@arkandel said in Antagonistic PCs - how to handle them:
However my caveat here is that competition kind of... comes with the hobby, too, whether there are black hats involved or not. Many players want to be special and stand out (which I won't analyze) but MU* social systems are often designed a bit like dancing chair games; your playerbase of 30 may only have 10 'ranks' - there is only one Prince, 5 Primogen, etc - so there you have it... competition.
Oh, absolutely. People are going to be competitive no matter what you do, which is one of the contributing factors as to why a competitive framework is so problematic. People are going to compete for time, attention, limited energy, and other resources -- now when your game sets up resources to be scarce, or more importantly something they can gain by removing resources from somebody else, now you have the environment itself saying "if you cooperate OOC, you are taking a risk".
This is actively unhealthy when you have a game of 30, 50, or 100 people, because you cannot ensure fairness of outcomes at that level, and when you remove fairness in a competitive situation, that's when toxic behavior explodes all over everything. This is why having everything coded like muds do mitigates it to a certain extent; when you have the code itself managing these things, the upset involved with Sally getting a mansion....well, it was the code, everyone has the same outcome with the code. It's also why there is such INTENSE screaming when it turns out that yet another one of these MUDs has cheater-bits in the code: it's the arbiter of fairness for their competition.
eta: I do want to note that I think all of this can be addressed, mitigated, taken into consideration, and worked with -- there are ways to like, handle all of the associated problems (there's a lot of them). I just don't think the juice is worth the squeeze, and I think the time is better spent on how we can improve engagement with cooperative play and lean into the hobby's strengths, rather than mitigating weaknesses.
Like, antagonists. If you set your game up to be cooperative, a lot of the sting of this comes out. You can set antagonist characters' players up to succeed, and create a culture of them working WITH the "protagonist" PCs to tell the best story, by rewarding them for leaving themselves vulnerable in X way. We ALL agree that antagonist characters add a world of good to EVERY game, provided they are in the hands of a good player.
The secret here is, though -- look back even at this thread, and the posts from good antagonist-characters's players, and you'll notice a common theme from them: they all played their antagonist PCs as if they were cooperating with the protagonist players. If you set it up to reward these people for doing the things that make that work, you hobble them for actually competing, right? But you make the experience more fun for everybody involved.
This is what I mean, and why I think it's super important to start divorcing "antagonist" from "competitive". If we start intentionally/mindfully setting antagonist characters' players up to succeed (OOC), the whole culture around it becomes more healthy. But that doesn't just HAPPEN save for a small handful of people, you have to actually build for it.
