General RPG DiscussionDiscussion of all RPGs and non-system-specific topics. DM/GM/player issues, settings, etc. Rules discussion belongs in one the forums below.
We learned through symbolism that a sacred place had appeared out side of the civilized area. When we went to investigate it we found a foul monster that was not of this Earth and it attacked us without cause. So we killed it.
Then we stumbled upon a group that was sacrificing people to a huge snake like creature and we dispersed the cult and killed the giant snake.
The (unaligned) Fey had taken a local girl to be part of their Court, against her will, to use her as a trophy in their ongoing rivalry of beautiful guests. The PC's arrive on the scene and find (evil) Orcs accused of the crime instead. They manage to get the orcs under their protection, and travel to the Feywild to rescue the girl. They disrupt the Fey contest, and bring the girl (and a few others) back, forcing the town to release the (evil) orcs as innocent.
They're also helping a mostly-unaligned rebellion fight a mostly-Good aligned dragon alliance, basically because the alliance views mortal lives as fairly expendable, if they must, to preserve the dragon rule (which in turn prevents something more evil from happening). I'm not sure they're aware that the Alliance is Good, and the Rebellion certainly doesn't know what hides behind it...
Kobolds took five children from town, they went to rescue them. (The PC had known four of them.) One of the children is the son of the lumber baron, who's busy blaming the PC and her "union goons" and promising war if his kid's not brought back.
The time before that, it was the old "prevent the apocalypse" routine. The PC captured the main BBEG, stabilizing him in negative HP, so he could stand trial and be hanged.
__________________ All role playing advice is given without knowledge of you and your group. Only you and your group knows what is fun for you. What you are doing is not badwrongfun. My advice is offered based on what I think might be fun for you to try.
"Art is the demonstration that the ordinary is extraordinary." - Amedee Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art
"I already have a place where I can get little recognition for my accomplishments, advance at a very slow pace, and have to work hard to eke out minimum rewards for my efforts. It's called work." - toberane.
For the past two sessions, we've been exclusively killing the undead that serve a necromantic cult that was terrorizing a nearby village, so we haven't had many qualms about exterminating them.
__________________ Veronica: Where's your brother?
Dick: I think he took Ghost World up to his room. They're probably up there making love. Or playing Dungeons and Dragons. Or both, at the same time. They're both, like, 12th-level dorks. I'm just sayin'
My games rarely revolve around capital letter good or evil, because I kind of think those ideas are dumb. PC killing sprees tend to take place in the context of wars. Which... in real life I don't find to be quite as cut and dry in terms of morality as everyone around me seems to find things, but in a game where disbelief has been suspended, works alright.
The only exception is zombies. You're allowed to kill zombies. Always.
Generally speaking, my PCs have killed monsters / NPCs because...
... they were iredeemably evil (undead, demons, devils, etc.)
... they attacked us first
... they attacked NPCs the PCs were obliged to protect, or who other NPCs engaged the PC's services to protect
... they were at war with the PC's country
There was no killing in our last session. Or the one before that. Or the one before that. We're superheroes, we don't kill. That's what the bad guys do.
'Course, we're not playing D&D...
AD
__________________ "Never Give Up, Never Surrender!" Barking Alien
All depends on the group/character. Right now I'm playing a very LG guy, so I'm killing the snake tongue cultists before they unleash hell. It's kind of against type for me though - one of my previous characters tortured a man for days and then murdered him in his sleep because he looked funny. (I still maintain it was justified, since we found out he was a Death Slaad after I killed him, and the alignment shift to Evil we all earned saved us from a Pit Fiend's Blasphemy attack a few hours later).
__________________ Rick Reroll -- Deadly Rickster Utility 26 Daily
Choose one: you reroll one die roll you just made and keep the higher result; or the DM rerolls one die roll he just made and keeps the lower result.
2 Rakshasa assassins who had previously killed the High Priest of Kord (3 players are cleric or multi-class clerics of Kord) and were attempting to kill the next High Priest when the players interfered.
The later on, they found out via a ritual that the plague that is affecting their town is magical and that the source of it was located a certain place. When investigating, it turns out that the source was a dracolich!
Needless to say, they had little issues with attacking those creatures.
__________________
355 hours played
Gnoguh, human fighter/cleric (kensei->adamantine soldier)
Carric, elf cleric/ranger (radiant servant->saint)
Torn, tiefling wizard/cleric (divine oracle->sages of ages)
Truxas, human feylock/bard (feytouched->feyliege)
Tagron, human rogue (daggermaster->deadly trickster) 21th level Musings of an Epic Virgin
In what was easily one of the most exciting, dramatic, and flat out fun campaign I heard of (sadly did not get to play, VERY sadly), one character, amongst many other insanely awesome things, turned an Erinyes good.
"Iredeemably evil" isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
__________________ Psionics are too sci-fi, not like the traditional method of spell casting that has existed only in D&D, involves research, laboratory work, and formulas, and was cribbed directly from a series of science fiction novels. I mean, come on, calling forth the power to alter the world from your own center of will? That's not magical in the slightest! Not at all like my wizard's spell "Telepathy!"
So what was the motivation for your good pcs doing their killing in YOUR last session?
As well as what creatures were killed and what assurances you had that you were doing "right".
Same as every session. The bad guys are evil. The good guys kill the bad guys.
The assurance on that point is pure metagame: It's one of the core assumptions of D&D. Nobody asked, nobody needed to.
(Kobolds, then hobgoblins, some ogres in alarmingly increasing numbers, then minotaurs, trolls, hill giants, and now fire giants. There might have been a human necromancer in there somewhere.)
There were two fights in yesterday's session, but only one resulted in a kill.
In the first fight, three PCs (mage, cleric, champion) were ambushed by three hired thugs in a dark alley. After a couple of rounds, all three thugs were on the run, and the PC cleric aimed his blunderbuss pistol at a crate which was hanging on a rope-and-pulley system over the alley. He fired the gun and the crate fell directly on one of the thugs, who got squished (I rolled to check, and ruled that it was full of rocks, because it was acting as ballast). The other two thugs got away, and the party was unhappy because they didn't learn who hired the thugs (they wanted to capture them and question them).
In the second fight, the party confronted what turned out to be a doppelganger slaver who was kidnapping young girls from a refugee camp. The doppelganger was outmatched so he surrendered to the party without fighting. They spared his life after questioning and then turned him over to an ally for further questioning about the slavers' organization.
Both the thugs and the doppelganger were evil. And yet, the party didn't particularly want to kill them.
Last session? Same as the previous three -- there was no killing.
Of course we are playing Changeling at the moment, but we kinda like this -- killing, even assault, is comparatively rare and has great moral implications (as well as gameplay mechanics).
Of course my favourite time that way was in a session of Over The Edge -- the PCs had the bad guy dead to rights, but since none of them has ever killed anyone before (by their backstories) they ended up having a 35 minute (real-time) discussion about whether they were morally justified to do so ... and in the end, they didn't kill him, but they did leave him in a place where he could be killed, and this haunted those characters for the rest of their days.
__________________ Jack, you have debauched my sloth.
During last session my character killed two bandits, one of other characters captured the third. It wasn't in self defense. They attacked us during the previous session and wounded heavily - two of us barely lived through it. So, when we met them next time, we used surprise to wound the most dangerous one before they could counterattack. One surrendered and asked for mercy, so he was spared. One died quite accidentally, killed by a single blow when I tried to get him off me. The last one I slaughtered deliberately, even seeing he can no longer defend himself. He was too cruel and too dangerous to let live.
In Eberron, giants in Xen'drik have organized. They've invaded and conquered Stormreach, killing 80-plus percent of the population and enslaving wizards and artificers. The PCs believe that the giants are in league with the Dreaming Dark, building warforged for some purpose. (They're puzzling out the final connection, and have even voiced it in-game, but I don't want to say anything here to directly confirm or deny.)
They have journeyed to Xen'drik and have attacked giants to get information. They killed as a by-product of taking prisoners for interrogation. One PC did flat-out murder a giant -- charmed, then killed in cold blood -- which IMO was an evil act.
My PCs are not Good, however. There is a N (whose player still thinks he's LN), two LN, a CN (the murderer), and a N (whose player still thinks he's CG; it's close, but he finally slid over after after he slit a drunk's throat out of revenge for a seven-year old grievance).
__________________ Jeff Wilder, San Francisco Bay Area If your sig is longer than your posts, your sig is too
long. Nobody reads it, they just get annoyed by it. And if you bore me, you lose your soul to me. - Belly
Last good party we had? The paladin killed Shar worshippers for worshipping Shar, and for anything they had done in that worship. The elven archer killed thieves. All killed slavers, partly out of revenge.
Last big bout of killing was when the PCs were part of an army freeing a town taken over by a few orge magi and their monster and mercenary army. No much if any mercy was given there.
Current party is neutral, and kills whatever gets in the way. Since they are pretty high up in their hometown's religious hierarchy, they kill (or capture for execution) anyone they catch casting arcane spells without church permission, since that's considered heresy. They kill rebels - their country recently conquerred the neighboring country - and traitors as well.
Well, last lethal combat in my the D&D game I'm a player in was fighting off undead who jumped us.
Last lethal combat in the game I'm running was the players fighting their way out of an enemy (in the military sense) base after sabotaging the Macguffin and stealing the other MacGuffin. It wasn't anything personal, but the old man in the part blew a sneak roll and the team had to fight their way out. Had he not rolled a one, they would have sneaked out without engaging in combat at all.
__________________ We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming. - Werner von Braun
Right now you have no idea how lucky you are that I am not a sociopath. - A sign seen above my desk.
Never confuse movement with action. - Ernest Hemingway
In the last session I GMed, nobody died (well, except a PC, but he got better); the PCs were fighting undead (nightshades & the like) and constructs (shadesteel golems), so no actual living beings were injured by the PCs. There are some living foes, but they're all dedicated to destroying the material plane, and are threatening the tens of thousands of inhabitants of Gryrax and the Principality of Ulek.
In the last game where I was a player, we killed rats, vermin, undead, and a single werebadger, while rescuing a prisoner, and learned that we'll probably have to face an ogre-led goblin tribe; all in order to complete our divinely-sent mission to retrieve a fragment of a magical amulet, and further our personal goal of replacing the corrupt and inefficient leadership of the village with something more suitable. The PCs happen to all be necropolitans in service (directly or indirectly) to Hextor, and thus evil.
__________________ - Bob Huss
[H]e's dead and poisoned and possibly insane on another plane. It's a very stylish death, but a definitive one. - Piratecat
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