Winning Dungeons and Dragons

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.

There's a long-standing view that role-playing games are not things that can be won or lost.  There's always more of the game to play, and in any case the players are mainly collaborating with one another so it doesn't make sense to talk about competition.  To make sense of this, let's consider a group of players - for simplicity's sake, we'll call them FCB.

FCB are a group with different ages and backgrounds, but they're united by their enjoyment of the game.  Every year, they'll be off to different locations, running the risk of defeat and injury in the hopes of winning fame and prizes.  Due to conflicting interests, schedules - not to mention the difficulty of wrangling a large group - many of the group won't be at a particular game.  In addition, some of their players are more skilled and more active, and these elite players tend to get the lion's share of the rewards.  On the other hand, the less skilled members of FCB often learn a great deal from the better players.


There's no conception that at some point, FCB will pack up and stop playing the game.  If they did, their members would probably see that event as something of a catastrophe.  However, each time they play, FCB are more or less successful in their pursuit of prestige and wealth.  At the end of a given campaign, they can look back and say that it was a better or worse effort than those that had come before, and that their history of achievement sets a benchmark for evaluating future campaigns.

A certain selection of sports fans will have probably noticed that I'm talking about Futbol Club Barcelona, a professional association football club based in Spain.  Nobody would doubt that Barcelona really do win games of football but even in their most successful years it would be bizarre to say that Barcelona have "won football" - there's always another game and another season.  In addition, although sometimes it's said that one of Barcelona's roster "won the game on his own", this is not a literal statement but rather hyperbole to refer to an exceptional performance.

By parity of reasoning, winning role-playing games is possible.  This is particularly true for old-school D&D and retroclones in which a haul of treasure provides a measure of success, and all the more so when the scenario includes rival adventure parties who might carry away a greater share.  Note that this doesn't meant that every RPG is a competitive event (people do play association football "just for fun") and it also doesn't mean that individual players competing against the group are doing it right.  A selfish attitude doesn't get very far in team sports, either.

An initial problem with the analogy is the DM's many hats.  Although the DM is certainly the game referee, they are also the scenario designer - the opposition.  I'm sensitive to this problem and my use of random elements in scenario creation, or scenarios designed by others, is an attempt to solve it.  Perhaps you buy the idea that the scenario, once closed, is its own thing and the DM just interprets it, perhaps you don't.  I'm not entirely comfortable with either view, but I do feel that the DM is capable of presenting the group with a challenge and then fairly interpreting their response to it.  If I enjoyed gold, if would have been a better analogy!

A more substantive problem arises if you're not playing with fame and wealth as the character objectives, and in particular if the game is focused on the DM creating stories.  At that point, the analogy simply falls apart - or at best, we're talking about "Sports Entertainment" (professional wrestling) rather than sports, in which the winning and losing is scripted and instrumental rather than an ends in itself.  I don't think that this style of game is wrong or inappropriate, but it does strike me as something very different to what I'm trying to do.  Nor am I the only one to make this kind of distinction, but finding non-pejorative terms for the split in the hobby is difficult.  I don't really fancy breaking up into "roll-players" and "story-gamers".  Perhaps role-playing gamers and role-players would keep everyone happy?