Competitive roleplaying experiences?

[Eero Tuovinen]

I imagine your Capes tournament was the faux kind, with the players playing more for the fun than the win.

No, it wasn't.  We weren't hitting narrative points in spite of the competition.  We were hitting narrative points because of the competition.

I don't disagree. That's a well documented phenomenon, and I get that kind of play in Dust Devils all the time.

You say "If you do these particular things then you get the prize" as if it means Gamism.  But in this case "these particular things" were "address premise, and aid others to do the same."  So ... what do you think?  If people really want the prize, and just flat-out balls-to-the-wall address premise ... does that make it Gamist?

Yes, it does. Creative agenda is not in what you do, but why you do it. Competition in creating drama (addressing premise) is competition still, and if the play group cares about the prize instead of the drama, it's necessarily gamist, being that they're in competition for the prize. The deciding factor is whether players evaluate the play in terms of good drama, or in terms of getting closer to the prize. Whether the two lead to the same end-product is irrelevant. Whether Capes is really a gam/nar hybrid where both reward cycles feed each other in equal measure (or really easily drifted, as another possibility) is another question, and one I'm not qualified to answer. So it's quite possible that you have both kinds of play all mixed up, especially in a tournament.

Tristan: The key is not in the reward, but in the player appreciation. It's possible and pretty common that people play for certain agendas despite reward structures. I'm reminded of a larp I helped write a couple of weeks back, where players wilfully disregarded the murder mystery and it's game mechanics in favor of freeform socializing in garb. They had fun, but not in the manner planned for.

In this case I think that if you have a prize only one player can achieve, that by definition means those who care will Step On Up and compete for it. This is a very different reward system from one where everybody can be a winner, which is the case if the ultimate reward is "having a good story", for instance. Thus I think that a tournament that picks winners and losers is pretty much necessarily a gamist reward cycle. But this is not because there is a reward, but because the only way to reliably land that reward is to compete against the other participants to get it.

But this is not on topic, because for the tournament purposes I'm happy with faux or real in equal measure, and will anyway make sure no major dysfunction is possible if somebody mixes them up. Let's take it to Actual play, if you want to compare experiences in greater depth. I suggest starting with an analysis of typical Capes play, as I haven't played it yet.

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Jason: I'll take you up on that, most likely. PM me about retail pricing, too, because I'd like to retail Roach in Finland. And if you can sell us several copies at a retail discount, that gives us the tools for a tournament at the same time.