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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Illithidbix" data-source="post: 6822781" data-attributes="member: 12283">Very much agree with The BananaInternal party player vs player CAN lead to awesome moments that are treasured and remembered by everyone involved.But very very easily lead to resentment between players and it breaking the game.Some people enjoy PVP, other people really hate being part of it.Anecdote time!I had one that worked out ok... in the end in my last Campaign. Which consisted almost entirely of newbies.Campaign premise was set in a world where magic and monsters were mostly legends, a bunch of teenagers from a mountain goat farming village follow a bunch of renegade archeologists into a tomb and accidentally got invested with the power of ancient heroes… I.e they got classes and levels.After fleeing their hometown for “accidentally” committing murder, treason and arson they get ambushed by bandits.- As in a bunch of bandits accidentally jump out on them and soon realise their mistake in an “Opps I thought you were someone else… less well armed” sorta way.The bandits are barely a threat and quickly captured, the real point of the encounter is the moral choice of what to do with said bandits (and a pisstake on the stereotypical bandit encounter).- Anyway things got heated between the Esa, the somewhat powermad dragon sorceress and Aino, the aspiring Paladin (due to pick up their Oath of Devotion next level…), after the dragon sorceress incinerates a captured bandit and then cuts their throat as the paladin tries to heal them.The paladin, then responded with a big enough hit to insta-kill the sorceress (negative hit points over her hit point maximum).At which point I ask "Are you striking to kill or unconscious" "To kill!""Are you sure?""Yep""Are you really sure?""Yes!"And then the most difficult choice I've ever had to make as a DM: Let it stand or let the sorceress live. As it was player agency vs player agency... I let it stand."Uh...Ok, you bring your sword down and decapitate Esa."Resulting in abject shock and horror from the rest of the player party as childhood friends murdered each other.The Bard went briefly mad with grief and tried to attack the Paladin... somewhat failed and eventally gave up and stormed off.It was fantastically roleplayed by everyone. And became pretty much the defining moment of the campaign.However it very almost broke the game, and I discussed with the players *rebooting* the game with different characters elsewhere in the world, as the party seemed dead or splintered, we carried on and said Paladin then started developing stigmata (a bleeding neck wound, which had a tendency to bleed if she got too smite happy), and I gave her the option to take the Oathbreaker variant, despite not getting.The player of Esa the Sorceress was somewhat saddened and shocked to have her first character killed off in somewhat an abrupt manner, but quickly got over with it.Esa returned as the final boss in kinda dracolich form, and Aino the paladin sacrificed herself in the knowledge that her sin could always return for the grave as long as she still lived.So... yeah, sometimes PVP can result in awesome, but it will often stretch a game to breaking point.</blockquote>

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