TTRPG sportsmanship?
Sunday, March 9th, 2025 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stepnixso i've been in a couple conversations recently about the idea of "playing to win" vs "playing to lose" in ttrpgs. Playing to win means taking the actions most likely to result in your victory (whether that's within a specific scene or within the overall campaign context) and playing to lose generally means taking whatever actions are most in-character, without concern for whether they actually bring your character closer to their goal.
...except, I'm not sure it always means that. Sometimes the way "play to lose" is used, it suggests "be okay with losing" instead. That's a different idea! Your behavior when you're trying to win, but accept the possibility of loss, is different from your behavior when you're not trying for a victory at all.
[As an aside: some of the games I focus on most are games with dedicated combat scenes where "do what's in-character without concern for victory" is either counterproductive or a false distinction. So I'm leery of descriptions of "play to lose" as fundamental to the hobby]
"Play to lose" is really weird advice to give when your game's player-side mechanics consist of ways to win, and ways to make winning easier, flashier, or more effective. It's mixed signals, at the very least. On the other hand, "don't be a sore loser" makes perfect sense in that situation. Even while players are trying to win, they need to accept the possibility of loss, or else, when they inevitably do, they won't be able to pick themselves up again
[As another aside: TTRPGs have such a weird relationship to loss in general. lose a video game you usually just try again, lose a board game, you shake your head and try again next week or decide to play a different game instead, but loss in a TTRPG often a permanent change in play or gets removed as an option completely in response to those kinds of permanent changes in play]
So as I'm thinking about "don't be a sore loser," I realize that, this isn't language I hear very frequently in TTRPG spaces? We very rarely talk about these things in terms of sportsmanship, and I'm not sure why. Off the top of my head:
1) culturally inherited aversion to sports, even as a turn of phrase
2) TTRPGs tend towards such high emotional and social investment that we avoid talking about them as "just a game" like the concept of sportsmanship leans on
now I won't act like sportsmanship is a single coherent and legitimate phenomenon we can talk about without any chance of miscommunication, but like, this is an already-existing idea that's extremely relevant to a lot of talk about social expectations at the table. So it's very weird that I don't see it invoked more often!
Am I missing something? Is it just a vocab difference I've missed? has "do what's good for the story" somehow replaced the concept of sportsmanship???
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Date: 2025-03-10 01:37 pm (UTC)There are more and more discussion of GM working with the players/being fans of characters. In this framework it'll be more "playing for a better story/greater fun/etc." collaboration rather than playing to win/lose.
I understand that old school l/OSR gaming are more GM as antagonists though, so there may be conversations in those circles - or it's just assumed as default. I'm not familiar with that kind of gaming though. 😅
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Date: 2025-03-10 03:08 pm (UTC)I think what I'm getting at is that, you can still compete without being "truly" antagonistic. The GM may not actually want the heroes to fail, but they're likely playing characters that do. So a lot of this is still applicable I think.
However
You're touching on something interesting about how "winning" against the players is not actually a victory state for the GM. The GM very rarely has one of those. It's a... motivational asymmetry, I suppose.
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Date: 2025-03-14 03:28 pm (UTC)I think many ttrpgs being fundamentally collaborative makes things different from sports or a most board games. I think that leads to fewer people being "sore losers" per se in that someone's loss isn't someone else's win and so you're not ruining someone else's moment if you're unhappy with dying most of the time. PvP LARPs definitely have more of a dynamic about people being sore losers and that causing problems, in my experience.
It's perhaps worth noting that some ttrpgs where death is expected, that's not a game-ending state, because you're expected to make a new character or similar, so it's different than loss in another type of game might be.