DM Advice: handling 'he can't talk to me like that' ~cuts NPC throat~ players.

[Storm Raven]

Psst! I already said that that was the very end of the socially accepted dueling period. The reason they did it was because there was a long tradition of it being considered the "right" thing to do.[/i]

And it wasn't socially acceptable. Burr was afterwards ostracized and his political and public career was finished. How is that congruent with dueling being "socially acceptable".

And you can't exactly say that what he did was illegal if the courts dismissed the charges against him, can you?

But they didn't dismiss the charges because dueling was okay, they dismissed them for other reasons. Here's the thing - the famous dules are often famous because they were the exception - someone or another got away with it and later told their story. It is no mistake that most of the duels featured in history also featured glory hounds who publicized their adventures. The duels involving people who were tried for murder, convicted, and hanged are not nearly as well known, because the participants died before they could become famous. If you go through the court records of the era, you find that the vast majority of purported duels resulted in murder or manslaughter convictions (in point of fact, one of the classic definititions of manslaughter is "killing someone in mutual combat").

No, you're inputting your own bias in there. I've read plenty of sources on this, and they all seem to indicate that they were acquitted or had their charges dismissed because the juries viewed their acts as acceptable. You're really straining to get around that basic fact which runs through the majority of historical duels; they were seen by society as acceptable, which is why they were engaged in. They really only caused problems 1) when someone didn't follow the rules for proper dueling, which could lead to murder charges, or 2) when society started turning against dueling as an acceptable practice.

Society as a whole has never really accepted duels as proper. In the U.S. being acquitted for killing someone in a duel was the exception, not the rule, and usually happened when the perpetrator was a law officer or came up with some other defense besides "we were dueling".

Wyatt Earp was arrested because there were competing claims about how exactly the gunfight had been handled. When unbiased testimony came forward and showed that the complaints about Earp's actions were likely made by witnesses biased against him, the charges were dropped. Judge Spicer didn't criticise Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday for their role in the gunfight at the OK Corrall, he criticized Virgil Earp for his temporary deputizing of Wyatt and Holliday. You also are apparently now conflating reaction to the OK Corrall and reaction to the Vendetta ride, which were too different things altogether.

The public outcry against the OK Corral gunfight led to the attack on Virgil, which led to the vendetta ride, which led to the Earp's fleeing the territory. The Earps were heroes for a brief period, until the funerals of those killed in the OK Corral, and after that, they were widely condemned.

While that may have been true in some cases, many times they actually were charged and even brought to trial, and then acquitted or had the charges dismissed because their actions were considered acceptable in that society at that time. You also very noticably forget to mention plenty of other famous duels; Samuel Martin challenged John Wilkes to to a duel in the House of Commons no less. Prince Frederick, Duke of York fought a highly publicized duel with Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Lennox that was reported in the Times (granted, no one was killed in that case.) Heck, Andrew Jackson went on to be elected President of the USA after killing an opponent in a duel.

You're really having to twist things to say that dueling was viewed as evil and lawless by society. That simply is not the case and the only way you can come to that conclusion is by ignoring tons and tons of evidence.

Or by actually looking at court cases concerning duels. And the history of the law and how it treated duelists: http://www.law.gwu.edu/Burns/rarebooks/exhibits/duel_opposition.htm

 

[Storm Raven]

The alignment guidelines didn't lead me to that conclusion.

Maybe one should use it as more than a team jersey then. Perhaps, as the 3e rules suggest, alignment should reflect actions, rather than simply being a label stuck on the character sheet. If a character behaves in an evil manner, then their alignment should reflect that, regardless of whether the PC wants his character to be evil or not. In other words, how you behave determines your status.

Observing people playing the game for the past 23 years did. Not to mention the fact that there are far more rules in D&D for perpetrating violent conflicts than exploring the moral implications of them (that would be 'a lot' vs. 'effectively none').

I didn't think one needed to have rules concerning what would happen if one acted in an evil manner. In general, it seems that people generally know how society treats random perpetrators of murder and mayhem, and how religious organizations usually view them.

 

[Mallus]

Maybe one should use it as more than a team jersey then.

Why? That's what it was made for. Plenty of game have rules that govern ethical conflicts. D&D isn't one of them.

I didn't think one needed to have rules concerning what would happen if one acted in an evil manner.

Right, because D&D is primarily about killing things and taking their stuff (ie murder&mayhem). Ethics are an afterthought, and in most games should be treated as such.

A huge part of D&D is about doing imaginary violence. There's no shame in admitting that. If you need proof of this assertion, may I direct you to several thousand pages of rules devoted to the practical application of imaginary violence? I understand that some people like a thin veneer of justification painted over their doing of imaginary violence and that's cool. But let's not mistake some cheap justifications --like D&D sketchily sketched ethical guidelines-- for something they're not.

Killing a mouthy peasant for being mouthy isn't much different from killing an orc because it's an orc. The trick is not to get hung up the relative morality of either and find ways to keep the action/challenges rolling.

 

[billd91]

The alignment guidelines didn't lead me to that conclusion. Observing people playing the game for the past 23 years did. Not to mention the fact that there are far more rules in D&D for perpetrating violent conflicts --and improving yourself by doing so-- than exploring the moral implications of said violent confilcts (that would be 'a lot' vs. 'effectively none').

I would say you're looking at the wrong evidence and making the wrong conclusions.

The alignment guidelines make it clear that D&D alignments are not mere social constructs but objective traits that a character may or may not conform to (or may conform to in varying degrees).
D&D also has far more rules for governing violence than ethical conflicts because that is where more rules are necessary to make a fair game.

Neither really makes the case that might makes right in D&D. Individual groups are free to ignore moral and ethical constraints on their characters, but that's up to individual groups and shouldn't be taken to mean that D&D is morally based on might makes right.

 

[haakon1]

As another aside; to all those of you who've recommended that he come down like a ton of bricks on a band of PC's who don't believe they've done anything wrong.

That's a great way to get uninvited as the DM.

Uninvited as a DM? That's a bizarre concept to me.

From ENWorld it seems like there's some culture of anonymous pick up games of D&D at game stores or something . . . the world of D&D I've seen is friends (or at least acquintances) playing at the DM's place, at the DM's invitation, with the DM as the clear instigator and leader. There, it's the DM who writes/picks the world and adventures and decides how the world works and the tone. That's when I'm on either side of the screen.

DMing is like being a professor. You can't do it right if you're worried about being "fired".

 

[Desdichado]

Storm Raven, thanks for the link, but honestly, I'm not going to look at it. I've read plenty on the subject. Clearly, you have your opinion and nothing I post (no matter how convincing---or even blindingly obvious) I think it is is going to change your mind. So I'm not going to waste any more time with it.

Uninvited as a DM? That's a bizarre concept to me.

From ENWorld it seems like there's some culture of anonymous pick up games of D&D at game stores or something . . . the world of D&D I've seen is friends (or at least acquintances) playing at the DM's place, at the DM's invitation, with the DM as the clear instigator and leader. There, it's the DM who writes/picks the world and adventures and decides how the world works and the tone. That's when I'm on either side of the screen.

DMing is like being a professor. You can't do it right if you're worried about being "fired".

You also can't do it right if you're not even worried about doing it right.

The bizarre concept to me is, "I'm going to suffer through this frustrating 'game' that I'm supposed to be enjoying, even though I'm not, because I have absolutely nothing else going on in my life that competes with my time and attention, so I just game in games I don't like because I don't know what else to do."

Do I game with friends? Yes. Absolutely. I wouldn't bother gaming with anyone else... gamedays and GenCon excepted. That doesn't mean I'm going to let a friend run a crappy game for me without telling him that his game sucks.

And crappy obviously isn't an objective standard; it simply is vernacular for "something I don't enjoy." Being punished in game because my idea of what appropriate PC behavior and the DM's idea for the same is my idea of frustrating, lame, and sucky.

I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of these players here. Because if you're a DM and you're not doing that, chances are you're not a very good DM.

 

[hong]

-1. This is not an alignment issue.

0. This is why, as a general rule, the people with blue circles around their feet should not be played as annoying.

And still noone listens to meeeee

 

[cr0m]

This is 100% a player & DM issue, not an in-game issue. The OP said that his players don't seem to see that they're not acting like good guys, and he wants them to either act like good guys or lose the benefits of being good guys (ie paladinhood).

Now, if he asks the players what they want to do, and they say "we want to keep being ruthless killers" (no value judgment on my part), the DM has a choice. Either he can chuck good/evil distinctions out the window and play that sort of game, in which case all the advice about NPC-related consequences is excellent. If the DM doesn't want to chuck good/evil out the window, he better tell the players that he can't play that way without imposing some sort of atonement, and go for it.

Either way, it sounds like the makings of some great games.

 

[haakon1]

Further, if *you* had (accidental) custody of a child, and someone you were warned about asked for him and wouldn't give a reason, would you turn it over unless forced?

The OP scenario was that the PC's witnessed the mother dying, and asking that the father not get the child, and then the father asked for his son. Frankly, I'm not sure what this scenario is doing in D&D. If somebody wants to roleplay family court/social workers doing custody cases, I guess that's their business, but D&D seems an odd medium for it.

I don't see why a father needs a reason to want custody of his motherless son.

To nevertheless answer your question: Would I, if I was on a jury or a judge, vote to award custody of a child to his sole surviving parent? In any non-bizarre society (e.g., other than ancient Sparta), I'd think the law would give me no other choice, plus it seems like obvious biological justice to me, so of course I would. If I was on the island of no-laws everybody-kills-people-whenever they want, I'd do the same, because who else is going to look after the child, and again, parents taking care of their own kids would be my default assumption for what's right.

This reminds me of the Elian Gonzalez case, in which a Cuban woman was fleeing to America with her young son and died on the way, with the kid being rescued and brought to America. The father back in Cuba asked for his son back, and US government complied. At the time, some people pilloried Attorney General Janet Reno for sending him back (and sending heavily armed cops to get him from the people who were taking care of him). At the time, I didn't think there was any other choice -- how can the sole surviving parent not have custody?

The difference here is that the kid wouldn't have to go to Cuba, the OP didn't mention any other downside of the father getting back his kid, and nobody in their wildest dreams ever thought of killing Elian's dad for wanting his kid, or that doing so could be anything but bald-faced evil . . .

 

[haakon1]

In my world adventurers don't get to behave like thugs and face no consquences.

My world too. Again, it's the DM who decided how the world works and sets the tone of the campaign.