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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6190489" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is a pretty common problem.  I've had to deal with in my own campaign early on.  The party is technically guilty of murder on several occasions, or being a party or accomplice to a murder, or standing by and allowing murder to occur.   A party member stabbed to death a mortally wounded cultist.  Granted, the cultist was a mass murderer and the blow might be considered a mercy stroke or a sort of justice, but it was on the line.   Then the party joined forces with a gang of opium smugglers to fight a rival gang that had been involved in a theft related to the parties quest.  But then they stood by and allowed the head thug to torture and then poison the prisoners.   That was over the line.  Then the party captured a grave robber, who tried to escape because one of the party members favored just killing him, and the party shot him in the back as he fled.  Again, the guy was not nice and he was 'resisting' but it seemed over the line to me.   I had to tell the religious types that they could sense their respective deities were getting displeased with the example they were setting.  Here the problem was we had two players who basically wanted to play evil characters trying to interact in a party that was supposed to be good.You've got a slightly different problem.  From the description, if the guy hadn't really expected the sailor to die, I would have made the character roll a Horror check as a way of communicating to the player that his character should be horrified by what he just did.   It was definitely evil.  He definitely needs to perform penance.   He definitely needs to understand what happened.  But if it was accidental and ignorant and well, stupid, I'm not sure it qualifies as alignment drift.   What it might constitute is poor role-playing if the character in question has a high WIS score, because high wisdom characters are suppose to understand the consequences of their actions better.  Partly it might also be your fault.  The entire sequence, lie, assaulting, and ultimately murdering a by-stander is something you might should have - acting as the player's consciousness - intervened in to explain that the PC had the feeling this might be wrong or a bad idea.   A wisdom check is sometimes appropriate as a mechanism for providing to the player clues about the morality of actions.</blockquote>

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