Competitive RPGs.

In a post below, Thunder_God pointed me towards his new blog – CSI Games – Home of Competitive Roleplaying.

Within, he defines the his ‘CSI’ classification of competitive RPGs thusly:

C is for Competitive/Cooperative.

Most games under the umbrella of “Role-Playing Games”(RPGs) till now had been Cooperative in nature, the social interaction between players, players and Game Master (GM) and that of between player-characters had been Cooperative. This is the origin of or originated from the “party”. We’re all in this together.

This may also be a leading cause into the “You don’t win in RPGs” when explaining what you’re doing to an elder party member.

The other side of the coin is that which I am putting up as the main identifier of CSI Games, the Competitive side. Competition is something inherent to human interaction, inherent to the act of gaming. You find competition in Board, War and Card games, along in most sports(where you have competition between groups and cooperation inside them). I want the players to compete, whether for spotlight, victory, control, in-game resources, whatever. There need be a competitive element somewhere in the game.
It should be reflected in the mechanics as well, but that comes second.

S is for Story.

We’re here to tell a story, to hear a story or experience one’s wake. We’re not here to merely roll the dice or shuffle the cards. Unlike board-games and card-games, we have a story unfolding here. If we don’t, we’re dealing with something else.

Story often goes with Cooperative. The story-building part is a joint effort by all participants.

I is for Interaction/Isolation.

We’re playing a game with other people, you interact with them. You want to help them stop that other guy from winning, you’re talking to them and trying to stop them, that’s also interaction! You do not play in a void, you’re playing with people, interact with them.

Mechanics should have some way to represent and encourage interaction between the players.
Isolation has little place in this scheme, it’s mostly there as the other side of Interaction, where you’re “Snubbed” for game reasons, as others ally against you. Alternately, if you’re snubbed for out-of-game reasons, you’re unlikely to do well in game, or have fun.

Let’s analyze this a bit. I’ll be throwing out AGE Model stuff, so you may want to take a peek at that. (BTW, I’ll be setting up an AGE Model wiki on PBwiki soon to replace the pretty-much defunct one here.)

C: Guy’s got me all the way up to the end on this one. The competitive edge in most RPGs is relegated to player-GM (in other words, character-world) interaction. Direct competition between players is a highly unexplored area, and one with plenty of potential to mine … shows like Survivor are popular for a reason. Turning to the AGE Model, there are three modes of competition that pop out at me right away – one for each apex of the model:

• A-mode competition (Baron Munchausen): The players compete with one another on a creative level. In Munchausen, this is explicit – you’re trying to out-brag your fellow players without getting caught with your pants down – since your character has no independent lie-telling ability, the players are competing directly.
• G-mode competition (Pantheon): The players compete with each other for purely gamic rewards. In Pantheon, there were various goals that could be completed by the players in the course of a game. These goals had point totals attached to them, and the player with the highest point total won.
• E-mode competition (Vampire): The players compete with one another through the proxy of their characters for goals that reside in the SIS. The social scheming that constantly went on in my World of Darkness games is a good example of this mode of competition.

Where I’d disagree with Guy would be the primacy of having the rules codify the competition. Unmoderated competition is a bad idea – it’s one of the prime ingredients of dysfunctional play. A competitive RPG should lay out the areas of competition up front and have all of the angles covered – the areas of highest conflict are going to generate the most debate, rules-finagling and potential misunderstandings.

S: I disagree that the story-building part necessarily needs to be cooperative. Certainly it’s usually done that way – but there’s nothing about the process of story creation which necessitates that everyone hold hands and sing Kumbaya. Again – if the story is going to be an arena of conflict, the rules need to be set out in advance and abided by.

I: Nothing to disagree with here.

Overall, I think that the idea is a strong one, but there’s little in Guy’s formulation to suggest howto do any of this. Hopefully he’ll continue to flesh these ideas out and come up with some good procedures to base these games on.

And I have to agree that RISC is a better acronym.