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Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Do RPGs Have to Be Cooperative?

One of the shibboleths in the periodic debate over what constituted the first rpg is the notion that wargames are ruled out because of their competitive nature.

Indeed another of the enduring conventions of rpgs is that players operate cooperatively as a team to overcome obstacles. Sure there are the occasional diversions of intra-party conflict, the rivalries both in-character and external-personal sometimes brewing over into the killing of a PC.
(Lord knows, we had those diversions in spades as maladjusted pre-teen boys brimming with new-found testosterone.) In the main, though, this has held true for self-styled rpgs over the past three decades.

Like the social conventions that evolved to keep gamemasters from crossing the line into player functions, the team-cooperative idea also had solid reasons behind it. It allowed for more stable social dynamics and provided a refreshing departure from the constant direct competition of nearly every other game form (and this seemingly helped many spend greater times focusing on pushing their imaginations).

On the practical level, it allows a GM to focus on creating just one (or several closely-related) at-the-table game experiences rather than doing the tough work of relating separate double-blind (or many) experiences to competing players. I can tell you after spending two weeks writing out 14 different multi-page reports for players each grasping a different piece of the Domain Game elephant in Nowhere, this advantage can't be underestimated.

But again like the GM-player role division we picked away at yesterday, was this convention as nailed down in the role-playing of the 70s as much as most think? Were there potential departure points laden in the play and rules of that time?

Again I think the answer is a resounding “hell yeah”. In fact I would wager a guess that the possibility of running rpgs alternately as exercises in direct competition was there until fairly late in the 80s even.

Take two examples from TSR's second generation of rpgs: second-edition Boot Hill and first-edition Top Secret. Tucked away in the backs of the campaign sections of each of those games are some interesting alternative examples that presumably were kicked around in play-testing. (Traces of this kind of play disappeared in the editions that followed each game respectively.)

From the “Players” sections of the second fictional campaign scenario in Boot Hill:
The player groups should be divided into two basic groups—lawmen and outlaws. There can also be an assortment of prominent citizens—ranchers, businessmen and so forth...Characters on the side of law enforcement can take such roles as: county sheriff, town marshal, deputy, state ranger, or deputy marshal...Players opting to be outlaws start their own gangs by hiring non-player characters and/or by joining with other player characters of similar bent...Players who are other than lawmen or outlaws may have special individual goals as outlined privately by the gamemaster at the start of play (for instance, a prominent rancher may have an objective of gaining control of part of the county).
OK wow, so now instead of the singular cooperative team of players you have the possibility of not just one team-vs.-team layer, but several competitive player layers, to the campaign—a veritable return full circle to Major Wesley's Braunsteins.

The competitive aspect of this campaign gets further sharpened in the “Objective” section that follows down the page:
The objective of outlaw players is to be the first to accumulate $100,000 and safely escape from the area. The objective of the lawmen players is to be the one who garners the most reward money for capturing outlaws without being killed...A campaign run run to some predetermined time limit, or can simply keep on going...formal guidelines for winning should be discarded and each player simply best improve their individual position.
In other words, the campaign is open-ended enough that it can end when time runs out or one or more players wins (now how's that for a decisive ending point!). Alternately it can putter on in a sandbox mode.

Now let's take the “Multiple Administrators” section in Top Secret (remember that the Admin is the name of the game's GM):
It is quite feasible to set up a campaign where there are two or more Admins, each with a separate organization competing against the others. There must still be an overall coordinator, but the admins would handle all matters within their organizations. One such play-test campaign involved Eastern and Western intelligence operations in Europe, with a few independent adventurers (like wealthy industrialists) thrown in as players. The two Admins build their organizations without and knowledge of what the other was doing, and agents were assigned to steal plans, foment unrest, assassinate targets, etc. When the Coordinator noted two agents at the same locale simultaneously, the players were notified and the drama was played out...
Fascinating stuff, hunh? Here you have not just players in direct conflict but whole gaming groups competing complete with their own GMs (assuming at times a quasi-player roles) and one uber-ref in an open-world setting.

I didn't throw out both these examples as ways (just) to illustrate my navel-gazing of the day, but because they actually sound like they would be a great deal of fun. And again like yesterday, I haven't completely grasped all the practical ways one could make this work, but I would sure love to see what shakes out of such a stick-bending experiment. 

21 comments:

  1. I don't think cooperative play is inherent in RPGS. That it has become the default seems to me a result of the factors that you point out. It certainly makes them easier to manage for a number of reasons.

    I would think a truly competitive game like the Boot Hill example might actually work better played live over the web or as a play-by-post/ e-mail vs. at the tabletop given all of the secrecy that would be required. I know that tournaments, conventions and to a certain extent any live action games can all achieve this, but it seems to me for those games to work you need more space than a kitchen table and a much larger ratio of real vs. game time.

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  2. Considering I saw the link to this post after having just made the public beta release post of my game called Statecraft, which is adversarial to a very large degree....

    No! It is not inherent :)

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  3. @James
    In our day and age I would certainly agree that it would be much easier to do as a PbP. I have no idea how we would handle the multiple blind sessions of the Domain Game in one physical location.

    On the other hand you could have different play groups on different nights or a coordination between tabletop groups in different cities. Though just the organizing to get that going and coordinated seems pretty daunting. Likely would have been much easier back in the early 1980s when there were many orders of magnitude more tabletop players than there are now.

    @Greg
    I read your previous draft. Here's a related question: how would you handle all this in a tabletop group playing Statecraft?

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  4. I may go this route with Zenopolis. I'm not certain I will yet, but anything is possible.

    I also largely agree with James, and since Zenopolis will most likely be a play by chat and skype game I think the two may go well together.

    I'd imagine at the table these more or less worked like the infamous West Marches campaign: you got together when you could rather than specific nights and lined it up with your referee. I'm not 100% sure on that, but it'd be my theory.

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  5. @Evan
    I can see that working with the Dark Ages multiple faction-setting and power-grubbing nature of what it sounded like to me you were aiming for with Zenopolis.

    Having player-organized sessions could allow for a more free-wheeling concept of player factions. Instead of rigid sides I could see players bouncing back and forth that way. It would likely cut down the workload as then you funnel the action into a somewhat traditional group session.

    Boy would that be potentially some cut-throat play...

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  6. Wasn't Rune a competitive RPG? Released 10 or 12 years ago?

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  7. The term, "referee" generally refers to two opposing sides. Interesting that in early d&d he was called by this name instead of dungeon/game master.

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  8. @KenHR
    Never heard of it (I was out of gaming at that time.) Anyone?

    @UWS guy
    Great point. Referee seemed to be a carry over from miniature wargames, but it sure did stick around a while. You see it get cited quite often as an alternate to DM or GM in a lot of D&D material in the early 80s.

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  9. We did something like this with AD&D 2e back when I was a university student. It was only possible because we had a gaming club and therefore, a large pool of players to chose from. Basically, we had two groups and two DMs. One group was evil and one was good. We ran a series of published modules interspersed with periods of sandbox gaming in the same geographical area. Any changes to the environment caused by one group would manifest in the gameworld of the other. We went like this for about a year, then culminated in a battle royale at the end. Sadly, due to differences in DMing style, the evil group was far better-equipped than the good group and the final battle was pretty one-sided. Still, it was an interesting experience.

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  10. @ckutalik

    Since the draft you read, I really gutted the wargaming side and made Statecraft much more of an RPG. By de-fanging it in this way, the GM doesnt have to spend their time on the mechanical side of things like they would have in the previous draft. So in Statecraft, the GM is kind of a resource that the players go to for support in their wars against each other.

    For example, lets look at the player in Spain. Well, they will be asking the GM for information on where they can explore, ask the GM about what is going on in the various contested regions in Europe (e.g. "what does the Duke of Savoy think about French aggression against Milan?") and thus the GM is providing ancillary info around the player's game. The GM doesnt have to provide hard data on these areas "there are three regions with these six values each", instead the GM can just assign a flat number and move on. So in a way, a lot of the changes I made were to alleviate the problems you point out in the post.

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  11. Dragons at Dawn, following the pattern in Blackmoor, allows for competitive play. The easiest way to handle this is to use seperate rooms and create problems to keep the players occupied when not in thier room.

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  12. @DHBoggs
    I feel like many of my roads these days lead back to Arneson. Definitely time I pick up your highly recommended homage.

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  13. 'morning, Chris,

    Thought I'd intercept you over on DF since it was obvious what you'd be posting next. :)

    > From the “Players” sections of the second fictional campaign scenario in Boot Hill:
    > ...
    > OK wow, so now instead of the singular cooperative team of players you have the possibility of not just one team-vs.-team layer, but several competitive player layers, to the campaign—a veritable return full circle to Major Wesley's Braunsteins.

    It would be easy to read it that way given the apparent similarities, but in reality the most obvious path/inspiration for the above in Boot Hill is NOT back via Arneson to Wesely.

    Per the DF post I'd slinked in - and /that/ previous thread - Boot Hill is, even more obviously than Metamorphosis Alpha, a clear "rip" of pre-existing concepts. Save, in the case of Boot Hill the previous game was already in publication.

    Indeed, this was one of the reasons I'd started out that "how to determine whether or not you're playing a "roleplaying game" thread and, as I'd deliberately set aside, it required 17 episodes/points to set that "Prisoner" free;
    > 17. If player characters are on more than one "side", it is not a roleplaying game
    ( http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=46465&p=993619#p993619 *points to last picture*)

    To answer the "Do RPGs Have to Be Cooperative?" question, broadly speaking modern /in game/ consensus for "RPGs" would probably tend to give the impression of "yes". I'll say "no", since to disallow the option of "no" even once/by exception is to kill off so many opportunities for "role playing".
    Players "Living in Harmony" ( http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=46465&p=994630#p994630 ) is largely a "convenience" for GMing purposes in "role playing" rather a "necessity". :)

    d.

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  16. (aside: *lol* re. two posts above. Giving the appearance of player-created content /is/ difficult for computers, is it not?)

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  17. Here's info on Rune: http://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=2412

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  18. @irbyz
    That selection you are pointing to as the Boot Hill precursor is from Donald Featherstone?

    His write up about western mini's skirmishes in Solo Wargaming definitely has role-playing involved.

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  19. I have fond memories of playing Paranoia by West End Games, it was perfect for openly antagonistic players. Everyone was basically a government agent, yet everyone was also a mutant and a member of a secret society, either of which made them traitors. So quite often the point of a scenario was to blame others in the party and accuse them of being traitors.

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  20. I have fond memories of playing Paranoia by West End Games, it was perfect for openly antagonistic players. Everyone was basically a government agent, yet everyone was also a mutant and a member of a secret society, either of which made them traitors. So quite often the point of a scenario was to blame others in the party and accuse them of being traitors.

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  21. I have fond memories of playing Paranoia by West End Games, it was perfect for openly antagonistic players. Everyone was basically a government agent, yet everyone was also a mutant and a member of a secret society, either of which made them traitors. So quite often the point of a scenario was to blame others in the party and accuse them of being traitors.

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