PvE and PvP

Many games include some degree of conflict, and Romancing the Toaster is no different. Whether between players and non-player characters, players and the environment or between players as groups or as individuals, it is likely that you will want something that someone else doesn't, and that you won't be able to negotiate a solution. In this case, you'll engage in Player versus Environment (PvE) or Player versus Player (PvP) activity.

When adjudicating how these work - who wins? at what cost? - we will take into account a wide range of factors. Mechanics and rules - Quirks, Skills, Items and Relationships - factor into our determinations, but a good plan can also be useful to use your abilities effectively or deploy them in innovative ways. If you use your Skills, abilities and advantages in particularly devious ways, you might be able to defeat a more powerful opponent; if you don't have much of a plan, or weren't planning for a particular challenge, this might mean that your abilities are less effective.

No matter what happens, a key principle that we will abide by for writing turnsheets is that both winning and losing should be fun. What does this mean?

• That winning should be fun is obvious. You get the satisfaction of seeing your plan work perfectly, advantages over your rivals or see your personal goals and agenda advanced. At the same time, we don't want to give you simple 'you succeed at doing this thing!' outcomes; instead, successes will typically raise interesting new problems or opportunities for you, or give you information that you may wish to share with people in session.

• At the same time, we also want losing to be fun, if not more so. We will endeavour to write turnsheets so that losses raise fun issues to deal with in game. Defeated characters may gain new insights into how the setting works or the strategies of a foe; they may incur strange and exotic injuries that you may enjoy roleplaying in session or force them to grow; they will at least get a fun or entertaining writeup. Our pledge to you is that we won't write turnsheets that just say 'you fail to achieve your goal' - there will always be interesting things to deal with. In turn, we hope that this will encourage players to not be afraid to fail, or to make their characters vulnerable - that's how the best stories are made.

Player vs Player combat can take many forms: any action where one player attempts to subvert the goals of another, directly or by simply having a incompatible aim of their own is PvP. This can mean racing for a piece of juicy scrap, hacking into another robot's website, or taking a buzzsaw to their chassis in order to pull them apart. While we expect characters trying to *actually* kill one another to be rare, interpersonal relationships - both positive and negative - form the core of the Romancing the Toaster, and so conflict is expected.

While PvP is nothing new to most roleplayers, we want to make sure that all players approach it in the right spirit in order to create a narratively satisfying, OC fun, generally positive game experience.

By the essential nature of PvP action, there will usually be a 'winner' and a 'loser' - that's just how things go! We ask that though players may portray characters as sanctimoniously or bitterly as they want while in character (and do in fact encourage it!), all players are gracious about the victories and defeats of their characters in equal measure when out of character.

As discussed above, we will work to ensure that PvP is interesting and fun. Even if PvP action results in mechanical losses, with characters experiencing great loss or suffering, we hope that their players will take these outcomes gracefully out of character.

Remember, it is the character that won or lost, not the player.