Okay, I have never EVER been a fan of interparty conflict. I'm usually from the "Can't We All Get Along?" philosophy.

Last night in our regular game, our party had just escaped from a space hulk full of tyranids. We made it off the hulk in a jury-rigged and abandoned Thunderhawk gunship and exhausted our fuel escaping from a rift in the warp. We set our rescue beacon calling out on all channels and eventually get picked up by an Inquisitorial frigate.

My character is a Cleric. I'm a devout follower of the Imperial Cult and I'm also a Noble.

Another character in our party is a Guardsman from a feral world. He doesn't really give my character a lot of respect and sees me as a weak coward due to my lack of close combat ability. In several prior situation he has commented on this, although he seems to appreciate me enough to have saved my hide once or twice.

.....anyway, We land in the frigate docking bay and are met by a platoon of 30 Naval Guardsman and a man stating he is an Interrogator in the Inquisition. He also tells us we are under arrest for heresy and will face the possibility of dying as traitors. The fact that we arrived in an abandoned and jury-rigged Thunderhawk may have had something to do with that, but we can't really be sure what his motivation is for declaring us heretics.

So, at this point, I'm thinking most of what the Interrogator said is bluster. Once in custody, we can explain the situation and talk our way out of it. My character is a Noble, a Priest of the Imperial Cult and an Acolyte in the Inquisition. I'm also quite adept at both the Charm and Deceive skills. Our feral guardsman character is not under the same impressions as I though. Nor does he have any faith in my ability to talk us out of trouble.

When the Interrogator has the ships guardsmen try to take us into custody, our guardsman attacks and then lobs a grenade into the midst of the platoon.

In the chaos following everyone still alive runs. The interrogator escapes and we are in pursuit. Some of us want to surrender and explain the situation. Our guardsman contents himself with slaying every 'enemy' around him with a giant axe as if he were a lumberjack felling trees.

It's described to the rest of the party that he's gone berserk and looks "somewhat" like a man possessed.

Anyway, after following this guardsman on a trail of destruction with him NOT listening to any sort of talk of giving ourselves up for questioning. Plus, based on his body count, I'm not too sure that's an option for him... or us anymore based on our association with him.

What it comes down to is this... He wouldn't listen to words. I can't best him physically..... So I shot him at point blank range in the back with my Hellpistol to get his attention. I knew full well, 1 shot would not kill him (unless I critted), but it might get him to stop for a moment.... even if it was just to hack me to pieces.

Was I wrong for doing this? Should I have shot a fellow party member that wouldn't listen to reason?

How would others have handled this?

Frankly, I felt like a Commissar for doing it. We did find out afterward that he distrusted the Interrogator and fully assumed we would be killed...so he decided to fight for his life and ours like a caged animal. I felt like I had betrayed someone in the party who had saved me in the past. While we have differing opinions, we are all on the same side.

A quick note: In the end, we did surrender, were tried and convicted of heresy and were saved at the last minute from the firing squad by our Inquisitor's retinue.

My opinion?

I HATE inter-party conflict. But if we strand on a starvessel UNDER CONTROL OF AN INQUISITOR and get confronted with 30 IG and an Interrogator.... the last thing I would do would attacking with a fragmentation grenade.

If we would talk about "being ambushed in city", that is a different thing. But you will not get out from a ship (unless your board the control room or a guncutter with enough firepower to blast the hull open!). Your comrade playes his figure well... but it was the right thing to put him down.

...but good and just Emporer on Terra, haven´t you had an Arbite or some-one else whith less lethal means?

You should have shot him sooner, and repeatedly, after all he might have been possessed or infected by the tyranids (at least those are the excuses I'd use afterwards). Better safe than executed because one of your associates is a lunatic.

If that's what your character would've done, then it's alright. Remember that you are playing a character, someone who isn' you (the real you), and sometimes characters do things that the player wouldn't have done IRL.

It's a tough one. Usually I would advise talking to your GM about this beforehand, see if he is comfortable with PvP conflict. Under the circumstances I think it was the right thing to do - if a PC acts like a crazed homicidal lunatic, the best thing to do is put him down.

I find that it is necessary sometimes (referring to inter-party conflict). It's a dark universe, and you're all trying to survive. If someone is doing their best to remove everyone's meagre attempts at living a life, then I'd go full-out to stop them. People disagree. Words get thrown around. Feelings hurt. It happens, and someone has to got to do something about it. Beliefs clash, thoughts rattle at each other, suspicion and paranoia egg inside of your head.

Take for example, the online game where I play essientially a Redemptionist-lite Arbitrator. There's a member of the party that's a radical, but it's only known information out-of-character. He has beliefs that would anger my character to the core and my character would probably attempt to end his life (repeatedly). Puritan versus Radical conflicts. It keeps the game interesting to me at least, because my character doesn't have a clue of anything about him and his ways, other than he is a low-life scum that should be fed to the dogs.

But, if he ever did find out anything of his nefarious deeds and ways...

DocIII said:

Actually, I was infected by the tyranids during one of our confrontations with them...but that's another story.

On another note, I had less lethal means of getting his attention in the form of a Shock Maul, but this guy is a rampant BEAST in hand to hand combat. I would not have connected and most likely the knock out feature wouldn't have worked even if I did connect. To date, it has never worked for me.

I'm a better shot and knew based on the penetration of my weapon it would have gotten his attention.

In addition, the guilt is fully on my part as a player. I think my character fully believes in what he did and the guardsman player is fully content with how his character acted. They both acted in character.

LeBlanc13 said:

Well, then don't feel guilty.

What happens in character, stays in character. No need to take it personal.

The same goes for intra-party conflict in general. It would be naive of a GM to just assume that the PC's in the party are going to be the best of friends all the time, so a smart GM should prepare for the worst (where PC's start to kill eachother over their differences). Personally I like intra-party conflicts and as a GM I try to promote and instigate it happening. Just to see how my players will react to it and what will happen.

There is nothing so boring as the "friendly" party were everybody trusts eachother completely and would never EVER entertain the idea of stabbing their fellow PC's in the back or that they might get stabbed in the back later on. Suffice to say that I find the "us against the world" mentality a bit dull. It is the MMORPG equivalent of PvE gaming, and that has a tendency to get old after a while.

As long as the guardsman player understands and doesn't hold any grudges, it's absolutely no harm done. I think your character behaved pretty much as he should have in that kind of situation, and it all makes sense. It's a bit of an unfortunate situation, but you both roleplayed your characters appropriately, so really, no one should make any fuss over it.

Locque said:

Exactly! In fact, you and the guardsman player should appriciate the situation. It is after all quite dramatic when acolytes from the same cell turns on eachother. Sure there are downsides, some PC's might die etc. But it's not such a big deal considering how awesome the story got with such dramatic turn of events.

Varnias Tybalt said:

We should never allowed him to carry grenades...

As far as characters are concerned, I think that relationship has taken a turn for the worse. I can't wait to have my character lord over the guardsman that "Faith in the Emperor" did protect us... as I had stated throughout the adventure. This time he was right!

Player-wise, I really like my whole group. The GM and all of the people I play with are great.

I'm really interested in seeing how the fallout from this conflict plays out over time.

LeBlanc13 said:

You sir, broke the fifth rule of suriving Delta Green gaming. Namely the:

"Never let your less-than-sane colleague carry the explosives."

And just look what happened!

LeBlanc13 said:

Precisely. Now compare these results with the more bland an boring course of action where your group just sticked together all the time and never did anything out of turn or against eachother. Then you would have no fallout to look forward to at all.

This makes me think of a recent session of the game I run.

The acolytes had faced an defeated their first opponent that was armed with a daemon weapon. I had rolled the weapon randomly including the daemon in it (Astral Spectre). Being good little imperials they decided to destroy the daemon sword.

After shooting it and chopping it with a mono-axe failed to make a scratch, the cell's resident demolitions guy took a full kilo of explosives and four frag grenades and rolled 5 DoS to make a field assembled shaped charge. That worked.

However, the perils roll from its destruction came up with a daemonic manifestation, so the daemon was let loose. Being an Astral Spectre it was a creepy discorporeal, freaky looking cloud of light fog and shadow. They tried several ways to attack it, which did not work so well, resulting in three out of four acolytes within the cloud of the Spectre (and it probing them to see which one to possess). The fourth guy (as it happens the demo guy who let the thing loose in the first place panicked that everyone was getting possessed, muttered "sorry guys" and hosed the whole lot with burning promethium from his flamer.

Now I don't usually run games with a me (the GM) vs. them (the players) mentality, but little is as sweet as seeing 75% of the PC's burning like wildfires without the GM having to even have rolled a die.

How's that for intra-party conflict?

DocIII said:

It's awesome, that's what it is!

... Besides. It's their own fault. If they knew it was a daemon weapon (don't know how they figured this out but you said they did), don't you think they should have figured it out that i they break the weapon, the daemon would be released?

In our group we usually opt to bring everything that seems important and hand the stuf over to our Inquisitor once we get back, confident that he'll know what to do with it... (Then again, that behaviour might result in us getting a radical Inquisitor that goes insane due to all the little "trinkets" we bring him)

My party has had alot of problems in the past with inner-party conflict. Only recently did we agree that unless its in an absolutly dire circumstance we will not raise arms against each other to kill (but the occasional honor duel is okay), its okay to go against our characters backround. In former parties we had issues where our pilot killed a guys new PC (as his old one died in the underhive) for saying "Dont ask about my history". The poor bloke didnt even play the character for 20 mins before he got gunned down by a party member. At this point, after my character killed the pilot in his sleep because he thought he was unnaturally bloodthirsty (OOC it was meerly payback to see how he would like it), we all decided that playing our characters is fine but they should know that the inquisition wont tolerate innerparty problems over stupid stuff.

The last instance (last week in fact) of inner party conflict was actually a great rollplaying expirance. The group was on a mission to kill a rogue acolyte, the group consisted of my Moritat Assassin (Arleth Vann), my friends pansy Adept (Tobias), a feral guardsman that was played as a norsfolkmen (Erik Bloodaxe), and a witch hunter esque cleric (Castus). We cornered him at an undercroft under a temple, but he was encased inside of an iron gollem (obviously heretical tech), and we retreated to the temple so we could better fortify our position. Erik and Castus left, and decided to go get PDF members to help fight him. It resulted in an arguement about never fleeing from a heretic between me and Erik. In the middle of the argument he simply left with Castus. Vann told Tobias to go, to save his own life and bring word of the heretical technology to the inquisitor, and to deliver a message to his moritat cell informing them of his soon to be death. Tobias ran, but not out of the temple, but into another room of the temple. Vann concealed himself in a corner and waited for the machine to reveal itself. When it did, it had damaged itself on the acention from the undercroft (or so I was lead to believe, *hint hint*) to the point where the machine shut itself down and passed out infront of Vann. He goes over to the pilots hatch, opened it, and cut off the targets head. He then attempted to contact Tobias, which he failed at, then left the temple to report to the interrogator who assigned them this mission.

At the report, he made a note of saying how Erik and Castus fled the scene meer minutes before killing the target. Erik got infuriated and challanged Vann to a duel, to first blood. Vann lost the duel, but because he fought like a warrior from Eriks home. Erik embraced him as a brother. One of two"Friends" Arleth Vann has is due to the innerparty conflict. The first (Tobias) is due to the fact that Tobias put his own life on the line to stop two logicans from taking Vann hostage, and he killed them in the bloodiest way possable (Two headshots both with Righteous Fury).

Just sounds to me like you had a good rp session. Everyone stayed in character and did excatly what they thought they would do. The feral guardsman behaving "like a caged animal" sounds bang on the money to me.

As you say so long as all the"players" remain freinds then its great to have inter party conflict. It creates drama and new story lines...and saves the GM a stack load of work

Why bother having to stat 30 assorted mooks, a scay psyker and a tough bad guy to ambush the party with.......when the players are happily doing their own mexican stand off.

Varnias Tybalt said:

The characters didn't know it was a daemon weapon per se (the players, knowing a decent amount of the setting had a pretty good idea though), but based on things that happend in the fight the characters were certain it was an evil supernatural weapon (the badguy was a Khorne worshiper whose idea of subtle was massacre all witnesses), that was enough for them to decide it was heretical and to destroy it.

They had no idea at all (or at least didn't stop to consider) the risks involved in destroying such an item.

They didn't take it back to their Inquisitor because they had been stranded when their contact that was supposed to get them off planet died in a house fire and they had no alternate means of contact in place. They weren't doing a mission when they fought the Khorne guy as much as stumbling across him while trying to travel to one of the spaceports on Acreage. Since they didn't know when or under what circumstances they'd get back to their boss, they decided to handle it themselves.

To be fair, the guardsman initiated the "inner-party conflict".

My psyker in my game pissed the party off *so* much that they put an explosive collar on him in his sleep. What the party doesn't know is that the psyker is under *direct* orders to behave this way from the Inquisitor, to "test" the acolytes he inherited.

While my party doesn't tend to geek themselves very often (it happens occasionally), I encourage party conflicts so long as there's a legitimate, in character reason. Conflicts between PCs *force* each player to flesh out his character's personality.

I just request that players metagame a smidge to refrain from geeking a teammate. Thankfully, DH provides me with an in-game control to help contain this. It is a problem with some of the people I game with, who love nothing else other than to find an in-game reason to kill another PC.

TheFlatline said:

Well, their Inquisitor is obviously nuts, and the rest of the acolytes are obviously sound and wise people. Psykers SHOULD ALWAYS be fitted with explosive collars, unless you want a daemonhost munching on your rear quarters in the near future.

-"Perils of the Warp you say? Failed the Willpower test to resist possession did you?"

*BLEEP! KA-BOOM!*

-"Problem solved. Oh master, were gonna need another spook in our group. This one seems to have broken!"

I think that you acted completely reasonably. To be fair though, if I had been GMing a similar scenario the guardsman would have been shot into human puree as soon as he pulled out the grenade. I tend to be a fairly merciful GM, but I draw the line at trying to take on thirty armed opponents who have the drop on you.

I find the OP's situation deliciously grimdark. I must remember to sow the seeds of dissent among my players.