When modern ethics collide with medieval ethics

[S'mon]

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.

If they're high-level PCs in a low level world, then sure, the GM should GM the natural consequences of their actions, just as he should do so when they're low level PCs in a high level world.

Either the 20th level PCs will get a lot of respect from the 4th level King, or they'll kill him and take his stuff. The next king over will probably be more respectful.

Likewise if the 4th level PCs mouth off to the 20th level king, he'll kill them and take their stuff. Maybe the next adventurer group will be more respectful.

If the GM wants to run a game starting at 1st level, with nobles who expect respect (possibly because they are themselves warlords, wizards etc with lots of experience in killing people/taking stuff) then the players can either agree, in which case they shouldn't expect to be able to mouth off with impunity, or say no, in which case the GM needs a different game (high level PCs? PC rulers?), or new players.

 

[Elf Witch]

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.)

I am lucky my players love my world and love playing in it. And I don't want to give the impression that the PCs can't change my world.

I am not rigid nor do I railroad and I have no problem if the PCs bring about major changes in how things work by their actions.

One of the joys of DMing is letting PCs lose in your world and watch what they do.

That is not what I am talking about though when I say I would get angry if a player didn't like an aspect and demanded I change for no other reason than he didn't like it.

I work with my players to make their characters fun. I do things in the setting to work with their backgrounds. I give them the ability to have a chance to accomplish the goals they have for their characters. But I don't just willy nilly change the setting to accomplish that I work with in the setting.

If I was running a Kalamar game and the players wanted to take down the slavers there are in settings ways to accomplish this. There is a god that is against slavery and an organization called the Broken Chain. You don't have to make major changes to the setting to let the PCs have a chance at accomplishing their goals.

As a player I enjoy working in the setting as presented to accomplish what I want for my character. That to me is the challenge and I would be hugely disappointed to learn that I accomplished my goals only because the DM changed the setting to allow this.

In my roommate's setting nobles and royalty expect respect from the lower classes and they have all the power to punish the lower classes if they don't get it.

Now your character believes all men are created equal.

There doesn't have to be a conflict with the DM if you play it right. If all you do to prove this is go around mouthing off to the nobility getting into fights, getting arrested and then getting angry at the DM because the world just slapped you back then you are asking the DM to just change how the world works because of your PC.

Now if you do it in a way to raise rebellion among the commoners ala Zorro style, as an example, you are playing a character with the out look of all men are created equal but you are doing it in the setting.

 

[Elf Witch]

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.



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.



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.



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.

In my game there are no heroes like Conan or Raistlan my PCs will one day be the heroes of legend. The PC cleric is the only cleric to be able to cast divine magic in over a thousand years.

When I DM most of the time my players know that I scale the world because I personally hate the whole I am 10th level adventurer I can now kick around the king and his army. And they are ok with it so there is no issue. But they also don't like the whole adventures as tyrants style of play. They like the feeling of knowing that there are always risks involved no matter their level.


Hers is the disconnect I am seeing on this. People seem to have this idea that the DM wants it one way and all the players want it another. Now when that happens you have a big issue. If the DM wants to run King Arthur and all the players want Conan everyone at the table is frustrated and unhappy. In that case the DM can say what the hay I will run it Conan or the players can say hey we will try King Arthur. But if neither side really wants to change then there is no way to really fix it.

But what happens if the DM and some of the players want it one way and one or two of the players don't. That is the issue.

As for I refuse to go to my knee style character. If all the players are playing this style then maybe the DM needs to rethink having a world where it is expected to bow to royalty.

But what if it is one player who feels this way and the rest of the table does not do you allow that one player to dictate how it is going to be? You can kick him out of the game or you can allow the characters to handle it. They can tell the guy you are not going to the king with us.

If he mouths off to the wrong noble the party can try and migrate the incident by stepping in and role playing out hey please ignore him he is not right in the head .

If the DM makes a world like this and a player wants to play a character who takes no knee he and the DM need to discuss it. The player needs to know well if you do that this all these things that can happen in this society. If he knows all of that and is still willing to play the character that way then he should not get angry when it happens to him.

If the player wants to play this style character because he thinks it will be cool to effect change the DM needs to know this and let the player know if it is a possibility or if the DM really does not want to handle this in this campaign.

 

[pemerton]

It used to happen a lot back when we played 2E but then we were playing with younger people and still bought the myth that hack and slashers and role players can play at the same table myth. That all it takes is a DM who knows how to give all his players what they want out of a game.

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.

Its like people who are in the SCA we bow to the royalty even their empty thrones. We use the correct titles when addressing higher ups. Not doing so and being a dick about can get you kicked out of the event.

No one forces you to join the SCA and no one forces you to play at a DMs table.

Only one player out of the six at the table had an issue

<snip>

The other player who took it out of game and still brings it up three years latter is just being a dick because he enjoys debating and wants to win the debate.

I totally agree that a DM needs to be sensitive to their players moral sensibilities and if they are going to add something that might offend a player they need to let the player know ahead of time. But once they have done that the burden is on the player not the DM. If the player finds the theme of the game to morally repugnant to play in then they should leave the game.

All this is fair enough, but then makes me want to ask what Doug McCrae did upthread - why not get rid of this player?

I had been assuming that for some reason, presumably friendships, the group wants to keep this player in the game. Which you confirm here:

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.

And my view is that, in these circumstances, there are ways to approaching alignment and moral evaluation in the game that can reduce the likelihood of conflict, and ways of doing that that can increase the likelihood of conflict.

But what happens if the DM and some of the players want it one way and one or two of the players don't. That is the issue.

<snip>

But what if it is one player who feels this way and the rest of the table does not do you allow that one player to dictate how it is going to be? You can kick him out of the game or you can allow the characters to handle it.

I don't think those are the only options in this sort of situation.

 

[pemerton]

I would like to point out that in our game the DM has not told any player how to feel about things

<snip>

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.

Unless I've misunderstood, the GM is spcifying what is good and what is not.

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.

<snip>

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.

See, for me, this verges on the incoherent. What does it mean to say of something "Sure, it's not morally permissible but it is Good", or "Sure, it's not Evil but it is a wicked thing to do"?

I know there are some corner cases here that cause some trouble for analysing the semantics of moral utterance (like Satan's notorious utterance of "Evil, be thou my good") but the player who has his/her PC say "That's wicked even though it doesn't ping as Evil" isn't trying to produce some sort of clever paradox along Milton's lines.

I can't but see that the player is being asked to suspend his/her moral judgement. And as far as I can see this is completely unnecessary - it's trivial to have an epic and morally serious fantasy RPG without alignment.

That gets to something I was trying to say to pemerton earlier - the exact definitions of Alignment will vary by campaign setting, players shouldn't expect them to be universal.

And I think this is verging on incoherent. "Good" and "evil" aren't relative terms in the requisite sense.

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?

I think there's arguably a big difference between gratuitous raiding cloaked in a fig leaf of defence of others ("We're protecting the villagers from the rampaging orcs") and killing a helpless prisoner.

The looting thing is trickier, I agree. I try to downplay it in my own game, or give it a Robin Hood-ish flavour.

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.

<snip>

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.

This is a more eloquent expression of what I was tyring to convey when I asked rhetorically, upthread, "Why wouldn't I blame the GM?" if I'm playing John Brown and my PC get killed by proto-Klansmen.

 

[pemerton]

D&D certainly supports a wide range of play styles - gamist,exploratory, and silly, for instance. Just not, traditionally, pemerton's one.

How long does something have to be done in order for it to be considered "traditional?" Unless I'm vastly misunderstanding what you mean by pemerton's playstyle, I'd say that folks have been hankering for a more narrative/dramatic take on the game that more closely resembles the fiction that brought a lot of fans to the game in the first place from the very early years.

Granted; you could argue that D&D never really supported that, which maybe is your point.

S'mon's account of my style seems roughly accurate - and Elf Witch's also. It is Forge-y by ENworld standards, I think, though probably not by Forge standards. The basic approach is strong GM authority over scene framing (it's not a sandbox) and strong player authority over PC response to said scenes (it's not a railroad). Plot emerges out of this.

Backstory authority is shared, although for the players tends to be confined to their PCs and immediate environs (eg players can introduce cities, secret societies etc for their PCs to come from, belong to etc, but they generally can't make up that the NPC they just met is actually their PC's long lost father). Theme is an evolving thing, but is driven by the choices the players make in relation to their PCs, and the scenes the GM frames in response to those choices. Given we're playing Rolemaster and D&D, we're not talking Forge-type themes here, but the sort of stuff that can be done with classic fantasy tropes. Think movies like Excalibur or Hero, but often not getting to quite those levels of grandeur!

As to whether D&D supports this style of play - it can be done easily enough in AD&D if you ignore alignment, use a variant XP system, and don't start at 1st level if you want to have much combat. Rolemaster is good on the PC build side but has some issues on the action resolution side. I don't think 3E is especially good for it, because it has much the same action resolution issues as Rolemaster without (I think) the same degree of support on the PC build side.

As it turns out, I've found 4e to suit it very well because it offers strong support on the PC build side and its action resolution mechanics don't get in the way at all.

How common this sort of D&D play was/is I wouldn't know. I've run D&D/Rolemaster more-or-less like this since 1986 and Oriental Adventures, although I'm better at it now then I used to be.

 

[Elf Witch]

Unless I've misunderstood, the GM is spcifying what is good and what is not.

See, for me, this verges on the incoherent. What does it mean to say of something "Sure, it's not morally permissible but it is Good", or "Sure, it's not Evil but it is a wicked thing to do"?

I know there are some corner cases here that cause some trouble for analysing the semantics of moral utterance (like Satan's notorious utterance of "Evil, be thou my good") but the player who has his/her PC say "That's wicked even though it doesn't ping as Evil" isn't trying to produce some sort of clever paradox along Milton's lines.

I can't but see that the player is being asked to suspend his/her moral judgement. And as far as I can see this is completely unnecessary - it's trivial to have an epic and morally serious fantasy RPG without alignment.

And I think this is verging on incoherent. "Good" and "evil" aren't relative terms in the requisite sense.

I think there's arguably a big difference between gratuitous raiding cloaked in a fig leaf of defence of others ("We're protecting the villagers from the rampaging orcs") and killing a helpless prisoner.

The looting thing is trickier, I agree. I try to downplay it in my own game, or give it a Robin Hood-ish flavour.


This is a more eloquent expression of what I was tyring to convey when I asked rhetorically, upthread, "Why wouldn't I blame the GM?" if I'm playing John Brown and my PC get killed by proto-Klansmen.

The DM actually didn't use the word good she used the word lawful. It was Sean who argued that it was an evil act and should cost the player his spells until he atoned.

Even if we were not using an alignment in this game this issue would still come up. Sean would have still argued that it was an evil act and that the character should be punished some how.

And yes in game I think the DM has every right to say with is good and what is evil in her setting. She is not telling the players that their real life morals are wrong or that their characters have to agree. But when it comes to adjudicating the rules about a cleric or paladin losing spells until they atone that is most certainly in the DM hands. Or adjudicating how the NPCs are going to view the act.

Just like the DM can make a house rule that all clerics must be the same alignment as their god or if warlocks get their power from pacts with demons then they detect as evil.

In my game warlocks are burned at the stake because the only way to get the power is to make a deal with a demon or devil. So a player who insisted on playing one would need to understand this. I would encourage them to pick another class.

I have played in plenty of games where characters have disagreed on what is good or evil or dishonorable. But we left the actually rules of it up to the DM.

I have a paladin in my game and I worked closely with him to develop his code and he and I agreed that if I thought he might be heading down a dangerous path I would stop the game and talk to him about it. But we both agreed that the final say on if he broke his code would be mine as the DM.

Now as a DM I don't put in situations that no matter what the paladin does he will screw up his alignment there will always be choices.

I also while looking at alignment look at the situation, the motives the big picture. I don't believe that alignment is black and white nor is a straight jacket.

For example it says a paladin will never work knowing work with an evil character. I am of the opinion that it depends on the situation. If there is an evil threatening to destroy the world and an evil character can help stop it then I most definitely can see a paladin working with him in this case and I think his alignment would be just fine.

It also says paladins never lie and people thinks that means a paladin has to tell the truth to the BBEG because otherwise he loses his paladin hood. I say BS I view the lying thing as a paladin does not lie for personal gain like telling a woman he loves her just to get her into bed when he doesn't.

As DM I can adjudicate how these things work. And I make sure any player who has a character tied to alignment knows how it works in my game.

Look I agree that if you build a character that you have an expectation to be able to accomplish something and the DM agrees then makes it impossible then yeah that is pretty sucky and bad DMing.

The player Sean making the big stink is playing a warlock. His background is that his father sold hm before he was born in pact to a devil. But his mother had twins and he was second born . Now the devil still wants him but a celestial being stepped in and said no. So they are fighting over his soul and tempting him. Sometimes he looks more demonic and other times more angelic. Depending on how he is leaning his alignment switches from chaotic good to chaotic neutral. His eldreicth blasts change color to when he is being more demonic they are red when he is leaning more celestial they are white.

Now he has no issue trusting the DM with this and he keeps saying he leaves the judgement of the alignment up to her based on how he is acting. Yet he still felt the need to argue with her about the evil clerics.

 

[S'mon]

Unless I've misunderstood, the GM is spcifying what is good and what is not. What is Good and what is Evil are defined by incomprehensible cosmic forces, not by people - or players.

See, for me, this verges on the incoherent. What does it mean to say of something "Sure, it's not morally permissible but it is Good", or "Sure, it's not Evil but it is a wicked thing to do"?

I'm going by 1e Alignment system - theft could be wicked/bad but not Evil. Assassination and use of poison are Evil.

The definitions of Alignment vary a lot 1e-2e-3e. 3e's Evil resembles 1e's Neutral! It's not me that's being incoherent; either the system is incoherent or it's arbitrary. It certainly never maps precisely to your, or my, IRL definition of Good.

If you don't like it, don't use it. If you do like it, just remember it's game-Good, not your personal pemerton definition of Good.

 

[S'mon]

Unless I've misunderstood, the GM is spcifying what is good and what is not.

See, for me, this verges on the incoherent. What does it mean to say of something "Sure, it's not morally permissible but it is Good", or "Sure, it's not Evil but it is a wicked thing to do"?

I'm going by 1e Alignment system - theft could be wicked/bad but not Evil. Assassination and use of poison are Evil. The rules are set by incomprehensible cosmic forces, not by people, or players.

The definitions of Alignment vary a lot 1e-2e-3e. 3e's Evil resembles 1e's Neutral! It's not me that's being incoherent; either the system is incoherent or it's arbitrary. It certainly never maps precisely to your, or my, IRL definition of Good.

If you don't like it, don't use it. If you do like it, just remember it's game-Good, not your personal pemerton definition of Good.

 

[malcolypse]

Back to being almost on topic:

While I was doing some research for my Classic Deadlands game, in which I plan on testing the characters world views, I came across this.

Victoria Woodhull - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You'd better believe the PCs will be running into her. She seemed to be the poster girl for doing things completely opposed to "how things were done" in her time. I may have a bit of a crush on her.