Recently, I've been watching some Dimension 20's Crown of Candy series, which was a somewhat ruthless game reminiscent of Game of Thrones wrapped in a sentient food aesthetic. Spoiler warning for the series - at the end of the series when the players won their decisive victory, they were faced with a dilemma - do they keep their fragile alliance, or do they backstab one another to have it all. This was an interesting example of the meta game of friendship you build around the table I'd like to discuss today.
Trust, friendships and bleed at the table
As discussed before, different tables will have a different level of trust built up over time of playing together for a while. If you're playing with randos online, chances are someone might turn out to be an asshole and backstab everyone at a drop of a hat. If you have a stable game going, usually you learn not to do that and respect one another's characters (unless everyone is into playing a backstab game of course, then all bets are off).
Along with that, you build friendships with the people you play, bonding over the many adventures you had together.
Every now and then, you also can experience bleed - mixing in-game and out-of-game feelings, grudges, etc. If someone hurt your character, you can feel personally hurt. It comes with the territory of being really invested in a game and a character.
Those three factors contribute to the meta game of friendship - when you play an RPG, you're not only playing the game, but also engaging with your fellow players at the table at the same time. Because of this, you tend to avoid doing something that might upset the other players, even if it would fit the narrative to do so (at least not without checking in with them first). If you don't, you might "win" something in the game, but lose someone's trust or friendship that would carry over to your future games.
This is kind of reminiscent of GeekNights' "Practical Game Theory" panel where they discuss threats and trust - if you play a game repeatedly, you can make credible threats that will affect the games you're playing. If you always punish anyone that messes with you to ensure they don't win even if you lose, eventually they will learn not to mess with you:
So the trust and betrayal in RPG would work similarly to game theory - by cooperating everyone gains something, but if you betray someone you break their trust and everyone is worse off in the long-term.
The Crown of Candy situation
The dilemma at the end of the Crown of Candy was like this - On one side you had Queen Saccharina, played by Emily Axford, daughter of King Amethar from his first marriage, abandoned by her mother at a church orphanage due to her magical prowess (non-cleric magic in the setting was heretical). She later became a queen of outlaws living at the edge of Candian society. After joining the game, she was crowned the Queen of Candia (after her father lost his claim to the throne), obtained a hatchling dragon and let it feed on the hearts of the priests to let it grow to an adult size by the time of the final battle. On the other side you had Princess Ruby, played by Siobhan Thompson, was a rogue princess, twin to Emily's previous character, Princess Jet, and half-sister to Saccharina. She didn't approve of Saccharina's ways and knew what kind of future her reign might bring.
Those two players were given an option to backstab one another at the end of the game. Ruby knew Saccharina would upend the status quo and go on a crusade to eradicate much of the church, and would probably be unfit to rule Candia. Saccharina was advised that the nobles look down on her due to her upbringing and would gladly kill her now that they don't need her to retake Candia.
So did either of them do it?
Watching the video, I had no doubt of the outcome. Siobhan and Emily have played through 5 series together, everyone at the table has been nice to each other, they have faced many hardships together in this series, playing inseparable twins that schemed together. They wouldn't backstab each other's characters, especially given that this was the end of the series - there was nothing for them to gain beyond a different epilogue. And yeah, shocking nobody, they decided to trust one another and have a happy ending together.
Last minute betrayal would certainly make for a shocking moment in the show, but would probably cause some strife between the caste members and some longer-term distrust. Sure, they are professionals, but if you watch the behind the scenes of the series they are jokingly dissing on the GM for backstabbing and killing their characters a few times in the series.
Backstabs in other actual plays
Thinking about it, I haven't really seen that many other actual plays that have the characters backstabbing one another. I've watched a number of other Dimension 20 shows, as well as various games by Arms of the Tide, A Pair of Dice Lost, RPG Clinic, etc. and played a lot of games on our very own podcast - Sponsored by Nobody. Sure, we had a number of "a character does whatever they want disregarding what others think" moments in Evicting Epistle, Princes of the Universe, Conspiracy at Krezk, etc. However, only one series had a genuine betrayal.
In Princes of the Universe (spoilers), there was one situation that was almost that, and one that was a full-on "I'm the bad guy". The first one was when the party managed to find the Eye of Autochthon, an ancient relict of nigh-infinite power. They wanted to use it to wake up a titan, but not before everyone had a mexican standoff to make sure nobody else would steal it and use it for their own goals. My character was a Night Caste (a hero-thief essentially) and was the only one that could actually steal it without anyone having a counter to his powers, so the GM asked me if I do it. In the end I decided not to, since it would turn the game into PVP, and being 1v4 had really poor odds. Plus it would be an asshole thing to do.
The other situation came at the end of the whole game, where after fighting the Scarlet Empress, the ruler of the world, the party was faced with a secret foe that was pulling the strings all along. During that fight, one of the PCs, Longhorn Desertwolf, turned on the rest of the party and was revealed to have been working for that foe all along. The reason why that twist worked though was because of how that character entered the story.
See, while getting the Eye of Autochthon, the party went to a weird proto-dimension that was all weird and wonky. They met alternative versions of themselves from another part of the multiverse. One of the PCs, Longhorn Seawolf, was already on a hit list for two other PCs due to letting a number of their children die in a fight, so it was only a matter of time before he'd be killed. So instead, we decided to trade our Seawolf for their Desertwolf to solve the issue of a character needing to be gotten rid of and also to give the player a similar character they could wrap the series with. None of the NPCs believed what happened, but they learned not to question our crazy antics a long time ago. But at the end of the series it turned out they were right - we did inadvertently trade an ally for a wolf in sheep's clothing that turned out to be orchestrated by the big bad evil guy. So that betrayal and backstab felt alright, especially since in the end we managed to kick both of their asses and win. If Desertwolf would've turned out to be victorious, I know of one or two players that would've flipped the table and not forgiven it - it would've felt that the last two or so years the game was running was a complete waste.
So lesson learned - if you want to have someone betray and backstab the party, they should probably lose to make the game less unsatisfying...
