Abusive Party Members

[Velaryon]

I've had PCs who hated each other on at least two occasions that I can think of, but the conflicts were purely in-character.

First was a Star Wars d20 game that I was GM'ing. After several players leaving and other players joining, we had a party consisting of a Rebel pilot, a Jedi, a smuggler, and the Jedi's apprentice. The pilot and the Jedi were basically good guys (the Jedi had toyed with going dark earlier in the campaign but ended up pulling back and staying with the light), while the smuggler was a fairly amoral criminal the the apprentice basically roleplaying a chaotic stupid D&D barbarian with Force powers.

Eventually the team fractured into two factions, with two of them (I bet you'll never guess which ones!) joining the Empire, specifically a subsection of Imperial Intelligence heavily modeled on the Turks from Final Fantasy 7. When the group imploded I thought the game was done for, but the players surprised me. We ended up splitting the sessions between their two factions who were working at cross purposes, though I did add a third faction that both sides could oppose. The climactic final battle of the campaign had them sort of working together along with the two groups' respective allies to defeat the third faction, and then they turned on each other. The whole thing ended when the Jedi (who was a true prodigy with the Move Object power) ripped open the outer wall of the Death Star, exposing the entire group (along with Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine) to the vacuum of space.

And believe it or not, the players loved it. There were a few veiled accusations of players using OOC knowledge to avoid each other, but nothing serious. Everyone was still friends, even if their characters had become mortal enemies.

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The second was a D&D 3.5 game I was in. We had two wizards who were complete polar opposites in personality and abilities, but were also students at the same magic academy. My abjurer was a lower-class guy with a rough upbringing whose family had managed to scrimp and save up just enough to get him admitted to the academy. He was becoming a man-of-the-people type of heroic character who wanted to use his magic in conjunction with his martial skills (which were looked down on by many in the academy) in order to protect people.

My friend played a necromancer, member of a powerful noble family with important connections all over the city, who had every door opened to him and was every bit as arrogant and unlikeable as you can imagine.

It happened that both of us had banned each other's schools when specializing, so we decided that they were rivals in particular. They only ever became members of the same party because of circumstances - the city was overrun by demons and we were among the very few that escaped alive, and had to work together in order to survive.

For the entire campaign, we traded insults, barbs, and threats, but never came to blows. The necromancer eventually got the last laugh, because of a crappy situation in which the party imploded. This one session, one of our players was missing and so his character was not present (naturally, it was our cleric). Another player had just brought in a new PC who was not particularly attached to our group yet. At this time, some enemies we had made earlier in the campaign caught up to us, and after hearing their grievances the new PC decided they had a point and betrayed us to join them (personally I think the player was wrong to do this, but there wasn't anything I could do about it). The rest of our party members went down, with me getting knocked out while trying to rescue someone else thanks to being badly outnumbered and having awful dice rolls. The necromancer, seeing he was the last one standing, shrugged his shoulders and teleported out, leaving the rest of us to die. Campaign over. Though realistically, he couldn't have won the fight all by himself anyway so it made sense from a survival perspective anyway.

The ending sucked, but it was more the fault of the DM and the other player, not because of our two characters who hated each other. Had the DM scaled down the difficulty to account for us being shorthanded and without a healer, or had the other PC not betrayed the party on what seemed like a thin pretext to me, it would have been fine.