D&D General Combat Against Player Engagement: A Systemic Challenge

[Lanefan]

Spike ("competitive player" that wants to win and show off their skill) is just completely stranded in most RPGs. Playing to win is just boring, because most RPGs are broken and will immediately fall apart if you play them to win. I don't really have a solid solution here (and frankly I don't know if there is a need for one—there are plenty of outright competitive games to play) but hard victory conditions and tighter balancing tend to help.

After 40 years of them I'm more than used to Spike players.

The way to both engage them and deal with them is to become a bit more adversarial as DM: when Spike pushes the rules envelope, push back; when Spike finds a broken-but-legal rules exploit, shut it down and ban it*; and otherwise throw decent challenges at them and let Spike try to be the best on the team. Oh, and the existence and use of hard loss conditions can help too, as obviously Spike wants to avoid those.

In Magic terms, you're emulating the DCI here.

 

[Lanefan]

While I understand if a player enjoys combat the most, I do not understand the sort of person that just sits there waiting until combat starts, not engaging with anything.

Oh, I do - it's the same person who tunes out the moment dialogue starts in an action movie and doesn't tune back in until the action resumes.

I've DMed one or two of those in the past.