There are many different types of RPG players. There have been many different attempts to categorize them, often reflecting the culture of gaming at the time. One category of gamer which has been around since at least the 1980’s and proven remarkably durable is the concept of the power gamer.
The power gamer seeks to make their character as powerful as possible. They analyze the rules and seek optimization: Character builds, mechanical tactics, party synergies — whatever it takes. Or, to flip that around, whatever will make them more powerful, they’ll take it.
Why does the power gamer exist?
Roleplaying games are fundamentally about exploring player choices. By creating characters who are powerful within the game system — i.e., who are more likely to succeed more frequently and/or at a larger range of tasks — the power gamer:
- Maximizes the odds that their choice will be meaningful instead of being negated by failure.
- Diversifies the number of game situations in which they can participate, thus increasing the number of meaningful choices they’re making.
- Reduces the chances of their character being killed, which would result in a complete loss of agency for the character and often results in wiping out the significance of past choices.
Various factors can vary the importance of these motivations — for example, #3 is a lot more significant in lethal old school games — but a lot of this is fairly fundamental to virtually all RPGs, which is why the behavior so reliably crops up across different games and different GMs.
Another factor here is that the power gamer effectively turns an RPG system into a puzzle, which they solve by maximizing power. Solving a puzzle, of course, is an incredibly satisfying experience, and is a fundamental part of what makes games fun. In a game like Chess, the puzzle is usually, “How do I win?” RPGs, of course, usually don’t have winners or losers, and so the power gamer creates their own challenge.
DEGENERATE POWER GAMERS
There’s nothing wrong with power gamers. After all, a lot of RPGs — including the vast majority of the most popular ones — are built around the acquisition of power, which would be really weird if there was something fundamentally wrong with players seeking power in the game.
In some cases, however, a power game can degenerate into behaviors that are disruptive or debilitating to the group and the game.
For example, there are leeches. These are gamers who try to make their character the most powerful at the table by preventing the other players from having any power of their own. This might mean hogging the spotlight, stealing magic items, or even killing other PCs.
There are also munchkins. These are power gamers who want the power, but don’t want to work for it. What they want is for the DM to hand their 1st-level character a +5 holy avenger. Or they’ll want to play a clearly broken homebrew sub-class. Munchkins are mostly harmless and can often have a ton of fun in a campaign with other munchkins, but they can be problematic in other campaigns if they feel entitled and become toxic when their wish-fulfillment isn’t granted.
(Munchkin campaigns also tend to have a lot of ire directed at them from gamers who are affronted that they didn’t “earn” their power or who believe that there’s a “right” or “balanced” way to play the game and that the munchkins are somehow “cheating” because they’re more powerful than they’re “supposed to be.” This tension, of course, can cause other interpersonal issues.)
Some power gamers will also become rules lawyers. There are a lot of different types of rules lawyers and a bunch of different reasons that people become rules lawyers, and I’m not going to dive into that here. A rules lawyer, though, is different than a rules expert. A rules expert is great: They have a mastery of the system, and that mastery can enhance both their play and the quality of play at the whole table.
A rules lawyer, on the other hand, is constantly trying to interpret the rules in whatever way gives them an advantage. (This will often include interpreting the same rule in different ways at different times, depending on which interpretation would be best for them in each situation.) Mild rules lawyering isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it can quickly degenerate into a situation where the game becomes overwhelmed without constant squabbles over the legalese of the rules, creating a bad experience for the entire table.
Finally, there are monomaniacal theorycrafters. Theorycrafting is when you’re building characters, experimenting with rules, or otherwise analyzing the mechanics of a game in the abstract (rather than in relation to actual play). There’s nothing wrong with theorycrafting — it’s a great way to explore and appreciate a game — but the monomaniacal theorycrafter becomes fixated on the idea that there’s a single “right” way to play the game, to the detriment of the actual game.
The root of the problem is that, in order to have the most powerful character in theory, you first have to nail down the key question of: Powerful at doing what? Because a character who’s optimized for solving mysteries is going to look very different from a character who’s optimized for running a Thieves’ Guild.
The most common answer monomaniacal theorycrafters tend to land on is combat, and it’s pretty typical for this to degenerate even further into a very specific type of combat encounter. I talk about this more in On the Slaying of Spherical Cows.
These degenerate forms of power gaming, unfortunately, can give all power gamers a bad rep. In my experience, though, having a good power gamer in your group is far more likely to improve your game than hurt it.
I consider myself someone who plays to explore a character-theme but even then I tend to “powergame” within my chosen bounds. The main reason (apart from “winning” is more immidiate fun than “loosing”) is that I really enjoy optimizing systems, finding that little “thing” that makes everything else work so much better is a great feeling.
That also connects to why I like completely random generated stats (like DnD 3d6 down the line) or characters (like in Zweihänder or WH-RP). It constrains the range of optimization and makes for more interesting/unusual choices in character devlopment in RP and mechanical optimization.
I think these categories are a good way to describe it. I have no problem with a player optimizing their character and, in fact, prefer it to someone playing haphazardly or actively avoiding playing well (there’s a weird phenomenon in the grimdark games I’ve played where people think embracing the mortality of the setting means no longer trying to survive, which ruins the integrity of the game).
Rules Lawyers seem to be a theoretical boogeyman that comes up in discussion of power gamers more than I’ve ever experienced actually happening, mostly because it’s so easily prevented. If a table adheres to the most basic rule of “it doesn’t matter if the rules technically make this possible, if it doesn’t make sense, it can’t happen”, than the “peasant railgun” player will adapt or decide to leave.
The most troublesome player to me is a combination of munchkin and theorycrafter, not because they are especially disruptive but because I have a hard time understanding why they want what they want or knowing how to please them. It’s the guy who wants “number go up” more than anything else, and I just want to tell them “if you just want a big number, I give you permission to write eleventy billion on your character sheet. Now can we play the game?”
I ran into this in Star Wars Genysis, with players who were only interested in skills and loot if they directly increased their damage output, players who would request house rules to arbitrarily increase their output, and only engaged in aspects of the game that made their damage go up. Which was not actually optimizing at all because it takes very little time in that game to reach the point where your to-hit rolls are almost impossible to miss and your damage exceeds the HP of any normal enemy or humanoid “boss”. So it just came to players obsessing over a damage number going up even though it had no relevance to the game and I realized I was not going to be able to give them a game that pleased them because what made them happy was so alien to me.
I think that up to a point, power gaming can be a very useful as a way of finding emergent properties within a campaign, or even gaming world. It is pretty much functioning as a market: if players are ‘demanding’ certain builds/items/skills, then either the ‘cost’ should go up or the opposition should be ”demanding’ them just as often. Conversely, if no-one is taking a certain skill or buying a certain item, drop the in-game ‘price’.
One issue that can come up with power gamers is when most, but not all, of the party are power gamers.
I played in a 3.5 game for 5 years that went to level 39
I was not a power gamer.
Everyone else, including the DM, were.
So my wizard was consistently the most useless member of the party.
Cool article! Reminds me of the different categories Magic the Gathering used to use for their player’s gaming goals. Timmy, Johnny and Spike were the!
My mentality is similar to Chris – I choose a character concept that is thematic but may not be optimal. Then I try to make it as strong as I can within the thematic limitations. For example I’m running a 5e character that’s Tempest Domain Cleric/Storm Sorcerer multiclass, taking lots of lightning/thunder spells.
Is it powerful compared to the top level meta of all published material? No. But it has an interesting synergy that allows some single-target nova damage, and it has a consistent theme without needing to re-flavour anything.
I have trouble relating to people who are uninterested in seeking out the most thematically powerful options for their characters. But I guess people are motivated by different things.
It also comes about because people don’t understand your initial statement of the premises (i.e. RPGs are primarily about player choice leading to entertainment). Instead they think that it’s a game and so they’re just trying to win.
I imagine this problem has got much worse due to the majority of people playing CRPGs rather than tabletop where winning is much more of the point (and making anti-powergaming choices can, in some games, make it hard-to-impossible to beat the game).
The comments about “On the Slaying of Spherical Cows” are so weird to read. Some of it is because they’re from 2011, but more because it’s just such a weird mindset to me. There’s somebody actually talking about the “opportunity cost” of letting somebody play a rogue instead of some kind of spell-caster, as if you need your guild mates to carry their weight in a WoW raid. As if you have the right to feel hard-done-by if a fellow player chooses a character based on what they think is fun.
Also, why was everybody stuck on the idea that the rogue is primarily “for” traps? In my games, the rogue player is always the one who lives for sneaking and scouting.
These theory-crafting arguments also seem pointless to me, as if the only options a character will ever have are what’s written in the PHB about their class, as if *magic items* don’t exist.
I feel like the type of power gaming is a reflection of broader trends in how games are run. When I was playing 3.5/Pathfinder 1e theorycrafters tended to be focused on making characters that were dominant (or at least capable) in all types of situations, and tended to gravitate to clerics, druids, and wizards for versatility as an important measure of power. Running 5e though, most of the power gamers who sit down at my table are monomaniacally focused on single target damage, usually melee. The type of powergaming represents the degradation of game structures into railroading and dungeons. In 5e it seems that players don’t trust that they’ll be able to do anything except hit things real good, regardless of their choices, and so discount other factors in their builds. And they’re rewarded for it by most DMs and published adventures.
RatherDashing: I disagree that Rules Lawyers are a theoretical problem but the most problematic kind I’ve encountered aren’t ones trying to manipulate the rules to their advantage but the ones who can’t tolerate the DM making a ruling. I’ve seen this many times, where as part of running the game I make an on the fly ruling involving an unexpected interaction, weird edge case, or obscure rule, and the rules lawyer will do everything in their power to grind the game to a halt and go digging in books to find the “correct” answer. Often there isn’t one, but even if there is no one signed up to spend 20 minutes doing forensic searches through the DMG. I try to explain to them that the DM has to make rulings sometimes and that’s just the way it goes, but sometimes the only real solution is to just bulldoze past them and not let them stop the game. I guess it’s their way of asserting some kind of control over the situation, but it makes the game worse for everyone.
I agree with the point about good powergamers. I’ve seen many that helped new players learn their class (often power gamers have explored many classes and know how the powers work, not just their own character), and act as a great source of solutions that don’t exist on the character sheet. They often are thinking of creative ways to use that crowbar or candle.
My favorite though is when a good powergamers optimizes around character combos. Like three concentration spells at once, because then they’re getting the whole group involved. A tabaxi grappler taking advantage of haste, spiked growth, and enhance ability (strength) to grab and drag an enemy, involves 4 PCs in a hilariously deadly combo that everyone will laugh about and can’t be used so often it breaks anything. Those people are always welcome at my table.
As a power gamer myself (at least relative to most of the people I have played with), I really appreciate seeing some actual discussion like this. Most times that the subject comes up online, it’s really pejorative.
However, I would like to mention one other reason for power gaming which I don’t think is quite the same as what you’ve said here. A large part of my own power gaming is the attempt to see games justify their mechanical weight. I’ve enjoyed some very lightweight games (and even played a multi-year campaign of sorts with no rules at all, just freeform RP), so I don’t think that every game needs deep rules to be enjoyable. But however deep a game’s rules are, I would argue that weight must always be adding something to the experience of playing the game, not just being there because people expect it for whatever reason.
Put another way: if an RPG wants to spend two full pages differentiating the properties of assorted melee weapons, I’m going to read them and expect my choice of melee weapon to be somewhat meaningful. If that game asked me to read ten or fifteen pages (as with, say, the Wild Shape options in D&D 5E), I will spend several times as long digesting the information, and expect the choice to be that much more significant – to add that much more fun. If that game instead presented over two hundred pages of mechanical widgets (like the Charms in Exalted 3rd Edition, virtually all of which are available for a starting character), I would conclude that it expects finding ways to actually use those details are fun enough to be worth more mechanical weight than most entire published RPGs, and read them as such.
When I do those things, and the game lets me down (maybe 90% of those weapons are identical in actual play, maybe it turns out that a tiger is a more defensive option whilst a bear deals more damage, maybe the system’s math and mechanical rigor breaks down under anything more than a cursory examination), that’s disappointing. Why spend my time gaining mastery of a system which fails?
But when I do those things and other players treat me like I did something wrong, I am utterly confused. I will never, ever, understand why so many people want to play games with a level of rules detail they don’t want to MATTER.
@Highbrowbarian: That’s a really good point about powergaming being an attempt to see if a game can justify its mechanical weight. This is a problem in modern boardgaming too (exaserbated by Kickstarter I feel) where games will push thousands of cards, a dozen expansions and all sorts of bloat… on a game that fundamentally isn’t even fun. It’s like there is some sort of cult of complexity, regardless of whether that complexity is necessary or fun.
As for the general topic of powergaming, I am also pleased to see the discussion and general consensus changing from “Powergaming is bad,” to “Powergaming is good, but certain types of it are problematic.”
A powergamer player can really help a GM out, taking charge of things like rules lookups, helping out newer players, keeping the party focused and so forth.
@Highbrowbarian: It’s a point well made that games need to purchase their complexity with concomitant depth. I wouldn’t call it powergaming to use those systems as intended though. In fact, the ability to powergame too much degrades depth. If the 200 pages of mechanical widgets can be put together into dozens or hundreds of possible playstyles, there’s choice of how to engage with the game. But if only one or two of those playstyles are dramatically stronger across the board, then there really isn’t any depth, just a wide array of bad options to provide context for the good ones.
This is a dynamic I see pop up more often in video games. Stuff like Path of Exile where there’s a massive skill tree to explore but only a small handful of builds that can realistically survive the vast amount of endgame content.
I think systems that earn their mechanical heft aren’t ones that provide powerful ways to synergize abilities so much as ones that make the differences between playstyles meaningful. For instance, there’s a sturdy mechanical framework in DnD differentiating ranged and melee combat (cover, opportunity attacks, threatening ranged attackers, etc.). There was a bit more of this in 3.5 than 5e, but the result is still that fighting at melee or range feels different and alters your choices of positioning and targeting in meaningful ways. In contrast, 5e really couldn’t care less what kind of melee weapon you use and thankfully doesn’t spend too much time describing a bunch of weapons.
Shadowrun 5e was a good example of what you’re talking about with meaningless mechanical choices. Dozens of pages of weapons that were barely any different. A couple crappy ones that you’d only use cause they’re cheap, a couple top tier ones that are two expensive or illegal to start play with, and a huge mush of options in the middle that mostly boil down to which picture you like best.
The page of diagrams of weird pole arms in AD&D may have been technically meaningless for play, but was also incredibly memorable. Iconic, even.
@colin r: No disrespect for the polearms. Everyone needs a glaive, fauchard, guisarme, and lucerne hammer at an absolute minimum.
@Sarainy: “Cult of complexity” is a great term for it. This also seems to apply with how people use systems, even if they are not broken in themselves. I’ve lost track of how many people I’ve seen playing D&D 3.X or 5E, shuffling through all the steps of a tactical combat engine they clearly don’t want to pay any attention to. Why?
@Wesley: The problem I really face is many games full of mechanical widgets where, utterly counterintuitively for me, the use “as intended” appears to be “pick some toys more or less at random and see what happens,” with the game running into real problems if people actually read the menu. I’m not asking for perfection here – obviously, abuse cases can crop up in a complex system, and development resources are finite. But so often, it seems clear to me that the writers are actively annoyed with you if you expect all those numbers they sold you to (gasp) mean anything.
To let poor Ex3 off the hook, your mention of Shadowrun firearms stirred a memory in me of one of my all time favorite games: Feng Shui. My copy of the first edition rules has a full fourteen pages of firearm rules, mostly just telling you the caliber and clip size of gun after gun after gun. The book not only repeatedly points out that the differences between roughly similar guns are mostly not worth worrying about, it also recognizes a few potential abuse cases… and doesn’t plug them, opting instead to make quips about “testing your GM’s patience with the Both Guns Blazin Rules.” WHY WOULD YOU WRITE THAT?! As content goes, it has literally negative value. At least squeeze in another joke about silly gun names or something.
@Highbrowbarian: I agree that many games don’t seem to consider what happens if the players actually use the widgets together. The more I think about it though, the more I think powergaming is subtly pushed by design choices. In many games, a lot of the widgets basically boil down to “more damage” or “higher attack” or a given games equivalent. Sometimes they’re predicated on circumstances which can encourage tactical play by getting the players to work to activate their widgets. On the other hand, the combos are often not worth taking effort to set up. If I could spend an action getting into position to get my +2 damage or whatever, or just make another attack, I know what I’m doing. The problem is increasing the numbers on a basic action in no way alters what you actually do on your turn. I’ve come to vastly prefer systems that dole out number increases sparingly and instead give you new options. Crucially, these options have to actually be competitive with whatever your basic attack is.
Storytime: I had a player in my 5e game who was excited to finally find a magic sword, and while it had various abilities, it didn’t have a plus on it at all. At first he was disappointed, because he was used to numbers increasing as the measure of power. One of the the things the sword did do was vastly increase the distance he could jump. Later, when the party attacked an enemy outpost in a valley, they set the entire valley on fire and that player was able to jump around on the tops of the buildings above the flames taking out the bad guys that managed to climb up. It was a whole strategy for the entire party that they could not have pulled off without that item.
I think often when designers/writers need to pad out a list of options they fall back on various ways to increase the basic action’s efficacy, and it gives a quick rush to players when they get high numbers, but the experience is flattened because their options never actually expand.
Wesley@18, entirely agree! Every magic item worth the name should enable some kind of action the PC couldn’t do without it. Figure out some small commonsense rule (like “you can’t jump across that”) and give them permission to break it.
Stuff like the Decanter of Endless Water is awesome. Sure, you can drink it, but I bet you can come up with lots more things you can do with it if you’re clever.
> RPGs, of course, usually don’t have winners or losers
I wanted to disagree a bit here. This is a very common party line, but it always struck me a one that isn’t really true in actual practice. People often point out to the fact that most TTRPGs don’t gave a defined “win” or “loss” condition, but systems aren’t really games. You can’t play a system – you can play a one-shot or a campaign, though. And those often do have things that are pretty much win conditions. (it’s like, say, playing videogame Doom: there are no win condition without levels that can be finished)
More practically, you’d often find yourself in the campaign about an Evil Necromancer BBEG, and ultimately, you’d either deck said Necromancer hard enough, or you’d die trying. The “win condition” is still very loose and wibbly-wobbly, and players usually get chose what exactly do they consider to be a “win” – maybe just protecting their loved one is enough, maybe protecting their kingdom (but the rest might as well burn), maybe it’s bringing Evil Necromancer to justice alive, or even redeeming said Necromancer. But wobbly as it is, it’s, like, still there, even if the goal is as vague as “deal with the Necromancer Situation”.
And the way most games go, it’s not even that vague-wobbly, it really is about applying enough blunt force to the Necromancer’s face!
There is another thing I wanted to point out, too. I’ve noticed that there is a sort of a… troubling trend in ways in which GMs react to noticing the non-degenerate Powergamers.
Powergamers (like myself) play to win, but winning in TTRPGs is often more than just winning the numbers game. You gotta engage with less-mechanised parts of it too; say, get friendly with a Dwarven King so they let you into the their weapons vault.
So a Powergamer does that – learns the dwarven lore, politics, the King’s backstory and all that to take their shot at getting into the vault. Then GM notices this, notices that player is playing to win, says “oh no! they are doing this to win and not out of care and curiosity for the lore!”, and intentionally thwarts their attempt – after all, outside of the numbers game things are decided by the GMs word. And after a couple of such events that Powergamer learns that it’s not worth it to engage with the lore and the world, and is now relegated to playing numbers games only (since most GMs do still respect those).
And it really is a troubling trend! After all, said player was engaging with the world, learning of NPCs, in-universe politics, etc, and now they really are just Doing Big Numbers Good.
@Flyfly: What you’re describing is scenarios having win and loss conditions, which of course they do (although they often fall flat on having concrete loss conditions), but that’s not the same as the game having win and loss conditions. If you successfully complete a scenario, you haven’t “won the game”, because you just move on to another scenario. And you don’t “lose” either, because losing a scenario moves you on to another scenario. In either case, the game keeps going. The way TTRPG games end is when the player, the GM, or both decide they’d rather not play them anymore. This could be, and ideally is, in the wake of a big win or loss that wraps everything up, but it doesn’t have to be. By contrast, when you win a game of Monopoly, the game is over.
I also think you’re right that many GMs can inadvertently strangle any interest in the world and game, but I don’t agree that it’s because they’re frightened of lore-based powergaming. I wouldn’t call that powergaming at all, but the taxonomy isn’t important. The reason GMs do this is, as Justin has talked about many times before, may GMs really only know how to railroad, and things like, as you say, trying to gain access to the Dwarven King’s weapons vault can really dynamite the railroad. It’s not that they resent the players engaging with the world, its that they don’t know how to handle it. The result from the players’ side is the same, the get shut down ad disengage, but the fix is different. The GMs usually really want the players to engage with the world, but they lack the necessary knowledge and skills to deal with it when they do. They’re not really trying to stymie the players so much as retreating in panic.
As a side note, I’ve never in my life met a GM who was mad that the players were interacting with the world because they were “doing it to win”. I’ve met a lot who would love their players to engage at all and don’t give a fig about their motivation for doing so.
@Wesley
> If you successfully complete a scenario, you haven’t “won the game”, because you just move on to another scenario.
I don’t think it’s fair, and it mostly feels like a unnecessary semantic distinction.
Using that logic, I can say the same for, say, DOOM. I can “beat” it, but then I move on to play Plutonia Experiment or some WADs. So I haven’t actually beaten DOOM by that logic either!
The trick here happens because of the way we assign names, really. When I say “D&D” we assume adventure-less system, when I say “DOOM” we think about both systems and the attached levels. So, the only thing that’s different here is the way labelling work. But we shouldn’t let ourselves be confused by this and see through it!
It is true that I can’t “beat D&D” in the same way I can “beat DOOM”, but I also can’t “play D&D” at all, because D&D is not a game, it’s a system to run games. But those games one would use D&D to run? Yeah, you can still beat those. And that’s the ones that you’d actually play in, ones that matter.
Plus, I mean, a given game usually is over once you defeat the BBEG. New campaign, new characters.
Though here I should admit my bias – it seems that a lot of other playgroups do “forever campaigns”, while our group tends towards shorter, concise games with limited scope. For example, we consider 20 sessions long campaign to be extremely long.
Still, I don’t think it really changes things in a meaningful way. I mean, if you beat a videogame and then DLC comes out and you can play that DLC with your character from the main game, we’d still say you have beaten the original game, DLC’s release didn’t “un-beat” the original game. One can make an argument that in actual TTRPG play these sub-games aren’t easily separable from each other, but like, does it really matter from the perspective of our topic? To me it feels more like a technicality gotcha rather than a satisfying answer.
Another point about powergaming is that it doesn’t just have to make sense from a mechanical point of view. It also has to make sense in the gaming world.
For example, D&D tends to be fairly relaxed about things that people probably shouldn’t be relaxed about, like carrying zweihander swords or poleaxes or indeed any type of missile weapon around largely peaceful towns. Let’s not even mention the kind of fantasy mace that if manufactured in reality would weigh 50+kg.
My main campaign setting has the authorities distrustful of such things. So adventurers in town need to have the ability to use not just the weapons that do the most damage, but also ones that are less threatening or concealable, and in the event people do need to get out the heavy artillery they need to think more about how they cover this. So you get more richness of planning and more varied characters (“Do I go for a mid-tier weapon like a rapier, or do I stick with the easily concealable dagger…?”).
@21, 22: Never mind DOOM; by the logic of “you haven’t won the game if you keep on playing it,” no sports team ever “wins” or “loses” a game unless they’re playing in a tournament, because there’ll be another game after this one.
In the early days of RPGs, cooperative board games weren’t really a thing (much less cooperative video games). It was probably hard for many people to conceive of a “game” in which you weren’t competing against the other players. Nowadays, I’d wager that’s true for fewer people. Therefore, there’s less need to trot out the line about RPGs having no winners or losers.
A true sandbox campaign may have no “win condition”, but most published scenarios do. There may be more than one way to “win”, as Flyfly described; there may be different degrees of victory (you beat the orc army, but not before they burned down your village); it may be possible to salvage a “loss” (short of a TPK), but the point still stands: some outcomes feel like “winning” and some outcomes feel like “losing”. And powergaming can be a way of increasing the likelihood of the former.
@Wyvern: Apparently I need to explain what I’m thinking more. If I lose DOOM, as in Flyfly’s example, then I’ve lost the game. Yes, I can just reload the save and try again, but that’s exactly the point. I don’t move on from the loss, I repeat the sequence up to it until I win. By contrast, in RPGs, losing a scenario does not mean I’ve lost the game, it just means the game takes a different turn. Say the win condition is “beat the orc army” as in your example. I can fail at that, and fail the scenario. But the game, that is an ongoing game using the same rules, setting, players, with character continuity, continues. This is not the case in video games. Even in the most supposedly open world, free choice video games, there is a nearly infinite number of things you cannot do or cannot fail to do if the game is to continue.
So when I say that you can’t lose the game, it’s because all outcomes simply lead to different permutations of the game. If I stop the orc army, I’m victorious and move on to the next challenge flush with accomplishment, if I fail, I gather the remaining defenders for a risky, desperate run out of orc held territory, or whatever else I decide to do in the wake of that failure. The scenario was lost, the game continues. We don’t know the outcome yet. Even in the case of the hardest failure, the TPK, there’s nothing stopping the game from continuing in the afterlife, or with a new set of heroes in the next generation or any number of ways. We can quibble over whether that’s technically the same game, but that’s ultimately determined by how it feels to the players at the table.
By the same token, you don’t win the game because there’s never a point at which winning precludes you from expanding the story. No victory is inherently final. Your group decides when its done playing the game, and if you do it right this coincides with the death of the BBEG if that’s what you’re going for. But nothing about victory in that final scenario stops you from saying you’re liking this game and just adding another scenario.
So again…scenarios can be won or lost, but games only end when the group decides they’re done with them. Which often isn’t because of any sort of victory but for a variety of out of game reasons.
@25: You’re addressing the wrong person. I *didn’t* use DOOM as an analogy, I only acknowledged Flyfly’s use of it so that it wouldn’t seem like I hadn’t read his post. I personally think a sports season is a better analogy to an RPG campaign. When a team loses a game, they don’t replay the same opponents over and over until they win; they move on to the next match. Neither does the team disband after a loss, so there is “character continuity”. And regardless of the outcome of an individual match, the season continues. The only significant difference I see is that the season has a predetermined endpoint, whereas a campaign may not (and even if it does, the number of play sessions it takes to reach that point is usually variable). So as I said, according to the criteria *you* laid out, no sports team could be said to have “won” or “lost” a game unless they’ve either won the championship or been eliminated from competition:
‘If you successfully complete a [match], you haven’t “won the game”, because you just move on to another [match]. And you don’t “lose” either, because losing a [match] moves you on to another [match]. In either case, the game keeps going.”
@25
> I don’t move on from the loss, I repeat the sequence up to it until I win
I mean, this still seems like a weird way to dodge the topic. Though Wivern has already wrote what I would have written. (though with stuff like various roguelikes and online games we don’t even need to leave the world of videogames to make the same argument)
> So again…scenarios can be won or lost, but games only end when the group decides they’re done with them
This all feels like you’ve shifted a “game” to include multiple scenarios that can be won or lost instead of being one by itself. Which, sure, fine. But, like, so what? Well, in that case as a Powergamer I guess play to win Scenarios, not Games – if we are using your definitions. It feels like with a lot of words we just kicked the can down the road, and not even particularly far.
Is this all this is about? Slight misalignment of our definitions of what exactly to include under the word “game”?
@Highbrowbarian “But when I do those things and other players treat me like I did something wrong, I am utterly confused.”
That’s just lack of empathy for other styles of play. Powergamers force powerplay. If everyone wants to powerplay, that’s absolutely fantastic, but when it’s 1 or 2 in a group, I can tell you right now, it ruins the fun for the non-powergamers. And I say this as somebody who enjoys powerplay, rules mastery, and systems optimization, I swear I have nothing against that mindset, but you need to recognize that that’s what it is: a mindset, an attitude towards the game. And while a lot of players (the majority I’ve met) have a mindset that says that the rules should serve the game, powergaming, whatever motivates it, is about “the game serving the rules”. Or, put another way, when you powerplay, the rules become the game. It’s the exact opposite paradigm of play.
In general, all other styles of play work together pretty well (people who are character-focused, exploration-focused, story-focused, lore-focused, jesters, …), it’s the powerplayer the one who tends to either push the group towards powergaming, poisoning it for those entirely uninterested, or becoming a disruptive element in the party. In a collaborative game such as an RPG, one player dominating mechanically breaks any semblance of group dynamics. It becomes his/her game, and everyone else becomes an audience. As a GM, I find these situations daunting. E.g.: If I prepare a combat encounter for the whole party to enjoy, the powergamer might very well solo the encounter; if I make it a bit harder for the powergamer, a TPK-1 becomes a very real risk (these extend to other sorts of mechanics-heavy situations, combat is just the easiest to understand). And something that I’ve seen with a wide majority of powergamers is that the moment the encounter is not about fighting something, they check out. If a whole session goes by without a fight, you can see them getting a bit angry, or even complain out loud. A few sessions like that, and they will likely drop out.
And I can’t stress this enough, there’s nothing wrong with playing the game like that, I also enjoy playing the game like that (I almost always play a bit like that), but the other players aren’t angry at you because they’re irrational beings, they’re angry at you because, from their point of view, you are being an a-hole. And once again, I don’t agree with that, but in my experience powergamers get along better with other powergamers, and they tend to become a problem in a group with a mix of interests. YMMV.
Oh man! I’m loving the evergreen discussion about winning and losing in RPGs! 😂
To add my take on the purely semantic discussion, no, RPGs can’t be won or lost, because winning and losing require win/lose conditions, or imply competition. There are definitely no win/lose conditions in almost any RPG that I’ve ever read (“Everyone is John” is the only exception I can think of, that is an RPG you can win). And RPGs are generally not competitive games, so you don’t get a winner and a loser.
What you will find in an RPG is success and failure (both, not either/or), which require an objective that you achieve or not. Because RPGs are awesome, objectives are usually self-defined.
@Jay: [Many] players (the majority I’ve met) have a mindset that says that the rules should serve the game, powergaming, whatever motivates it, is about “the game serving the rules”.
I respectfully disagree with this description of power gaming. Rather, I understand that you may play this way, but I don’t think that should be construed as universal.
The entire point I was trying to make was that I power game BECAUSE of sharing the belief that rules should serve the game. I have nothing against a game with, say, statistics for “heavy weapon,” “medium weapon,’ and “light weapon”. Honestly, I usually prefer that approach. But if we’re going to have rules for dozens (or hundreds) of weapons, I want those rules to do something other than make people slow down the game as they reference stuff they’ve forgotten. I want them to be part of the story, part of the experience… part of, I would say, the game.
If those rules are not serving that game, get rid of them. But if people use rules they don’t like and then get upset when I play with the toys they’ve chosen, then I am somewhat confused by the suggestion that it is my play style which shows a lack of empathy.
In particular, a game with crunchy, lethal combat runs directly against the interests of a bunch of social gamers who are not interested in build optimization or tactics. In my experience, games like that will see a lot of encounters which are either total jokes or rely on heavy DM fiat to not kill the players even without any power gaming. If the choices which the rules assume are the most important ones actually get made at random (by picking whatever feels right emotionally, rather than for mechanical reasons), the outcome will also, by definition, be random. And, since we have a widely-accepted source of randomness in RPGs, I think everyone would be happier removing all those mechanics they dislike and replacing them with a dice roll.
And, yes, I understand that a huge swath of gamers just play [current edition of DnD] without considering what kind of play it encourages or incentivizes. And that a huge swath of the rest pick a game based on its lore, and just assume the rules will support that – how else would an industry legend be the “storyteller system” which is full of crunchy rules for combat? But understanding the reasons for a bad decision doesn’t magically make it a good decision.
The last post does seem a little harsh, so I would like to clarify:
My favorite type of character to build is in a support role, and lately I’ve even added the restriction of not taking “face” skills. I don’t want to make any other PC feel overshadowed.
I just want to either use the toys in front of me, or get out a different box.