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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5751716" data-attributes="member: 3448">WRT good campaigns:  It's perfectly "fair" to face the players with moral dilemmas like this.  From my perspective, the question is more whether it's a good/desirable idea for a given group.  Some groups really enjoy moral dilemmas/tough choices.  I'm very fond of them myself.  Other groups hate them, often with particular hate for the "do we kill semi-innocent but evil prisoners"?  Either of those are fine as aesthetic preferences.I would say that whether moral dilemmas are present should broadly speaking be equivalent across adventure design and emergent play.  If you're designing the scenario you described and you don't want moral dilemmas, you should replace the goblin and orc slaves with good human slaves--then it's a simple matter of freeing the slaves, yay!  If you avoid moral dilemmas in design, you'll typically want to avoid them in emergent play as well, because the point is that they're not good for your group.  Some groups might want to have moral dilemmas, but only rarely--that might be a group where not designing them in, but occasionally allowing them to emerge from the events in the game might be a good fit.  But if the players really, really don't want to engage with moral dilemmas, then insisting on them can be really destructive (even if just because it's what makes sense based on prior events and was unplanned).As a last point, I would say that if you do engage with moral dilemmas, you have to expect different sorts of play to emerge in response.  The moral dilemma as you present it has some flavor of "heads I win, tails you lose"--do you do something horrible and distasteful, or do you allow terrible results to happen.  If those are the only outcomes, that's a pretty rough choice, and one that will be unfun to many players.  But if you're willing to allow the PCs to try to civilize the orcs (for example), then the PCs can still get to a "win" despite the dilemma, by in a sense defusing the dilemma.  Of course, then the choice isn't a one-off "what do we do with the orc slaves," but rather becomes a driver of the campaign.  That's not a bad thing in my eye, but it is something to think about.</blockquote>

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