My Players Really Want To Kill Each Other
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Twice now, I’ve had two different players come up to me at work and ask if it’s possible to kill the other players.
Hm.
One of the players, I suggested that instead, if he really wanted everyone dead, he figure out a reason why it is his character would want everyone dead. Also, I warned him that if he tried to kill one player, the others would probably band against him.
The other, I, unfortunately, explaned the rules of Coup de Grace to…
Whoops.
So, what is it that you think the players have that makes them want to kill one another? I think it’s simple “seeing what I can do in the confines of the game.” What can they get away with.
They don’t seem to believe me that ANYTHING in the game, and want to test that. “Anything? Really?”
Also, the first one I was talking about, for no reason, really, really wants the wolf companion of the ranger dead. Those two have been butting heads at the table like crazy, though always in fun, and never to disrupt the game.
I’ll be down two players this week, so instead of our regularly scheduled game, I’m going to have an arena match between those two to see who’s the real champion. Both characters are Strikers, so they should be fairly evenly matched.
Have any of you had this issue?
The problem I always have with posts like this (and I’ve been reading similar ones for a few years now) is the players and characters things.
If the PLAYERS want their CHARACTERS to kill the other CHARACTERS… OK the characters are sociopaths.
If the PLAYERS want to kill the other PLAYERS…. call the police.
Actually if the characters start killing other characters the police might turn up too. Society tends to look down on general killing.
Oh, I have no doubt the players themselves want to murder one another. They are co-workers, after all.
With the exception of arena games specifically designed to be PvP and nothing else, I’ve never had a group that stayed together after a player decided he wanted to kill another’s character. If they want to PvP then they should be playing an arena game or a non-D&D game all together.
If they want to work it into the story, like having one of the characters become a minor/major villain or something, then that’s fine. But just having them fight or kill each other for the sake of doing it serves no purpose other than derailing the game.
@psynister That’s my concern. I’m hoping that having an arena cage match will get it out of their system… I don’t want this campaign derailed by a couple of players acting out a “what if”.
With the Rogue, I’ve suggested to him that instead of Coup De Gracing everyone, perhaps he try simply being as sneaky as possible, and ally himself with a dragon at some point or something.
You might see if the two players would like to step in as the villain every now and then so that they can get that sense of fighting other players out of their system without screwing everything up. I’ve had PvP happen in live games and online games, and every time it’s led to disaster.
I played and ran an online 4E arena game that was 100% PvP. It can be a lot of fun, but it gets old pretty quick. If they want to do PvP matches, they can do that with just the two of them on their own time. You don’t even need a DM to fight against each other.
If you and I are at the beach building sand castles next to each other and you decide to come jump on top of mine to destroy it, you might have a lot of fun knocking down my castle and seeing how I react, but all you’d really accomplish is pissing me off or hurting my feelings. Either I’m going to destroy yours in retaliation, or I’m going to leave and go find myself another beach.
It’s all fun until somebody gets hurt.
There have been two occasions where I have REALLY wanted to kill another character and one where I was the victim.
One was a wizard that was killing the game. Every round initiative would grind to a halt when his turn came around as he flipped through books looking for the perfect spell to cast for the situation. Ages would pass as he pondered his course of action. He was the GM’s NPC – Abner. I (as a player) made no bones about wanting Abner gone. I just couldn’t come up with an in game reason to do him in him. My character Tor had been saved from death on MANY occasions by Abner – There was absolutely NO in game reason to want Abner dead or out of the group. The best I could come up with was to position Tor near Abner whenever the party fought monsters with Charm or Suggestion powers. Eventually, while fighting an Oger Magi, Tor was the target of a Charm spell. But, much to my chagrin, Tor made his save and the opportunity was wasted.
The other ‘character ‘ I wanted gone was the wolf companion of the druid. Every combat, the player whined about how under-powered his companion was, while in the next breath ordering him into extreme danger. The wolf would be at deaths door within a round and the druid would then charge to the rescue it and demand that the rest of us drop everything to help him. The player could also be relied on to forget his wolf during his initiative and then demand that we roll back the round so that his wolf could go. I never got the opportunity to ‘do-in’ the wolf. He sent it into combat with a group of pirates who flanked it and back-stabbed it to death.
The time I was the victim, it was just pure unadulterated player murder. We had a crossover game where we would pass the GM chair around from month to month – it was a dangerous game with lots of PC deaths. I’d been pretty careful (and lucky) and was still on my original character.
One week, a guy brought in a new PC (I later learned that it had been build specifically for the task of killing my character). Right before it went down, I noticed the player and the GM looking a little shifty and my player-sense started tingling. I figured something was going on, and my meta-gamed my character the hell out of there. But you can’t fight the GM and before my character could get out of the ambush area the GM called for an initiative roll. I watched as the assassin pretty much just teleported across the crowded tavern and gutted my character like a trout before I even got to take a step.
Near as I could figure, the GM and that player just decided that my character had lived too long and decided to end him. The disturbing part was the look of smug satisfaction on the player’s face as it went down.
Maybe it’s just me, but I only seem to see this problem in my D&D games. I used to played Star Wars and Shadowrun, and everyone seemed to get along just fine and had happy adventures, but in D&D, almost without fail, someone would gravitate to the anti-social character, whether they be a jerk or a “dark brooding loner with a tortured past.” See, when a player does that it’s hard enough for the rest of us just to keep the group together, let alone accomplish goals in a RP appropriate way. In that situation it really is the character, not the player, who gets in fights with the other party members, and when they next complain about how the group doesn’t work well together and the game isn’t fun anymore, I can do nothing but shake my head.
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[...] Throwdown in the Valley of the Dead Posted by Mark on Aug 15, 2011 in 4e D&D, Actual Play | Subscribe #leftcontainerBox { float:left; position: fixed; top: 60%; left: 70px; } #leftcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; clear:both; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; padding-bottom:2px; } #bottomcontainerBox { height: 30px; width:50%; padding-top:1px; } #bottomcontainerBox .buttons { float:left; height: 30px; margin:4px 4px 4px 4px; } Number of Views :89 On Friday, I was down three players, so the other two players came over to smash each other up. [...]
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