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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6619797" data-attributes="member: 42582">My view on this is that, if the player's protestations that his PC could do good things if he wanted aren't to count for anything, then likewise his brazen boasts that he would kill anyone for a high enough price probably shouldn't count for much either.Just as there are plenty of people who find it hard to do the right thing when the time comes, so there are plenty of boasters who find it hard to do the wrong thing when actually presented with an opportunity.While perhaps in the fiction only the gods truly know the content of the PC's heart, at the table we either have to take the player's claims at face value, or look at the actions the PC has actually committed. But holding the PC to account for one set of possibilities (imagined assassinations) but not another set of possibilities (imagined acts of kindness) doesn't seem very principled to me.Now perhaps the PC has, in fact, killed innocent people for money, but we've not been told that. Nor have we been told the context in which the player is making the choices for his PC that he is. What role does the GM have in framing the PC and player into situations where contract killing comes up as a viable choice for the PC to make? I think knowing the answer to that - more generally, how is the game run? who plays the dominant role in driving the story dynamics, the range of options open to the PCs, etc? - is very important before giving any advice on how the GM should respond to the choices that a player is making for his/her PC.Yes. It tells us that they're not good. But it doesn't tell us they're evil. Lawful neutral and chaotic neutral people are sources of misery for others, because they prioritise other external goals (order or freedom, respectively) over human wellbeing, truth and beauty. Hence they may well be legitimate targets, provided they pose a sufficiently proximate threat (fill in the details based on your theory of permissible violence - D&D tends to default to a very relaxed permissibility threshold!).</blockquote>

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