Pitting player characters against each other

[tchntm43]

I have an interesting idea for the next adventure I'm working on. It's quite a bit different from anything I've done before. Two of the four characters in my group are estranged from their families. One of them (Zahara) comes from a noble family but she decided she didn't like that life and went to live in the woods where she learned rudimentary magic from a weird hermit. The other (Anakis) comes from a criminal family and her own family tried to make her take the fall for a crime, which led to her leaving her family for good.

In the adventure I'm working on, they return to the city where Zahara's family is from. They find themselves taking on a mission to free some hostages from a band of mercenaries seeking ransom and holed up in a forgotten ruin far from the city. The first twist is Zahara discovering that her mother is one of the hostages. The second twist is finding out that the mercenaries are led by Anakis' brother and this is normal criminal business related to her family.

In this case, it's not really pitting the characters against each other since Anakis has every good reason to side with Zahara and I'll be really surprised if she doesn't. But I wanted to know if others have created a situation like this in their games before, and if so, are there any issues I should be aware of that could cause problems I haven't foreseen?

[Guy Lombard-O]

My guess would be that it'll work out fine.

Most players know (meta) that they're playing a cooperative group game, and act accordingly. PCs usually side with their party members as a default. Backstory elements like family and such tend to take a back seat to working with PC comrades unless doing so becomes game-breaking. Unless they're super hardcore roleplayers, the kind who justify PvP with statements like "that's what my character would do".

Unless you introduce this campaign as a Paranoia-like game. In which case, weave a few more cross-purpose strands in there, and watch the PvP mayhem with glee (which should be shared by your players).

[Keravath]

Odds are it will work out fine though Anakis might decide to spare her brother if it comes to the point of killing him if only to force him to return to the family and face the music for his failure though this would also declare her as an open enemy to her own family.

This kind of depends on HOW estranged from their families each of the players imagines their characters to be.

---

I've run some campaigns where characters had implicit conflicts of one sort or another that would eventually lead to some sort of intra-party conflict. They were fun in general but more challenging to DM.