Henry said:
I have never played an RPG where Player vs. Player conflict resulted in a good time being had - Paranoia and Assassin notwithstanding...
Kill every NPC the DM introduces, including the little old lady, the one-legged poddle, and the town guards - but PvP stuff pushes ALL of my bad-buttons.
I agree. PvP doesn't belong into RPG. I exclusively play in groups where the party sticks together (even evil ones). I had one evil party that was a bunch of backstabbing rat bastards - everyone had at least one other party member he wanted to see dead. Of course, my character acquired one of his own - the female anti-paladin of auril, who tried to kill him by affecting him with a deadly disease over nothing. At least nothing in-game. The player of that character - a guy, but a real sissy - didn't understand that all the comments about the character's physical attraction - she had Cha 17 after all - were out of game, and "took revenge". I didn't kill the paladin, but only because I didn't get the right opportunity (another character - a male played by a female this time - was into that paladin and paid my curing on the condition that I don't retaliate, so I had to make it look like an accident, or inhume both of them).
The other story also didn't end in PC death, but could very well have ended in TPK: It's an evil party consisting of a wood of psychic warrior, a moon elf death cleric of Kiaransalee (don't ask), a fey'ri spy (rogue/assassin - my character) and a lunatic gnome alienist. This alienist had a "hinophobia" (halfling-fear) - and the DM forced us (really forced us, like "the prophecy demands it") to sail to the pirate isles (wind walking didn't work for the reason mentioned above). And the only ship available (there was a war going on) was with a halfling village.
So the plan was this: I disguise as halfling, persuade them to sail to the pirate isles as a big big adventure, and the others dimension door onboard as soon as we cleared the main land - after that, the halflings have no choice but to sail on, or we kill them. We put the gnome below deck in a locked-up room and told him the people outside were afraid of gnomes and couldn't work properly when any of the Forgotten Folk are about.
Well, all went well for three days, until the gnome decided to turn invisible (so the sailors wouldn't throw themselves overboard in a fit of panic) and look around a little. As he got on deck and saw halflings all over the ship, he froze. Eventually, the invisibility ran out and the halflings started at his sudden appearance. This made him snap out of the shock, and all he wanted to do was kill the halflings, using the only spell of mass destruction he had on hand: reality mealstorm!
Now we all had one chance to stop him before he could cast, so my character started to run to grapple him. Unfortunately, the psychic warrior broke out his mind blast in attempt to stun the gnome. He ended up stunning me (and only me, except for a couple of halflings, but they don't count
) , and the cleric also failed to stop the crazy little necromancer. And all the hells broke loose.
The gnome and me made our saves and stayed on the plane, but the rest got sucked into the mailstorm - psion, cleric, halflings
and the ship got a little instand vacation on the
Infernal Battlefield of Acheron, while the gnome and me fell into the water.
Well, at this point luck returned to us at last: freed from his panic, the gnome held me above water until the stunning wore off (otherwise I would have drowned: I couldn't swim, I couldn't change my shape, I couldn't hold my breath, as I was stunned), and the other two somehow survived long enough for the cleric to prepare plane shift....
All in all I was more or less the only one not responsible for the near-TPK (the cleric didn't do anything, either): The DM for us forcing to use a halfling crew (and choosing this more-than-stupid phobia), the psychic for stunning me, and the gnome for flipping out (although I must say that he plays that little paranoid gnome alienist exceptionally well).
