D&D 5E Goals for a party - why should they even go anywhere together?

[Jester David]

I notice everywhere that typical parties are formed by a real ragtag of characters (because everybody just chooses whatever they want), ranging from chaotic to lawful and from good to evil. What could be some good examples of ultimate goals for a quest that would unite a random selection of players? I cannot come up with a single goal...

The catch is, this is up to the players.

Not that it's up to them to decide to work with the group. But they're working with the group and they need to justify why.
Unlike real life where someone is who they are and need a reason to work with people, characters in a game can be artificially given that motivation for why they're sticking together. They start with the end in mind: they're working as a group, and need to come up with a justification.

As a Dungeon Master, you can give them some incentives.
They might all be hired by the sale boss. They might all belong to the same organisation. They might owe the same person a debt of some kind.
You can also make this a group activity at the table. Each player's character could know the character of the player sitting to the left.

 

[ccs]

Then why are they evil? if they never act out on their "evil nature" then IMHO at worst they are neutral. That gets into semantics.

For sake of argument I would only consider someone evil if they commit evil acts. Someone that fantasizes about robbing banks is not a bank robber.

So how would you judge this character I'd made for a game that I ended up not getting to play?

Some background: Long ago the elves & humans were at war with each other. The elves started it the 1st time. The 2nd time it was the humans. But the humans magically experimented upon captive elves & created the orcs. That didn't sit well with the elves. This isn't secret knowledge.
If you're a human, why you'd go adventuring with an elf is a mystery to me....

So I made an elven bard who hates humans. He doesn't let this show. Instead he uses his knowledge of ancient lore to locate "dungeon" sites. He then recruits parties to go delve them. The more humans in the party, the more dangerous the site he'll lead them to. He's hoping that the humans will get killed & isn't above (conveniently) not having things like cure wounds prepped for them. Unless casting such a spell is what'll save his own pointy ears....
If the delve is successful? Great. If humans died in the process? Even better. If the delve was unsuccessful (low loot)but humans still died? He's OK with that - though he'll feign otherwise.
Of course, once back in town he'll sing the praises of any fallen party members.

But he'll never cheat/steal/betray/PvP a party member. He won't even badmouth the humans.

 

[Lidgar]

Now, wouldn't it be in the best interest of "Evil PC" if the party completed their quest, so that his plans can continue? What possible reason would he have to stab them in the back, unless he was a complete idiot?

Sure. I don't disagree that evil PC's can work together to accomplish a certain goal, and help each other achieve that goal, especially lawful evil types.

As my original post says, evil PC's, in general, are not apt to help their comrades over the long term unless forced to do so by someone else that is more powerful than them. At least that is how our group views evil PC's. YMMV and all that.

 

[transtemporal]

I came to the conclusion that he attacked women on multiple occasions based on physical evidence (scratches and bruises) in addition to his attitude.

Listen, maybe you've never realized that someone you considered a friend is really a monster that belongs behind bars. I get that.

I don't understand how people can claim there are no evil people. We could get into a philosophical debate about the nature and root cause of evil, but the guy I knew in college was evil.

I don't know you and I don't know what you've seen so fair enough man. I've met a few quite scary people over the years but never met anyone who I thought was outright evil. I did have a friend as a kid who showed the signs though (anti-social behavior, hit animals).

Back to the topic, what about characters that become evil over the course of a campaign? In our campaign, our DM decided that killing noncombatants of any race was evil. We were playing Caves of Chaos and took a bunch of kobold women and children prisoner. While we were arguing about what to do with them, the LN mage snuck off and fireballed them, killing them all. The DM basically said "Congrats, you're now evil". Which was an awesome moment and generated a lot of debate. So now we've got this mage of the "Kill em all and let the gods sort em out" type. Did I mention he's half-drow and despises humans? lol

 

[transtemporal]

gah, double post

 

[Oofta]

I think the ensuing discussion has revealed the weakness of the "No evil-aligned characters" position: It doesn't actually get at the specific behaviors you do or don't want to see in your players. It just slaps a prohibition on a game mechanic and forces everyone else to make assumptions about what that means. Of course, individual groups may, through their personal history and experience together, share the same assumption and understand what the prohibition implies... but the same cannot be said of strangers on the forums!

I would say that "specific behaviors" can be as broad as evil acts. Much like the definition of pornography, you know it when you see it. Violating taboos (such as cannibalism as someone else mentioned) doesn't necessarily make you evil.

I don't want to participate in a game where one or more of the players are committing evil acts. I don't want to run a campaign where players are committing evil acts. If you do that's fine, I just would not participate in such a game.

My wife agrees with me (we chose not to join a campaign a friend was running because of this) and several other people I've had this discussion with would agree.

There is no way every DM will run a game that will work for every player. Therefore all the people participating in any particular campaign have to agree on general principles. I find my general principles of no evil characters, don't play a jerk, have a relationship to at least one other person and have a reason to be an adventurer work for me and have for the past few decades.

 

[Lanefan]

First off, [MENTION=6803664]ccs[/MENTION] - post 65 is completely full of win. Love it!

PCs (and players) will tend to work together when it serves their rational self-interest. It serves their interest when the benefit-to-risk ratio from working together is perceived to be lower than that of working alone. How to accomplish this? There are a bunch of ways.

• First, the D&D game generally rewards specialists over generalists. Having a variety of dangers and impediments between the PCs and the rewards will reward groups over loners.
• Second, "higher-level" rewards tend to scale faster than linear growth so a 5th level treasure is greater than five first level treasures further pushing the PCs towards working together to tackle tougher challenges.
• Third, don't be gentle when someone does decide to split form the group. That PC dying to something the group could handle (bonus points if the group could handle it trivially) reinforces the point about whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
• Fourth, (use this one very gently if at all), the PCs are the only ones the players generally truly trust. NPCs can come with ulterior motives or hidden baggage.
• Fifth, created enemies need not discriminate between the person who generated the enmity and the team with them. Self-preservation of the survivors when a couple of most remote members get attacked will tend to reinforce clumping behaviour.
• And lastly, tell the group you have neither time nor inclination to run N solo campaigns. Anyone who deliberately departs from the group for more than a short period runs the risk of involuntary retirement at your discretion.

I agree with most of this.

Point 4: I see nothing wrong with a PC being untrustworthy and-or having a separate agenda from the rest of the party. The best ones are where a player manages to put an enemy PC into the party, has it run with them for a while, then after a couple of adventures gets it out so it can report back to its real friends. This doesn't happen often but it's cool when it does.

Point 6: Disagree most of the time. I'll run what I'm given, when it comes to split parties or solo scouting or whatever. If the timing works out such that someone goes solo just at session's end then that player and I have a perfect excuse to spend an evening that week in the pub. Or, I'll just run it by note during the session, while the rest of the party go on doing whatever.

If I get the sense that a player is repeatedly doing this simply to hog the stage and-or my time as DM I'll start paying less and less attention to their solo missions...I can be evil that way.

Worst case scenario is when the entire party goes solo. This happened to me a month or so ago: a mid-combat wild magic surge teleported each creature in the room (that's 10 party members and two opponents) to a completely random place in the (very large) dungeon. So now I've got ten solos to run, along with figuring out where the opponents wound up. Very lucky for me in that this happened close to when the session would have ended anyway, and so I did the solo stuff by email* during the week. By next session a few people had reunited...and again I got lucky; the characters belonging to the players I knew would be missing that session were still on their own, so I ran with a reduced crew whose characters had either reunited or were within a room or two. By session's end everyone had been scooped up with (amazingly) only one casualty. (they'd already explored quite a bit of the complex and by sheer luck many of them went to relatively safe places)

* - what this taught me is that I will never ever ever EVER run a full campaign by email. Bleah!

Lanefan

 

[Magzimum]

Wow!
I ask a question, hoping for an answer by next day. But instead I find a thread of 8 pages with 77 replies. This is quite an active forum, isn't it?

Thanks for the replies. I've read them all.

Personally, banning all evil is a no-go for me, but I read a lot of good suggestions that can help me, and our group of friends.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

I definitely wouldn't allow evil in my group. The group is supposed to work together. I'm pretty strongly enforcing that and outright not allow actions like attacking or stealing from party members. But usually it's only really a problem when you have a "problematic" player in the first place. Most players already behave and work together without being told to do so, so it's rarely a problem for me.

And it really isn't only the DMs job to come up with a reason "why". Anything involving characters, I often give my players a say in it. As in "The situation is like this and that, what do YOU think would be a suitable reason for your character to want to do this?"
I do that because I learned that the player liking his character and being able to play it his way is one of the most important things to the enjoyment.

Also this usually helps me identify problematic players before even starting to play. Like when someone goes like "I want to join the party, but secretly I'm the evil overlord and will kill them all when I get the opportunity", I can stop him right there. Luckily for 5e it's really easy to find players, so I don't have to take problematic players at all.

 

[Imaculata]

While the Basic Rules do in some cases refer to adventurers as "heroes," I don't think of that as the default or as the best way to curb certain issues. Same with "no evil." I think we have to get at the underlying issues to be the most effective at getting what we want.

When I explain to my players what I expect of them, I often use Han Solo as an example. Yes, you can play a shady character who shoots first. Yes, you can play a character who isn't very noble. You may not even be all that nice to the rest of the party. But when it comes down to it, you've got their backs. You are basically a good guy.

This is especially important in my current pirate campaign. They are all playing pirates, so obviously they are all playing characters that are not that nice, and are breaking the law. They don't have to be kind to their enemies either, and they can be really violent. But in the end, they also have some good in them. They work together as a team, and they are not evil psychopaths.

Obviously this isn't the only way to play the game, and I have played with an evil party before. But for newcomers to D&D, I would definitely advise not to allow evil alignments. Not much good comes from it in general.

What's more, I'm sure he thinks he's a brilliant roleplayer and just "doing what my character would do." And while that's fair enough, doing what you think your character would do must be, as I see it, tempered by the metagame assumptions that make the game function well.

Looping it back to the OP, it's very important to get this stuff out in the open at the beginning of the campaign in my view. If you don't, you risk situations like the above.

This is why a session 0 is so important. You want to get all the players on the same page, so that they all understand that they are expected to create characters that work with the campaign, and with the rest of the party. If one of your players want to play a character that doesn't feel like going on any adventures, just tell him that maybe this isn't the right campaign for that. That is not much to ask for.

I'd be out, on hearing that.

While this particular character might have some heroic tendencies I want the freedom to decide that the next one might not; and might in fact just be out for the money and looking for the fun. I'm not in it to always play one of "the good guys", particularly if I have to worry about means as well as ends: if I've got to break some eggs to make an omelette, gimme that hammer.

All that is fine. You can play a bit of a rogue, a jerk, a snob, or a Han Solo type. But in the end, you've also got some good in you, and you are loyal to your party.

One character in the game I play in is listed as evil - he's never done anything against the party that we know of, hasn't stolen from us, hasn't murdered anyone...but he does have this nasty habit of eating whatever he kills (except for Humans or Orcs, that is; as he's partly both) which means when we're fighting and sometimes killing members of the other kindred races things get...interesting.

Interesting, until one of the other PC's decides your behavior is over the line, and then you get into a party conflict that can disrupt the whole campaign. That is why I put my DM boot firmly down, and kill any such nonsense before it even starts. Just play a character that works with the party and is not a lunatic, please.

Scary thing is, in that he's now the party's longest-serving member in a way it's become his party.

But that doesn't mean it is a good idea to play that sort of character in general.

Look, I can understand that it can sometimes be fun to play a weird and/or evil character. I get that. But often it goes wrong, and derails the entire campaign, so I would highly advise against allowing these sorts of characters for a group new to D&D. Just ask them to play normal characters.