When modern ethics collide with medieval ethics

[Elf Witch]

Maybe different people have different conceptions of what makes for a meaty campaign with an epic feel.

One thing I've found over the years is that if every decision comes back to tactical expediency, then that will tend to undermine the epic feel, and push towards some sort of "shades of grey"/gritty/special ops vibe instead.

Another thing I've found is that the best way to avoid every decision coming back to tactical expediency is for the GM to create a "space" in which non-expedient decisions do not end up biting the players. For example, let players extract promises of repetance from prisoners and then have prisoners keep those promises.

Whereas I find that strong use of mechanical alignment tends to undercut epic feel, in part by shifting the focus away from the players' choices and decisions and back onto the GM's own evaluative judgements.

In DnD if you are playing save the world from great evil style of play which we are. Then it absolutely becomes part of playing tactically wise if you fail it is not just you who die it is the entire world.

Part of the fun at least for me and most of the people I play with is making the choices even the hard ones. Getting away from the kill evil clerics for a moment say you are heading to stop an event that will happen on the full moon it is two days to get there and if you ride hard you can make it in one.

You come across a village besieged by orcs. You can A sneak around and make it in time to stop the event or B you can help the village and take the chance of missing the event. It is a tough choice and neither is really the right answer. Some players may choose to save the village from the immediate threat and hope that they will still have time to get to the event. Others may choice to leave the village to its fate on the idea that saving more lives is the right thing to do.

To things like this can make for some compelling role playing. With the right players and the right DM.

And I disagree that you can't have an epic game that sometimes has gritty choices in it. I also disagree that alignment makes this impossible. It depends on how you use alignment it is a straight jacket, is it setting specific, how does the DM define it.

I am not advocating always taking the best tactical choice and killing the prisoners but I also don't buy the never ever under any circumstances kill the prisoners either.

In the situation I described we were far from any help. We still had two more evil temples to deal with. We were outnumbered and here were our choices leave and take the prisoners to a high authority which would take hours which gave the other temples that chance to find out what we had done and be better prepared for us when we came back.

Tie the prisoners up and hope they didn't escape to raise the alarm. Try and drag them with us and hope they didn't give us away and which would mean one of us keeping an eye on them instead of being free to do other things.

Or kill them. Tactically the best choice was to kill them. Though not everyone agreed. The fun part of the game to me is dealing with these choices.

And not once did the DM interfere in our choice. We did talk about it later and she did say that if we had kept them alive she would have rolled escape artist rolls on them and played them in character which was to stop us. But she would have done it fairly by the rules and the roll of the dice.

 

[Elf Witch]

Of course things work best when, as per your preferred approach, everyone is in agreement.

But the question is - what happens when agreement breaks down? And what can be done, both in campaign set up and in the course of play, to help maximise the likelihood of enduring agreement, and minimise the likelihood of agreement breaking down.

In my experience, at least, aggressive deployment of mechanical alignment is basically the opposite of a sound approach in these situations.

And it need have nothing to do with bait-and-switch. Not everyone really appreciates what they're getting into. 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? And what difference does it make if we up the time to 4 hours a week/fortnight for some indefinite number of weeks?

Why wouldn't I blame the GM? The GM decides what the NPCs do, after all. They have no independent life.

The question is, is this bad GMing? That depends a lot on the point of the game, and mutual understandings about such things. If I'm playing John Brown in the USA 1850 setting, and the very first NPC I meet and speak to turns out to be a proto-Klansman who rounds up all his friends to ambush and kill me, I'm going to be a bit pissed off. If I get at least to make it to Harpers Ferry, that's a different thing altogether.

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.

If you are watching with a group of people and you are the only one having an issue with the movie then yes it is rude of you to expect to have your way. What you should do is leave the room.

But the DM a good DM plays the NPCs with some kind of consistency. He doesn't change the NPCs reaction based solely on the fact they he is facing a PC. The slave trader NPC is not going to say hey go ahead and free my slaves I won't fight you because you are a PC and I am an NPC. If the law of the land says no one may enter the throne room with a weapon unless they are a member of the royal guard then why should the NPC change that just because you are a PC? Now if it because the King called for you because he needs you then I can see a negotiation over it but that is not the same as just being allowed because you are the PCs.

And again I would like to point out that in our game the DM has not told any player how to feel about things if they want to hate the whole idea of the Knights of the Rose that is fine. They can even in character try and find people who agree and try and put a stop to it. But they shouldn't just expect every NPC to agree with them just because they are the PC.

Slavery is legal in Kalamar I have played in several campaigns and run several I have never been told by any DM nor have I told my players that they have to be okay with it. It has been left up to the players on how to react to it.

Here seems to be the disconnect you seem to think that I believe and my DM believes that we should be able to tell the players how their characters feel and think about our setting. And no we are not saying that. What we feel is that we present the setting the players choose how to react to it and if they choose to go against the norm that is perfectly acceptable. But going against a society norm can be a rough road to walk hence my whole tax example.

If you believe that all men are created equal ad the King is a stickler for tradition then you have to expect it might be complicated to get him to deal with you if you break the social mores of the kingdom. Expecting him to just throw out his social mores with no other reason than you are the PC is not good enough and imo bad role playing.

 

[Elf Witch]

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.

Well bully for you. I guess that means your way of playing is the only correct way and the rest of are doing it wrong.

But then maybe you just don't play with people who disagree like the one player. The game would run 100 times smoother if he was not in it. But here is the crux of the matter he is a close friend and his feelings would be crushed if we kicked him out. And we are not willing to take it that far.

So we cope with him and most of the time it is just fine. We have had three incidents where discussion has come up in three years . So I don't think that is to bad of a record.

He doesn't play in my game due to scheduling conflicts and that at table we have fun conversations out of game on things but we don't have any conflicts in game and we manage to get an epic meaty style game using 3.5 alignments and we even have an ninja style assassin in the party as well as a paladin.

 

[NewJeffCT]

When I ran my Kalamar campaign from late 2007 to early 2010, I explained to the players up front that most kingdoms in Kalamar had some form of slavery, though in many places it was slavery due to things like debt, and that there were laws in most places governing the treatment of slaves. Even in Pel Brolenon, which is the evil slave trading theocracy run by The Overlord's clerics (the deity of slavery & tyranny), most slaves are treated like a fairly valuable commodity. (Of course, I also told them, a powerful noble might want to show off his or her wealth and power by treating his slaves as expendable commodities.)

However, the Overlord has his hands in almost every slave transaction in Kalamar, not just within Pel Brolenon. So, his reach is extensive, and The Overlord has influenced laws on slavery just about everywhere.

I also told the player who wanted to play a champion of The Guardian PrC (the deity of freedom and liberty, who is strongly opposed to slavery) that if he went around and attacked every slave owner and freed every slave he came across, he'd either get killed or tossed in the dungeon rather quickly. However, I also promised him plenty of opportunities to make a real long-term difference when it came to slavery in Kalamar, but that he'd have to pick & choose his spots. He was perfectly fine with what I set down, and managed to adhere to that idea throughout the 2 1/2 year long campaign. And, in the end, the group defeated the high priest of Pel Brolenon and dealt the Overlord a huge blow in Kalamar, as the whole nation of Pel Brolenon was shattered, and taken over by two neighboring kingdoms (Mendarn & Meznamish) who ended up freeing tens of thousands of slaves and promoted a far more liberal slave policy for the world. (They had also defeated several other top Overlord clerics along the way, so his entire power structure was effectively crippled for a generation or more.)

 

[prosfilaes]

I agree that DMs should be flexible. But so should players. Again if you as a player agree to play in a game where the DM has put certain social aspects like noble expecting to be treated with a certain respect then as aplayer you should not act like a huge asshat over it when it comes up.

Acting like a huge asshat should be off the table for all parties. But naturally it's not interesting to discuss those cases, because that's so obvious.

I don't believe that dropping a five page document in front of your players is really flexible. I don't know what to say about going ahead with a campaign as if your players agreed with the document when you know that most of them didn't read it. Blame can be spread around, but I think it more useful to ask everyone to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

But then maybe you just don't play with people who disagree like the one player.

What's the issue here? As I said above, don't play with asshats. If you ask what to do with problematic players, you're going to get a different response then if you raise it as "When modern ethics collide with medieval ethics", and in either case you can't just expect everyone to agree with you.

 

[Elf Witch]

When I ran my Kalamar campaign from late 2007 to early 2010, I explained to the players up front that most kingdoms in Kalamar had some form of slavery, though in many places it was slavery due to things like debt, and that there were laws in most places governing the treatment of slaves. Even in Pel Brolenon, which is the evil slave trading theocracy run by The Overlord's clerics (the deity of slavery & tyranny), most slaves are treated like a fairly valuable commodity. (Of course, I also told them, a powerful noble might want to show off his or her wealth and power by treating his slaves as expendable commodities.)

However, the Overlord has his hands in almost every slave transaction in Kalamar, not just within Pel Brolenon. So, his reach is extensive, and The Overlord has influenced laws on slavery just about everywhere.

I also told the player who wanted to play a champion of The Guardian PrC (the deity of freedom and liberty, who is strongly opposed to slavery) that if he went around and attacked every slave owner and freed every slave he came across, he'd either get killed or tossed in the dungeon rather quickly. However, I also promised him plenty of opportunities to make a real long-term difference when it came to slavery in Kalamar, but that he'd have to pick & choose his spots. He was perfectly fine with what I set down, and managed to adhere to that idea throughout the 2 1/2 year long campaign. And, in the end, the group defeated the high priest of Pel Brolenon and dealt the Overlord a huge blow in Kalamar, as the whole nation of Pel Brolenon was shattered, and taken over by two neighboring kingdoms (Mendarn & Meznamish) who ended up freeing tens of thousands of slaves and promoted a far more liberal slave policy for the world. (They had also defeated several other top Overlord clerics along the way, so his entire power structure was effectively crippled for a generation or more.)

First of all I want to say your game sounds awesome. Kalamar is my favorite published setting.

In the one campaign our first in Kalamar we discussed the slave issue. One of the players was playing a paladin of the eternal lantern who is mainly concerned with undead. He was wondering if there would be an issue if his paladin ignored the issue of slavery. He didn't think it was right but it was not his focus.

And the DM told him that since it was legal it would not effect his alignment to not fight slavers.

We were more interested in that game with the whole Kabori issue and finding the Lost Sword of Kings and working with the Blackfeet Society.

I love that in Kalamar the setting is stagnant which allows individual groups to vary the outcome of world changing events. It is a very meaty setting with tons of political intrigue, issues of racism and slavery. I also like the fact that important NPCs are not stated out so Kabori can be everything from a good misunderstood ruler under the sway of his evil advisers to a pit fiend.

It is not a vanilla style DnD setting.

 

[Elf Witch]

Acting like a huge asshat should be off the table for all parties. But naturally it's not interesting to discuss those cases, because that's so obvious.

I don't believe that dropping a five page document in front of your players is really flexible. I don't know what to say about going ahead with a campaign as if your players agreed with the document when you know that most of them didn't read it. Blame can be spread around, but I think it more useful to ask everyone to make sure that everyone is on the same page.



What's the issue here? As I said above, don't play with asshats. If you ask what to do with problematic players, you're going to get a different response then if you raise it as "When modern ethics collide with medieval ethics", and in either case you can't just expect everyone to agree with you.

Big sigh again. She did not just drop a document in front of the players. She discussed with each of us what we would like to see in game. She presented her setting and asked okay any questions any issues with any of this.

I am huge believer in a DM being flexible. But there is a big difference between being flexible and just caving in every time an outcomes happens in a game and a player does not like it.

Take the player who went to jail because he broke in and murdered a non evil necromancer even when two of his party members are yelling at him to stop because they know the guy. The player was a little pissed over going to jail he felt that in most games necromancy is evil and he the player was being punished unfairly by the DM. He did calm down since it didn't have last repercussions other then the rest of us being blackmailed in doing something for the town mayor and he the player was going to be out of town for several weeks.

He in character still thinks necromancers are evil and that humans are stupid for tolerating it. He will never trust them just like in his eyes all drow are evil.

The player has made it clear that he knows and is okay that necromancy is not evil and he thinks it might be cool to be faced with dealing with some non evil drow.

We had an incident where in character he destroyed a bunch of necromantic expensive loot. There was some harsh words until we talked it out and got on the same page and he explained that as a player he is fine with what the DM is doing. That his character is the one with the issues.

The DM was very flexible over the incident. Yes there were consequences to his actions but she worked out those consequences in a way to move the game forward, handle a lengthy player absence and have it make sense for the setting. She also handle the murder aspect by having the necromancer have a contingency up that allowed him to be raised. So while the dwarf did technically murder him in the end all he had to do was serve a light sentence and pay back the necromancer for the cost of the spell ingredients.

I did not ask what to do with problematic players. I started this thread to talk about dealing with modern ethics in a fantasy world. I think it is an interesting topic removed from what happened in the game. I have said that I used those as examples not that I was asking advice on what to do about it with the player in question. But some posters started bringing up those examples and I have tried to clarify what happened.

 

[the Jester]

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.

IMHO:

I disagree. A big part of dming is running the world as it ought to run. If the pcs are of lower class stock, then damn right they ought to bend the knee when they see the king, or else they won't ever get to see him. If that's their choice, that's fine, but if that means that they miss out on the royal rewards offered for adventure #6 and instead only get the loot off the bodies of the monsters, that's the consequence. If the game is set in a world with a high nobility that expects respect, the pcs need to act appropriately or else expect appropriate responses from said nobility. The milieu should not bend to the whim of the players; it is established by the dm and ought to remain consistent.

 

[fanboy2000]

If you are playing a historically accurate 12th century RPG, it's metagaming to bring in science and other modern concepts into the game.

If you were truly playing a 12th century noble, he cannot have modern ideas about morality. Properly role-played, he must act and believe as a 12th century noble does, not a 30-something computer analyst from Boise.

This, I think, is where things get strange. I want to get talk about something brought up by the response to this your post.

Lets say we have a DM who's trying to hue closely to medieval concepts about gender roles and class. One player wants to make a female paladin who was raised on a farm.

The problem is that woman weren't allowed to be knights in medieval times. The idea of elevating one to a status that might put them on equal footing with men (or even in charge of them) was unthinkable.

But that's not all, Joan of Arc was such a person. She didn't do it for any modern feminist reasons, she wasn't trying to buck the system. She believed she had a special calling to protect her country. She seems to have fulfilled it.

What we have is a Reality is Unrealistic problem. The DM is trying to create a world that makes sense using rules that, IRL, weren't always followed. I once asked Jef Lobe at World Con (the only time I was at World Con) when he was on a panel why people always complained about so-and-so acting out of character when people IRL acted out of character all that time and no one calls it that. He response? Real life doesn't have to make sense.

I my game, my expectation is that you are protraying a fictional character who acts and believes as a person who lives in the game world, and not as yourself. I'm fine with somebody basically "playing themselves" as that character's personality. But it still has to be consistent with the fictional character fitting in with the world. If the player trumps that, they are failing to portray a fictional character.

There's a flaw in this reasoning, but I want to discuss it in the context of what you said in a follow-up.

But I think it's one thing from the character's perspective to be living a certain way in society, and then one day, when the player takes control, he snaps and starts acting stupid in front of the king because the player doesn't share the background of his PC, and doesn't see to evolve the character to reach the same conclusions the player has.

Background is a funny thing. The same background details can be used to justify two different outcomes. For example, having a strict upbringing can be used to explain a strict PC, or a rebellious one. Rebels exist in many cultures and in many time periods.

More to the point, I think this illustrates a reason Ugh the Funny (often Half-Orc) Barbarian exists, even in "serious" campaigns. Such a PCs behavior is easy to explain and it gives the player freedom to act.

I think part of the disconnect like with the "I kneel before no man" players, is seeing how to execute that as a character without being a total moron.

Well, there were morons in medieval times.

More specifically, D&D also draws heavily on fiction, and a such characters are common in fiction. Conan was a total jerk to people in power, even to people with power over him. One story starts off with him kidnapping the princess. If Conan were a PC, his DM would have strangled him Homer Simpson style (and accuse the player of cheating for somehow rolling all 20s before stat adjustments).

Also, there's a whole class of fiction where there the hero, someone from "our" world, crosses over into another world and "fixes" it. John Carter, the hero of A Princess of Mars and Gods of Mars (and a bunch of others) is such a hero. So, it's not unsurprising that players may want to play out such a story.

DMing is a lot of work and one of the reasons I do it is because I love world building if the players want to take that away from me then I have to wonder why am I doing it.

Have you thought about posting the settings/worlds online? I'm assuming that you get something out of DMing other than just building the world, but if world building is a big source of you're enjoyment it might be worth exploring communities where that's the main thrust.

I mean, that have communities for people who make-up languages. No one seems to expect anyone to learn them. (Except for Esperanto.)

 

[prosfilaes]

A big part of dming is running the world as it ought to run. If the pcs are of lower class stock, then damn right they ought to bend the knee when they see the king, or else they won't ever get to see him.

Why is that the world as it ought to be run? In most D&D worlds, I would expect that people would know that Conan and Raistlin are out there, and the simple fact that they're lower-class doesn't mean they can't single-handedly take out most of your army, not to mention your throne room. The rules change.

If that's their choice, that's fine, but if that means that they miss out on the royal rewards offered for adventure #6 and instead only get the loot off the bodies of the monsters, that's the consequence.

But that's a DM's choice; you could equally say if they choose not to murder the merchant they run across on the road, that's fine, but they'll miss out on the rewards. You're punishing people for not enjoying their characters kowtowing to nobility; that's not something you can foist off on the world.

And frankly, if the king needs higher-level characters, the king needs them. He may not deal with them in open court, or even directly, but people with needed skills can get away with being a little eccentric.

If the game is set in a world with a high nobility that expects respect, the pcs need to act appropriately or else expect appropriate responses from said nobility.

And vice versa, though. DMs seem to get all annoyed when the game is set in a world with superpowered characters, and said characters decide to explain to the nobility that people who can cast Timestop and Meteor Swarm are people to respect too.

The milieu should not bend to the whim of the players; it is established by the dm and ought to remain consistent.

Why should the DM set up a milieu in such a way that his players will be unhappy? Why is consistency a greater value then player fun?

I'm not saying this isn't complex, and that there aren't cases where a player drags the game down by making a fuss about it. But obsequiousness to nobility is hardly universal in the real world and there's good reason for it not to be in a D&D world.

And so often it just seems to be a proxy battle for power. The player wants to play a character that doesn't have to kneel to anyone, and the DM wants to show the player that he can force his character to kneel.