Detect Liar
I think maybe Wizard has been spending too much time around Thief.
Speaking of thieves, I think it’s fair to say that rogues have a bad reputation for “fiscal PVP.” We’ve all met that stereotypically selfish rogue player who skims off the top “because it’s what my character would do.” This kind of PC relies on the sleight of hand skills to do their dirty work, but rogues are far from the only character archetype guilty of intraparty thievery.
At low levels you sometimes run into “I’m the toughest fighter” guy. This is the barbarian meat tank who thinks that “If you’ve got a problem with it, fight me for it” is an acceptable means of loot distribution. Same deal with the magic detecting guy (looking at you, Wizard) who neglects to mention that the “worthless junk” in the hoard is actually worth a king’s ransom. Same deal with the cleric who demands a copay for healing duties.
Trust is a big part of gaming, especially when you’re palling around with a bunch of armed murder hobos. If everyone is out for themselves, then it becomes that much harder to overcome the group challenges of the game world. After all, it’s awfully tough to fight monsters when you’re already fighting among yourselves.
Important caveat though: characters with opposing goals can create some amazing moments. If you’re trying to find and kill the villain who murdered your horse and rode off on your wife, but some other PC is trying to redeem that villain, you’ve got some interesting points of character conflict. This can be a lot of fun to resolve at the table, and in my humble opinion it should be encouraged. It raises a troubling question though: how do you distinguish between “good conflict” and “obnoxious conflict?”
I’m turning it over to you guys for the answer. How do you personally draw the line between “interesting intraparty conflict” and “dickish behavior?” Sound off in the comments!
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I would put it as a matter of just how meta your vendetta towards a particular character’s actions is.
My whole idea to awaken the “cheese magus’s” ox is quite in the realm of “dickish behavior” for the sole fact that I, as the player, was rather annoyed with the antics of our gouda friend. If my character were a druid who was appalled by how the ox was being used, and wanted to let it have its own say in the matter of how it would rather be treated, that would be more “intraparty conflict.”
So for you it’s a matter of “is this actually what my character would do?” I guess the sniff test becomes “is this a sincerely held character belief?” The problem is that you can always come up with a reason that a given action was in-character, but the rest of your buddies at the table always have to wonder if that was authentic.
In your case, it doesn’t particularly matter. If I recall correctly, that ox’s owner started the war of dickery.
The game has kind of been slowly falling apart… People losing interest, holiday season, overly busy DM. It’s a shame, too… This was the only game I’ve had in years, and it barely even got off the ground.
A recent event has the extremes of both dickishness and amazing intra-party conflict. You see; my character died and I made a new wizard to replace him. Now, the party on a whole is pretty suspicious looking. The rogue hides their face constantly, and the alchemist has mysterious tattoos that sometimes glow(they’re an android in a world where “lost age” technology is highly valuable and distinct from magic). My new Wizard was immodesty suspicious, and used the seek thoughts spell to attempt to glean their secrets ta because the party chose not to tell him about any of the secrets. Suffice to say, they found out about my mind reading, and the rogue in particular was highly pissed and in the following sessions attempted to: frame me for murder, push me into an instant death trap, and a rash of other bad spirited pranks and actions. This all came to a head last session when the rogue put a poison called scholar’s blight on my pellow that meant I couldn’t use scrolls or prepare spells. I decided my wizard had had enough, and used the one free spell from my bonded item to fail a dispel check on an already prepared explosive runes hidden in the party leader’s hair.
My wizard almost escaped the party’s wrath, but the party was able to summon an extremely powerful allied NPC that used phantasmal killer to end me. I was able to use a curse to summon a demon that ALMOST manage to kill the party leader and the rogue, but the allied NPC had the ability to teleport them away from danger and kill the demon.
Well here’s the question: was all of that fun for you guys, or are there hurt feelings at the table?
It was fun ultimately. My betrayal and death took up the entire session and it was described by another player as “super intense”. It also managed to put the entire party up a level, which I guess was a bonus.
10% off loot value. not getting turned into a frog is a valuable thing, so a premium for opening ALL. THE.DAMN.DOORS. and disabling all the frigging traps? yeah, i’m down with that.
I…what? Are you suggesting that rogues deserve to skim off the top by virtue of being rogues?
Things that don’t interfere with mechanics are generally ‘good conflict’ that inspires roleplay, like the revengekill vs. conversion that really defines the values for both characters in the law versus good spectrum. If it becomes about party loot, it’s different…that’s mechanical ability to improve via equipment.
Besides, the stronger your fighter is, the stealthier your sniper rogue is, the more options your wizard has, the more likely you yourself will survive any given fight, which makes investment into them an investment in your own wellbeing as well. Not being able to buy something because you’re missing 170 gold when the rest of the party doesn’t particularly have anything in mind to do with their collective 3000 is really obnoxious, and most gamers that I’ve played with recognize that at some point they’re going to be the one short a trifling amount of gold from their own ‘share,’ so maybe it’s good to help a brutha out today.
If players walk away from the table upset at each other’s roleplaying or feeling like they’ve been hindered or quashed, that’s gotta get addressed right soon. That’s bad conflict that turns into actual conflict if people don’t talk it over and figure out the right compromise.
There’s an interesting dynamic between “there ought to be rules that govern PVP” and “good PVP is based on story rather than rules.” I wonder if those two ideas are really mutually exclusive though….
The best interparty conflict is one that’s agreed upon OOC. If the “damaged party(?)” continues to roleplay and doesn’t complain about it, then yeah, it might spice up the party dynamic.
The other part of the caveat is that it’s well played. Squabling over loot isn’t particularly interesting, but if say an evil cleric pretends to be good in order to steal the Necronomicon from under the party’s nose, then that could make for interesting RP.
The best solution I heard on this was to disallow PVP that just pops up out of nowhere in the middle of a session. Here’s the TLDR from the reddit thread.
Both parties to come to the GM outside of the game and say, ‘We’ve got a character conflict and we want to fight about it.’ Everyone discusses the stakes, the consequences, and the concessions. After that, they’re let loose and in any future session that thing comes up, they can come to blows over it.
If you have to look someone in the eye and say ‘I want to slit your characters throat while they sleep’ before you do it, and justify it, it’s just a whole lot less likely to come up.
The trick to fun intraparty conflict is remembering that your character isn’t you. Anything that happens in character shouldn’t be taken personally. Sometimes this can be a problem at my table though, because we are usually slow to role-playing so I don’t think everyone else there draws that line.
The worst case of this ever happening our gm somehow too something I did to an npc personally, to make matters even more ridiculous the dude was trying to fleece me for a spell component that shouldn’t have even had a gold cost in the first place. I was game, but when it was clear that the obstinate fool would part with thing for a mere ten times more than anyone would ever pay I vandalized his building. This was just wizards being subtle and quick to anger (well if anger elephantine shapeshifters are subtle away), not me riling against the person who made said shop keeper behave that way. There too side to it as well, if you react personally to how someone responds to you, then its like that was your decision, not you characters. So when a shopkeeper decides he has a monopoly on all the magic stuff in town then your character will wanna beat him up for being a jerk, but if someone else at the table wants to punish you for playing your character then you just don’t want to play with those people anymore.
At the core of it even a sketchy back-stabby party is fun, but only if people can draw that line between what happens in character and whats happening between people out of character.
I think there’s a lot of truth to that. By the same token though, it’s not just the victim of PVP shenanigans guilty of making things personal. If you get a dude like Pierce in game, it’s the instigator that’s bringing out-of-game animus to the fiction.
“Out-of-game animus” feels like a fantastic use of words and I think that hits it exactly. I’v always been of the opinion that one sort of pvp is like another, but if its not all strictly in character and everyone understand that then even something mild like a rhetorical battle between clerics with strong beliefs can go sour.
There is poetry to be found in RPG theory! lol
The more I write about this hobby, the more I begin to think that “talk about it like adults” is the correct answer for everything. Of course, actually following through and getting everyone on the same page is easier said than done.
I think it helps if you start early- have everyone sit down and talk through their character creation, so that you can hopefully head of any problems before they even get going and make sure everybody is on the same page. That’s easier than trying to bring people to heel after they’ve already settled in their roles.
Truth. I think that all of my future games will have a session zero.
Well, I think it has to do with intent, and if the players find it either funny, helpful, or immersive. If most players agree that this is indeed the way you should play those character types, by all means go ahead. However, if your group only has one of them, then it can come to a head, and maybe that person should be asked to leave.
One of my fellow players in a Castle Falkenstein game, plays a Baron, with very low Social Graces skill,, and another character is a countess. The player of the baron always misaddresses the Countess as Baroness (which is, in Dutch nobility, a lesser rank, so amounts to a mild insult) to get a reaction from the player of the countess, which he indeed almost always gets. Most of the players, and the GM, are aware of this ploy, and see this as a sort of running gag. The player of the countess is, at least in my opinion, not (fully) aware of this, and get mildly frustrated whenever she has to correct him. Is this Interesting Conflict, or Dickish behaviour? Most of the people at the table think it is the first. But I can imagine the player of the Countess feeling it is the second. However, she has not complained about it outside of the game, although her countess has made some choice remarks about the social ineptness of the Baron in game, and she turns up at the sessions every time. So the jury’s still out on that one
Castle Falkenstein? Reading through your comic-binge comments, I’m getting the impression that I need to seriously up my game in terms of new settings and systems.
Interesting situation with the Baroness / Countess. Has anyone asked her opinion on the subject yet, or would that somehow ruin the joke?
Well, I’m gaming for quite some time now, and I like to try different systems.