The ethics of ... death

[Ahnehnois]

Depending on the prevalence of magic, I question whether people in a D&D milieu would perceive any difference. And those Raise spells are granted by a deity - who are we mortals to claim their use is immoral?

Even in a high-magic D&D world, I think trading a life for another is a pretty special case. I also don't know whether a good deity would allow these things. It isn't enumerated anywhere, but I think there's a good case to say that, if an unwilling sacrifice is used to power it, Raise Dead should acquire the Evil descriptor and be forbidden to some clerics.

First, if it cannot make moral judgements, then how does it possess a soul? Second, cats still hunt even when their sustenance is provided by pet owners.

I don't know that being able to make moral judgements is a prerequisite of having a soul. This is mostly me talking about souls; the rules make it clear that they exist but don't exactly talk much about them. I would think that many humans with low mental ability scores might have a very limited ability to make moral judgments, but they still have souls.

And well-fed cats hunt because they don't know any better. Hunting is not a rational choice, but they are unable to understand that and act accordingly.

They are nothing like real druids (of whom we know very little, really). I see no reason they would be hippies. As you note, nature is violent. One cannot revere nature and ignore that violence, can one?

There's plenty of space between acknowledging that something exists and is valid and doing it oneself. Many followers of real life pacifist/vegetarian ideologies clearly revere nature, including its violent aspects, but hold themselves to a different standard than some of the creatures they observe.

Can he communicate before the sacrifice takes place? If not, the death occurs for no purpose.

Ouch. Yes. There's risk there.

Under the core rules, a scenario can unfold where an evil cleric tries to raise a good character to use him as a prisoner or something, the good character says no, and the 5000 gp diamond is wasted because the spell fails. I would carry the same principle forward.

Is a willing sacrifice somehow better? It's OK as long as it's suicide rather than homicide?

Maybe. Maybe not. If the character talked with an elder he trusts beforehand about the value of life and the elder decides that (as discussed in previous posts) the life of a young hero is worth more than his last years, maybe the good character is honored by the sacrifice and accepts it. Conversely, a charismatic hero might have fans willing to give their lives for him, and he might decide that using them that way is wrong (though as stated, said fan is likely dead either way). These examples are malleable though. In some interpretations, suicide might simply be evil under the "respect for life" definition, making raise dead a guaranteed evil spell.

Where is the differentiation? Is it OK to eat insects? What about crustaceans or mussels?

Let me go back to this one real quick. To me, good or evil is internal rather than external. I had a trenchant moment as a young child where I would sometimes look down at the sidewalk, see some ants crossing it, and go out of my way to step on and crush the ants. I then reached a point where I realized that this was wrong. I think many (not all) would agree that such an action is wrong, not so much because ants have rights or feelings, but because it indulges our own worst impulses. Would I kill an ant if it was invading my house? Sure. Do I kill some purely by accident? Undoubtedly. Would I kill some that are not causing me problems just for the sake of doing it? No. Because doing so would be wrong. That's a line that I drew.

Would I kill a bug to eat it, or for some other gain unrelated to alleviating any problems or danger it is associated with? Again, I file that under wrong. Gray area, definitely.

I think we agree there are no easy right answers here, anyway.

Just warming up for my ethics conference this week. I'm guessing that raising the dead won't be on the agenda, but there will be some issues that require a lot of thought to reach no definitive answer.

 

[billd91]

I strongly agree with [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] in relation to these examples - they are about default expectations for common-sensical happenings. They don't show us anything about science in the gameworld. For instance, the gameworld could be flat, and contain no fundamental force analagous to gravity, but swords would still fall when dropped.

Well, there goes any real predictability. How do I know a particular physical law applies if that's not fundamentally how things are supposed to work.

And if I should be able to expect things to work, so i can predict how the world works, what's the point of basing it all on some different physical laws? They conform to my expectations, which are based on the real world's science anyway.

 

[pemerton]

Well, there goes any real predictability. How do I know a particular physical law applies if that's not fundamentally how things are supposed to work.

Ask the GM? Negotiate it at campaign set-up? Gygax's campaign doesn't seem to have had any trouble despite the fact that chemical laws don't work (eg no gunpowder on Oerth) and geology/astronomy are also different (a planet of less dense substance and large diameter yet essentially no difference in gravitation, climate, geography, etc).

Ie the same way that I know that there will be dragons, giants and magic, none of which conform to phyiscal law.

 

[Sunseeker]

Well, there goes any real predictability. How do I know a particular physical law applies if that's not fundamentally how things are supposed to work.

And if I should be able to expect things to work, so i can predict how the world works, what's the point of basing it all on some different physical laws? They conform to my expectations, which are based on the real world's science anyway.

Expecting a fantasy game to conform to real world science is sort of like asking birds not to fly.

 

[billd91]

Ask the GM? Negotiate it at campaign set-up? Gygax's campaign doesn't seem to have had any trouble despite the fact that chemical laws don't work (eg no gunpowder on Oerth) and geology/astronomy are also different (a planet of less dense substance and large diameter yet essentially no difference in gravitation, climate, geography, etc).

Ie the same way that I know that there will be dragons, giants and magic, none of which conform to phyiscal law.

Hash it out beforehand? So, you expect me to sit down with the GM and other players and design a physics engine for the game? That sounds to me, considering we can use real world understanding of physical laws, like a colossal waste of time. It's something computer RPGs and shooters have to do, sure, because they have to build a game engine for everything to exist within, but we tabletoppers have the advantage of not needing to do that. We have our own understandings of the world around us to fill in the incredibly large number of gaps that would appear if we didn't have them.

 

[billd91]

Expecting a fantasy game to conform to real world science is sort of like asking birds not to fly.

Let's assume you aren't playing Toon. If your PC tossed a sheaf of dry parchment in a bonfire, would you expect your GM to say that they burn? Would you expect a sword your PC dropped to fall at his feet or fall upward? If you managed to hit a flying dragon with a rope of entanglement and it fouled his wings, would you expect him to fall or turn pink? Would you expect a wooden longboat your PC is in that gets rammed by a trireme to be smashed to flinders or would you expect it to bounce like rubber? If you expect any of these things to act in a manner you find predictable, I submit you're expecting your game to conform to real world science to a substantial degree. Do you expect non-scientific things that fit the genre to be OK, sure. But fundamental assumptions are already there.

 

[Sunseeker]

Let's assume you aren't playing Toon. If your PC tossed a sheaf of dry parchment in a bonfire, would you expect your GM to say that they burn? Would you expect a sword your PC dropped to fall at his feet or fall upward? If you managed to hit a flying dragon with a rope of entanglement and it fouled his wings, would you expect him to fall or turn pink? Would you expect a wooden longboat your PC is in that gets rammed by a trireme to be smashed to flinders or would you expect it to bounce like rubber? If you expect any of these things to act in a manner you find predictable, I submit you're expecting your game to conform to real world science to a substantial degree. Do you expect non-scientific things that fit the genre to be OK, sure. But fundamental assumptions are already there.

I suppose that's true for the vast majority of settings, which again I agree with Permeton, the DM needs to make their design decisions clear. The problem with expectations, assumptions and the like are that whoever holds them generally feels they don't need to be communicated, and for your generic LOTR-like setting, this is probably true. So if the DM creates a setting that he expresses to not be normal, it's important for the player to question if their expectations and assumptions are worth holding on to.

Maybe the setting is ruled by gods of writing, and thus any paper with any writing whatsoever cannot be destroyed by any means. Written over? Buried? But once written on, it will not rot, burn, break or in any manner take damage.

In D&D and life in general, assumptions tend to work out poorly and communication pretty much solves any problem they could cause.

 

[Balesir]

Let's assume you aren't playing Toon. If your PC tossed a sheaf of dry parchment in a bonfire, would you expect your GM to say that they burn? Would you expect a sword your PC dropped to fall at his feet or fall upward? If you managed to hit a flying dragon with a rope of entanglement and it fouled his wings, would you expect him to fall or turn pink? Would you expect a wooden longboat your PC is in that gets rammed by a trireme to be smashed to flinders or would you expect it to bounce like rubber? If you expect any of these things to act in a manner you find predictable, I submit you're expecting your game to conform to real world science to a substantial degree. Do you expect non-scientific things that fit the genre to be OK, sure. But fundamental assumptions are already there.

I think you are conflating two steps into one. Things have properties both in the real world and in a fantasy world (step 1) and those properties are explained by the (meta)physics of the world they are in (step 2).

We generally assume that common items (and, to some extent, creatures - although the properties of these tend to be imperfectly known to many RPGers) have the properties they are generally observed to have in the real world. This is our "simplifying assumption" as far as knowing how the fantasy world looks goes. But this does not mean that the underlying "physics engine" of the world is the same as for the real world. Since we only have an imperfect understanding of the real world 'underlying mechanism', in fact, that would be impossible in practice, anyway.

So we use "step 1" as a matter of course to make the game world easier to relate to and simpler to describe. Stuff that has more earth element than air fall toward the earth (and things with more air than earth tend to drift toward the sky/upper air). Fire interacts with flammable stuff, releasing the fire within it and sublimating the watery parts, releasing the airy parts and leaving the earthy parts behind. Things like wood have properties like brittleness, hardness, strength and so on - as well as sometimes properties that do not exist in the real world but apply to certain elements of the fantasy world, such as insubstantialness, incorporeality, undeadness, magicality - that are either expected from the common meaning of the word for them ("wood", "sword" and so on) or are defined by the game system.

Step 2, however, is a "step too far". It might be amusing to speculate about is from time to time, but we don't really need it, in general, to play the game. In my capacity as an engineer, I have very often been able to do my work using just the properties of the materials I have been working with. The actual science underlying why those materials have those properties might be interesting, but I don't actually need to know it in order to use the material. Playing an RPG is a bit like engineering, in this respect; to resolve almost all character actions, you don't need to know the underlying 'science' of the world - you just have to know the properties of things.

Once in a while, of course, the underlying mechanisms will become relevant. What to do then? Well, my experience is that trying to understand the matter by resorting to real world physics and chemistry is unhelpful. It leads to biases for magic-using characters (because we are forced always to give magic a "free pass"), it leads to assumption clash (because all of us - no exceptions - have an incomplete or flawed model of real world mechanisms, and sometimes they clash) and it is seldom "fun".

What should we use, then? Start with the game rules. Structures like keywords and magic system divisions are especially useful. And look for analogies. Things that spells and fantastical beasts can achieve must be explainable by the mechanisms underlying this (game) world. What does that tell us about the current situation?

And, if all else fails, discuss it as a group and choose a set of "facts". We often do this on a pro tem basis - we select a way things work to run with for now, and then review it later in more depth.

So, for instance, can a human fighter develop the strength of a giant? Well, sure - even if their size may not let them leverage it in quite the same way. Whatever mechanism operates in the giant's muscles, sinews and bones could be incorporated into those of the fighter somehow. How? Well, that's for the players to figure out.

 

[pemerton]

Hash it out beforehand? So, you expect me to sit down with the GM and other players and design a physics engine for the game?

The only RPG I'm familiar with that even comes close to pretending to have a physics engine is Traveller. Most RPGs rely, either expressly or implicitly, on shared genre conventions: that is why we know that in the D&D world a dragon or a giant wasp can fly but Icarus can't (without magic).

But I commonly see people on these boards speculating about monster biology in evoutionary terms. For me, that is just bizarre: evolutionary biology is no-wise part of the fantasy genre, and every D&D world I'm familiar with (i) posits that lifeforms were created, not evoloved, and (ii) that lifeforms, particularly intelligent ones, can interbreed in a way that bears no relationship to real-world biology. For me this is a clear case where notions of, or presumptions about the applicability of, scienctific explanation have no work to do, and it is very obviously genre logic all the way.

Because (as far as I can tell) more RPGers are educated in the natural than the social sciences, genre departures from sociological possibility seem to be remarked up on less often. But needless to say the political, economic and social set up of a typical D&D setting (whether Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms or Middle Earth) makes next-to-know sense in real-world terms. They are, literally speaking, impossible. We accept and work within them not because we have an alternative "physics enginge" (Traveller excepted, with its odd sociology and economics built into its world-generation and trading mechancis) but because we understand the logic of them as genre elements.

I suppose that's true for the vast majority of settings, which again I agree with Permeton, the DM needs to make their design decisions clear. The problem with expectations, assumptions and the like are that whoever holds them generally feels they don't need to be communicated, and for your generic LOTR-like setting, this is probably true.

I think your use of the word "generic" is telling - settings bring with them genre conventions, which we can then rely on for adjudication and resolution.

 

[pemerton]

Once in a while, of course, the underlying mechanisms will become relevant. What to do then? Well, my experience is that trying to understand the matter by resorting to real world physics and chemistry is unhelpful.

<snip>

What should we use, then? Start with the game rules. Structures like keywords and magic system divisions are especially useful. And look for analogies. Things that spells and fantastical beasts can achieve must be explainable by the mechanisms underlying this (game) world. What does that tell us about the current situation?

<snip>

So, for instance, can a human fighter develop the strength of a giant? Well, sure - even if their size may not let them leverage it in quite the same way. Whatever mechanism operates in the giant's muscles, sinews and bones could be incorporated into those of the fighter somehow. How? Well, that's for the players to figure out.

Interesting observations.

The "strength of a giant" example makes me think of Atlas holding up the sky, and Hercules helping him out as one of the labours. In physical terms, the idea of being strong enough to hold up the sky (or the earth) makes no sense. But it's a classic fantasy motif. And in RPG terms, I don't need a physics engine to resolve it - I just need a resolution mechanic that allows the player to devote player-side resources (stats, buffs etc) to the effort, and tells me (eg via successful skill roll, or skill challenge, or whatever) whether or not they succeed.

In 3E terms, the Epic DCs for balancing and tumbling are a bit like that. I don't see them as establishing a "physics engine". I see them as setting DCs for certain genre-appropriate stuff.