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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3505854" data-attributes="member: 4937">No.  Roleplaying games make exceptionally bad competitive games because they depend so heavily on fiat and because the ability to control the game is inherently in favor of just one participant.   If you want to play a game that is about humiliating rivals, then RPGs are a very poor choice and you are likely to ruin everyone elses fun as well.I played alot of chess in my youth as well.  I still play alot of Settlers of Cataan and other sorts of competitive games.But if I DMed the way I play competitive games, I wouldn't have any players.  I am most certainly not trying to beat the players, much less humiliate them.  I'm deliberately playing to lose, and unlike any competitive game this isn't considered to be poor sportsmanship.  On the other hand, if I were to play to win then it would be poor sportsmanship!My experience of many of the players that are primarily 'playing to win' is that they are playing the wrong sort of game.  They need to be playing chess, or settlers, or Blood Bowl, or some other sort of actually competitive game.   That sort of game would actually satisfy that craving to prove themselves.But the problem players are the ones of that sort that don't want to actually play a competitive game, because in a competitive game there is the possibility of ego crushing failure.  Instead, they play a non-competitive game as if it were a competitive game and attempt to control both sides of the DM screen at the same time - DMs trying to control the players or players trying to control the DM.  In this fashion, if they succeed in doing so, it offers them the chance to get an ego fulfilling victory every single time that they set down to the table.  And thats what they really want.   And there is nothing particularly wrong with that, as I said, its not like all of these players are bad players.  But, again, frequently this goal becomes so important to them that they become control freaks and then that  becomes disruptive.Other sorts of players with different goals rarely become disruptive in this fashion.  They become bored, and when bored they might express that with in character actions that are meant to disrupt the story that they are now bored with, but they rarely are disruptive out of game.  An in game disruption is a signal to me that I'm not doing my job and I need to compensate.  An out of game disruption is a signal to me that I need to talk with a player privately, and maybe find a new player.Riiiigggghhhttt.</blockquote>

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