The Anti-Party Principle

[SFEley]

Hi all,

This is a tangent (at nearly 180 degrees, okay, but a tangent nevertheless) >8-> to the Party Principle thread.  I initially posted it there, but was informed that was a faux pas, so here's take two.  

Some of the points in that thread about alternative party seeds struck a chord with me, and I started thinking about parties with different motives for interacting. In particular, I'm curious what ideas or successful experiences people have had with parties at cross- or even counter-purposes. Paranoia comes to mind as a functional example of this: the characters are given strong drives to simultaneously work together and try to kill each other. Amber is another example, with such a Machiavellian spirit to the source material. But those are games where the system itself compels character competition -- can this sort of thing work in a more traditional context, say, D&D? More specifically, can it be done in such a way that it's the characters competing and not the players?

I'd like to know what people think. This may (or may not) have direct relevance to some attempts I'm making to revitalize my regular Sunday campaign. >8-> Thanks in advance for any input.

Have Fun,
- Steve Eley

[Ben Morgan]

I seem to remember a recent D&D supplement that posits dungeon-crawling as an extreme-reality show. PCs compete for gold, treasure, popularity, and ratings? Can't remember the name right now.

-- Ben

[Comte]

can this sort of thing work in a more traditional context, say, D&D? More specifically, can it be done in such a way that it's the characters competing and not the players?

Yes.

To illustrate I will tell you all about the most recent AD&D campain I was involved in.  We had a wizard (jeff neutral good), a bard (me! neutral evil), a ranger (krista neutral good), and a sorcerer (bobby neutral of some sort).   The plot is that one day while we were all off doing our own thing a Demigod decided we were the right people to use to save the world.  So he gathered us altogether, gave us stupidly powerful artifacts, and sent us on our way.

Well the pary imeadiatly decided that we all hated one another.  The only thing that bound us together was the fact that we hated the demigod more.  Soon the group broke into two seperate mini groups, bobby and me formed one, Krista and Jeff formed the other.  In real life Krista and I are best freinds, heck I'd date her if she wasn't so high strung.  In the game we hated each other.  The only reason my charecter didn't murder her's in her sleep was the fact that she was the only fighter and she was the one that bailed us out of trouble.  We had fights over who got what part of the treasure, and when I lost the fight because I'm a bard and I suck, I stole it in thier sleep.  In the end things were almost always stolen back from me or the scary wizard would threaten me with a fireball.  Every time we back stabbed, or betrayed one another we did it with a laugh.  I would be talking about the methods I use to steal Bobby's monstor summoning pearl as I was getting him a soda.  Krista would be shooting Bobby with an arrow just after giving him a hug.  We all were best freinds and the horrible things we did to one another were okay because thats just the way we were.  

There were a couple of rules though.  One of them was that we were not allowed to kill one another.  The contract for our group is that players work hard on thier charecters to give them flavor excitment and life.  Since on one would like to see thier charecter snuffed out the only person who could reserve the right to do so was the GM.  Another was that turnabout is fair play.  If you don't give me the gem I don't heal you the next time you need it.  If you steal from me don't expect me to come galloping to your aid.  Things like that.  So it created an odd sort of balance between us that resulted in a pleasent, chaotic amount of srife, but we ultimatly got the job done.  

The game master was annoyed with our constant bickering, in fact he hated it.  Still as dysfunctional as our group was on the table, in real life we were still the best of freinds.

I think our groups crowing achivement is when Krista and I were fighting an Oger-Mage together.  Krista gets knocked out, and I am fighting alone.  Another player runs up to cover me so I can cast a healing spell on her.  Instead I steal a healing potion from her belt and drink it.  Then I use her magical weapons leaving her body to just sort of bleed there.  The player who ran up to help was initialy horrifed by my actions but I pointed at the nutral evil written on my charecter sheet.  Krista spent the empisode laughing confident in the knowlage that we wouldn't let her die.  Which we didn't.  It was fun.  It dose work but all the players have to agree to it.  I went around and made sure all the players were okay with me being an asshole.  We established up front that the turnabout rule was okay, and we pledged to make an effort to keep each other alive.  It was almost a shame when the campain fell apart, but our intergroup bickering is where some of our fondest roleplay moments come from.  It also gives players the freedom to desighn charecters that may not nessisarly all get along with one another.  Playing an evil bard was so much fun I can hardly wait to do it again.  I once got the entire party thrown in jail, and the town nominated me thier hero.  I then used my new found status to repair, get all new equiment for us but they weren't very happy with me.  So yes it works.  It works in all sorts of games.

[mythusmage]

Greetings.

But, it does take more preparation than the old 'everybody's buddy buddy' trope. That falls under the purview of game design, so I shant add more here.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Just after GenCon 2002, Paul Czege commented on how many of the games we played relied on player-character vs. player-character dynamics. I just spent a while hunting for that thread and couldn't find it. Paul or anyone, any idea which one it was? I think I already stated any points I'd make in this thread in that one.

Best,
Ron

[jrs]

I think Ron is referring to this topic:  

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=3217">character vs. character: dealer-room demos at GenCon

Edited in to add:  In response to Steve, my experience with Dust Devils would indicate that it is also conducive to play where characters are at cross-purposes.  

Julie

[Mike Holmes]

It's long been the opinion of many around here that it's not only possible to do character v character competition without pvp competition that I think we take it for granted.

The only thing that's required for this to work successfully, is for the player's personal success to be totally divorced from the character's success. That is, there can be no metric in-game that rewards the player for the character succeeding. Hence, if you have EXP, or somesuch, this won't work. Because players will associate their personal success with how many EXP the characters accumulate.

Most of the games created around here lately don't have such mechanics specifically so that the player from character dissociation can occur. As such all of them allow this sort of interaction to work functionally. To whit, our last game of Sorcerer, my character ended up being framed by another player's character and sent to the looney bin permenantly as his fate. My suggestion. Seemed the perfectly fitting end for the character given the circumstances. Basically my success was not based in that game upon my character's success, but upon the success of the story that involved him. This is encouraged by the rules of the game as written.

We can give lots of other examples. The most famous was the game of TROS that a lot of folks here played at Origins last year in which Ralph's character had a Destiny to hang, an event which came to pass in the single session of play that occured at the hands of, IIRC, Ron's character?

Basically the system has to suggest that "losing" is at least as interesting a proposition as "winning". So to speak.

Mike

[Lxndr]

I seem to remember a recent D&D supplement that posits dungeon-crawling as an extreme-reality show. PCs compete for gold, treasure, popularity, and ratings? Can't remember the name right now.

For the purposes of informing - I think this is Xcrawl.