pvp vs pvp
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@Pyrephox “You can’t solve an OOC problem with an IC solution.”
From your lips to God’s ears. Perfectly crystallized.
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@Pyrephox I’ve been fiddling with Rhost in my spare time, I do have a cool concept for a game like this. But about halfway towards amping myself up to learn Rhost’s finer details, I started learning Unity for a video game and have put my creative juices there for the moment. This has been a constructive conversation about what is needed in a MU* with pvp though and I’m thankful for those that helped me notice some of the stuff I may have missed; I’ve scribbled various house rules trying to tackle many of the issues that were brought up today.
Maybe the ease of newer systems comparatively is why so many devs go towards those languages, or maybe from the various reasons Ashkuri posted. I do get the pain of doing it from the ST side of things, been there as a staffer and it’s not always fun and sometimes outright painful.
I do completely agree though that the game I want to exist cannot exist unless I make it a reality. I’ve basically given up on most games at this point because they don’t hit the way they used to. There are no turn-key solutions, I just have to get my hands dirty with the code and challenge myself past what I’m comfortable with code-wise. And making games is challenging no matter what it is you’re making.
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Generally, I enjoy conflict with other characters. I tend to shy away from the use of the term ‘pvp’ because when it’s done well it’s just the same as any other collaborative storytelling effort we do on these games, and while your characters may be in conflict the players aren’t. I’m with @Pyrephox’s points above. Having OOC communication available for these sorts of things heightens the experience for me.
I’d probably join a WoD game with a lot of ‘pvp’ in it just fine, but the idea presented earlier of having no OOC discussions at all would really turn me off. Half the appeal of being on a MU* for me in general is the OOC community, the chatter, and all of that. If all my games were just log on, role play, log off, then I wouldn’t have this cool group of online friends I’ve made over the decades, and I think that’d be unfortunate.
I know some people really like that entire OOC disconnect, that’s great but it’s certainly not for me, though I don’t tend to shy away from the confict with other PCs that much.
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It seems what our friend here is after is less of a modern MU and more a new version of something like Cybersphere, or Sindome. Where you can and will be shot, stabbed, mutilated, abused, assaulted (yes that kind too), etc, etc, etc all because you had the temerity to step outside of a safe zone.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
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@Livia This is kind of where I fall too. I definitely did less OOC discussion/avoidance of it earlier when I was on a lot of WoD games, and it doesn’t bother me when people prefer less checking in. I’m neutral on it for myself.
But I personally have found that many people I run into now are a lot more relaxed and willing to change it up with RP/invite more and more diverse tension/conflict in RP when it’s okay to have that OOC check in, and a more overt understanding that saying “I’m into whatever RP,” does not mean that “and I am down with giving you whatever you want whenever you want it so go ahead and lay that assault and kidnapping scene on me 5 minutes after I walk into this upscale restaurant on grid/feel free to snipe me unseen because I forgot to change my clothing object before coming to the dive bar so I’m dressed inappropriately, since of course if I’m logged in I’m at your disposal.”
Sometimes I could do without the “and anyone who’s into gritty RP is obviously a psycho if I’m not in the mood–even if they’re not even remotely interacting with me or affecting my RP in anyway,” that I’ve seen too but again I think that’s just people peopling, and the desire to yuck other people’s yums that aren’t yours is not something I think is ever going to stop completely.
I enjoyed the thrill of non-consent-based places. But I think I’d only play on a private/invite only one where I trusted the people running it to vet and/or remove problem people from it these days. I’m just too old/low energy for that shit.
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One thing Requiem for Kingsmouth, a Vampire the Requiem game, did well was having tiers of characters not based on getting extra XP or having extra activity requirements, but based on what you wanted out of the game. If you wanted the full political-thriller-taking-power-fucking-over-your-friends game, then you came in as a so-called Political character that had a bit more stuff you had to do in your application. And that character was basically as Full Consent as it could be, you could be targeted for killing and all that jazz, all mediated through staff as per. Then there was a Support level where you got to do some political stuff, and you could be targeted for some PvP stuff. And then there were the lose-- I mean the non-political folks who just wanted to tell cute coffee-based stories with their friends. They couldn’t be targeted for anything, but at the same time couldn’t be involved in the political machinations of the game either.
My memory may be wonky so please feel free to correct me on the particulars, but this is in broad-strokes how I believe the game went and might serve as a model for future game runners.
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@Pavel That’s how I recall it as well. But honestly there were so many ways to do the machinations, that the non lethal stuff was kind of inherently more rewarding. Also the system allowed great diversity in types of PCs that could get involved too (non-vampires were quite valuable). If someone only focused on the ability to kill someone whenever they wanted to, that really wasn’t going to be as effective as in essence team building for their side, ect.
However, that was also a very intensely managed game, and when the person doing most of the managing couldn’t, and it had to shift more into a traditionally managed thing, it really became problematic because people didn’t have as much fun diversity to focus on. I do think that’s really why you don’t see as much of that style of game. It’s a lot of work, if you want it to be sustainable it takes a lot of cultivating/caring for it, and if playerbase gets too big or there’s not as much time for cultivating the atmosphere then you get the same old same old problematic stuff.
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@mietze said in pvp vs pvp:
But honestly there were so many ways to do the machinations, that the non lethal stuff was kind of inherently more rewarding
Agreed, though frankly that’s more what I think of when it comes to PvP these days anyhow. I don’t have five hours to do WoD combat shit anymore.
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@Pavel oh the glory days of days (or weeks) of being timestopped/frozen.
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@mietze To be fair, I didn’t really do a lot of the OOC discussion stuff really either back in the day, at least not to begin with, but I would have moments of it. I played some pretty antagonistic characters that I thought should’ve ended up dead or whatever but no one really seemd to want to because I guess it was more interesting to be threatened/attacked by a street ganger than yet another bar scene? idk really haha, but I do remember my Haunted Memories days having a lot of people coming to me and my antagonsitc character for combat tutorials and the like. I do miss the thrill of that sort of non-consent place too, but I also do remember losing a PC unexpected to IC conflict and it wasn’t that fun at all to just have my story be over now. So in the end so IDK. I like conflict and understand that sometimes it ends in PC death but I try to avoid actually ending PCs in the end, maybe I’m just too soft after all.
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@mietze With nary an “RP Room” in sight, so we’re just stuck there on grid standing around like we’re waiting for the bus. Ah good times (they were not).
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@Pavel See I never said want a cybersphere where you die as soon as you step outside the safe zone, just something inherently more dangerous. People tend to blow these things out of proportion – if there’s any PVP at all, diehard PVE players have a tendency to distort things and overstate how bad they really are. This happens in all games.
@Livia I agree that making friends and socializing is fun, hell I even remember when we had several chats in the past (on HM too I think lol). I still have many friends from the old MUSH days so I suppose taking it TOO far for metagaming protection purposes might be kind of lame and missing the forest for the trees.
Out of curiousity, would you be interested in a game that has such communication semi-public? Or would you need the private @mail/page system for it to be the kind of communication you want? Maybe keeping it to channels would be a good medium ground, with subchannels for coteries and such?
@mietze I agree with both sides of this sentiment. There’s got to be a good tension-building middle ground between jumping people for their misspelled descs and needing to ask permission for every interaction.
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@Cygnus I mean I guess I don’t specifically NEED private communication, just being able to chat on channels etc would probably be enough, but I also don’t really see how limiting it is beneficial. I know some people really like it though.
I guess I can’t see how, in a system as complex and full of niche interactions as World of Darkness or Chronicles of Darkness (and others), you can really take away OOC communications. Even if we’re just RPing in a room and some conflict arises at some point I’m going to have to explain ‘I’m using X power with Y modifiers due to this merit and that clan bonus.’ Because I can’t imagine you can (or want to) automate absolutely every niche interaction in these rules systems.
Paging people as a way to get RP happening is also pretty standard in my experience, and you don’t always want to broadcast that on public channels for a lot of reasons. But I could probably make do with just public channels and the like if the game was interesting enough.
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If anyone actually does end up making the PvP WoD game of their dreams, I’d play. Put me on your mailing list.
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@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:
People tend to blow these things out of proportion – if there’s any PVP at all, diehard PVE players have a tendency to distort things and overstate how bad they really are. This happens in all games.
This has literally happened to many of us. Repeatedly. Please stop telling us that describing our actual lived experiences is “blowing things out of proportion”.
It’s like your argument about PVP video games. I’m glad that you’ve found at least one game or one guild with a non-toxic PVP community, but there is a very real and serious problem with toxic behavior in online multiplayer games, and it’s worse in competitive ones. Especially if you can be identified as a woman or other minority group. This problem is rampant, and many of us believe (backed by some research, though admittedly not enough, and basic human psychology) that it is a direct result of the core game design combined with inadequate moderation.
I’m not saying that all PVP games are doomed or that nobody should run one. I’m just saying that the “golden days” you’re yearning to go back to were literally miserable for many of us, and the drift away from them wasn’t a bug for us, but a feature.
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I played on the same game as @Ashkuri and had many of the same sorts of experiences there, and I echo many of the same takeaways. “PvP” does tend to be higher stakes than what “PvE” can provide, and higher stakes are generally more exciting. Whether that is worth the additional baggage is a personal preference, but I disagree pretty strongly with some of the assertions in this thread that PvP doesn’t drive story, or that PvE (as it is commonly run) is just as thrilling.
I also don’t agree that PvP needs to mean character death/mutilation, or this sort of Running Man + Mad Max dystopia where PCs are subject to devastating consequences 24/7.
On one game I joined, maybe a week into playing there, I attended an event where PvP combat occurred. It was the first combat of any kind I experienced on that game. I was instantly one-shotted by a veteran player. I can see how for many people this would have been an instant turn-off and they would have logged out and never logged back in. I thought it was dope as hell. I decided to lose an arm, my PC languished for days in medical treatment, there was a whole side-plot spun out of his journey to obtain a mechanical arm (this was a sci-fi game), and he ended up switching factions in the resulting STORY from the simple act of me getting pwned in my first ever fight on this grid. It was fantastic, it was the best thing that ever happened to me on that game.
Nobody made me do that, though. The only part that was “enforced” was my guy getting shot and being out of the fight. I didn’t have to go do chargen again.
On the flip side of this, I stayed on that game and I ended up running an opposition faction and many times that meant organizing and facilitating PvP events, and no matter how much communication there was about what would be allowed to happen, or what stakes there were for PCs involved, or even preset outcomes to where the fighting would end up overall, could ever outrun the resulting drama around the mismatch between people’s expectations for how things would go and how things actually occurred. There is simply a scale and trust issue with running PvP on an MU* that TTRPGs (which we should remember that WoD was designed as a TTRPG) do not have.
You can do everything right and communicate everything down to a T, but on a long enough timeline, somebody is going to get their wires crossed about how something went down and become convinced that something was done unfairly. There are players that I would probably still be friends or friendly with today that do not want anything to do with me because of PvP that I was doing my level best to make as fair and story-oriented as possible. It’s just the nature of the beast.
God, I love it though. We should probably start a support group, PvPers Anonymous.
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@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:
if there’s any PVP at all, diehard PVE players have a tendency to distort things and overstate how bad they really are.
I’m fairly sure that what I’ve said in this thread excludes me from the diehard PvE category. While at the same time the games you’re lauding, or at least looking back on wistfully, had telenuking for crying out loud. So you have to be much more clear and specific about what you’re after, because our experiences of those times are different enough that adding references to other forms of gaming media are just muddying the waters.
@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:
Out of curiousity, would you be interested in a game that has such communication semi-public? Or would you need the private @mail/page system for it to be the kind of communication you want? Maybe keeping it to channels would be a good medium ground, with subchannels for coteries and such?
In my experience, if players want to communicate privately, they’re going to find a way to do so. Banning or removing the functionality from the game just makes policing troublesome behaviour all the more difficult.
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@Cygnus said in pvp vs pvp:
might be kind of lame
Y’all. It’s 2025. Can we maybe think about trying to use a different word here?
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i do want to respond to the idea that OOC masque is necessary because RPers can be immature and can’t be trusted otherwise: if that is the case with the players you have, that’s a player problem and those players will find a different way to cause problems.
it’s basically treating a symptom instead of the cause. if you don’t have a masque and a player throws a hissy over something, then boot the player.
she/her | playlist
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@Roz Agreed.
Don’t get me wrong, I do love an OOC Masq. Mystery is fun, especially in a game culture where people are friendly and engaging, and they’re all as invested in the idea of maintaining the mystery as I am. I’d even argue that for a good version of an OOC Masquerade you’d actually need more trust than otherwise.
(For those unfamiliar the OOC masquerade is the concept where one doesn’t know details about other characters. “Don’t talk about players, alts, or OOC info your character wouldn’t know. Keep the mystery, protect the immersion, and respect the game.”)
