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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 9695036" data-attributes="member: 86653">Exactly. There seems to be a least some undercurrent of competition and competitiveness. I'm lucky that I haven't had that experience yet. I'm not sure I would have handled it as well as you did. I'd probably just smirk and say, "Rocks fall, you die," then tell the player to leave and never come back. Someone winning necessarily implies someone else losing. If you can win an RPG that means someone else has to lose. Only in a competitive setup or mindset does that even work. And having a competitive mindset or an "us vs the referee" attitude will generally end with a lot of dead PCs and new faces at the gaming table. It is one of the areas of misunderstanding because winning and losing inherently implies the end of the game. You haven't won or lost the game until it's over. You see it in sports all the time. A team's down and they give up. The coach has to remind them it's not over until it's over. And this only applies in those games with win or loss conditions. RPGs, generally speaking, don't have those conditions. Players can decide they "win" or "lose" if certain conditions are met, absolutely, but that's the player bringing something into the game that's not inherent to the game itself. Exactly. We have a weird habit of talking about things that aren't competitions as if they were competitions. That's a bizarre trait of ours, but it's not inherent to life or RPGs. Exactly. Feelings don't always match reality and players can impose their own self-determined win or loss conditions onto a game that doesn't actually have any. But again, that's the player not the game.</blockquote>

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