D&D 5E About Morally Correct Outcomes in D&D Adventures [+]

[EzekielRaiden]

I want to give an aside - this is a perfect example of home brew vs. published modules differ. I home brew all of my setting and adventures. It's one big continuous thing. I never look to a "golden ending" -- I want threads that lead out to other adventures, hooks that lead further. Wrapping up all of the threads Is something I avoid. Connected modules and adventure paths also do not try to tie up everything. At least, like my homebrew, until the end of the last act.

Sure. I don't use any prewritten adventures for my Dungeon World game either. There have been fronts and secret connections and such, but what comes of them and how much they achieve is a function of player choice. I try to plan situations rather than events and processes rather than outcomes. If the players don't interfere, those processes result in Bad Things. If they do...we find out what happens!

But I'm pretty sure the thread is about prewritten adventures.

 

[Steampunkette]

Allow me to introduce the Prisoner's Trolley Problemma and solve philosophy forever!

All of your loved ones except the one you love the most are in a trolley. The one you love most is tied to the tracks. If you pull the lever, the trolley swerves onto another track, and then a third track, where it's smooth sailing and no one gets hurt...

BUT!

On the third track someone else is facing the same dilemma with their loved ones! And if you and they both pull the lever to save your most beloved people, the trolleys will crash, killing everyone else!

 

[Oofta]

An insight from a small and humble poll

When asked "Which of these endgames do you like to see in every WoTC 5E adventure as written?", these have been among the popular answers:

• At least one heroically "good" ending (PC can achieve a morally correct outcome)
• And I am good with [2 or more] possible endings examined & explored in the adventure as written

While not a scientifically accurate representation of the entire D&D 5E community, this poll may suggest that a significant* number of D&D 5E players prefer each WoTC 5E published adventure as-written to examine and explore a number of suggested endings, one of which should have a "good" / morally correct outcome.

This +++++ thread treats this idea as an "invitation" to engage in some hypotheticals...

* albeit an estimated percentage is not possible to assert without robust data

But wait, what is heroically "good" and "morally correct" anyway?

When we run or (re)write adventures for our own group, chatGPT says:


And what if you are a writer at WoTC? If tasked with including a "good" ending with every adventure, how do you navigate the issue of every gaming table having different expectations and moral codes in the fiction?

This reminds me of a book called "How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question" by Michael Schur. The author seemed to be in a somewhat analogous situation, trying to define good and bad in the fiction for the TV show "The Good Place". Here's an excerpt:


Now I have zilch experience at moral philosophy, so I found this book very interesting. For example, it describes The Trolley Problem -- in essence, is it OK to cause the death of one person in order to prevent a bunch of other people from not dying? And then goes about explaining ways of approaching this thought experiment.

The Trolley Problem reminds me of potential situations in D&D too, such as: is it "good" or "evil" to extrajudicially murder a handful of brainwashed cultists who are actively trying to summon the elder god from destroying the entire city full of innocent people? You may have your own, even trickier, example from a previous game.

One possibility is, since the fiction is never set in stone, the author could attempt to avoid writing the kind of story that expressly puts the PCs in morally ambiguous situations.

Another possibility is when the author writes the adventure story that sets up morally challenging scenario, but not really provide any suggested guidance of good and bad, which may obfuscate understanding of what exactly is the heroically "good" / morally correct outcome that some D&D gamers prefer to see in the adventure as written.

OK, what if...?

Hypothetically, what if every WoTC 5E adventure as-written examined & explored 2 or more suggested endings, including at least one heroically "good" ending where the PCs can achieve a morally correct outcome?

How would that affect your game?

On the flip side, if you worked at WoTC and were tasked with the above, how would you approach it? What kind of moral code/framework you would you draw from?

This is a +++++ thread

The intent of this +++++ thread is to offer a psychologically-safe and efficient and effective option for Enworlders who wish the discuss the What if? and related scenarios, based on the basic premise described above.

[+ positive contributions]

By participating in this thread, please make positive contributions to the premise.

[+ other contributions in another thread]

If you don't agree with the above premise, that's totally valid. Just asking you to refrain from arguing about that here in this thread.

This is not the thread for analyzing, expounding or arguing about:

• the poll that drove the insight
• to what extent the insight is accurate or inaccurate
• if adventures as-written should exclude suggested endings
• if adventures as-written should exclude a "good" ending
• subtracting or adding to adventures from the way they were written

If you to want to initiate an argument about:

• the poll, sure, just take it to the poll thread
• not wanting adventure page count to include suggested endings, I could see why, just take it to another thread
• why "good" endings are not appropriate for every campaign, such as grimdark and morally grey settings, I agree but please take it to another thread
• how a DM can rewrite adventures on their own, honestly not relevant to the ideating here, so please take it to another thread

Again, nobody is forcing you to agree with anything, just saying if you don't have a positive contribution to make here, please take it another thread.

[+ please be nice to others]
Please don't make assertions about other people or their games or their moral code.
If you're not sure about the wording of your post, imagine you are responding to a young innocent child, not in a patronizing way, but rather considerately and non-accusatory

[+ positive feedback]
Those who participate may benefit from positive feedback; how else would we know if our contributions are helpful or not?
I would suggest a liberal use of Like if you find a post helpful!
If you feel someone's post contravenes the +++++ thread, first try respectfully pointing out the part you think is problematic and ask a clarifying question

[+ stick to values, not opinions]
Discussing morality/ethics is hard, because values are close to our heart and our sense of self.
Our opinions, however, may come and go, the more we learn and course-correct.
This thread is not about our attachment to our opinions as right or wrong.
If you are not sure about the helpfulness of expressing an opinion, then default to an unpresumptuous inquisitive mindset, like the beginning of a hypothesis to be tested or with child-like curiosity

So this is tough to answer, not just for me but others as well. But I'll do my best.

Thing is I don't plan out conclusions. I don't worry, or even think much about what options the PCs have. I set up locations, actors, motivations and actions. The locations will be influenced by many things, but primarily it's to set the mood and stage. Is it in a city? Wealthy part of the city or the slums? A city can have it's own personality and culturewhichmayplay into options.

Then we get to the actors. Actors, for my purposes can be individuals, groups, or unknowable entity. Actors have descriptions like a gnome wearing a heavy leather apron covered in stains wearing a band around his head that has multiple lenses that can be dropped down and a crown of snowy white hair sticking out the top in random directions. An actor could be the local wererat guild that is having a power struggle for leadership or the noble family running out of money but trying to maintain their status.

Then there are motivations. The gnome is doing experiments, trying to understand the regenerative abilities of the wererats hoping to make a potion that will let people heal and even regrow limbs. What he is attempting is what he sees as the pursuit of knowledge and giving people hope, if a few street people have to have limbs cut off to see if they can be regrown, that's just the price of progress, right? That noble family is using their (waning) influence to support the gnome. The matron of the family is only thinking of the profits they could make but the son truly wants to help people. He suspects something is going on, but is willfully ignorant.

The actions include things that have happened in the past. The gnome, with the help of the noble family, has been kidnapping wererats and trying to extract the parts of their disease that grant regeneration. He's been testing things out on people living in the streets. The group has been hired by a someone secretly representing the wererats to investigate, the noble son is starting to get suspicious, a few of the people that were previously treated have started showing violent tendencies.

So ... what's the good ending here? Stopping the gnome? Do you work with the wererats and if so, which faction? The gnome's formulas do work sometimes and at least a few street people have had limbs regrown. What if the people being experimented on know the risk going in but are so desperate they still volunteer? A few wererats have been killed, but the gnome has been careful to take the worst of the worst, wererats that are themselves far from innocent and the kidnapping of wererats has actually made them more cautious which also helps the downtrodden.

A lot of my scenarios are much more straightforward, but this is something I could see doing. Do you expose the noble family? Exposing the matron will ruin the family, the son was trying to do good, exposing the matron will bring down the whole house. Do you continue to work with the wererats even though they're a far worse scourge?

I do my best to avoid trolley car problems, and try to allow for anoption that would be considered a happy ending. I don't worry too much about philosophical debates of good and evil. Would the majority of my group (including me) consider it "good"? If the answer is yes, then I'm satisfied.

I don't think there is one true definition of good and evil that is not subjective and biased. I just accept that as good enough for a game.

 

[S'mon]

I like video games, and RPGs, where you get to make moral choices. This requires some degree of inherent moral ambiguity, Stormcloak v Imperial perhaps, not Alduin vs World Not Ending. To do well it requires some degree of moral maturity from the writers.

"What if every WoTC 5E adventure as-written examined & explored 2 or more suggested endings, including at least one heroically "good" ending where the PCs can achieve a morally correct outcome?"

This sounds like supporting (a) clearly good ending, eg save the world from the demon cultists, and also (b) Don't save world from demon cultists. So not really a moral choice as such. Sometimes players like to join the bad guys, but it's normally obvious who the bad guys are. This would be like the choice between joining the Dawnguard vs joining the Skyrim Vampires. I think supporting both is very good for world building, and the complete absence of support for the 'evil choice' leads to modern WoTC adventures where the Good side is apparently completely defenceless if not for the PCs.

So I'm in favour of choices, moral or not. They usually make for better campaigns.

 

[Emoshin]

Allow me to introduce the Prisoner's Trolley Problemma and solve philosophy forever!

All of your loved ones except the one you love the most are in a trolley. The one you love most is tied to the tracks. If you pull the lever, the trolley swerves onto another track, and then a third track, where it's smooth sailing and no one gets hurt...

BUT!

On the third track someone else is facing the same dilemma with their loved ones! And if you and they both pull the lever to save your most beloved people, the trolleys will crash, killing everyone else!

On that note, I predict that in 2025, it's going to be a very quiet year for D&D. OGL drama will have been forgotten. OneD&D is expected to roll out smoothly. To fill the boringness, they are going to publish the Prisoner's Trolley Dungeon which is going to be the most contentious D&D adventure ever.

 

[MGibster]

The problem with morality in a lot of computer games is that being bad is very often just being a jerk for no good reason. As much as I loved Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic, my choices were usually something along the lines of doing something nice or kicking someone's puppy for the lulz. I like having moral choices, even difficult ones from time to time, but just so long as they're meaningful choices and not moustache twirling evil for the sake of being evil versus doing good.

I'm not big on evil characters, but I did want to make an evil character once who was totally behind the group. i.e. He was going to do whatever he could to make sure the group succeeded because their success was his success. I'm just not sure D&D is the best choice for that kind of character but it sounded interesting.

 

[Stormonu]

Some food for thought, taken off the "history" section from Rahasia on DriveThruRPG. I think #1 and #4 are along the lines of what is being discussed here. While I myself agree with #1-#3, I don't necessarily agree with #4, and am quite happy with an open-ended adventure with no assumed "perfect" outcome, though possible discussion of avenues for further adventures or what the fallout of certain obvious actions in the adventure might lead to (i.e, "If the players kill the werewolf leader in room #3 but other werewolves survive, one of the other werewolves takes over but the group seeks to find less dangerous hunting grounds").

The Hickman Revolution. The Hickmans' work for TSR (in particular on Ravenloft and Dragonlance) is today said to have begun a revolution in how RPG adventures were written, moving from location adventures to plotted adventures. The Hickmans' actual beliefs for how roleplaying should be changed could be found in their list of "requirements" for their Nightventures, which they said should include the following points:

1. A player objective more worthwhile than simply pillaging and killing.
2. An intriguing story that is intricately woven into the play itself.
3. Dungeons with some sort of architectural sense.
4. An attainable and honorable end within one or two sessions playing time[\quote]

 

[Faolyn]

I wasn't referring to the people on the Death Star. Killing them is morally correct.

It's the Ewoks that will be wiped out in the ensuing ecological disaster caused by a moon-sized hunk of metal exploding while above their planetoid.

It's the inhabitants of Endor itself who will be wiped out by the destruction and the ecological fallout of the reactor core explosion. The material of the death star and the radiation don't vanish instantly.

Basically the Rebel Alliance saved themselves by damning an entire planet and it's moons to utter devastation for generations to come. Victory!

Depending on a person's specific moral identity, and philosophical ideals, the Rebel Victory could be a war crime.

LOVE that episode!

This is entirely fanon, based on what would happen in Star Wars obeyed actual physics. Which... it doesn't. The apparent actual canon is that the Rebels used tractor beams to deflect the debris.

So the actual morality here would be based around the killing of the probably thousands of people on the Death Star who had been pressed into service against their will, were in low-level jobs, or who otherwise weren't actually evil but had no other recourse but to be there--like when Luke wanted to go to the Imperial Academy so he could get an education and presumably become one of their pilots.

But since storming the Death Star, arresting the leaders, and interrogating and processing all the rest of the people on there doesn't make for good cinema, they just got blowed up.

 

[Steampunkette]

This is entirely fanon, based on what would happen in Star Wars obeyed actual physics. Which... it doesn't. The apparent actual canon is that the Rebels used tractor beams to deflect the debris.

So the actual morality here would be based around the killing of the probably thousands of people on the Death Star who had been pressed into service against their will, were in low-level jobs, or who otherwise weren't actually evil but had no other recourse but to be there--like when Luke wanted to go to the Imperial Academy so he could get an education and presumably become one of their pilots.

But since storming the Death Star, arresting the leaders, and interrogating and processing all the rest of the people on there doesn't make for good cinema, they just got blowed up.

As I noted before according to the current Canon they only protected bright tree village. The rest of the planet is covered with debris as large as a whole star destroyer in some cases.

They took the fanon and made it Canon.

 

[Oofta]

This is entirely fanon, based on what would happen in Star Wars obeyed actual physics. Which... it doesn't. The apparent actual canon is that the Rebels used tractor beams to deflect the debris.

So the actual morality here would be based around the killing of the probably thousands of people on the Death Star who had been pressed into service against their will, were in low-level jobs, or who otherwise weren't actually evil but had no other recourse but to be there--like when Luke wanted to go to the Imperial Academy so he could get an education and presumably become one of their pilots.

But since storming the Death Star, arresting the leaders, and interrogating and processing all the rest of the people on there doesn't make for good cinema, they just got blowed up.

War. War never changes. Oh, wait, that's Fallout, not Star Wars.

But the point is that there are casualties in war, sometimes those casualties are innocent bystanders. Well, that and without knowing very specific details such as how much of the death star's debris would have stayed in Endor's gravity well, what the mass of the death star was, what materials were used etc..

A significant amount of debris did not end up on Endor, depending on many factors, most of the debris could have landed in an ocean on the other side of the planet. Or maybe the little cannibalistic teddy bears all died horrifically.

That doesn't make the Rebel Alliance's actions evil, it just means there is always collateral damage in wartime.