so 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???