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View Full Version : Roleplaying Can we all get along? Good and evil mixed party, having some....issues



Odessa333
2016-01-27, 04:58 PM
Hi all!

Looking for some advice/insight here. Our campaign is a low level quest on the sword coast with four main players who are at the point where I can't see an alternative to an inter-party fight. Here's the run down:

Dragon Born Fighter: Our local bastion of good and law, with a mistrust of spell casters. Keeps party on track in most cases.

Half Elf Warlock: Our wild card who likes torture, threatening party members, and has an odd plot line of scamming the local temple. Has some kind of 'evil-ish' pact of his own, though we don't know the full details as he role plays it well and covers his more 'evil' stuff from the party.


Half elf, bard (myself): I play her as chaotic good, being super optimistic/naive, trying to do good for goodness sake, etc. Currently in trouble as she was recently deceived into breaking the law by the...

Human, Paladin/Anti-Paladin: She started out as a Paladin who lost her powers for several reasons, including excessive torture of prisoners in public (getting us nearly run out of town), making deals with the mafia, and consorting with devils. Then went ahead and made a demonic pact to join the dark side officially.



So yea, you might notice some extremes here. I've been using my charisma to cover up for (at the time) Paladin and trying to mend fences as much as possible to avoid a party fight. I'm just running out of ideas/excuses to avoid such a thing. My bard is REALLY pissed with the former Paladin, as she killed an unarmed prisoner for the Paladin. My bard had been convinced that doing so was crucial in saving the Paladin's soul from demons, only to find out the former Paladin has sold her soul willingly to said demons and only the wanted the prisoner dead on orders of the mob. I really don't see how we can come back from this. I've made my concerns clear to the party and the GM, but I get the impression no one else thinks it's a big deal.

I'm not sure what to do at this point, you know? I feel like we're heading to a fight next week, and I really do not like that. The only alternative I can see is retiring my character and rolling up an evil character and going with the flow. Either way, someone's rolling up a new character.

Has anyone else dealt with such a divisive party? Is there an another alternative I can't see? This is really bothering me and I don't how to resolve this. Suggestions?

Forderz
2016-01-27, 07:16 PM
It sounds like you've got every extreme on the alignment chart covered, which is a bit of a problem.

A quick solution might be to have a meddling archfiend of hell (warlock's patron?) shanghai you all into an immutable contract that forces you to cooperate.

For a purely player-based possibility, maybe your character is going to swear to see that antipaladin reedeemed or die trying?

Open torture is really rough to work around, secret torture is not. Try convincing the evil players to be less overt in their depravity?

icefractal
2016-01-27, 08:51 PM
Depending how attached to your current character you are, the best course of action might be to have said character leave. After all, why would you want to continue associating with these torture-loving jerkwads, who have even threatened you? If your group is ok with PvP, you could sell the party out to the local authorities as you go. :smallwink:

Then bring in a character that would be ok with these guys. Not necessarily evil, could just be on the darker side of neutral. Perhaps someone who can slap the Warlock upside the head if he keeps threatening his compatriots, because evil or not, that kind of thing is annoying. :smalltongue:

Of course, there is still the LG Fighter. So technically, the party is evenly split, and it could be either side that departs. But given that the Fighter seems content to turn a blind eye, while the evil characters are more devoted to their agenda, I'm guessing that's where the future direction of the party is.

hifidelity2
2016-01-28, 05:42 AM
We had a similar problem

Party (started in AD&D 2 and moved to 3.0 and then 3.5)

We allow alignments to move – your alignment is based on your actions and a DM/PC chat

Illusionist / assassin (became Rogue) (LE) – Me
General Wizard (NE)
Cleric (NG)
Fighter (LN) who became a Paladin (LG)
Fighter (NC)


When the fighter became the Paladin we could have had issues but as we were all fighting the same “foe” his God visited him and told him to play nice, try and stop some of the worst excesses that some of us might do

So you could have the DM have the relevant God / Power etc visit and tell them that they must work together

Darth Ultron
2016-01-30, 01:26 AM
So, your bard was tricked into doing an evil act as she thought she was doing good. Well, sorry to say...but your bard willing crossed the line. See a ''true'' good person does not cross that line. The true good person finds another way.

So you can role play being unhappy that she was tricked, but you should be more concerned that she allowed herself to be tricked. Why did you think murder would save a soul? Just as the pally said so? Well, maybe you should not just believe everything your told?

And did your character really get no hints at the falling paladin? Your bard did cover things up and mend fences for some time, right? So she should have had a big hint or twelve that ''the paladin is falling''.

This type of thing would happen all the time to a ''super naive '' character.

You could:

1. Save the Paladin. You character might feel all bad she ''helped'' a paladin fall from good, and dedicate her life to making her good again.

2. Soften the Evil. A bit more realistic, your character stays ''friends'' with the paladin to soften her evil as much as possible.

3. Dig into Chaotic Good. You should not really care if you broke a law. And your not a crazy lawful good character. So your character can overlook lots of ''evil''.

TurboGhast
2016-01-30, 10:47 AM
See if you can convince the the LG character to help you try to rein in the other two without killing them, by focusing them towards other evils.

Nifft
2016-01-30, 11:46 AM
If you can get the evil PCs to keep the evil external, as in NOT being a jerk to party members, then I could see myself playing along with them.

But if they're actually being jerks to people in the party, then I don't care about their alignment or other excuses: they are a liability and they are not going to survive the next long rest.

endur
2016-01-30, 08:31 PM
Hang em high. Help the authorities bring the anti-paladin to justice.

Keltest
2016-01-30, 08:51 PM
If youre looking for solutions out of character, have a talk with the evil characters players. Ask that they try and play their characters as pragmatic evil rather than gratuitously evil. Torturing people in public serves no particular purpose other than to twirl their metaphorical moustache, even if it did coincidentally result in something beneficial happen. The warlock seems to be at least trying for this with their only doing evil in secret.

If youre looking for non-contrived in character solutions, I think you may be out of luck. A naïve or optimistic Good character could try and redeem the Antipaladin, (assuming their player is willing to accommodate that), but if youre set to come into conflict with the warlock, there isn't a lot you can do short of bailing entirely, because he isn't the only one dictating his agenda.

Ninja Bear
2016-01-31, 01:03 AM
In-character, why are of the four of you in a party together with each other? What made each of the PCs go "yeah, OK, I really want to work with these people that I just met, instead of the adventurers from the next table over?"

The reason why buddy cop movies where the cops are wacky polar opposites work out so well is because in those, the characters have the same day-to-day goals (stop crime), the same source of authority and organizational backing (they're cops), the same boss (Da Chief), and the same external motivations (the mayor is riding Da Chief hard on this one, so he'll make them turn in their badge and their gun if they make a mockery of the force). There are really more similarities than differences, and plenty of external reasons why they need to keep it together.

If Skylight Hugglebunny the elf druid and Deathstab McGee the blackguard just decide one day to team up and go on an adventure, they don't have that. They may not be after the same things and there may not realistically be any reason why they would have given each other the time of day in the first place if they didn't recognize each other as PCs. From what I can tell, there isn't a strong external motivation for the PCs to work together despite their extreme differences, so your options are:


get the GM to impose one,
have the PCs agree to downplay their differences (doesn't seem workable in this case), or
have some or all players reroll.


Forderz' solution might work:


A quick solution might be to have a meddling archfiend of hell (warlock's patron?) shanghai you all into an immutable contract that forces you to cooperate.


Character-specific motivations can also be workable (i.e. the warlock's patron could tell him personally to make a show of pretending to obey the party leader and stop torturing people for a while, etc.) but may be more effort on the GM's part.

PoeticDwarf
2016-01-31, 03:38 PM
Hi all!

Looking for some advice/insight here. Our campaign is a low level quest on the sword coast with four main players who are at the point where I can't see an alternative to an inter-party fight. Here's the run down:

Dragon Born Fighter: Our local bastion of good and law, with a mistrust of spell casters. Keeps party on track in most cases.

Half Elf Warlock: Our wild card who likes torture, threatening party members, and has an odd plot line of scamming the local temple. Has some kind of 'evil-ish' pact of his own, though we don't know the full details as he role plays it well and covers his more 'evil' stuff from the party.


Half elf, bard (myself): I play her as chaotic good, being super optimistic/naive, trying to do good for goodness sake, etc. Currently in trouble as she was recently deceived into breaking the law by the...

Human, Paladin/Anti-Paladin: She started out as a Paladin who lost her powers for several reasons, including excessive torture of prisoners in public (getting us nearly run out of town), making deals with the mafia, and consorting with devils. Then went ahead and made a demonic pact to join the dark side officially.



So yea, you might notice some extremes here. I've been using my charisma to cover up for (at the time) Paladin and trying to mend fences as much as possible to avoid a party fight. I'm just running out of ideas/excuses to avoid such a thing. My bard is REALLY pissed with the former Paladin, as she killed an unarmed prisoner for the Paladin. My bard had been convinced that doing so was crucial in saving the Paladin's soul from demons, only to find out the former Paladin has sold her soul willingly to said demons and only the wanted the prisoner dead on orders of the mob. I really don't see how we can come back from this. I've made my concerns clear to the party and the GM, but I get the impression no one else thinks it's a big deal.

I'm not sure what to do at this point, you know? I feel like we're heading to a fight next week, and I really do not like that. The only alternative I can see is retiring my character and rolling up an evil character and going with the flow. Either way, someone's rolling up a new character.

Has anyone else dealt with such a divisive party? Is there an another alternative I can't see? This is really bothering me and I don't how to resolve this. Suggestions?

In our part with a LE, CN/CE, LG and CG/NG character it was the same way. We had some fights, but mostly because we like pvp. It is not a big deal often