To Catch a Killer, Part 5: Job Offer
Well then. It looks like we’re gonna need another catgirl. I guess that’s the cost of doing business with Evil. When your would-be employers leave a murderous calling card, lead you a merry chase, and then “test” your skills in battle, you know you’re dealing with some grade-A bad hombres. That in turn raises a question: Are you willing to work with these guys?
This is an issue more or less designed for Neutral PCs. You’re not morally obliged to smite on sight. You aren’t necessarily a villainous nogoodnik yourself. All you’ve got to do is some adventurer cost-benefit analysis: Are the risks worth the reward?
In the category of “risks,” you’ve got your standard hero hazards. These are the traps, monsters, and general likelihood of death you’ve got to deal with in every adventure. That’s de rigueur though. When you’re dealing with bad guys, you’ve got additional worries on top of that. For example, there’s the possible hit to your reputation. Are you alienating your goodly allies? Will anyone else ever hire you again? And then there’s the high likelihood of getting betrayed. Even if it’s not an outright stab in the back, nobody wants to get Lando’d.
As for “rewards,” Evil has plenty to offer. Piles of gold, premium magic items, and your literal heart’s desire are all on the table. As with the risks, these are the standard goods and services that come with all flavors of successful hero-ing. When you’re getting the goods from the baddies though, additional caveats apply. Namely, are the incentives high enough to sign on with the black hats? Is it worth going against your personal code? Maybe even an alignment shift? And even if your rogue doesn’t happen to have a heart of gold, you’ve still got to ask yourself whether you can afford to say no. Coercion is more than a Magic card, and skelemans in black armor tend not to take rejection well. In that sense, the implicit reward of “won’t have to roll initiative against BBEG” is tough to ignore.
It remains to be seen whether the surviving members of Team Bounty Hunter will accept this nefarious commission (or even what it may be). But I confess myself curious about the rest of you guys. Has your party ever signed on with the villains? Did things turn out OK in the end, or were your wicked ways summarily punished? Tell us all about the shady AF quest givers in your life down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
I was stuck in a villainous party once. I got fed up and bailed. The end. Enough said.
So it’s official now? Inquisitor and Magus are an item? ^_^ That’s adorable!
Well… they were an item, at least.
Always have been. They just aren’t into PDAs.
I suppose we did get a hint on the big wedding page…
Well, the obvious “right” answer is to say yes.
And then backstab the bad guy at the first opportunity, probably metaphorically but maybe literally (and ideally both).
But in practice, the bad guys always anticipate that one. If they were stupid enough to trust you that easily, they wouldn’t have you over the barrel in the first place. If you just want out of the situation, it might still be enough, but if you want a meaningful revenge (or if your new boss has a vindictive streak), what you really need is to burn them to the ground, and that requires earning their trust. Can you stomach following their orders for that long? Can you sabotage them subtly enough that they won’t suspect you in the meantime? Can you pass information to the good guys without the Big Bad catching you or determining who the leak must be by deduction? And once it’s all over, how will you make up for all the evil you’ve wrought?
No matter what your answers are, it has the potential for great drama and great, almost heist-like gameplay with plans and counter-plans and counter-counter-plans.
I wrote a character with a similar plot… wow, has bit been two years already? It’s not a perfect fit for the Bounty Hunters; War Child was written to be a solo act, and he was after redemption instead of revenge, but I’m a narcissist so I’m sharing it anyway.
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=24198725&postcount=50
Of course, the struggle there is always figuring out how to make the subterfuge work at the table. As an NPC, a villain has the potential to be omniscient. As a GM, the onus is on you to communicate enough weaknesses and blind spots to make counterespionage viable.
I don’t know how it worked out in the end, since I had to drop out of the campaign fairly early, but I played a game of Dark Heresy where our squad of fearless inquisitorial goons tracked down the local leader of a traitorous cult of mutants… and immediately accepted his offer to join them. GM had to rewrite the whole campaign.
Quick note: it looks like there’s no special hover text, just the title of the comic, unless that’s because I updated my phone recently?
In Dark Heresy, it’s really just what flavor of bad guy you want to work for. For example, the inquisitor was probably not a good guy.
There is hover text there now. It says “That’s eight lives remaining.”
Glitch in the Matrix.
Well I guess Miss Gestalt can’t turn people in the vampire fashion, and has to rely on good old fashioned persuasion instead.
From a DMing perspective, going with the “team evil gives you a job offer” over “you’re a monster now, welcome to team evil” is probably the smart call. I’ve heard about the latter option working, but it’s got a much higher risk of majorly upsetting an invested player.
I think the latter is what happens after you have a TPK. At that point, it’s more a “premise for campaign 2” than a plot device.
Can be, but an individual PC getting turned into a vampire or something is also an option
While I’m not sure in the case of Gestalt, werepires are technically RaW in 5E: A Werewolf’s creature-type is ~~Humanoid~~ Dwarfoid.^1 A vampire’s bite can turn any ~~Humanoid~~ Dwarfoid who was slain by it and spends 3 days in the ground. Since lycanthropy says nothing aboot going away if you die/become undead werepires are RaW. Granted most forms of the were-curse wouldn’t do much for a vampire.
^1 Why would we refer to creatures that are “Like Dwarves, but…” relative to the Apefolk? Similarly we need to stop calling Hin by the Apefolk slur “Halfling”.
Nope. I have never once signed on with the villains of the campaign. ‘Sudden betrayal’, no matter what form it takes (just got old fashioned betrayal, mind control, or being raised as an evil undead) is my least favourite trope ever, and I dislike it enough that it has caused me to stop watching or reading things I was otherwise enjoying.
Now, there are some exceptions. Betrayal only really bothers me when it’s a character who really was trusted and didn’t show any signs of villainy. This is why the mind control and ‘is a monster now’ options bother me more than the others. If there’s an alliance of convenience going on between two characters who don’t really trust each other and one ends up backstabbing the other, I’m fine with that.
I gather you enjoyed The Thing.
I actually haven’t seen it. Horror and I don’t mix, cause I’m a huge coward.
I don’t do psychological horror, but monster movies are OK.
If you can deal with some gory practical effects…
https://giphy.com/gifs/arrowvideo-monster-the-thing-john-carpenter-IhNzvlaWhuOE1ZwMoE
…You can live through The Thing. It really is a great model for sewing paranoia between characters.
‘Expense me’… I can’t recall BBEG ever being more Cold Ham-style sinister than on this page.
Of course it’s a fine example of him being a bad (potential) boss as well, but we’d had plenty of evidence of that already, what with the way he broke up the Goblin strike and whatnot.
It may be the first time he’s actually done anything villainous.
Countless Goblins might disagree. ^^;
As might any adventurers foolish enough to chance the dungeon of perma-death.
I doubt the main party enjoyed its TPK… though killing some (or at least one) of them might actually count as a good deed.
I’m not sure it’s actually that bad a boss, I mean, covering the cost of resurrection is a nice health care plan advantage.
Tell that to the Goblin strikers.
You’ll need a good medium to reach them, though. 😉
The party I currently DM for recently found themselves in the middle of a rat race for a big pile of money. They found out quickly that their early successes meant that “free agent” was going to be a difficult position to maintain.
After receiving a few overtures from the various factions – Drow Pirates making veiled threats, Demon-worshiping Aristocrats leveraging their sensibilities and playing the victim – they got a more impactful offer. A small army of black-clad goons escorted them to a magic stage coach where a metal-handed dick wizard gave them an ultimatum it would be unhealthy to refuse.
The party strung their various would-be bosses along, playing one off the other. It worked surprisingly well. In the end, when the prize was in sight and their ‘boss’ was heavily injured with most of his lackeys otherwise occupied, I expected ye old “Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal”. Instead they chose to play the job straight and even saved his life.
To be fair, killing him would have made them even more dangerous enemies in the long run, but now… now they’ll probably get another job offer. They’ll hate it 🙂
You straight up cannot predict players. They always turn lefter than left.
As a DM, this was a fun one.
The previous adventure, the PCs had survived someone making their enormous half-orc Cleric try to kill them (à la the Madness of Hercules), then the team failed to prevent the assassination of said Cleric (Boromir had it easy). The next mission began with the resurrection of the Cleric.
Upon returning to the mortal plane, the Cleric of Heracles spoke with his superiors, greeted his friends, then immediately flew off on his pegasus to confront the evil king who had ordered his death. The party had to finagle means to catch up with him and arrived just as the confrontation was going down.
That’s when I sprung my surprise. The king freely confessed to driving the cleric insane in an effort to have him kill his own teammates and discredit himself in the eyes of the public, but said that it was the king’s late son, the prince, who had ordered the firing squad and made Cleric a martyr. Said prince had just died in an unfortunate “hunting accident,” and the palace was in mourning.
Immediately, about half the players at the table got it. They had barged into a solemn occasion and violated the rules of Hospitality. Their Cleric could not seek revenge without angering his gods even further, and now they owed a debt to the one NPC they hated more than anyone else. Sure, it was pretty easy to see that the king had finally gotten rid of his disappointment of an heir and rigged the whole scenario at the same time, but the party was still in a bind. Four adventures later, the debt finally repaid, the king now approached them for a paying assignment through their usual channels.
My explanation for the IRL commitments that kept half the players away was that half the party said “No way!!!” to the lucrative commission and stormed out.
There is no better tapdancer than a GM explaining missing PCs: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-listlessness
I expected the PCs to collect the 4 items for the evil king, then decide whether or not to actually give him his heart’s desire (rough equivalents of a crystal ball, rod of rulership, phylactery of the long years, and ring of human influence) –exactly what he needed to solidify his rule. To my surprise, the PCs’ response was pretty much “Meh, he pays well, and if he starts any trouble, we all know where he lives.”
I dislike having to work with villains as a PC – it makes good-aligned peeps uncomfortable and routinely leads to awkward conversations or passive aggression. You also can’t trust them from just backstabbing you once you stop being useful.
But those are exactly the feelings your PC has. My God… Are you method roleplaying?
Magus, nooooo~
I wonder what happens next. Does Magus come back with a few bits of missing skin and/or exposed bones, possibly with a newfound eternal thirst/hunger?
Does she get reincarnated into a different kind of cutie via Druid?
Or do they just pop a rez and call it a day, so that the other Handbook may continue to prosper with her bodily existence?
What makes you think Magus is coming back?
https://imgur.com/gallery/h2cqy
But… But… Think of the pinu-I mean, merch!
Now if only we could have Rouge the Eidolon get a similar ‘job offer’…
Heh. I usually play a hero character. That said, I do remember a certain Warhammer Fantasy game.
We were trekking through a frozen forest to try and make it back to a city. We were evading undead that had recently razed a town we were in.
At the same time we were escorting a handful of refugees, including a young woman and her child. During our trek we started to notice signs of more undead rising out of a nearby frozen lake. And it was at this moment we encountered an inquisitor. The inquisitor demanded we give up the child! The child, according to the inquisitor, was the source of evil magic that was raising the undead.
So decision time. What would we do?
The GM, who was new to our group, figured we’d be heroes. He figured that since we knew the reputation of inquisitors, we’d refuse. Protecting this child until we could free him from this curse was the GM’s whole campaign.
This of course would have been a great story. One that would be sung at taverns for ages to come.
But unfortunately, our group had played Warhammer Fantasy before with a different GM. And with that GM, we had learned that Warhammer Fantasy is grim. Grim covered grim with grim filling.
We did indeed know the reputation of the inquisitors. So instead of standing between the innocent child and the menacing inquisitor, we handed him over! In our minds, the child was a chaos infected mutant spawn. And we had no desire to stare down a man who could have us tortured and killed for looking at him funny.
Surprise surprise, turns out the inquisitor was the big bad.
At this point the GM quit the game in frustration. Which is understandable. With one decision we had so derailed the campaign that the train had left orbit.
Granted, we didn’t quite accept a written invitation from the big bag guy. But we had practically gift wrapped the McGuffin for him.
Lol! Poor GM!
Sounds like it may have been his first time. Because players always zig when you expect them to zag, and hinging your campaign on “zag” is a recipe for frustration. It’s the narrative equivalent of the firefly pilot rolls we talked about last session. If you need the PCs to protect the kiddy, don’t give them a choice.
Is this the first time it has been established that they’re together?
They’ve always been an item. Just more explicitly so in the HoEF.
If you’re female you should not schtupp cat-people. Sandpaper tongues, clawed digits. Plus the males are barbed.
Counterpoint: drow.
For a sandbox game I was GMing a player handed me this revenge backstory against an evil organization as well as a missing sister. His character fell somewhere in the good to neutral range.
I decided that the sister had a similar idea, but went full on evil necromancer with collateral damage just more material to construct undead from. I expected the PC in question to attempt to redeem her but he went the opposite route, throwing his full support behind his sister.
It worked out as the sister did truly care for her own family so there really wasn’t a sense of worry of betrayal for him, though the rest of the party had to stay on their toes because she wasn’t above leaving them to die as long as her brother was safe. There were several tense moments but it never quite led to a full falling out.
They should have let your guy write the Star Wars sequels. A fall to evil can be a great storyline, but the real trick is preventing it from degenerating into an immediate brawl. Kudos to the table for manage the tightrope act!
In a semi-home brew campaign we are getting back into after my character sheet got deleted (A lesson to anyone that uses digital character sheets or virtual tabletops. Back-ups/exports are your friend. Use them.), we had a spot where we found ourselves at a blockade. A legendary pirate hunter was looking for our band of small-time-crime (except Duncan who led a mutiny against said pirate hunter when he thought they were gonna attack some innocents) shades-of-neutrality. They had a blockade set up with some poor schmucks that probably questioned his authority and were lined up to stop carriages. He killed one when we approached and demanded we stop. We turned around and a chance ensued. When another character asked why we didn’t stop to try and help, my character loudly proclaimed “We’re not heroes! We’re just trying not to die!”
We had a brief victory before the defeated captain disappeared on us… when we were offered a shady deal (an oath and our first mythic tier) we took it. Work is work. She seemed alright, for a scary lady…
A chase ensued*
https://c.tenor.com/5u3x7ag5qMIAAAAS/star-wars-money.gif
This is not inaccurate…
Wouldn’t Magus be at seven lives, following Witch’s likely choke-tastic retribution for ‘finding’ Brutus?
Wasn’t depicted on-screen! Doesn’t count!
Magis and Inquisitor are girlfriends? I thought it was the job of inquisitors to hunt down furries 😛
Just kidding 😀
I am happy for them as a couple 🙂
We have signed both sides. As employees and employs. There is something that bother me and is that idea that evil will betray its minions. As already spoke on self destructive evil that is the kind of stupid things that makes evil look cartoonish. Like a counter of stupid-lawful. Why to break your own tools? That is like breaking the minies each time the monster they represent dies. No DM would do that. Yet, BBEG do? Working for the bad guys isn’t different of working for the good ones. It’s just working 🙂
Wait… You don’t break your minis every time you play? Then how do you get better at mini-painting?
We don’t got money for minis, we don’t use them 🙂
But you could whittle them from mountain dew cans!
We don’t got mountain dew on my country and cans are expensive 🙁
MAGUS! NOOOOO!!!
https://c.tenor.com/68xGFUr_HbIAAAAC/lord-of-the-rings-fantasy.gif
Hey now, let’s not forget about Ranger. Magus may be dead, but our poor raised-by-wolves half-orc is having a really bad hair day. Fates worse than etc. etc.!
My closest experiences to this is sort of the reverse of it. Games where I signed up intending to play as part of a neutral or semi-evil party (like pirates) and the GM just made the situation work out that we’re basically either the good guys or we’re implicitly the good guys because we’re just doing our thing as a means of self-defense against unwarranted hostility.
I guess a game I’ve just started playing in sort of counts? But again not really. It’s a military focused game where all but one PC (in a game with 5 players each playing a main character and two sergeants) is non-human on the side of a xenophobic/racist mainly human empire and the opposing side is monstrous humanoids that we’re not entirely sure are in the wrong for initiating a war.
I suppose in this game the GM has noted that we’re allowed to flip sides or whatever, but I can’t imagine we will given it’s probably more a “two bad options” situation and I doubt there will be sufficient incentives to do so.
I feel ya there. My group’s seminal pirates game was full of good-hearted pirates with hearts of gold who would adopt needy animals and never harm their captives. And here I was ready to make dudes walk the plank!
Actually, that might be a good comic for the Evil Party.
“What? We saved the day? Don’t cheer for us! DAMMIT!”
I had a character who’s backstory was she was part of an evil organization which had recently fragmented. She didn’t like the guy that was in charge of her splinter group and took the opportunity to backstab him and join the PCs. Several levels later we were guests of honor at a banquet that was attacked and everyone was separated by fog clouds and such. Each PC ran into a ‘rival’ character that the DM had previously established. (One PC spent the whole fight running away from his opponent because he spent all his higher level spell slots attempting to impress her earlier in the banquet but I digress).
My character was approached by the new leader of the org who basically just gave her a sales pitch: “Hey I know things were rough for a while, no hard feelings. Anyway, I need competent lieutenants and I’ve heard good things about you and I can pay better than the heroes.” My character accepted and became a new recurring villain while I switched to a backup.
I’ve never had the opportunity to go for this arc. Now that I think of it though, I might have a character in my long-running mega-dungeon who could fit the bill. Hmmm….
SHE’S GOT seven? i think seven SEVEN LIVES LEFT SHE’S FINE
Finally caught up – I wasn’t able to comment on some of the strips up ’til now, but working through the archives has been just a treat, first time I’ve done it for a strip that isn’t bye a known friend in – ages, actual ages. I’ll be sticking around, too, and I’d like to hope supporting you all in some way. All that aside, then…
My alignment is Paladin(‘s boomer father), haha, I kid. ‘Evil’ is about as interesting to me as dried toast. If it makes the plot interesting, I absolutely would, though; problem is, I can’t think of a scenario where it would’ve enhanced the plot at all, let alone fit the character I was playing. I’m not hung up against playing evil, mind; if a friend was running an evil campaign, I’d tag along to support them (though probably somewhat unenthusiastically. I haven’t played it, but I heard there was a somewhat ‘boring, droll, practical’ evil route, in Tyranny? That!).
Working unintentionally for villains though (ah, in both cases I’d figured it out, but why on earth would my characters have? One was an absolute chowder-head of a fighter, the other was smart, but had the situational awareness of a stalk of bamboo)? That’s the good stuff. Especially if your character isn’t good, for example – character #2 was a free spirit with malicious tendencies, but only if it benefited her somehow.
Her realisation that she’d been a patsy for most of the campaign was incredibly fun to work through, and lead to a gradual shift in her personality (or alignment if we’re doing that, after that jaunt in the planes, ahaha)!
Anyway, your very logical risk/reward table above might use an addendum; if the player plays characters who aren’t really motivated by ‘big’ desires, evil has a lot less to offer… Or has to work a bit harder, more creatively. You mentioned earlier that everyone wants to be Batman (or maybe Bruce Wayne? My – legendarily sleepy mind strikes again!); I must dissent. I’d rather be some rando walking through Gotham, ‘hmn, it’d be nice if today I got a raise of .01 cents… that’d be cool…’ and this explains why I GM most of the time, snort.
Ah, but.
For a GM trying to win fairly ‘normal’ heroes swept in to an adventure, they get to exercise some more of their evil. A hero tempted by gold, power, gifts, their heart’s desire? That’s easy. An ordinary person, promised something /meaningless/ that’d probably be known only to them?
Even if the PC wouldn’t take the bait, a revelation of a ‘small desire’ like that, something that’s barely even a hook, can nevertheless open up all sorts of fractures – or growth – between the PC and their allies.
Finally, speaking of villains…
I really appreciate how ridiculous that line from BBEG is, while /still/ managing to feel cold, chilling? Miss Gestalt looming in the background, looking very self-certain; it’s pinnacle ‘welcome to my lair… I do not drink… Wine’ villainy, great stuff.
Naturally, I’ll be rooting for Team Bounty Hunter to resist the siren call of skeletal dental benefits and whatever promises might be made about how things might be ‘fixed.’
But I can’t wait to see where this goes.
Wait a minute… When did I kill Magus before?
https://www.ericpetersautos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/sleazy-car-salesman.jpg
I guess I had the Black Company novels in back of my mind with today’s comic. Finding your likeable band of army grunts running patrols for the evil overlords offers some interesting dramatic possibilities.
Nice to give our resident skele-man a bit of an arc. So far he’s mostly been a place-holder of a BBEG. This is our big chance to show him doing villainous things to characters we like. That’s a whole ‘nother can of worms beyond the cartoonish kick-the-puppy of goblin strike breaking.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/union-dues
Gestalt looks so smug and pleased with herself, like a spoiled child who snitched on their sibling to their parents, or a cartoonishly evil animal pet belonging to an evil disney villain (hang on…).
Hmm, did we have any goofy/slapstick shenanigans (i.e. what happened to Snowflake a bunch of times) or similar comedic misfortunes happen to Gestalt yet? She’s so far been dishing out the comedic pain but not receiving any. I think she’d primed for some shenanigans.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/cats-and-dogs
I see Gestalt as that evil Muppet hanging out at Jabba’s.
Her laugh is far throatier. And more German.
https://www.starwars.com/databank/salacious-crumb
Hmm, to be clear, was BBEG the one to kill Magus directly, or was the ‘you killed my girlfriend’ more directed at Gestalt’s involvement in the murder?
Sometimes, we must reconstruct narrative from inference.
I find it amusing that despite being killed whilst wearing it, Magus’s attire is in better/spotless condition compared to BH’s and Ranger’s duds. Presumably her hairdo is untarnished too. Gestalt isn’t one to leave a kill ‘clean’ either.
Well sure. It was washed.
Not sure if it counts – but party was trying to track down an organization that was harassing the local merchant shops. Once we found their base, we had a perfect vantage point and choke point to take advantage of versus superior numbers… Little did the party (or GM) expect one of the PCs to go full Leeroy Jenkins and charge down the stairs into an unwinnable battle. With one PC suddenly in trouble, naturally the rest of the party had to abandon the plan and rush in in an attempt to salvage the situation and avoid getting him killed. Instead, we got TPKed and woke up captured, with an offer to sign up (after the same PC made an ill-advised escape attempt).
We ended up accepting the offer, later finding out that a different organization was actually behind torching the shop we were assigned to protect. I kinda suspect that the organization got rewritten by the GM after our unexpected TPK/recruitment to be less bad, though their leader did have an LE Cleric who served under a life-debt to him (something my devout CG Bard wasn’t too pleased about working with).
On the GM side, something I’ve been planning for awhile but have yet to implement is an evil Succubus NPC who shows up as an ally because they want to screw over the campaign’s BBEG. Basically have her saying she either works for a rival of the BBEG and profits from their failure, or is trying to backstab her way into a promotion by selling out middle-management. Either way, basically have her openly tell the PCs that she’s evil, but suggest it should be fine working together since they both want a greater evil to fail.
That’s probably easier to stomach than actual in-character ultimatums. When you’re recovering from a TPK, you’re more or less starting a new campaign. At that point, accepting the deal is synonymous with accepting the campaign premise. Talk about offers you can’t refuse!
If I’m BBEG with my vast knowledge of rez abilities that exist (as I’m most certainly making use of a few of them at any given time), I feel like “yeah yeah Expense Me” is exactly the right response here.
My party has never signed on with Team Evil (as it were), but I have a few times. Most recently in RotR where my ability to bluff and con the cultists of Lamashtu landed me with a very direct threat from the group, so after shenanigans, I decided to join said cultists.
There’s a certain required mentality, but let’s cut to the chase on this one. When Team Hero threatens your existence for trying to trick Team Evil into giving up information on their Nefarious Plot(tm), whatever misgivings you had about working with them ever just became irrelevant. The whole reason to work with Team Hero beyond doing ‘The Right Thing’ is a general guarantee that Team Hero won’t stab you in the back. That indeed, they Will Have Thine Back Through Thick And Thin.
Without that guarantee of being together through whatever may occur, even if our goals occasionally diverge a little… I’m not sure that Team Hero has much to offer.
Ultimately, I approach evil more as ambitious anymore because let’s face it, there are tiers of evil. We don’t tend to judge things like the Bible does where a lie is weighed the same as a man’s life.
That’s a problem with The Neutral Party. If you’re all amoral cooler-than-thou badasses, then you’re inherently unpredictable. You can’t base decisions off of trust or loyalty or (in player terms) discernable character traits. Getting suddenly threatened for no reason might look like a neat “I don’t trust this lying snake” moment in-character, but in practice it sets up actual distrust between players.
Bleh. Good luck with the PVP. I hope your group has an established policy for it!
This sort of situation is proooobably going to be one of the options on the table for my next session.
To make a long story short, my party was sneaking around a certain gangster Beholders dungeon under magical guise. By and large, they had been doing GREAT except…
One of the players was disguised as a Drow. That alone was fine, until one of the dungeon’s few Drow denizens started expecting him to communicate in hand-speak. This led the Drow to becoming suspicious, and with a damn good roll, pierced the party’s magical disguises. One beholder anti-magic cone later, and low and behold, hey, it’s the guys who have been the gang’s thorn in their side for the entire campaign.
They are not at a level to fight a Beholder. I’ve made them well aware of the stakes. They could run. The whole dungeon is gonna try to come down on them like a hammer, but they could run.
Or. They could barter for their lives. Because I can think of a few ways a few expendable Aaracockra could factor into their plans. Personally hoping they go for that plan, because boy-howdy is it gonna be finicky to try to handle an escape sequence. Besides… Even if one of them gets turned to stone as collateral… I still have the high-level, but currently AWOL adventurer SOMEWHERE in the dungeon as a sort of emergency button.
Schrodinger’s backup. They’ll exist when I need em to, and not a second before.