Mastering The Game: Player vs. Player

A few days ago I did a post about the setting of my current Dresden Files RPG campaign. Specifically, we talked about some of the issues that I had in trying to meld together the Dresden setting and the Sunnydale location, as well as some of the problems that I encountered when it came to first running the campaign for the first day.

Well, last night, we met again. By now, we've been consistantly meeting most Fridays and the campaign has recently been thrown into high-gear. They players have found out that everything is actually connected, despite everything seeming completely unconnected at the start (through good planning or because I only connected them later, we'll never know!). However, over the last two sessions, we've had a bit of an issue crop up, and it's not something that I've ever dealt with in any of the campaigns that I've run before.

That issue, of course, is player vs player combat.

For one of the first times, we've been actively confronting the fact that a lot of these characters are private people who might not necessarily share all that they know. Furthermore, the characters aren't all best friends, or a troupe of adventurers who are used to sharing everything. They barely even know each other outside of the events of the campaign. Having something revealed to one member of the group does not necessarily mean that all of them will eventually know it.

Imperfect knowledge on the parts of the characters means that, because they don't have the entire picture (and are viewing the situation through their character's potentially flawed perception of the situation), that there's a good chance of two characters ending up on different sides of a major conflict. For example, last week, we ended with River defending a friend against her older cousin Drake, who was determined that this friend was withholding knowledge that would be pertinent to his defense of the town.

That conversation ended with a tranquilizer gun being fired, and magic being cast. The party had very nearly come to blows. A few years ago, I'd have flipped out, and tried to get the players focused back on the thing they're supposed to be doing – you know, that plot I have pages and pages of!

This time, I decided to take a step back, let the characters flow as they would, and even subtly influence the path they're taking by clever use of compels. (The Dresden System permits a DM to basically reward players for making their lives difficult, if it would be in accordance with the character's personality.) A week later, we've almost certainly got the party basically split between two allegiances – one side convinced that the Calvieri Institute for the Gifted is attempting to cause an apocalypse of some description, and another side who's at least sympathetic to the fact that they don't appear to be evil.

I don't know how this is going to turn out, but I know that my plans, at least, are going to need to be a little bit more expansive if I need to account for the possibility that either side, with the aid of the players, could prevail. Previously, one of those answers was an almost certain TPK (Total Party Kill, for laymen). Now, I'm not sure. Perhaps the player(s) who ended up on the other side might find their way back to the correct side and try to rectify the damage they've done.

Or maybe not. We'll see how it goes, and I'll keep you all posted.

Talk to you all tomorrow!