So I’m playing in a campaign that includes dark gifts and the option to work for a dark goddess.
One of the other characters has decided to sign up as a servant of the dark goddess. This lead the player to betray an ally we were helping in the middle of his home town. If the ally dies, and it looks pretty likely next session he will. The party will be surrounded by powerful enemies with most of our spell slots gone. The character is also talking about serving the dark goddess by burning down a church and killing the Abbot who has provided shelter for previous allies of the party that needed protection. my character’s backstory is centred around him being prevent by the pack of hunters he joined from stopping a village from burning down. Given the situation, I think my character would rather turn on the party then let them burn down the church and kill the innocent and the Abbot that helped us. I also think my character would eliminate other PC’s who have taken dark gifts to make sure they didn’t try something similar. However if my character did this, then it would be the end of the campaign. To make matters more complicated the worshiper of the dark goddess is developing a romantic relationship with another PC who would almost certainly turn on my PC if I turned on the worshiper. I just can’t see why my character wouldn’t fight against the rest of the party if they do this, but I don’t want to be the one to end the campaign.
The setup as described seems designed to create interparty conflicts which could lead to violence.
Obviously, if things shake out as you expect, there's going to be disruption to the party, as characters die or leave, but that doesn't mean the campaign has to end; it just means there will need to be some new characters.
If you're worried about out-of-game ill feeling, have a conversation about it before the session. Just something like "hey, the way things are going, it seems pretty likely the party's going to blow up messily real soon now. Are we all cool with rolling with it, or do we need to talk it over first?" As long as you're all reasonable people, this can be resolved without anybody having to do things in-game that they don't want to.
If three of the four players die while the party is in hostile territory, then it would be pretty likely to end as a tpk. Even if the last player manages to survive, three new PC’s is seriously stretching what’s plausible.
I just feel like the options are make it an evil campaign round followers of the dark goddess with new characters or play my character as not having the backstory I created.
Well, given that your character does seem to have a good alignment, they could try talking it out with the party in character. If that fails, maybe have a in game duel. Not one to the death, but still a duel to make a mini plot point.
I try to teach a simple lesson to players: Actions have consequences.
Sometimes, players take that to mean that I intend punish them for 'being evil' - as an example. And that's not really true, it's more that in any more of less stable society, the burning of churches and killing of abbots (as the example is here) isn't going to go over particularly well. So it's not me, the GM, punishing the players - it's society retaliating against aggressors and evildoers. NPC's, reacting to the actions of PC's. Because actions have consequences.
That said, a showdown is one way to end this. In my years of playing this game, it's happened twice: Once, I as a GM played a long campaign of moral grey zones and moral ambiguity, which resulted in half the party siding with the ... final boss - who was obviously not a BBEG, because ... grey zones and moral ambiguity. He was a BBGZ/MA. Another time, my friend's PC joined the Dark Side and betrayed us all, resulting in an epic fight, in which she (the PC) managed to escape, although we had to ressurect a couple of other PC's.
Both of these went well. So it can be done.
But really, I think PC's turning on PC's should be avoided, generally speaking.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
Literally nothing, the DM banned pvp, and so we simply had to not fight. We got called to the castle of the BBEG the next session and although my character could be as verbally provocative as I could make him. The player with the evil character thought that was just good banter. We fought through the castle sniping verbally at each other and killed the bbeg. After that the game was over. It just wasn’t as fun.
think A: outside the box by B: by adding some real to the role play.
1: If your PC is for sure not aligned with the party's general vibe/m.o. If they are evil and you are good, or whatever combo between you all that just honestly is not a real plausible ongoing situation. + 2: and your PC could honestly in world self asses that they are the odd one out. they somehow misjudged and got mixed up with the wrong crowd. + 3: it is you alone vs. more than you could honestly hope to overcome. If you are not a nutter that just is suicidally foolish, why would you start that fight that you calculate gets you killed? that would not be an honest role play to make a not insane PC go do some insane suicided stuff.
=
it is always an option to walk away.
Disassociate yourself from that crew, have your PC pack it out in the middle of the night with no confrontations or anything. They can make a rational choice to see that a situation is A: fooked, and B: not within their power to change. So they can choose to GTFO from a bad scene, like any decent sane person would.
If you dislike the way the story RP is going, then maybe you should just politely leave the table so the people who are having fun can carry on doing so how they like. If you don't mind the way things are going and it's just the current PC you got that's not working to that. Then RP that they left and the make the next PC in a way that will fit well to whatever the party m.o. is.
I do this, it works out fine. And i believe this has salvaged campaigns that would have otherwise have become an unfun inner party conflict slog.
I approach every "meet n greet" party campaign start with the POV: I will find out what the party MO is, and if my PC is not a good fit to that, they will notice and bail on a scene they are not into. You know just like any real person would. Then I'll make a new PC that is now a good fit to the now known player party MO, that i had no advanced knowledge about.
This is also why i much prefer a session zero where the players work that out upfront together. We can all make a PC we know has the right personality disposition/alignment for the kind of adventuring party we're going to be.
There are always other options to fighting, like how IRL you can simply walkaway from just about anything. It is totes legit for PC whose POV on X would totally nope out, to nope out.
The campaign is over, I did consider leaving the campaign, but after nine months of being part of the story, I wasn’t keen to just drop out. we did have a session zero, but non of the characters were evil when we had the session zero, so there didn’t seem to be a need to ask whether murdering civilians was an issue. The evil goddess came later and change the way the player played his character. I tried discussing the issue with the DM but he was keen that we stick together till the final fight. I had spoken to the player about not wanting to play an evil campaign. Murdering the abbot in front of my character was his response. He thought that was funny.
I would say that the behavior you describe is not real role playing of a true character. That's the player playing with their little action figure in whatever way they as the player get entertained by. Like getting a rise out of the players in whatever way. Oh gee you wanted X and I can force Y on us all, let me trip on my power here.
basically if we spend enough time with a person/character, then we can generally predict their behavior once we know them well enough. If we should know them well enough, then they should also not really surprise us/do things we'd not predict very much.
A well done story can totally see a PC shift alignments, but it has to be done with story veramsilitude to be real. Events add up and we can see that possibility is in their future. And we'll might even understand that how events pan out in the near future, is likely the fulcrum of if they it is a going bad/staying good story for them.
When a player is making PC choices based on the reactions of the players at the table, instead of who that person the PC is. I don't consider them a legit RPer really. If the point of a PCs action, is for the player to know that another player at the table was unhappy about it. That's just trolling.
More or less this POV of , "is my PC among good company?" where good means, "of like minds." Is a paramount question i force to the front of RP whenever i find it is challenging for me to explain "why is my PC hanging out with yall? Why do i trust any of you?" If i cannot find/give good plausible answers to these, at any time in the campaign. The PC exist the party and I craft a new PC that is just explcitly a follower doing and being into exactly whatever it is the PC/PCs were that made me make this chocie. I craft the PC that will not be possible for them to have conflicts of interest with, unless they do a 180 flip. Or I peronally exit the table if that PC would be no fun for me to play.
And i do like to have some amount of inner party conflicts. But those have to be the right kind of conflicts or it is not plausible that that group of people hangout together if they are not forced to. Like Han Luke and Leia. better than 50% of the on screen time is them arguing with each other with inner party conflict going on. But at no time are they not aligned in what their overall POV and goals are. Han wants off the station, Leia wants off it too. They may fight a lot, but they do not take actions that would undermine the group goals. For all their conflicts they are in alignment about the stuff that matters.
Whilst everything you have said is true, it was an online game that a player decided to ruin because there were no consequences. There is no test for whether strangers on the internet are going spoil other people’s fun for spite.
I’m confused by why the DM included “dark gifts and the ability to support a dark goddess” as part of the campaign then seeminglY got upset when one of the characters went all in on that. There should have been a plan there from the start. I know you mention no one was evil in session 0 but wouldn’t the idea that you could get corrupted thought of by the DM? Hell, it sounds like it should have even been intended. I’m sorry the DM did a hand wave and just created an arbitrary rule at the end to avoid it all but 9 months is a decent campaign length anyway. I hope you have a good next campaign but I’d probably find a different DM or try DM yourself next time if this is the only group you have that you can play with.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
So I’m playing in a campaign that includes dark gifts and the option to work for a dark goddess.
One of the other characters has decided to sign up as a servant of the dark goddess. This lead the player to betray an ally we were helping in the middle of his home town. If the ally dies, and it looks pretty likely next session he will. The party will be surrounded by powerful enemies with most of our spell slots gone.
The character is also talking about serving the dark goddess by burning down a church and killing the Abbot who has provided shelter for previous allies of the party that needed protection.
my character’s backstory is centred around him being prevent by the pack of hunters he joined from stopping a village from burning down.
Given the situation, I think my character would rather turn on the party then let them burn down the church and kill the innocent and the Abbot that helped us.
I also think my character would eliminate other PC’s who have taken dark gifts to make sure they didn’t try something similar.
However if my character did this, then it would be the end of the campaign. To make matters more complicated the worshiper of the dark goddess is developing a romantic relationship with another PC who would almost certainly turn on my PC if I turned on the worshiper.
I just can’t see why my character wouldn’t fight against the rest of the party if they do this, but I don’t want to be the one to end the campaign.
Why would it end the campaign?
The setup as described seems designed to create interparty conflicts which could lead to violence.
Obviously, if things shake out as you expect, there's going to be disruption to the party, as characters die or leave, but that doesn't mean the campaign has to end; it just means there will need to be some new characters.
If you're worried about out-of-game ill feeling, have a conversation about it before the session. Just something like "hey, the way things are going, it seems pretty likely the party's going to blow up messily real soon now. Are we all cool with rolling with it, or do we need to talk it over first?" As long as you're all reasonable people, this can be resolved without anybody having to do things in-game that they don't want to.
If three of the four players die while the party is in hostile territory, then it would be pretty likely to end as a tpk. Even if the last player manages to survive, three new PC’s is seriously stretching what’s plausible.
I just feel like the options are make it an evil campaign round followers of the dark goddess with new characters or play my character as not having the backstory I created.
Well, given that your character does seem to have a good alignment, they could try talking it out with the party in character. If that fails, maybe have a in game duel. Not one to the death, but still a duel to make a mini plot point.
I try to teach a simple lesson to players: Actions have consequences.
Sometimes, players take that to mean that I intend punish them for 'being evil' - as an example. And that's not really true, it's more that in any more of less stable society, the burning of churches and killing of abbots (as the example is here) isn't going to go over particularly well. So it's not me, the GM, punishing the players - it's society retaliating against aggressors and evildoers. NPC's, reacting to the actions of PC's. Because actions have consequences.
That said, a showdown is one way to end this. In my years of playing this game, it's happened twice: Once, I as a GM played a long campaign of moral grey zones and moral ambiguity, which resulted in half the party siding with the ... final boss - who was obviously not a BBEG, because ... grey zones and moral ambiguity. He was a BBGZ/MA. Another time, my friend's PC joined the Dark Side and betrayed us all, resulting in an epic fight, in which she (the PC) managed to escape, although we had to ressurect a couple of other PC's.
Both of these went well. So it can be done.
But really, I think PC's turning on PC's should be avoided, generally speaking.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
What ended up happening if the session has already happened?
Literally nothing, the DM banned pvp, and so we simply had to not fight. We got called to the castle of the BBEG the next session and although my character could be as verbally provocative as I could make him. The player with the evil character thought that was just good banter. We fought through the castle sniping verbally at each other and killed the bbeg. After that the game was over. It just wasn’t as fun.
think A: outside the box by B: by adding some real to the role play.
1: If your PC is for sure not aligned with the party's general vibe/m.o. If they are evil and you are good, or whatever combo between you all that just honestly is not a real plausible ongoing situation.
+
2: and your PC could honestly in world self asses that they are the odd one out. they somehow misjudged and got mixed up with the wrong crowd.
+
3: it is you alone vs. more than you could honestly hope to overcome. If you are not a nutter that just is suicidally foolish, why would you start that fight that you calculate gets you killed? that would not be an honest role play to make a not insane PC go do some insane suicided stuff.
=
it is always an option to walk away.
Disassociate yourself from that crew, have your PC pack it out in the middle of the night with no confrontations or anything.
They can make a rational choice to see that a situation is A: fooked, and B: not within their power to change. So they can choose to GTFO from a bad scene, like any decent sane person would.
If you dislike the way the story RP is going, then maybe you should just politely leave the table so the people who are having fun can carry on doing so how they like.
If you don't mind the way things are going and it's just the current PC you got that's not working to that. Then RP that they left and the make the next PC in a way that will fit well to whatever the party m.o. is.
I do this, it works out fine. And i believe this has salvaged campaigns that would have otherwise have become an unfun inner party conflict slog.
I approach every "meet n greet" party campaign start with the POV: I will find out what the party MO is, and if my PC is not a good fit to that, they will notice and bail on a scene they are not into. You know just like any real person would. Then I'll make a new PC that is now a good fit to the now known player party MO, that i had no advanced knowledge about.
This is also why i much prefer a session zero where the players work that out upfront together. We can all make a PC we know has the right personality disposition/alignment for the kind of adventuring party we're going to be.
There are always other options to fighting, like how IRL you can simply walkaway from just about anything.
It is totes legit for PC whose POV on X would totally nope out, to nope out.
The campaign is over, I did consider leaving the campaign, but after nine months of being part of the story, I wasn’t keen to just drop out.
we did have a session zero, but non of the characters were evil when we had the session zero, so there didn’t seem to be a need to ask whether murdering civilians was an issue. The evil goddess came later and change the way the player played his character.
I tried discussing the issue with the DM but he was keen that we stick together till the final fight. I had spoken to the player about not wanting to play an evil campaign. Murdering the abbot in front of my character was his response. He thought that was funny.
I would say that the behavior you describe is not real role playing of a true character. That's the player playing with their little action figure in whatever way they as the player get entertained by. Like getting a rise out of the players in whatever way. Oh gee you wanted X and I can force Y on us all, let me trip on my power here.
basically if we spend enough time with a person/character, then we can generally predict their behavior once we know them well enough. If we should know them well enough, then they should also not really surprise us/do things we'd not predict very much.
A well done story can totally see a PC shift alignments, but it has to be done with story veramsilitude to be real. Events add up and we can see that possibility is in their future. And we'll might even understand that how events pan out in the near future, is likely the fulcrum of if they it is a going bad/staying good story for them.
When a player is making PC choices based on the reactions of the players at the table, instead of who that person the PC is. I don't consider them a legit RPer really. If the point of a PCs action, is for the player to know that another player at the table was unhappy about it. That's just trolling.
More or less this POV of , "is my PC among good company?" where good means, "of like minds." Is a paramount question i force to the front of RP whenever i find it is challenging for me to explain "why is my PC hanging out with yall? Why do i trust any of you?" If i cannot find/give good plausible answers to these, at any time in the campaign. The PC exist the party and I craft a new PC that is just explcitly a follower doing and being into exactly whatever it is the PC/PCs were that made me make this chocie.
I craft the PC that will not be possible for them to have conflicts of interest with, unless they do a 180 flip. Or I peronally exit the table if that PC would be no fun for me to play.
And i do like to have some amount of inner party conflicts. But those have to be the right kind of conflicts or it is not plausible that that group of people hangout together if they are not forced to.
Like Han Luke and Leia. better than 50% of the on screen time is them arguing with each other with inner party conflict going on. But at no time are they not aligned in what their overall POV and goals are. Han wants off the station, Leia wants off it too. They may fight a lot, but they do not take actions that would undermine the group goals. For all their conflicts they are in alignment about the stuff that matters.
Whilst everything you have said is true, it was an online game that a player decided to ruin because there were no consequences. There is no test for whether strangers on the internet are going spoil other people’s fun for spite.
I’m confused by why the DM included “dark gifts and the ability to support a dark goddess” as part of the campaign then seeminglY got upset when one of the characters went all in on that. There should have been a plan there from the start. I know you mention no one was evil in session 0 but wouldn’t the idea that you could get corrupted thought of by the DM? Hell, it sounds like it should have even been intended. I’m sorry the DM did a hand wave and just created an arbitrary rule at the end to avoid it all but 9 months is a decent campaign length anyway. I hope you have a good next campaign but I’d probably find a different DM or try DM yourself next time if this is the only group you have that you can play with.