Treacherous PC Advice Needed

[strongarm85]

On another forum I've started up a Play by Post game. Right now I have 5 active players. For their first adventures I'm thrusting them into the "Freedom for Edan" scenario.

That rate we're playing they'll probably be finished with "Assault on Edan Base" around Friday or so.

I decided to rename the scenario "Trouble in Edan" rather than "Freedom for Edan" because the cast of PCs involved because the end Result probably wont be anything like the "Freedom for Edan".

I have five active Player Characters right now, and a sixth waiting in the wings.

I have a Rodian Bounty Hunter, a Toydarian Failed Jedi, and a human Special Forces guy. The human in the group is force sensitive, but doesn't know that he is or even what force sensitive means.

The fourth player is a Young Hutt Crimelord. The reason he's at Edan Base is to negotiate a supply line sell the Rebels weapons and provisions. Since he's not a fighter by any stretch of the imagination, I went ahead and provided him with two body guard NPCs. The Guards are farely Generic NPCs, in a head to head battle against an equal number of Stormtroopers they'd probably loose 7/10.

The reason I decided to allow this character is to simply add yet another sub-plot to everything that is already going on. Now the Rebels characters fleeing the base are not just having to worry about Imperials, but they also have to worry about protecting their VIP since the supplies that he could arrange would greatly help their effort. But this VIP is also a huge jerk. The Character has already threatened one of the other characters because he wanted one of the Blaster Rifles found in the weapons locker to go to one his guards instead of the Failed Jedi player. So even though they have to keep him safe while they're doing all of this, they also don't trust him any further than they can throw him. Being a Hutt, he might betray the Rebels if he feels its in his best interests.

The last character, who I've yet to mention, is the highest ranking member of the Rebelion on their team. A Low ranking officer. So far even out of character and in decision making (sense I'm allowing a lot of player discussion to go on in the main thread) he's been generally leading the group so far. The thing is he's not just a Rebel, he's an Imperial Spy. Furthermore the attack on Edan base is a result of information that he managed to smuggle out to the Empire before the story began.

The only problem from, his perspective, is that attack happened too early. It wasn't supposed to happen until he was re-deployed to another base. His mission is to find the location of the main Rebel Contingent and report it's location while occasionally reporting other Rebel activities and locations of smaller contingents until he was able to fulfill his mission. His primary problem right now is the Imps can't tell him apart from the Rebels he's assigned to spy on. As of right now, that's all the player knows.

What he doesn't know is that the reason why the Imperials showed up early. Its because the CO in charge of the Star Destroyer in Orbit intercepted the report before it reached its destination and used attacking the Rebel Base as a pretense to subsequently arrest and enslave the planet's native population to work in his family's mines.

So that's basically the situation right now. I might be a ways off before it happens, but there are two characters in this group who may very well betray the rest of the group if given right situations. I was wondering anyone had any advice on what would be a good way to handle things if and when it happens.

[Lostboy]

Toydarian's and other force resistant rases cant be force users.

[strongarm85]

Beldorion would disagree .

[Gry Sarth]

Agreed. Being "mind trick resistant" doesn't mean you can't be affected by the Force in other ways, and manipulate it yourself. We're not talking Yhuuzan Vong "Force void" here.
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"He's Gry Sarth, of course he has the stats for them."

[strongarm85]

There are lots of reasons why mind affecting techniques would be ineffective for that matter. Strangers not the same species have a DC30, but these other species with higher resistances could simply stem from from their minds being so different from everyone else's that attempts to affect them have a much lower probability of affecting them.

[Lostboy]

Unexpected this is. I didn't know about Beldorion but you make a compelling point.

Never the less for game balance having both force sensitivity and force resistance might be a little unbalancing. The difficulty of using your own powers should be increased by the resistance factor(Different species are resistant to different degrees.)ie the mind effecting powers have their difficulty doubled when used against a hutt so a hutts powers should require their difficulty doubled whene not used against any non hutts.[/b]

[cheshire]

I think it's great that you've got two people who could potentially betray the group. One of which they implicitly trust, and the other they they find highly suspect.

Personally, I would use this duality to heighten the drama. Lay out the plot obsticles and betrayals so that either one of them could potentially be responsible. When things finally come to a head where they feel the events are coming to a final culmination with a confrontation or fight with the traitor, that's when you have your choice. You can either let them go through with their error and deal with the consequences of having persecuted an "innocent" person, or at that moment you can have the real traitor do his big reveal. Either one would be dramatically appropriate.
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Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[Amra]

My best advice is don't try to stop it. If one (or especially both) want to screw their fellow characters, let it happen. Make suggestions. However, make sure the players are mature enough to not take it personally and let character shenanigans disrupt real world social interactions.

One of the best campaigns I ever played was a group of characters who didn't trust each other, and even tried to set each other up. We were all good friends, but our characters were playing every man for himself.

These dynamics really empasize role playing, as opposed to roll playing.

[mdlake]

Unless you expect betrayal will ruin the fun for everyone else, there's no need to prevent it. (Given the character concepts, the chances that someone will feel cheated of a good game seem small, but it happens.)

If, for some reason, a true, campaign-ending betrayal is unacceptable, you could tailor the motive of the destroyer's captain to something the spy will feel he must address even if it means letting Edan off the hook, or even if it means finding common cause with a rag-tag band of rebels...for the time being. You could even build it into a great crisis of faith that turns the spy against the Empire for good. Tricky, but doable. Obviously, you'll need the player's cooperation.

The Hutt and the spy have implicitly given permission for NPCs to betray them, in turn. Perhaps you'd prefer to allow them to betray the group, only to find their reward is immediate execution, now that they are no longer useful and/or know too much. Whether they can escape their well-deserved fate(s) and rejoin the less perfidious characters to free Edan then is rather up to the PCs.

[Dread Pirate Al]

This IS Star Wars.

So the treacherous PCs should have the chance to come good.

Just because they start the film er campaign as treacherous curs that does not mean that they have to be baddies when the credits roll



Yarrrrr