Kill All the Hostages! (We'll bring them back...)

[Cloudgatherer]

There better not be any paladins or good characters in that group. Don't let the PCs get off making relatively trivial amends for what they did. The rogue in particular, killed an innocent person simply to get at the baddie.

I can see if the PCs were unable to stop the baddie from killing the hostage, but the rogue actually killed one of them willingly and it sounds like none of the others objected. He hit her the first time, then did it again and killed her. That is manslaughter at least in modern jurisprudence. Under medieval criminal codes that is murder. The fact that they raised her later might mitigate some of the penalties, but it doesn'd absolve them of the crime. Note also that it is not the girl's choice whether or not to pursue muder or manslaughter charges, that is the local law's decision.

If I didn't make it clear earlier, I'll reiterate: the rogue did not intentionally shoot the hostage. He was aiming for the antagonist, who had cover from the hostage. The rogue hit the cover/hostage, thus slaying her.

And yes, the party is good aligned. I did not see any reason for the cleric to not be able to bring the two girls back (he's a cleric of my world's LG diety: good, protection healing, law domains).

As far as "what happens when you die", I've left it a "great unknown" in the world. Actually, I use the approach that the dead become a part of the plane corresponding to their alignment/deity, and only exceptional people can progress to celestial/infernal forms, but this is not known to the people of the world. Bringing someone back from the dead retreives the soul from the plane and restores it to the pirme material.

 

[Ace32]

Well, since you can't go and make them decide to go back to being dead, make up some strange repercussions that affect the PCs much farther down the road. Maybe the girl's minds snapped at being killed and later raised. I mean, it is a traumatic experience. Perhaps after that, she developed arcane (sorcerer) or psionic (if you are using them) abilities (levels), and is hell-bent on destroying the .."heroes".. that did that to her.

 

[novyet]

I was in a similar situation once with a group of mine. It was in some module that I bought for $2. A mage falls in love with his queen and confesses, she very gently turns him down and announces that she is pregnant with the kings child, so the mage runs off, takes control of a tribe of orcs and develops a spell to change the heredity of the baby. He waits for it to be born, kidnaps it and runs off again.

Enter the PCs.

They ride off to capture the evil mage and eventually fight there way into his stronghold where the mage confronts them face-to-face, with the child in his arms. He reveals the whole story to the PCs, colored to make him appear to be the victim, and they ask for a moment to mull over their decision. The mage more than happily indulges them and moves to a far corner of the room to play Patti Cake with his precious little son.

The players discuss the issue in character for a few moments when the rogue announces his intention to end the whole controversy be killing the child and framing the mage, saying that “they can afford to raise him later, the brat IS a prince after all,” To stunned to reply, the other PCs watch as he yells “HEY YOU” to the mage and hurls a dagger at the baby, killing it.

Fierce battle later they are left with a dead mage no one cares about and a baby that naturally doesn’t want to be raised. They were forced to leave that kingdom as swiftly as possible. There was a lot wrong with that adventure.

I swear that sounds just like one of my second edition groups.

BTW your sig is pretty cool, did you make that, or is it a quote from something?

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

In my campaign I'd have to have serious reprecussions from that kind of activity from good aligned players. Plus resurrection and raise dead aren't something you get easy like going to see the doctor for a physical. There would be some questing involved, and a lot of atonement for the recklessness that caused the innocent girls death. If they can just kill innocents when they feel it's necessary and then just easily raise them later the whole concept of mortality becomes trivial. I'd never allow a raise dead for a fee or something trivial like that, if they can even find a cleric of sufficient power and of a suitable alignment to do it.

 

[Methinkus]

BTW your sig is pretty cool, did you make that, or is it a quote from something?

Nah, i wish i had made that up, but i stole it from the Drew Carey show.

Not that you heard that from me, of course. . . . .

 

[Corinth]

I don't see the problem. The PCs ed up, made it better and still put down the villain. What's the big deal?

 

[Tzarevitch]

If I didn't make it clear earlier, I'll reiterate: the rogue did not intentionally shoot the hostage. He was aiming for the antagonist, who had cover from the hostage. The rogue hit the cover/hostage, thus slaying her.

And yes, the party is good aligned. I did not see any reason for the cleric to not be able to bring the two girls back (he's a cleric of my world's LG diety: good, protection healing, law domains).

As far as "what happens when you die", I've left it a "great unknown" in the world. Actually, I use the approach that the dead become a part of the plane corresponding to their alignment/deity, and only exceptional people can progress to celestial/infernal forms, but this is not known to the people of the world. Bringing someone back from the dead retreives the soul from the plane and restores it to the pirme material.

I got the part that the rogue didn't go in with the intention of killing her, but from what you said he hit her TWICE. Once can possible be attributed to an error, but twice?!? That is the same logic as someone taking an M60 machine gun into a hostage rescue, gunning down all the hostages while trying to hit the hostage-taker then claming that he didn't intentionally hit the hostages and he wasn't trying to kill them.

I am not saying that the cleric shouldn't have been able to raise the girl, I am saying the fact that the cleric can raise the girl doesn't mitigate the fact that the rogue callously mowed her down in the first place. From what you said he injured her badly on the first shot. At that point he KNEW that a second miss could kill ker. He then made a conscious choice. He knew that the chance of killing her was signigicant but he persisted anyway. He then fired the second time, missed the bad guy and killed the hostage. Neutrals could justify that as ends justifying the means, but not good.

Personally, I would have had the rogue's alignment slide to neutral (he can try to bring it back up later), and I would've had the town law officials (or the girl's family) demand a significant penance from the rogue. A favor later is just not enough. You do a favor later for someone you stood up on a date, not for someone you just killed. The fact that he had her raised again should be a mitigating factor in assigning penance but the fact remains that he showed a rather callous indifference for her life and he continued with an action that he knew could be lethal to her.

Tzarevitch

 

[frankthedm]

raise the Girl, RAZE the rogue

 

[Haffrung Helleyes]

kidnapping...

Well, this hits a bit close to home for me. My Uncle was kidnapped by FARC guerillas in Colombia and held for ransom for 11 months.

But the main problem is, you let them get to the villain and his hostage. In a real kidnapping, your loved one is gone and you get an anonymous message telling you where to leave the money. There's no exchange...they tell you they'll let the person go after they are paid (and escape) and you have no choice but to trust them. Most of the time the kidnappers let the hostage go, but some times you get a 2nd ransom demand (as my family did) and you end up paying that as well. In real life, at least in Colombia, rescue missions generally end with the death of both the kidnappers and the hostage, and so are not favored.

In DnD, however, getting the hostages body is almost as good as getting the hostage, so a smart kidnapper will make this as difficult as possible. If the kidnapper kills the girl and Animates her as a skeleton, she can't be brought back even with True Ressurection until the skeleton is found.

You need to play up the drama of the kidnapping and make the focus of the adventure finding where they are holding the girl. Once your pcs have got that figured out things become much easier, if you are playing by the core rules.

Ken McKinney

 

[Jordan]

Another perspective

Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you made a crucial mistake in setting up the encounter: you didn't take into account all the abilities your players had at their disposal.

A villian taking a girl hostage would have been a fine challenge for a lower level party. But once the PCs have access to Raise Dead, the threat of killing an innocent person just isn't going to carry the same weight as it once did. And for everyone saying that the players did something horrible, how is that the case? They simply used the abilities they possessed to bring about a satisfactory end to the encounter.

Monte Cook recently wrote something about this on his website. He made the point that, as characters go up in level, they gain access to more powerful abilities, and you as a DM have to take them into account:

"If you aren't prepared for what the PCs can do with their skills, spells, feats, and magic items, they are going to throw you for a loop, and quickly. You have to be ready when the spellcaster pulls out the high-level divination spell that "ruins" the adventure, or when the monk just jumps over the 30-foot chasm of fire, or when the cleric brings the murdered king back to life."

There are perfectly vaild arguments on both sides of the allow/don't allow Raise Dead debate, but given that you have it in your game, you have to plan for it. For example, if you want to have an effective hostage situation, you could have the villian take the whole village hostage: He tells the PCs that, if they don't give him what he wants, he has a small band of soldiers/monsters waiting in the hills that will kill everyone in the village. While raising two girls from the dead is perfectly feasible for a 10th level party, raising an entire village (100+ people) is probably going to be beyond their abilities.

This type of situation could be a lot of fun for the PCs, because they have several different choices about how to handle the situation. They could give the villian what he wants (possibly trying to take it back at a later date). They could fight the villian. They could quickly return to the village and try to fight off the monsters. Any of these choices would allow them to use their abilities to full effect, rather than being hamstrung by the DM saying, "Sorry, you can't do that because I don't want you to handle the encounter that way", which is the course of action some people here seem to be suggesting - and that's certainly not fun for the players.

-Jordan