Near self-inflicted TPK

[jethrien]

If you don't particularly care about rpgs, feel free to move on up to the next entry in your friends list.

Last night, we had our usual weekly roleplaying game. Things went a bit, umm, awry.

Quick background. I'm playing Vi, a mage (specifically Euthanatos). Her particular branch of magic believes in the wheel of reincarnation - and that people who aren't doing so well in their current incarnation should be helped along to the next. And creatures such as vampires, who cheat the wheel - well, they should be helped along even faster. There rest of the party is mixed. There's Jim, a magic-wielding ninja. And Connor, a werewolf (the werewolves hate vampires even more than the Euthanatos). And Penelope, a were-lizard (that is, she turns into a dragon).

Unfortunately, given the anti-vampire bias of the party members so far, the rest of the party are vampires. There's Algie (Ivy03's character), who's an idiot, and Mica, who's totally bat-shit loco, and Michael, who would be a perfectly nice guy if not for the pointy teeth and blood magic thing.

So far, we've been grudgingly dealing with each other because there's clearly been a common purpose. But the tension's been mounting.

So last night, we stumbled through a portal into a desert. Several of us were injured from the last conflict.

Algie, unfortunately, is an idiot, as mentioned above. To heal himself, he decides to bite Penelope. Being an idiot, he hasn't managed to put together the fact that the shy little grad student and the giant dragon are the same person. So he's rather surprised when she suddenly morphs into a dragon in an uncontrollable berserker rage.

Jim tries to calm her down, rolls five ones, and ends up horrifically mauled and near death. While Connor's trying to calm down Penelope, Michael realizes Jim's about to die. In a perfectly logical move, he decides to make Jim into a vampire - after all, it's not death, right?

Problem is, Connor and Vi have only been grudgingly tolerating his existence to this point. And they'd rather die than see him make someone else they care about into a vampire. Well, they're prefer that he'd die, actually.

For a minute, it looked like we'd get Algie eaten by the dragon, Connor possibly badly injured by the dragon, Jim shredded by the dragon, and possibly Michael and Vi killing each other.

Vi, who's usually the subtle one, magic-wise, ends up turning Michael into a greasy smear of ashes. But not until after he beat her up.

We ended up with Michael dead, and managed to pull Jim back from the dead, ghouled but not vampiric. Connor calmed Penelope down, and Algie was eventually retrieved from the sand dune he ended up sitting on after running away for quite some time. It could have been worse.

But that's definitely the first time I've actually been a party that killed one of its own members. Entertainment for all...

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

That's, um, impressive. We just have a tendency to kill minions who have their energy completely drained and respawn as wraiths. And, last game, fleeing in terror and letting the Kobold fighter get killed in a single round. Though apparently cubby_t_bear was just off his game and could have safely stopped the evil warrior tearing us to shreds.

I'm honestly not a big fan of intraparty conflict, which tends to hit record levels in games with the New York group. There's nothing in the rulebook that says two members of the same party can't get along, right?

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

It was a big week for character death, but only the D&D deaths were my doing...directly.

Intraparty conflict is excellent for certain type of games and gamers--it's what Vampire: the Masquerade was designed for. There's drama, there's angst, there's love and hate and all that good dramatic stuff. And that's what makes the game interesting.

However, that doesn't work for dungeon crawls. When there's a wraith trying to suck out your life force and an ogre trying to bash your head in, you need to know the rest of the party has your back. It's a matter of personal taste and style.

And there's a reason I'm running two games, currently.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

There's nothing in the rulebook that says two members of the same party can't get along. There's also nothing in the rulebook that says two members of the same party have to get along.

In any group of people, some people will get along with each other and some won't. Some will like each other, some will hate each other, some won't particularly care. And the dynamics within a party that doesn't all like each other but are united in a common cause can be very interesting and amusing to play out. And in general, this hasn't made the party ineffective.

And in the players' defense - Chuckro deliberately set this party up so that some of us would naturally hate others. If you're going to have White Wolf vampires and werewolves in the same party, conflict is guarenteed. The only question is which way the mages and mummies will go.

(For that matter, he set up the Project Prometheus team up to be somewhat antagonistic, as well.)

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

White Wolf Comment: Playing somebody who can act on all the random impulses that come into my head is quite therapeutic. The character has taken an evil turn of late, which is also amusing, since the last time I played an evil character, he had a decided turn towards chaotic stupid. This time, it's closer to chaotic insane.

D&D Comment: Sorry again to Brian and Scott for not acting more intelligently to prevent Scott's character death. I have decent tactics for a low-level D&D character. I haven't quite gotten my head wrapped around the optimal way to use all these different spells I hooked on to -- I went in for a good deal of spell variety, and that means I have more options than I can properly process.

For that matter, I think the Ninja's death could have been prevented, but that was a slightly more coldblooded decision on my part -- the wraith's obvious next target was my *main* character, after all.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Hey, Mica might be messing with all of our heads, but at least he didn't deliberately betray us all like Michael did.

Also, he made Vi cry but he didn't bite her. Unlike some other vampires we could name...

[(Anonymous)]

That is *awesome*. :)
I'm totally of the opinion that one of the main purposes of RPGs should be to generate amusing stories. And that one sure takes the cake. *grin*

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Takes the cake, and uses life and entropy magic (spending a dot of willpower to force a success and a dot of quintessence to lower the difficulty) to reduce said cake to a smear of biological matter across the desert floor.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I completely agree! Which is why I always do the most interesting thing instead of the most effective.

I'd like to claim total credit for starting this particular fracas. Thank you, thank you.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

You get most of the credit. If we'd been more interested in keeping the party alive than having fun with character dynamics, I'm sure things could have come out better. After all, Michael didn't have to try to Embrace Jim, and Vi and Connor didn't have to reduce him to his component atoms. But we all played true to character, and things got entertaining...

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

You have no idea how near Mica came to panicking and shooting you :)

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Who is the you you're referring to? Or is that a collective you? I could see Mica shooting pretty much anyone involved in that entire scene, and not even needing to be insane to want to do it...

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

Well, Vi. Although, come to think of it, if we had proceeded down that route, I can definitely see a situation where he panicks, splits the die pool four ways, and takes a shot at everybody.