betterbemeta:

These are OK, but remember that there’s many kinds of conflict. Not just the “you gotta pick one, arbitrarily gotta sacrifice the other” kind. And not every consequence is one that is obvious or devastating to the progression of the story, or it may go on to be psychological or formative to future decisions rather than “you chose the option that saved one person but rocks fall and kill the other person”

Your character’s flaws always provide some resistance to their goals, but that might not always be overt or manifest at key moments. Overcoming these flaws to perform a difficult action, or hiding these flaws, can also create kinds of conflict.

put drawbacks on magic– but be sure they aren’t merely contrived out of the blue, and those drawbacks do not need to result in failure for conflict to exist. A device working clearly, depending on what it does and who uses it, can be just as controversial as a device working but requiring baby souls or w/e.

the disasters your characters cause don’t always have to be obvious, nor do they have to impede your character in the physical sense to impact their story. Everything going right, but then having to face the implications of that, can be just as bad as everything going wrong in order to achieve a goal.

Your characters can cause disaster itself by being right or facing the consequences of success, too. It’s not just being incorrect that leads to pain.

when faced with two choices, your character and even the reader is not always aware they are making a choice. Sometimes conflict comes afterward when you realize what you have committed to, when your actions felt perfectly straightforward.

TL;DR– conflict doesn’t necessarily literally impede or punish a protagonist so long as the protagonist must navigate it to develop or reach the end of the story. Sometimes conflict can arise from NOT being impeded… we usually don’t know what we’re actually striving for or what it will really be like when we get there, not really.