RPG Errata: The Great Ork Gods, One Wrestling Ring, and Collaborative Competition

A two-fer, eh? Okay, let’s go!

The Great Ork Gods is an RPG made by Jack Aidley. It’s a one-shot comedic game, designed to be played and forgotten about in an evening. At its most basic; the players play brutish nasty hate-filled Orks, as well as the Orkish gods who hate the Orks as much as the Orks hate them.

That description hides some fascinating game design.

To start with, Ork creation is fast. You have ten minutes, and if you take longer than that to create your ork, you start the game with a penalty to your stats.

To take an action in the game, you have to pray to the Ork God of that action. There are seven Gods, and therefore seven “actions” you can take: The God of War handles combat; the God of Strength handles lifting, pushing, etc.; the God of Gab is for talking; the God of Stealth and the God of Movement are self-evident; the God of Artifacts is for handling any object more complex than a door handle; and the God of Death handles whether or not you die.

Here’s where the tricky bit comes in. These Ork Gods? They’re also played by the players at the table.

Let’s say your Ork wants to stab an elf. That’s the purview of the Ork God of War, so whomever is playing the Ork God of War decides how difficult the action is: Easy, Medium, or Hard. This decides whether the God (not the Ork, the God) will roll 1, 2, or 3d10. If any of the dice show a number lower than the Ork’s stat (labeled as the amount of Hate) for that God, their action is a failure.

But that’s not all, Gods also can gain Spite, a resource that can be spent to add dice to another God’s roll. Orks are surrounded by goblins, who can be sacrificed in brutal and hilarious ways to reduce the number of dice. If an Ork performs an action under the jurisdiction of a God, and both are played by the same character, every other player gets a point of spite, because the Gods hate favoritism. If an Ork performs a brutally clever or difficult action, they might get a point of Oog, which is something good that Orks want to get. It’s a score of sorts, like Victory Points in a Board Game.

There it is again! Victory points? Making your fellow player’s dice-rolls harder? Is this a cooperative game or not?

The entire tone of The Great Ork Gods is one of comedic absurdity. In any other game, the Orks and their Gods might work together, trying to overcome a challenge or advance a story. Yes, the Orks are supposed to kill things, grab gold, eat fluffy things, and generally acquire Oog; but that’s not where the game wants you to find your fun.

This is one of the more interesting aspects of competition in RPGs. In chasing that amorphous intangible, “fun,” we can look at players working together or against each other, and measure the different effects each style of play has on the game as a whole, but The Great Ork Gods draws an underline on a style of play that maybe can merge the two.

What if competition is collaboration?

One Wrestling Ring to Rule them All (stylized as 1WR) is a Wrestling RPG by Dice Kaptial. The players play as wrestlers who must fight and compete for the entertainment of the onlooking audience. A bingo-card of nine “goals” increases the audience’s score as they are met, including things like one of the wrestlers doing a heel-turn, or performing a specific move during a specific round.

Make no mistake, the wrestlers are fighting each other, complete with die rolls to figure out how much pretend damage (Theatrical Hit Points) is done. There are even Real Hit Points, to represent how actually wounded a wrestler is, if something goes wrong. The game tracks Kayfabe, acts of coolness, wrestler goals, and even dealing Real damage to yourself to make the Fake damage look better, all to construct a very specific ludo-narrative: the players aren’t really fighting each other, they’re pretending to fight each other while actually working together.

In The Great Ork Gods, if the Orks just run around killing and pillaging, well, the players are “succeeding,” right? They’re engaging in the time-tested tradition of taking action, rolling dice, and dealing with the results. It’s all very straightforward and standard — but by adding the setting detail of Hate, by framing the meta-action as disgust and anger, the game becomes less concerned with the “success” of the Orks. If they succeed, they win and get Oog. If they fail, the Gods win, and we have a great story about the time the God of Artifacts turned their spiteful gaze on Gruk after he found a crossbow, so he shot himself in the face.

In 1WR, the ability of a character to succeed at their goals is supported and worked towards by the whole table. The acts of competition are little more than an illusion laid on top of an otherwise collaborative game. If your character succeeds in their efforts, that success might look like a win or a failure. The players are encouraged to engage with success and failure in a gamespace “outside” the actual Audience Score.

One of the most cliche axioms of friendly games is: “if everyone had fun, everybody wins.” This separation of fun and winning is an important one: The Great Ork Gods says that an Ork failing is as fun, if not more fun, then succeeding. 1WR suggests that entertaining the audience is really winning, no matter what the Kayfabe says.

When GMs play the part of antagonist, they are expected to play the part fairly. The “ideal game” is usually in the realm of a hard-fought challenge where the heroes win by the skin of their teeth. This makes GMing a bit of a tightrope act, where the GM pushes against their fellows with just enough effort to make the game fun, but not so much that the players feel cheated or that the game is unfair.¹

How much easier to do away with that tightrope altogether? Consider the free-play of just running around in a field throwing the ball to each other, not keeping score, not caring about sides or boundary lines; even the idea of winning can be an afterthought.

What I think makes The Great Ork Gods and so interesting is that it has set up the players as their own antagonists. If the die-roll goes well, you (the ork) win. If it goes poorly, you (the God) win. It’s a fascinating trick that manages to provide an engaging competitive atmosphere that remains cooperative.

As for 1WR, the game engages in its own Kayfabe, creating a structure where the meta-narrative is wholly collaborative, but the game-narrative is not. The game itself is perfectly “winnable” if the players just decide that “Yeah, my character will do a heel-turn now and become the badguy. That gets us more audience points, right?” is acceptable. Instead, the game encourages players to play collaboratively while actively pretending to be antagonistic. It calls itself out in the rulebook. The game only works if you buy into the performance.

I suppose that’s the thesis of this post: Collaborative Competition works when the competition isn’t real competition. It works when it’s fake, when the competition is a narrative layer on top of the real game. It works when losing isn’t losing.

When we allow ourselves to be emotionally invested in something, we do so with the understanding that we are doing so in a place of safety. I think it is this safety that allows for competition to be collaboration. Whether because its a silly nonsense game with no real stakes, or a high-drama narrative that’s been building for months, as long as the players know that they are safe, they will be willing to play.

Now…is this all a bit over the top? It’s not like RPGs need safe-words, right? Oh, they do? Nevermind then.

It’s true that not all games require safe-words. Vanilla or Missionary RPGs are perfectly fine, and if that’s what you’re in the mood for, having safe-words might ruin the experience. Just make sure everyone is vanilla, or else one of the players might show up in a leather gimps suit and good lord has this metaphor gone off the rails.

But there I go again, talking about “fun,” and “safe,” and “enjoying yourself instead of suffering.” It’s almost like I didn’t grow up in the early years of roleplaying, when death was around every corner and arguments about rules were a part of every evening. Am I just going to ignore the important part that Suffering has to play in our hobby?

Hm…Maybe that is worth discussing. Next time, I’d like to discuss playing games that aren’t fun.