Ever let players run the opposition?

[Varianor Abroad]

Yep. It works fine. You may notice that the more cooperative or group-oriented players will actually avoid their best abilities if they are about to wax a party member solid.

 

[Odhanan]

Yes, sure! Works fine between players with the right mindset (aka "good players" by my book). Playing the opponents when their characters are down, playing the doppelganger who took over the original character, etc. Sure! It's a fun part of the game to switch the tables around a little bit!

BTW, Monte Cook's Temple of Mysteries: In Medias Res presents a great spin on that concept. Good one-shot, particularly for convention games and such.

 

[Riley37]

This isn't quite what you were asking about, but at one point, the GM of a "Shadowrun" group asked the players to spend half an hour on this topic: if someone in The Opposition was paying attention to patterns and trying to learn about the PCs... what could they discover?

The GM wanted to have villains counter-attacking the PCs. He wasn't sure if this was fair, or if we would recognize it as fair. But when we four players got their heads together, putting ourselves in the shoes of an Imperial Intelligence senior agent, we thought of several ways that Imperial Intelligence could track and perhaps attack the PCs... and because *we had thought of those tactics ourselves*, we HAD to accept it as fair.

We agreed that it was fair to play our characters as having had some downtime conversations, and being a bit more careful about what clues they left in their wake; but NOT as knowing how closely Imperial Intelligence was on our track, and certainly not as being specifically prepared for the counterattack. The GM trusted us, and we honored that trust, and we ended up with a better story for the players, though not always as happy a story for the PCs.

 

[Umbran]

Instead, they pulled it out of their behinds, managing to kill-shot him in 1 round with the help of an HK-47 style droid who sacrificed himself (and his chest-mounted thermal bomb) because the "meatbag did not pay him proper deference," and fighting one hell of a struggle.

(Note to all Sith: Make sure you have a spare force point to spend on not dying, and an acolyte nearby who knows Dark Transfer...)

I haven't had the turncoat scenario since... back in high school, I think.

I have had a case where the GM for our Mage: The Ascension game brought in another player, gave him some guidelines, and told him, "Make a bunch of Fomori to squish the PCs. The player in question was *good* with rules - he now does wargames for the Navy for a living. He brought up some very scary Fomori....

But not scary enough. What this player had not seen in his Mage playing was a group truly cooperating. The group he normally played with (under the same GM) had not worked out how to cooperate. They were pathetic, in that sense. So, we were able to pull off tricks he could not have thought of. Even so, it was a tough battle.

It would have been scarier if it were a real turncoat, who knew how we worked. Disrupting our normal cooperation would have seriously impacted our effectiveness.

 

[gamerprinter]

Not exactly the same, in the published trilogy of modules for Kaidan (PFRPG), The Curse of the Golden Spear, the PCs are good guys fighting against an evil undead Daimyo and his samurai soldiers. There's a one-shot module called Up from Darkness, which features a party of adventurers intended to be the opposition force in the third module of the Curse of the Golden Spear, Dark Path. So an a GM could run both, at the appropriate time, and the players Dark Path get to fight the NPCs that they represented in Up from Darkness - as an interesting twist.

More in line with your original thought, I've run adventures where one of the party members was subject to a Charm Person spell, but rather than I the GM, running the charmed PC, I gave specific written instructions to the player stating what the charm was forcing the PC to try and accomplish, then letting the player run his PC as charmed under those instructions - and attack the rest of the party, while trying to steal an important party magic item. It went well.

I've done similar things with a PC transforming into a werewolf and PCs becoming undead. Also the way the Kaidan death mechanic works, if a PC becomes transformed into undead, they can still participate with the party as an undead member, however if the undead PC is lain to rest or "destroyed" in Kaidan, the spirit of that undead being can return to the reincarnation cycle and be reborn as a living person once again. Just because you become undead in Kaidan, is not necessarily the end of the line for a given PC.

 

[Dioltach]

I remember reading once (I think in a letter to Dragon) about a group who'd been badgering their DM to let them play evil characters. So one day he did: they played a band of orcs that attacked a village and looted, pillaged, tortured and murdered. Great fun for the whole family.

Then the next session the DM opened with, "You receive word that your hometown has been wiped out by marrauding orcs ..."

 

[Umbran]

I remember reading once (I think in a letter to Dragon) about a group who'd been badgering their DM to let them play evil characters. So one day he did: they played a band of orcs that attacked a village and looted, pillaged, tortured and murdered. Great fun for the whole family.

Then the next session the DM opened with, "You receive word that your hometown has been wiped out by marrauding orcs ..."

A bit passive-aggressive, that one. If you didn't want them to do it, you could say so. The "Well, this'll show 'em!" attitude required to impose repercussions to characters for things done in , essentially, another game, is not really appropriate.

 

[JamesonCourage]

A bit passive-aggressive, that one. If you didn't want them to do it, you could say so. The "Well, this'll show 'em!" attitude required to impose repercussions to characters for things done in , essentially, another game, is not really appropriate.

I actually think my players would like that twist. Guess tastes vary.

Might want to include that in your post next time, Umbran.

 

[Umbran]

I actually think my players would like that twist. Guess tastes vary.

Might want to include that in your post next time, Umbran.

I think it is effectively is included. Note that "if" - the conditional is important. If you don't care if they do it, or if you *want* them to do it, then the rest does not apply. If the players would like the twist, then it isn't a matter of, "Well, this'll show 'em!"

 

[JamesonCourage]

I think it is effectively is included. Note that "if" - the conditional is important. If you don't care if they do it, or if you *want* them to do it, then the rest does not apply. If the players would like the twist, then it isn't a matter of, "Well, this'll show 'em!"

I've done a "this will show them!" And they thought it was clever. We're all really good friends in my main group (going back 15 years). There's no hard feelings even when I've done stuff like that. (Because I've also warned them about things that led up to that.)

Again, a little more "tastes may vary" would probably help your posts out a little bit. Or a lot a bit. I dunno. Just throwing that out there.