pvp vs pvp
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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.”)
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I think OOC Masq is silly given that our hobby is at its core supposed to be collaborative storytelling, and OOC Masq prevents collaboration. Also, there’s no way in the current era of speedy communication to prevent OOC conversations off game that shatter that Masq.
Also, in my experience, any time one PC learns juicy secrets about another PC through legitimate IC means, someone eventually claims some combination of cheating, OOC Masq violation, or staff favoritism. And in some cases, the person making that claim is totally unrelated to that particular instance of secrets being uncovered.
The most ridiculous version of OOC Masq drama I have ever seen went like this:
- Player A accidentally paged Player B with an IC secret about their character that they had meant to page staff about.
- Player B, realizing they were just given an IC secret about Player A’s character by Player A through OOC means immediately went off on public channels about it. They tried to get Player A removed from the game for the accident, claiming that if Player A couldn’t respect their own OOC Masq, how could they be trusted with anyone else’s OOC Masq.
- Player B continued to harass staff, Player A, and other Players about getting Player A banned for the next week before finally letting it go.
- Player B’s character took action against Player A’s character using the very secret he learned OOCly and was called out by Staff for this.
- Player B told staff that since Player A couldn’t maintain the OOC Masq, their character should just be eliminated, making their ban from the game easier. Player B could not explain how he came to know the secret IC, and admitted that he didn’t do anything to learn it.
- Staff banned Player B for being an arse.
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@MisterBoring said in pvp vs pvp:
given that our hobby is at its core supposed to be collaborative storytelling
Given that how you want to play is collaborative storytelling. Just because that’s what (general) we forum users tend to prefer doesn’t make that the default for the hobby as a whole.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
I agree with both of you! I enjoy not knowing everything OOC about other characters so I can discover it in play, and I enjoy knowing enough OOC about other characters to make RP happen.
If I’m playing in the Vampire sphere, I find it useful to know who the other vampire characters are, so I know who to look for if I want to talk IC about vampire stuff without a lot of hemming and hawing to make sure we’re not breaking the IC Masquerade by doing so. On the other hand, I don’t want to know what their sheets look like or what their backstories are because I enjoy that mystery.
But I’m also pretty sure everyone draws the line dividing “things they like to know about OOC” from “things they like to not know about OOC” in a different place. OOC Masq is a spectrum.
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@Autumn said in pvp vs pvp:
OOC Masq is a spectrum
Basically everything is, especially matters of preference. But everyone has their way, and their way is superior because it’s theirs, etc, etc.
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@Pavel said in pvp vs pvp:
Given that how you want to play is collaborative storytelling. Just because that’s what (general) we forum users tend to prefer doesn’t make that the default for the hobby as a whole.
I try not to slip into the idea of there being ‘wrong fun’ even if it’s not a style of fun that’s fun for me.
But. I’m not sure I can see this in ways that wouldn’t be wrong fun. This hobby is LITERALLY comprised of nothing more than dice and co-writing stories with each other. Co-writing stories seems to be a definition of collaborative storytelling, unless your only and entire RP is a string of endless vignettes.
Could you expain how it’s possible to MUSH without collaborative storytelling because I’m super confused and not understanding what you mean.
We're all mad here.
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@Jenn Sure. First:
@Jenn said in pvp vs pvp:
This hobby is LITERALLY comprised of nothing more than dice and co-writing stories with each other.
That’s not true.
That’s what we primarily do. It’s not the entirety of the hobby. MUDs are included, RPIs, weird shit I don’t even know about are probably included too. Cybersphere was an example I used earlier, and that’s definitely a MU. It had/has RP, deep and meaningful storylines. It also had the risk of you just being gunned down in the street, using combat code without any RP, because someone wanted your shoes.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
@Jenn said in pvp vs pvp:
Could you expain how it’s possible to MUSH without collaborative storytelling because I’m super confused and not understanding what you mean.
There is no one true universal definition for what a MUSH is. For some it’s more TTRPG+some writing. For others it’s more storytelling with (maybe) some dice or cards or something. Different players and games fall at different points along that scale.
But even if we accept the supposition that collaborative writing is the core, how you collaborate is open for debate.
Think of an improv troupe. It’s more about going with the flow on the fly, not knowing detailed backstories and collaborating OOC about the details and stuff. I think that’s akin to an OOC Masq.
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I guess I should have been clearer. It was stated earlier we were talking about PvP MUSH’s rather than MUDs or other things. I’ve not encounterd a MUSH that wasn’t storytelling first and foremost, but. There a a lot of things I haven’t encountered, too.
