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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Water Bob" data-source="post: 5611677" data-attributes="member: 92305">Interesting. I've had it in the past, and I quite enjoyed it. It's interesting to see how many DMs and players discourage this. I do understand it can cause some problems, and I've played (but never DMed) in a group where there were major problems due to party in-fighting (in two different groups, a player got booted from the group over it, and that's not good). But, both times that happened, in my opinion, it happened because of the DM's inability to manage the two players. It's happened in my games a few times (the last time was at least 20 years ago), and each time, it was a very fun element of the campaign. I remember keeping both players happy reminding them that they just need to play "in character", and that the other player didn't mean anything by it outside of the game. In a 2E AD&D game, I had a player playing a thief that was getting upset with the goody-goody-two-shoes way the cleric and the paladin in the group were dominating the party with their Lawful Good ways. And, to be sure, those two players were reining in the thief. After all, the thief was true neutral. The King had made the cleric and the paladin hire the thief in the first place--they needed someone with those skills for their mission. And, it was a mission for the Church (Tyr, in the Forgotten Realms, the God of Justice....doesn't mix well with "thieves").  Well, it came to a point where the thief had enough. It was a random encounter. The party was traveling across a field of chest-high grasslands and encounter a few basilisks. As the party went into tactical mode, the theif player started passing me notes unseen by the other players. The thief was hiding in shadows and moving close to first the cleric, then the paladin. As the party concerned itself with the basies, the thief did a sneak attack on the cleric, putting a bag of devouring over her head. The entire table cracked up. You did what?! So, the cleric is running around, trying to rip this bag off that is eating her head. Finally, she slumped to the ground, motionless. The paladin saw this and darted right for the thief. Everyone at the table thought the thief was a gonner. The the thief was a clever one. He'd planned for this. Just as the paladin approached, we threw initiative. The thief won, then tossed a pinch of dust of sneezing and choking at the paladin. No save. And, the paladin went down, dead. The table was astonished. The thief looked at the remaining two characters and said, "OK, I'm running this outfit now, and there are going to be a few changes." My entire game changed. The story had been centered around the Church of Tyr, with the cleric and the paladin in charge. As things will go, that was just the preamble to a much different type of campaign. The group became bandits, of a sort, and using the information about the church relic that they had obtained earlier, they went on the same quest that I had planned for them, but had a different outcome. They sold the relic instead of handing it over to the Church. The fighter in the group stuck, but the ranger left at the next town. The player playing that character rolled up a half-orc fighter, and the players playing the cleric and paladin rolled up new characters. And, from then on out, we played a very neat game about these scoundrels (they weren't very evil in the things they did--if you don't count the cleric and paladin murders <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /> --kind of like fantasy Han Solo's) and their adventures that turned into quite a campaign.   We still talk about that game, today. Hey, remember when that thief took out the cleric and the paladin....? We still laugh about it. The players liked it because it was proof that they truly were in charge of their own destinies. I had talks with the players of the cleric and paladin, making them assure me that their new characters could not use meta-game animosity against the thief. Those characters were completely separated from the original ones. And, it was just a very neat, bad-assed game. All because of party in-fighting.</blockquote>

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