Lose Some: Competition in Role-Playing Games

I'd like to thank the stalwarts and luminaries who I have consulted in making this post. I have played in domain games with each of them, and hoped to mitigate the narrow bound of one writer's subjective experience. Thank you to Bamzolino of the GLoG discord server, Primeumaton of The Madman's Menagerie, Josie of Occultronics, Wes of Pangur Ban Collective, and Mergo-Kan of A Sense of Immersion.

A PC in the default pose. From TSR's Birthright

The standard advice for adventure games is to prohibit or carefully limit player characters acting against each other. In your standard D&D games, the PCs are assumed to be largely working towards the same goals, acting as a team. Fighting between PCs is often a source of real-life discord.

In some non-standard D&D games, player characters are expected to act against each other. I've played in and run several domain-play games, where players take on the role of princes and principalities, and challenge each other in the realm of war, ideology, and competition. I've come to realize that the changes required in player mindset is easy to underestimate. Players still feel angry or hurt when the competition comes, even if it is the explicit premise of the game. Sometimes it feels like they're throwing elbows, and the feeling of going against other players is drastically different from the feeling of contending with NPC foes. I've thought a lot about why this is, the best practices for players, and how games can better fit the competitive style.

PVP Brain

I call the affliction of unreasonableness, tension, and acerbity that comes from this kind of competition "PVP Brain". Even someone who signs up for a game of intrigue and violence might keep their normal roleplaying mindset. They may not internalize that their character is probably going to lose a lot more often than they're used to if they play more common adventure games. 

If you're accustomed to winning most violent encounters, treating most others as setbacks in which you regroup and go win the rematch, and consider the remainder, in which you get fucking murdered, as the worst possible failure. But in competitive games, you lose half the time. You build something up and might lose it. If your PC dies in a normal adventure game, the collective enterprise of the party chugs on and you join it with a new character. If your PC dies in a competitive game, maybe your killer is sitting in your throne deciding which of your retainers with funny voices and charming personalities get to live and die, and maybe the grain of your fields is going into their silos rather than yours.

When PVP Brain sets in, the DM is often one of the first casualties. Players become more likely to request as many mechanical bonuses as possible, come up with every possible mechanical obstacle for their foes, argue the fairness of the application of all of this, and generally behave worse than they ever would in a cooperative adventure game. They may start angle-shooting outrageously. Things which are normally treated like "flavor" or "fluff", any piece of the narrative that players have control over, may be suborned to the self-glorifying power of PVP brain.

On average, every player in even a mildly competitive game is losing way more often and way more keenly than even a moderately lethal OSR adventure game. It's hard to know how that feels if you're not accustomed to it, and agreeing to play in such a game is often not enough.

This is most keen in domain games where you have a single PC like in most adventure games. I've played in games where each player is a rotating cast unto themselves, like a royal dynasty. I've also played games where each player represents the entire domain unto themselves-- playing as France rather than its prime minister, for instance. Games with distributed characters or entities for players to control are less susceptible to PVP Brain if players keep in mind that the death of a beloved character is often closer to HP damage than the scary failure state it is in adventure games. Losing members of your dynastic can be something that is inevitable, to be avoided as much as possible but not to be flinched from, and not to be considered as a sign that you necessarily did anything wrong.

(Some say that in their adventure games combat is a failure state, but we're being for real here.)

Consider the incentives your domain system offer. Many reward consistently turtling up, building up your holdings, and risking as little as possible because advancement can be done on ones' one while competition is risky and destructive.

Art by Reneford. From the Realm.

Because of instincts and norms players may have developed in adventure games, many are hesitant to instigate conflict. They may enjoy making the sort of character who is wild and dangerous, but often their eyes are bigger than they're stomach. They have to go to someone who's just enjoying the game their own way, say "I'm being the bad guy at you," and somehow not flinch when the targeted PC (not even necessarily the player) says "Hey quit it, that's a dick move," Let's assume your players have an inborn real-life instinct to be susceptible to reasonable requests not to fuck with people. It's a rare player who knows ahead of time how much to dim that instinct for in-game chatter, at least once you age out of the innocent sociopathy of high school.

For this reason, the campaign and the system should probably have markers to signify that conflict is a normal state of play, and encouraging players to instigate it. I've seen games where you are mechanically rewarded for starting— and even for losing— wars, games where there's an explicitly normal non-villainous form of raiding you can undertake, games where many players' domain holdings are mingled with others' lands and their population is already raring to use that as an excuse to conquer a bit more.

Generally, these incentives aren't enough! Almost every player I know does everything in their power to avoid aggression. I say get experimental! Make it so your yearly taxes come exclusively from raiding, and specify whose peasants are getting the short end of the stick. Make it so you don't actually declare war, it automatically comes as a fait accompli when multiple players double down on trying to influence an area. Make it so there's fewer domains than there are players, and control is a game of musical chairs. Ooh, ooh, make it so when two domains are close, one will gradually become the subsidiary of the other, and the rulers must jockey to see who comes out on top. Make it so players must choose between types of conflict rather than between conflict and cooperation. Cooperation is often so strong anyway. The more the game creates conflict, I believe the less people can apply their mismatched previously learned mindsets, and the less PVP brain can harsh the vibe.

(One of my beta readers reminded me that their home group is incredibly competitive, and that they have no issue being induced to freak up and wreck each other. My advice won't strictly apply to such natural talents.)

My greatest success so far for a competitive game was a Trojan War-style scenario. It was explicitly framed as a game where the red team was going to end the game defeating and sacking the home of the blue team. Much of the game was commanding soldiers, and when rival PCs met, their fights were resolved in a single opposed die roll. Beating the enemy by any reasonable margin killed them. The first time one PC killed another, the player apologized anyway! When the city was captured, the bloodthirsty commander of the victorious army gave them theretofore unhoped-for merciful terms. Even when the game is about killing each other and war, players will try to make things easy on each other. It probably helped that the players were divided into teams, so they got to have friends to cooperate with who were okay with them aggressing against others (on the rival team).

You certainly don't need to stamp that out as a DM, but you should keep in mind that there's no way to push them overboard towards being obliged to be more competitive than they want to. PVP Brain, and other things I want to cover later, can make players hyper-aggressive, but not in the way you might want. I suggest that it comes from the wound of the wrong mindset applied to competitive games, and is not simply the correct mindset for a very competitive game.

The Terms of Battle

In adventure games, PCs are often capable of extreme and total war against their NPC enemies. They will break truces, violate every norm, and use lethal forces as a first resort. They are wolves in a world that is usually incredibly hostile, and this kind of behavior often makes sense for the goals of play.

In competitive domain games, it's more normal for players to want to engage with the norms of their setting that limit conflict. They don't like executing another player's little guy (unless the PVP brain has set in), and want to keep hostages or captives. They hate (hate!) torture, and consider needless cruelty of that kind to be beyond the pale. They want to fight with honor.

This is great! Most competitive games benefit from conflicts that are usually less than total conflicts of extermination. But there is a barrier between the player and character that must be considered. The player is a modern human who has probably grown up in a stew of ideas about equality, punishment, and justice that may mismatch them with the society presented. If it's normal for the victor in a war to burn the loser's villages while the loser watches helplessly in a castle, they may balk to do it and be incensed if it's done to them, and treat it as not only the act of an enemy but a demon.

Players are not always on the same page about what is a limited conflict and where an escalation is happening, and because they don't know that they're not on the same page it can get frustrating. The worst thing that can happen is when one player thinks they're establishing a boundary for the game's social contract or engaging with a safety tool (the sort of thing you should never lie about) and the other player thinks they're negotiating in-game (and rubbing their hands together thinking about how much they love lying.)

Often, players are accustomed to the norms of capture from the perspective of prisoners. They ruthlessly and immediately try to break free from every orc jail they find themselves in, and often the DM is trying to abet them because imprisonment is often awkward and feels bad for the campaign's goals. When the players are suddenly in the role of the captor, they may have to deal with what it feels like to deal with a defiant and squirming prisoner. In many places and times, the common response to prisoners who tried to escape was to execute them. In some places, noble prisoners were asked to take an oath not to try to escape, and that oath was taken seriously.

I find as a player that squirming after my little guy has been captured is usually just prolonging a spiral of loss. It's best to negotiate terms or let my little guy just lose. Ultimately, players usually capture each others' PCs because they don't want to execute them, but squirming too much is challenging that notion. At worst the captor player feels like their mercy is being taken advantage of, and that they "should" execute prisoners far more readily, starting with the problem character. This dynamic doesn't come up often for PCs in adventure games, and often is not considered beforehand. Be forewarned! Prisoners in these games are establishing a soft iterated prisoners' dilemma, where defecting might kill them and future prisoners.

The man 

Establishing norms around prisoners and their attempts to escape behoove such PCs, but interestingly you may find that "establishing norms" is much weaker than one might naively assume in competitive domain games. Even if the DM prepares a list of cultural norms around conflict, the player is still just a player in a game. They may object if their main PC's cousin is executed for violating a truce in a neighboring city even if the norm is well-ingrained. Their cousin had a funny hat and was almost level 2, you dick!

In many times and places, rulers are endlessly trying to maintain their reputation as honest exemplars of their society's norms. They may be deceptive and disloyal, but to be known as deceptive and disloyal by all your rival powers was often a major problem. Players will not care about that nearly as much. They may keep it in mind, but behind every rival lordling who violates the culture's norms is another player that they already have feelings about. In each PC are two people, and the one who's a modern person trying to have fun wins a lot of slack for the one who's violating the customs of a culture that isn't even real.

This means that players can and will trash their own reputation to get ahead, and they will not necessarily face much punishment from other players. To pick up the slack, if you're setting up a domain campaign, you should therefore consider if acquiring a tyrannical reputation is going to provoke friction from NPCs, especially the NPCs who are under such a person. You probably don't want to make consequences so heavy as to straightjacket the choice to follow the customs of the country, but games are hardly hurt if the ruler PCs constantly have to deal with unruly vassals in the best of times, and offending their sensibilities will create interesting problems.

Unceasing Rage

Competition between players often feels more viscerally engaging than contending with NPCs. Your opponent may be as dedicated to winning and as wily as you are, and they are not obliged to foreshadow threats or abide by the other ways that DMs stay "fair." But keep in mind that when the conflict ends, even if they despoiled your city or quartered your heirs, you as a player don't want to commit to make them your enemy for the rest of the game. Campaigns are long, and the sweet tension of losing a conflict will untense after a time. It's generally more interesting if old foes may one day work together than if not, even if that potential is never realized.

Certainly you want to avoid a situation where your enemy has learned that you're going to spend all your time hurting them, even after they win a war or force a decisive concession. Think about what that game will be like! Sure it makes sense for you to want to hurt an enemy who hurt you, but eventually the game should move on into other diplomatic territory. It kind of sucks, at least in the games I have experienced, to pull down someone with you because they hit you once. It's like that cruel EDH player who focuses down the person who did 2 damage to them in the early game, or worse yet carries forth vendettas from previous matches. I think players often do this out of a sense that they're demonstrating good game theory, proving how damaging it is to mess with their little guys, but the main thing they're encouraging is for them to be driven fully out of the game so their opponent can at last have some peace and quiet. Often the opponent will be loathe to do this because it feels bad to drive another player out of the game. This is a nice notion, and you should not reward it with a game of chicken.

People can get truly angry. They can get tilted, so out-of-game mad that it creates awkward and unfun situations for everyone involved. I have tried to give tips for player mindset and game design to prevent this, but it has happened in almost every domain game I've played. The tension spills over from roleplaying through PVP brain to genuine rage. When this happens, do not try to solve it in-game. Address it directly, whether you see it in yourself or if it's a wider situation. Whatever approach someone is taking, it isn't working and needs to be adjusted. Sometimes someone learns through anger that competitive RPGs aren't for them. More often, they just need to step back and adjust. We can all help each other in such moments.

The game system can be of aid by making major conflicts as short and decisive as possible. The longer things drag on, the more needling and incremental advantage players try to eke out, the harder it is to win or lose with grace. The one thing players hate more than having lost is the process of losing. Perversely, players tend to be tenacious, and will defiantly fight to the last man when it doesn't really make sense, prolonging the part that sucks the most for them, often because they're working from the adventure game mindset where fighting to the last is usually rewarded, and giving up is sometimes seen as frustration with the game.

Therefore, the DM should consider when the outcome of events should be presented as a done deal. I know a DM whose domain game has been very successful with this. Wars, in their many battles and advances and vagaries, are resolved with a big die roll, and the victor makes their stipulations and the loser, who is informed they've already lost and surrendered, has to deal with them. Obviously there is tension between this approach and the normal high degree of latitude given to PCs, so you should be as clear as possible what parts of your game might enforce such truncated outcomes, and remind people the first few times they might come up. Playing in this same game, I was defending my city-state against a large navy and one of the players was surprised when I reminded them that if I win, I may have captured their city-state on the opposite side of the peninsula. To that player, the conflict felt like a major sea battle on my turf. The DM did well in reminding them that a lot can happen in a military campaign, and the toss of the dice represented way more than they may have been thinking of.

Let the outcome come quickly. Be clear what is at stake.

I tried to find the source for this but no one posted it with credit.

I note that players are generally mild about their victories. Even when PVP Brain makes them go hard after a rival PC, they tend to be very merciful with any populace they conquer along the way. If you are trying to make a game where cities are despoiled and countrysides burned, you will need to put work in. I might set these up as choices with clear mechanical benefits, just so the player doesn't feel like a heel for doing something normative for victors to do in your setting. Make clear that if you sack a city, it will reduce their willingness and ability to act against you, and that if you don't, it will be a test of your soldiers' loyalty, so you aren't risking nothing by being magnanimous.

In domain games, PCs should probably be risking catastrophic loss from time to time. The game should be ready for this to occur. When the PC ruling family is deposed, are they out of the game? Are they set back so far that they'll never rival anyone else again? Probably that's not the sort of outcome you want to go for. If PCs can be deposed, there should be interesting things that non-ruler PCs can do, and it shouldn't feel like a consolation prize. Non-ruler PCs should be intensely valuable allies, and you should consider gating as little as possible behind formal rulership of a domain. Otherwise, consider some way for players who fall behind to catch up. Make development hit diminishing returns, or let nimble, unencumbered PCs get to take advantage of opportunities their ruler PC colleagues can't.

Beware also the thorny problem of conquest. Domain games often sell the fantasy that if you play well enough, maybe you can conquer vast lands and have many people under you. Defeated lordlings may bend the knee, but player characters are an order of magnitude more spiteful on average. In many ways this is the same problem as PCs taking each other captive, only worse because the loser is given some power and leeway with which to spit in their new liege's face. My brother calls this the "Spiteful Vassal Problem". The D&D setting Birthright has special blood magic related to rulership, and if a vassal breaks their oath of fealty their liege can immediately tell. A construction like that puts the balance towards PCs being able to conquer each other, leaving the option to go back on oaths of loyalty but with complication. Decide as a DM if you want to tell stories together where PC domains can gainfully conquer each other or if it's a fool's errand, and arrange the game to make it happen.

Coda

My most important piece of advice for competitive games, for DMs and players alike, is to accept that other players will make decisions you don't like. In a cooperative adventure game, you may not even notice. In a competitive game, when your ally betrays you for what you think is a stupid reason, it can be hard to keep your cool.

You have to honor the decision anyway. The game does not work if you get mad because players do something you wouldn't do. People will be suboptimal and they will be erratic and things from outside the game will affect what they do. What's more, they have access to information that you don't. They have had different conversations and different plans than you, and secrets abound in competitive games that you won't be privy to.

It's hard to understand why everyone is doing what they're doing, so just try to make it fun. Make it fun to fight you. Make it fun to beat you. Take big swings. Check in with people. Ensure that your in-character and out-of-character thoughts are distinct, because you'll find in competitive games that your character is lying about things which are definitely not okay to lie about between friends and fellow-players.

I love the sweet tension of good competitive play. It can be done without gall and vinegar, but it requires a deliberate mindset shift if you are accustomed to other forms of RPGs. Realizing how you think is the seed of changing how you think.

May your reign last a thousand years, if you can keep it.