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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grendel_Khan" data-source="post: 8783369" data-attributes="member: 7028554">The Alien RPG is definitely not for you, then. Nothing good comes of any stories in that setting, except maybe them rescuing Newt in Aliens. But only if you make sure to skip Alien 3 and work up some head canon!This is an interesting point, but it butts up against one of the big differences between movies and RPGs. What's interesting in a one-shot or short campaign, the PCs all being thrust into the role of "heroes" (or at least inclined to selflessness), while only NPCs are unsavory? Or having players being part of the more interesting plot dynamics, including having competing agendas?I think it's totally fair to not want to play an unseemly character. But if you're going to be in a game where at least some PCs are doing underhanded things to each other, then how do you determine who's the good guy, meaning, essentially, the protagonist (in a standard sort of story)? Should there be an Agenda card that says "You think you're the hero?" And if you get that, is the whole session or mini-campaign now about your survival above all others? Because what does it mean if someone's designated the good guy, and they get iced by a bad guy, particularly if it happens way before the final scene? But also, I think it's worth interrogating that knee-jerk aversion to any sort of PvP in RPGs, which isn't just a you thing. Trad games have trained a lot of us to avoid PvP like the plague, in part because the goal is so often so-called immersion. So PvP becomes literally player-vs.-player, with people encouraged to not draw a line between how they feel and how their characters do. PvP in that approach means lots of annoying little asides between one PC and the GM, hiding information from the group, generally fracturing gameplay into lesser facets, all because people are still trying to "win" the game, and also because they've been told that RPGs are like some sort of VR-with-bad-graphics experience, where the players should only know things that their characters do.Some RPGs have moved past that. I mentioned Trophy Dark, but there are a slew of games where PCs are supposed to be at odds, to varying degrees, and a common thread running through a lot of them is that we're adults, we can tell a collaborative story that isn't about winning, and also one where even if you know something that your character doesn't, that's ok. If you watch a movie where you see something happen from the villain's perspective, but not the protagonist's, do you storm out because immersion is broken?RPGs can tell stories that aren't just yet another version of embodying some heroic avatar. If some RPG stories are about bad people doing bad things, but then meeting a bad end, sometimes that's more memorable than defeating the villains and winning. You don't have to play those types of games, but realize the difference between dismissing them as less-than, and just not being your preference (in part because you may see RPGs in an older, narrower context than some current game designers do).</blockquote>

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