I have no examples of ever having really enjoyed such a design.
Winning conditions in RPGs
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In Caper, a heist game, if you physically steal one of the coin tokens in play without that being noticed by the other players, your character tricks their fellow criminals and gets to keep everything for themselves at the end. I think that’s clever design and there’s a clear fictional reason why you would want to try and do this.
The same goes for Kagematsu, where you vie for Love points from Kagematsu although that’s not as competitive because the most important thing probably won’t be to become his most loved but the common goal of saving the village.
Both aren’t explicitly framed as winning the game, though.
There is also While the World Ends that has two ways in which the world might change at the end of the game associated with two main characters each. Characters can earn change tokens by successfully going after personal goals and whichever side has the most change tokens at the end wins and sees their possibilty of change come true. But importantly “the main characters do not necessarily actively work for their possibility of the change. Perhaps they are not even aware that the change is coming.” So there isn’t really too good a reason why you would want to win this except I guess, if you feel really strongly about one of the possibilities?
In Hollowpoint and 10 days without sunlight winning is presented as more of a joke, expressly not to be taken too seriously.
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From a design perspective, consider how the explicit competition a win condition provokes can be used as a lever to encourage behavior. There’s a win condition in The Shab Al-Hiri Roach, for example, and it does its job of making everyone paranoid and competitive, but it isn’t there so that someone can actually win the game.
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Thanks to everybody for their input and thoughts!
I actually have a game with a winning condition: in Tuk Fast Tuk Furious you win the game by making it first over the finishing line (obviously) and you do so by player skill. The game encourages you to do your best to be the winner.
However, the strategical input required from player side is low: Once in the game everybody assigns a bonus and a penalty to two other players while the rest plays out as snakes and ladders pure randomness. At the end of the game a bluff element plus luck decides about the winner.
The design goals were:
- Play to Win,
- Luck and simplicity instead of tactics,
- Tension until the end (no early winner),
- Focus on collaborative story telling
- Tight connection between story and mechanics.
I have written a longer article about my design goals at the Erzählspiel-Zine but the article is only available in German:
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I suppose The Final Girl has a win condition but since the characters are shared, it is the character that wins by surviving to the end as opposed to the player. Yet a player “wins” the right to narrate the final confrontation by losing the most characters.
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I think the word “win” is off-putting in the context of RPGs, which we’ve always been told (or we’ve always told ourselves) are games you don’t play to win. It makes it sound like you’re playing to win, rather than playing for the experience of play, playing to spend time with friends, playing to find out what happens in a story, etc. I think that wariness is worth pushing back against, though: Just like you can play a board game with a clear win condition and have goals that supersede winning—an excuse to have fun with friends being a prominent frontrunner—I think we should be able to recognize that RPGs can and do allow for this too. If by “win” we just mean either “end the game when someone achieves a predetermined goal,” or, “play for a set period of time, number of turns, or number of sessions, and then assess who best met predetermined goals,” I feel like we do that quite a lot.
One of my favorite campaigns of all time, in fact, was a Cold Ruins of Lastlife game on Gauntlet Hangouts. That game is a soulslike variant of Dungeon World, including special advancement tracks for when your amnesiac PC either reclaims the lost knowledge of a dead world, or inspires hope for a bright new world. After you advance along one track or the other a certain number of times, the game text advises you that you should start wrapping up the game. The way we discussed it in play, though, was definitely in terms of “winning”—but maybe we were more comfortable with this because it was more like when you win a cooperative game than when you win a competitive game. (And the fact that it was inspired by a video game series that is very much about winning may have something to do with it, but I got the impression most players didn’t have much experience with that series.) When we achieved that final advancement, we took turns narrating an epilogue of how we changed the world.
I also think D&D more generally has moved toward a model of being “winnable” in later editions, especially the 4th edition that’s clearly inspired by World of Warcraft and tactical minis games. Every adventure/module that sees you facing (even if not fighting!) a “final boss” is one that can be won. I have loved plenty such scenarios.
I might even go so far as to say that RPGs do win/loss games better than board games. If you play a cooperative board game for hours and then lose at the end, while it doesn’t undo the fun you had along the way, it can feel pretty deflating. When you “lose” in an RPG, it can be just as exciting or affecting as when you win. The setting for Blades in the Dark and Ghost Lines started, after all, when John Harper’s players “lost” at Dungeon World. And in a similar situation, a failed skill challenge in D&D 4e led to a tragic but fascinating variant of the published setting we played, turning our “town hub” into a tent city surrounding a massive sinkhole to hell. At least it left us adventurers with plenty of work for future sessions.
Perhaps I’m being too loose with terminology, but I think if we can think charitably about what “winning” means, and not necessarily think of it as connected to social dominance (and all the toxic masculinity stuff that comes with it), we can probably think of a lot more examples of RPGs we’ve enjoyed winning at.
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My game Cut to the Chase has a winner. It’s a game of chase so the situation almost demands a winner. One player can be playing to win and the other might be playing for the narrative, both serve the narrative regardless.
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Quietus has a Hope score that you build towards, and if you max it out you escape, but it’s not competitive, so much as it is a pacing mechanism.
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There are some folks making D&D and Pathfinder modules where you get a score at the end, mostly based on specific objectives, monsters, goals, and treasures. I think that’s a fun way to play those crunchy/tactical RPGs.
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Becoming has a win condition too - although it’s about which GM made the player’s life most interesting with their bargains, so I feel like it’s a secondary thing to encourage memorable situations for the group, rather than the overall aim, if that makes sense?
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Murderous Ghosts was the first game I thought of as well. With no-prep games sometimes I’ve had players get overwhelmed trying to figure out what they “should” be doing at any given moment during play, but the win conditions very quickly communicate the one big thing they need to focus on.
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That’s a really good point. Win conditions do in one shot games was xp does in longer games: direct you to what you should be doing in play.
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Dead Planet, the Mothership module, offers a few ways the creators can think of how you could “beat” it (quotes in original). It’s kind of neat as an example of how you can have intentionally ambiguous “win conditions” in a very open ended game.
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Winning and losing is such an important and useful idea across games.
Inhuman Conditions is another good example of a roleplaying game that makes good use of it.
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John Harper’s Agon has you playing Greek heroes competing for glory. While there’s definitely a quest to complete at the end one of you will be more glorious than the others, and win
This is baked into the system and definitely encourages (and rewards) inter party conflict, although more in the ‘killing more than the other guy’ way than in the ‘stab him in the back’ sense.
I ran it once, and it was good.
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I’ve played both a one-shot LARP and a big group wargame ( please bear with me) that had a very similar way of determining winner(s) that might be worth considering.
As a note, neither announced these ways prior to the end of the game, so perhaps they didn’t exactly encourage certain play behaviors the way they would have were they known in advance.
In the LARP, at the end of play, everyone was gathered together ion a circle, and then a sort of bragging session/debrief happened. Each player had 1-2 minutes to re-introduce their character( the play group was big enough that you may have only interacted with their character briefly or not at all)and talk about how far they had gotten on accomplishing their character’s goals ( often your character had multiple goals, not all of which were fully pursuable in the allotted play time). After everyone finished, the group nominated a couple of players ( GMs aided in narrowing the numbers down to just a couple of players ) and the in-fiction winner was chosen by vote-by-applause.
After that, a second of round of voting produced an MVP ( Most Valuable Player) award as well. This was for a player who contributed most to the overall fun of the LARP play, not necessarily succeeded as their character.
( Yes I won that, and yes I was super pleased 
)
In the big convention group wargame, they really just jumped to the second type ( MVP) award when the time was up for the game. A round robin verbal debrief wasn’t really necessary as everyone playing had seen the game-state at the end of play time. Also, MVP here was kind of nice because it was a war game with wildly lopsided results, in a genre of wargame that often has wildly lopsided results ( Late 1800s Colonialism. It’s rare for the locals to win solidly, and even when they do, rarely without absurdly awful casualties).
Yes, I got that one too 
. Apparently I was an awful tactician even for someone playing the outgunned locals, but apparently made the game fun for other people.
Anyway, the point is that you can have win conditions. But, there need not be a single person as the sole winner of the gold medal, so to speak.
You could have multiple winners, and winners in different categories (outside of in-character, in-fiction wins) and even a well-planned debrief method can let people brag a bit about what they accomplished and get some decent encouragement and recognition, without going absurdly competitive.
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I don’t think the idea of winning / losing an RPG is anything new, but it’s definitely a difficult thing to do with nuance. It is used a lot more frequently for short campaigns or one-shot games than longer form campaigns. I agree that a win condition does motivate similarly to experience, but game length is a factor here. Getting “points” is a great motivator, which works well when your games win condition is not easily or visibly attainable.
I, like others in this thread, have been working with the concept in my own game. It’s focused on the long term competitive, short term cooperative flow of play to build up a sense of paranoia and ultimately betrayal. I think there is an excitement that comes with social competition with players that is harder to achieve when fighting against the dice or the narrative, but it also can make things less friendly and more aggressive (obviously). It isn’t a game style that can fit every group.
Multiple winners seems like an interesting method, but I think it undercuts a lot of the excitement of competition. That is, if there isn’t a large enough group to keep “winners” relatively scarce.
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It’s been a long time since I’ve read it, let alone played it, but Burning Empires had a pretty clear meta narrative and win conditions.
I was really happy with it, though I ran it. I had one player really not like how little influence they felt they had on the overarching narrative and phases, whereas the other players were totally there for it.
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For most RPGs, the default assumption is that the player and the character are aligned in their goals, I.e. the player wants to see the character succeed. So the game doesn’t actually need an explicit win condition for the players, because that would be redundant. The point of a win condition is to motivate players in a specific direction. If you’re already motivated to make your PC succeed in their goals (whatever they are) then you don’t need an additional incentive.
But a win condition could be interesting or useful when the goals of the player and the goals of the character aren’t the same. In a game about comedic or dramatic irony, you might set up the player’s goals to be opposed to the character’s, so that the player who wins is the one who pushes against their own character’s goals the most, causing entertaining dramatic interactions. In a horror game, this might mean putting your character into the most danger by going along into the woods at night with a broken flashlight, even though we know what might happen. In Paul Czege’s The Valedictorian’s Death, each murder suspect was trying to be the most suspicious person who wasn’t arrested for the murder, which motivates players to describe their characters in a suspicious manner, but be careful not to incriminate themselves.
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Space Wurm vs Moonicorn has win conditions for the title characters, either control the universe or liberate the people respectively. It helps to drive the conflict in a specific direction. The campaign ends when one of those characters succeeds at their objective, but it’s kind of one of those “the real Space Wurm was the friends we made along the way” kinda of things
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