Betrayal

Can inter-party betrayal be done without going into That Guy territory? Anyone have stories of it being done well? I get games aren't books, and much like the loner trope the plot of most RPGs and its characters will rarely accommodate someone's bullshit long enough for them to drop it with character development, but even that could likely be pulled off with some tweaking and by toning it down. Is it just a group maturity thing and how personal they take this sort of stuff OOC? After all, there's certainly shit that would fly in your group of old high school friends but not the group at your flgs.

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I find that it's doable if everyone knows going into a campaign that the possibility of betrayal is on the table and that it makes sense in the kind of setting or system you're playing in.

My group was playing Shadowrun and had a PC sell out to a Corp after the party was careless on a few runs and let the Corp use the PC's family as leverage. Everyone had a blast and it was a great addition to the campaign.

On the flip side it's happened a few times during D&D with the same group, and since no one really had that sort of expectation in mind we always had a player or two who was left salty by the whole ordeal.

Betrayal isn't necessarily killing the rest of the party. It's merely going against their wishes. This can be settled without combat with good role playing.

I'm in a campaign right now where everyone has a pile of secrets and tell each other lies upon lies but give smiles and truths and half truths. We know we can only trust each other so far, but we still work together anyway because no one else can do our work.
We just need to be prepared for when that work is done.

Know your players, their expectations, and cut bullshit, and you can have excellent betrayal moments.

The Infinity rpg planned to have the option of secret agendas for each player which is bound to cause some betrayal. It's still in development though.

I'd argue a character would be committing a betrayal by secretly showing mercy to an enemy that the rest of the party wants to do away with permanently. Say, send the villain far away with a geas to never again trouble you while telling your party you killed them.

>I find that it's doable if everyone knows going into a campaign that the possibility of betrayal is on the table and that it makes sense in the kind of setting or system you're playing in.
This.
When everyone (in the real world, nor in game), is complicit in the betrayal, or a least happily agreed that it is on the table, it can be a lot if fun.

When one guy pulls one over on the party because "it's what my character would do" (read: being an ass hole and hiding behind an imaginary person you have complete control over to duck blame), when that wasn't on the table? It is just gonna hurt the game.

I've been thinking of doing a betrayal on 3.5. My friends are cool with betrayals on the table, as long as they're in character, not out of salt. I think they already know that I'm doing a betrayal, my character is easy to read.
>Play a paladin-in-training, ordered to follow a cleric who acts as my mentor
>Cleric accompanied with CE barbarian, who owes the cleric his life. Follows his every order and doesn't even think about betraying him
>A wizard who specialises on illusions
>Sessions fly by, PC PLANNING and laughs all around
>Fastforward several sessions, group is traveling north
>Cleric tells Pally that it's time to start fasting for two weeks to honor our gods
>Both start fasting, but cleric secretly wears the ring of sustenance
>Paladin finds out, is disappointed in his mentor, tries to convince him to be honest, fails. Paladin continues fasting alone
>Paladin recieves a message that he has inherited a mansion from his relative
>Party encourages paladin to see the mansion with them
>Party loots the place clean right under the paladin's nose
>Party gets magically trapped in the mansion, fight undead during the night
>Cleric finds Paladin's dead relative in the mansion, animates his corpse as a bodyguard. RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE PALADIN
>After the party gets out of the mansion, cleric stops Paladin from laying is undead relative to rest
>Insults the dead by saying he's already in hell
>"I can no longer call you my mentor"
>Did I mention all this happened during the hasting?
>Planning START!
I cannot engage the barb and the cleric in honest combat, it'd be suicide with the barbarian being the embodiment of a meatgrinder and the cleric being able to fight from afar.
I need a proper plan to either separate the two from each other or defea them without combat. What would you suggest?

Hire a wizard to kill them both.

So it's like magical realm except non-sexual. Do we have a term for that? We should.

In what way is it a magical realm if it's not based on somebody's fetish? Is it based on their hobbies?

I have an explicit rule that intra-party conflict is OK, but talk about it OOC and have both individuals okay with proceeding.

This works because I have good, reasonable players that welcome the chance to construct an interesting narrative.

That's not betrayal, that would range from an in-character roleplaying action(if done by a paladin or saint-ish man, for example) to a whim for the sake of development. Rarely sparing someone's life with a geas for good measure would be seen as worse than just killing the guy.

It's not betrayal if it doesn't incur on any loss or hardship for the rest of the party.

No, no. The base idea of unceremoniously bringing something into the game at the expense of others when it's not wanted nor welcome.

Poison. You're playing 3.5, so you can do a LOT of nasty stuff with poison, specially to the cleric as barbs have high Fortitude saves. Some poison flasks are extremely costy and have 2d4~2d6 stat damage which CAN make the cleric unable to cast spells(you must have 10+[spell level] in the relevant stat to cast any spell) and might lower the barbarian's wreckage power. Poison deals their Primary effect when applied, and a Secondary effect 1 minute later. It's a good idea to apply some to their food and let them think raiders/bandits did it until the full effect comes to play. Tell them bullshit like hearing about bandits and assassins making moves on enemies of whatever you're fighting.

To list good ones:
Name (DC), Primary, Secondary, Cost
Nitharit (13), 0, 3d6 Con, 650 gp
Dark reaver powder (18), 2d6 Con, 1d6 Con + 1d6 Str, 300 gp
Dragon Bile (26), 3d6 Str, 0, 1500 gp

Read more here: dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Poisons

Just to add too, poison can make someone helpless if it lowers the stat to 0. So you can focus on Con poisoning to not only lower HP and future Fortitude saves, but also to knock out the person outright.

As you're a paladin, you'll have to pay a penitence later to your church as an apology for using poisons, but it's the only way of winning such a fight you're facing short of hiring mages(and the only one that can succeed without any combat if done right).

One of the best games we every played culminated in betrayal of pretty much the entire group by one player. I think one of the reasons it was so great was that we continually underestimated her and dismissed her actions, so we had only ourselves to blame when it all came crashing down on us. Perhaps doubly funny, that her actions/efforts were based on historical precedent, and we still didn't notice enough to act.

Aren't poisons easily curable due to cleric's Neutralize Poison?

>Can inter-party betrayal be done without going into That Guy territory?
Only in games where people expect it (Paranoia for example) or if all the cards are open on the table from the get-go. (and in the latter case it can still mess up the game negatively for some people)

>WoD Hunter
>Group of investigators on the trail of a serial killer
>Go through hell, uncovering monsters and psychics
>We've determined the killer is a Slasher, powered up with some kind of mind control ability, forcing Hunters and innocents to kill others and themselves
>Setting up a sniper ambush
>We're gearing up in the Mystery Machine
>Our tech guy slides open the door and pulls a gun
>He's FBI
>Tac team swoop in and black-bag us all
>He was a VASCU mole the entire time
>We've done some bad things to take monsters down, so they offer us a choice
>Game becomes Suicide Squad with the traitor as our handler
>Sent up against the Slasher and his murderous victims
>Teams starts to dwindle down to just the players
>Pinned down in a warehouse by an army of the crazed who see the Slasher as a messiah
>Traitor is stabbed and bleeding to death
>Wishes he'd never brought us in and deactivates our implants
>Takes our explosives and builds some crude IEDs
>We make our getaway
>Watch from a distance as the building erupts in gunfire, then explosions
>The FBI destroy the army of lunatics, but fail to catch the Slasher
>We go on the run and become soldiers of fortune, all while tracking down the Slasher

Man that was a fun game.

Not if its a poison that lowers his wisdom below 10.

3 hours late but I'd love to hear the whole story.

We were playing SotC and the group had come to NotRussia to bring about the revolution. One of the characters basically made a gangster that served as the party's (political party in this sense) thug, for things like getting money and intimidating people, meanwhile the rest of us were the intellectual or public figure sorts. We didn't but should have noticed she basically made female Stalin and based her actions on his, though we overlooked and didn't take her seriously until it was too late and she forced her way into power. After that, she purged the party including many of our characters/the group and those who didn't flee abroad were imprisoned and executed for various trumped up reasons.

So yeah she betrayed us all in a pretty bad way, mostly because we never took her all that seriously, despite it being pretty obvious what she was up to and after. A long ongoing portion of the game went on to focus on the country under her reign, whereby the game became more of a scheming political maneuvering paranoia driven game. We ended up losing our characters to have to play cabinet and party members who danced about without trying to draw her ire or too much attention, all while trying to climb higher on the ladder.

You got revenge right? Dear God please tell me you got revenge.

Nah I didn't. None of us did, any only two characters out of like 16 made it out of that situation alive, only 1 of them of the original group since she had others killed abroad. It was actually kind of sad since the original group had been through a lot together and were close friends.

For what it's worth though, she never ended up happy with what she worked to get, and had a generally stressful life of anguish. She ended up dying of preventable natural causes because we were too afraid to treat her.

I'm planning on 'bringing back' a dead party member whose death another one was indirectly responsible for, and having him turn out to be a Chain Devil who's exploiting her guilt and the guilt of the party, who don't actually know that this guy is dead.

You should kill your friends irl.

No, we've been best friends since childhood. I have no grudge for them out of the table. What they did on the table were in character, even the looting of the paladin's new mansion.

>Praise the Moon

That's fucking great.

Do they sleep? Stack damage & critical multipliers until you can one-shot coup de gras one or both of them. It will auto critical & then force a fortitude save of 10+damage death. Eclipse 50 damage, add the massive damage save on there. If they survive they're prone & unarmed, commence full attack.

Easier accomplished at lower levels before HP bloat. But you can add smite to the ones that are evil.

Supposed to be going to:
D'oh

I once had one player who joined a campaign a bit late be straight up an agent of the bbeg. Fed him intel from the bbeg and he lied to the party about his motivations, they knew he had something up, but thought he was just an edgelord. Did wonders for roleplay and when it was revealed boy were they mad, they loved it, but since then are trying to kill him.

I "betrayed" my party in a evil game because they had bitched the DM into it and were constantly saying good natured characters werent good.

Sure got salty when I stole shot and poisoned the sorc.

Convince the party wizard to help you end their treachery and rat out the cleric to your church for HERESY (plus I would do a little investigation on him, something smells fishy and he could possibly be wearing an item that disguises his TRUE EVIL ALIGNMENT !)