Psychopacifist clerics

[J. R. Scherer]

I dunno ... if that happened in the same party as one of my notorious characters ...

That just means you have a prisoner to torture for information before forcing them to fatally disembowel themselves.

"Unless you have the means to take prisoners, letting them live is not merciful."
There's always wandering scavengers, or exposure, or infected wounds, or simply slowly bleeding out.
Killing during combat is usually the lesser evil.

Doesn't really sound like this feat is something you or your players would pick in the first place...

 

[Shazman]

I'm having trouble reconciling the rules on pacifist clerics with the fluff. Here is a cleric who is punished for dealing damage against a bloodied foe (even an ooze or a skeleton) but who can cheerfully commit mass murder as long as all the victims are minions.

The best I can come up with is, he actually has two separate sets of powers that use the same rules crunch. When he blasts or hits minions, he's using powers that knock them out, scare them away, disarm or demoralize them. These powers don't work on more powerful foes, so he uses his "other" powers (with the same area, range, keywords and damage) on them.

Given that whenever you reduce an opponent to 0 HP you can declare him to be incapacitated rather than dead, this sort of works... but then why does he freak out when he hits an injured enemy with one of these (non-lethal) attacks? And why is he OK with the fact that he travels with a party of stone cold killers, and every single encounter ends with a heap of bloody corpses? And what is the deal with being unwilling to damage a ZOMBIE? Or a mechanical trap with a "bloodied" level? Help me make sense of this character!

It's 4E. It's not supposed to make sense. Does it make sense for you to heal from a serious injury because someone yelled at you? Does it make sense for you to go from nearly dead to completely healthy just by resting for 6 hours? Does it make sense for a someone to shoot laser beams at enemies to punish them for attacking other people besides them? If you can make sense out of these things, then your problem will be cake.

 

[DracoSuave]

It's 4E. It's not supposed to make sense. Does it make sense for you to heal from a serious injury because someone yelled at you?

No, but it makes sense that someone could be inspiring enough to push their fellow soldiers past the wall of fatigue and into the zone. It doesn't erase their injuries, it pushes them past it.

But, either physical OR emotional improvement in how long you can fight can be represented by hitpoints, a combination of injury AND morale.

Does it make sense for you to go from nearly dead to completely healthy just by resting for 6 hours?

I got a party of superheroic beings that have the ability to erase wounds with a snap of their fingers and a flash of light.

Resting, I am certain, consists more of lazing around and doing buttkiss. Probably the healer-types are administering their magical stuff to make us feel better. Perhaps mystical substances are involved. But if 'Cure Light Wounds' is plausible, then 'heal to full in 6 hours' doesn't even challenge the wall of credibility.

Does it make sense for a someone to shoot laser beams at enemies to punish them for attacking other people besides them?

I usually thought of it as lightning bolts from heaven myself.

If you can make sense out of these things, then your problem will be cake.

But this much is true... the crunch is so easy to make plausible fluff for that there's no need to worry about the fluff to begin with.

 

[bramadan]

In significant majority of the games I have played PCs have a definitively heroic reasons for doing what they are doing...
Orcs are not just hanging out being "evil", they are actively invading the civilized lands, raping and pillaging as they go. Slavers are taking innocent people as slaves and need to be stopped. Someone is summoning destructive elementals in that yonder temple which are destroying the woods and villages around. Dragons eat fair maidens and demand tribute. Local tyrant king is taking people away to give to feed to his court necromancer

In each of those instances PCs are vanguard of some sort of active defence against the direct threat to the local community. They are no more bandits then the soldiers or well organized militia would be.

Of course, you can occasionally have extremely unimaginative DM that will say "here is this cave complex, you guys heard there is some loot there - why don't you raid it ?" but that is *not* representative of the bulk of DnD.

Person who is a pacifist - particularly a pacifist on religious grounds (as a pacifist cleric would be assumingly) would still be willing to help out the folks who are the first (and perhaps only) line of defence of their community/family/state. They would not necessarily approve of all their methods and would not necessarily want to partake in all of them personally, but with stakes sufficiently high - as they almost always are in DnD - they would certainly be able to find a modus operandi.