Give Me Moral Dilemmas for my PCs!

[LostSoul]

The dilemma is whatever the players perceive it to be... and the word to read carefully is perceive. The players need not directly know all the details of the situation any more than what critter might be in the next room of the dungeon. It is all DM fiat, as long as the result is a good time for all.

Right, but if the players ever find out, they'll be pissed off. (Unless they like that kind of stuff.) I personally find it less rewarding as a DM as well - I'd rather have my players surprise me with their choices! "Holy crap, I wasn't expecting you to save/kill that NPC! You're more heroic/hard core than I thought. Cool!"

 

[Bloodstone Press]

- I'd rather have my players surprise me with their choices! "Holy crap, I wasn't expecting you to save/kill that NPC! You're more heroic/hard core than I thought. Cool!"

I totally agree.

I am reminded of a game I DMed a few years ago where one player got left behind in a cave that was the home of a group of Ogres. The PC was about 3rd level. The Ogres had been capturing children from the nearby human village.

At first, when the Ogres returned home trapping the PC inside (he was hiding, they were unaware of him) the PC just wanted to escape the cave. But when I told him that he could see the ogres grab one of the captured children and eat it, the player said to me, "Damn. Now I have to kill them all." (meaning kill the ogres)

As the DM, I knew the leader of the ogres was CR 9 and there was no way the PC was going to kill him AND the group of regular ogres. When the player said that, I thought "No way... No Way. He's going to be rolling up a new character before this session is over." I couldn't see any way he could kill all the ogres and rescue the children single-handedly.

But to my great surprise, he did. It took a combination of guile, luck, desperate fighting, and spell use, but he pulled it off. When the game was over I congratulated the player and told him how impressed I was with the heroics.

 

[Mark CMG]

Give Me Moral Dilemmas for my PCs!

Hostages.

 

[LostSoul]

But to my great surprise, he did. It took a combination of guile, luck, desperate fighting, and spell use, but he pulled it off. When the game was over I congratulated the player and told him how impressed I was with the heroics.

Awesome!

I remember running a game years ago where one of the PCs had some demonic heritage (typified by vampires, although I think vampires are lame; but the world was 10 years old by that point and I was stuck with it ). Anyway, his father and brother had been captured by these demons and they were using them as blackmail in order to turn the PC to the Dark Side. I totally expected him to tell them to stuff it and fight his way to his brother and father (who would have been turned at that point).

But instead he accepted their deal and he turned Evil! And I was like, "Damn... didn't see that coming. Awesome!" (The demons thought that he would also be Dominated and that they could control him, but he made his saving throw and he was okay. But he was still Evil all of a sudden - his latent demonic urges were awakened.)

 

[LostSoul]

Hostages.

Possessed innocents (especially children). Do you kill the host to get rid of the demon?

 

[ptolemy18]

I think you need to talk to this player and ask him what he wants out of the game. If he wants to play a lawful good character or not. If he doesn't really care about that, just go with it. Maybe you could have him switch faiths to a god that suits the player's beliefs more. Or not; nothing's going to be ruined if he keeps up that behaviour...

I kind of want to do that, but the last time I e-mailed him OOC that he was behaving in a possibly-inappropriate manner, he gave me such a long and (IMHO) 'convenient' justification for his actions that I dropped it, but I got kind of annoyed. (This isn't what he said, but basically, I think it boiled down to "I don't want to risk my life trying to save this innocent prisoner because I'M SO SICK OF THAT PLOT THREAD.")

I can understand being sick of a plot thread but I wish he'd just been upfront about it. Basically, I'm not going to have much respect for his role-playing until he actually does something that's inconvenient for his character, for role-playing reasons.

Anyway, I think I'm going to keep the moral decisions in-character from now on, with whatever in-character risks and rewards and consequences I can come up with.

Jason

 

[LostSoul]

I kind of want to do that, but the last time I e-mailed him OOC that he was behaving in a possibly-inappropriate manner

From my point of view, he's not really behaving in an inappropriate manner. He's just doing what he finds fun. If you asked him, "Do you think your guy is still Lawful Good after all of this?" and he replies with yes, then you should work out some kind of agreement on what Lawful Good actually means.

If he doesn't think he's being Lawful Good, but he likes the flavour of the church and he likes playing the way he is, you could change the alignment of the church to match his own. Or just cast him as an outsider to the approved line of thought, but still kosher.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

Here's how I like to handle it: Have the moral dilemmas come up through play, by letting characters with goals and strong opinions come up against issues you've "seeded" into the world.

For example, I'm a fan of Sweet20's experience system. It involves having the players choose Keys for their characters. (The plugin actually is intended to replace the traditional XP system, but it could certainly be used as an addon.) Keys represent issues or goals core to the character's beliefs, and they work really well to let players indicate what kind of moral challenges they'd be interested in dealing with. The central mechanic involves whether you want to pursue a Key or forsake it (selling it off to buy a new one).

The most important advice I could give you is that in my experience, moral dilemmas don't really fly in play unless they're something the players get jazzed up about wrestling with. That's why I prefer to come up with some ammo in terms of possible situations that'll test the areas that the players have staked out for their PCs.

Also, well, the other thing I've seen in play is that this kind of stuff falls totally flat if there's a pre-chosen "right" answer that you the GM are going to impose. I'm all for making players deal with heavy consequences as the results of their decisions -- heck, that's the meat of the games I run -- but doing it just to "gotcha" them when they do something you've predefined as evil has an unfortunate tendency to make them actually avoid really grappling with these dilemmas in the future. In other words, what you're proposing, as you've stated it, is a pretty good way to turn players into turtles. So I'd be really wary about that.

I have to say I love this kind of play -- I've pretty much moved all my campaigns over to this format.