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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8506645" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I think this stuff very much depends on the game. Some games will have assumptions that the PCs will at least lean toward heroics. Modern D&D, going by what’s published, is almost universally about stopping the bad guys. It doesn’t have to be, and there are plenty of other games that allow for a more nuanced take.I’m running a campaign of Spire. The PCs are members of a resistance cell operating in the eponymous city, members of the drow underclass fighting against the tyranny of the high elves. The group is the Ministry of Our Hidden Mistress. The players in that game have had to make some interesting choices.They’ve uncovered a bit of a conspiracy, which involves the production and sale of an illicit substance, and they’re working to disrupt that operation. They also need to maintain anonymity; they can’t let people know they’re members of the Ministry. So they spent one session essentially wandering about the district where they’ve been operating, Red Row, eliminating their loose ends.One instance of that was getting rid of a drug addled drow who pointed them toward some of the key players in the drug trade. They grabbed him off the street and made him OD. Another loose end was a human retroengineer who was unknowingly involved in the manufacture of the drug (he treated one ingredient of it and sold it to the main drug dealing faction, not knowing or caring what they did with it). They snatched him from his lab and used one of the PC’s ability to teleport back to their base, where they questioned him and then finished him off.What makes this work is that the game mechanics allow for these acts to take a serious toll. One of the PCs is a cold-blooded killer, but the other two are not, and they’ve both taken fallout from these violent acts. One has been fairly minor, but the other has permanent effects that are causing him to crack. He’s slowly losing his mind.I think that games like this that expect to put PCs into such situations and want to see how they handle them are best when there are some kinds of mechanics that are involved. That if you simply allow the player to decide how the PC handles all this trauma, then it’s kind of dodging the issue. That works for a typically heroic approach like D&D or Star Wars and the like, where the PCs are heroes and can slaughter any number of bad guys and be essentially fine because it’s only bad guys. But if you want a little more nuance, then there needs to be something the player puts at risk.</blockquote>

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