Forums » RP Discussion » PVP Conflict: Finding the Balance

I've been RPing for years. I've definitely improved over time, but recently I'm finding myself faced with a challenge that I think most RPers tend to deal with earlier on in their RPing development. By this I mean figuring out how to deal with a PVP situation.
I've avoided PVP since I first worked out exactly what it was all about, because I saw that it too often results in two people trying to win a game rather than trying to progress and develop a story. The plot can get hung up and stalled because naturally both players are attached to their characters and want to see them succeed.

Now, I have no problem with my characters getting the tar whooped out of them - in fact I wholly encourage it! My characters are always riddled with crippling, debilitating weaknesses and faults to mirror any ability or advantage they have. Typically their faults play a much more critical role in plot development than their abilities. Short of death - which would be counterproductive in ending the RP - I usually play Non-Consent and put a little trust into my partner that they won't abuse it. So far nobody has, which is good!

Enter Aelyn; an all powerful, technological god-among-men NPC who has previously served only as a plot device to put events into motion. I never built weaknesses into him because there was never any need - the idea was that he exists in a whole other league than my and other folks' characters, so all his power and vulnerability has no effect on the story or characters - with the exception of keeping him out of the action.

(Example: He shows up with his city-sized spaceship and goes all Willy Wonka, inviting players' characters on board. Then the League of Extraordinary Evil launches an attack on the ship's civilian population and Aelyn becomes a nonentity in the face of this new conflict. While characters are running around and doing stuff he's up in the offices doing his important-person things that have more global effects than direct. If he does play another part down the line, it's that he decides to destroy the League of Extraordinary Evil by sending in his reserve army of Wombat-Men armed with AK-47's to shoot the place up, but they don't discriminate and end up shooting at the players' characters too. Indirectly he's started a new conflict. Again, down the line, stuff happens and he recalls his force at the insistence of a PC and that particular conflict is resolved.)

He never has to fight anyone because since he's so indestructible that a fight is out of the question. This encourages the story to lean in the direction of solving the problem without fighting...does that make sense?

Anyhow, I'm faced now with a situation where Aelyn has become a more central character than I'd usually allow him to. He's faced with Kampfer, another character who it seems has been designed in largely the same fashion. Mostly equal forces on either side, and both myself and Kampfer's player have no objections to giving and taking in the scheme of victories and losses. We both win some, we both lose some.
But naturally the conflict needs to escalate, or else it becomes stale. Both characters will start employing greater and greater forces in more and more desperate attempts to thwart the other. If they truly insist on fighting until the ultimate victory of one over the other, this presents a few potential problems for writers:

1. Neither player, understandably, wants their character to fail. The battle reaches a stalemate and the plot stalls.
2. One player at last gets their ultimate or mostly-ultimate victory, but this counterproductively ends the narrative.
3. One player decides to break the stalemate by god-modding.

This brings me to my second vague, half-formed collection of words that I'm still personally trying to make sense out of as I write: God-Modding.

I'm not worried about Kampfer's player doing it, I'm worried about myself doing it. As previously stated, weaknesses had never been taken into consideration over Aelyn's development for the reasons mentioned above - but I can't (And don't want to) play an invincible character in the face of another player's opposition as it wouldn't be fair or fun for either party. Yet my character was designed as being an ever-present, immovable object. Having him be defeated would seem almost out of character, against everything he is.
But obviously I have no more of a right to my character's 'victory' than they do to theirs - and really I don't want Aelyn to 'win' any more than I want Kampfer to 'win'...But here we have a fight to the end and eventually someone's going to have to go down, right?

As a further digression, I find myself thinking too practically about it. I see the problem that my character is faced with and put myself in his shoes, trying to figure out a way to solve the problem from his standpoint. The problem is that he wants unconditional victory, and I want continuation of the struggle. Sometimes the only way for him to solve the problem is by pulling some trump-card that I thought up on the spot. (IE 'Surprise! He had anticipated the attack and set up preemptive measures to counteract it!' A potential cheese-splosion of god-modding misery.)

But these trump-cards can be excellent sources of plot-twists and surprises, too. What it comes down to is moderation. I guess this leads to my ultimate question: How to achieve moderation?

How to know when I'm going too far with the all-powerful stuff? How to build weaknesses into a character who's primary trait is the lack-there-of? How to keep from falling into the trap of just wanting to win?


I'm rambling incoherently by now so I'll leave it at that - typing these things out usually helps me sort my head.

Does anyone have any input on the matter? If not advice then maybe just a response to the garbled mass of half-formed thoughts and vague, pointless digressions into a pool of ideas with the muddled and unflattering variety of mystery-meat-stew?

Sounds like you need a systems baseline like d20 or WW (my preference, and a lot simpler than a lot of other options out there) to work with at a core level. If you're not assigning stats to your PCs and NPCs it becomes that much harder to prevent situations like this.

In whatever case, it's your decision as a storyteller to lead the story where you think it should go, but there is a reason why I personally invest in finding a foundation system that works for me and the people involved.

Instead of being forced to "wing it", you have numbers to look at, and numbers to compare to, which can determine what works and what doesn't. Everything has a weakness. It's just figuring out what it is.

I agree. An extremely simple dice system takes the wind out of this problem immediately. Both characters can have their skills represented fairly, have their "edges" over each other represented fairly, and still have a fair chance to lose. And it still works if they both have identically maxed out skills in literally everything. In fact, if they are the "same", it immediately gets simpler. You could just do opposed rolls and you're done.

It also does not need to disrupt or supersede the normal freestyle writing that you're used to.

D&D et all can be difficult to get into (they've taken into account practically every possible situation in any combat ever, which is awesome, but also complicated), so the RPR has a radically simple dice primer for people who just want to break a stale-mate fairly and move on with their plot writing.

And it can be as complicated or as simple as you like. I make those two examples because they are at two different ends of the spectrum. Learning curve for both, but eventually White Wolf's system is going to get figured out a lot quicker. Not a lot of extra numbers thrown into the mix. Just some d10s and a dot counter for skills and attributes.