A roleplaying game is, at its heart, a collaborative storytelling mechanism. Some games lend themselves towards a lot of hacking, slashing, shooting, and blasting tactical simulations. Some games lend themselves towards a lot of player-generated narrative and creativity. Most games contain several elements of both. Something that is present in the introduction chapter of most RPGs, but is frequently glossed over and not spoken of again, is that it is not only collaborative but cooperative. When five people sit down in somebody’s mom’s basement with some books, clipboards, and dice bags and start spinning yarns about elves and dragons and spaceships and giant robots, everybody has a pretty solid idea of who is going to win. Everybody and nobody.

Most games have a game master — certainly the most popular ones do — whose role is to control and present the world to the other players. The other players control and present a far more limited set of characters and objects and actions, typically limited to those of a single fictional character in the game master’s world. The players, through their characters, collude to overcome the challenges set forth by the game master. Everybody, including the game master, is pulling for the ultimate victory of the players. This is the norm, but not always the case.

Sometimes the players’ characters just at odds with each other. One wants to go slay the dragon. One wants to go unseat the evil king. Another wants to stop the dread necromancer’s horrible scheme. When one or more of these can wait, and the players are willing to be reasonable, this is not a problem. When two or more just cannot wait, you’ve got a problem. When two or more will necessarily preclude each other, you’re not talking about cooperative play any more; if the players cannot figure out a way for both their characters to get along, cooperation becomes competition.

There is something basically dishonest about entering into a roleplaying game intent upon meddling with and confounding the goals of the other players without being quite up-front about it. When you play Chess with somebody, it is understood that you will take your opponent’s king. If the game you’re starting up revolves around political maneuvering and conflicting interests, everybody needs to know this heading in; you’re setting up a situation where some of the players will win at the others’ expense, and that’s a different sort of game entirely.