Post/Author/DateTime	Post
lulzapalooza 12-23-07, 03:04 AM	I just had an idea: what if in the course of a game, the players not only get to decide what the virtous heroes do, but how the evil villians react to their foils and plot angrily for revenge? I figure the players could play several sessions as heroic characters, and then, an evil band of ruthless mercenaries or horrible servents are introduced. The players get to play as an evil band indirectly attempting to stop the good party for a session! Then, next week, the chalenge would be getting the players out of their own jam! Think of the possibilities! Think of the problems and the downfalls! It would leave alot of openings for metagaming, but it would also let the players use oddball character designs.
Misterfido 12-24-07, 03:47 PM	In my experience, players like doing multiple parties (if done very properly) that interact, but if they realize they're going to hinder/attack themselves, they will fight it. They will find a roleplaying reason not to do it, they will straight up refuse--the works. On a side note, look up the Head of Vecna story, heheh. I just finished a bizarro world campaign--the players played as themselves in a demiplane spawned by Eberron's The Shadow (dark magic god). It was a reflection of the real world, with good characters evil, evil characters good, Spock had a beard, and The Mournland was alive and everything else was dead. However, every time the party wizard cast a 4th+ level spell, the surge of magic allowed The Traveler (trickster god) to swap his consciousness with that of a drow. The rest of the party just took over drow characters, thus allowing the confused wizard to direct the evil drow and the good players alike to save the world from The Shadow's machinations. During the process, the drow came across a party of adventurers--evil reflections of the PCs. They became enemies for a while, until they became strained allies. Blah blah, a search for artifact later, they ended up traveling to a God's extradimensional space, and all three parties met each other. Then The Traveler told them that only one party's worth of people could leave alive. It was quite the epic battle. The players had built up the drow and their own characters to be epic and powerful, not knowing they would eventually fight--and my own DM-designed party reflection NPCs were also quite awesome. The moral is, players like playing multiple parties, players like making their two parties cooperate or even compete, but my players almost straight-up refused to allow one character they had put love into crafting kill another character they had put love into crafting. So I suggest... if you're going to have one party wreck another party, act as though you have two campaigns running--for example, have an evil party collecting devices and hiring monsters for dungeoneering, use the results of that party's adventuring to design a dungeon yourself, then have the good party assault that dungeon. Or have the two parties work together towards the same goal, with different methods. Or something to that effect.
CryoSilver 12-24-07, 04:34 PM	Another possibility is that they gimp one party badly, or ptimize the party they like better to win. My cousin once ran two games, one good, one evil, with two different groups of players. At the climax of the game, both groups came on the same night and a three hour battle ensued.
lulzapalooza 12-24-07, 10:52 PM	Another possibility is that they gimp one party badly, or ptimize the party they like better to win. My cousin once ran two games, one good, one evil, with two different groups of players. At the climax of the game, both groups came on the same night and a three hour battle ensued. I'd love to do something like that! Except I don't have enough friends for even one D&D group, let alone two...Awwww, I'm lonely.