Rigamortus, my whoopsie widdle snugglemuffin, I'm not going to compare ages with you. Except to tell you, junior, that I'd have a lot more respect for both your attitude and your (in my view excluded-middle) morality if you were fourteen years old. If you've reached 27 without understanding the subtleties and no-win nature of formulating an ethos, it's a lot harder for me to respect that.
Just as you're in no position to pretend that you're just returning pomposity where you found it, you're in no position to complain about other people twisting your words around. You keep depicting your opponents' campaigns as simple hackenslash, in which PCs kill first and ask questions later. Nothing could be further from the truth, at least in my case.
Furthermore, your calls for civility in this discussion are as laudable as they are laughable. Throughout this discussion, you've mocked people for playing evil campaigns, called them narrow-minded and uncreative, and generally insulted the bejeesus out of folks from up on your high horse. If you want the discussion to be civil, you owe us an apology, and then you need to knock it off with the condescension and holier-than-thou attitude. Laying into me with a post full of sneers and putdowns, and then saying, "Let's try to keep this civil," is just a wee little bit hypocritical.
That said, I'll lay off further insults if you will.
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I'm trying to give you an idea of how the complexities of morality play out in the campaignss I run and play in. Maybe some examples will help.
Our characters are assaulting a complex full of cultists in the game I play in. We have very good evidence that these cultists not only capture prisoners to torture and then feed to their monstrous pets, but that the cultists are genuinely and sincerely trying to bring about the apocalypse, killing all life. We further have evidence that they're not too far from accomplishing their goals: we don't have much room for error if we're going to stop the apocalypse.
That said, we've developed a means of assaulting areas within their control. Generally, our first attack against a group of cultists is fast and lethal. We try as much as we can to draw the attention of their higher-ups (consisting of ogre magi, barghests, giants, and the like). We kill these guys quickly and efficiently, because if we try to be merciful, we'll likely die, and the cult will succeed.
The lower troops that attack us, however, we encourage to surrender. We will use nonlethal spells (hold person, web, etc.) to bring this goal about.
If they surrender, we knock them out and retreat. We then interrogate our prisoners, looking for a couple of bits of information:
1) Are our prisoners mercenaries or cultists? If they're mercenaries, we'll pay them a couple month's salary, confiscate their weapons and armor, and send them away, telling them that we won't ever take them prisoner again. If they're cultists who genuinely believe that bringing about the apocalypse is hunky dory, why, we execute them: it sucks to do so, but there's no suitable prison nearby, and better to kill them than to have them succeed in killing everyone.
2) Who else is in the compound, and who is likely to defect from the apocalypse cult? It doesn't matter whether the defectors are human, giant, or manticore: if we can lure them away from the cult without killing them, we're very happy to do so. In one memorable case, we found out that a pair of hill-giant brothers were now the de facto leaders of a cult group (after we'd killed the boss), and that these none-too-bright, reluctant-fighter brothers loved fruit. So we went to a town a day's journey away, loaded up on watermelon, and brought it back to sweeten our negotiation with the giants. We offered the giants and the remaining mercenaries a large share of their slain leader's treasure, warned them that they'd best leave the area very quickly, and disbanded the rest of that cult group without shedding further blood.
What I want you to understand, however, is that
we went into negotiations holding cards. If we'd tried to negotiate as an opening gambit, all we would have done is lost the element of surprise: nobody negotiates with an Enemy that they think they can defeat. We only opened the negotiations AFTER we'd eliminated the figures least likely to negotiate (the cult leaders) and demonstrated to the rest that attacking us was not in their best interests.
The negotiations you suggest in your sample alternatives to the fire-giant killings simply aren't plausible, IMO. No bluff or diplomacy check is going to get around a fundamental truth of negotiation: you have GOT to be holding some cards when you go to a parley. If you've got no cards, you shouldn't be trying to talk your way out of a problem.
As for the games I run, they're rarely heroic. The PCs may find themselves forced to cooperate with an organized crime lord in order to stop a bloodyminded revolutionary/terrorist group. They're blackmailed into missions by the leaders of the local Good church. They save a town from certain doom, but the mayor takes advantage of a mistake they made to threaten them with lawful execution unless they lie to support the mayor's assertion that he was the key to saving the town.
Characters IMC have disguised themselves and hired on as one-night assassins, hired to kill themselves; once they and their assassin bosses were in position, the PCs ambushed their would-be killers. THAT's the sort of ingenuity that I reward; THAT's where the bluff check comes in.
A character has faced the choice of leaving her religious-zealot husband -- and leaving her infant daughter with him -- or facing certain death. THAT's the kind of moral quandery I like to throw at my players.
A PC has intruded on the sacred site of a xenophobic tribe, and called to her own God on this holy ground in a way that shattered the tribe's faith in its protective, violent God. Was that heroic? Was that a good act? If the tribe now scatters to the winds because their God is proven not to be able to protect them, is the world a better place? Conversely, if the PC had not called on her God and had allowed the tribal God to devour her prisoners, would the world be a better place?
A heroic game, in which there's always an easy solution to every moral dilemma, is fine. If that's how you like to play. It's not how I like to play: I like the path of good to be as muddled and twisted and difficult to find as it is in the real world.
Daniel
(end tangent 2)
