose to read it charitably in this case because I think there’s something I can pull from thinking of it as such (and because it’s useful for informing how people see this kind of thing, because it’s a common framing in this context). When something is described as a “puzzle”, it’s usually because you’re given certain inputs and are asked to figure out the best way (or the only way) to get a desired outcome. I would say that of the two varieties, a more tactics-focused game has conflict that’s more obviously closer to a “puzzle”. But I would posit that strategy-focused games are frequently also quite “puzzle-y”: it’s largely a question of the scale of conflict. The latter case is how it can get treated as a “fail state”: if you got there, it often means you didn’t do enough of the puzzle prior to the conflict in question or that you didn’t perceive the bounds of a puzzle sufficiently to properly address it.

Character Expression #

So this is where we start to get away from that dichotomy into what is, in my opinion, more interesting territory with respect to the strengths of the medium. Why would we engage in conflicts that are either trivial or borderline unsolvable? Which is to say, why would we make a “bad” “puzzle” on purpose? And players don’t always just beeline for the answer - why do players solve a puzzle “badly”? One of those answers gets in to narrative concerns.

“Puzzles” as such are usually about the change in state through resolution: what’s the outcome, what resources got spent or mechanical states changed along the way, what’s the next course of action given how all that shook out. Conflict and resolution of it is usually a cornerstone of a narrative, either constructed authorially beforehand or in retrospect. But beyond actual tangible outcomes, we are interested in conflict because it tells us things about characters. This is one extremely useful outcome of an “inconsequential” conflict and choice: knowing how someone acts when something is on the line is only one facet of a person’s character, you know? I can guarantee that you, the reader, can think of several things about yourself that have nothing to do with anything that really matters in a life-or-death situation. Are those not also relevant? To Be Resolved notes (correctly, I think) that a lot of Character Vs Self style conflicts come from, for instance, self-imposed rules: if a character is never seen as in a position where they are easily following their self-imposed rules, you’re not going to see a proper contrast when they have to have a hard time not breaking them.

At the risk of making your eyes roll out of their sockets from the cliché, a setting can be a kind of character too in this regard: not in the sense of how something plays out, but what’s even considered a conflict or not. Is everything between combat kind of brushed over or is that where the real juice is? Is getting from place to place challenging, trivial, easy but expensive, a secret fourth thing? Are people generally helpful or do they require some kind of persuasion or quid pro quo to get anything? What is the “expected” mode for resolution - is violence accepted, unsavory, unacceptable?

Personal Expression #

Every player - and remember, a GM is a player too - has different “things” they do or don’t want to do in a game. My brain rebels against leaving obvious advantages on the table a lot of the time, for instance - my latent optimizer-brain wants every last crumb even when that’s kind of unnecessary or silly or it would obviously be better for the narrative if that weren’t true. Some folks are just absurdly stingy with resources, or risk-averse to a prohibitive degree.

And, as I stop burying the lede, this frequently makes people do stuff that doesn’t make sense either in a puzzle or a characterization sense. Sometimes people don’t want to engage in conflict because the nature of the conflict is something upsetting or unpleasant. Sometimes they do want to engage in it in a particular way, because it’s funny or cool or just something they want to do. Sometimes they start trouble because they’re bored. And sometimes they start trouble because they got Chekov’s Railgun in act 1 and by god they’re going to fire it in act 3.

In my opinion, from the GM side, this is also where conflict as a pacing mechanism lives - and for that matter, where conflict as “the fun minigame we all get to do” lives. Whether or not it makes narrative sense or whether or not it’s a properly good puzzle to solve, sometimes a trash encounter or a little roadblock is great to break up (or raise) tension, or just space out events. An underrated secondary aspect is that it’s good for teaching players what they like and what to do when shit hits the fan for real: you can’t expect people to run before they can walk unless they’re old hands at this kind of game, and they can sometimes come in with a complete misconception of what they actually want. The middle of a deadly car chase is a bad time to learn you hate driving.

Ok, so how do we resolve conflicts then? #

We’ve gotten into some root motivations thus far, but that’s not the whole picture. I believe the nature of the handling of said conflicts generally falls into three⁴ things. I’ll define this as resolution. These three are:

• Preparation: Coming to a conflict with a resolution at the ready
• Cleverness: Figuring out an unexpected way to resolve a conflict
• Execution: Doing the “expected” thing or brute-forcing your way through a conflict

Preparation #

Sometimes, we want to have come into a conflict with the resolution in hand. This is what I’m calling preparation: you’ve got something going into a conflict that’s either going to solve it or heavily mitigate it and you’re using it for its intended purpose, or on the flipside you’re coming into a conflict underprepared and so you’re bound to lose. High-preparation games involve long planning sessions, plans, predetermined tactics, specific loadouts, etc. Low-preparation games live in the moment and often don’t track things from state to state nearly as much, or “retroactively” add in a kind of preparation in the narrative that practically manifests in some other way (such as quantum items, flashbacks, etc).

When expressed as a matter of changing the game state, this is often a matter of locks and keys, be those locks soft or hard. Sometimes players anticipate a particular kind of conflict and prepare something with the intent of defusing it, or they just bring something as a matter of course and it turns out to work. Or from the combat-game perspective, players frequently come up with a well-rounded party in anticipation of different kinds of enemy compositions.

In resepect to charater expression, this one can be simple: what does a given character bring or do in anticipation for kind of conflict? The obvious vectors of preparation are more tangible things like items or spells, but there are more “baked in” ones like skills - maybe this is the one time swimming actually counted, why did you take that instead of something else? You can also look at it from a matter of how willing your characters are to prepare: Are your characters willing to be diverted to solve something painlessly (e.g. take on a “sidequest” or similar) and is the nature of that diversion preferable to a more straightforward solution?

Some players are Preparation Sickos who will be absolutely thrilled to do this. (I’m absolutely like this for equipment loadouts…when they feel like they can actually matter and aren’t just D&D Magic Item Christmas Tree Modifier shit, anyway.) Others dread the thought of committing to anything beforehand and resist the concept. (I’m absolutely like this for stuff like D&D spells that trivially neutralize one very specific problem. I probably don’t need to remove diseases today, but what if I do?)

Cleverness #

Sometimes resolving a conflict can be done through quick thinking. This is very often a result of bouncing off something in the scene, but it could also be using something prepared in a more unexpected or unusual way than originally intended. Improv-heavy games are “high” in this category, for obvious reasons. “Low” is where you get things that veer more towards being extremely systems-based, probably. (Obviously there’s a lot of flex on both of those).

This is where hail-mary ideas and weird ways to avoid otherwise-certain consequences sit: positions that by “normal” play would have to be prepared for or endured, but because you were smart about it, you found an alternative. It’s also, because it’s my definition, where “mini-puzzles” live: stuff that’s definitely intended but requires more specific execution or consideration.

In respect to character expression, characters doing something in an interesting/unexpected way can definitely inform who they are as a character. Sometimes this is a revelation, but sometimes it’s just a reflection of who that character is. Given the nature of these things, this is often a “player thinks of something and then back-solves it for their character” situation. (Of course, sometimes it’s just not remarked upon as such and that’s fine.)

For a lot of players, this is what they come to the dance for. Thinking about tabletop games, in some ways it’s the biggest strength of the medium: things can go absolutely sideways or resolve fully unexpectedly in a way that, for instance, a video game can’t really handle.⁵ It’s not always what players want in every conflict, though - if someone came to a conflict to fight some stuff and another player short-circuits that, they might feel a bit deflated about it.

Execution #

I would posit that most conflicts presented in an RPG have varying degrees of a “default” answer to how they resolve. It’s the thing that preparation and cleverness are trying to get around (or make more favorable), but especially for more board-gamey stuff, sometimes it’s more or less the extent of the game. High-execution is where I think a lot of the aforementioned capital-C capital-S Combat System games live: sometimes it’s about what you bring to a given fight, but a lot of the time it’s just about doing the dang thing. Low-execution would be a game that doesn’t really have a “default” as such, or at least doesn’t emphasize it in the same way - games that do single-roll combat as opposed to an actual minigame kind of thing, for instance.

The game-state application of this is kind of apparent in the above framing. It might be described as a fail state, or it might be the thing you’re really here to do because that’s where 90% of the game lives. Or both!

Character-wise, if this isn’t most of the game, it can be interesting to see what kinds of things fall back to that “default”, especially when it’s combat. If it is, though, all kinds of expression can happen through it. This is the argument for trash fights: it’s the same as “pointless” action scenes in movies.

Player-wise, I think this is another big dividing point between the “sport” and “war” framing. I’m tired of talking about that so go read any of the other things I linked up there about it. What I will say is that the spectacle of Execution, for better AND for worse, is very frequently something that doesn’t particularly hit either of the other two metrics. When you’re locked in, you’re locked in, you know? Sometimes it’s just about watching the fun action scene play out.

What do we do with this? #

Shit, I don’t know. Make a coordinate grid about it or something. Put all your favorite and least favorite games on there and argue over what the best quadrant is.

My serious answer is that I hope this helps folks unravel a bit of what a conflict system can be designed to do, and what designers and players might want it to do. As with a lot of preference tools, everyone knowing what they want going into something is a useful act of focusing. I think it’s good when we think about what we want games to do and a lot of that does indeed comes down to the nature of why and how conflict plays out.

As a closing thought, I would also say that quite a few TTRPGs that care about conflict have some kind of mix of all of these motivations and resolutions. When a popular game feels kind of unfocused and not particularly good at any one kind of play and folks are confused why it’s popular, I would posit that sometimes that lack of focus is a kind of strength from this perspective. It means players who like different things can all find something to enjoy in the same game at the same time, and that’s pretty important to a lot of people when all is said and done.

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