Friction Forward

Conflict sets the shape of your RPG stories, but friction gives your stories texture.

Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

Lately, I've been contemplating the contrast between conflict and friction in adventure design and at the gaming table.

The early 2000s taught us that we can create consistently good roleplaying experiences through conflict and stakes setting. If one explicitly thinks about the conflicts characters engage in and the stakes of those conflicts, it leads to powerful narratives at the table rivalling any prestige drama.

I learned those lessons with many others and incorporated them into my game design projects and in the games I ran. Seeing stories as based around central conflicts does work, but I still found myself challenged sometimes in a project or a game scenario when trying to create an interesting narrative. Conflict is about having the right opponent. It doesn’t matter if it’s nature, another person or yourself, thinking of a story beat in terms of conflict requires you to find the side B to your side A.

Sometimes that side B likes to hide. Sometimes that side B... doesn’t seem to be there. Maybe it doesn’t align.

I run into this problem more when I design an adventure than when I run a live game. When you write an adventure, you have much less purchase upon which to rest conflict; you are writing a structure for people you will never meet who make decisions you know nothing about, so conflict can only be broadly defined.

When playing or running games, I have found that framing every challenge as a conflict also results in “conflict fatigue”, a situation where every beat is so hard fought that it destroys tension. When you constantly fight against an opponent, each fight loses its intensity.

What you want is to preserve the focus and intensity of conflict while still being able to offer colorful and challenging situations to your players. What I find helpful in this situation is to switch how I frame my story beats. Instead of conflict, I frame my beats in terms of friction.

Something in the Way: Using Friction

Conflict is the clash between opposing forces over some important goal or resource. Friction represents inertia, complication, and difficulty involved in reaching a goal or destination. The key difference between conflict and friction is the former requires stakes and an opponent, while the latter does not.

What I’ve found about looking at my TTRPG adventures and scenarios as fractal layers of conflict is that the layering of stakes within stakes diminishes the stakes I want my players to care most about. What I want are a few good conflicts, with obstacles and complications in the way. The goal is to create texture within a small amount of conflicts so that each conflict feels vital and moves the story forward. Friction doesn’t need an opponent or stakes, so we can add it without diffusing the concerns the story seeks to raise; We are adding bends and hills to the otherwise straight road of our conflict.

Conflicts are the keyframes of my story, and friction creates interest and movement between each keyframe. What this looks like in practice is I create a core conflict and few sub-conflicts. Each conflict defines an opponent and what is at stake. Then, for each conflict, I ask “what complicates this conflict? Why can’t we just start fighting?”

Friction shouldn’t be so difficult or complicated that it pulls the players in the opposite direction of the conflict. Too much friction and we’ve developed “sidequest syndrome” where players have so many extra sub-tasks to perform it overloads working memory, forcing them to ask: “what were we doing again?” In any type of storytelling, over-reliance on techniques is to be avoided.

Friction Forward

There’s more to be said about the layering of conflict and friction, but I’d love to hear from you. Do you use an approach similar to this when running or writing adventures? Would you like some examples of this in practice?