I kind of have a sticky situation right now with the party I'm in right now. My GM is rather open minded and allowed custom races and 3.5 material into the game, and due to how the players set up their characters, its started some conflicts that do not seem to have any immediate solutions.
The situation right now is we have five players and a cohort. Two players are CN custom races that could best be considered small Strix's, one monk and one swashbuckler, set up for high AC and damage, who's motives are to become pirates and have fun messing with everyone, player and NPC alike. We have a half dragon, half human rogue who's also CN and literally is tagging along with the two players above in order to have fun adventuring and stay away from her fiance (a plot hook).
Opposing them are two custom characters based off of Hylians, a rogue with a monk cohort, who are built for role-playing purposes over combat, and a custom dragonborn thats an ex-paladin, now a warblade/bard multiclass, who is sort of the middleman who wants a mix of combat and roleplay. They're true neutral (leans good),lawful good, and lawful good (that now spans the good spectrum) respectively. All three have the similar reasons of traveling around adventuring for the sake of taking in new experiences.
The basic plot synopsis is that somehow all these characters got thrown onto an airship, which is a new pioneering technology across the land, and one day all divine magic is suddenly done, and its the groups job to find out why.
The conflict I'm seeing is the chaotic neutral vs good (and lawful to a degree) arguments that will inevitably ensue and will make it hard for the group to stay together. Does anyone have any advice on how I as a player or as a character could either talk to the GM or to other players/characters to try and find some way to solve this issue without the entire party turning against each other over conflicting interests?
There's no reason why a CN character can't work with an LG one... As long as the CN character isn't an ass about it. There should really be a rule against PvP; stealing from other party members and other in-party fighting nonsense is a dead campaign waiting to happen.
If the GM knows what he's doing, he has something planned to force the players to work together, to make working together in everyone's best interest (sort of a "I hate you, but I'd rather not die moment"). As a character, you can try to find ways to convince the other characters that working together is in their best interest.
Also, I expect the conflicts will be less "chaotic neutral vs. good" and more "selfish bastards vs. people who want to help". The "mess with everyone, player and NPC alike" attitude is going to be more of an issue than alignment. If you can find ways to work that attitude to your advantage, you should be fine.
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Alignment in and of itself isn't necessarily an issue. But, the attitude of wanting to mess with players is a big red flag.
If I were you I would discuss with the GM that you would like a no PVP rule in place. Which means you can't do anything to another players character, without their out of character permission. First and foremost this should be secured. Because I have a strong feeling based on the two group constructions, the chaotic neutral group will walk all over the good group if allowed.
Second thing is that the GM needs to have a good reason for the CN guys to cooperate with the guys who want to save the world. This may require greater detail of their characters and backgrounds to flesh out believable reasons why they would be interested.
To be honest the CN group sounds like they want to be Murderhoboing Richards, based on your description.
Yeah, I'm most likely going to have to discuss with the GM over how to deal with the problem, and no PvP sounds like a good place to start.
Honestly my issue is that the two that want to be pirates definitely have the greatest potential to walk all over the rest of the party simply because they're more readily built for combat (I mean, they're built for dexterity, have taken teamwork feats AND they can fly naturally, whereas everyone else has at most feather fall rings or spells). Combined with the fact that they're already plotting to oust the captain of the airship and take it over for themselves, I'm hoping that I can find some way to leverage enough advantage to keep myself and the other two good aligned characters from being forced to "walk the plank."
And yeah, that's a good summary of it, because from what I can tell from the players perspective the two players want to be able to go completely off the plot to fulfill their personal side quests, which usually involves pillaging, obtaining wealth or power, and in one case they want to pull off their plan on seducing the admiral of the nations navy.
It's going to be kinda hard to convince two wanna-be pirates and a noblewoman on the run to come to any sort of agreement with a traveling combat bard, a paranormal investigator and a monk that's tagging along just to make sure his investigator friend doesn't get screwed over.
I haven't really thought of it like that before. So by taking advantage of my alignment I can have a good chance of bargaining my way into the party, and I can actually give them a legitimate front through being a good and fair leader compared to them, while using the paranormal investigation as another front to provide legitimate business services beside looking like traders to gain access for wealth for the CN characters and professional business for the good characters. Course I sense the idea of digging up graves will cause some issues, but it still sounds better than a major party conflict.
Well for a status update, I did talk to my GM, and he has accepted the no PvP rule without player permission to stick, so that will help a little, but apparently his insights are aimed at people's play styles. In his opinion, the hard part is dealing with differences in play styles. The CN swashbuckler and monk players like trying out the features of classes and feats and try to wring the most of them through optimization and combat, and enjoy doing things that are completely absurd or off the wall. The bard and rogue/monk combo players play more realistically, trying to roleplay through scenarios with logic and critical thinking, and don't completely optimize their builds because they try and cater to combinations that can lead to unique roleplay opportunities, though the bard is designed to be a jack of all trades and the rogue/monk are meant for skills and roleplay. The CN rogue is a relatively new player that's kind of a middle of the road between these two extremes, but at least on the roleplay side leans more heavily towards the absurd than the realistic.
Overall, the GM said he's going to have trouble to find a compromise to have the two trains of thinking for playing the game co-mingle, especially because the personality of both players and the characters themselves means the swashbuckler and TN rogue are going to be constantly arguing over whether to take the common sense approach or the risky and absurd approach. He also acknowledges that due to the bard being an ex-paladin means that if they take the piracy approach that anything other than trying to become privateers is bound to cause trouble.
Since I enjoy the meaningful feedback I'm getting from people on this thread, I'm going to post some updates on how the situations going.
So far we haven't devolved into the piracy side of things quite yet, though the two CN piracy-leaning characters now command the merchant vessel they were already crew members on. The CN rogue is in a little bit of a pickle, because her rich fiancé is after her, and ended up paying the TN hylian rogue to investigate and keep tabs on her, complete with 20,000 GP down payment (frigging caused the rest of the party to have our eyes almost pop out of our heads, because even as 7th level characters we considered that to be a huge amount of money). Said rogue on the run also seems to have her family after her, once it came to light her main backstory is that her family is comprised of trained assassins and when she got sent on her first assignment (to kill one the CN monk ironically), she didn't carry it out because she's getting bribed with large sums of money by the two piracy leaning characters.
The major conflict still at this point is integrating the warblade/bard and the hylian rogue with her cohort because they don't really have much motivation to stay with the other three crew members. The rogue refuses to do anything towards contributing to an airship since she doesn't like them at all, combined with character tension over nobody paying any interest in her paranormal investigation specialty and tension between her character and the CN swashbuckler, who's the new captain, which can be characterized as a money gouger and being very confrontational when it comes to social interactions. The bard has a lesser level of tension with said captain, mostly due to money gouging and getting irritated OOC at how OP her character is compared to his own, due to having to listen to how optimized she is with an AC over 28 and with an attack bonus of over thirty on her first attack, which has gotten out of hand enough that the GM has to set up a combat with two types of opponents; ones to take on the combat optimized characters and ones to take on the non combat optimized characters.
I'm hoping to find some way to convince said hylian character to stay with the ship, because she's stated that she'd be willing to not accept the rest of the rich guys reward if the three keep emphasizing their plan on drink booze, sail around, kill foes quickly and efficiently, and make tons of money, but if things keep going the same I'm already planning for the idea that the warblade/bard, hylian rogue and cohort will split from the other three and get on another ship, which will most likely make the GM's job a nightmare.
Well, to sum up an answer to that question, the GM is trying to avoid intra-party conflict because in terms of how conflict is forming in the party it's turning into the exact same composition as the last campaign we did together, right down to the players siding with the exact same others as last campaign (aka the three CN characters forming one group and the non CN characters forming the opposition in this case, with said players of these characters forming the exact same split in the campaign before this). He's trying to avoid this both to make the game easier to get through and he doesn't want to have to feel like he's putting up with the exact same split as before in the last campaign.
In my opinion I think the CN players both enjoy and dislike the conflict at the same time, because on the one hand it fuels the personality of at least one of the characters, but on the other hand the CN group is sort of exasperated by the fact that the non CN characters don't just go along with them, especially the rogue and cohort because they don't understand that she doesn't have much interests in airships, even if they're the central means of transportation in the game, and in their minds they think she agreed to it when she got outvoted by the group along above group lines and the GM tried to appease everyone because the group was originally torn over what campaign to run and had gotten ties over the ideas of "loss of divine magic", "martial only party", and "airships", so the GM decided to mix all three together with mixed results.
The rogue/monk cohort combo most likely have less enjoyment out of everyone due to the combination of not wanting to make many concessions due to wanting to maintain the purpose and flavor of her character, and also because the overwhelming majority of the solutions given by the CN group is to mold her characters to the concept of airships and siding with the less than lawful members of the party (which the monk will definitely have issues with, and the rogue already has issues with the CN swashbuckler).
In my opinion I think the major problems are differences in IC personality types and that the CN group have the same goals and motivations while the non CN group does not have the same goals and motivations as the CN group and thus have no reason to stick around, especially since the CN group doesn't seem interested in the main quest of investigating why divine magic has disappeared from the world. I'll also admit that the non CN group doesn't seem very interested in the loss of divine magic plot right now, but on the other hand they're all trying to investigate sub quests in the cities they travel to in order to do some sort of good for the common populace while the CN group mostly is fending off people coming after the rogue on the run, which so far has resorted with the CN group getting put through multiple combat sessions at the docks while the non CN members are out and about in the city role-playing all the time.
Well, he's gonna hate it, but I guess that's gonna be the solution I'll be telling him to use because I just don't want to have the entire session turn into a constant switch off between half the party enjoying themselves while the other half is not enjoying the game and then switching.
I feel kind of stupid now that I didn't just accept the splits as inevitable and as the only sure way to make sure this whole issue doesn't escalate into major conflict.