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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2022095" data-attributes="member: 27012">I'm not talking about being timid.  I'm talking about looking at the big picture.  What is the net benefit and cost of a particular course of action?  If I witness a woman being attacked in an alley, I could just run down the alley without thinking like a hero and try to stop the attack.  If her attackers have guns and shoot us both dead because I decided to play the hero (me because I frightened them and the woman because she was a witness to my murder) I've not only not helped the woman avoid being attacked but I've gotten both of us killed.  I've made the situation worse.  That's not heroic.  It's stupid.I'm not suggesting that the PCs do nothing.  I'm suggesting that they avoid making things worse by throwing the setting into chaos without having any idea how things will turn out.  That requires some consideration of the implications of what they do.  And unless the GM protects the PCs from utterly catastrophic outcomes, which some GMs do, some utterly catatrophic outcomes are quite possible from some of the things being suggested.  Grensha being conquered by Voushta would make things far worse than they are.This thread had been filled with plenty of people making suggestions that don't make much sense in light of the details that have been presented so far (e.g., slave revolts when there are 24 slaves and 40 slavers, etc.).  It helps when everyone is working with the same details.I honestly didn't expect someone to understand that the good guys could lose the war and still suggest that they start one without addressing that possibility, at least in passing.  The thread has alread established that (A) Grensha's last war "took a heavy toll on Grensha's army", (B) Baron Woodsrow, their leader, is "very ill" having been "poisoned by a succubus", (C) "Grensha is in no condition to fight another war, and this is plain to see", (D) "Woodsrow sending even a small contingent of his army to stop the slaveing ring would be taken as an act of war by Voushta", and (E) the war is "one they might lose."  You know all of that and you still think they should start a war to end slavery?So you are saying that a nation that supports paladins is not a nation that should care if they win or lose the battles they take on?  That's not Lawful Good, in my opinion.  That's the proverbial Lawful Stupid.  I'm not saying that Good characters should avoid messy consequences.  I'm saying that they should avoid messy consequences that are, on balance, worse than the problem they were trying to solve.  What's the point of starting a war between Grensha and Voushta if it won't bring about an end to slavery and might actually increase it? In the D&D game that I'm running, all of those things are also true and I'm not a moral relativist in real life, either.  In fact, alignment is such an important part of my game that I had a lengthy discussion with my players before they created characters so they'd understand what the different alignments meant.  I simply draw a very different conclusion about the implications of those beliefs than you do.  Good that does not consider the "big picture" is the sort of Good that ultimately helps or creates Evil.  Good certainly has ideals but it also has responsibilities.  Yes, ignoring your ideals because of your responsibilities is not necessarily Good, but neither is ignoring your responsibilities in favor of your ideals.Of course I'm not sure how any of this pertains to the context of the situation under discussion since they've clearly said that they aren't using absolute alignments like that in this game.</blockquote>

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