Excalibur Con Panel - How to Ruin Everything: Third Person on Conflict, Mishap, and Catastrophe in Storytelling.

This is a live panel discussion from Excalibur Con 2026 featuring Third Person, the creative team behind the Midst Cosmos, discussing conflict and catastrophe in storytelling. The panel explores how to effectively deploy conflict in narratives—a fundamental storytelling element that many creators struggle to calibrate properly. The discussion centers on practical questions: How bad should things get for characters? What constitutes meaningful conflict versus gratuitous suffering? How do you balance serious consequences with maintaining narrative fun and engagement? The panel draws from Third Person's experience creating the Midst Cosmos, a transmedia storytelling project, giving the conversation grounding in actual creative practice rather than pure theory. The scope spans multiple mediums—games, fiction, and other narrative forms—suggesting the panelists address conflict across different storytelling contexts and audience expectations. Key themes appear to include the psychology of character suffering (making terrible things happen to beloved characters while keeping audiences invested), the mechanics of escalation and consequence, and the tonal balance between catastrophe and entertainment. The panel likely explores how different genres and formats handle conflict differently, and offers practical guidance for creators wrestling with pacing conflict and stakes in their own work. As a live panel, the format suggests conversational depth with audience energy, though the show notes don't specify whether there was audience Q&A or interaction. The 53-minute runtime is substantial for a panel discussion, suggesting either a full panel with multiple speakers or extended exploration of the topic.

Verdict: A focused panel on a practical storytelling challenge with credible creators, likely valuable for writers and game designers, but limited source material prevents confident assessment of execution quality.

Fiction rubric

• Writing n/a

  No transcript or dialogue samples provided; cannot assess script quality or dialogue sharpness

• Performance and production n/a

  No audio description or performance details given; live panel format noted but acting/production quality unknown

• Plot momentum n/a

  This is a panel discussion, not narrative fiction; plot momentum criterion doesn't apply

• Substance 3/5 33%

  Panel promises practical discussion of conflict in storytelling with examples from creators' actual work, suggesting solid content, but show notes don't confirm depth or detail of takeaways

• Delivers on its title 4/5 33%

  Title 'How to Ruin Everything' directly addresses the core topic of creating conflict and catastrophe; description confirms focus on conflict, mishap, and catastrophe in storytelling

• Value for time 3/5 33%

  53 minutes is reasonable for a live panel; without transcript details, pacing cannot be fully assessed, but length seems appropriate for the topic scope

How we score Fiction

Worth it if you're a writer, game designer, or fiction creator struggling to calibrate conflict and stakes in your own work.

Based on the episode description. AI-generated; it can be wrong.