(no subject)

[rowyn]

* "Natural Adversary": rather than pitting the PCs against armies of darkness, the government, or a conquering nation, they'd struggle against some impersonal natural force. The PCs are trying to survive/conquer against a tsunami/plague/meteor strike/earthquake/etc. I'm envisioning this less as "survivalist fiction" and more as a race against time, to find a solution before the end.
* "On the Cusp": great or terrible discoveries have just been made, or are about to be made. New powers have emerged in the world. The PCs have the opportunity to be the first to make discoveries or invent things that could change the world -- and the first to find out what the ramifications of those things are.
* "Breaking the Cycle": similar to the above, but with more emphasis on the PCs or their world being trapped in a vicious cycle, which the PCs must either deal with, or find a way to escape.
* "Non-violent Competition": Most games and the majority of sf/fantasy genre fiction revolve around violent conflicts. Even though most of my games are light on combat, the potential for violence has been omnipresent and the games have emphasized life-or-death struggles. I'd be interested in doing a game where the chance of death was minimal and the central conflict revolved around something else. Political struggles, competing enterprises, getting the scoop, propogating a way of life or religion, are all possibilities that come to mind, and I'm sure there are more.
* "Unique Abilities": The PCs have powers or skills that almost no NPCs in the campaign setting has access to. (Possibly extending to "unique to a particular PC").
* "Extraordinary People": The PCs have unusual powers but not unique ones for the setting.
* "Ordinary People": The PCs have typical powers for their setting. (Which might still be unusual by modern standards.)
* "Global Scope": The campaign's central conflict is likely to have large-scale consequences. This will actually encompass anything from nationwide on up.
* "Local News": The campaign's central conflict is fairly localized -- city-wide or smaller, and unlikely to shake the world.
* "Small Stories": The central conflict is personal and only really important to the PCs and/or a small number of NPCs.
* "Injustice": Authority figures in the setting tend to be incompetent, corrupt, and/or evil. Revolt and rebellion in this setting would be heroism.
* "The System Works": Authority figures tend to be competent and beneficient. The system may not be perfect, but it's not the enemy. Threats come from without rather than within.
* "Wheels Within Wheels": The truth is hard to find; lots of people are lying for their own reasons, or are misled themselves. The PCs may have a tremendous struggle figuring what's really going on, and may never know for sure.
* Political intrigue: Which applies not just to governments, but any organization where accomplishing goals relies on convincing and manipulating people into doing what you want. Some high schools have more political intrigue than some governments.
* Violence: Ie, combat, ie, the staple of most gaming. On the list to gauge interest and see if there are people who are dismayed or intrigued by the idea of an RPG that doesn't have it.
* Innovation: Problem-solving through new ideas. Eg: The political solution to pollution might be to get everyone to agree to stop using coal-burning factories. The violent solution would be to destroy the factories. The innovative solution would be to find a non-polluting substance to replace coal. Innovative solutions tend to be the most saisfying and the hardest to come by.
* Romance: I'm running this game. Good luck avoiding it. >.>
* Honor: I'm using this word as a stand-in for "non-pragmatic value systems", or people who do things which would appear irrational to someone who didn't buy into their idea of honor. Eg: ritual suicide infeudal Japan, or those Hollywood heroes who'd throw aside their guns to have a fistfight because shooting an unarmed man would be dishonorable.
* PvP: I've never managed a game with PvP that went well. Game of October was explicitly supposed to be focused around PvP and it still barely happened. In the end all the players wound up switching to the same side. I'm half-inclined to insist of player cooperation in games, but still curious/masochistic enough to see if others are interested in PvP.
* Antihero/villainous PCs: I've seldom done anything with PCs as the bad guys, and am somewhat adverse to it. But having done it so rarely I'm also intrigued by it. Check this box if you're interested in yourself and/OR others playing villainous PCs in a game you're in.
* Sex: My RPG experiences have mostly kept sex off-camera. I don't anticipate changing that, but I am curious how people feel about it. The main thing that would get me to include sex in an RP is if it were somehow the focus of the story. I think Postvixen once suggested usng sex in place of combat as a form on conflict resolution in an RPG, and that thought amuses me, although I dunno how (a) I would make it work in terms of mechanics or (b) if it could sustain my interest through an actual campaign.

This list has gotten unwieldy and I think at some point I lost track of what I really wanted to accomplish with it. I'll just go with what I've got now.

[Poll #1100626]

Polls may not have been a good way to go with this one, either. :) Just leave comments if you want to clarify your votes or don't like the way this was set up.

Comments

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

PvP might work better if there are two separate sessions, one session for PCs on one side, and then the next session for the people who are on the opposite side. Since the biggest problem I've noted running PvP is that people start getting disgruntled with one another personally, but they're all still sitting at the same table and it starts to get uncomfortable.

[gen.livejournal.com]

PVP bothers me because people will ALWAYS take it personally, or get smug about it and hurt one another's feelings.

I'm relatively okay with violence, but in past games it was a 'half hour of roleplay, four hours of combat' thing. That I'd like to avoid if at all possible.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Not that I'm specifically interested in playing -- but I'm interested in seeing the results. I may thus have contaminated your poll; if so, I apologize.

I don't see anything that lends itself to a robotics/AI adversary (or player) situation -- but it seems to have possibilities.

===|==============/ Level Head

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

'natural adversity', 'unique abilities' and 'pvp' get minor icks or mehs from me, but I'd be willing to try them.

If the game focused on politics I probably shouldn't even try to play because I wouldn't.

And for 'violence', well, I like games where some detailed, well-defined rules-based resolution system is used to decide important events instead of just narrating them. In practice, that pretty much always means combat. Presumably in the 'nonviolent' game it wouldn't be deadly combat. }:)

[rowyn]

'natural adversity', 'unique abilities' and 'pvp' get minor icks or mehs from me, but I'd be willing to try them.

Out of curiosity, what makes 'unique abilities' a turnoff?

If the game focused on politics I probably shouldn't even try to play because I wouldn't.

Heehee! I was telling John, "When I put that option down, I thought 'Why am I bothering to include this? I'd like to have Terry in the game." :)


I like games where some detailed, well-defined rules-based resolution system is used to decide important events instead of just narrating them.

I have come to see the value of having rules around that help decide important events, so I promise to at least try to have some interesting mechanic for conflict resolution.

[rowyn]

My feeling is that if people can't avoid getting disgruntled with each other personally, they probably shouldn't be doing PvP. :/

[rowyn]

I ran, what, twenty logs for Piper? Out of which how much was combat? :D (Did Piper ever get into an actual fight?)

There were some long fights in JTM, but out of 60 or so logs, I thought only three or four had combats in them; perhaps I'm misremembering.

[rowyn]

Not that I'm specifically interested in playing

Aww, why not?

[gen.livejournal.com]

No no no no, I didn't mean to imply YOUR games. Just 'Games in the past that have annoyed me'.

[rowyn]

Aha, okay. I don't think there's any real danger of any game I run having any more time spent on violence than JTM did. :) In my experience, text RPGs aren't well-suited to combat in general, and PBEMs even less so than MUCKs.

That said, "non-violent competition" has been a surprisingly popular theme so far. I'm gonna have to give more thought to non-violent storylines. I've always wanted to run one but past player groups didn't seem very enthusiastic. Maybe I just need to come up with a good setting and mechanic.

[gen.livejournal.com]

I've actually done combative PBEM games, and usually what happens is that people start making NPCs and causing destruction elsewhere because they're bored and want to do something while their main character is off fighting one soldier in an alley. So a small invading force becomes an EPIC BATALLION of soldiers with TRAINED LIONS and LASER CATS and NINJAS and... You get the idea...

The end result is that it takes six months to end a battle, and usually the town is flattened and nobody can remember why they were being invaded to begin with ;)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

You left off 'antiheroes' from the 'dealbreakers' poll - that'd be the 'other' I put in there.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

Well, the thing with PvP is that the setting is a huge factor about how people feel about it. We can't easily say, "I never want to compete with my fellow player," as players often compete with each other even in friendly scenarios. Explicit competition brings something new to the table, however.

We play these games (presumeably) for fun. Obviously, fun isn't always about winning, nor is it about everything turning out ideally all the time, but I'm going to assume that at least a significant portion of the time, the fun isn't contained only in the excercise of creativity. Losing has to be a possibility for things to be exciting, and in PvP there is always necessarily a loser. In designing something to be fun, the nature of how one can lose has to be considered. In some games, losing is a setback that can be overcome with more work... lose the battle but continue the war. In some games, losing is the end of the game, but the game can begin anew... you're playing Starcraft or something. In some games, losing is the end of the game, and it's game over, and it's your only shot, but you can lose with some dignity and recognition... witness all the stress of the Olympics. And in some games, losing is life or death for the character, with all the permenance implied.

So we divide PvP into these degrees. Imagine a scenario in which you are part of a competition, a non-fatal one, the stakes are recognition, imaginary money, etc. You can be a fresh-faced adventurer, ready to give your all... you can even be a mustache twirling villain, seeking personal gain, and in either case you can lose with aplomb and merrily shake your fist at your opponent as he makes off with the prize. Along the way, you can have your various adventures so as not to leave empty handed. You can invest in this character, experience their ups and downs, but it's easier to leave without being sore.

We have degrees in between, but for the sake of illustrating the point, let's jump to the other side.

Now imagine a scenario where the stakes are all or nothing. You are asked to give a different level of life to a character, to invest blood, sweat, tears, and soul into this creation and you are further asked to believe in their convictions with all your heart. Put hours and hours into playing them, into developing them, into striving for them because their goals are your goals. Then imagine they are utterly thwarted, pointed out to be completely wrong-headed, are dominated after a close or not-so-close conflict, and end their existance ignominiously, whether through death or simply from the end of the game.

We can say that players should be mature about it, that it's only a game, even that it's part of telling a story, and some stories are tragic. However, no matter who you are, if you cared enough about the character to make it believeable, you're going to take it partially into yourself, and suffer the sting when it's dashed. You may not necessarily get disgruntled with each other personally, but it will be a personal injury, and it's hard to smile at your fellow player after such a wound. The best of us can do so, but in the end, is it fun? And those of us who are not the best... well, it'll get ugly, and you can understand why that might be, even if you can't condone players acting out over it. In either case, it's a discomfort everyone, winner or loser, can sense and feel. To say they ought not to be doing PvP wouldn't cover the whole of it. I think even the best of us probably doesn't have the stamina for all-or-nothing head-to-head more than once in a blue moon, even as a creative excercise. Good players must be responsible, courteous, and open-minded, there's no getting away from that. Still, having all this borne in mind will, I think, contribute to game design.

So, in the end, the question of whether people should be doing PvP, or whether you should run it, isn't so easy to answer. It could probably do with a whole different poll itself. It can be fun, but it can also be more stress than everyone needs.

Gee, I sure talk a lot, don't I? >_>

[telnar.livejournal.com]

My general reaction to PvP is that if it's everyone for themselves it is probably better in a shorter campaign than a longer one, since it is likely to interfere with the ability of players to discuss the game out of character.

If there are clear-cut sides, then you that objection is less of an issue, but you will need to find a way to construct the scenario so that characters have a reason to think of themselves as individuals rather than as cogs in the machine which achieves their side's goals.

On the whole, I suspect it's easier to make a campaign work without PvP than with it, but I don't want to express too strong an opinion.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

Ohhhh, I want laser cats and ninjas!

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Well... maybe it's just overload from all the games I've been playing lately, but 'I am the special destined one' seems to bring out the worst in some people, and most of the recent examples I can dredge up are pretty cheesy (like the GM in my D+D game giving our cleric a special strength-draining wand one session, and then letting him shapechange into a completely different character the next). If it was done well or the setting supported it better it's not so bad, which is why it's not a dealbreaker.

Politics: I was in an Amber PBEM briefly... playing a laid back surfer dude who happened to be a prince of amber but didn't really care about all that backstabbing stuff. It, uh, didn't work. Basically, as far as I could tell, nothing ever happened, and then I eventually got bored and quit. In reality, the game was pretty active, I just wasn't in on any of it.

[rowyn]

Oh, yes, that's very well put, and I think your second example addresses what people hate most about PvP. And I agree, if the virtual stakes were lower more people would enjoy PvP. I think that's part of why PvP games like Team Fortress, Unreal Tournament, etc., are so much more popular than PvP (as the default) in MMORPGs.

I should clarify my original statement, though: I didn't mean to imply that people who took PvP (of whatever sort) personally were somehow inferior, or even uncommon. Just that you shouldn't play a game you might lose if losing is almost certainly going to make you mad at whoever beat you. Playing a game with high stakes and odds that aren't in your favor is a mistake for almost everyone, myself most definitely included.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I agree. I probably got off on a tangent, mostly I just wanted to put forth some considerations for pvp and thoughts on it in general.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I think that may have been a failing of your GM.

If I had been running it, the first thing I would have done would have been to have someone die in your hands carrying the MacGuffin, followed shortly by the villain destroying the Shadow in an effort to get it back!

*purrs innocently*

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, sign me up for the romantic honor-sex PvP. *grin*

Hmm... nothing is a real deal breaker for me. A few things done badly might be, but I can think of examples of them in GoO where they went fine, so I'm not too concerned it's a danger with you.

[telnar.livejournal.com]

One of the problems with excluding violence is that it becomes harder to build realistic adversaries. In a social system which functions well enough that even those with genuinely evil intent are unwilling or unable to use violence, there are probably many NPCs who can deal with problems better than the PCs (since they have the ability to maintain those social norms).

The trick is that what the PCs are doing has to seem important to them, and if it was caused by intelligent agents (as opposed to a natural process), then you need an explanation for why those agents aren't prepared to use violence to further the goals that they have in opposition to the PCs?