I have never really heard of competitive roleplaying until somebody suggested I go to one of the events. It makes sense I suppose, you can always easily tell if somebody is role playing correctly or well just as anybody can tell a good actor from a bad one. I recently took some time to go and compete for the New World of Darkness title for competitive role playing at the Game society Nationals, however my main reason for going down was to see if there would be a noticeable difference in quality when somebody had been running storytelling systems for extended periods of time in their lives.
When it comes to tabletop storytelling systems the player is left largely without any constraints beyond their imagination and the Game masters world. You would think that this would in and of itself inspire creativity in the hearts of people who play these games, however the reality is quite different. I think tabletop games are a great example of how the ability to make any choice at any time and literally do anything does not make things especially better, it makes choices very difficult for the person making them as they are hampered by the options. Another reference to point that the Bioware and borderlands games make is that people love to make choice and they love for those choices to have a sublime impact on the story and have consequence and weight. But what they don't want is to be unable to choose what it is exactly that they should do.
The games that I played at Game soc were excellent in their own way because they pulled the players into the characters and made them easy to understand, one of the games featured an interesting dream sequence designed to be a tutorial where the player gets a feel for the character they have picked. They were designated by simple one word titles taken from tarot cards which gave us the overall theme for the character while not giving us too much information, the aim of which was to make sure that people did not end up in their specific comfort zones. I believe in these kinds of games there is a specific type of game play the player knows well and usually aspires to, this damages the act of role playing for that player because if they know too well what their ability's are and what they can do they will immediately seek to use these skills to their full effect in any situation using their gamer instincts, this leads to players acting exactly as they would do in linear role-playing games, killing thousands callously without any emotional impact to themselves or their characters, not even flinching when threatened and not for a second thinking 'what would my character do?'.
This seems to be the contradiction of tabletop role playing games, and one of the reasons the phrase 'No plan survives contact with the players' exists. When I began playing games such as Baulders gate and Neverwinter nights I was entranced by the amount of choice I got, the ability to go where I wanted and do what I wanted. This reached its ultimate expression in fallout, a game where I could go out and do anything in a fantasy world, however eventually I found the walls, the built in systems that the game used for advancement, the overlayed main story line and the startling amount of punishment any one human (including...especially the protagonist) could take. All of these things made my all rounded character into a mass murderer in a simple attempt to follow the plot, it became increasingly obvious I could not solve every problem with stealth, words, cunning or allies, it always had to come down to how quick I was with a gun or knife. It seems that the same applies to tabletop games, players are only interested in kicking the door in, looking for trouble and killing for XP, this to me seems counter intuitive as all of those things are handled much better by computer games as a whole, surely the reason tabletop games still exist is they allow more freedom of choice? Then why do people stick to the same thought process when given more freedom? I think the reason (apart from power fantasy and plain old 'its fun this way') is that there are no real games that are designed without the main consideration being these systems, PVP and PVE seem to be the main focus of the games designers so why wouldn't they be the main focus of the people who play those games?
Well, I would like to see something different,
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