D&D 5E Killing is bad: how to establish morality

[pemerton]

I think the only way to get the result you want is to sit the players themselves down and talk to them about playing the game in a different fashion.

Nothing wrong with that, but I don't think it will change the way they play their PCs if the GM doesn't also look at how s/he is framing situations and adjudicating consequences.

If you make it hard or dangerous to fight and kill, then choosing not to fight and kill doesn't tell us anything about the morality of the PCs except that they are expedient.

If you want the conduct of the heroes to show moral character, then you want them to choose not to kill even when that would be as easy as any other choice.

That is kinda tough to do in-game. I mean, maybe you could go through the hard work of showing penalty-free moral ripples of their actions (maybe the characters find the starved corpses of some goblin infants who died because their parent was slain by the PCs), but why would that move the players to more immersive roleplaying when everything else in the game-world didn't?

I think the bit about "everything else in the gameworld" is right, and seems similar to my point that a GM who wants the players to play non-murderous PCs needs to start by looking at how s/he is framing and adjudicating the ingame situations.

In this old thread I talked about an occasion when the players in my game had their PCs tame a bear rather than kill it. There was no particular mechanical advantage in doing so - I deliberately framed the skill challenge at the same degree of encounter difficulty as the combat. Nor was there any ingame social pressure - the bear was in a ruined temple out in the wildernesss, and no one would have objected to the PCs killing the bear.

They did it because one of the players suggested taming rather than killing it; and afterwards that player said "I feel really good about not having killed that bear."

You can't get that sort of player internalisation of morality by making it expedient not to kill. Morality means not killing because it (everything else being equal) it is wrong.

But what you can do, as a GM, is remove reasons that make it expedient for the players to play murderers - eg don't have tamed bears turn on them, have every released prisoner break their parole, etc. If your adjudication is neutral as between the expedience of killing or not killing, that creates the space in the game for the players' moral choices to emerge.

 

[Corwin]

But what you can do, as a GM, is remove reasons that make it expedient for the players to play murderers - eg don't have tamed bears turn on them, have every released prisoner break their parole, etc. If your adjudication is neutral as between the expedience of killing or not killing, that creates the space in the game for the players' moral choices to emerge.

I think this is core. So many DMs fall into this kind of trap. The tamed bear, or captured enemy or whatever, is low hanging fruit for a DM scrambling for interesting things to do to the party. Taking care not to invalidate the players' efforts can really help foster the trust the players need to not fell they must scorch the earth, lest it unexpectedly rear up behind them and swallow them whole.

 

[philosophers_stoned]

There's a thing I notice in fiction that I feel falls away in rpgs sometimes. The heroes don't kill outside of the heat of battle, and even then, they still try to not kill. Countless times I've seen heroes put themselves in bad situations because they let someone go or they take them to prison instead of just snapping their neck early. From Luke Cage to Fin and Han to whoever.

Are inspiration points a good enough mechanic to reward players making in character decisions that aren't the best from a strict stand point? Taking a prisoner instead of just killing them, for instance.

Regardless of what kind of mood the PCs and the DM set to a campaign, i think we should all acknowledge one fact: D&D at its core is violence oriented. Look at the abilities of any class. They are meant to kill another creature or escape damage from a creature that means to kill you. Each time you level up you become a more efficient killer because you gain abilities that mostly hurt/kill others. So, when you start playing D&D, the first thing you want to do is use your PC's abilities and most of them involve killing. It's like giving someone a remote control with a big red button: regardless of what you tell him he will want to press it at some point.

I think you can create a campaign that is less violence oriented only if the DM and most of the PC agree to such a theme. You don't need mechanisms, like inspiration points, but concesus.

 

[Salamandyr]

Easy change: there is no death except as a deliberate act of murder.

Characters and opponents surrender/ run away/ fall unconscious at 0 hit points. If a PC then kills an opponent, it's a deliberate act to murder a defenseless/surrendered foe. There are then lots of ways to deal with that sort of behavior in game (to include opponents willing to do the same to PCs, alignment impacts, "proper" authorities, hits to reputation, and the like).

Was coming here to post this. With a little creativity, even spellcasting narration can be done nonlethally; it used to be done in comic books all the time. The lightning bolt that dropped the orcs to zero hit points didn't hit them, the wizard cast it at the ceiling above, which dropped on the orcs knocking them out.

0 hit points is just a game state--what it means is up to you.

 

[Edwin Suijkerbuijk]

There's a thing I notice in fiction that I feel falls away in rpgs sometimes. The heroes don't kill outside of the heat of battle, and even then, they still try to not kill. Countless times I've seen heroes put themselves in bad situations because they let someone go or they take them to prison instead of just snapping their neck early. From Luke Cage to Fin and Han to whoever.

Are inspiration points a good enough mechanic to reward players making in character decisions that aren't the best from a strict stand point? Taking a prisoner instead of just killing them, for instance.

Maybe some stress system?

Where comitting actions that a character would consider moraly wrong would give the character stress points.
When resting the character rolls a D20 if he rolls lower then his current stress score he is unable to rest ( think all of us had a sleepless night in rl)
and it might take acts of redemption, or long time rest to reduce stress.

 

[pemerton]

Regardless of what kind of mood the PCs and the DM set to a campaign, i think we should all acknowledge one fact: D&D at its core is violence oriented.

So is Batman. Or the X-Men. But they're not killing-oriented. And they're certainly not murder-oriented.

Maybe some stress system?

Where comitting actions that a character would consider moraly wrong would give the character stress points.

I still think there is a tension - maybe even a deep contradiction - in trying to get players care about values in play by making it expedient for them to do so.

 

[Rhenny]

I still think that sometimes the urge to kill in game stems from the thought (true or only perceived) that PCs can get away with it.

If PCs spare lives, and those spared come back to haunt them, players/PCs become distrustful and kill to avoid later complications.

Also, if they kill indiscriminately and there are no ill consequences then they tend to continue the pattern of killing because it seems like an easy way to handle situations.

Sometimes the formation of an in-game PC conscience is important, and knowing that there are consequences for unlawful acts is one way to build that conscience.

DMs can also have NPCs who are moral and powerful take note of those that make the moral choice even when it might lead to further complications. Like in life, recognition for good deeds from authority figures (parents, holy people, mentors, family friends, business partners, etc.) build our sense of conscience. The same can be done in game.

If the DM gives PCs a chance to develop a moral conscience, then tempting them with easy, less moral choices becomes part of the drama in the game.