Play to Win: The Case for "Competitive" Role-Playing Games
You should play Deathmatch Island.
I’m bad at games.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy games. I have fun playing them, tinkering with the puzzle they present, and exploring the experience they’re trying to give me. I’m just not very good at winning. It’s actually pretty common that the designers of a game are not the best player. A lot of gamers are better at finding the most efficient and powerful way to play, while I often find something that feels fun, unique, or otherwise allows me to feel like I’m creating my own unique way to play a game.
That’s why a lot of game designers come from one or both of two places: Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons. Both games allow the players to explore their own way to engage with the game, tinker with their deck or character (a personal creation that they use to play), and generally use avenues of self-expression to design and develop their own game inside the pre-existing system.
I come from both games, but today I want to talk about D&D, or tabletop RPGs more generally. The Dragon Game is probably a bad example to use in this context for a number of reasons I don’t need to get into today, but if you’re reading this you probably don’t need me to reiterate that discussion.
Role-playing is generally a cooperative experience, so being bad at the game doesn’t particularly matter. The goal is to tell a cool story with your friends, not necessarily win by having the most powerful character or being the best at exploiting the mechanics. In modern story-driven TTRPGs that I enjoy like Blades in the Dark or Cybermetal 2012, if your character dies it is part of an impactful moment in the story and, at least to most types of players I appreciate playing games with, it isn’t a bad thing. Character death should move the story forward and be a decision that the player makes rather than punishment for a bad roll.
There is even a whole world of games that have character death as a goal, or at least an inevitability, in the game. Play-to-lose games such as Ten Candles, Dread, or The Zone are generally horror experiences where you know your character will die by the end of the story.
This means you can push the narrative forward by doing things that are stupid or dangerous knowing that the consequences are going to be bad and that is the goal. After all, repercussions create conflict and conflict is an important part of a story. If your characters just win all the time, it’s pretty boring.
But what if one of you CAN win? That changes the stakes. It turns the whole dynamic on its head.
Today I’m going to talk about competitive TTRPGs, why I love them even though I’m bad at games, and how you should approach them to get the best experience. I’ll discuss my own game, The Last Hand, as well as a different game I finally got to play that made me think much more about why I designed competitive mechanics into my game and how it helps drive the experience home.
Play to Win®
Recently I played the quickstart of a game by Tim Denee called Deathmatch Island, a game using the very structured narrative tech of the Paragon System established by John Harper and Sean Nittner’s AGON. If you go to the game’s website you’ll be graced with the not-so-subtle images and text that hit you over the head with the theme.
I reached out to Tim from Old Dog Games and was fortunate to be given access to his press kit so I could grace you all with some of the incredible art from this game.
It is a very good looking game.
Plastered all over it, in the rules, on the art, on the packaging of the fictional branded cookies, everywhere, is the text “Play to Win.”
It’s cheeky, because as I’ve discussed most TTRPGs aren’t there to be won and this isn’t an exception. Deathmatch Island is as much a play-to-lose game as any of the ones I mentioned previously, using the tropes and trappings of the battle royale genre rather than horror. On the other hand, it yells in your face that you are there to win from the moment you start making your character.
And as much as I am bad at games and don’t think you can really “win” at RPGs, I love this game.
Let me give you a quick rundown before we dig into it.
REDACTED
Players in Deathmatch Island portray Competitors sent to a mysterious island chain to participate in a battle royale scenario, with only the final survivor allowed to leave. The party begins as a single team among many, and the common way for other teams to survive the initial days is to band together into larger forces to cooperate, knowing full-well that they will have to turn on each other eventually to win.
The mechanics are simple, but not your typical game where you control your character’s actions and respond to the GM. It’s much more structured and technical in how it builds the story. I don’t want to explain all the ins and outs, but you should buy the game and read it.
While exploring Deathmatch Island, there are Restricted Areas that the event you are participating in helpfully informs you not to venture into. If you ignore that advice, you come across all manner of REDACTED that can only be accessed by REDACTED, and if you dig around you will find out about REDACTED.
You get the idea.
The setting plays on the tropes from media it references in its helpful “Touchstones” section, such as Squid Game, DEATHLOOP, and Control, to establish a dynamic of The Competitors vs The System. You get peeks behind the curtain at how the facility operates and it sets you up to have a chance to escape. However the way it has you decide is the real power of the game.
Break the Game
When the field narrows, you’ve explored the island and your characters, or you’re wrapping up due to time, you enter the Standoff. The play stops and players are given a choice: Play to Win, or Break the Game. But there’s a catch.
Players must decide which choice their character makes in secret.
If at least one Competitor chooses to Play to Win, the outcome is the same no matter how many chose to Break the Game. The Endgame results in a final battle to the death with only one survivor. In addition, players who chose to Play to Win get a bonus die to their rolls for being a backstabbing traitor.
However, if ALL Competitors choose to Break the Game, you have a completely different REDACTED Endgame where you REDACTED and REDACTED.
The game always ends in this prisoner’s dilemma, forcing you to decide if you can trust your fellow Competitors or if you think they will be unable to trust you and you should get the same advantage in the final showdown.
Knowing that this Standoff is coming, you spend the entire game engaging in obligatory cooperation to survive, with warranted distrust of your allies who might turn on you to win. It makes all the events of the games so far feel impactful as you analyze your fellow Competitors and their possible intentions.
The Standoff re-contextualizes the entirety of your experience playing Deathmatch Island. It’s absolutely genius and creates incredible tension right before the final climax of your story, a mechanical tool that heightens the narrative immeasurably.
Play To Lose
Here’s the thing: the players aren’t really being told to Play to Win® by the game. That message is for your characters, the actual Competitors in a God-forsaken game show.
If you go into Deathmatch Island with the goal of winning, you’ll almost certainly be disappointed. That’s the whole trick of the prisoner’s dilemma. Even if you want to get out of the game, can you really trust that your fellow Competitors won’t take the advantage and try to win?
Deathmatch Island is, in my opinion, a more mechanically focused, longer-form version of the same kinds of play-to-lose games I love in the horror and storytelling segment of RPGs. If you go in with this mentality, that you are playing to tell a compelling story about a character doomed to die, you will take more risks and tell a better story than if you play it safe.
Playing to lose will lead you into REDACTED where you can expect dangerous REDACTED but be rewarded with REDACTED if you survive. If you were playing to win, keeping your character safe, not pushing to explore the unknown and face mysterious challenges, you wouldn’t get to uncover the rich secrets the world of Deathmatch Island has to offer.
You are also more likely to get hurt feelings out-of-character if your friends end up betraying you in the end when you thought you were all trying to win together. Expect to lose, try to win, and maybe you’ll get the triumph of cooperation to subvert all your expectations (but don’t count on it).
Is that déjà vu?
Writing a lot of my praise for Deathmatch Island left me with this feeling. All the things I type about warranted distrust or obligatory cooperation are identical to the description and marketing materials I wrote for The Last Hand.
What’s strange is that they are NOT the same game. Not at all.
Obviously coming from Evil Hat and having a $161,870 crowdfunding success it’s an astoundingly bigger game than mine, and I don’t want this to come across as some sort of self-promotion. The comparison I’m making is intended more to highlight the unique experience of semi-competitive TTRPGs and the ways it can be implemented.
Deathmatch Island impresses me so much because it does everything I like from the play-to-lose horror games I love, including my own, without relying on the horror genre. The games I’ve mentioned previously, from Ten Candles to The Zone, rely on an impending doom presented from some horrific evil. The pacing is intentionally slow, ramping up tension and relieving it as threats come and go.
Don’t get me wrong, I obviously love horror, but Deathmatch Island has managed to capture the same feeling of assured failure without the same trappings of unknown monsters or corrupting magics. Its pulpy, brand-plastered action aesthetic is a far step from gloomy darkness while still keeping the sense of unknown, uncertainty, and unavoidable death.
What I was proud of myself for creating in The Last Hand, a game inspired by the horror games I loved, was a new mechanic core to the experience that forced players to cooperate while secretly positioning themselves to win. What love about Deathmatch Island is that it accomplishes the same thing in an entirely unique and fantastic way.
If you haven’t looked at it yet, you can pre-order Deathmatch Island and get access to the quickplay rules now. If you have heard of any other semi-competitive storytelling TTRPGs that I may have not, let me know in a message or in the comments.
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Talk to you next time!