Quote from: Opaopajr;805428The corollary to that is you also probably do not find yourself attracted to Machiavellian schemer, Byzantine politics, games, yes?

Between the PCs or in the overall game?

QuoteI've noticed it as a pattern among those who tend to dislike oWoD or IN SJG internal friction campaigns. I'm guessing, but trying to place a pattern.

Players that like a PvP seem to enjoy more open ended, sandbox style games in my observation.

Quote from: Sommerjon;805516Nah, you sound 15.

I think you are being too generous there.

Quote from: Baron Opal;805798I have found this attitude towards running a game decreases PvP to nil. Once players realize that there is an active, complex world to play in they have a lot less interest in screwing around with each other.

To answer the original question, I allow PvP but it is discouraged. The majority of the time, when one PC has been violent towards another it is something between the people, not roles. Now that I think of it, my discouragement is little more than telling the players "if you aren't a team the monsters will eat you."

That said, the style of the game, known at the outset, changes my attitude a lot. D&D always seemed to be a team sport. Now, when I played Vampire the milieu is different. There may have been excursions where people worked together, but it was allways allies of the moment. You were free agents when you got back in the city.

Again play Amber.

It scores at the top end of

• Players fully engaged in the game - to the point where they will meet up independently to role play scenes with no GM
• PCs fully integrated into the game world - everyone has allies, political links, ties, affiliations etc
• Role play
• PVP - both political subtle and marginal and outright face to face battle to the death

Now that isn't the game system that is the setting.
You play a D&D game based round a theives guild, the establishment of a new non-good cult, the establishment of a new city, etc basically anything political and you will get an Amber level of response with the right players.

Imagine a Game of Thrones setting without PvP or a Blade Itself setting or a Firefly setting or a Battlestar Galactica Setting or a Breaking Bad Setting or a Godfather Setting.... in fact name a setting based on a popular film, TV show or book that has no risk of PvP and you end up with the Carebears or the Smurfs and even Smurfette started off an an enemy agent working for Gargamel.....

There is a spectrum between "Backstab Extravaganza" and "The Carebears meet the Ponies for Hugfest 2015" especially in rpgs. Hell, some people complain about the level of duplicity, backstabbing and "Awful people being awful" in Game of Thrones, BSG, The Walking Dead, etc. Everyone doesn't like the same things.

Quote from: Bren;805734The only way to discourage people from acting like assholes is to ask them not to act like assholes and then to boot them if they don't stop. Anything else that seems to work only does so because the method used indirectly asks them not to act like assholes. I believe in being direct.

Don't invite assholes to your game. If they show up later then talk to them about their behavior, boot them if they don't conform. Sound nice in theory, but it not that simple when it comes to actual people.

What happens when the asshole is two of your players ride to the game? What happens when there is only four players in your town? What if the asshole is another player's girlfriend or boyfriend? The list goes on?

What Old Geezer said is A solution not THE solution.

My view is this. Playing a session of tabletop RPG is an experience. Just like going white water rafting, playing paint ball, or climbing Mount Everest. If the experience is brief then people with "difficult" personalities can be accommodated, to a point. Sometime they have to be accommodated or the whole thing doesn't happen.

For some the answer is that it is better not to have it happen. Just walk away from the game. But like many things with human interaction it on a sliding scale. Everybody has a different tipping point where the hobby itself is not enough to put up with difficult people.

So you haven't reached the tipping point but you need everybody you have to make the game happen. So how you setup things so that tipping point isn't reach. How do you make it happen is spite of the difficult personalities.

My personal answer involves a lot of things I learned over thirty years. I rather not have to work with difficult people but as I live in a rural area, I don't have a wide range of choices. Especially considering the systems I am most interested in, classic D&D, GURPS, etc are not exactly the popular ones in terms of numbers.

I start out with requiring people to speak as their character in first person. I don't let them treat their character or the other player's character as playing pieces in a wargame. Mind you they don't have to act, they just have to play as if they are there as their character even if it just a version of their own personality. If that happens everything else will start to follow.

I don't make a big deal out of the daily life of my setting. But it is there. When the character wake up for a game I will spend a few sentences on describing what goes around them. The same when they meet somebody.

I gotten good at handling split parties over the year and even stepped it up a notch when I started running a game store campaign. I can handle up to eight players all doing their own thing now. With ten or more, then I have to start doing callers and some of the really old school techniques to keep everybody engaged and interested.

What this does produce very little down time in terms of play even outside of combat. I found that there is a type of player that when they get bored starts instigating things. By learning to handle split parties, they not as bored.

The downside of my methods is that they are a result of experience. Half the time I can't explain why some of the of the stuff works, it just feels right, and the feedback more often than not confirms that.

Another downside is that it is complicated. I am juggling a lot of balls to make it happen. To make more fun, I am half deaf from nerve damage. While I have hearing aids to fits the sounds coming through my ears, what they don't fix is the damage inside that causes delays in understanding what I just heard was speech. Very disconcerting at times.

Honestly if you are tired of assholes in the hobby and you reading this. Learn how to use Virtual Tabletops. The fact you are reading this means you have internet access. And unlike MMORPGS VTTs don't need any better hard than what it takes to open a webpage. With a VTTs you have a pick of the entire on-line RPG universe. Even some of the off-line sometime through a friend of a friend type of introduction.

Anyway, the Monday Night group that I am a part of is the single best group I ever gamed with. It started with me and my two best friends from high school. But over the years as we talked to others we found a few others to invite and it been great.

So why I still involved with a game store campaign? Well one reason, among others, is that I like the challenge. The challenge is that can I run a fun game for everybody who steps up to my table. Can I get the dickhead treasure grabbing, backstabber to have fun in the same game as the guy who impressive himself in a character, or the guys who spend hours asking question about the relationship between the noble houses and their secrets.

I have quite a bit of failures but for the most part I been successful. The most simplistic answer is that I make them feel as if they been transported to a new world. That they really are there as their characters. Because a lot of the problems are minimized when the players stop looking at it as a game but rather as something to experience. That it is a place with a life of it own.

Quote from: CRKrueger;805788y
2. Here is where the trouble starts - Disruption is attributed to a mechanic/situation/playstyle/gaming behavior instead of the player in question.

This.

It's not "we need a new rule," it's "fuck you asshole."

Quote from: estar;805831Don't invite assholes to your game. If they show up later then talk to them about their behavior, boot them if they don't conform. Sound nice in theory, but it not that simple when it comes to actual people.

It is exactly that simple.

You just have to decide what you are willing to give up so you don't have to play with assholes. If you are willing to put up with assholes just so you can have 4 players instead of 2 players, well that is your choice. Now it is not what I would choose, but don't act like you didn't have a choice not to play with the asshole.

Quote from: jibbajibba;805722Yes PvP in and of itself will not deter assholes.
However, complex well realised games with consistent motivation, genuinely applied laws and so on, go over time deter assholes because they promote and reward active participation in the game world.

There are two types of assholes:

(1) There are the people being assholes because they want to be assholes; they get a thrill out of screwing over or annoying other people.

(2) There are the people being assholes because it works.

The only thing you can do with the former is say "don't be an asshole" to them and then boot them to the curb if they're still being assholes.

The latter group is a problem that a lot of GMs create for themselves, often because they're trying to preserve the railroad they've envisioned in their head: They don't want their plot disrupted, so when the PCs do disruptive things they work hard to minimize that disruption. They give the PCs literal or de facto script immunity and then can't figure out why the PCs never run away from danger. They mandate that the PCs have to stick together and that the PCs can't kill each other. All kinds of stuff that removes consequences from the game world... and then they wonder why the PCs behave as if there were no consequences.

I've literally had the experience of having a player come into my game, try to steal loot from another party member, and then get a dagger driven through his eye while he slept. This player wasn't an asshole. He stole the loot because it had always worked for him in his previous games. He never did it again because he'd discovered there were consequences for it.

Ditto the group who tried to solve their problems by going on an indiscriminate murder spree. They were shocked when the SWAT teams showed up and even though they were able to escape, their tactics in future sessions toned down.

Quote from: jibbajibba;805638But the players loved it.
In all my years roleplaying I find Amber gives the deepest roleplaying experience and the deepest level of immersion and Amber is the most PvP game out there. Even Chargen is constructed round PvP....

The other PCs are part of that world. Ragar the Bold is just as much a part of the world in motion as Count "Obvious Antagonist" and making the PCs only focus on GM constructed threats and oposition is a false premise that restricts role-play.

I can site multiple examples from the CoC game where one of the PCs was, unbeknownst to the rest of the party, a serial killer and whose crimes became the centre of their investigation, to an incident where one PC was sent to kill another in her appartment in 1920s NY, to an Amber PC with multiple personality syndrome and advanced shapeshift who was his own arch nemesis, to a bunch of Holy knights working with some Camerilla Vampires in Texas to eliminate a Sabbat threat, and hundreds of others where the PvP stuff became more than just a petty arguement betweeen asshole PCs but where it became the entire focus of the game and a created the sort of RPG moments that are talked about in reverential tones 30 years later down the pub.

You've mentioned three games I have no interest in playing. PvP might be appropriate for those games, but not as a general principle.

Quote from: jibbajibba;805638It comes down to a few things
i) do you want to simulate a world in motion or a set adventure path for the Players
ii) Are PCs supposed to be fully realised people with complex motivations and objectives or just complex playing pieces in a board game
iii) Are the only obstacles that are valid GM constructed obstacles because the GM is the only valid generator of content

False dichotomy. It's perfectly possible to have a pretty credible, realistic-seeming world, without the PCs at each other's throats. More to the point, it makes sense not to treat your closest allies and comrades-in-arms like rivals.

None of which precludes all the scheming against people outside the party, of which our games have a lot.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;805706That's not my experience at all. In fact, complete opposite, it intensifies the gameplay experience for all involved.

What exactly made it slow in your case? Any prominent examples come to mind?

Time spent pissing around scheming against the other players is time not spent engaging with everything else going on outside the player-group. I don't need "intensification", I need getting on with playing the game.

It makes it slow because it's wasting time on a pointless activity that detracts from other stuff.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;805706I can't see that working on the large scale. In fact, I KNOW that doesn't work on a large scale. I've had too many players across different games and different environments that, despite being well-meaning and cool about other stuff, will have and have had their PCs showdown impromptu with other PCs because an in-game line got crossed. Didn't have to get violent but it weren't passive in any way shape or form.

Bullshit. In nearly seven years of near-weekly play with my current group, across almost a dozen different games, we've never had a PC kill or attack another PC. You don't have to take my word for it, you can listen to any of our games since 2011 on our site.

The only time something like that did happen was when a PC was temporarily mind-controlled during a fight. It's really easy, by mutual agreement, to avoid all of that nonsense.

Quote from: jibbajibba;805693All of these are totally fine reasons why a PC might align them selves with a group of neardowells who seem on the surface to be entirely untrustworthy.

Like I said; caricatures.  I find it boring.
Next you'll say is something about a dark wizard type who secretly works for the bad guys is in a group with a paladin...

Quote from: jibbajibba;805693I said 90% of D&D games... I don't run all the D&D games in the world do I ?

I figured you did since you seem to have a firm grasp on the number of games that start in taverns.

Quote from: jibbajibba;805693In my current campaign we have
A Paladin knight Justicar sent by the order of the Stone to a village being plagued by goblin attacks and his servant.
A representative of the Sidhe Court sent to the same place for ostensibly similar reasons but in reality because the Fairy Queen has felt the rumblings of a dark force from ages past and needs to know the details.
A Warlock who actually works for said dark force and has been attached to the group through said forces machinations of the Order of the Stones higher ranking politicos
A local man who has been the one leading the local defense (local hero Background)
They were joined briefly by a professional dualist who was just passing through and has since passed through taking the Paladin's warhorse with them.

Oh look there's that dark wizard type who secretly works for the bad guys is in a group with a paladin.
W00T! for Caricatures.
Yeah, never seen this set-up before. :rolleyes:

Quote from: jibbajibba;805693However I am fully aware that most D&D groups meet in taverns and similar locations as I am sure you are

Define similar.  
No I haven't met up nor have I run games where the group met up in a tavern in 20 years.
You know why?  I grew tired of seeing the same tropes over and over and over again.  The games ended up being the same shit, same plans, same tactics, same, same, same.

Quote from: PrometheanVigil;805706We are men! Manly men!

So, in other words, you're saying escapism takes precedent over how stuff works in real life? Even if that would mess with the core concepts of a given RPG?

Yes. These are games and/or telling stories. They're supposed to be fun so people will focus on things that are fun for them at the table and skip the things they don't like including brushing over things that aren't fun for them. People have to regularly shit in real life but few games make you track how your character's BMs  and fiber intake.

For a less off putting example mention handling sex and relationships in rpgs and see how many gamers look askance and generally hooking up and fucking isn't just something happens in real life but something most people enjoy. But not many people want to handle it at their tables. Same with backstabbing and other forms of "realistic interpersonal conflict" between PCs.

Cultures in rpgs are, quite often, boiled down to simplified stereotypes that are more fun and colorful to play instead of the intricate and diverse thins they are in real life, including the modern world. Because they are entertainment, not education or academics. Rpgs are supposed to be enjoyable or why do them and why play out things that aren't fun for you or your group?

QuoteThat's not my experience at all. In fact, complete opposite, it intensifies the gameplay experience for all involved.

I find most PvP dull personally. It takes the focus off the world and turns it inward, narrowing everything down to inter PC plotting and growing OOC grudges as characters are bumped off and replaced by new characters that all mysteriously have vendettas against the guy/girl that ganked their predecessor. As a gm I feel like I'm just there to watch the players roll dice against each other and as a player I'm bored. I want to go out and see the world and the game as the GM has set. In character I start to wonder why I'm hanging out with this group of contentious borderline psychos.

I know and acknowledge the playstyle works for others but its not my cuppa tea.

QuoteYou're closer to doing that so far than most others in this thread from what I can see. "Fun" is a relative term in RPG context and you are practically saying "I don't care, other types of gameplay satisfaction don't matter, story over characters everyday and anyday". A lot of anti-PvP responders seem to feel that way here or at least partially.

I don't think its "story over characters". Its "Fun game over game the players don't find fun." Players in rpgs make concessions to the fact its a game a great deal sometimes without even thinking about it. We agree to have our characters at least make a passing attempt to stay together ("Don't split the party!") and have goals and motivations somewhat in line with the game/setting, etc. Agreeing not to attack each other (at least past a certain point) just doesn't seem that difficult or that limiting.

QuoteI can't see that working on the large scale. In fact, I KNOW that doesn't work on a large scale. I've had too many players across different games and different environments that, despite being well-meaning and cool about other stuff, will have and have had their PCs showdown impromptu with other PCs because an in-game line got crossed. Didn't have to get violent but it weren't passive in any way shape or form.

Its worked for me for 30+ years of running games. Most of the people I've played with have no interest in attacking or undermining the other PCs to begin with. Perhaps its the genres or play style I use but it rarely even comes up and I find the concept of entire groups that are really eager to throw each other under the bus odd.

QuoteSo far in this thread, I haven't seen any real arguments as to why PvP shouldn't be allowed unrestricted.

What's wrong with "Because the group in question doesn't find it any fun or that it improves their play experience"?

Quote from: Bren;805838It is exactly that simple.

You just have to decide what you are willing to give up so you don't have to play with assholes. If you are willing to put up with assholes just so you can have 4 players instead of 2 players, well that is your choice. Now it is not what I would choose, but don't act like you didn't have a choice not to play with the asshole.

I am glad that you are so wise you see all situations, and thanks for your insight that the world is filled with assholes and not assholes. Heaven forbid people should exhibit variants, nuances, and shades of grey.

Estar does raise a good point here. Online we speak in terms of ideal game groups, and while many people like to say they weed out all by behavior by pruning players, in practice it is more complicated. Not all bad behavior comes from total assholes. Even great players who everyone likes can have bad habits. And like Rob says, sometimes you put up with one ssshole because they are there with someone who isn't one. You can also have situations where complete non assholes clash because their personalities don't jive. I think a GM having tools for reducing the impact of bad behavior at the table is fine and understandable.

Quote from: Nexus;805869I find most PvP dull personally. It takes the focus off the world and turns it inward, narrowing everything down to inter PC plotting and growing OOC grudges as characters are bumped off and replaced by new characters that all mysteriously have vendettas against the guy/girl that ganked their predecessor. As a gm I feel like I'm just there to watch the players roll dice against each other and as a player I'm bored. I want to go out and see the world and the game as the GM has set. In character I start to wonder why I'm hanging out with this group of contentious borderline psychos.

I know and acknowledge the playstyle works for others but its not my cuppa tea.

I agree entirely. Waste of everyone's time, and a diversion from the real game, as far as I'm concerned.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;805879Estar does raise a good point here. Online we speak in terms of ideal game groups, and while many people like to say they weed out all by behavior by pruning players, in practice it is more complicated. Not all bad behavior comes from total assholes. Even great players who everyone likes can have bad habits. And like Rob says, sometimes you put up with one ssshole because they are there with someone who isn't one. You can also have situations where complete non assholes clash because their personalities don't jive. I think a GM having tools for reducing the impact of bad behavior at the table is fine and understandable.

He does indeed - these days I swear, getting a game together with people who a) have time to play regularly, b) like each other (a lot of my mates dislike another of my mates over various perceived slights of different degrees) and c) I want to play with them is more of a challenge than actually planning the game.

That all said - I had several instances of PvP in my games. I have myself killed at least 2 other PCs as a player - one was a necromancer in Warhammer game that got too many occupational diseases, the other time it was a one - shot game where we were thieves.

And in none of these instances, there were any hurt feelings. But, I can also tell why to a degree - because it made sense, both in character and to the story per se. Everyone agreed that it was just a climatic ending to an adventure/character's career. Of course, not always will it be such, but I think that the golden rule to PvP in RPGs is simple - if you can see some of the players don't have fun in the conflict to the point they might leave the group, mediate it. I've seen many squabbles over treasures where Asshole Mode activated, which I have mediated, because I knew there'd be sour feelings over something that's very, very silly. On the other hand, if the characters start waving weapons over an important decision - it's not my point to intervene. I've had one CoC game where, to this day, one of the players does not know the other shot him.

And as Kruger pointed out - sometimes, PvP is the game. When I ran my (sadly aborted) quasi - Viking setting, I made a very clear point - it's a culture of strength. You are free to challenge another character to a duel at any point (though the duels were almost always not to the death but to the first wound, as per the culture's rules) if they disagree with you. If you can't buy into such a setting, it's not for you.

The great irony? The party consisted of a skald, priest and goat herder. Not exactly a team that'd be challenging each other to martial combat anytime soon.