Non-toxic PvP
-
So I am someone who generally enjoys PvP in my text-based roleplaying games. I tend not to care very much about combat, but I like political systems, ideological debates about the ethics of magic or what-have-you, mysteries where there are some stakes to being the one to solve a puzzle, and an intelligent, player-controlled opponent.
The problem I find is that it’s very hard to have any system of this kind that doesn’t devolve into player resentment and envy. Even if it doesn’t involve character loss or anyone being beaten up or bullied, if the game features some sort of prize that only one player can get, then no matter how fairly it’s earned, it seems inevitable that those who lose out will grumble about how unfair it is that player one got it and they didn’t. Likewise, if you have Team Magic is Cool and Team Magic is Evil, as fun as it is to design characters with ideologies that can participate in an IC debate club about it, inevitably players on Team Cool start projecting assumptions about Team Evil’s OOC ideologies and comparing fictional themes to sensitive RL politics.
Naturally a lot of games choose to sidestep this entirely by just not having PvP, and putting all players on the same team. But this puts a lot more onus on the DM to provide challenges and conflict, and I think it’s impossible to have truly three-dimensional villains in this kind of setting. It also lowers the stakes considerably, because you know that the NPC team isn’t supposed to have an equally fair shot at winning as the PC team.
So, if you were designing a game where PvP is meant to be part and parcel (it doesn’t have to involve actual combat or risk of character death), how do you go about mitigating any risk of OOC toxicity?
-
@Kestrel said in Non-toxic PvP:
So, if you were designing a game where PvP is meant to be part and parcel (it doesn’t have to involve actual combat or risk of character death), how do you go about mitigating any risk of OOC toxicity?
100% OOC Transparency across the board is the common factor among the few games (mostly LARPs) I’ve played in where PVP didn’t cause resentment at all. In any given game, the players and staff are working together to collaboratively tell a story for the enjoyment of all. The moment the players are OOCly obfuscating their plans and actions, then resentment can creep in.
-
I genuinely don’t think it’s possible to do healthy PVP en masse in a game of strangers on the internet. Among friends? Sure. One of my favorite TTRPGs was a cutthroat game of Amber diceless where everyone was plotting against each other. With the right people in isolation? Absolutely. There are MU players I would trust with an antagonistic IC relationship. It just doesn’t scale.
But to attempt to constructively answer your question - if I were going to try it, I would do:
- OOC transparency to foster trust
- Strict enforcement action against poor sportsmanship
- Make conflict more give-and-take so it doesn’t feel like a zero-sum game (like in comics - Batman can win the day, but Joker doesn’t die; that lets the conflict go on)
-
What does “100% OOC transparency” look like in this kind of game?
-
You can design a near perfect character-conflict system and it will be ruined by an influx of extremely sensitive slice-of-life RPers who devolve into sobbing fits whenever they witness so much as an invitation to participate in conflict.
So lately I’m thinking I’d just kick out those people. Not everyone is capable of the kind of introspection required to choose a game that suits their playstyle, sometimes you have to do it for them.
-
@bear_necessities In games where I’ve experienced it, it works something like this:
- Staff are open with players regarding upcoming plots and players are open with staff as to how their character would respond to those situations.
- Players regularly debrief with each other (and staff) before and after scenes to work together on crafting a narrative all can enjoy and ensure that bleed is handled in a healthy fashion.
- PVP Conflict scenes are heavily discussed by the players before the IC interactions begin. Staff is on hand through all of this to ensure all parties are being heard in the OOC discussion and to make sure all of the games various rules are being followed fairly. Doubly so for any scene resulting in the final resolution of a PC’s storyline (aka death or other permanent change to the character that renders them unplayable).
In one LARP I’ve participated in, a particularly brutal PVP scene ended in the players of the two conflicting PCs having a big happy cry and many tales being told at dinner after the game that night because debriefing techniques were used for the whole game.
-
@Juniper said in Non-toxic PvP:
You can design a near perfect character-conflict system and it will be ruined by an influx of extremely sensitive slice-of-life RPers who devolve into sobbing fits whenever they witness so much as an invitation to participate in conflict.
So lately I’m thinking I’d just kick out those people. Not everyone is capable of the kind of introspection required to choose a game that suits their playstyle, sometimes you have to do it for them.
As I often say whenever the topic of “how do we do character conflict good and fun?” comes up within the MU discussions, the answer is literally this. Community management.
That’s not a skillset that every (maybe even most?) folks who want to run a MU have or want to develop, which is understandable. But willingness to have to be “the bad guy” and take a rep hit, and deal with reports, and investigate claims, and all that sort of thing.
IMO player-driven conflict as a focal point to a game doesn’t really ease the cognitive burden on the staff running the game. It just shifts it from “THE METAPLOT” to “watching out for jerkwards”, which inevitably leads people to complain about the lack of Metaplot anyways.
Not even just slice-of-lifers who want to stake up a part of the niche game that clearly isn’t for them. But tryhards that focus entirely on winning conflicts over creating cool stories. “But that’s what my character would dooooo” types who justify crummy behavior via “IC logic”. Escalators that go from 0 to 100 (both in reacting to conflict, and in initiating conflict).
There’s many pain points that arise when it comes to running a game w/ PvP (tho I prefer Jumpscare’s rebranding of it to CvC personally) as the main drive, and after years in this hobby I just don’t know that I believe it’s worth all of the effort, given the variety of dillweeds and trashbag people you have to sift through to get The Cool People Who Just Want A Lil Bit of Spice In Their RP to stick around.
-
I also believe that it is important to categorize cooperative character conflict as CvC and not PvP. PvP is a competition between players, and players strive to beat their competition, which is antithesis to cooperative RP. Character vs Character is a much more accurate designation to use in my opinion.
For a CvC system to succeed, I believe that a very firm hand by staff is required, because it is much easier for any small misunderstandings or issues to fester into something big, especially in silence. These needs to be resolved as soon as possible, even if it means showing certain players the door that may initially prove to be a benefit and a contribution to the community but over time, has become a detriment that are also unable to recognize the issue or change for the better.
Fairness will be the hardest to maintain in a CvC environment, even if there is a cooperative mentality, because each player will have their own goals for their characters and stories they want to tell. So a fleshed out system on how IC conflicts are resolved will be needed, whether it is through dice rolls, plot/story points, IC resource management, etc.
-
@KDraygo said in Non-toxic PvP:
Character vs Character is a much more accurate designation to use in my opinion.
I personally like the CvC designation, but I think it’s wallpapering over the fact that for a lot of people, it really IS the PvP that attracts them. They view the game like a game of chess, or a game of tennis or whatever, where it really is about “winners” and losers, being “the best”, etc. The fact that it’s another player involved is what elevates the stakes/conflict to a level they don’t get when it’s player characters versus non-player characters (which really when you think about it is also literally CvC).
You can call it what you want, but it’s not going to change their fundamental outlook, and that outlook is what causes a lot of drama on PvP games. (The other large chunk of drama is poor bleed management, and I really don’t know how you address that with a big group of internet strangers.)
-
This reply is to bits and pieces of other posts that mention transparency, namely @MisterBoring’s, but I don’t wanna get too scattered with the quote-texts:
One issue I have with very high transparency and OOC communication is that it negatively impacts more cerebral styles of conflict. So, if I’m playing Superman and you’re playing Batman and I’m planning for us to have a big epic fight in an alleyway, very little of substance is lost by tapping you on the shoulder to talk to you and the DM about it first, check if there’s anything you wouldn’t be comfortable with, like maybe no ball-kicking or teabagging after.
But, if you’re playing Vesper Lynd and I’m playing James Bond, the emotional and intellectual stakes aren’t the same if I know in advance, hey btw Vesper was actually working for the baddies the whole time, she’s gonna take the money from the hotel room and deliver it to the villain, also the tea she gives you turns out to be drugged. I wouldn’t want to know this information, because it changes how I parse my scenes with Vesper leading up to the reveal. Even someone who thinks they have perfect IC/OOC separation, if they’re invested in the idea of their character as a mastermind who can’t be fooled (a very common failing that can’t be realistically banned out of a playerbase), may then be influenced by out-of-game knowledge in their decision on whether or not to drink the tea, and overestimate whether they’d start to suspect without already knowing the answer. The outcome of physical combat with her boss after the reveal will still be organically determined, but it’s worth bearing in mind this isn’t the only approach to IC conflict — subterfuge and cunning is another, IME favoured by people who lean more towards character-building play than by-the-numbers competition.
-
@Faraday said in Non-toxic PvP:
@KDraygo said in Non-toxic PvP:
Character vs Character is a much more accurate designation to use in my opinion.
I personally like the CvC designation, but I think it’s wallpapering over the fact that for a lot of people, it really IS the PvP that attracts them. They view the game like a game of chess, or a game of tennis or whatever, where it really is about “winners” and losers, being “the best”, etc. The fact that it’s another player involved is what elevates the stakes/conflict to a level they don’t get when it’s player characters versus non-player characters (which really when you think about it is also literally CvC).
You can call it what you want, but it’s not going to change their fundamental outlook, and that outlook is what causes a lot of drama on PvP games. (The other large chunk of drama is poor bleed management, and I really don’t know how you address that with a big group of internet strangers.)
To be honest, I think that even games which claim not to be PvP or CvC games tend to have elements of PvP that people don’t like to think about, which means they should always also be accounting for these same issues. You can never fully prevent them, because of what @Faraday says here.
The most common instance on otherwise chill “everyone is on the same team” MUSHes is romance drama. Like it or not, when a hottie who writes good shows up, there will be competition for their affection/attention/dance-card. It often gets ugly in subtle ways, and I consider this a form of PvP. The same is also true for staff attention and metaplot dissemination, etc.
-
@Kestrel I feel like that comes down to personal experience. For me, I’ve seen fully cerebral Jesper Lynd / James Bond style conflicts go rather well even in a fully transparent situation. In those cases, the players of the character locked in CvC use the transparency to make the conflict a better watch for those people just on the outside looking in. Big reveals and stuff still happen, but both sides of the conflict are in on it from the start so that the story gets more detailed.
I think there’s a number of people who believe that CvC automatically involves the entire playerbase whether they want to be involved or not, and really, it should only involve the players of the characters directly fighting in the narrative, be it a crowbar duel in an alley behind a bar or a long drawn out series of espionage plays that result in the PC that is the King of Royalland being assassinated quietly in his private library.
-
@MisterBoring said in Non-toxic PvP:
For me, I’ve seen fully cerebral Jesper Lynd / James Bond style conflicts go rather well even in a fully transparent situation.
Same. It’s valid to want that kind of immersive experience where you don’t know any more than your character, but it’s still possible to tell a compelling story when everybody has all their cards on the table. After all, that’s what the writers of the original Lynd/Bond storyline did. The writers, the actors, the directors, etc. were all operating with full transparency.
I think that the more immersed you are with your character, the more likely there is to be bleed and OOC competitiveness. Transparency and communication can help combat that, but they’re not a magic cure-all.
@Kestrel said in Non-toxic PvP:
To be honest, I think that even games which claim not to be PvP or CvC games tend to have elements of PvP that people don’t like to think about, which means they should always also be accounting for these same issues. You can never fully prevent them, because of what @Faraday says here.
Oh absolutely. My last several games were all PvE, but there absolutely were players competing directly. Whether it was who was atop the NPC “kill” leaderboard, or who got the medal/promotion, or who got the guy/girl, or whatever. You can’t escape human nature, you can only manage it.
-
People have brought up plenty of great points. Here are a couple others.
Make factions that have a pre-defined level of conflict, along with the types of conflict they’ll most likely engage in, and alliances they may have. Some examples…
- The jungle faction is a high-conflict combat group.
- The journalist faction is a moderate-conflict social group.
- The spy faction is a moderate-to-high conflict espionage group who is enemies with the jungle faction but allies with the journalist faction.
- The enforcer faction is a moderate-to-high conflict social/combat combination group that tries to keep the peace between the jungle and enforcer factions.
- The cafe faction is a little-to-no conflict social group with an alliance with the enforcer group that they can call on whenever there’s a problem.
Another thing that you need to have zero tolerance for is what I’ll call the pacifist. The pacifist is a player archetype who will join a moderate or high conflict group, then do as much as they can for their faction without engaging in the central conflict. Then, when they get backed into a position where they’re called upon to resolve a conflict by fighting it out, they’ll agree to the fight but refuse to fight back, letting the opposing side win, in order to give the other players the most unsatisfying resolution possible. The two most notable offenders on Silent Heaven had to be removed from the game for their un-collaborative behavior.
Lastly, if someone is bringing down the mood of the game but isn’t violating any specific policy, you can still ask them to take a break from the game. Sometimes someone’s just not a good fit, and it’s best to wish them the best finding a game that’s right for them.
-
I agree with all the comments on the OOC transparency, I think that’s the key. For all the issues the vampire sphere had on Fear and Loathing back in the day, it was a pretty PVP heavy space and it was run on a lot of transparency. I remember a ghoul doing some daytime snooping of my vampire’s haven to get back at me for something I did and they put the job in to spy on me, and staff just added me to the job and said ‘she’s made these rolls so she finds out this much, tell her what she learns’. And I did.
The information never really ended up getting used against me sadly, but every time I’ve engaged in any sort of PVP, being able to check in with each other, make sure we’re enjoying everything etc really just makes it a lot better.
-
One of the issues which hasn’t been brought up yet is “who is involved”.
Because, honestly, I’ve had more problems in IC conflict from people who weren’t involved but now are sticking their oars in without anyone requesting their “help” than I have from straight conflict. Two characters have a bar fight or an argument, and both players are fine with it, but suddenly five other characters all want to jump in and make it a much Bigger Thing than it needed to be, and usually they’re nowhere near as respectful of other players as the original conflict-folks were.
That’s where a lot of PvP resentment and clusterfucks come from, in my experience, and neither of the original folks have any control over what those players do, even when it pretty much ruins what WAS a fun, rich conflict plot.
