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Dungeons & Dragons and the ethics of imaginary violence
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6751646" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I don't think it's evil characters that cause intra-party conflict. In my experience, most intraparty conflict has its origin in one of two things - a player who insists on his PC's getting the better of other PC's, and differences of opinion over how the player wants to relate to an NPC.</p><p></p><p>The first is stereotypically the "Chaotic Neutral" character that continually steals from the party, or the assassin that has as his goal killing or betraying the other party members, or that one Paladin in a group where everyone else is CE witches, warlocks, tieflings, assassins, and sadistic mercenaries. You can usually prevent this by some sort of table agreement regarding what sort of characters you are allowed to play, and a DM that insists any new characters have reasonably similar goals to the existing party if not necessarily the same motivations (see Order of the Stick).</p><p></p><p>But the second source of conflict has little or nothing to do with alignment, although obvious if there are greatly varying alignments those differences are likelier to be highlighted. Pretty much any time there is a difference of opinion regarding how to treat an NPC, there is a big potential for party conflict. The stereotypical case here would be a party that is discussing what to do with a captured NPC, and some player just decides to resolve the argument by slitting the characters throat right in front of the rest of the group. This sort of thing is effectively no different than attacking another PC, and no one should be surprised if it is treated as such. But the more invested players can get in the story, the more potential points of conflict you have. Whose side are we on? Do we play judge, jury, and executioner here or not? Do we repay an NPC for being kind to us, by helping them escape justice? Are we going to risk our lives to save an NPC? </p><p></p><p>In my opinion, intraparty conflict could be really cool, but rarely is cool precisely because the players are used to solving every problem they face by application of lethal violence, so whenever player's face any sort of disagreement with each other at all, they tend to respond with lethal violence. Moreover, at least half the time that this happens, the character's violent disagreement result in players having a very angry disagreement with each other. Tempers flare. Sometimes walls get punched and friendships get broken.</p><p></p><p>So, back on topic, I'm not completely convinced that all this imagined violence we do isn't training us in some fashion.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6751646, member: 4937"] I don't think it's evil characters that cause intra-party conflict. In my experience, most intraparty conflict has its origin in one of two things - a player who insists on his PC's getting the better of other PC's, and differences of opinion over how the player wants to relate to an NPC. The first is stereotypically the "Chaotic Neutral" character that continually steals from the party, or the assassin that has as his goal killing or betraying the other party members, or that one Paladin in a group where everyone else is CE witches, warlocks, tieflings, assassins, and sadistic mercenaries. You can usually prevent this by some sort of table agreement regarding what sort of characters you are allowed to play, and a DM that insists any new characters have reasonably similar goals to the existing party if not necessarily the same motivations (see Order of the Stick). But the second source of conflict has little or nothing to do with alignment, although obvious if there are greatly varying alignments those differences are likelier to be highlighted. Pretty much any time there is a difference of opinion regarding how to treat an NPC, there is a big potential for party conflict. The stereotypical case here would be a party that is discussing what to do with a captured NPC, and some player just decides to resolve the argument by slitting the characters throat right in front of the rest of the group. This sort of thing is effectively no different than attacking another PC, and no one should be surprised if it is treated as such. But the more invested players can get in the story, the more potential points of conflict you have. Whose side are we on? Do we play judge, jury, and executioner here or not? Do we repay an NPC for being kind to us, by helping them escape justice? Are we going to risk our lives to save an NPC? In my opinion, intraparty conflict could be really cool, but rarely is cool precisely because the players are used to solving every problem they face by application of lethal violence, so whenever player's face any sort of disagreement with each other at all, they tend to respond with lethal violence. Moreover, at least half the time that this happens, the character's violent disagreement result in players having a very angry disagreement with each other. Tempers flare. Sometimes walls get punched and friendships get broken. So, back on topic, I'm not completely convinced that all this imagined violence we do isn't training us in some fashion. [/QUOTE]
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