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

[drothgery]

I'm sure the judge will take these things into consideration before sentencing them for the crime of manslaughter.

In a D&D world, can you really charge someone with manslaughter if they'va already raised or resurrected the victim? It seems iffy to me. The accidentally killed person isn't dead.

 

[Wolfspider]

In a D&D world, can you really charge someone with manslaughter if they'va already raised or resurrected the victim? It seems iffy to me. The accidentally killed person isn't dead.

This is an iffy issue because real-world laws fall apart when dealing with a realm in which life-restorying magics are available.

But you can't deny the fact that the girl was killed by one of the party members, albeit accidentally.

Imagine that the guilty party member is asked the following question: "Did an arrow from your bow kill Anne the farmgirl?"

How will he respond? Well, if he responds truthfully, he will have to say "Yes!"

"Yes, but...." won't be acceptable.

"No" won't be acceptable either.

Truth discerning magic will detect that the only truthful answer to this question is "Yes." And that's an admission of guilt. Extenuating circumstances will factor in when it's time for sentencing, but the guilt remains. The man's arrow killed the girl. That cannot be denied.

 

[Squire James]

I don't know the details, but I imagine the archer never thought he would flub two shot in a row and hit the hostage both times. He apparently had a reasonable expectation of hitting the villain, and he took a chance. It probably would have been considered a brilliant move if he had downed the villain with a critical hit, for instance.

This ain't the old Marvel Superheroes system. You DON'T lose all your Karma if you kill something!

 

[Wolfspider]

This ain't the old Marvel Superheroes system. You DON'T lose all your Karma if you kill something!

Nope. Instead you get hounded by the law and by scruffy bounty hunters and, if your offense was grave enough, you are hanged by the neck until dead or decapitated or drawn and quartered or tortured until dead or ....

 

[Mistwell]

I respectfully disagree with this post-modernist viewpoint.

I can't imagine any heros from literature or film behaving this way. It is what the bad guys do, it is what separates the good guys from the bad guys.

D&D is even *more* of a world of absolute morality than the one which we live in - after all, good and evil are literal detectable forces!

You know, I read this, and just had to laugh. No hero from film would do this? Allow me to quote a conversation between two hostage-negotiator police officers (Jack being the lead) from the movie Speed (1994):

"Alright, pop quiz. Airport. Gunman with one hostage. He's using her for cover. He's almost to the plane. You're a hundred feet away. Jack?
Shoot the hostage.
What?
Take her out of the equation. Go for the good wound and he can't go for the plane with her. Clear shot."

That is effectively what the heros did in the situation described at the beginning of this thread. I think it is naivity to believe that people who take hostages do not need to be stopped at all costs. The hostage will likely be killed later, and letting the villian get away puts the lives of other innocent people in jeopardy as well. This is the justification for war, and for executions, as well (kill someone to prevent even more killing of innocents in the future). Take the hostage out of the equation, and you not only stop the escape of the villian, but you send a message to other villians that taking hostages will not work. In a world where ressurection is real, that is exactly the kind of message many a heros would want to send: "Evil, know this. Hostage taking is not a tactic that you can use against us, so don't even try it."

Perhaps that's just the lawful neutral in me, leaking out.

-Mistwell

 

[Wolfspider]

There's one flaw in your example from Speed (an example I thought of earlier, in fact). The police officers are not talking about shooting and KILLING the hostage. They are talking about shooting the hostage TO WOUND, incapacitating the hostage so that the hostage-taker cannot use him or her as a shield. And that's exactly what Jack did in Speed.

He certainly didn't shoot his partner between the eyes or anything.

You said it yourself in your quote: "Go for the good wound"--not go for the clean kill!

In any case, this kind of maneuver is highly unorthodox and would not be performed by any kind of real law enforcement officer. It would be more likely to get a person canned than to get them commended (which happened in the movie).

 

[Corinth]

Quite frankly, bitching about any lingering pain and suffering after you've been brought back from the dead is ingratitude of the worst kind.

 

[Wolfspider]

Quite frankly, bitching about any lingering pain and suffering after you've been brought back from the dead is ingratitude of the worst kind.

* * * POST REDACTED * * *

 

[xjp]

Actually, I think the party's actions were quite sensible given their abilites, the game world, and the situation they were in. I don't see why there should be any negative consequences for the party.

One girl was missing and the villian was leaving with the other girl. Who knows what would have happened to the girls if he had managed to escape? The two girls may never have been recovered alive or many other awful things may have happened to them if the villian had escaped with his hostage.

In this case the villian was defeated and the girls are alive and well, minus one consitution point(big deal).

Maybe this was not the intended solution, but the solution was extremely sensible and it worked. Your biggest dilema should be deciding what type of reward they should receive for bringing the girls back.

 

[Tzarevitch]

In a D&D world, can you really charge someone with manslaughter if they'va already raised or resurrected the victim? It seems iffy to me. The accidentally killed person isn't dead.

Whether or not the person remains dead has nothing to do with the fact that he was killed. Manslaughter is the act of killing someone (i.e. rendering someone dead.) You are confusing an action and an outcome. The crime is in the action not the outcome of the action.

1. Action: Rendering someone dead.
2. Outcome: Person is dead.

#1 is a crime, #2 is not.

The argument, "But I resurrected him," would negate the outcome. It does not negate the original action, the act of killing a person in the first place. The person was killed she is simply now no longer dead. That does not cause her to be unkilled, it causes her to not be dead right now. There is a big difference.

A good analogy is the argument, "Yes I stole it . . . but I gave it back later."

The fact that you gave it back does not mean that you did not steal it, it just means that you gave it back. Giving it back might earn you a lesser penalty for theft, but you are still a thief.

In the original story the rogue IS guilty of manslaughter regardless of the fact that the girl is no longer dead. The fact that he took action to try and make up for what he had done (by raising her) would help mitigate possible penalties by producing a more acceptable outcome to the slain party, but it does not mitigate the underlying action (the fact that he slew her in the first place).

Tzarevitch