Thorn RPG released! I have not played it, its description just reminded me of the thing I am always thinking of. Thorn is a Diceless, Healthless game where you use resources to move the game forward. Enemies die in one hit. I don't know how much fighting is in Thorn, but it sounds like that's the main conflict it puts in people's way (as many games do). I have been wondering for a while what we, as small rpg people, could do to move away from this.
I've had a game I've been drafting that tried to lean into this! As much as we want to push against combat as a source of conflict in the games we play / the stories we tell, one of the other things I've been thinking a lot about the directionality of conflict (specifically in RPGs). Because of the out-of-game nature of the role playing game (a bunch of people, often friends, sitting around a table / on a call, having a conversation about a story they're engaging with), the conflict is very often extrinsic to the core group of players: we're a fantasy adventuring party fighting monsters, we're a squad of mech pilots fighting a war, we're running a summer camp being plagued by The Lindwurm, etc. As a result, one of my big design goals recently is to break down "the party" as a construct in the role playing game, and write a game that pits the different player characters against each other as their own sources of conflict. This isn't a new idea or anything, you can look at Dream Askew // Dream Apart, Firebrands, Kingdom, and many more as potential examples of this. But for me, they are either not antagonistic enough, or don't provide the tools I want to navigate that conflict interestingly (I think this is because the thing I'm wanting to do is rather specific, and not because those games are missing anything).
All this to say that thinking expansively about conflict and violence as it involves the stories we tell is super exciting to me! Both in how it pushes my design and how other people act on those same impulses. Can't wait to see more games engaging with this.
