Rainbow Dash: Ah, don't worry, you're safe. Heck, let's say we gave ALL the homes lightning rods, so we can go all out!
Rarity: Fine. Then I guess we can spend the night in a... wizard's house. Cleaning our hooves first, naturally.
Twilight Sparkle: I heard that pause. What's up?
Rarity: Well, it's just, you know, wizards often have things in their homes.
Applejack: Like an enchanted water hose to clean up with.
Rarity: Indeed. Or books of forbidden knowledge. You DO live in a library.
Applejack: Good thing we don't have to make sanity checks. Or how about monstrous servants?
Rarity: And we don't mean Spike.
Twilight Sparkle: You've got me all wrong! I'm not that type of wizard. I've got something much better planned for you two.
Rarity: What's with that look, darling?
Applejack: Uh, just checking, but can Rainbow Dash aim a lightning bolt in through the window?
Twilight Sparkle: Heh, heh. PILLOW FIGHT! With Mage Hand I can... uh... uh oh...
Applejack: Awful brave of you to go one on two.
Rarity: IT! IS! ON!
Rainbow Dash: Heeey, there's PvP and I'm not there?
Guest Author's Note: "Normally PvP within a party is a problem, but tell us of times when it strengthened the party and made things more enjoyable for all the players."
Notice: Guest comic submissions are open! Guidelines here. Deadline: February 20th.
Maybe it can, but I've never seen it happen in the 20+ years I've been gaming. That includes a couple stints trying out Paranoia, where PvP is the point. Some players may find it fun, but most of my locals never got into it.
It can really depend on the setting and how you get there. Player relations breaking down is bad...but in some very shonen manga type settings, you can be chomping at the bit to see how your characters fare if they fight one another.
It's worked pretty well for me in PTU games, although mostly in purely Pokemon-on-Pokemon battles. Probably because friendly battles are a theme of Pokemon in the first place.
I remember one campaign where some of the players, with martial artist PCs, spent some scenes IC sparring as an extension of their mutual OOC enjoyment of white-room combat and playing with the system. I didn't care for it myself, but they clearly did.
This spilled over into character builds: they wielded mystic martial arts while I brought gun and, when that didn't work, more gun. (To be fair, they could punch almost as hard as I could shoot, and mine were the biggest guns in the party, at one point including a nuclear warhead capable of cratering a city - having been stolen out of a missile intended to do just that, in mid-flight. Let's just say, my PC's magic was routed more toward the rogue archetype.) I wasn't the only one; in combat, half the party was punchy tanks, the other half snipers relying on agility and distance (and that the enemies had the other PCs in their faces) for defense.
There are some instances where pvp in our party was "required". There were some tournaments that played a lot like Castle Crashers dualing for the maiden's haert at the end of some levels, or where we simply had to fight eachother because non of us were very good at the perform skill (fake fight eachother in front of our enemeis/potential allies, long story).
there are a few times when I have played characters that learn and train during random moments in peace times in game. Specially in a Star Wars Campain I was in, where I worked on the force as well as being trained in combat by the fighter so id stop almost taking my own arm off with my saber :P
Thanks! My own writing style but the visual style mirroring NS's is what I was aiming for.
I repeat my offer as posted in last Tuesday's comments, if you want to do it too (because more good-quality guest authors for next time is not a bad thing).
I once played a sorcerer who was fond of big splashy area damage spells. The other characters were... "optimized for purposes other than combat." I spent a dozen sessions trying to convince them that getting fire resistance items and blowing ourselves up with fireballs was both hilarious and a good strategy. Couldn't get any of them to budge. Then we fought the vampire.
This guy was a real jerk, took his time stalking us and dominating each party member in turn. When he finally got to me, I dropped a quickened resist fire on myself, followed by a wall of fire. I was nearly unscathed, they were all down to single digit hp by the end.
We survived, and the next time we got back to town they were clamoring over each other to buy rings of fire resistance. The rogue grabbed a wand of fireball, the fighter found a necklace of fireballs, and we exploded our way through the rest of the campaign. It. Was. AWESOME.
I can imagine. I've been in a campaign where you could get items that let you absorb damage of a certain elemental type, so the party mages would spam AoEs of that type to hurt the enemy and heal the tanks at the same time. (Until we ran into enemies that were immune to or could likewise absorb that element...but the AoEs could be aimed to only heal our tanks. It just took longer to take those enemies down.)
This is what happens when you play all undead characters in D&D. Spam negative energy everywhere healing the party and killing all the living squishy enemies.
Bonus points if you are undead because of templates that let you control undead so the GM can't risk sending your own kind after you.
I had a similar experience. It was a normal dungeon crawl (typical Pathfinder Society mission) and every time I asked the Magus if I should cast a spell on him, instead of saying "Yes" he'd say "QUIT ASKING STUPID QUESTIONS, BIRD." (I was a Tengu Sorcerer)
Fast-forward to the boss, who had filled the room with fog but had been corned by the Magus. I asked if I should shoot a Fireball in their direction even though it would certainly cause him great harm as well.
"QUIT ASKING STUPID QUESTIONS, BIRD."
Well, it DID kill the boss AND the Magus was still in postive HP afterwards! =D
In the Persona-based campaign I'm in, my character is pretty reserved and cautious. But somehow, another party member, who is boisterous and prone to running into things without thinking, convinced me to fence with him. (With perfectly ordinary not-at-all-sharp fencing sabers, in case it's not clear.)
I immediately rolled a 1, and he rolled a 6 (on a d6, in my dump stat and his highest stat). We decided this meant that he managed to hit me so hard that he drew blood and I could barely move my arm for ten minutes. But we did form a social link (read: strong friendship with game-mechanics benefits) from the experience.
I was in a game where I was playing a veteran fighter who just recently joined forces with a brand-new book-learning-only arcanist (among others). In the first few encounters, my fighter steam-rolled half the enemy army by herself, while the arcanist rolled a near perfect chain of misses with her ranged touch attacks. Her incredible bad luck became a source of ooc teasing, so I decided to do something about it in-character.
The next time we had a break, the "veteran" urged the "rookie" to spar with her, in order to teach her how to cast and evade in a simulated combat environment. We fought a duel (non-lethal only, of course), which mostly involved my fighter beating the arcanist with a stick, interspersed with "you'll thank me for this later," etc.
Oddly enough, our characters built quite a bit of mutual trust with that exercise, and the arcanist's accuracy has been better lately.
Well, it didn't *strictly speaking* strengthen the party, but I guess it did give one player's character some development. This is from D&D 5e.
We'd just finished up fighting some trolls and upon looting their stash of items we found a bag, which the halfling rogue insisted on searching several times. All this while, I was getting frustrated at what looked like an obvious attempt at badgering the DM into making it a bag of holding. He was on 3hp after the fight with the trolls and I didn't want to dope slap him or anything in case the DM made me roll for damage, even nonlethal, so I decided to make a roll to grab the bag from him, which succeeded, and then another successful roll to shove the bag on his head, while declaring "Good news. It's a bag!"
Imagine my surprise when he disappeared into said bag. Having read some funny stories involving parties encountering items that have held similar properties but also been prone to killing or dismembering those who stick themselves into them, partially or otherwise, I feared the worst. Tipping the bag upside down got him out, but he fell the full distance of the inside of the bag, so about 20 feet, roughly the same as the depth of a bag of holding.
Bearing in mind that he was on 3hp and every 10 feet is 1 die that gets rolled for fall damage... yeah. He was alive, but he lost a lot of his hit dice for that day. He's consistently had his character refuse to enter the bag of holding since, even for safety or when it'd be more convenient to do so.
In Monsterhearts, PvP is arguably the whole point, as your angsty supernatural teams snipe at each other. It can be a lot of fun if everybody understands that it's a genre thing and not a personal thing.
The system really has to be built for it to work, though, and that means the players have to be able to fight without actually killing each other, and you have to have a rules set that allows a character to actually win a conflict over intangible things (like arguing over whose plan to follow). Monsterhearts, Mouse Guard, and Dogs in the Vineyard all handle it well, in my opinion.
The Gift of Maud Pie is about 50% standard lesson episodes, and 50% character based hilarity, like Maud's ice skating skill, Rarity bouncing around like a morph ball on a sugar rush, or the Maud Sense.
I'm staff for a Changeling: the Lost LARP. Given our player count, PvP is a driving force of the game. Klatsky* killed your buddy? Punch him in the nuts. Klatsky stole your sandwich? Punch him in the nuts. Klatsky sold the souls of your departed comrades for a bauble at the auction house? Punch him in the nuts. Really, just punch Klatsky in the nuts. He's a dick.
*Klatsky is a real PC in our LARP, and only one of those is made up. It's the one about a sandwich.
Is it really bravery for a wizard to fight a few foes in melee combat? ... maybe, but here is a challenge you could make for yourself. Make a spellcaster (wizard, sorcerer, etc.) that has no close quarters expertise, and develop them to be a real contenter for such a bout.
I have none, in fact my angular worst memory in DnD was a session where most of us killed each other in pvp, most of it bent fr "role playing" reasons that I felt were stupid.
And then me, the guy who won the pvp, the the guy who like me didn't participate in pvp(I have a absolute rule I will leave the game, WITH MY SHEET, if for any reason I am forced into pvp, and insist my presence be OOCLY retconned from the story, that I may deserve them in a game that's not bent shit.), and a reroll of one of the guys that died... Well long story short, DM forgot said PVPer had a flaw where he does not heal from resting, and he let the other survive "test" us IC, through some dumb anime ninja "see if they are worthy", and used a COMPLETELY uncoil able disguise and a illusion of himself in a cave... Oh and he also gave himself TEN levels for this fight.
The best fighter in or group, the pvp RPer I mentioned before, died instantly, and for reasons. Don't recall, the remaining guy tried to kill me because "math" or something I don't know... We don't let tha DM try to DM again, meaning I am doomed to forever DM and neve PC, because I have a "you pvp, I end this game" rule, which s CLEARLY nessarily for this group.
So yeah I despise PVP in tabletop RPGs on just about every level.
Guest Author's Note: "Normally PvP within a party is a problem, but tell us of times when it strengthened the party and made things more enjoyable for all the players."