Splitting The Party

[Vaern]

No, I'm not referring to splitting up in a dungeon to cover more ground.
I mean encountering a scenario in which your party's disagreements cause them to knowingly and willingly split up and take opposite sides in the same combat.
Has this ever happened to anyone else?

[killem2]

No, I'm not referring to splitting up in a dungeon to cover more ground.
I mean encountering a scenario in which your party's disagreements cause them to knowingly and willingly split up and take opposite sides in the same combat.
Has this ever happened to anyone else?

If this happened in my game, I'd have them both over run by an enemy and either they come together or they all die, then when they all die, we reroll, and if the split again repeat step 1.


Life is too busy to be fighting in a fantasy game, when my players play or when I am the player we are a team, we get that from the beginning and go on.

[Jack Zander]

If you have good players it really wouldn't be an issue. Winners win, losers reroll. Not everyone can shrug off make believe disagreements in a fantasy world though.

[killem2]

If they did it diplomatically, with out any hostility OOC, i would be ok with it, but typically, that's now how I would see it going down.

[thethird]

No, I'm not referring to splitting up in a dungeon to cover more ground.
I mean encountering a scenario in which your party's disagreements cause them to knowingly and willingly split up and take opposite sides in the same combat.
Has this ever happened to anyone else?

It happened in one campaign I was playing, which turned out to be the best one I've played. I'm partially suspicious that the DMs at that moment didn't really know how to deal with it, but their solution ended being great. At the end we just became two parties, those of use who had left the original the party recruited some more into our team and from there... Well there were two campaigns going on in the same campaign world and it was great.

[Ranting Fool]

This sort of thing has a habit of ending games, too many people take PvP badly and end up arguing in OOC and refusing to play with each other :smalltongue:

[NilsRichter]

Has this ever happened to anyone else?

Yes, although not in DnD, but in the German DSA.

Details:
I was playing an Ice Elf in a party of humans, who come across a palace of the Ice Elfs fallen empire. They basically looted it and learned of a great evil that could be held in check by taking a relic from there to a Sand Elf holy site far in the south.

My Elf could see that it was necessary to take the relic from the temple, but asked that he would be allowed to carry the relic and that he would be allowed to return it after the adventure was over.

The wizard of the group called the Elf childish and declared that he would hang on to the relic, hoping to learn its secrets and gain power from it. The rest of the characters decided that the Elf took the desecration of his people's religious heritage way to serious and sided with the wizard.

The party came to blows over this and my Elf had to flee.


At this point, I decided that the elf would/could not return to the party. In his eyes the party had succumbed to the same arrogance that once ended the Ice Elfs empire (badoc). So I gave the GM some pointers how the Elf would make a great recurring antagonist for the party and rolled a new character.

I did not hold a grudge, and to this day see no reason why I should have. The character outgrew his role in the party and become something else, narratively.

I have had this happen to several characters during my gaming career: A rogue grew so powerful that he was no longer interested in pick-pocketing and went into international counter-espionage. A combat mage opened his own academy for magically gifted street kids and became a quest-giver.


Sometimes characters change drastically. Then you have basically three options:

1) Ignore the change. This is boring to a Roleplayer™.

2) Change the narrative. This impacts the whole of the group and is thus not your decision.

3) Change the characters status from PC to NPC. If the GM agrees they can still be present in the gaming world as quest giver, antagonist, enemy, ally, ...

[Gazebo's Bane]

Just to add to the consensus: depends on maturity/perspective/sense levels of those involved. I had a character who turned on his party and tried to ditch them and take the loot (after over a year of play - realistic in character - had been planning it for months). But I only did it in the knowledge that nobody would freak out IRL. With a less experienced group I'd avoid it at all costs to reinforce the 'this game is co-operative' message.

[Vaern]

My story involves encountering a lich while attempting to track down a devil.
We had encountered the devil we were hunting several times already, and he was growing more powerful with each meeting. While infiltrating a cult, we stumbled upon a list of names of people who we suspected had made pacts with the devil. This lich was on the list.

Once we met the lich, though, we learned that he had not become a lich until long after the pact was made. He had only asked for a quite place to research his magic without being disturbed - a wish which the devil saw fit to grant be conjuring a maddening mist that drove all of the inhabitants of the city to slaughter each other, and then constructing a grand mage tower from their flesh and bones. Only then did he think to become a lich, sealing his soul away so the devil could never claim payment for this vile atrocity.

Of course I, the chaotic good bard, and the party's chaotic neutral possibly-leaning-a-bit-towards-the-evil-side wizard, agreed that the lich's original wish was nothing short of neutral, that he was deceived by the devil, that he was driven to commit the heinous act of becoming a lich only out of desperation, that we shared a common enemy, and that an Atonement spell or two could grant us a powerful new ally. The neutral good monk and lawful neutral fighter, however, would not hear a word of mercy.

Now, really, does kicking in the door of this pitiful, misguided wizard's sanctuary, mercilessly slaughtering him, and sending his soul to Baator to empower our greatest enemy sound like the work of noble heroes? Not to me, but it's apparently the lawful good way to get things done.



Anyway, once combat begain, the lich's first round was spent using a scroll of Energy Immunity and became immune to fire, which the wizard and I both identified. The wizard decided that it was a perfect opportunity to start raining fireballs on the lich, so I assisted him with Inspire Greatness. The monk and fighter were none the wiser that we were actually taking the lich's side (in character, at least).

The fighter was removed from the fight within a couple of rounds. Unfortunately, though, the monk was overly twinked out with exalted feats and templates to the point where two unoptimized party members, a lich, and the lich's minions and summons couldn't take him down.

The monk pretty much soloed the lich, after which the wizard and I basically said "Good job. We were rooting for you the whole time." [Insert bluff check with Glibness here.]