The Jerk
I think I was "that guy" at the gaming convention. I attacked other characters, the characters of people sitting right across from me playing D&D. I think I may need to apologize.
We were playing a 5e adventure called Smash & Grab. We were to enter a complex to retrieve a magical lamp before other parties could find it. Little did we know what this really meant. The characters we were using were C/N, N, L/N. There were no good characters at our table, and there were no evil characters at our table. I had a C/N tiefling warlock.
We found out, through the adventure, that there was another party in the complex, less than an hour ahead of us, that was also after the magic lamp. We set our sights on this party and tried hard to catch up with them. We were pretty sure that they not only wanted to get to the lamp before us but they also had retrieved some items along the way that we needed to fulfill our quest.
Well, we did catch up to them, and what happened really surprised me.
Apparently the other party was another group of players running through the same adventure at another table. When we caught up to them (entering in game via a door on the opposite side of the room they were in), our DM had us get up, take all our stuff to the other table, and describe ourselves to the other players. I apologized right away, saying "this was much easier when we weren't staring at you face-to-face." I then allowed this other party to expend all their resources fighting the big bad guy. Our team fought, too, but only using minimal resources to save ourselves from immediate threats. They fought through threats and took the fight to the bad guy.
Then, when the fight was over and all was saved, I looked at my character, thought about how our party saw this rival party for the last three hours before meeting up, and attacked their survivors. I thought long and hard (considering the time restraints of ending a convention game) before doing it, and I convinced myself it was something that my character would have done. I still think I may have been right.
However, it didn't have to happen. The DMs weren't expecting it to happen. Both teams had completed their slightly different quests, killed the bad guys, and all survived to tell the story...until I attacked. Half of their party went down immediately. The other half escaped, shocked.
Ugh, following through with what your character would do isn't always the right way to play. I'm rather sorry I was "that guy." All I can do is endeavor to act better next time I'm in a similar situation.
We were playing a 5e adventure called Smash & Grab. We were to enter a complex to retrieve a magical lamp before other parties could find it. Little did we know what this really meant. The characters we were using were C/N, N, L/N. There were no good characters at our table, and there were no evil characters at our table. I had a C/N tiefling warlock.
We found out, through the adventure, that there was another party in the complex, less than an hour ahead of us, that was also after the magic lamp. We set our sights on this party and tried hard to catch up with them. We were pretty sure that they not only wanted to get to the lamp before us but they also had retrieved some items along the way that we needed to fulfill our quest.
Well, we did catch up to them, and what happened really surprised me.
Apparently the other party was another group of players running through the same adventure at another table. When we caught up to them (entering in game via a door on the opposite side of the room they were in), our DM had us get up, take all our stuff to the other table, and describe ourselves to the other players. I apologized right away, saying "this was much easier when we weren't staring at you face-to-face." I then allowed this other party to expend all their resources fighting the big bad guy. Our team fought, too, but only using minimal resources to save ourselves from immediate threats. They fought through threats and took the fight to the bad guy.
Then, when the fight was over and all was saved, I looked at my character, thought about how our party saw this rival party for the last three hours before meeting up, and attacked their survivors. I thought long and hard (considering the time restraints of ending a convention game) before doing it, and I convinced myself it was something that my character would have done. I still think I may have been right.
However, it didn't have to happen. The DMs weren't expecting it to happen. Both teams had completed their slightly different quests, killed the bad guys, and all survived to tell the story...until I attacked. Half of their party went down immediately. The other half escaped, shocked.
Ugh, following through with what your character would do isn't always the right way to play. I'm rather sorry I was "that guy." All I can do is endeavor to act better next time I'm in a similar situation.