On PvP and permanent injuries

[Ashkuri]

I’ve run a lot of pvp. Things that were successful:

• Clear rules set out ooc at the start so everyone knows what to expect
• Allowing “cinematic defeat” when people lost so they can topple over a cliff and lose the fight but not lose a limb or otherwise be grievously mangled
• Encouraging ooc banter and teasing in a fun way, gently nipping it if it starts to sound snotty
• Everyone using gear/weapons/powers that are clearly defined, and ideally automatic in the system

Things that were not successful:

• Anything outside the bounds of very clear dice vs dice that requires more subjective GM decision making.

“Politics” or social pvp was a disaster. Spy PvP was a disaster. People who don’t want to fight but want to do tricky shit to advantage their team, disaster. People who want to use special gear, perks, and magic that aren’t clearly defined so that they gain an advantage, disaster.

When everyone was rolling clean, no problems, people had fun. When it started getting into “I should be allowed to do this weird thing that means I win,” there were problems every time.

It would have been easier if that game had more things clearly defined, lol. PvP is exciting in a way PvNPC isn’t, but it can definitely get messy.

[Jennkryst]

@Roz said in On PvP and permanent injuries:

@Jennkryst said in On PvP and permanent injuries:

Since there is the distinction between PVP and CVC… wanna fight with folks? Stick it in your RP hooks, everyone agree to limits in OOC before hand, and then go forth.

I’ve reliably found that the players who put this sort of interest into their RP hooks have been the least capable of dealing reasonably with even mild IC conflict.

Yeah. That’s why instead of assuming people are cool with it, you could just go on RP Requests with ‘anybody wanna fight?’ and then discuss from there. Even if Player 1 is cool with getting mugged, Players 2-4 who are also in the scene might not be.

[Livia]

I like the idea of rebranding to CvC but it’ll never take – though I have seen PvP that really is about just beating the other player. OOC lies to convince a player to join a scene in a specific way ‘I’ll help you evade the authorities!’ only the then ICly set them up to get got.

I’ve had the ‘Hey I’d like to scene with you’ chat with someone I didn’t ICly get along with, get warned ‘Depending on how this goes, this could turn to violence’ and then when I agreed, extra people suddenly show up to help the other player out. Violence was a 100% guarantee, not a maybe, and it ended with my character dead and over out of seemingly nowhere.

That said, I really do enjoy going against other players sometimes, but like most forms of RP, it’s always been at its best when it really is a collaborative effort like other forms of RP. Discussions with the other parties, talking about what could or shouldn’t be attempted – sometimes you do want to surprise people so you might not mention everything, but sometimes with some chatter people will happily engage.

I don’t mind serious or permanent injury being done to my characters in the course of it either. Back in the days of Haunted Memories I had a mortal+ character built as a sort of ‘Hunter’ archetype, and one of my good friends needed to go away for a bit and volunteered to have his vamp be torpored by her to explain his absence. It drove so much RP as people looked for him and looked for her, and she ended up getting got but I had so much fun.

But I generally wouldn’t engage in serious PvP shenanigans with pure strangers anymore either. Some OOC communication beforehand needs to be done.

[Pavel]

@Livia Brb gonna trap Prism in a crystal… Will call it the Prism prison prism.

[Livia]

@Pavel Prism ponders Percy’s pernicious Prism prison prism.

[dvoraen]

@Livia said in On PvP and permanent injuries:

@Pavel Prism ponders Percy’s pernicious Prism prison prism.

I just wanted you to know I upvote for alliterative responses (ETA - bonus points awarded for username being part of the alliteration).

[watno]

It works well on Silent Heaven for a number of reasons.

First, there are no OOC channels. It can be fairly and easily assumed that all IC conflict is IC and consequence are kept IC and aside from OOC “you cool?” check ins (which are rarely needed because we have consent sheets). That said, you never know in SH what is happening on the other side of the line. So you might be fine, but the other player still might be OOC mad. But if they are, there’s really no avenue to turn it OOC toxic for the whole group.

Second, the game loudly and warns prospective players that their character will get shot, looted, etc etc. So it’s all up front and opt in.

Third, the physical conflicts mechanically resolve in minutes.

Four, you don’t lose your bit - and honestly, I think that tones down the ill will the most. There’s no harm that can be done that ends your story. As long as you want to play through to the end of the game, you can. So even if you get beat, shot, etc. there’s really no means by which someone can take your story away from you before you hit the end-game xp threshold.

And the community seems to be well policed for truly frivolous aggro nonsense. It’s easy to read through the veil of IC conflict mechanics to see potential OOC vengefulness and it is called out and staff will take action against it.

[Rinel]

@watno said in On PvP and permanent injuries:

Four, you don’t lose your bit - and honestly, I think that tones down the ill will the most. There’s no harm that can be done that ends your story.

This is definitely true. But it gives so much opportunity to change the story! I love it.

[Faraday]

@watno said in On PvP and permanent injuries:

It works well on Silent Heaven for a number of reasons.

Perhaps I’m missing something, but all of that seems very focused on physical conflict.

The majority of PVP interactions I’ve seen on games haven’t been centered around combat. It’s more about thwarting plans, taking a position someone thought was rightfully theirs, interfering with an IC relationship, making somebody look bad… heck, I had one player quit the game entirely over an IC prank (where no literal harm was done) because they felt the other player shouldn’t have gotten away with it.

Some of this is unavoidable, but at least on a co-op game there’s a set expectation that you’re supposed to work it out in a way that’s fun for all.

[watno]

@Faraday Oh. I just know the context around what happened to Rinel’s character so I was only addressing acrimonious interactions escalating to physical violence.

There’s plenty of non-violent PvP on Silent Heaven but as I haven’t personally been involved in any of it I can’t really comment on how it goes. But I can say there hasn’t been a single hint of OOC butthurt dropped in Discord or the one game ooc channel. So I won’t assume OOC acrimony doesn’t happen on a regular basis, but if it does it seems to be resolved quietly rather than blasted around the community.

There is plenty of IC bitching and moaning and jealousy and what have you, however.

[Apos]

I have complex feelings about it. Most of the games I play on my own are PVP games, and one of my earliest RP experiences developed organically from PVP on a game, and it was good and memorable enough it sold me on online RP to begin with. And then even before I started MUs, antagonistic tension in stories made for some of my favorite character dynamics of all time.

But man, for all the good times I’ve had personally in those dynamics going perfectly, I’ve seen them happen in just god awful ways to other people dozens of times more often.

For one thing, I think trying to achieve the balance that a competitive environment requires more often than not stands in tension with a strong narrative atmosphere. Fairness is always a good goal, but you can rapidly approach the point where unless everyone gets exactly equal storytelling, regardless of how excruciating they are to RP with and how miserable they are for GMs to attempt to entertain, the field gets unplayable in terms of balance. It can be extremely corrosive, and that’s why a lot of the games that allow PVP in close to unrestricted ways don’t really care about that kind of balance which creates enormous OOC toxicity and resentment.

In other words, competitive PVP needs a balanced field but in narrative games, but people are just not equally fun to RP with and not equally good storytellers.

And in more limited and restricted PVP, you are usually trying to avoid two separate poles and creating an enormous amount of effort in avoiding them. The first and most obvious, just bullying and people feeling they can push around characters weaker than they are without consequence, and without regard to whether the other player is having a good time. And the other, some character that really merits consequences, but it would be absolutely miserable for anyone to inflict it on them, so they are being incredibly obnoxious and a drag for everyone else to deal with, while trying to pressure other people into being the bad guy in a way that would be zero fun for them.

You can make a pvp game that addresses all those but the amount of time and effort involved is just hard to justify to me, when I could do other things that aren’t possible in a PVP environment that I think are generally better for story. Like you can make entirely collaborative systems without having to always worry about, ‘but what if the players are in opposition’. It skews the whole design, and you can’t ignore it.

[Third Eye]

I’m another who’s kinda struck by the focus on physical consequences like maiming as the seemingly implicit only example of a PvP consequence. I think losing status/getting fired/losing access to IC benefits is also a consequence for behavior but idk if players think of it as meaningful unless it’s attached to a +sheet’d demerit.

[sao]

@Third-Eye it depends on the game. I’ve definitely gotten loads of ooc and ic shit for firing people or demoting them. IC status can mean a lot to people particularly if it’s a consequence they’re getting for something that they, the player, believe their character was not wrong about.

[Pavel]

@Third-Eye said in On PvP and permanent injuries:

I’m another who’s kinda struck by the focus on physical consequences like maiming as the seemingly implicit only example of a PvP consequence

This partly stems from, at least historically, the tendency for certain kinds of confrontational players to go ‘all out’.

An insult? Fight to the death.
An attack on my assets set to weaken or undermine my influence? Fight to the death.
Not wanting to split the bill on this date? Fight to the death.
Didn’t watch the youtube video I sent them but still said ‘haha yeah’? Fight to the death.

For a long time this kind of person was pervasive enough that dealing consequences that weren’t physical was seen as pointless, because they’d come bnack with “nuh uh, we fight now… to the death.”

[Jumpscare]

@watno said in On PvP and permanent injuries:

It can be fairly and easily assumed that all IC conflict is IC and consequence are kept IC and aside from OOC “you cool?” check ins (which are rarely needed because we have consent sheets). That said, you never know in SH what is happening on the other side of the line. So you might be fine, but the other player still might be OOC mad. But if they are, there’s really no avenue to turn it OOC toxic for the whole group.

I’d like to partially contest this statement, haha.

Players on Silent Heaven do check in OOC with each other fairly often, and I encourage it. If someone is having a problem with a conflict, be it physical or social or [redacted], I absolutely encourage players to say something like this:

OOC Hey, this isn’t working for me. Can we resolve this now? Or FtB?

And it should be honored. Nobody should feel like they need to RP something they don’t want to RP. Silent Heaven is all about putting our characters into spooky and dangerous situations because we want to have fun doing it.

If you’re not having fun, talk to the players, and they’ll help find a resolution. There’s also no shame in moving to a lower conflict faction that better suits a less involved playstyle.

The Faithful, Guides, and Misfits are moderate-to-high conflict, Pallia and the Quills are low-to-moderate conflict, and the Hopefuls and Moonlighters are little-to-no conflict. There are also optional [redacted] with their own intermingling levels of conflict, on a different level of play.

[Rinel]

@Jumpscare

Yeah, I do think part of the reason the experience went well was that I checked in pretty frequently OOCly with folks re: Jocelyn being as horrible as she is, and I also expressed active willingness to have someone beat the crap out of her (wanted that as a catalyst for her to get properly scared about the place). I don’t know if it would have gone as well otherwise. But I also think that all games should have high levels of OOC candor and openness.

[Juniper]

Any time you design guidelines surrounding conflict to ensure everyone is playing nicely together, there’s going to be people who engage in a game of “I’m not touching you!” while trying their hardest to ruin the other person’s day.

Sometimes you just have to feel the vibes and know when to tell people to stop being a shit.

[Gashlycrumb]

Back in the early aughts we had The Blackhats Club where we’d sometimes meet and @mail on OGR or someplace. It was a handful of people who played antagonist PCs and talked about making it fun for other players. Both IC stuff to do and OOC measures like directly saying, “I want you to love to hate my character, not hate me or feel threatened, am I succeeding?”

This was fun. And is probably not PvP as we think of it.

We all had troubles from time to time with the bully types who would run up and try to immediately make it fatal, like, hop out of chargen with a new-minted combat-based character and immediately try to knife the Blackhat guile-based character and be the hero who killed the baddie. That seems like the kind of PvP that’s usually meant.

Sadly, I’ve seen abundant PvP the last few years but it’s overwhelmingly, “you pissed me off and I want to punish you, IC and OOC both,” or “I wanna be evil” but without the Blackhat consideration of if it’s any fun to anybody else, or it functions as plot/playgroup gatekeeping.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Juniper said in On PvP and permanent injuries:

Any time you design guidelines surrounding conflict to ensure everyone is playing nicely together, there’s going to be people who engage in a game of “I’m not touching you!” while trying their hardest to ruin the other person’s day.

Sometimes you just have to feel the vibes and know when to tell people to stop being a shit.

Somebody reminded me that I would say, “Pretend this is a tabletop game and all of us are sitting around the battlemat in my living room. We may not all be friends but we are all gonna be friendly, because it’s my fucking living room, okay?”

Seemed to work.

[Kestrel]

My opinion on this topic is fairly moderate, but I’m going to advocate for side B because I’m not seeing it represented here so far.

There are a few problems with games which discourage or heavily restrict PvP:

1. I think that the definition of PvP is broader than what most people mean when they use the term, and games which claim to eliminate/discourage PvP merely relegate it to shadier, passive-aggressive and OOC forms which are harder to deal with.

2. Not having PvP means that any sense of stakes/consequences for character fuckups are relegated to staff responsibility; since they’re often spread too thin to deal with every instance, it leads to a lot of obnoxious and immersion-breaking behaviour where people can talk shit, but not get hit.

3. It is my opinion that all stories require conflict to be engaging. In the absence of player conflict, staff or the game mechanics must be responsible for delivering conflict instead. Although on the whole staff’s intentions are going to be more trustworthy than those of other players with a stake in said conflict, it’s also more work for them to spoonfeed, which means there’ll usually be less of it, and PvE opponents can be a lot less challenging for players who enjoy the sort of long-term chess-match rivalries. It also incentivises unhealthy social dynamics in pursuit of staff attention.

4. Games which discourage conflict, and therefore minimise loss, are better at protecting player sensitivities concerning positive OOC self-image through their character’s positive image. This means characters are more likely to be self-inserts, which can feed into unhealthy attachment and blurred IC/OOC boundaries. In my opinion, this also results in less interesting storytelling, because I prefer to interact with flawed characters dreamed up by versatile players. YMMV on this one. It’s why I avoid L&L and Superhero games, and lean more towards gritty settings.

The ideal unicorn game for me would be one which allows for PvP, but where:

• The rewards for engaging in PvP (if they exist at all) do not create a zero-sum game between opponents.
• The community is strongly story-oriented, and conflict is therefore not driven by the desire for mechanical gain.
• Strict policies govern healthy communication between players, and are enforced by staff.

My favourite players are ones who love to play-wrassle.