The Gaming Den

'Tis glorious. And it is criminally panned. Yet held up as one of the most impartial means of settling character (or, more likely, player!) disputes. Usually all in the same breath. Also, the cause of many a dice and pens and big gulps being thrown across tables...

In the last few sessions at the club, the PVP gameplay is ramping up big time. Now, we are running Vampire: The Requiem, so that's to be expected. However, even in Vampire, I've had a player complain (and rightly so) that most of the time, it ends up like "D&D no PVP style" and in the same breath thank me on the way back home for running a campaign where PVP is a legit threat (because Protean 3 is a bitch... among other things). From arguments over mission approaches to full-on ethical debates, sabotaging other characters deliberately, using Disciplines on each other, outright fist and sword fights, and now even blood bonding! And the players are only at the neonate level, barely out of being fledglings...

Anyway, to the questions: why is PVP not embraced more? Why are characters expected to somehow "get on"? And as a GM, do you allow PVP in your sessions and to what extent? I'd like to think in the 2010's we've learnt PVP is an enjoyable part of a healthy RPG campaign. Hell, I know it makes my GM life a hellva lot easier when I don't have to generate conflict all the time.

Many RPGs are explicitly geared towards an experience where the party are on the same side and any betrayal will disrupt the intended play experience. If PvP happens in tabletop then someone's going to have to stop playing for a while most likely, because either their PC will be dead or the conflict will have resolved in such a way that they are no longer playable, eg.. having abandoned the group.

It's profoundly different in VtM LARP where there isn't a single group the camera is focused on.

I depends on the game.

Paranoia is SPECIFICALLY about that.

Vampire wasn't [originally] about that, but you know how V:tM is the biggest example in the hobby of Death of the Author. All power games are built on cloak and dagger, and often the eggs that need to be cracked for your omelette are the other players' reproductive organs.

Fiasco inevitably devolves into this.

D&D? Yeah, no... d&d (or any other game which is based on teamwork and problem solving to overcome NPC opposition, for that matter) needs everyone on the same ship.

Mind you, I'll have to sort my feelings on cloak and dagger once again soon since I'm scheduled to run Vampire 5E in the near future (let's see if WW's apology was sincere and the nazi shit removed, because I find so much as one nazi dog whistle, I'm torrenting the hell out of that book).

There's also a difference between games like D&D, where each party member is expected to individually be a combat badass, and games like Shadowrun and Vampire, where being a purely social character who dies from being sneezed at is a valid life choice. And a big problem that arises is the use of social skills on fellow PCs. People never stop bitching and moaning if a fellow PC or an NPC is allowed to diplomance them into doing something in-character against their out-of-character wishes.

A D&D Bard might say "fuck it", and just go stab you in the face anyway when not allowed to diplomance. But a Face might just have fewer party coercion tools than a stabby guy who can threaten to stab party members.

Echoing that it really does depend on the game, but also depends on the players. I think we've all encountered at least one joyless asshole in our lives who uses the threat of PvP to bludgeon other players who aren't playing the game "correctly." People like that sort of poison the well because they're literally trying to soft reset other people's characters until they get one they like, while the other person just wants to play the damn game. There's no narrative stakes to this conflict, it's entirely OOC with thinly veiled IC justification ('Your character insulted my character's hair! This requires a duel to the death!' or 'My character has a big problem with Paladins so if you make one we're going to have to fight.')

Also unless the system is literally built around it, most systems just aren't balanced to handle PvP. The common advice when someone asks about PvP in DnD or its derivatives is "Don't, player abilities aren't scaled with player HP in mind, whoever wins initiative is just going to vaporize the other player." This makes the above situation x3 more frustrating because those players almost always build to exploit those balance issues.

It took me forever to accept PvP as a legitimate conclusion to a series of character decisions because I'd only ever experienced it as someone else going 'your character is wrong and I want you to stop playing them. Or maybe just stop playing period.' I've had fun with it now but I still prefer it when DMs set it up as an expectation in their campaign during the session zero.

It's generally only acceptable in TTRPGs when the game was designed from the ground up for it, and even then only for short bursts. For it to be fun as a means to itself over extended play, it needs:

• 1. All classes balanced to at least a 7:3 matchup (that is, out of every set of 10 duels, the loser loses no more than 3 times on average)
  2. Deep enough combat that the game hasn't been "solved" with a set of optimal solutions that cover all contingencies, or degenerate strategies.

There are more factors to making a fun PVP game, but those two are the foundation. Given the scope of TTRPGs compared to successful PVP games (DotA, Street Fighter, Counterstrike, Rocket League, Brood War, Overwatch, Go, Poker, etc.), it's a monumental design challenge.

shinimasu wrote:It took me forever to accept PvP as a legitimate conclusion to a series of character decisions because I'd only ever experienced it as someone else going 'your character is wrong and I want you to stop playing them. Or maybe just stop playing period.'

Boy, am I familiar with this. There's a reason why I got at home with virtual tabletops right away. In 22 years playing, I have only had one meatspace table I have really enjoyed top to bottom (non-coincidentally, one with vast majority of women). Ten years was a long time to grow a spine and learn that No Gaming Is Better Than Bad Gaming.

Nowadays I got zero tolerance for rat boys and otherwise garbage people, and they get rejected on screening (the few times we take new blood at the table, we screen people over).

...still, this got me thinking. I know for a fact two players got beef. I'd get second thoughts about Vampire, but the book is already paid for.

The only time I've really encountered PVP was in a D&D Game set in my DM's own custom setting of Everchill, which is basically a super cold prison island with a nefarious purpose and all that. Every time PVP happened, it's because we were all playing asshole prisoners who realized that this group was the only group they had but had to establish who was running the show, and a big deal was made out of using nonlethal weaponry to settle all duels (to the point where there were arrow types and the DM made sure each character had a nonlethal weapon).

It was more fun than it was terrible but that's because we were all in on fighting for dominance in a prison gang for that campaign.

As previously noted, a lot of RPGs -- possibly most? -- are built on the implicit premise that the PCs are a team. PVP under those conditions tends to arise from one of the players deciding to be a dick and disrupting the intended play experience for everyone else.

Also, games that aren't well balanced (most games) get even worse when the PCs end up fighting. There are plenty of groups where the stronger PCs are actually doing most of the work, but the objectively weaker party members still get to do cool stuff and feel like they're contributing, so it seems okay most of the time. It's going to suck the fun out of the game if such a group ends up throwing down, though.

(Ironically, the one D&D game I played in where the DM told us up front that there were no rules and we could fight each other all we wanted, there was no PVP at all. The PCs had a really obvious common enemy to focus on, though.)

If you want to run a game where PC-on-PC conflict is acceptable, and your group is on board, go ahead and do that. But there's nothing inherently better about such a game style, and it's going to be a very different experience from what a lot of people expect in their RPGs, so (as with any game) you need to make your expectations clear up front.

In many (most?) games, PCs have enough problems without having to watch their backs around each other. My experience is that PVP usually ruins the gaming session and has only a slim chance of being hilarious enough to make up for it.