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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 9695122" data-attributes="member: 86653">I mostly run open-world sandboxes. Play lives and dies with player and PC goals. But at no point have my players told me they lost the game because their PC failed to achieve some goal. It's the connection between those two that seems to be the main crux of the thread now. To a point, yes. But context is also important. In the context of games winning and losing mean very particular and precise things. That's not how they're being used in this context however, which causes confusion. The RPGs we're talking about do not provide win conditions to aim for or loss conditions to avoid like most games do. So when people talk about winning or losing RPGs it doesn't make sense. What people seem to mean by that doesn't match the typical usage of those words in the context of games. So I asked. The dominant answer seems to be when people say they can "win" an RPG what they mean is they can achieve a self-imposed goal for themselves or their character. And "loss" means to fail to do the same. Cool. But it should be acknowledged that those goals are self-imposed, not inherent to the game. I wouldn't say that adding those goals is wrong. Of course not. As I said, I mostly run open-world sandboxes. That style lives and dies on player-defined goals. At least how I do it. But in the decades of running such games, I've never encountered someone who said they "won" or "lost" the game if they achieved or failed to achieve their stated goals. I would say calling that "winning" or "losing" is at the very least confusing as hell. If it takes a few thousand words to clear away all the standard uses of a word to get to what you really mean, that's a fairly clear sign there's a better word to use.</blockquote>

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