Mallus said:
You wouldn't exactly get it from my original post, but I really admire the scenario... I'm just not sure what to make of it. It's daring to humanize a foe that is, in fact, irredeemable, and proceed to make the characters follow their beliefs to their logical conclusion. The only use I could think of such an encounter is to present a rather obvious critique of the use of inherently evil races in fantasy lit.
Frankly, I'm not sure what to make of it, either. It certainly was interesting, though. I didn't take it so much as a critique of the use of inherently Evil races but more as an example of how Good characters might react to the grim reality of such races. Being Good in a morally complex world is going to mean that sometimes you've got to make grim choices. In fact, that paladin player has also been dealing with the problem of having to ignore some of the small Evils so that he can tackle the big Evils of the setting.
When I set up my game (admittedly it was a rush job), I had some fairly lenthy discussion with both the player of the paladin and the other players about what Good and Evil would mean in my setting (including passing out alignment diagrams and explaining how I was going to view alignment). In fact, I talked at least one player into changing alignment to Neutral because I didn't think he'd enjoy playing a character to the standards I had defined for Good. It was, in part, the players' choice to have "killable bad guys" and (in particular) the paladin's player didn't want to have to second-guess his Detect Evil before smiting a bad guy. So basically, they got what they wanted and then maybe didn't like it as much as they thought they would when the implications were graphically illustrated to them. We'll need to have a talk about it when the campaign is finished to see what they all think when it's over.
Mallus said:
The moral dilemas I find entertaining are ones that can only exist in settings where the absolute moral authority is unknowable; where the characters struggle to define good and evil, not choose between the two clearly deliniated options.
The dilemmas in my current game derive from how one handles the situations even after they know who the good guys and the bad guys are. Even though they knew that a goblin and a derro were Evil, they still needed to decide if they should bargain with them to get information that would help them save others. I think there are still dilemmas aplenty, even though "Is it OK to kill this guy or not?" isn't one of them.
I did, however, leave the religion in my game fairly ambiguous because I think religion needs a philosophical and faith component. There are several interpretations of the cosmology that are a matter of faith rather than perfect knowledge and they often disagree with each other in fairly important ways. While everyone knows there is an Outer Plane, Celestial and Infernal beings, etc., it's a matter of faith to interpret what it means. One group believes that the cycles of reincarnation are not only inevitable but desirable, a second group believes that the cycle of reincarnation is a path to perfection and transcending the Prime Material plane, while a third group believes that their objective is to die and go to Heaven and stay there as part of the plan of a deity that exists beyond the Outer Plane (I have only one -- the inside of a sphere divided into alignment-based regions).
It's been pretty interesting because the party contains two religious characters from one faith (a paladin and cleric) and a religous character from a different faith (a druid) and the druid, in particular, already has a pretty good idea that his goals will eventually diverge from the other two.
