A Matter Of Trust: 14 ways to prevent inter-party conflict

Based on Pair-707509 by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Rite Of Passage
There’s one experience that used to be common to almost every GM out there – the party being betrayed by one of its members and the GM expected to make sense out of the situation before it killed the campaign.
It often started, in the AD&D days, with the Thief in the party pick-pocketing one of the other members, or stealing goodies from their packs, or snatching the occasional goody before the other party members got to divvy everything up.
Often, alignment conflicts were used in attempts to justify these conflicts.
Calling the class a “Thief” didn’t help, either. Things only got worse when there was a suspected Assassin in the party – any time a player wouldn’t specify what character class he was, or seemed to come up short in effectiveness relative to expectations, paranoia would start, and quickly get out of hand.
So common were these events that they were almost considered a “rite of passage” that every GM had to go through.
The Thief’s Treachery
I had two brushes with this phenomenon back in my early days as a GM. On the first occasion, it was a straightforward case of the Thief getting greedy and sneaking off to ‘reapportion’ loot while the others recovered after their last battle.
Because he was good at hiding in shadows and seeing in the dark, he got away with this for quite a while, even while suspicions were growing.
Finally, one time while the party rested after a battle, the mage (a simple “magic user” in those days) used his abilities to scry the thief’s activities – resulting in an image in the crystal ball that was all black, because the thief didn’t need a light source. Calling on one of the other PCs – one who had ultravision – solved that problem and ensured that the Thief got a hostile reception after his little expedition.
His claims that he was “just playing his character” didn’t go over with the other players. Result: one dead thief, and one player walking away from the game table for good with a justifiable grievance.
As outcomes go, this one was far from satisfactory.
The Mage’s Gambit
The second time was when a quite different mage (different player, same campaign) paid a low-level thief to extract a valuable item from the backpack of another PC and place it in the Thief’s pack.
The mage was True Neutral, and thought that both the Thief and the Paladin were cramping his style with their respective alignment-based restrictions and conflicts.
His solution was to employ an inter-party conflict to remove them both. Unfortunately, the low-level thief got caught, and spilled his guts to the Paladin, who then declared a holy war on the Mage.
The Mage was operated by a relatively experienced player compared to the rest of the party (or the GM, for that matter) and took the amputation of his character’s hands at the armpits in stride, as though this sort of outcome was the way the game was supposed to be played.
Lessons Learned
In those olden days, a party was a random assemblage of characters, a genuinely motley crew if ever you had seen one. Getting them to work together for any reason was always the first challenge that a GM faced; there was even a saying at the games store (Sydney only had one at the time), “You can lead a PC to the Inn but can’t make him drink”, specifically addressing this phenomenon.
My solution was to incorporate such motivation for cooperation either into the campaign background or the player’s backgrounds. It didn’t matter whether the motivation was mutual survival, or profit, or even different for each PC, so long as they had a reason to overlook each other’s foibles and avoid beating each other’s brains in – or giving the others just cause for doing so.
If you look over my gaming history, you might think that my D&D days were pretty lean in between my original D&D campaign (1981-1984) and Fumanor: The Last Deity campaign in 2000. That’s a long 16-year gap – even with a lot of Superhero and Shared Reality (TORG) campaigns to fill it.
There were a few attempts in between to start new AD&D campaigns, but the players simply weren’t available / interested at the time. Some of those notes and ideas were discarded, others eventually made their way into either the Fumanor or Rings Of Time campaigns.
Some of the discarded material was explicitly aimed at this phenomenon. Specifically, I realized the degree of influence the class name was able to exert over the way characters were perceived, both by their owners and by the other players. In other words, if I renamed the class and perhaps made one or two minor tweaks to class abilities, I could rename “Thief” to “Spy” or “Explorer” or “Scout” and completely change the way everyone thought about these characters with virtually no alteration to the game mechanics or class descriptions.
When Fumanor finally got off the ground, it was with players who were extremely insistent that inter-party conflicts were not wanted and would not be tolerated, so there was no need to pursue these changes further.
Eventually, D&D discarded the “Thief” title in favor of still another title, “Rogue”, so the authors appear to have learned the same lesson. Furthermore, variations on the class (in the form of Prestige Classes) began appearing in various supplements – with names like “Scout” and “Explorer”. And “Assassin”, the other class-based cause of angst, was quietly dropped from the line-up.
I felt that this discarded an essential piece of the flavor of ‘old’ D&D without adequate cause, and so was amenable when the opportunity came to create Assassin’s Amulet, which restored the class – albeit with a LOT of tweaking.
There’s Only Ever One First Time
But none of this exists in isolation. I can never fully divorce my experience from any situation that I might contemplate, not with any certainty. That’s what makes it so hard for me to write articles pitched at the beginner.
It’s my suspicion that GMs still have to endure some variation on the rite of passage described, in which a collection of independent PCs turn on each other for short-term gain or fidelity to a concept that intrudes upon the foundations upon which roleplaying games are built.
It won’t be the party “Thief” stealing from the party any more, but betraying a fellow PC for personal gain is still a story that is told, I’ll wager.
It doesn’t have to be that way, but GMs won’t avoid it without a clear plan in place.
Possible Solutions
I have a baker’s-dozen-plus-one solutions to the problem. More, if the problem exists at a player level and not a character level, but I’m framing this part of the conversation purely about the in-game. Some work well, some have specific problems that will need to be solved, some can be combined with other solutions, and so don’t have to be the sole response. Some have already been mentioned – which will make discussion of them fairly brief.
1. All Thieves
One of the easiest solutions to think of, mandating that every party member be a thief (in combination with some other class, perhaps) permits them all to be members of a single Guild which sets the rules for “social” interaction between it’s members. If the GM is prepared to invest deep thinking into the social structure and practices of a Thief’s Guild, and into how various combinations would work, this can be a viable solution.
The trickiest part is ensuring that the Guild is a diverse agency with room for many different kinds of characters within it’s tent. How do magic-using Thieves differ from Fighter-thieves? How might the Paladin-thief combination work? How do relationships between the different faiths work within the Guild – does everyone have one God or is more diversity possible?
The most difficult part (as opposed to the trickiest) will be convincing all your players that they should play varieties of thief. My suggestion: (a) Make sure everyone knows that the campaign requires all PCs to be members of a particular thief’s guild; (b) Create hybrids of all the non-thief characters (some thief abilities, some not), naming them “Guild Clerics”, “Guild Enforcers”, “Guild Mages”, and so on (Guild Druids? Why Not?); and (c) inform the players that because of (a), the only primary character classes available are these hybrid classes.
This leaves only one problem: The “Guild Thief” class and the implied game balance issues. If the other classes have their progress slowed by learning non-thieving skills, the “Guild Thief” will have a clear advantage; If the other classes get thief abilities as well as their normal abilities, the “Guild Thief” will be at a clear disadvantage.
Solving this problem – and not making the hybrid character classes too weak relative to ordinary Clerics, Fighters, etc – are the reason why the design of these hybrids will be a very delicate task.
A related problem that may have heavy impact is the question of racial restrictions. Is it credible that the whole gamut of PC race-and-class combinations can be represented within this one Thief’s Guild? Every restriction risks treading on the toes of some player who has his heart set on running a Half-Hafling or whatever. So this will also require heavy thought.
Boy, from what seemed such a simple and obvious solution, the complications are sure coming thick and fast, aren’t they?
2. Alignment Rejection
Another simplistic solution that occurs to most GMs after their first encounter with the problem is to confine PCs to the alignments that the GM thinks capable of working together – which usually means banning Chaotic Evil, Chaotic Neutral, and Evil Neutral characters from the game. Some may add “Lawful Good” to that list if the problem involved a conflict between a Holier-than-thou PC and a more casual character.
This solution has a high likelihood of at least superficial success, at least initially. The problems that result are subtle, and slow-acting – but poisonous to the campaign, and the GM’s rep, just the same.
This is a case of the GM telling players what they can and can’t do, confining the PCs to choices that the GM thinks he can cope with, rather than the GM actually solving the cause of the problem – inter-party conflict.
With most small children, telling them they aren’t allowed to do something only makes them more eagerly inclined to try it out, perhaps on the sly. Most players aren’t small children, but the parallels in childish behavior occur nevertheless. Sooner or later, many of these players will sit at a more “liberal” table, and – taking the option of exploring terra incognita, will play a character of alignment from the “forbidden” list.
Some won’t enjoy the experience. The notion of having to protect yourself as much from the other players as from overt enemies is often uncomfortable – though it can be good training for prospering (or at least surviving) games of political intrigue. Those players aren’t the problem; they will return, convinced that you had it right with the ban.
Others will find the experience liberating. There’s always something attractive in being able to run hog wild, doing anything you like. No more moral hand-wringing or angst-filled logical justification required – just do it because you feel like doing it. Almost everyone will admit to finding something at least a little desirable in that proposition – though one person’s choice of desired form of “running wild” may vary dramatically relative to another’s. There are those for whom going fishing when they should be working or worshiping is the height of rebellion!
These are the players who will return to your table critical of your past decision, and by extension, critically-appraising of all your other decisions. At the very least, you will be seen as a milquetoast who doesn’t deserve to sit behind the screen. From that moment on, the fuse on a more permanent bust-up has been lit – but no-one knows how long that fuse is.
This solution is playing with nitro. Eventually, it will go boom.
3. All Evil
GMs aren’t immune to the seductive powers of a walk on the Dark Side, either. The notion that everyone is in the same boat and therefore should know what to expect makes this an attractive, if occasional solution.
Even I have conceded at least once (because it worked to enhance the main story of the campaign) – that was in my Shards Of Divinity campaign.
When I took a close look at the requirements, though, I found that more work was needed before the solution was viable. I ended up needing to redefine the different alignments for the campaign; I included details of the results in part 5 of my series on alignment, Dark Shadows (if interested in why that seemed necessary, and the logic behind the definitions, a lot of it is discussed between-the-lines of parts 2 and 3 of the series, and part 1 is a necessary preamble by a guest author).
Make no mistake, you can run an “evil campaign” using the standard rules – others have done so – but there will be more rocky patches along the way.
4. Alignment Redefinition
The definitions of alignment in the various players handbooks / core rulebooks are very puritanical, when you get right down to it, and not only license in-party obnoxious behavior and conflict, they actually incite it. Maybe the solution you would prefer would be to redefine the alignments completely, focusing on motivations and not on behavioral restrictions. After all, if a deed is ‘unthinkable’ by characters of that alignment, you’ve pretty much made that deed ‘illegal’ for that alignment, anyway.
Alignments should not be codes of behavior, holy writ to which PCs pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. They should be practical guides to philosophies and behaviors – and a key element of that should be how they can get along with, and work alongside, characters of other alignments, even polar opposites. At the bottom of such descriptions, there might be a subsection “Extremists of this alignment” followed by the existing, ‘official’ descriptions.
As an example,
Lawful Good characters care for others; they subscribe to the philosophy that charity is good, within the limits of what you can afford, that what comes around goes around, that everyone is served by clear and sensible laws that are enforced for all, regardless of rank or position. They generally like helping others, it makes them feel good about themselves. They dislike rationalizing breaches of law or of expected social behavior, though they can do so if they have to. They think that Lawful Neutral characters lack the courage of their convictions, and try to be a good example to them. They find Lawful Evil characters distasteful, but at least respect that they admit that they find it necessary to “look after Number One” first and foremost. Because they have to live in the real world, they will listen respectfully to a reasonable argument in favor of needing exceptions to broad laws. They see Neutral Good characters as meaning well, but needing organization and direction. Chaotic Good characters also receive the ‘mean well’ label, but are anarchic to the point of disruption, and often lazy or inclined to fritter away their time and capacities; these characters need to be confined to simple tasks and monitored closely and regularly.
… and so on.
That’s a fair amount of work, and it’s always possible that you will make some grievous error in the process. Some players won’t like that you’ve monkeyed with the rules at all, and to some extent they have a point – but I don’t want to get distracted with that conversation at the moment. You always have to question whether or not it’s worth all the effort for a problem that comes up so infrequently – no matter how catastrophic it might be when it does manifest?
5. Jobz 4 The Boyz
I’ve already touched on the problem of class titles implying a certain pattern of behavior. It’s not enough to add a line, “Thieves are not normally kleptomaniacs, they are skilled professionals or skilled-professionals-in-training” to the official class descriptions; while that might mitigate casual breaches of respect for the property of another PC, it’s only a band-aid on the problem. Those tend to be the breaches that can be papered over, anyway.
But applying a different job title can bring about more profound changes in conception and application, concept and behavior. Bilbo Baggins undoubtedly thought the Dwarves entirely justified in employing a burglar to help them regain their treasures, and no doubt considered his many missed meals in their company to be a “noble sacrifice”.
Or perhaps you might sell your thief-playing player on the concept of basing his performance on Whoopi Goldberg in “Burglar”.
You see, what you are really doing is defining a role within the team for the PC to fill – with the promise (and implied threat) that there will be loot and experience if the PC does so.
6. Dominant Leader (NPC)
GMs can often get away with doing things through NPC proxies that would never be acceptable if presented as ultimatums to players. I have heard of some GMs using this principle to curb undesirable PC behavior through the assigning of a team Mentor who will ‘lead’ the team for a period of time (defined in character levels).
If you go down this route, I recommend some house rules to ensure that the Mentor gets listened to – perhaps only 1/3 of the experience the characters earn comes from the encounter itself, the remaining 2/3 come from lessons provided by the Mentor and discussions of alternative strategies moderated by the Mentor afterwards – points that the Mentor can withhold if he doesn’t consider them earned.
When the Mentor considers the PCs ready, he will cut them loose – a time defined by his resuming the relationship with his own Mentor. This might also involve handing the PCs off to a new, still higher-level Mentor as “journeymen”, who get half the xp outright and the other half from the Mentor.
After more levels gained, the PCs become “senior” or “leading” journeymen, are handed off to a new Master, and get 2/3 of their xp up front. This Master acts more as a guide and sounding board – and part of each PCs requirements for getting their xp is to satisfactorily nurture and protect a new set of Novices through their first X levels…
This makes adventuring a subculture, recognized and with its own policies, procedures, and practices.
I’ve never tried this approach, though I came close with the adventurer social class and associated society in Fumanor (in a nutshell: The King credited Adventurers with having saved the Kingdom from destruction, and so granted their “profession” official – and taxable – recognition, and insisting that an appropriate bureaucracy be established to oversee sanctioned adventuring activities by any citizen of the Kingdom).
So I can’t report on how successful or not it might be. I suspect that there would be a clear need to roleplay the interactions with the Mentor (who might or might not be with his charges in the field). You would need that characterization “buffer” between GM dictates and the awarding of experience to make this solution viable.
7. Dominant Leader (PC)
This is a similar idea to the previous one, but it requires more substantial tinkering with the rules. The idea is that with a group of relatively inexperienced players, you bring in a battle-scarred veteran player to assist and guide them. To explain the disparity between the player’s experience levels as it manifests in-game, you grant the veteran additional character levels that makes him a dominant leader for the party.
It is necessary that the experienced player be one with the “right” attitude and philosophy regarding inter-team conflicts, for this to work.
But there is a trade-off – if encounters factor in the “leader’s” abilities, they will probably be too dangerous for the novice players, and if they are appropriate for the novices, the “leader” means that they will win easily. The whole foundation of the xp system breaks down if there is enough disparity in character levels to make a difference.
There are two option that I can suggest from my writings here at Campaign Mastery:
– A Different Experience: A variation on the D&D 3.x Experience Points System
(be sure to read the comments, which contain additional explanations and corrections); and,
– Objective-Oriented Experience Points
– though it might require some tweaking. Comparing the amount of xp a (low-level) character gets to the amount the higher-level would get from the same encounter, and applying the ratio, is one answer – but a simpler one is to define them as having different missions. That means that the high-level character will earn one character level for successfully carrying his proteges through to Xth level (whatever the trigger is for ‘handing them on’).
My natural breakdown would be in 5-level bands, meaning that between 16th and 20th levels, characters would be on their own – in a 3.x system – and expected to be training senior journeymen that they have received from some other Master. That gives the three bands – apprentice, journeyman, leading journeyman – as levels 1-5, 6-10, and 11-15, respectively.
8. Forbidden Words
Some GMs think they can solve the problem by banning any discussion of alignment at the table. The only guide to someone’s alignment would be from the actions they were seen to take and the way they described their character’s reactions. This ban would exist for the GM, too, though he can declare a time-out from the rules to discuss something important that might need the forbidden words.
I’m afraid that this solutions strikes me as wishful thinking, fine in theory but impossible to enforce. You would be better off scrapping alignment altogether, as guest author Gary Stahl did in part one of the alignment series referred to previously – An Unneccessary Evil?.
Note that I don’t actually advocate doing so, though Gary raised some good points; Parts 2 and 3 of the series detail my response and an alternative proposal. Gary responded to my proposal in the comments, finding that our ideas had more in common than he had expected.
9. The Cut-purse Warning
Some GMs take the Mos Eisley approach: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy”. A PC can’t steal something an NPC has already misappropriated, in other words, and the threat of NPC ‘appropriations’, given to the players, should be enough for them to take extraordinary precautions – and that in turn makes it harder for a PC to ‘privately appropriate’ anything.
Therefore, runs the theory, problem solved.
There’s a lot to like about this approach. It’s simple, it promises plenty of game-play throughout the campaign, it seems reasonably functional (at least at lower levels)…
But I have an abiding suspicion of any solution that challenges a PC to ‘have a go’ at something you don’t want them to do. It may delay the inevitable, but the bust-up when the Thief thinks he finally has a big enough advantage to give it a try will only be the bigger for it, because the sense of betrayal of loyalty will be bigger.
But it’s a very nice answer – in theory.
10. Mission: Improbable
The characters are all experts, brought together for a common goal, and required to set aside any differences in order to achieve it. That’s the Mission: Impossible answer, and it works a treat – especially when the underlying genre of the campaign supports the concept. Not so much, the rest of the time.
For Pulp and Superhero campaigns? No problem. D&D? With good characters, no problem. With anyone else? I’m not so sure about that one.
11. You Bet Your Life
You can, perhaps, enhance your chances of success by presenting the PCs with a direct threat to everyone’s survival. My experience is that the more directly the PCs are threatened and can act against the threat, the more effective this approach is.
To show why, let’s look at the quartet of possible combinations.
– The threat is direct and the PCs can take immediate action: The ideal form of this scenario, it implies that the PCs are too busy to in-fight, and that if they do in-fight, they could lose it all – which makes the price of party infighting too high to be countenanced.
– The threat is distant and the PCs can take immediate action……but why would they bother? The threat is too remote to motivate them to do anything more than be “themselves” – which is when conflicts come into prominence between them. This, unfortunately, is the way many people see the threat of climate change. My personal take on that issue: even if it is unproven, the dangers posed by climate change are serious enough that action is required now, and the politicians who oppose it are frittering away our window for such action while burying their heads in the sand. The only proof is an increasing incidence of disaster, and that’s unacceptable, so we have to act without waiting for the final, politically-undeniable, proof.
– The threat is direct but it’s not obvious what the PCs can do about it: This is a recipe for despair, for the abandonment of principles and choosing a “go out with a bang” approach. It’s not a good choice for solving the problem, like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
– The threat is distant and it’s not obvious what the PCs can do about it, anyway: And you thought option #3 was bad? This is incomparably worse, to such an extent that you might as well not have the threat in the first place.
Oh dear – that’s all four possible combinations, and only one of them actually promises to even help solve the problem.
But that one works so well that you can even discard the “Elite Force” and have the PCs be ordinary people, who might normally oppose each other violently, but who have to set their animosity aside to confound the common threat. Which is why this item stands alone, separated from #10.
But there’s another, more subtle, problem with this solution: it’s hard to make imminent threats feel distinctive, and so this solution is really more of a holding pattern that buys you time – one whole campaign’s worth – to come up with a better solution.
12. Common Cause – CharGen
Of course, it doesn’t need to be a catastrophic threat to life and limb; you could try giving the PCs common cause as the basis of your campaign. That might be enough.
There are three ways of approaching this; the first one is to mandate one during character creation, telling the players just enough that they can design characters to fit in with the desired circumstances. For example, a PC who wants to play a thief in a very moral campaign in which several PCs are law-enforcement types might be a snitch – sorry, a police informant. The implication is that this particular PC keeps himself out of trouble by selling information to the Police and very definitely not getting them off-side, say by stealing from one of them.
13. Common Cause – Campaign
The second choice is to explicitly define a common cause in the campaign briefing. The difference is in how much the players know about the cause prior to generating characters. Whether you realized it or not, in advance, this actually results in a slightly watered-down form of Elite Force, because the players will shape their character construction to the ‘common cause’.
14. Common Cause – In Play
The last choice is to spring the common cause on the players without warning. You can even give them some quite ordinary adventures to enable them to bond with the game setting before bringing down the curtain on what they thought the campaign would be about – though it’s probably better if you incorporate some vague hints along the way.
You know what all these solutions have in common? None of them are certain to work. Some offer greater security than others, but none provides an iron-clad surety. Not even #11 provides that level of certainty, because players are independent entities to the GM. One PC, for example, may attempt to sell out the rest to the enemy (if there is one), or to save themselves at the expense of the others, or the expense of the overall victory. Holding off the death of everything long enough for them to die at a ripe old age might be a perfectly viable solution – but one that puts inter-party conflict right back onto the agenda.
Horses For Courses
The section title is Australian slang for “making the right choice for the situation”. Different groups will respond in individual ways to any of the solutions offered; none of them are universal panacea. That means that it’s up to the GM to decide what solution his or her group will best respond to.
If you don’t know that there’s going to be a problem, the best course of action is to assume that there won’t be one – unless one of these solutions adds to the richness and depth of the campaign story that you want to tell, of course.
One of the biggest mistakes that a GM can make is blindly applying specific lessons learned from one campaign to one with completely different players. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be wary, shouldn’t learn from the past and make adjustments to improve your ability behind the screen, but it does mean that every campaign starts from zero. You can’t carry grudges or prejudice from one campaign to another.
It’s a matter of trust.
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November 19th, 2019 at 12:23 am
My solution is to explicitly say there will be no intra-party conflict in my game — if that’s a requirement for the player to be happy, they can find another DM. There are infinitely more players than DMs these days, so fiat works fine.
November 19th, 2019 at 4:37 am
You’re right, Craddoke, and that should have been a solution added to my list. If I had done so, I would have described it as a partial solution, addressing conflicts that result from wilful intent, but doing nothing about circumstances that arise through legitimate role-play. What’s more, ultimatums like this imply a threat (“Or else…”), and those in turn imply some form of enforcement mechanism – and I have to admit that I can’t think of one that doesn’t risk making matters worse. Still, if you’ve made it work for you – perhaps with the willing cooperation of your players – then I can only say, more power to you!