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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SnowleopardVK" data-source="post: 5610905" data-attributes="member: 6677945">(Apologies for the upcoming long post...)Things turned sour at a session today when two of my four players began fighting over who got to lead the party. Now a little argument can be good for roleplaying and drama sure, but it went from a small argument to out-of-hand incredibly fast. They settled on an agreement of "each one of us is our own leader, neither commands the others" after a bit of argument. That solution seemed fine except that the moment the paladin turned away after making the agreement, the cleric attacked her from behind.At that moment a critical hit was rolled and confirmed, the paladin was nearly taken down in a single hit, and the cleric stood over her and said "submit to me or I'll kill you". The paladin stated that she was leaving the party the moment the ship they were on gets to the next island. The cleric agreed to that, but told her if (after she leaves) she keeps pursuing the quest that they were on, that she'll kill her.Now... The whole game I'm running is essentially a playtest of a homebrewed campaign (this was NOT supposed to be a part of it), so I actually don't mind splitting the group. The paladin will leave and the sorcerer will likely choose to join her, whereas the two clerics are likely to stick together. The players seem fine with the idea of disbanding the current party and continuing to playtest separately, but there's still the issue that they have the same goal. The paladin has specific orders and certainly won't back down from them, and the cleric won their "fight", despite it being essentially just an attack from behind, and feels that puts her in charge and gives her the right to kill anyone who interferes with her mission.Also an issue is that they've all levelled up since that encounter, and Pathfinder's paladin level 4 seems to be a very good level. The cleric got lucky with her strong critical hit, the fact that she could attack from behind, and the fact that I didn't award them experience until the end of the session, but now that they're both 4th level the balance seems completely different. If they fight again the paladin will not be caught off guard, the cleric is unlikely to get as lucky with the dice, and the paladin is likely to kill the cleric (despite the cleric's threats).I've talked to the players about it. Both feel that what they did (attacking and declaring an intention to leave the party respectively) was completely in character. I agree with that. Both feel that it makes no sense for them to abandon their quest despite the other's intention to kill them. Once again I agree. The issue is that playing their characters as their characters would act is probably going to kill one of them.And unfortunately kicking out or killing half (or all of) the party is rather unfair to the other two players, who haven't really done much. Their characters aren't even aware yet that the other have had a fight, so it's not really their fault.So now I'm stuck looking for solutions. Although the players aren't fighting outside of the game, they've both said that they won't accept reforming the group during this campaign, pretty much regardless of the situation. I think my options at this point are to get one of them to change their main quest somehow (the paladin is the more likely one to accept some form of this although I have no idea how to do it at the moment), or to actually have them play separately for a while and then fight to the death. They might actually enjoy that (stressing the "might" part), but I'm hesitant about setting up a PC vs. PC situation in which it's almost certain that one of them will be killed. Somebody loses a character that they spent hours with week after week if I do it that way.Phew... I got thrown a curveball tonight. I would appreciate ideas of what to do.</blockquote>

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