@Juniper said in Non-toxic PvP:
You can design a near perfect character-conflict system and it will be ruined by an influx of extremely sensitive slice-of-life RPers who devolve into sobbing fits whenever they witness so much as an invitation to participate in conflict.
So lately I’m thinking I’d just kick out those people. Not everyone is capable of the kind of introspection required to choose a game that suits their playstyle, sometimes you have to do it for them.
As I often say whenever the topic of “how do we do character conflict good and fun?” comes up within the MU discussions, the answer is literally this. Community management.
That’s not a skillset that every (maybe even most?) folks who want to run a MU have or want to develop, which is understandable. But willingness to have to be “the bad guy” and take a rep hit, and deal with reports, and investigate claims, and all that sort of thing.
IMO player-driven conflict as a focal point to a game doesn’t really ease the cognitive burden on the staff running the game. It just shifts it from “THE METAPLOT” to “watching out for jerkwards”, which inevitably leads people to complain about the lack of Metaplot anyways.
Not even just slice-of-lifers who want to stake up a part of the niche game that clearly isn’t for them. But tryhards that focus entirely on winning conflicts over creating cool stories. “But that’s what my character would dooooo” types who justify crummy behavior via “IC logic”. Escalators that go from 0 to 100 (both in reacting to conflict, and in initiating conflict).
There’s many pain points that arise when it comes to running a game w/ PvP (tho I prefer Jumpscare’s rebranding of it to CvC personally) as the main drive, and after years in this hobby I just don’t know that I believe it’s worth all of the effort, given the variety of dillweeds and trashbag people you have to sift through to get The Cool People Who Just Want A Lil Bit of Spice In Their RP to stick around.
