So I am someone who generally enjoys PvP in my text-based roleplaying games. I tend not to care very much about combat, but I like political systems, ideological debates about the ethics of magic or what-have-you, mysteries where there are some stakes to being the one to solve a puzzle, and an intelligent, player-controlled opponent.
The problem I find is that it’s very hard to have any system of this kind that doesn’t devolve into player resentment and envy. Even if it doesn’t involve character loss or anyone being beaten up or bullied, if the game features some sort of prize that only one player can get, then no matter how fairly it’s earned, it seems inevitable that those who lose out will grumble about how unfair it is that player one got it and they didn’t. Likewise, if you have Team Magic is Cool and Team Magic is Evil, as fun as it is to design characters with ideologies that can participate in an IC debate club about it, inevitably players on Team Cool start projecting assumptions about Team Evil’s OOC ideologies and comparing fictional themes to sensitive RL politics.
Naturally a lot of games choose to sidestep this entirely by just not having PvP, and putting all players on the same team. But this puts a lot more onus on the DM to provide challenges and conflict, and I think it’s impossible to have truly three-dimensional villains in this kind of setting. It also lowers the stakes considerably, because you know that the NPC team isn’t supposed to have an equally fair shot at winning as the PC team.
So, if you were designing a game where PvP is meant to be part and parcel (it doesn’t have to involve actual combat or risk of character death), how do you go about mitigating any risk of OOC toxicity?
I always link 
