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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 469641" data-attributes="member: 4937">I guess this answers the question of whether or not D&D can provide a moral compass with a resounding 'NO!', since we can't get about half the posters here to admit that murder is evil.Stop gaming this question.  Would you do this IRL?  If you say someone do this, would you consider it evil?  Since some of you can't seem to relate to anything that is not couched in fantasy terms, look at it this way.  Why didn't Frodo or Bilbo kill Golem?   Surely they were justified in doing so.  After all, Golem meant to kill them.  They had every right to protect themselves.  In the case of Frodo, not only did he have the right (chaos), but some would say he had the duty (law).  Afterall, if he let Golem kill them or otherwise frustrate the Quest, then it wasn't just Frodo's skin that was on the line, but the lives of every free citizen of middle earth.   How dare he be so presumptious to be merciful?  How dare he risk such evil be unleashed?  Because he was good, and good people are reluctant to kill.  This showed no reluctance to kill, and very little justification.  A reasonable justification might be that the character in question was known to have committed murder, or was known to intend murder as soon as he escaped the characters control.  We got no such justification.Without some such justification, this was murder.  Plain and simple.  The question 'was this evil' is not that relevant.   The real question is 'Was it good roleplaying?', which is somewhat harder to answer given the limited information we have.To a large extent the murdered man strikes me as being like an ancient red dragon in a 10'x10' room, that has no past and no future, does not eat or sleep, and whose whole purpose was to sit around and wait to get into a fight to the death with the first PC to come through the door.   What do we know about this murdered man?  Did he have a family?  Did he have children?  What did he do when he was not sitting around waiting to get murdered?  What crimes had he committed?  Where did he live?  Did he like doing what he was doing?  Was he a fanatic or a paid hireling?  Did he dream of retiring from this trade?  Was he himself charmed into the service of the slavers?It's alot easier to kill a faceless NPC than it is one who has a face, and what strikes me is that the PC didn't even want to look into the NPC's face (literally and figuratively) when he killed him.</blockquote>

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