Should the DM foster Party Conflict?

[Feliath]

Strange...

Generally I prefer to leave role-playing angry hateful and other negative encounters to the NPC-PC arena and try and discourage such things in the PC-PC interactions. just because it can cause problems, and generally does.

How's this? How is inter-character conflict in any way a problem? As long as it somehow (man, I sound like an overpretentious literature critic) promotes the story*, what's the problem? Why does the party always have to like one another and have everything be hunkydory?
In a situation like this I would probably see it as exceptionally poor roleplaying if the PCs weren't constantly at one another's throats. To resolve that, I'd make adventures that forced them to realize that due to outer circumstances they had to work together anyway; neither will benefit from killing the other.

People talk about how it's wrong to force the players to roleplay their characters a certain way. I mostly agree, but isn't forbidding conflict between PCs to do just that?

*Please note that "story" refers, in this case, to "every interesting thing that happens to the characters", I.e. as long as it's entertaining, what's wrong with it?

 

[hong]

Re: Strange...

How's this? How is inter-character conflict in any way a problem? As long as it somehow (man, I sound like an overpretentious literature critic) promotes the story*, what's the problem? Why does the party always have to like one another and have everything be hunkydory?

Inter-character conflict is fine. Inter-player conflict is not. The one has the potential to spill over into the other, when you're talking about PC-PC clashes.

 

[EOL]

Re: Re: Strange...

Inter-character conflict is fine. Inter-player conflict is not. The one has the potential to spill over into the other, when you're talking about PC-PC clashes.

Well said. I've seen people I would consider mature, who nevertheless allowed a character-character conflict to spill into a player-player conflict. In fact it's been rare in my experience for a character-character conflict to not immediately become a player-player conflict. Now obviously there are some people who can handle it, but there are also a lot who can't.

And though I will be the first to admit that this may not be "realistic" I am very much oppossed to one character killing another. And if you truly want to play the conflict out and not inhibit "realism" that's were it most often ends.

If I really want to enhance the story and if I would really like it to make sense then I prefer to role-play out why they are together, rather than emphasising why they hate one another.. Maybe it's grudging respect. Maybe one owes the other a debt of blood. Perhaps there's some greater evil that they have allied against and declared a truce of necessity.

No, every party doesn't have to be best friends, but I would like there to be some reasonable explanation for the characters to be together. Something beyond the players being friends.

So as I said earlier my personal preference is for there to be some party commonality from the beginning.

 

[reapersaurus]

It shouldn't be TOO much of a stretch to have D&D players roleplay their distaste of another player's character.

This IS a roleplaying game, right?

We have a similar situation in the In-Character Forum, where my half-orc character, Ubaar, is adventuring with an elf who absolutely despises orcs - has them as a favored enemy, in fact.

We've had a LOT of in-character threats and arguments, and I haven't had any bleed-over into player-vs-player conflict with Doppleganger, the rat-bastard son of a whore who can't even spell his own name...

 

[kamosa]

I believe that tension with in the party is fine, but having characters killing characters and/or just at each others throats for most of an adventure, is seldom fun.

1) People tend to get pretty hung up on their own characters and therefore mad when their prized PC is killed by another player. This leads to hard feelings and an I'll get you next time attitude, which can ruin the fun.

2) Watching two people from the party battle it out is boring. Think about the rest of your players. What benefit is it to them to spend game time on a conflict between two of the members of the party. Unless their joining in and picking a side in the conflict, it gets boring quick. As a player its cutting down my time to have fun with my character.

3) It leads to a party that gets less done. Maybe you run a different style of game, but as DM I bring an adventure to the table every week. Having parties that don't trust each other or can't work together just drags out mundane tasks, interviews, planning and combats. Lots of fun for you as the GM.

4) Often each player expects you, as GM, to pick their side as the eventual winner. If this comes to blows in the game, are you sure the players will take it all in good fun, or think that you favor the winner?

My advice is to make it tense, but not leathel. They don't like each other. They don't solve adventures the same way. Keep it on the level of verbal jousting.

 

[JLXC]

Well why are you the DM allowing their gods to be ok with this?

I'm all for roleplaying but allowing the clerics of Gods who absolutely hate eachother is silly. Cleric is the most powerful class period. The only thing keeping then on par with other classes is that they HAVE to follow their gods wishes, especially in certain areas. This is one of them.

 

[Utrecht]

Well,

The Gods (i.e. me) have not really decided how far they should push their followers.

Right now, the Orc could care less what the Elf (or his god) thinks of him.... and the party os low enough level that the Gods also have more importan things to do.

However, what I am planning on doing is having some other priests of CL talk to the Elf character and express their absolute disgust that the PC could even consider adventure with a 1/2 orc (in that condescending way that only elfs can)

On a Meta level, I am not to concerned about the Players hating each other (we are all over 30 and I would like to think mature, responsible members of society playing a game) - what I am more concerned about is play stopping/revolving around this Soap opera - but as the DM, I am starting to put into place controlling factors.