Friends and Enemies
I told you guys back in “Guild Charter” about those poor hill giants who had befriended my megadungeon PCs. Our heroes forgot to spread the word around the local taverns about this truce, and so they returned to Giant Town a few days later only to find their new pals cut down by a rival band of adventurers. It was a large scale version of the smaller interactions that happen all the time within adventuring parties. You see, not every character shares the same sets of friends and enemies. Despite the message in today’s Handbook excerpt, I think this can be a good thing.
Traitorous and untrustworthy NPCs crop up all the time in adventures. Different Sense Motive / Insight / Whatever checks can yield different prejudices in individual PCs: “She seems nice” vs. “She seems nice, but there’s something off about her” can result in major disagreements. Just imagine your buddy the bard introducing you to her new pal the lycanthrope.
“Don’t worry! She told me that she doesn’t bite.”
Do you trust this unconventional quest-giver or don’t you? The bard certainly seems to think this wererat rogue is on the up and up, but you’d be a fool to let your guard down. These are exactly the sort of intraparty disagreement I can get behind. They result in the kinds of conflicts that create interesting tension, no matter what side of the betrayed/not betrayed line the case happens to fall on.
The alternative of course is the groupthink style of play, and I’ve got to be honest: I’m not a fan. To continue the wererat example, imagine that you’re fresh on the heels of a solo encounter between the bard and the lycanthrope. There was some tense dialogue, earnest backstory from the rat, and a show of trust between the two. If the rest of the group meets this shady NPC and decides without question to trust her implicitly, then you’re taking all of the dramatic tension out of the moment. After all, you might have been there to witness Gnawtooth’s tale of oppression at the hands of the cruel bounty hunter guild, but your character wasn’t. Don’t let another PC choose your reaction for you. It’s metagaming 101, but it bears repeating. Just because you believe that an NPC is a trustworthy ally, that doesn’t necessarily mean your character does. My advice is simple: try to remember to think from your character’s perspective. We take time and effort to make sure our characters are unique individuals. It’s worth putting in the effort to make them unique in fact.
Question of the day then. Have you ever found yourself disagreeing with another PC about friends and enemies? Let’s hear your tales of uncertain alliances and suspicious NPCs in the comments!
REQUEST A SKETCH! So you know how we’ve got a sketch feed on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon? By default it’s full of Laurel’s warm up sketches, illustrations not posted elsewhere, design concepts for current and new characters, and the occasional pin-up shot. But inspiration is hard sometimes. That’s why we love it when patrons come to us with requests. So hit us up on the other side of the Patreon wall and tell us what you want to see!
In Tomb of Annihilation we hired the Tabaxi guides because I was in charge of hiring the guides, and I wanted the potentially cheaper option. It turns out that one of the party members is prejudiced against Tabaxi, and another one is planning to kill them so we don’t have to pay…
I think our party might have some problems…
That reminds me of how with my first campaign of 5e, I decided to make a bard character, Elliot, or as he would later be known, Elliot the unlucky. The first bit of bad luck started even before play began, as it turns out another character had already written down that his guy had a dire hatred of Bards, and also Owlbears. Since then, it has been a running joke that every guy he made despised bards. This made the fact that his monk in tomb of annihilation got forcefully bonded to a magical bardic instrument all the funnier.
The anti-tabaxi prejudice is exactly the kind of thing I’d enjoy in my game. It means that the PC cares enough about the NPCs to have an opinion about them, which makes for better RP than, “Are we going the right way? Good.”
The murderhobo on the other hand…. Woof. That’s getting into the nighted land of alignment debate, and that is a dread and dismal country that I shun.
“Commoner will catch that wascally wodent if it’s the last thing he does”.
The difference between editions, I think, is key here. If it’s 5th edition, think commoner actually stands a chance. If it’s 3.5, then attempting to catch wodent will be the last thing commoner does.
And gods forfend that he should do battle with a 3.5 cat.
This has happened so much in my groups campaigns. In the first one, not only did we end up in different factions, but as the game went on, every character but mine grew more and more evil, except trogzor, who was always a blood knight type of guy, and remained one, and eventually joined the zentarum, which made party dynamics interesting since Elliot was kinda very strongly on the side of good, if somewhat underhanded at times. Luckily as a 16th level bard, he controlled most of how the story of their adventures went to the general public in the epilogue. In the next campaign, we had alex jones, who eventually joined the water cult, destroying the original group and causing us to start a new evil one that ended up destroying the links the elemental evil gods of fire and water had to the material plane as the group quickly fell apart with one member being possessed by the evil elemental fire god fighting alex jones, my guy tantrumming off after some vitriolic spheres, and our barbarian mind controlled by a aboleth. Then we did tomb of annihilation, which was actually notable for both a comparably minimal amount of disagreement in the party, and for being the first group that we played in which the dm thought calling us a group of heroes was not completely false. In our current urban one there are also a lot of disagreements between players, as we have my guy, a wizard focused on magi tech research who’s a bit of a stuck up jerk, but who is still very practical and appreciative of stealth and discretion. Our changeling rogue, who is also naturally a big fan of stealth and discretion, both in and out of character as the player is a big fan of shadow run, who has a kill now, don’t bother with jail style of dealing with criminals due to a nasty past. Then we have 3 paladins, who don’t fit in with mine and our rogues play style so well. We have a oath of the ancients paladin, who is the most good member of the party and, while being fully willing to lie or attempt social manipulation and diplomacy, sticks out like a sore thumb with his rainbow cape and shining armor. He’s also the one least likely to go with the parties plans when they are more violent due to his greater good nature. Then we have the paladin of vengeance, who is typically willing to use any non evil method to achieve his goals, as long as they are not illegal,or atleast not too much so, as he is greatly concerned with the legality of many situations. Luckily the laws are fairly loose in the half of the city where we typically play. And then there Mordred, the murder hobo paladin of conquest, whose typical plans involve running at the thing that needs killing and killing anything in his way for that goal. He is often barely contained, if that by the other party members, and the other party members have made it pretty clear that they only keep working with him because he is a wonderful combination of meat shield and chainsaw, and frankly would not care that much if he did die, which isn’t much of a problem for mordred since he feels the same about them. Naturally in a party like this, there has been a lot of conflict, and it has been beautiful and so much fun playing in this campaign. Not only because of the fun interactions, but because of all the unexpected things we have managed, like the gangwar we started between us and a group of assassins called the crimson roses, or the stocks some of us obtained in a venture to create a manufactured imaginary demiplane paradise that my guy may help with the work on.
It’s such a shame that next weeks session will be my last with the group, as I’m moving to California.
I tend to honor the gentleman’s agreement of the party: find a reason to adventure with one another. I probably overemphasize that aspect due to a dislike of PVP, which means that I seldom get a properly uncooperative party. That means most of my intraparty conflicts rise from stuff like this:
It’s that last part that I’m most familiar with: “Or at least not too much so.” The dude has a distinct and characterful way of approaching problems, and rest of the party might disagree with his opinions and actions. From the sound of it though, he isn’t so mired in his mindset that it’s impossible to work with him. That’s the kind of interesting conflict that I’m talking about. It adds flavor without derailing the game.
The scenario as shown here (“your NPC follower is causing trouble for their NPC follower, and if it continues at least one may disappear”) sounds like something a DM needs to be careful about introducing. It would be very easy to end up with player vs player drama at the table rather than people remembering that this is only happening because the DM, who controls both characters, has decided that it will.
Commoner is his own man, thank you very much!
The point is well taken though. Literally shooting st another NPC is going to cause drama, but the milder form of “I don’t like that guy” is a fun dynamic. Imagine Gimli and Legolas as NPCs.
As they say, “it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye and we all have to debate the relative ethics of paying for a regeneration vs dealing with the penalty”.
My chain lock GM did this interesting thing with my imp, having him prank other PCs. That turned out to work well since a familiar can be “killed” in 5e without much permanency. It made for this interesting dynamic where the other murder hobos in he group could turn to violence without drastic repercussions. It also left me playing mediator, which is a fun place for a CHA-based class to be.
I have several times told the story of the Ranger NPC who we left alone with the blind, 2-hp Bloodrager while we searched another part of the building. The GM likes to have off-screen conversations and revelations take place out of the room, so that players have a chance to choose how to distribute such information to the rest of the party. So he took the Bloodrager’s player outside for a minute. Then the player comes back in, grabs a d20, looks at his character sheet, says “Uh-oh” and then walks back outside. The rest of the party immediately panics (as we had been joking about this NPC betraying us before), but not out of fear for our comrade – rather fear that the NPC would steal the big pile of bows we had collected as loot. When the party meets up again, everything seems fine, so we move on. A session later, the NPC hands over one of the bows to a guy we just rescued, who was its original owner and her mentor. The Bloodrager player finally explains that she had asked him for that bow and his roll was a Sense Motive check – while he is bad at Sense Motive, he was still able to conclude that she was sincere. The moment is really sweet… and then I shout “SHE DID STEAL THE BOWS!” and our most loot-obsessed player nearly flips the table in rage.
This comic does, on the other hand, remind me of my partymate who is convinced that the solution to all problems is a sufficiently large number of peasants with muskets. And possibly implanted alchemist bombs. He had a decent point until we discovered the existence of enemies with DR 15, which will absorb even a perfect 1d12 roll. So now we need to make sure that the Peasant Army has access to enchanted ammunition for those special occasions.
Speaking of which, (Rise of the Runelords Book 3 not-really spoilers) since the Order of the Black Arrow has been decimated by ogre attacks, our Paladin musket sniper has begun plans to convert its remnants into the successor organization the Order of the Black Powder, using the power of firearms to keep further ogre incursions at bay. Firearms really are a field-leveler, especially against Large creatures. No wonder Earth humans killed off all magical things centuries ago.
It’s always bittersweet for me to remember that scene form Book 3. That’s the last session we played before the group disbanded. Sad times.
In relation to the peasant army, remember that it “only” takes 400 peasants for one of them to roll two nat20’s in a row and therefore crit their enemy. 4d12 can easily surpass 15 points of damage after all.
There are very few things that remains immune musketeers as their number approach infinity.
Ghosts mostly, if the muskets aren’t magical.
Of course once “sufficiently large” grows to actual army size, it has a tendency to attract hostile armies rather than merely singular monsters.
This was something I enjoyed doing with one of the fantasy settings I created. There were a group of noble houses, the Halan, Hazat, Ordos, and Decados. (Bonus points for recognizing the origin of those totally not stolen names) and each had a description of what they valued and how different classes generally fit into each. The houses also had different relationships not only with each other, but the other major power players in the land, and had secrets themselves.
The party wound up befriending folks from one noble house, while at the same time assisting another noble house. This led to them getting titles from both and there was some definite strain produced. They also wound up becoming bloodkin to one of the barbarian tribes that didn’t necessarily get along with some of the noble houses. A whole lot of intrigue and trying to balance their service so their decisions of taking different quests or how they carried them out would influence their interactions across the land.
Beautiful! Not only did the NPCs have distinct personalities. Those personalities also interacted dynamically with the party, becoming real rather than hypothetical setting details. It reminds me of the “what your tribe thinks about the other tribes” permutations in Werewolf: The Apocalypse.
Tell me though: did different party members prefer different factions? Did they ever argue about it?
“Make sure that thy allies are also thy allies’ allies”
Why? Once a pc of mine heard of some vampires that were causing problems, my character was a dhampir rogue, so he calls on the adventure party to search for the vampires. Very easy to find the vampire manor, dead trees, fog and more fog, wolves howling. My rogue kicks the door and scream: “Ready to die you bloodsuckers!?”. The chief vampire starts to laugh, and while the party was waiting for him to start his rant of vampire supremacy my rogue starts to laugh too. The two of them they walk to each other and give a huge hug. The vampire chief was my pc uncle, from the post-mortem side of the familly. The guy was that kind of cool uncle, if a little sanguine in his culinary tastes. The rest of the party the was having a tea party whit a bunch of vampires, my rogue was ok with that, his uncle also ok, the rest of the party scared to death of the hungry vampires the other side of the table. Bunch of vampires that helped the group and where useful allies, if a little intimidating.
And that was not the only time, many time my magnificent badassery has allowed me to broke truces and alliances with unlike parties to get the campaign objectives done. Like once an Abyssal exalted of mine said “Do you want to save Creation or not? … Then stop whinnying and learn to love the lunars, you infernal scum!”. Meanwhile other times, and just for trolling with my companions, i like to do something like this:
https://www.deviantart.com/ayej/art/The-Witcher-3-doodles-335-755139803
Yep, that is. Funny times indeed 🙂
You may disagree with the Handbook, but I think you’re right in line with the blog. Your vampire example is interesting conflict par excellence.
Glad about that. It always bring some friction in the party when your companions want to murder your family. At least that time all the party could take a nice tea with a dozen of vampires.
In one of several short lived Storm King’s Thunder campaigns I’ve played in, my character had convinced a goblin that we didn’t want to kill all his fellow goblins, we just wanted everyone to get along.
Unfortunately my allies didn’t realize my character was genuine about this and after witnessing enough goblin murder (due in part to failed persuasion/deception checks but also due in part to straight up murder in a few cases), my poor friend goblin was absolutely terrified of us and tried to run off in the night. With predictable results.
So sad. I’d really wanted to diplomatically bypass the entire encounter of the cave goblins.
It should also be noted that part of the reason my character was genuine in her interest in sparing the goblins and the other PCs didn’t realize this is because I’d worked out a secret backstory that was written between the lines of what was visible to the rest of the players on my character sheet. This backstory involved her being the sole surviving member of a monster loving cult she was raised into.
Are we talking “druids and love for all things” here or Lamashtu?
A little from column A and a little from column B. And a dash of column 57-grapefruit-sonnet for good measure. =P
In truth she loved monsters, enough that she’d want to go up and hug them where possible, but was perfectly fine killing them if she had to because she had a deep understanding of monsters and knew that sometimes that’s just how it goes.
Coincidentally this later part was also how she viewed civilized beings as well.
Equal opportunity murder. Truly the most neutral of philosophies.
So I’m playing in a campaign that’s basically the party, a bunch of uncharismatic soldiers from a warmongering nation, tasked to go around a recently occupied country and be all diplomatic, helping people out, making them like us etc etc.
We disagree about things all the time – especially about our impressions of the NPCs. It feels like every session there’s a “should we have done that?” moment when we’re all divided with different opinions. With each of us being particularly paranoid, good-hearted, forthright, or self-conscious, we tend to have different opinions on how we should act, or the same opinion for different reasons.
And it’s great – I think everyone likes highlighting more about their character’s personality, while our GM probably loves throwing a moral dilemma at us just to watch us bicker about it for an hour.
Huzzah! This is the kind of party dynamic I love. If you’ve ever seen Farscape, that’s the kind of party I’m imagining. A diverse set of strong personalities obliged to work with one another. The trick is to express your opinion without stalling out the game.
We have an NPC in the party that almost everyone in the party was at least ambivalent about and one character is in legitimate love with- my Necromancer’s fiancee.
My necromancer’s sister, however, hates/hated his Fiancee, because she thought that her brother was being used and that the fiancee didn’t actually care about him, or that her brother was going to be taken away from her.
The former, at least has, by pure chance, been proven unquestionably false, but she still worries quite a lot about her brother being taken from her and never seeing him again.
So good! The fiancé thing is especially nice since it comes with a built-in relationship for the necromancer that no one else can share. That asymmetry leads to fun dynamics in the group.
it’s also a pretty solid excuse for my necromancer to just…nope out if I can’t make a session. Gotta keep his wife happy and and his lands settled, after all.
Slight nitpick – “thy” should be “thine” in both instances, because “allies” starts with a vowel sound. If you say it out loud, “thine” should sound more natural.
The Handbook has been magically and transdimensionally translated from Common to English. These things are bound to happen.
It isn’t really a NPC thing, but we were playing on Roll20 and every time I would roll to check for traps, others in the game would comment on the roll as my character said “It looks clean” and then backs away out of habit. There was a subtle metagaming going on where the characters knew what the DM said (“You see no traps”), but we as players knew it was a ‘5’ that just got rolled…
We try not to metagame, but there’s always that backup plan that starts running through your head. So I set that one macro to roll to GM only. I could see it and the GM could see it, but that’s it. Now when I roll, there is only the GM’s word. 🙂
I actually go a step further and ask for the PC’s modifier when they’re disabling traps, then roll for them behind the screen. Conveying he difference between “you think you got it” and “you’re not sure if you successfully disabled he trap or not” is a communication challenge, but it does solve the meta problem for the lock-picker and the rest of the players.
I like that too.
What other rolls would you prefer were behind the screen?
Well, we had one such Situation,… where i think we disappointed our GM. We have been Traveling with a Stone Giant for a while, who became our Ally. At First we were all of course quite a bit Suspicous, but he proved himself a reliable ally so far, for a few Session.
We are hunting the Tracks of our BBEG, a manipulativ Succubus who is collecting Artifacts. It’s a pretty Standard Artifact hunt. Well in the Region there is a Stone Giant Lord who is terrorzing everyone else, and is a really bad an Evil Spellcaster on top of beeing a Stone Giant.
Soe after some Time our Ally tells us, that he is the Son, of the Stone Giant Warlord. The entire Reaction of the Party can be summed up as: “Well, our Condolences Buddy.”
Our Party already trusted him a bit. He was quite suprised that we didn’t care much. My Fighter then explained to him, that it would be really friggin Stupid to tell us this Information, if he was indeed an Enemy, since we barely know him. So it can be concluded that he really is an Ally.
Our poor DM was quite disappointed.
Was there sudden but inevitable betrayal? I hope there was sudden but inevitable betrayal.
Actually No. he really was a Nice. We parted in Friendship. Maybe it was planed later. But den Campaign sadly died soon after we parted with him.
Curse it all the same.
Kingslayer varient of Pathfinder. Playing a female character, who had more than one drink at a party containing a bunch of fey including a satyr. DM was rather embarassed when he told me what had happened to my character. I pointed out that consent wasn’t going to be given, so that was going to change my reactions. Fast forward an in-game yeat or two and the saytr is living in town, working at the bar, and all the other PC’s best buddy. I point out that this makes my character uncomfortable. After telling the other PC’s that my character is going to murder him, they decide to send him off as an ambassador to some lizardfolk. It’ll probably take 60 or so in-game years to unscrew that situation. We managed to rescue him, and the other PC’s decided he could come back to town with us. So I shot him in the head. Sneak attack + 4 arrows. Not even a full attack. This was about the point when i read everybody the riot act. Oddly enough, the quietest character at the table may have the least tolerance for b.s. Almost as bad as the time out good characters tortured, or allowed to be tortured, a changeling child. But that is another story.
Ugh. What is it with all the rape in this hobby? Yes satyrs are a part of classical mythology. No, they have no business creeping on your PCs. What the crap is wrong with people?