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Alberic Strein
2017-01-18, 02:44 AM
So, I was looking for some shadowrun character creation tips and stumbled upon this (https://www.reddit.com/r/Shadowrun/comments/4kf93b/that_guy_storytime_the_shadowrunner_team_trust/) thread. So, after a good laugh at the story, whether it was fictional or not and noticing how griped the remaining members of the team were with the whole thing, I ended up thinking about the different PVP experiences I encountered while gaming. Including one which resulted in the ending of my participation in a campaign.

I can't really claim to really know where I'm going with this, I'm not writing fun stories and I can't claim this will be interesting, or even relevant, but I do feel that it's necessary, and may end up starting an interesting discussion. Or maybe I just want to get it all out before I start playing IRL again.
Doesn't even really count. I was playing a fighter, got hit with a save or suck spell which turned me hostile towards the wizard next to me. Didn't really have a choice there. I did go the extra mile to remind the DM that my mark allowed me an attack of opportunity as the wizard sidestepped, which stopped her movement and caused an ungodly amount of rage. End of story. In those years playing D&D4, this was the only example I could find/remember.
A much more interesting example, one of my first characters in shadowrun was a street sam with a grenade launcher. I didn't exactly have a good working relationship with my paranoid dwarven mage partner. This was particularly problematic when we were sent to pull a Die Hard on a mall/tower infested with zombies. At at least one occasion, and probably more than that, dispatching the hordes charging straight at us was more important than avoiding friendly fire. Which prompted my dwarven partner to abandon me at the top of the tower in flames (white phosphorus grenades forever) right after I killed the zombie mage and as I lacked the strength to jump to the rescue helicopter. The exchange went something like this:
"Please use your levitation spell to bring me to the chopper, I can't jump! (dice pool of 0 due to fatigue and lowish strength to begin with)"
"F*ck you, you shot at me!" (not strictly true, but he did take some [reduced] damage from some of my grenades due to being in the outer rim of the blast)
At which point the DM stepped in, had the ork that came with the chopper clock the mage, because you can't do that, and then jump to the flaming tower, grab my character and jump back. The DM promptly saddled us with negative traits as a "Don't do that, the both of you!" slap on the wrist. That's it. We still didn't have a good working relationship after that, but we saved each other many times and there was no friendly fire.
Another interesting case. After a number of sessions and after the GM told us that we would have pooled XP to roll evil characters, I contacted him to roll a mad inventor Tzeentchian cultist from Marienburg. Instead he proposed that my current mage (former hedge mage now apprentice at the colleges) would realise that his heretical magic was a gift from a chaos god and turn servant of said god. That implied betraying the party. I accepted, but did try really, really hard not to become an antagonist from the party's point of view. This was after I cooked up the SGTF test and I really didn't want to fail it. The one act of betrayal I did was not stopping a ritual when I should have, and bargaining that the best thing to do now that it was unstoppable was to screw up the Chaos God that was going to use said ritual to warp his armies at the figurative doorstep of Altdorf by disrupting the spell. In private I told the GM that I would link the summoning spell with my god. This utterly destroyed and sacrificed the (sizeable) town we were in, but none of my allies were harmed, and the capitol of the Empire was safe. Many, many games later I revealed my character's treachery as another member of the group was forced into becoming a chaos champion by the circumstances (and I had nothing to do with that), so no more treachery on that end, and my character never betrayed the evil party. Or yet anyway, I still play that character through skype.
Now, you're probably wondering what this test I mentioned in passing is all about, right? As I started a Pathfinder campaign we did a communal group creation. The DM was sadistic to the extreme, throwing us in the Pathfinder equivalent of CubeČ, so we needed to be able to work as a group, and well. However, a couple members struck out, preferring to avoid revealing their character sheets at large and even their classes in the beginning. Smelling backstabbing from miles away, I decided to be pre-emptive and introduce, as the resident sneaky guy with a greatsword sneak attack and a huge initiative, the...


Surprise Greatsword To the Face test.

It's a very simple test. Can your character refrain himself from cheating the group out of his money, pickpocketing team members, handing them cursed items as a practical joke, killing the princess because she is bitchy, and all around killing NPCs left and right for no reason whatsoever, especially when the group is trying to get information out of them? In other words: Disruptive behaviour.

It goes somewhat like this :

Can your character live harmoniously with 5+ other adventurers?

If not, Surprise Greatsword To the Face.

Is your character, in fact, a traitor to the group?

If yes, Surprise Greatsword To the Face.

That is not to say you can't have an "interesting" concept, like a full spellcaster powered by cannibalism. As long as your character is not an enemy of the group, I have no issue with some (a lot) of mischief. Like "forgetting" to warn the rest of the group that the client for the adventure is actually your boss and that we are helping you get a better place in your secret organization. You're still technically helping the group get a job and during the mission too, so it's okay. Running away while the barbarian heroically holds off the orc horde is okay too. However, "forgetting" to warn the bard about a magical trap because you would like his share of the loot much better is not okay. Handing the barbarian a ring, telling him it's a True Strike ring and that if he can one-shot the orc boss with it he will be able to make the horde flee with an Intimidate check, and then using his heroic charge to run away, is not okay. Schadenfreude is hilarious, I concur. And as long as an "interesting role-playing opportunity" kind of concept keeps it tasteful and makes sure to be nice and helpful with the group, it's okay.

Just keep asking yourself if your character wouldn't work way better as an enemy of the group.

If one day that answer clearly becomes yes...

Surprise Greatsword To the Face.

A simple test, really.

Said test proved quite popular, which is hilarious because the campaign it was created for had two instances of players working against each other, and I was pretty much the only willing source of conflict. Explanations to come in...
Ok, this one is going to be a bit long. The first instance of (unwilling) PVP was when the group's resident gnome tried, again and again, each and every night for weeks, to murder the group. It wasn't the gnome's fault though. The natural 1 on the willpower test to not get posessed by the timeless evil from beyond the abyss that made her into a murderous liability wasn't her fault. (Looking at the freaking timeless evil from beyond the abyss though...) That was at the beginning of the campaign and we carried on for... months? Maybe even a year? without any hitch in our teamwork. That ended when we found the princess. After the initial "I'll be the one to court her!" lighthearted conflict settled down (with the female gnome as the winner) we got embroiled into a sh*tty political situation. Said princess was the rightful ruler of the realm, all the rest of her family having disappeared in a cataclysmic event. she was fully aware of that fact and she definitely wanted her throne. And pretty dresses. One leading to the other. The catch being that she only survived by making a pact with... A timeless evil from beyond the abyss. Of the surviving political leaders trying to lead the kingdom were a paladin and a general. The latter in the middle of a rebellion to unite the realm under his banner. He would only bend the knee to the rightful heir, but not as long as she was in a pact and thus under the influence of a great evil. Likewise, the paladin could not allow said corrupted princess to ascend to the throne. Both rationalizing that it would be tantamount to selling out the kingdom to daemons.

Actually a pretty sensible train of thoughts.

Still the kingdom needed to be unified. So while we distracted the princess with pretty dresses, we searched for a solution. The paladin ended up forcing our hands, discovering that the princess was alive, her location and kidnapping her as his rival got his forces ready to siege the capitol. We... well, split the party. Since I had the only sneaky character, I would infiltrate the royal castle to check up on the princess, while the rest of the group went to negociate with the paladin, which was going to forcefully marry the princess. Not out of any lustful thought mind you, merely to ascend to the throne and become able to pull rank on his rival, which would respect him as the new leader and stop his rebellion.

Actually, the paladin's plan made a lot of sense and while the party nitpicked some points, more and more players fell in agreement with it being a necessary evil.

My character had of course reached the princess long ago, infiltrated her quarters and found her crying in her pretty dress.

I decided that it was time to put my foot down.

And by "put my foot down" I mean cutting open the door and half of the wall from the inside and breaking the princess out by slowly walking away and daring any paladin to try smite evil, see what happens.

Of course I quickly ran into the party. At which point the gnome politely but firmly told my character to stand down. To which I responded that she was going to shut up for all the times she tried to kill us, and that this would not stand. I didn't knowingly quote The Big Lebowski, but eh. Also, while a badly optimized tier4 character threatening to murder an entire castle of paladins, one paladin head honcho, and his entire group would not sound threatening in a normal game, in this one the GM had been very, very generous (and inventive!) with the loot we got. Chief of all, an Artifact sword of the god of war with insane buffs. Which was in my possession and took no prisoners. The group also left most of the fighting to me, so there was a real chance of the party getting TPK should we end up fighting. We didn't though, opting for a third option instead: Freeing the princess from the evil entity, which would let the paladin and his rival submit to her authority and reunite the kingdom. ...And kickstarted a chain of events which brought the Apocalypse upon the entire world. But the princess wasn't wed.

Well, she was actually. But as a Queen, to my character and after we ended the campaign by beating the Apocalypse back and turned the timeless evil from beyond the abyss into a barmaid. But she wasn't forcibly wed.

So yeah, while we did not eventually devolve into PvP, I kinda strongarmed the group into doing what I, and not what they wanted, with the explicit threat of murdering their characters if they got in my way. Not the most team friendly behaviour in truth. Still, I think I would still do the same thing today, even if it's frowned upon at the table.

I guess you probably feel like "Cool story bro, but there isn't really any pvp in any of those stories." And that's true, we get some near misses, backstabs (with and without the blessing of the DM), some conflict, the threat of PvP and greatswords applied directly to faces, but no outright murder. Well, get ready for the most excruciating campaign I played. And oh boy, was it rife with retcons, random bull****, some PvP and the gnome inquisition.
First game, one of the PC dies when another player botches her infiltration attempt. Unfortunately that PC was of a race that exploded on death. My character was in the blast radius. My character barely survived thanks to my paranoid habit of taking toughness at lvl1. How's that for a first game? Now, some context. When I first entered the game, invited by one of the players from the first pathfinder story, I thought it was a one-shot. I thought I was filling in for one game and that was going to be it. So I wasn't bothered by the very, very late hour (from 2 to 6 in the morning). Turned out it was a campaign with an extremely high turnover rate. Some alarm bells might start ringing in your head. That's normal. Since I had to quickly put together a character, I basically went with "fiercely loyal to the group" as a personality, slapped it on a quaterstaff magus and called it a day. I don't know how to describe that group or that campaign further than "entirely dysfunctional". We had a dog following us. That dog was better than the entire group in everything (eventually gaining paladin levels) until one of the players left it to die to a monstruous spider swarm when their little (mostly solo) recon expedition started boring them. Of course, since we were losing players each game, more had to come. The first act of the two newest additions to the group? Try and mob/kill the clearly overpowered wizard we stumbled upon. Barely had the time to walk out of that fireball. At some point we arrived at a marsh, so we started exploring. Actually, most of us went to try and build a bridge over the marsh while another member of the group went to talk to the lady on the other bank, going through the maze of paths. Alone. I was still one turn away from catching up to that character when she was attacked by a huge snake. It was an encounter designed for 4+ players. We had to make do with 2, since half of the team didn't care about the gnome (and later me) dying, while the one who did was too slow and only caught up after we somehow managed to win, the gnome in a dying state and all my spells exhausted. Then I missed a game and when I came back, the group was scattered in a death dungeon. One character and her pet DMPC facestomping everything where they were, while the rest of the team was in deep ****. Remember the "fiercely loyal to the group trait"? My character went in the freaking death trap, and managed to save one PC from a pit. Then things went South. Said barely-saved-PC let it slip in the conversation that he really didn't care about the rest of the team and would only come to get his stuff back. Straight to the face of the guy who got him out of a hole because he was part of the team. I tried to make him say/lie that he would do it for the group. No, he would only move for his self-interest. At which point I asked for a heal check "Would he survive if I dropped him back in the hole?" *roll* "Yes." "I do it."

The player was pissed. Even more so when the GM revealed that I had failed my heal check and that the fall did kill his character. He quickly offered his dying soul to a daemon (having fallen back straight into a sacrificial summoning pit) in exchange for my character being cursed with having his soul taken to the Neutral Evil hell when he died.

Continuing the dungeon, the two very, very powerful members of the group (one DMPC and one PC who was in a relationship with said DMPC) exited the maze by overpowering the dungeon, while the gnome died, having failed fortitude saves after accepting to become the friend of a Vampire Queen. Which entailed becoming a vampire. Stumbling upon the scene and since the Vampire Queen was a lvl18+ wizard, I had her use my life to resurrect the gnome. Dying in a sacrifice to save another's soul somehow f*cked with the Neutral Evil daemons and I got sent back in the material world as their agent. Basically I switched classes, but kept the same character. Since we had no healing I took a cleric. And since I wanted to have fun, I rolled a (hell)fire blasting cleric.

I won't get in details over the rest, but basically we did not get sh*t done. Winning against opponents was the exception rather than the norm (and on at least two occasions I had to push forward alone to beat the damn things while the group retreated), I once fell asleep for two hours in the middle of a game and found out (to my terror) that I hadn't missed a thing. One of our PCs managed to lost against an NPC bard, maybe not even with class levels. Peasants had waaaaaaaay higher stats than we did because they, I quote "trained for them" end quote, with our party routinely losing "congratulatory fights" the DM threw at us to congratulate us from solving a mistery and where we would have gotten the opportunity to kick the smug bad guy in the mouth. If we hadn't lost. Needing a number of retcons.

Now, you remember from my Shadowrun adventures that I had a, huh how shall we say, a bit of a tendency to let my allies be in the blasts of my attacks? Well, I was very careful not to let that happen again. And that got us killed, since the way to survive that situation WAS the fireball to the guy's face, which I couldn't use now that our tank was helpless and hostage (drow poison)... But due to that state had a HUGE DR THAT ALLOWED HER TO SURVIVE THE COUP DE GRACE WHEN ONE OF OUR MEMBERS DECIDED NOT TO FOLLOW SUIT WITH THE BAD GUY'S ORDERS. Which meant that I could have used the damn fireball to save us all! If only I knew, right?

Side note: If you are alone, isolated and swarmed and being devoured alive by a swarm of gobelins, yes I do burn them off with burning hands. And yes, that is justified. Even if you take some damage.

Said "burn the gobos off the tank" only happened once, after the group told me how we lost ANOTHER fight when I wasn't here and I somehow decided that the only way to get sh*t done was to do it myself. Even if I had to go through my companions.

Of course, a few games without encounters and three real life months later, I was considerably calmed down, if completely jaded out.

Then of course came my last games with that party. We were in Japan (don't ask), I had just gotten the hang on adding divine damage to my flame spells through ki (don't ask) so I finally had my hellfire when we were invited by the lord of the gunpowder nation (don't ask). We went there from the ninja village (don't ask) as the followers of the now disowned heir of the gunpowder nation (the PC with the DMPC as lover, who was a dryder in early games, explaining her extremely high physical stats) and the heir of the Youkai nation (said DMPC). A bunch of other lords were there, and after the supremacist racist bad guy and father to one of our PCs explained his plan to be an evil, supremacist and racist overlord and got the other lords to side with him and betray the Emperor, his PC daughter challenged him to a duel and started losing badly due to the loss of her dryder stats (she was now some sort of water youkai). Roll initiative. The traitor lords start appealing for peace. One of our own is fighting (and more importantly, losing) a duel to the death, one of our members teleported away to a prison cell with one of the lords' guard, while another got closer to the dueling father and daughter. At this point I decided the situation called for hellfire. We weren't going to talk our way out of this. We had rolled initiative. I only had one spell with the power to kill the evil overlord and had just gotten the ability to double said damage. The water youkai PC was going to be in the blast radius, but at this point she was going to die at the overlord's next initiative pass. And she already had her action this turn. We were otherwise too far to do anything. So I pulled out all the stops, used my neutral evil daemon knowledge to use part of my soul as fuel for the optimized divine fireball (fumbled those tests and died, my soul consumed by my own fire) and took a pot shot at the evil overlord.

Now, of course the water Youkai took badly my blasting her. I understand that. But with her relationship with the DM, his DMPC, and the insane amount of stupid sh*t she had lived or been resurrected through (up and including the lvl19 drow queen hired to kill her) I figured she would manage. She still took it oh-so-horribly badly. Which, again, I can understand. But winning that duel wasn't going to happen, even if she would be resurrected by her boyfriend DMPC next turn. So lost for lost and dead for dead, let's at least murder the overlord.

Except I didn't know, but it was obviously common knowledge, that adding a divine element to the fireball doubled its blast radius. So not only did I thoroughly incinerate the water youkai PC, and made the evil overlord's shadow beat a hasty retreat (because hahah, why wouldn't it be a doppelganger *mustache twirling*) I also took an innocent PC in the blast (at the other side of the room from my spell, mind you). And he died. The water youkai PC? Oh it was very poignant and all, with the DMPC boyfriend sacrificing his sanity or something to bring her back. Unfortunately, the wizard normal PC didn't have that kind of angel over his shoulder and just straight up died. Soul sent to the nether realms.

...Except he came back after the semi reboot (the second of the evening), none worse for the wear, but it was all my fault and I was the source of all the evils of this world, yadda yadda.

For some weird masochistic reason I hung around some more with another character, a cleric with close to no offensive capabilities who concentrated on buffing people. Surprisingly, sh*t did not get done. Except by the DMPC. Sometimes. Until I eventually stopped showing up to the games. Turns out being the NPC of one PC's adventure isn't particularly fun nor interesting when you have no say in what happens, no right to speak due to your low status in that country, and all that which made this campaign a chore.

Heads down my worst gaming experience. And that says something.

Probably where I was at my lowest too.

God that was long.

And devolved into a rant in the end. I didn't know I was still that bitter about that campaign.

Anyway here it is, as for what this all means, what it should all mean...

I'll think about it after a rest. Probably something of the effect of "There is That Guy in all of us, what matters is finding what makes it come out." or somesuch.

Do comment on these misadventures or put out some of your own. PvP at the gaming table tends to be a divisive (and touchy) subject.

daniel_ream
2017-01-19, 12:20 AM
PvP at the gaming table tends to be a divisive (and touchy) subject.

Character vs. character can be awesome and fun, as long as everyone's having fun with it. There's an old gaming war story about the original Champions playtest group splitting because of an entirely in-character "does the end justify the means" argument between two characters. The players loved every minute of it.

Player vs. player is always bad at the RPG table. Period. No exceptions. If you want a competitive game, play Risk or something.

LibraryOgre
2017-01-19, 12:46 PM
Character vs. character can be awesome and fun, as long as everyone's having fun with it. There's an old gaming war story about the original Champions playtest group splitting because of an entirely in-character "does the end justify the means" argument between two characters. The players loved every minute of it.

Player vs. player is always bad at the RPG table. Period. No exceptions. If you want a competitive game, play Risk or something.

Tend to agree with Dan, here... character v. character can be great, and a lot of games (I'm thinking Vampire and Legend of the Five Rings, specifically) tend to assume that there's going to be at least some of it.

Jay R
2017-01-19, 02:06 PM
Player vs. player is always bad at the RPG table. Period. No exceptions. If you want a competitive game, play Risk or something.

In general, I agree with you. But I would say that exceptions are extremely rare, and that most groups should not do it.

The exception is when everybody agreed to it at the beginning (and actually meant the same thing when they agreed), and then it's no different from playing Risk or something.

I'm playing in a 1e game right now in which every character is an Egyptian prince and possible heir to the throne, trying to prove why he or she should become the next Pharaoh. Yes, I, the player (Jay, not Pteppic) want to win. But winning eventually means succeeding on our adventures, which requires working together. It's a very nice mix of cooperation and competition.

Quertus
2017-01-19, 05:11 PM
In general, I agree with you. But I would say that exceptions are extremely rare, and that most groups should not do it.

The exception is when everybody agreed to it at the beginning (and actually meant the same thing when they agreed), and then it's no different from playing Risk or something.

I'm playing in a 1e game right now in which every character is an Egyptian prince and possible heir to the throne, trying to prove why he or she should become the next Pharaoh. Yes, I, the player (Jay, not Pteppic) want to win. But winning eventually means succeeding on our adventures, which requires working together. It's a very nice mix of cooperation and competition.

Perhaps we mean different things by "player vs. player". I've gamed with people who hated each other personally, people who hated each other racially, people who were angry at each other over IRL events... such that it evidenced in their characters, usually in the form of PvP. This is what I mean when I say "player vs. player".

Jay R
2017-01-19, 05:48 PM
Perhaps we mean different things by "player vs. player". I've gamed with people who hated each other personally, people who hated each other racially, people who were angry at each other over IRL events... such that it evidenced in their characters, usually in the form of PvP. This is what I mean when I say "player vs. player".

Yup, that's different. I consider player vs. player to be when one player is competing with another.

No-Kill Cleric
2017-01-19, 11:10 PM
Under my main GM, PVP is only allowed if both players consent to it. It's led to some fun character dynamics and given the DM some great arcs to build up to their dramatic climax. In general we stray from it, since we all understand that we get a bit attached to our characters.

Alberic Strein
2017-01-25, 05:55 AM
That's just the thing. Players tend to be really attached to their characters. Even when it's done in good spirit both participants walk in expecting to win, as it is both logical and justified in their own narrative. As both players know they are right, of course.

You can be good-natured about the whole thing of course, but I reckon that the only way for both players to have a good memory of the experience is for both of them to make it out alive and reach a compromise, or at least a grudged understanding.

I know that separating IC and OOC is the basics of the basics, but really I feel it doesn't really happen. Fighting the character is always fighting the player on some level. And that seldom ends well.

But at the same time, some of these conflicts have to happen for the story to make sense. Being told by the GM "no, you don't drop the ******* you save back in the hole" would have been alright, but if the GM had gone "no, you don't oppose the party selling off the princess to the aging paladin. We do a vote and you abide by it." that would have immediately gotten me out of the game and really make me rethink my involvement in the campaign.

Also, while we'd all prefer if everybody got along at the gaming table, it's not always the case. OOC warnings and blocks can only go so far and can leave a player disgruntled, as he feels forced to go along with something clearly wrong from his point of view.

It can also depend on the campaign. Some are fairly straightforward. The party is given a goal and strives to fulfill it. Players can disagree on the means, but not on the ends. Sandboxy games can mix it up by giving players different paths, different stories. And players can disagree on which story to follow. Sometimes violently, in and out of the game.

Maglubiyet
2017-01-25, 08:36 AM
I ran a group that inexplicably devolved into PvP for none of the reasons listed here. In the middle of a fight with some city guards, one PC turned to another and kicked him.

The one who was kicked then stabbed his assailant. It ended up with a full three-way melee between the guys, finally decided by the mage's fireball.

I protested at first and tried to redirect, but in the end I decided to let it run its course. Only one of the PC's survived that fight.

We all knew each other pretty well and I'm still at a loss for what caused this fiasco. I suspect that it was due to some player vs player conflict I was unaware of.

Is self-murderhobo a term? Maybe auto-murderhobo.

Stealth Marmot
2017-01-25, 02:01 PM
Ugh, avoid it when you can. When players kill players you have to go through a bunch of motions, first the apologies, the disposal of the murder weapon, taking the body to a proper pig farm you have a friend working at, disposal of all of the easy ID items like the teeth, the cleanup of the scene, and you would NOT believe how hard it is to get blood out of those gaming pads. It leaks in after a few minutes and getting a replacement is always suspicious when you bought one yesterday.

At the end of it all you are using an assumed name at an airport in Uruguay using it's wi-fi to get on your favorite gaming forums to make sure other's avoid the hassle.