What's your attitude towards PVP?

[Blue]

Your full or partial PvP answers are written neutrally, but your against-PvP answers are both derogatory. There's no simple "I don't prefer it", it has to be either something you don't think your characters can handle, or a bad experience.

Please try to frame polls more evenly in the future.

 

[Scruffy nerf herder]

Your full or partial PvP answers are written neutrally, but your against-PvP answers are both derogatory. There's no simple "I don't prefer it", it has to be either something you don't think your characters can handle, or a bad experience.

Please try to frame polls more evenly in the future.

Thank you, that's very helpful. It's difficult phrasing things right and I've always struggled with language, especially when it comes to tone. I didn't mean for the options to sound derogatory.

Maybe a little too late now but I inserted a more neutral option.

 

[Blue]

So is it a totally foreign idea to you that for some players it doesn't compromise fun time at all and is literally in no way "interpersonal conflict" (this is a friendly and honest, not rhetorical, question)? It's a game. We're making cooperative fiction.

"Interpersonal conflict" is a far cry from PvP. You have have drama within a party without it devolving into combat or similar actions. While not comprehensive, one way to think about it is as long it stops before it requires dice (attacks, pick-pocketing, etc.) then it's not into the territory of PvP.

You can have rich, complex characters who don't always agree or see eye-to-eye without an argument escalating to swords and spells.

 

[Blue]

To me, PVP is fighting between characters where death is a possibility. A little drama or butting heads is not PVP.

In a game of Paranoia, sure.

In your average D&D game, nope.

Yeah, if we're playing Paranoia or Toon or something like that, the scale of "what's acceptable" is very different. Thanks for pointing that out - this is in the TTRPG general, and does include games like that.

Heck, I'm running Masks: A New Generation which is a PbtA game about teen superheroes, and half the mechanics are about finding yourself and the other half is about all the teen angst, anger, uncertainty, and the like. You are expected to lash out at your teammates some. But it's a supers game - death is basically off the table.

 

[uzirath]

When I think "PVP" I usually think of PCs duking it out, trying to kill each other. I've never seen that go well, though I'll admit that it's been a few decades since it has even come up in my adult games. I see it frequently with younger players (I run RPG activities for middle-schoolers), and there it is always messy, often ending with someone stomping off in frustration.

In my adult games, we definitely have a lot of inter-character conflict in terms of different goals and priorities. In GURPS that's often about clashing disadvantages. That's good fun. At the least, it often adds a layer of comedic banter. At best, it drives powerful plot arcs and character growth.

I can imagine an RPG experience that is more competitive between PCs, but I'm not sure if I would enjoy it. One thing that draws me to RPGs over many other games is their cooperative nature. I love working together as a team to solve problems. As with real-world teams, I might sometimes disagree with or roll my eyes at my colleagues, but fundamentally I've got their back.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

One of the most fun campaigns ever (D&D) was the 'evil campaign' that one of my friends ran. All the PCs had to be evil, and most of them were various sorts of humanoid monsters, although that wasn't strictly required. Everyone was understood to be utterly out for themselves and there were no restrictions on how that could be expressed. The only limitation was, you started at level 1 and you had a boss, and he had a boss, etc. Failing to achieve assigned goals was generally punished harshly, regardless of whether or not it was 'your fault', so screwing around was a fairly hazardous pastime. Various arrangements arose over time as the game progressed, they all tended to increase the value of cooperation. One group of PCs banded together to avenge any attack on their members, another group all placed themselves under the protection of the most obviously powerful and effective boss they could find, and then do anything to make his career advance, etc.

It was a pretty amusing game, though the average lifespan of PCs was generally brutally short. lol. Still, a few characters managed to advance to decent levels, as I recall (this was all played under 2e IIRC, so the advancement rules were fairly loose, but involved a lot of "get 200xp if you do this evil thing").

The point being, PVP doesn't HAVE to ruin a campaign, it just has to be designed to allow for it!

 

[Lanefan]

It's not foreign so much as something I don't find entertaining. And my group are all pretty like minded. Other people enjoy it, I don't, so I don't take part in that. I don't mind a little personality clash (at worst Superman/Batman or Wolverine/Cyclops, but prefer it less that that) - but I see the phrase "PVP" and to me, that means things have come to blows.

So no Captain America/Iron Man civil war, then?

 

[Lanefan]

As far as I can tell PVP is not conducive to long-running games.

My ongoing 14-year campaign would beg to differ...

(though in fairness, most of the real PvP happened in the first few years - it's largely settled down since, as these things tend to do)

 

[Lanefan]

My only rule as DM is that what happens in character stays in character and doesn't spill over to the table.

Follow that rule, along with common decency, and pretty much anything goes. Experience tells me that every so often in a long campaign some big in-character argument or fight will rear its head, then once it's out of their systems things settle down again.

I neither expect nor demand on any sort of meta-level that the PCs in my game aspire to any sort of hero status - they go on the adventures they go on and do what they do, and while some heroism might tangentially result from that (and some characters might bask in it!) if the party instead decides to throw in with the bad guys or whatever it's all fine with me.

IME it's the first few adventures in a long campaign when players aren't as invested in their characters that can really be a powderkeg, but with the right players the resulting shenanigans can generate some amazing fun and hilarity.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

So no Captain America/Iron Man civil war, then?

I considered that one of the worst stories in the history of Marvel Comics... so no.