Mr. GC wrote:Yes, because those orcs really aren't trying to kill your character. Oh wait, they totally are, and you are competing to not make that happen.
You did manage to hit on just why tabletop gaming is so near universally bad. This notion that "It's a cooperative game, so it's cooperative in all ways at all times and therefore people are adverse to good play."
In actuality it's cooperative because you work with your party, but you still work against those enemies, over there. And that's where effectiveness comes in.
Competitive does not mean "there are things which can make you lose." That is not the definition of competitive. That is the immediate consequence of any activity that has a reachable failure state, which includes competitive and cooperative and singleplayer gaming (not in their entirety; Dark Souls, for example, absolutely cannot be failed. Nothing you can do results in the inability to win the game). So first I'm going to explain why the things you're saying suck, then I'm going to tell you what your argument actually is (because yes, I actually do know it better than you at this point, and yes, that's hilarious). Spoiler: then I'm going to make fun of it. Sounds a lot like a strawman, but that would imply I'm not right. And I am.
A) For a game to be competitive, there have to be two (or more) players who are playing adversarially because the game has an underlying mechanism such that at least some of one player's victories are another player's failures and vice versa. It's... a lot more nuanced than that, really, but that's good enough for this. A player is some agent that makes decisions with respect to the game. Those orcs are not making decisions. They don't actually exist. They are not players. The GM is making those decisions, and he is a player. You cannot compete with them. You can overcome them or fail to overcome them, but you can't compete with them.
Until you are invaded or go duelling or otherwise engage in PvP (or accept some metachallenge that involves competing with another player, i.e. first to punch Gwyn to death from new chars, measured in game time, GO), Dark Souls is a non-competitive game. Since you just went on a bitch-fit about how non-competitive attitude is tied into why tabletop gaming is terrible easy-mode bullshit, and are also using Dark souls as the goto example of your HARD MODE ONLY, BASKETWEAVERS, I'm going to have to come to a familiar conclusion: you have no idea what you're talking about. So, let's recap a bit. Dark Souls is a
non-competitive game that you can't lose. You are using it as an example to defend your style of playing D&D, which you specifically claim is neither of those things because they are both bad. That's beautiful, man. That is fucking beautiful. I am in god damn awe.
Anyway, let's go back to D&D. Since you don't think the players are competing, the only remaining competition can be with the MC.
That means you think the MC wins when the players fail an encounter. Alright. So, now that we've established that D&D is competitive by virtue of the MC trying to kill the players and that any good MC never sandbags himself... how the fuck does every session of D&D not end in 'that orc was a shapeshifted uberdemon, you die.' Seriously. We're talking about a competitive game where the MC's goal is to win by killing the players. You have to start showing us the
rules that prevent the MC from doing bullshit like that. Because it's a competitive game that the MC is trying to win, apparently. Have fun writing a new CR system and encounter rules that actually work to regulate the MC's role in this competitive D&D, I guess?
B) Here's the part where I help you out. Your core argument has nothing to do with competitive vs cooperative vs single player. Your core argument has nothing to do with the ability to permanently lose the game. You keep bringing these things up as examples of Bad Things That Ruin Games, but that's because your core argument isn't coherent and your examples make this really obvious by
doing all the things you hate. An actual example of a game that matches your demands is a multiplayer Rogue-like where death is character deletion and only one person (or small party) gets to reach the end of the dungeon.
So, let's address the three separate concepts you're pooling together:
1) Difficulty; this is how difficult it is to reach a game's victory state (or overcome individual challenges).
2) Competitiveness; this is whether another agent is in the gameworld making structured decisions within some rules and your loss is their win and vice versa.
3) Failure; this is whether or not a game has actual failure states or if instead you just loop the same or different challenges over and over until you overcome them.
Dark Souls is sort of difficult, it is largely not competitive, and it has no failure (you just loop challenges until you get past them). D&D is who-fucking-knows on difficulty, it is not competitive at all as played typically, and it has failure (character death). So what you're actually talking about is pretty obviously difficulty. You don't want D&D to be competitive (that doesn't even make fucking sense, and your examples refute it), you don't really care whether failure is a permanent state or whatever (your examples refute that, too, unless you delete saves or something when you die in Dark Souls). All you really want is for D&D to be difficult. Precisely, you want it to be exactly as difficult as it can be for you to still be able to reliably beat it, and you don't want it to be any easier because people not on your level don't deserve D&D or something hilarious like that.
tl;dr the only thing you're actually saying is that games should have only one difficulty, and it should be the difficulty GC plays them at. You aren't even arguing that you want difficult options (perfectly legitimate; 'I personally want to play games which challenge me.'),
you don't want anyone else to have access to options you wouldn't personally pick. I cannot make a parody more extreme than that. I seriously fucking can't. That's it. If I wanted to, the spoiled, infantile brat with the "MY WAY OR NO ONE GETS TO PLAY" ultimatum is what I would go for,
but that is what you actually are. And worse; you revel in it with a smug, shit-eating grin on your face as though your incessant whining about how people don't play your way is actually a gift to the world.
