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Killing is bad: how to establish morality
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6934364" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>In <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?301282-Actual-play-examples-balance-between-fiction-and-mechanics" target="_blank">this old thread</a> 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.</p><p></p><p>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."</p><p></p><p>You can't get that sort of player internalisation of morality by making it <em>expedient</em> not to kill. Morality means not killing because it (everything else being equal) it is wrong. </p><p></p><p>But what you <em>can</em> 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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6934364, member: 42582"] 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. 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 [url=http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?301282-Actual-play-examples-balance-between-fiction-and-mechanics]this old thread[/url] 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 [I]expedient[/I] not to kill. Morality means not killing because it (everything else being equal) it is wrong. But what you [I]can[/I] 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. [/QUOTE]
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