D&D General One of my favorite challenges is party vs party!

[Krachek]

I remember some tryout with PvP in DnD.
in 4ed it was a kill right in this first round, usually the healer.
My memories are almost one way fight. Even if both well prepared, one team make some slight errors, and bang, like in baseball playoff 14-3!
No dramatic turn over, no smart move, one mistake or wrong preparation and then steamrolling.

 

[Lyxen]

I remember some tryout with PvP in DnD.
in 4ed it was a kill right in this first round, usually the healer.
My memories are almost one way fight. Even if both well prepared, one team make some slight errors, and bang, like in baseball playoff 14-3!
No dramatic turn over, no smart move, one mistake or wrong preparation and then steamrolling.

This is a very good point, even with good preparation and a stable game like 4e, it's a very swingy game, based not only on luck (a d20 is very swingy), but also really chaotic in the sense that it depends a lot on initial conditions (terrains, synergies, initiative, etc.).

Moreover, the action economy makes it obvious that as soon as a character goes down on one side, that side it more or less doomed extremely quickly. It's a phenomenon that we saw extremely well in our LARPs (we ran scores of very big LARPs with hundreds of players in teams of about 6 which were more or less equal in size and power, combat was not necessarily at the centre of it, but we also had teams of monsters roaming the woods with organisers in there, very well placed to see hundreds of fights). Some players complained that their adversaries seemed to win very easily, taking few wounds, while they were steamrollered. But from actually observing hundreds of fights, the action economy was absolutely critical, almost as soon as it's N+1 vs. N, it becomes 2 vs 1 and N-1 vs. N-1, the 2 vs.1 is almost instantly deadly and one team hits the ground before the other one can do much. The only mitigating factor in our games was magic, since a caster (or powerful knight/rogue with powers) could take 2 or maybe 3 adversaries and re-establish balance, but magic had limited uses during the game and skill in the end counted a bit, but it had to be when it was mostly on one side and little on the other.

So unless the DM intervenes at some level, I'm not sure that these fights can be really interesting, probably over very quickly if played cleverly.

And another thing which detracts me from them, the metagaming. How does the DM not metagame as he has all the stats of the PCs, and from the PC sides where they don't have it, they certainly can metagame from what they know about the adversaries. This is why I like my NPCs not to be built along PC lines, so that they can have the right abilities considering their role, but everyone is in the dark and in any case the DM is not playing against the players...

 

[el-remmen]

In my current Ghosts of Saltmarsh+ campaign the PCs are about to return to their homebase town (Saltmarsh) and find a rival party being feted by the locals at the party's favorite inn for successfully completing the mission the PCs passed on to go help an old friend. Not sure how the PCs will react to these new competitors/rivals who are not "bad guys" (in fact, I plan to make them exactly as morally questionable as the PCs to cast a mirror on them).

 

[Lanefan]

In my current Ghosts of Saltmarsh+ campaign the PCs are about to return to their homebase town (Saltmarsh) and find a rival party being feted by the locals at the party's favorite inn for successfully completing the mission the PCs passed on to go help an old friend. Not sure how the PCs will react to these new competitors/rivals who not "bad guys" (in fact, I plan to make them exactly as morally questionable as the PCs to cast a mirror on them).

I'm curious to hear how that turns out.

A few times, when I've run party-vs-party scenarios (e.g. there's a big ol' ruin with multiple parties exploring it, each unaware of the presence of any others until they happen to meet) what starts as a combat ends with some participants finding common ground and - after a few bad apples get weeded out - the parties combining or merging.

Yes this can mean I'm suddenly stuck running a bunch of adventuring NPCs in a now-much-bigger party, but if the personalities involved indicate that's what could happen I'll go with it if it does.

 

[el-remmen]

In the last 3E campaign I ran in my old homebrew, one adventure led to the PCs competing against a rival party in the private arena of a high level priest of the god of luck. This was a lot of fun and the addition of competition rules made it very challenging. Fighting was not totally forbidden, but scored less points and there were penalties for using certain kind of magics that were deadlier than others (there was a list) and they all had to sign geas release forms before competing. The reward, of course, was the macguffin that would drive the campaign forward. The winning condition involved moving two out of three objects in the center of the arena into your home area of the field. One was a boulder, and one was a chest that turned out to be a mimic (and had to be convinced to come along - though violence was a less efficient method) and I am forgetting what the third object was.

 

[Slit518]

The winning condition involved moving two out of three objects in the center of the arena into your home area of the field. One was a boulder, and one was a chest that turned out to be a mimic (and had to be convinced to come along - though violence was a less efficient method) and I am forgetting what the third object was.

Your opponent?