Good vs. Good

[Jon_Dahl]

For the longest time I've been toying with the idea of pitting good against good, but unfortunately in my current long-running campaign there has been very little room for it.

I'd like to hear your ideas and past experiences with campaigns and adventures that have had good guys vs. good guys. Was it good or was it bad?

The following contains my ideas...
[sblock]Right now I've been tentatively contemplating this:
In Greyhawk there's a powerful cleric/paladin of Pelor, who has an ambitious plan: To unite all churches to one extremely hierarchical world-church and make him the pope. He strongly believes that an absolute unity and strict rules will make them better with their holy mission to save the world from evil.

High priest Kireth Trantle does not fully share his views. He thinks that to some degree it would nice to unite the weaker and passive churches, but he is running his church really well in his own opinion. Having some distant headquarters in some place that he has no time to visit is a horrible idea. In order to save the innocent, he is ready to take action against the "pope". Kireth admires "pope's" determination and believes him to be a good but stubborn man with pure heart and some awfully bad ideas.

Kireth Trantle knows the local "Robin Hood" very well. "Robin" has proven himself to be the defender of the weak and warrior of light. "Robin" also is famous for his short temper and occasional run-ins with the authorities.

Trantle contacts "Robin Hood" (who is a PC) and gives him the mission to benignly humiliate "the pope" and make him lose face, but not to harm him in any way. Pope is travelling with a slow moving caravan and "Robin the PC" has all the chances play a little trick or two with him...[/sblock]

 

[Ahnehnois]

A major feature of my campaign world is a perpetual conflict between dragons and deities. When said conflict came to a head, the chromatic, metallic, and gem dragons were one united force against the entire population outer planes (fiendish, celestial, and otherwise). As the PCs were on a side (dragons) they came up against a full range of enemies.

There was particularly a battle early on in which they were attacked by a celestial and the party barbarian cleaved it apart with a crit. It was an unsettling moment for the party, evoking the image from the BoVD of something similar happening. It gets an emotional reaction you don't often get in D&D; you kill a lot of things but rarely do players stop to think about it to this extent. I suspect the same is true when your characters kill an NPC who seems good in nature.

In general, I play a fair amount of good-aligned puritanical zealots as a DM; the PCs are more often allied with rational, neutral NPCs. To me, good v. good is entirely natural if done well.

The "Robin Hood" idea sounds like a good one.

 

[Elf Witch]

We do this a lot in the games we play it makes it more interesting.

In my campaign there is friction between some of the churches especially St Cuthbert and Pelor. It has come to blows.

The party does not know it yet but they are about run afoul of the Inquisitors of St Cuthbert. It will be interesting to see how the cleric/paladin of Bahmut handles this.

And no if he has to kill them to save his life and the party he will not lose his paladin hood.

 

[Barastrondo]

I've found that for players who actually enjoy playing good characters, good vs. good conflicts are interesting, but not satisfying. There is no feeling of a job well done at the end of the game, only a feeling of having done something dirty and glad it's over with.

Depending on your players, this may be a delightful change of pace, but it may also mean they just don't enjoy the game as much as good vs. not-so-good. So yeah, it varies.

Addendum: And of course, if your players enjoy playing good characters, they hate it if one side is perceived to be acting like idiots for the sake of having a conflict. Always best to go into something like this with both sides being tested as intelligent and willing to try other options. Said other options may not be available, but it rather undercuts the idea of both sides being "good" if one is really just doing the expedient thing.

 

[ppaladin123]

D&D has two dimensions, law/chaos and good/evil and while nothing demands it to be so, law/chaos usually takes a back seat to good/evil as a secondary or less important dimensions. In the end, the lawful good and chaotic good being typically unite in their goodness against evil. It is rarer that, for example, lawful evil and lawful good beings unite in lawfulness against some chaotic force. Then law/chaos is relegated to something like personal style ( "paladins are so up-tight, but in the end we are on the same side" says the chaotic good elven ranger). To get a good versus good battle going on, you may have to really emphasize the importance of the law/chaos divide. It is not about style or expedience in carrying out good/evil (e.g. paladins think law promotes good and the chaotic good ranger thinks chaos promotes good better) but rather the sort of world one wants to live in. It has to provoke strong emotional reactions.

 

[Tallifer]

This reminds me of the historical war in the late 1640s and early 1650s between Cromwell's England and Presbyterian Scotland. The leaders of both countries were sincere in their religious motivations and reasonings for their policies, but they ended up fighting. Both sides were fanatically puritanical protestants, but they vehemently disagreed about the role of the state and the church hierarchy in religion, as well as having various religious justifications for the usual Scotch-English ethnic rivalry.

Before the climactic battle of Dunbar, both sides spent the night and the next morning in prayer, and both sides had numerous ministers accompanying them on the battlefield.

Indeed most English puritans and Scotch presbyterians still considered each other brothers in the faith and regretted the circumstances.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

This was a side theme in a campaign I once ran in FR. One of the players had a good cleric of the sun god, and I made sure to play up the differences in approach in the various "sects" within the church (throwing the whole Lathandar/Amanuantor/Three-Faces Sun God split in for good measure). It was a lot of fun -- arguments among otherwise "lawful good" (some "neutral good") clerics and paladins about the rightness of one particular sect or the other. They could generally agree upon ends that were both lawful and good, but debates over means led to some violence.

It was great having the party pick sides and play a bit of inter-church politics.

 

[Bedrockgames]

For the longest time I've been toying with the idea of pitting good against good, but unfortunately in my current long-running campaign there has been very little room for it.

I'd like to hear your ideas and past experiences with campaigns and adventures that have had good guys vs. good guys. Was it good or was it bad?

It works great in my opinion. Having opponents that are basically good but have conflicting agendas with the feels very real. Remember, just because someone is good, it doesn't mean they can't be slimy. In an intrigue campaign for example you could have rival political factions, both good but seeking different goals. There is also the rival adventuring party standby. That can be lots of fun too (especially when they plunder the tomb before the players or set up an ambush to rob them).

 

[Janx]

Consider politics. Both local and international.

Even when 2 good parties agree that element X is bad, they disagree on other things with regards to dealing with the problem.

 

[S'mon]

It's kinda difficult because no real-world historical government matches D&D's standard of 'Good' very well, most historical conflicts would look more like Evil vs Evil if we actually considered what the participants believed. And really the game is more set up to slap a 'Good' label on 'our guys', an Evil label on 'their guys', then hack & slash righteously.

The 18th century is about the earliest anyone ever behaved in a way much resembling D&D 'Good'. Drawing from that, you could have a conflict something like the American War of Independence/American Revolution: colonies seek independence despite being of similar alignment to the home country. The American Civil War provides a similar model; irreconcilable differences lead to part of a nation seeking independence. But of course what happens is that in order to justify fighting, both sides still have to paint the others as Bad Guys. And if everyone on both sides is a paragon of virtue it seems very unlikely that conflict would arise.

Another case might be a dispute over resources - the Icelandic Cod War of the 1970s between Britain and Iceland over whether Iceland could keep British fishing boats out of her nearby waters was mostly non-violent, but is a good example of a dispute where both sides felt justified - with laws to point to - and disagreed strongly, potentially violently. Where one (more LG?) side points to the established Law, and the other (more CG?) side says the Law is not Right, you can easily have conflict.