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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9695087" data-attributes="member: 6690965">I think there's some confusion here about what "winning" is for exactly. You're focusing a lot on the competitive angle, which I agree doesn't really apply to TTRPGs outside of some really unusual table setups, but that's not the only purpose that setting a goal and checking if you've achieved it serves.The reason you'd want a victory condition in a TTRPG is no different from a board game or videogame or whatever; you need a metric to understand/guide your decision making. Games are playful systems, they're collections of rules and restrictions and allowance that set up a network of decisions that the human players can interact with. The thing that takes such a system from a toy to a game is the evaluation; if you have a victory condition (and/or a loss condition) you can make decisions to try and achieve it.Then you get the good game stuff people like, like looking to see what decisions could have been made better, learning about the system to make better decisions, formulating heuristics to navigate the system, finding unusual states the system can be pushed into and devising strategies to get into/out of them and so on. You can't really have all of that without evaluation. You need the metric to make the decisions meaningful.With that in mind, competition is often a means and not an end. A lot of games use competition to to make the decisions interesting, by putting them into conflict with the other player's decisions, and it's a really easy way to render what could be a simple system into a much more complex one.</blockquote>

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