When modern ethics collide with medieval ethics

[Zelda Themelin]

S'mon I agree. It might have worked for our typical problem guy too, but when we were teeny at that time gm was playing his authority to provoke.

All kinda of alternative takes I have used. Some city's had "peace-bonds" for weapons. Some regulater weapon bigger than short sword. And only missile weapon you could carry were slings/throw knifes.
Some had rules that you have leave weapons in rack of inn/tavern when you entered.
Rules for places and times of duels. For those whose arguments grew over fist fights.


Regulations for magic. Usually required local guild membership and some spells banned of use in city area.

This kinda little thematic came up often, but I tended to let players get aways with sojme things, since they were "bad-asses". Gate guards didn't stop them and aks gate fee but did that to merchant passing after them. Friendly stopped and advaced about "weapon laws" to avoid "misunderstandings". Spell regulations were rather sensible.

Kings and the like didn't often meet some random adventurers personally. I had couple of cases when player demanded for the audiance. But that was pretty much in-game.

And honestly nobility did not really exempt some punch of adventurers know local ethiquette. Even the bowing part. And if that was required symbology characters were told about it beforehand (since they obviously woudn't know etiquette) and only allowed those people of party for diplomatic meetings that agreed to some simple local polite habits.

So if party had Ulaf the Barbarian of BloodyThunder, Sneak the beggar thief and Mordog the Mighty (wizard of great power and sucky social skills), it would be unlikely for king to see them in public hall with usual court. If he wanted to meet them personally it would be only his body guards and advisor maybe in private area where meeting could run more informal without becoming malady for court.

And it would make sense since often these missions where king would need such tought but outsidish adventurer help would be for "secret business".
Naturally if business weren't really secret and pc:s would represent less offensive social material they could be publicly received. And once adventures would become trusty people for kindgoms causes they would call Ulof to parties to scare/impress cityfolk, because it would now be "good olde Ulof". It's not like kings of old banned those less socially charming but good soldier types.

If it's social very stict caste sociaty when you really need to get players to agree. If they only agree because it's that game or no game you are gonna have some troubles later. Or sometimes, when players gain power (levels etc.) they might change into less humble and want to trancend their social position.

We played long lasting game where we even had system we callled "disribution of loot acording to rank". And we were super-lawful about it too. One player playing monk started to get off-game greedy. we ended up kicking him from the game, since there was also cheating issues. Ah but he was player that always had issues after few games to any role-playing game he gm/played.

 

[pemerton]

I agree; I find that 4e Alignment seems to work a lot better than 1e-3e.

The first rule of 4e Alignment: we don't talk about Alignment.

My group talks about alignment from time to time, but I agree it works better than AD&D/3E (which I regard as fatally flawed). I think Basic does also. My own theory on this is that in both Basic and 4e alignment is not an attempt at a general moral classification. Rather it is tied to a particular cosmological situation (law vs chaos, or gods and order vs demons and primordial chaos) and locates the PC within that situation. Provided that the framing of the situation itself is not repugnant to anyone - and I think for most fantasy RPGers that would be unlikely - and provided that the game doesn't stray too far from the core conceits set up in the DMG and MMs, then the alignment system doesn't require anyone to make any controversial moral judgements.

I would expect that a world like Dark Sun, that does stray from the relevant core conceits, could put a lot more pressure on the 4e alignment system, and would work better if it were dropped altogether.

Conversely, 1e AD&D Alignment has worked fine for me in picaresque Wilderlands and Yggsburgh campaigns. Being Good is a mechanical advantage - you can be a Paladin or a Ranger, notably superior to the unrestricted Fighter. But if you act non-LG or non-G you can lose your special powers. As GM I don't act like a jerk, and none of the Good-aligned PCs have had any trouble.

Would I be right in guessing that this is not a campaign that puts a lot of pressure on points of potential moral controversy? And/or that relies on well-known and shared sword and sorcery tropes and conventions?

Others like pemerton see the GM as another player at the table, with no more authority over the game than any other player. There are Indie games designed around the latter approach which seem to work fine, but neither approach is suitable for D&D or any traditional RPG.

Your last clause seems a little question begging - it appears to imply that either what I play isn't D&D (or any other traditional RPG), or that I'm doing it in a non-suitable way!

But I'm not the person who's having trouble with moral conflict at the table and trying but perhaps failing to achieve epic and meaty feel. And it's not because my players never confront situations in which evaluative matters are to the fore, nor that my players never disagree with or shock one another (or me). It's that the group has a range of techniques - mostly informal, but fairly easily identifiable - for dealing with this stuff.

Not being a jerk is an important part of those techniques, but I think it is possible to be more precise than that about what they are.

 

[S'mon]

Suppose we sit down to watch a movie. You suggest Hardboiled. I ask what it is. You explain that it's an ultra-violent action thriller with a strong thematic focus on loyalty and duty. I say, OK. Then we start watching, and I find that the ultraviolence is more than I can take. Am I obliged to sit mutely for the next two hours and suck it up? Or can I ask you to turn it off?

You can if you're married* to me.
Otherwise, if it's my house, and we agreed to watch that film, you can leave, and I'll not invite you to watch action movies with me any more, since we clearly have incompatible preferences.
If it's your house, and we agreed to watch that film, then you should be a good host and suck it up. Maybe play with your ipad or something. If you absolutely can't stand it you could go to the kitchen. And we'll not watch action movies at your house any more.

What you don't do is get up and turn the TV off.

*I'll say no, though. My wife can't stand suspense movies and she got pretty annoyed when I insisted on watching Shymalan's 'The Village' through to the end, to see the denouement. Mostly we don't watch films together.

 

[S'mon]

Furthermore, your example doesn't require me, as the player of John Brown, to agree that slavery is morally permissible. At least as you've presented it, you're just describing the setting. You're not evaluating it, and imposing that evaluation upon me as a player. Whereas, as best I understand it, in the campaign described by the OP, at least one player is objecting to the claim that a person (maybe more than one person - a king and a cleric) is simultaneously good and tolerant/supportive of extrajudicial killing. I don't think that's an unreasonable objection to put forward. One way for the GM to respond is just to keep running the setting, but (i) refrain from expressing any evaluation of it, and (ii) not rub the dissenting player's nose in it. A GM who insists on sticking to the evaluation, and/or on rubbing the dissenting player's nose in the situation, is in my view simply asking for further conflict.

The player in Elf Witch's campaign is not required to agree that extrajudicial killing (actually, it seems pretty judicial to me per her description) is morally acceptable IRL. They just have to accept that executing evil priests does not ping as Evil in that setting's Alignment system. Which is certainly supported by D&D-RAW, but even if it was a house rule, it's totally fine. You can have a PC who sees extra-judicial killing as always wrong, you just have to accept that that universe's Alignment systems doesn't peg it as necessarily Evil.

If you can't accept that, I'd think you would not be able to accept 99% of the premises of D&D anyway (eg: it's ok to invade the lairs of Evil monsters, kill them, and take their shiny gold), so why are you playing this game?

 

[S'mon]

Why wouldn't I blame the GM?

Because you're a decent human being, not a whiny cry-baby with an overgrown sense of entitlement?

Edit: To be clear, I do think you're a decent human being!

 

[S'mon]

Your last clause seems a little question begging - it appears to imply that either what I play isn't D&D (or any other traditional RPG), or that I'm doing it in a non-suitable way!

My understanding from previous posts is that you take 4e D&D, already the least world-simulationist version of D&D, then you drift it very heavily in a dramatist/narrativist direction, so that it no longer much resembles D&D. Elf Witch's DM is running a more traditionally world-simulationist style, much closer to core D&D IME - indeed it was the dominant mode in the 2e era and well represented in both 1e and 3e.

 

[S'mon]

My group talks about alignment from time to time, but I agree it works better than AD&D/3E (which I regard as fatally flawed). I think Basic does also. My own theory on this is that in both Basic and 4e alignment is not an attempt at a general moral classification. Rather it is tied to a particular cosmological situation (law vs chaos, or gods and order vs demons and primordial chaos) and locates the PC within that situation. Provided that the framing of the situation itself is not repugnant to anyone - and I think for most fantasy RPGers that would be unlikely - and provided that the game doesn't stray too far from the core conceits set up in the DMG and MMs, then the alignment system doesn't require anyone to make any controversial moral judgements.

Would I be right in guessing that this is not a campaign that puts a lot of pressure on points of potential moral controversy? And/or that relies on well-known and shared sword and sorcery tropes and conventions?

On D&D Alignment - I agree, I think both Basic and 4e have much better systems than 1e-2e-3e. 3e's is the worst due to the application of symmetry, eg being Good makes you more vulnerable to Evil!

On "not a campaign that puts a lot of pressure on points of potential moral controversy? And/or that relies on well-known and shared sword and sorcery tropes and conventions?" - My Wilderlands City State game I'd say was more or less in the 'swords & sorcery conventions' area - act like Conan and you'll be ok. It had some weird moral issues with a revolutionary socialist secret society The Preservers of Law plotting to overthrow the Invincible Overlord, but in CSIO all factions have Good and Evil members in the same faction - the Overlord has LG Paladins and NE Assassins, and so do the Preservers.

My Yggsburgh game has a slightly Swiftian, 18th-19th century rather satirical take on social mores, which plays through into its depiction of Alignment and Morality. The Clerics are out of Trollope, the whores from Moll Flanders, the gentlemen are like Flashman or maybe Dickensian, and so on. There have been no Alignment arguments, the players seemed to enjoy the public hanging of the highwaymen they captured, complete with their leader Lord Ollie's Last Words - "I'd just like to say... F*** you all."

 

[kitsune9]

How often are these sorts of things happening in yours (and others') games?

If this sort of thing happened in my game I would regard it as a disaster.

Well, the refusing to comply with orders thing was back in my 2e days. I was a lot younger and put up with a lot of players' crap. Nowadays though it's just the mouthing off.

 

[gamerprinter]

Why? If I wouldn't kneel to a king, why should my character, Badass McAsskicker, kneel? It's not really one of my issues, but I can sympathize with people who want to play characters who come to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and didn't put gum on their equipment list.

At a certain point, I can see this as being a sign of a GM entitlement issue. If the GM is pushing the players around using the king as proxy, then that's a problem. A mutual understanding of where the PCs fit in the social order is important, and I think it's as important the GM be flexible as the players.

There are many possible entitlement issues to a game. I recognize GM entitlement to be just as bad. But this issue of the OP, doesn't seem to be GM entitlement, so much as a player one, in this case only.

Nothing wrong with a player that doesn't want to show respect of authority - it's hardly a new issue. But if all players agreed ahead of time to the GM's premise (as it seems to be in this case), then a deliberate act of counter authority by any PC is some kind of PC vs. GM mentality. Because it was initiated by the player, it looks very much like player entitlement.

But it's not my problem. My group has no entitlement issues, and I don't play with other groups. GMs nor players in our game do not have any expectations of such trials. We play to have fun and leave any social problems at the door. But then we're friends outside the game and understand each other.

 

[Zelda Themelin]

Strongly agree. I once had a female player complain about the sexism in my medievalesque campaign world - of which there was rather little, less than in 21st century Britain I'd say, and it didn't really affect the PCs that I could see. Her own PC was a hugely powerful Witch (16th level Druid in 3e) from a female Witch-ruled society, but the local city state in the immediate campaign area was more patriarchal. All the PCs were a lot more personally powerful than almost any non-enemy NPCs, who tended to top out around 9th level. But she roped in the other female player to demand I change the setting to have complete gender equality, and was angry when I refused. I definitely felt disrespected as a GM.

I'd just like to know if you forced her to play female character, because she was female in real life. That would make all her compains legal, because apperently you set her apart of rest of team and she had to suck it up.

If she wanted to, and was ok with it, and then got into some "feminist pissing-contest-mindset" you were quite right to feel offended by her behavior.

I've seen both end of that. "Gender-realism gm:s" who only insist it on gender, even if people get to play elfs and other fantasy critters. And then set world really misogynistic. This of course when there are girls in group. Some don't even mean it ill ways, they are looking for some middle-ages feel. And don't even notice how they npc:fy some pc:s.

Also, I've had my share of drama-queens. Some of them guys. They are sneakier and often come laden with sense of entitlement, both for social leadership and "dominate person" on dm so that universe would react to their characters according to their whims. They also tended to create mary-sue dmpc:s or just npc:s when running games.

That her choice of character was a witch for my personal experience links her to this later group. Also, my unfortunate experience is that they don't grow out of it.