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.)