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View Full Version : PvP In/Out of character.



RandomNPC
2013-02-25, 06:51 PM
So, yea... Character intro?
Caster: Wizard with the undead minion alternate, the minion stands in front of his boss in combat and does his best to pretend to be alive. (Fully covered by armor/clothing) Nobody knows he's undead. The caster is quickly falling towards evil if he's not already there, that's where chaos hits.

Non-caster new character.
Been playing with the group for a while, just came back from having to work over game days.

Minotaur
Yea, there's one in the party and he happens to be relevant here.


New guy tries to impress the group making silly gunslinger noises when drawing his two hand crossbows. Caster hits him with suggestion "Never do that again."

Later: he comes up with a new noise and fails against another "Don't do that" suggestion.

One belt of gender changing and an offer from the minotaur of "I'll give you money if you give me a kid" later, the new guy (person?) walks away with 1500 gold. The caster wants to dispell the cursed belt while the gender changed person is with child, so s/he runs off and finds a cleric with spells to speed things along (to one day, they make spells for everything)

Caster hits him with suggestion "You want to do that again and let me dispell the cursed belt." dude fails his save and flips out OOC. Things about player choice and not being forced into doing things. He kept repeating the same argument after it was pointed out he didn't care about the other two saves he made.


I get that "Don't make funny noises" and "Have another kid while gender changed, and let me do experiments on it" aren't even in the same ball park, probably not even the same game. He had no in character issues outside of not wanting the kid process to happen again, unless he got paid again. OOC he didn't really articulate his words well, the only point I got out of it was he's ok with the "Stop that sound" suggestions, but not more important things like the kid stuff.

For a bit of history, this guy always had odd builds, and once challenged an unarmed swordsage (short range teleport build) with his spiked chain trip cheese fighter. Fighter went down like a sack of spuds, there may be some resentment over that. Caster openly admitted OOC to trying to see what the party would allow and when they'd ask him to step out. Non-caster said he'd play the coward and run and quit without telling anyone in the party why over and over again no matter how many characters it took.

Mostly everyone's good at OOC and IC knowledge, non-caster guy gets a bit out of hand, but everyone else keeps it in reigned in, from time to time someone will make a choice to help plot. The caster admitting OOC he's messing with people will probably not do anything to people IC until he commits a real atrocity.

TL;DR
I'm ranting.
One guy is fine with small mind affecting spells, but not large ones. Other guy trying to make the party fight him admits it OOC. First guy calls him a dink and swears to make his OOC goals rough. What do I do?

Rakmakallan
2013-02-25, 07:49 PM
Depends on whether everyone is having fun, which does not seem to be the case. Frankly, I get the vibe that your players are not taking the game seriously and just want to run amok and -ahem- exhibit inappropriate behaviour towards each other, but have not found a consensus of what is fun. Personally, I would address the issue ooc and ask them to find some common ground, while banning everything that they could abuse in-game. No belts of gender-change, no suggestions, nothing. Otherwise you are better off quitting the campaign and gathering for a round of Munchkin.

GnomeFighter
2013-02-26, 10:23 AM
Basic rule for me as a GM. Never let players take control of other PCs. Ever. It just leads to bad stuff and people getting upset and passive agressive bullying.

It sounds to me like the caster realy needs to be taken aside and told he is spoiling everyones fun.

tensai_oni
2013-02-26, 10:36 AM
Okay, first of all:

That thing, with a character changing genders to have a kid? That really is something the player should ask the DM and others first, to make sure they're okay with it. Maybe the spellcaster guy's suggestion was his way of saying that he is, in fact, not fine with such things happening in the game. OOCly.

Other than that, you either have a game that allows inter-party conflict - and you let players know that beforehand, or you do not. And if it's the latter, then the answer is simple: don't do that. Combat or domination/suggestion, it's both PvP.

RandomNPC
2013-02-26, 05:18 PM
They don't take it to seriously, that's for sure. A while back I had them save a dragon from a fire breathing princess. It generally is a fun having kind of game, the guy playing the caster is trying a new angle, see how far they'll let him go. I plan to NPC him later as a bad guy if they don't wipe him out when the party finally turns against him.

Gonna toss in some personal thoughts.

Caster is having a genuine good time, and would with any character he rolls up, he makes them to his play style. He and I brainstormed a caster with some back story that goes evil to finish his life goals, and he made it for my game.

Other guy finds a build that sounds entertaining, builds it poorly, and plays it until it gets old to him. He generally finds builds to fill a need in the party, but tends to get annoying, hence the "Don't do that" suggestions.

the spell casters suggestion was purely in character, I offered a few ways to find the info including DM says so, and someone googled an old convo from yerars ago on these very forms on the topic of what happens when you dispel the gender change on a pregnant person.


I guess the question is what do I do Sunday if he's still upset, to give an idea, he'll probably carry through on his saying his characters aren't going to let the party turn on the caster, he'll play coward and run off to hide the fact that anything went wrong, just to deny the player the conflict the character was made to create, forcing him to be with the party longer.

dps
2013-02-26, 11:05 PM
My general position is usually that in-character conflict between party members is ok, but ooc conflict is a bad thing. The big caveat to that is, it can be real easy for in-character conflict to grow into OOC conflict. It's not clear to me exactly from what's been posted here if the caster is messing with the other guy because what the other player is doing in-character, but it sounds more like the caster's player is just messing with the other player for OOC kicks. It also sounds like you kind of encouraged that behaviour, but now are regretting it. Maybe I'm missing something here, though.

GnomeFighter
2013-02-27, 05:46 AM
Other guy finds a build that sounds entertaining, builds it poorly, and plays it until it gets old to him. He generally finds builds to fill a need in the party, but tends to get annoying, hence the "Don't do that" suggestions.


Am I right in thinking the guy is annoying the players by his in character behaviour and the caster is reacting to that in character? If so this seems like a good way for the group to implode, and like both of them need taking aside and you to have a polite word with them

RandomNPC
2013-02-27, 07:58 PM
DPS:
I believe the suggestion was an attempt to cut the silly off as soon as it appeared, the noncasters last character had one level of bard, he didn't tell me anything about it before hand, but had a big back story about bike beasts and how it's hard to get a bike horn, he then produced a bike horn and honked it every chance he got. When told it was annoying he put it down for maybe a half hour.

The belt of gender change was originally on another characters mentor, to mess with him a bit. The party thief got it out of the room unseen, and now it gets put on new people as a prank. It just went a bit far this time, I'm not egging them on, but I'm not telling them to knock it off either. When it comes up I let them deal with it between characters in as much RP as they feel comfortable with, this is the first time he's broken character and gotten upset about anything, and it was all in character up to then.

GnomeFighter you may have it about the group imploding, but they might just make him feel unwelcome, after thinking about it some more I realized as much as we goof around, he's the odd guy out, always taking jokes in directions the rest of us wouldn't, or just finding all together different jokes.

RFLS
2013-02-28, 12:57 AM
So, I'm assuming you're talking about the spell Suggestion (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Suggestion). Did A) the caster make the request sound reasonable, and B) is the action harmful to the character after you consider all meanings of the word "harmful" ? It sounds like you're letting the caster walk all over the other player with a 3rd level spell, which is honestly kinda ridiculous.

Driderman
2013-02-28, 01:38 AM
From what I can tell, gaming group opinion (including the DMs) is very obviously skewed against the strange guy with the strange noises.
Sounds a lot like he's annoyed at least the two of you (DM and mage-player) and as a result, your impartialness as DM is compromised.

You need to solve this OOC, have a talk with the whole group I'd say. Personally, I wouldn't enjoy playing in a group as you describe, maybe there's a fundamental difference in what the respective participants expect from a game of D&D?

Rhynn
2013-02-28, 07:32 AM
First, the rules niggling:


Caster hits him with suggestion "Never do that again."

That will only work for 1 hour per caster level. (I.e., "Suggestion does not work that way!")

Then, the issue:

Unless PVP was pre-agreed to, it's a d*ck move to start it. Using suggestion on other PCs is PVP (or PVP enough).

Tell your players to chill out and stop picking fights and acting like children. Wait, they're under 18, aren't they? Damn...

And yes, it does matter what you do, it's not just about principles. Using suggestion to make a party member stop being annoying for what's probably a few minutes of real time is not the same as forcibly aborting their imaginary weird magic children (although go figure why someone would care about that either).

GnomeFighter
2013-02-28, 09:49 AM
I don't know the people and I don't know all the details, but it dose sound like the player playing the caster is being a passive agressive bully. He is using IC stuff to try and exert influence over a person he thinks is annoying. It sounds like stuff has been done in charicter and then excused as "part of the game" until this guy finaly snapped (Hence why it seems passive agressive).

If the guy is annoying the rest of the group it is probably best to have a chat to him about the expectations of the group (less sillyness) and that he needs to calm down (In the nicest possible way, he needs to grow up). You should then have a chat with the caster and ask him not to do things like that (And also, In the nicest possible way,grow up). I would then ask the whole group not to PvP. Anyone who can't play nice would be out then if it was me (subject to the occasional reminder).

RandomNPC
2013-02-28, 05:49 PM
RFLS:
"Don't do that" was reasonable, the other bit not so much. I wasn't expecting anything like this and didn't brush up on the spell descriptions, caster guy is usually only a small step away from RAW if he's off at all. He started playing in 3rd and has pulled legit rules lawering on people who've been playing from 1st ed. So now I trust him a bit less on the rules, but it's not all out the window, just a little more checking up.

Driderman:
Yes, I'm a bit annoyed by the noises, and that takes a lot. While I was still laughing at the bike horn others were asking him to put it away. I know when I'm annoyed, and do what I can to keep neutral when giving a description of a situation or person. I know it's not perfect, but I put some effort into it. Generally we get together to game and talk about the past week almost as much as we game, fairly casual game, we're all friends, it's just as long as there's more than two people in a group someone's the odd person out, and odd noise guy is it.

Rhynn:
Never said it wasn't PvP, my rule is stated every time we get a new player: don't make my game about you guys fighting one another, you guys can ask for an arena, and we can do that, but until then we're telling a story. Occasional conflict is fine, as long as it's only occasional. My gamers are mostly late twenties, but lets face it, boys get bigger, but never "grow up." I also never said the suggestions were the same, I think what I said was along the lines of "Not the same ball park, probably not even the same sport."


Gnomefighter
The idea of the wizard was to push the party to kick him out, either by asking him to leave, running off while he sleeps, or by one form of combat or another. Odd other option: They make him party leader and become his willing followers (not gonna happen.)


All of this could be resolved if the guy would tell the party that the caster attempted some form of mind control and didn't want him around, but the player specifically refuses just to spite the entire reason the wizard exists.

Matticussama
2013-02-28, 10:37 PM
I don't know the people and I don't know all the details, but it dose sound like the player playing the caster is being a passive agressive bully. He is using IC stuff to try and exert influence over a person he thinks is annoying. It sounds like stuff has been done in charicter and then excused as "part of the game" until this guy finaly snapped (Hence why it seems passive agressive).

If the guy is annoying the rest of the group it is probably best to have a chat to him about the expectations of the group (less sillyness) and that he needs to calm down (In the nicest possible way, he needs to grow up). You should then have a chat with the caster and ask him not to do things like that (And also, In the nicest possible way,grow up). I would then ask the whole group not to PvP. Anyone who can't play nice would be out then if it was me (subject to the occasional reminder).

This. The caster player is being a jerk. You should handle these sorts of problems with people out of character, not using mind control magic to force their characters into being obedient. Unless it is small and relatively unimportant - or agreed about ahead of time in the case of an evil campaign - I never condone mind-controlling spells being used by PCs against other PCs.