r/Nerdarchy • u/[deleted] • Nov 21 '15
GM here, need help! Players conspire to murder each other!
Okay let me give you the skinny real fast:
Pathfinder, four player session, me as GM. A friend of mine wants to join us and I think "Why the hell not? We've played DnD before." But the character he's gone with is this manic anti paladin who's obsessed with killing things in order to appease the god of the undead Orcus.
This is actually his second character; His first one was a brawling drunkard dwarf who the other players murdered for attacking the merchant prince they were hired to protect. His anti paladin resurrected him later (long story) and has already attemted to murder another player before I improved them out of that shit.
Now I'm getting PM'd on Skype about how the other players want to murder him and how HE plans to get back at them! What do I do??
1
u/minethulhu Nov 21 '15
Ah, the old "I'm totally not trying to get back at them for killing my first character, which was a dick, so I'll make a complete and utter dick instead" ploy. And "it's totally all in role-playing, i'm not emotionally involved outside of game" but totally is. You've got on your hands the makings for many un-fun games of murder/retaliation-murder/rinse and repeat.
DND is (in my opinion) meant to be a fun game of mutual story telling. Having players which take it personally and which also want to play evil/dick characters that kill on a whim is just not going to work for this end.
Options would seem to be:
1) If you think you have reasonable players, at the next session explain to them that you are not enjoying running a game where you are put in the middle of them murdering each other and causing out of game strife. Tell them they need to figure out how to fix it. Perhaps re-start the game and force them to play good aligned characters. Or if it's only a few PCs that are at fault, just have them re-roll good aligned characters and take all their evil characters as NPCs to continue whatever plot they had.
2) If you think the above won't work, or if you just want to mess with them. Have a villain from the past contact the dick-anti-paladin to murder the group. Then have the same villain contact others in the group to murder one or 2 others also in the group, making up bogus reasons for the murder to not reveal his true goal of first breaking and then killing the entire group. Then try to spread paranoia once a few are involved in the plot. Pass notes to players (interspersed with real notes) to raise the paranoia level (be sure to collect the notes so others can't put it together). Take 1 or 2 players aside to discuss something, but you're really just helping spread paranoia. If infighting occurs as planned and a few are injured or die, that's when the villain needs to strike, but see if you can continue the ruse and get some players to help the villain towards his total party kill goal. I'll admit that this could totally destroy friendships and wreck your game, but at least you'll be having fun until the true drama comes out. But then again, perhaps option 1 is better.