[True/False] There is a point in every campaign when the PCs come to blows.

[Arashi Ravenblade]

True for my group. Especially when we play OWOD. Sometimes resulting in players making new characters every session due to irate characters resorting to violence.
In D&D, it tends to be more rare as the players resort to threats.

 

[ejja_1]

In the game I currently play in we have raised our voices and argued at the table, but we never came to blows in or out of the game. We have even gone so far as to tell each other that if your character proceeds to do whatever it is they are planning that we won't support it our have any part in it. As an example in our most recent adventure we are in an underground area known to be an old abandoned dwarven citidel. We had just finished getting our tails kicked by an Iron golem, and half the party was low on hp and the other low on spells. We needed to rest and had chosen an out of the way room with one entrance/exit and started setting up watchs and such. The party rogue does not agree with our choice of rooms and wants to go back to a previous area we had been in that was guarded by a good aligned and friendly gaurdian. However per the constructs original orders it was not allowed to let any dwarf pass it into the area we had come from originally. So while it would let us pass the way we came into the area we were presently in, it would not let us return back that way with the dwarf in our party. The rouge voted to split the party so that we could be guarded by the guardian, and leave the dwarf to fend for himself. The rest of the party looked at him as one and said no, and that if he wanted that it was fine but he went his way alone.
Again outside the game voices were raised but it all ended agreeably.

The last time I can remember inter party conflict outside of a setting where we were actually pitted against one another for the game, would have to be all the way back in grade school about age 7.

 

[(un)reason]

No, despite how much I enjoy it, a substantial fraction of the games I've been in have never had the PC's come to blows. And a good thing too, because too much of anything gets boring after a while.

 

[Starglim]

Excluding monster-attack-mandated situations such as domination of PCs, it's more common than, in my opinion, it should be, but not inevitable. I would say about half the campaigns I've played in had such an incident.

 

[Lanefan]

In my new campaign there's already been two characters intentionally killed by the party, and they're not halfway through the first adventure yet.

They started, it seems, as they meant to go on. We're now up to 4 party-vs.-party deaths, along with any number of other varieties of conflict (for example, at one point the party sold* two of its own into slavery just to get rid of them). The players, however, get along just fine with each other in and out of game. Now *that's* D+D!

* - by "sold" I mean left tied up with the slavers made aware of their location. No money changed hands...in case that matters...

Lanefan

 

[Henry]

It's been false for me. If you had said, "There comes a point in several campaigns," I'd have said "true." However, it's maybe one campaign in every three or four. For the most part, we'll have character friction based on choices made, or we'll have smack-talking-fests, but not to a point where blood is drawn or spells cast.

In my 4E campaign about two months ago, it happened - the wizard loved using his Orb of Blood ("Orb of Sanguinary Repercussions", a damned stupid name) with the Cleric of the group in range every time the cleric was bloodied. It affects EVERYONE in range who is bloodied. He'd done it twice before, so the player of the cleric decided that the cleric was fed up, and cast one of his big spells (Cascade of Light, I think?) On him, and CRITTED, doing max damage.

The wizard responded by unleashing some whoop-ass on the wounded cleric, and the Shifter Ranger in the group saw the exchange, but not the initial incident that caused it, and unloaded on the cleric, killing him dead, dead, dead. The group just decided that the cleric had lost his darned mind in the depths of the dungeon, and looted his body and moved on.
It looked like there was friction between players, but they assured me there wasn't, and they were just "having fun". So the Cleric player announced he didn't want to keep playing the Cleric, he rolled up a different PC, and they found a captive in the dungeon that they knew from back in town, freed and equipped him, and there wasn't a problem after that...

Before that, the only other time the party came two blows was about five years ago, in a Forgotten Realms game, where one guy was playing his last game session before moving away, and wanted to make a "memorable exit."

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

It's almost never happened in any game I've played in, apart from one Evil game where it was pretty much a case of "When" rather than "If" it happened.

But no, it's not a part of the games I play in.

Although, in the way in which the OP tells it, it'd be a good game to play in where that kind of play was possible.

 

[Janx]

Rich Burlis has a great article on this on his site (giants in the playground).

The key point is, PLAYERS choose to interpret things and act in ways that cause conflict.

There was a good example upthread where the player's psion chose to intepret that the other PC's failure of an umberhulk saving throw was deliberate.

This is intentionally causing conflict. The player of the psion could have shrugged it off.

This is the same as players who make the elf hating dwarf when they know there's an elf in the party. When the 2 PCs come to blows, over it, it's because the player CHOSE to make a violent issue out of it.

I'm ok with PCs having faux-arguments that are character building. I'm not OK with them choosing directly confrontational (and party splitting paths).

It would also be different if an in-game event caused such a party division.

 

[Mallus]

I was just about to post that my campaigns have been PC-on-PC violence free for over a decade when I suddenly remembered a recent event in my Tales of CITY game in which Rackhir the Bloody Archer persuaded Atlatl Jones not to touch the Word of Creation by shooting him in the head at point-blank range with a magic arrow that resembled a hissing snake made of black iron (that dripped corrosives).

Which got the point across. Fortunately, there were no hard feelings.

 

[Wombat]

I have rarely had my PCs come to blows ... except where that was part of the initial campaign (Klingon FASA campaign, anything with Paranoia).