Killing as fun and games: a question for the Good Guys

[Edena_of_Neith]

(dark, ghastly, perverted humor)

What if ...

What if ...

We houserule that resurrection costs the cleric neither experience points, or years off his life, when he casts it. It's free.
We also houserule that clerics of high enough level to cast resurrection are common enough in the society that even the average man can easily get one.
And finally, we houserule that being resurrected does not cause you to lose a point of Constitution.

Then, long before the Greyhawk Wars, Ivid and the Holy Censor of Medegia get together, think matters through, and decide to play wargames.
Aerdi invades Medegia and slaughters some of it's people. But not any of the clerics. The clerics then resurrect the fallen people of Medegia (and, of course, a lot of Aerdian NPCs gain experience points and levels.)
Then Medegia invades southern Aerdi and slaughters some of *it's* people. But not the clerics. And the clerics of Aerdi then resurrect their fallen people. (and a lot of Medegian NPCs gain experience points and levels.)

Repeat procedure. Rinse, and repeat. And repeat again. And again. Even the PCs can join the party.

Gradually, death becomes meaningless.
As the NPC clerics gain in level, they become able to throw more resurrections, which in turn means both sides can kill more people with each war, and thus gain more experience points with which to gain more levels and thus resurrect more people and thus kill more people and ...

By the time of the Greyhawk Wars, this scenario leads to Aerdi and Medegia being invincible powers that overwhelm everyone else.
Except that ...

Everyone else saw what was happening, saw In Character how all these people were becoming alarmingly powerful from killing each other, and decided to copy them.

So all the 'good' nations, like Veluna and Highfolk, started their own 'wargames' in which they slaughtered each other, resurrected each other, slaughtered each other again, resurrected each other again, everyone gained experience points, everyone realized that death was meaningless and killing was just great fun, and everyone won.

And when the Greyhawk Wars finally happened, it was one grand festival of slaughter and gore and a jolly good time, not a war in any normal sense of the word.

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

Heck, throw in a lot of Anaesthesia spells, so nobody feels any pain.
Forbid the destruction of property or other mayhem, so the war is convenient and causes no social or economic disruption.

And heck, claim that the Space Invaders are coming, everyone needs to be prepared anyways, this constant war is the way to prepare for their coming, and thus it *IS* a good thing for good people to do. (Perhaps the Space Invaders *are* coming ...)

Then Ivid could ask: ain't war grand? And the whole Flanaess would shout: YES.

 

[Sound of Azure]

You're right, that is ghastly.

You're assuming the clerics are amoral, allowing people to be killed in "wargames".

You're assuming the gods of the clerics have nothing to say about that, and would do nothing in response to it.

You're assuming the spirits of the dead would want to come back to the meat grinder of the wargames of the clearly insane leaders of Medegia and Aerdy.

None of these things would be acts of a good people (it doesn't respect life, for one thing), maybe not even a neutral people.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Personally I think the mistake is applying the rules that are created to govern the advancement of the PC's to the world entirely. The 1e guards I created in a town may have been 2nd level mostly on the strength of thier training, etc. I guess what I'm saying is that the rules that govern PC advancment are created to serve a specific purpose for the PC's, they should be ignore when designing the larger world.

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

You're right, that is ghastly.

You're assuming the clerics are amoral, allowing people to be killed in "wargames".

You're assuming the gods of the clerics have nothing to say about that, and would do nothing in response to it.

You're assuming the spirits of the dead would want to come back to the meat grinder of the wargames of the clearly insane leaders of Medegia and Aerdy.

None of these things would be acts of a good people (it doesn't respect life, for one thing), maybe not even a neutral people.

Now wait a minute, wait a minute!

It would be *moral* to prepare people for those Space Invaders, no? Sounds like a Good thing to me!
If the Norse gods can pull this stunt in Ysgard, I don't think the Greyhawk gods are going to mind it ...
It would only be everyone's patriotic duty to come back from the dead, to defend Oerth from the tyrannical Space Invaders!
The leaders of Aerdi and Medegia were already insane. But this is a Good aligned insanity.

Who says it doesn't respect life? After all, it will save Oerth from those despicable Space Invaders, won't it?

Sounds like a good aligned situation to me.

 

[Fifth Element]

I asked: How do we create a good aligned people, who view killing as fun and games?

Apparently, nobody can answer the question.

Because it's not a valid question. Someone who views killing as fun & games is not Good per the alignment rules. Such a person would be Evil. You're asking "How do we create a Good-aligned people who are Evil?" And you wonder why no one has answered to your satisfaction.

As for the rest of this, Edena, I think you need to stop assuming that game rules put in place for adventuring PCs necessarily apply to every other sentient being in the game world. The rules are designed for adventurers in an adventure game. They are not designed for peasants and other "mundane" people, even if they exist in the same game world.

As someone said, way too much metagame thinking here.

 

[Sound of Azure]

I don't know about the characters in your games, but PCs and NPCs in my games have never thought of returning from the dead as inconsequential, nor have they concluded that death is meaningless due to resurrection magic (even repeated instances of such magic). I don't think they would even with nil costs from casting the requisite spell.

Are you being flippant for any particular reason? :\

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

Because it's not a valid question. Someone who views killing as fun & games is not Good per the alignment rules. Such a person would be Evil. You're asking "How do we create a Good-aligned people who are Evil?" And you wonder why no one has answered to your satisfaction.

As for the rest of this, Edena, I think you need to stop assuming that game rules put in place for adventuring PCs necessarily apply to every other sentient being in the game world. The rules are designed for adventurers in an adventure game. They are not designed for peasants and other "mundane" people, even if they exist in the same game world.

As someone said, way too much metagame thinking here.

As I said, I don't know if the question can be (seriously, at least) answered.
What scares me, is that my ghastly humorous answer above, just might work.

-

As for the rest of your post, in 3rd edition - 3.0 and in 3.5 - the peasants and other mundane people gain levels just as PCs do, and they can gain character classes by default if they choose to and someone trains them. If they gain character classes, they can advance as fighters, wizards, clerics, thieves, etc..
Even monsters can now acquire character classes and advance in them.

Back in 2nd and 1st edition, the majority of people were 0 level and could never advance in any known classes of the time (Commoner was not a class back then) so you are correct when referring to the 2nd and 1st edition rulessets.
Since Medegia was a 2nd edition country when it was overwhelmed, that meant the peasants were out of luck. Because when type 6 demons attack 0 level peasants, the results are pretty messy.

Yet even in 1st and 2nd edition, the drow were always classed, and typically higher than 1st level. And why is that? Consider what made the drow into powerhouse figures. (ala, they would have stomped the Surface World had they united and come up to do so. And that's canon, too!)

 

[Edena_of_Neith]

I don't know about the characters in your games, but PCs and NPCs in my games have never thought of returning from the dead as inconsequential, nor have they concluded that death is meaningless due to resurrection magic (even repeated instances of such magic). I don't think they would even with nil costs from casting the requisite spell.

Are you being flippant for any particular reason? :\

This thread has been deadly serious. Humor is needed. I think humor is a good thing. Relaxes the nerves. Calms the mind. Grants you an automatic 18 wisdom!

Of course people would not view resurrection flippantly, in any normal situation or mindset (what I described in my post above was not a normal society with a normal mindset, of course ... )

Let's houserule that nobody can refuse resurrection. Back in 1E and 2E, nobody could ... let's keep it that way. Keeps things simple. (Trust me, it gets *real* complicated if the soul can refuse resurrection ...)

So, you get resurrected 100 times, after being killed 100 times (painlessly.)
After a while, the brain becomes innured (even to such an insane situation as this one.) You become accustomed to it. It becomes Old Hat. Ordinary life. Just your run of the mill daily doings.

 

[Bloosquig]

Heck if returning from the dead were really easy to get all the world would be in a deathmatch mode. I can imagine the spirits sitting in the afterlife talking to one another.

"So how'd you do?"

"Ah I killed two from an ambush before I got a crossbow bolt in the gut."

"Sounds painful."

"Not really, I just cut my own throat once I realized I was dying. It's a lot simpler that way."

"True that. What's the respawn timer at right now?"

"Well most of the clerics are out of spells so probably some time tommorow. Maybe the day after that. We got creamed pretty hard with some boiling oil going up those hill forts yesterday."

Spooky.