Assassination

[Yoroichi]

Hey guys,

My players are part of a company that hands out missions to them, and the have a handler who communicates their missions from the management to them and who handles basically everything they do. One of my players is an assassin who has contacted an outside assassins' guild in order to join their ranks, and the guilds' leader has asked him to assassinate his handler as a test.

Now how do i play this out? I am playing a sort of open non-railroading campaign, so i don't mind the handler dying, but in no case do I want it to be easy for my player. It is known that the handler is a monk, so i was thinking of making a level 4 monk ( the party is lvl 4) and have the battle play out as it goes. The player will 99% work alone.

Any thoughts?

Thank you in advance :D

[Aetol]

Your players are probably not the only adventurers working for him. The player will have to go through a few lower-level adventurers of various classes before reaching him.

[Sigreid]

I don't understand the issue. You make sure you know what the victim's routine and security are like, as well as when and why the routine varies and the player takes it from there. He has 3 potential outcomes.

He fails and pays the price
He succeeds, but people realize who did it, and pays the price
He succeeds and gets away clean and has no price to pay


All you really need to know is what the victim likes to do with his time, and how paranoid he is. The rest of it (how, when, etc.) is all up to the player. You may have some PVP coming depending on how the other players fell about it.

Side note: It could easily be a different kind of test. Would you really want to accept an assassin who has demonstrated that he has no loyalty whatsoever?

[Yoroichi]

A guild of assassins accepting a guy who would assassinate the guy he currently works for? Sure!

Plus there is some ulterior motive. The guy who handed the kill order to my player ( and is also in charge of the assassins guild) owes the target lot of money.

[Coidzor]

So Charlie's Angels are going to murderkill Bosley and go rogue?

[Warwick]

My gut reaction is that this sounds like a recipe for intra-party strife if the other characters (or their players) are not cool with Mr. Assassin shanking Mission Control.

On the other hand, if they're all on board with it, it's not fundamentally any different from any other encounter*. I would think the greater concern would be long term consequences, i.e. alienating the patron organization if they figure out who is behind it.

*should be noted that an actual assassination is not modeled particularly well by DnD's abstracted damage model, so you may need to make something up if the assassin PC goes for something more subtle than picking a fight.

[Yoroichi]

The players individual story lines come together in the main plot. The assassin player sort of has to join the guild in order to find information about a guy who while killing his parents stole a very valuable family heirloom, which will be used in conjunction with the other characters story lines ( it is a vessel that can carry a soul that is used to arm and potentially destroy one of the magical pillars that hold the continent aloft) for the main plot to develop :0.

So even if the others kinda object, and they probably will, it does not matter to the story ( as botching the storyline it is an option) and it does not matter really to me. I am aiming to make it a sort of real life choice with risks and rewards. With players having to work together in spite of not necessarily liking each other.

Btw he already has a lead on the guy he is looking for, a lead that he hasn't examined yet, but he wants to play an assassin and the company (guild) i have them working for, while it also hands out assassination jobs from time to time, is governed by laws of the kingdom and the player doesn't like that -_-.

[TopCheese]

So Charlie's Angels are going to murderkill Bosley and go rogue?

This explains Chairlie's Angels 2, Bill Murray did piss off Lucy Liu.