In search of rampant competition

[radiantfracture]

Does anyone know a fun indie TTRPG with competitive elements? All the ones I know are delightfully co-operative...

It doesn't actually have to be super indie, but it does have to be something a student could read and come to grips with over a couple of weeks, so not all of D&D for example. (Though D&D isn't actually competitive, now that I think of it -- combative but collaborative.)

So let's say the main criteria are that it is a game with story and/or character, but also there are competitive elements between the players.

I found an intriguing list of just such games, but it's from 2006 and all the links are dead.

{rf}

Comments

[yhlee]

Not 100% competitive but Emily Care Boss's Shooting the Moon (PDF) has two Suitors competing to win the heart of a Beloved. (I think you can modify it for more than three players.) I've played it once and had a blast. Alas, my character's accordion-playing just wasn't romantic enough. ;)

[radiantfracture]

Thank you! But not being won by accordion? Madness. What was the gameplay like?

That reminds me of a TTRPG review I heard not that long ago onnn... (frantic googling) The Farrier's Bellows, a very good but short-lived podcast.

It was a game callllleed (scramble scramble) Kagematsu that did a thing with gender that sounded interesting though super binary... a village is confronted by a threat that a wandering warrior might be able to deal with, so all the women are vying to make him fall in love with them -- and the idea is that a woman plays the male character and men play the other characters.

Sounds like it would yield much analysis of various kinds.

[jazzfish]

John Harper's AGON has some friendly-competitive stuff between players. At least in the first edition it did, I assume it's still there in second edition. Can confirm that first ed was an awful lot of fun. (Second ed published by Evil Hat; looks like first ed was self-published.)

Robin Laws's RUNE was explicitly players-vs-GM. I never played it, so I don't know how well it works in practice, but it was an interesting read twenty-odd years ago. (Published by Atlas Games; long out of print, but the free PDF jumpstart might be enough to get you going. Rune product line website.)

I feel like if you're not playing Amber Diceless competitively you're doing it wrong. Every game I've run or played in has been deeply intriguey and backstabby among the PCs, even when they're nominally working towards a common goal. Happy to talk more about that if you'd like. (Published by Phage Games; long out of print in hard copy but PDFs are available on Drivethrurpg.)

[radiantfracture]

These all sound excellent, thank you!

I would *love* to hear more about Amber Diceless! I only know about it from a mention on Enthusigasm. I think I read some of the novels long ago? I remember the shelf they were on at the library, anyway. (And the D&D version of the mythos.)

*And anything else about AGON or RUNE would also be fascinating.

Context: I'm in search of possible topics for a student who said he likes competitive games and has an assignment on TTRPGs to write.

[jazzfish]

Hm, okay, so looking at a couple of reviews of AGON second edition, it seems that they took out the player-v-player aspect. Which is fair, it was kind of underdeveloped.

In AGON (first edition), the PCs are Greek heroes, sailing around an archipelago, exploring strange islands, meeting interesting people and monsters, and beating them up, For Glory. The PvP aspect comes into play in a couple of ways. First, you're explicitly trying to score Glory (functionally, XPs) to be more awesome and a better-remembered hero: you score Glory by killing monsters and overcoming various obstacles. Specifically, by dealing the killing blow, or by rolling the best in a non-combat challenge. Second, during downtime you can recuperate by calling for a contest among the heroes, using your various skills. Everyone regenerates a little bit, the winner regenerates more, and the loser owes the winner a favor (typically the loan of a die during a later challenge).

I don't remember much about RUNE except that it was explicitly players-vs-GM and had a rotating GM, changing every encounter.

---

Amber Diceless is the game of my heart. The central conceit is that the PCs are from the Really Real reality of Amber, and as such are inherently superior in every way to anything they might encounter in the multiverse of Shadow... so the only real conflict is with their peers, other Amberites. Note that there are also 'elder Amberites,' their parents' generation, who can generally kick the snot out of the PCs... but they're still only human, so they can be outmaneuvered. Amber games usually involve some sort of existential threat to Amber and/or the Courts of Chaos, and often a lot of political maneuvering for the throne of Amber itself.

Characters have four attributes: Psyche (magic prowess), Strength (physical prowess, unarmed combat), Endurance (not dying), and Warfare (sort of mental prowess, and also all physical conflict other than fisticuffs). Attributes have values, but only the relative ranks matter: "I'm second-ranked in Psyche, so I can out-magic anybody but Frank, but I'm low ranked in Strength so if anyone punches me before I can magic them I'm toast." Attributes are initially doled out in an auction, and players can then secretly spend character points to buy up their attributes, so that they're slightly less good than that rank ("I bought up to first rank in Warfare, so now I'm a little less good than Chris, but better than everyone else... unless they also bought up Warfare").

Conflict resolution is entirely narrative, and adjudicated by the GM. In general you're not going to beat someone who's way better than you, without some extreme trickery. (Or changing the terms of the engagement: making it into a Strength conflict instead of Psyche, as above.) In a close contest, Endurance is often the deciding factor: "You're a little better than me in Warfare but I'm three ranks higher in Endurance, so I just have to not die before you exhaust yourself."

Amber is a weird, weird artifact of a game. Erick Wujick, the designer, is better known for his work on Rifts, aka "the 1980s teenaged boy powertrip RPG." The Amber rules mix complex and technical magic systems and magic item creation with the freewheeling conflict resolution I describe above. In practice I steer players away from the weirder magic stuff and the overpowered items, and towards the attribute auction, because that's where the fun is.

[elusis]

Paranoia?

[ducks]

[radiantfracture]

Ha, I don't know enough about the game to know why you would duck.

[elusis]

I'll just quote Wikipedia: "Paranoia is notable among tabletop games for being more competitive than co-operative, with players encouraged to betray one another for their own interests, as well as for keeping a light-hearted, tongue in cheek tone despite its dystopian setting." That... doesn't get at the half of it, but it's a good start.

[radiantfracture]

And it is fun? :D

Is there anything about it that would make it unsuitable for study by a first-year college student?

[elusis]

Well, it is fun. :)

The player characters frequently receive mission instructions from the Computer that are incomprehensible, self-contradictory, or obviously fatal if adhered to, and side-missions (such as Mandatory Bonus Duties) that conflict with the main mission. Failing a mission generally results in termination of the player character, but succeeding can just as often result in the same fate, after being rewarded for successfully concluding the mission. They are issued equipment that is uniformly dangerous, faulty, or "experimental" (i.e., almost certainly dangerous and faulty). Additionally, each player character is generally an unregistered mutant and a secret society member (which are both termination offenses in Alpha Complex), and has a hidden agenda separate from the group's goals, often involving stealing from or killing teammates. Thus, missions often turn into a comedy of errors, as everyone on the team seeks to double-cross everyone else while keeping their own secrets. The game's manual encourages suspicion between players, offering several tips on how to make the gameplay as paranoid as possible.


But I don't know if it violates your ask in terms of complexity - I've never run a game and it's been decades since I played it. As, in fact, a first-year college student. But looking briefly at the Wikipedia entry, it sounds like Paranoia XP, "Zap version," might be workable.

Someone crowdfunded a card-based adaptation of it in 2017, which I admit that I bought and have not played ever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)

[radiantfracture]

This is beginning to sound vaguely familiar... I think it must have been described to me back in the 1990s, though I don't know if I actually played it. Mmmaybe.

[skygiants]

We had an incredible time with Get In the Fucking Robot, a competitive RPG in which your objective is to aggressively overcome other characters' self-doubts so that they, and not you, will get in the fucking robot.

[radiantfracture]

The title alone sounds AMAZING. (Reading) OMG I love this.

[skygiants]

My friend wrote up a great gameplay report if you want more detail on what it was actually like for us to play this, although of course I think any group's experience would be different based on how they ended up tackling the narrative element!

[radiantfracture]

if you want more detail on what it was actually like for us to play this

Yes yes I do

That is indeed a great writeup.

Damn now I really want to play this immediately and have fun tragedy. I was going to make my crew play Psi*Run but I think it might have to be this one.