D&D 5E Next session a character might die. Am I being a jerk?

[jgsugden]

Good and evil are subjective. This is a debate that goes back and forth so often and always comes back to subjetive questions. There are some questions everyone will answer similarly, and some that have more varied answers, but it is a question of philiosophy at the end.

To go back to the main question of the thread - you may wish to listen to episode 57 of Season 1 of Critical Role. Spoilers:

Spoiler

In it, Matt Mercer, the DM, brings back a prior foe, a Rakshasa, to attack a single player that had previously slain it. The creature uses guile and tries to make the attack personal to the PC. However, the DM does it in a way that tells a great story.

 

[fearsomepirate]

TL/DR - Should I throw a revenant at a party of level 5/6? One of the party murdered the revenant and now it seeks revenge.

A few sessions ago, the party encountered 3 acolytes of (NG deity of life/light) who were unconscious and injured. The necromancer decided to cast vampiric touch to heal herself, killing one of the acolytes. I ended the session there - these were supposed to be npc's that they were to rescue, not murder. The party was a little suspicious of the whole thing, thinking the acolytes were evil somehow. Obviously, I should have done a better job telegraphing who these unfortunate victims were.

In between sessions I asked the player of the paladin how she felt that the wizard murdered an unconscious person just for the lols. She wasn't too impressed - good! Next session I recapped, calling it murder. They took the hint, revived the other 2 acolytes, plaid dumb on how their colleague died and escorted them to safety.

Here is where I worry that I'm being unfair. The revenant is going to find them in the forest at night, hunkered down in their Tiny Hut. If they don't deal with him, he will just make noise, disturb their long rest and attract all kinds of nasty creatures in the process. He doesn't care, he just wants revenge on the necromancer.

If the party leaves the Tiny Hut to attack, he will single mindedly go after the necromancer. She will almost surly die, unless the party does a fair amount of damage first. However, RAW if he fails he will just come back again 24 hours later, and again, and again...

Sounds fair to me. The way you deal with a revenant at low level is to not commit murder.

In my current campaign, an 11th-level assassin eventually picked off the entire 5th-level party in my game because they murdered somebody who had a powerful patron (his name was Lareth; her name was Lolth). I gave the party many opportunities to track him down and deal with him, and they largely ignored them in favor of treasure-spelunking. He murdered them all, one by one.

IMO, it isn't unfair at all for players to die as long as that death is avoidable, and "avoidable" doesn't necessarily mean it can be avoided by rolling to hit and casting magic missile. It means put on your thinking cap and do something smart instead of ignoring the bodies that keep piling up in the village.

 

[Mistwell]

If adventurers are storming into a dungeon simply to slaughter the goblin or orc inhabitants and steal their things, they're evil.

Armed Goblins and Orcs in a dungeon are nazis. If you're soldiers and you find a den of them, take them out for the good of all and let Pelor sort them out.

They have "Chaotic Evil" written right there on their monster description. Leaving them be is abetting the evil they will do to innocents if you are given the chance to stop them and you don't.

To me, D&D isn't like real life. Creatures you encounter in dungeons are not typically shades of gray. They are evil. You can turn on your detector and know, with certainty, they are evil. It's part of the game. Unless the challenge IS the determination of morality and shades of gray, if you find armed orcs and goblins in a dungeon you don't need to drag things down by fretting about morality. Alignment was put there to remove that concern from the game, because it can detract from the fun if every scenario has to start with that question.

 

[The Green Hermit]

I killed BOTH of my daughter's characters today, and my husband's only lived because we have to make special rules for him if we ever want him to play (one of said rules is that he can pretty much appear or disappear wherever and whenever -- not teleporting, but being absent and then present). Now my son is trying to convince me to let him create a second character as well. I'll probably let him, but he needs to be more creative with it than he is now.

 

[Flamestrike]

Armed Goblins and Orcs in a dungeon are nazis. If you're soldiers and you find a den of them, take them out for the good of all and let Pelor sort them out.

Is what an Evil or the occasional Neutral person would say.

They have "Chaotic Evil" written right there on their monster description.

Not all Goblins and Orcs are evil. You can literally play one as a PC and be LG.

They're not inherently evil. They're evil because the Gods they tend to worship encourage a society that advocates for raiding villages, slaughtering the inhabitants, looting the corpses, and merciless genocide.

Which of course, is exactly what you're advocating for here as well.

See your problem?

 

[Fenris-77]

This issue is indeed why the creatures who are CE tend to be the ones that populate dungeons. It's very much outside real world ethical concerns at that point, as detailed above, and dragging those in is pretty much always an exercise in overwrought hand wringing and PHIL101 armchair philosophizing.

You can indeed point to individuals of those races and say "see, they aren't CE" but that doesn't change the general ethical teleos of the game, or counter any arguments about the general CE nature of the race in question. Blaming the gods isn't a workable argument contra either. Are the Orcs and Goblins the ones raiding villages and eating people? Yup. Can they be positively identified as evil in the game mechanics? Yup. At that point trying to rationalize their behavior isn't a useful argument.

To be fair, this is very setting and table dependent. Some settings handle sentient races differently, especially orcs and goblins, and that would change things a lot. Those are exceptions to the rule though, and a separate case from your bog standard D&D milieu.

 

[Weiley31]

Sigh...is this where you say that any use of a Vampiric Touch spell, is always evil?

I'm gonna laugh SUPER HARD when the plot twist reveals that this is the SAME Necromancer and Paladin from that crazy "Paladin joined party with a Necromancer" topic that is on here.

 

[Mistwell]

Is what an Evil or the occasional Neutral person would say.

Nope. It's what good PCs do in the assumed world of D&D. You can change those assumptions for your game, but don't pretend your altered assumptions are the baseline assumed for this game. They're not.

Not all Goblins and Orcs are evil. You can literally play one as a PC and be LG.

Sure, as an extreme exception to the standard alignment so extreme it's that noteworthy as an anomaly. Sort of like finding an SS Nazi with a heart of gold.

They're not inherently evil.

No, they're just almost always evil. And, it's war, and they're armed and enemy soldiers in enemy territory. We're not talking about you walking down your own city street and seeing an orc come out of a bar, we were talking a dungeon with armed orcs you just found.

They're evil because the Gods they tend to worship encourage a society that advocates for raiding villages, slaughtering the inhabitants, looting the corpses, and merciless genocide.

Which of course, is exactly what you're advocating for here as well.

See your problem?

Nope, you left out a crucial element of what I said. I said ARMED. When you come across ARMED goblins and orcs in a DUNGEON, you ASSUME they are evil because they 99.999999% of the time are. I am not in fact saying you kill unarmed civilians. I am saying when you come across enemy soldiers (which is what they are) of evil mass murderer warriors and you're armed and able to stop them before they kill their next victims, it's considered good in this world to do so.

Again, what I am describing is in fact the baseline assumption of this game and has been since I started playing in 1978. Change it however you want for your game. But don't shove your house rules down my throat and pretend everyone plays like that or else they're somehow doing it wrong. There are in fact RPGs out there which alter these baseline assumptions to be the way you're describing it. In fact there are D&D settings that might change those assumptions too. But D&D with the assumed setting of the PHB isn't one of those RPGs. In can however easily deal with your alteration of those assumptions.

I don't think it would be an improvement as you'd have to use your first action to attempt to negotiate every single encounter to see if you've run into the unusual neutral or good armed orc or goblin only to find you're getting smacked with a sword or struck by a arrow most of the time. You'd be adding an element of philosophy to the game which I think is much more interesting if done outside of a game rather than in it. But hey, you do your game.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Executing captives is generally considered evil in Western warfare, and yes, that includes all the Axis belligerents and Al Qaeda. In fact, one of the main reasons we considered the Japanese evil was because of how they'd torture and execute POWs and civilians. We don't kill people who follow bad principles or evil religions, because we believe that is in itself evil.

But D&D isn't real life. It's mythic...and it depends on your setting. Traditionally, they aren't just really ugly humanoids who follow a bad religion and an incompatible morality. They're the spawn of Gruumsh's blood, shed in his battle with Corellon. They don't just worship Gruumsh; they're living incarnations of his malevolence; they are the means by which Gruumsh extends his orgy of cruelty to the Prime Material.

You don't kill orcs "because they're like Nazis." You kill them because they're the embodiment of the god of cruelty. Of course, you might be Neutral and believe that even orcs have their place in the cosmos, bringing balance to all things. You might even be Good and conclude that killing them would have negative consequences (perhaps this orc tribe is warring with some ogres in the mountains and keeping them at bay). But it's not an Evil act to kill them. It's Good.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that your morality has to be framed within the cosmos of the setting. If the gods are real, if they create this race and that monstrosity in their eternal wars over the spokes of the Great Wheel, morality is fundamentally different than in our modern world.

But in Eberron, sure, massacring orcs that haven't done anything is evil, because in that setting, goblins and orcs are more just "ugly, uncivilized humanoids." But Greyhawk and the FR? Nah, cut 'em down.

 

[Flamestrike]

Nope. It's what good PCs do in the assumed world of D&D.

No, it's not. Good PCs dont engage in genocide.

Sure, as an extreme exception to the standard alignment so extreme it's that noteworthy as an anomaly.

Rubbish. Read the rules bro. Orcs and Goblins are only normally evil because their society (driven by their Gods like Grummsh etc) tells them to be.

If an orc is separated from its cruel gods and its society, it will not be inherently evil. Mike Mearls even said, “But if you took an orc and raised it in human society, it would just be like a human. Obviously it would be orc biologically, but […] there's no reason why an orc couldn't be raised [that way].”

Those Orcs could very well be disillusioned with the Orc pantheon, and only in the dungeon to find a better life for themselves (Neutral) after leaving their tribe.

Nope, you left out a crucial element of what I said. I said ARMED. When you come across ARMED goblins and orcs in a DUNGEON, you ASSUME they are evil because they 99.999999% of the time are. I am not in fact saying you kill unarmed civilians.

Coming across armed Orcs or Goblins in a dungeon is not reason to kill them out of hand. You gain your reason to kill them, if (and only if) such force is reasonably needed to protect yourself (or others) from harm from an imminent threat, and is proportionate to that threat.

If those Orcs ARE in fact armed, and they DO in fact pose you an immediate threat that requires lethal force in self defence, then yeah - hack away. The alignment of the Orcs has nothing to do with it.

Paladins carry swords for a reason.

Again, what I am describing is in fact the baseline assumption of this game

No, it isn't. For you perhaps.

But if the Gods of Good in your games are down with genocide and the wholesale slaughter of a people based on nothing but the Race of your victims, I shudder at the atrocities that one could commit and still get into 'Heaven'.

I don't think it would be an improvement as you'd have to use your first action to attempt to negotiate every single encounter to see if you've run into the unusual neutral or good armed orc or goblin only to find you're getting smacked with a sword or struck by a arrow most of the time.

What on earth are you talking about? Why on earth would you need to first attempt to negotiate with something that is trying to kill you (or just about to)?

If you wake up in the middle of the night and see an armed intruder in your home, you dont have to talk to them first before shooting them. You can use whatever force is reasonable in the situation to protect yourself and your family.

If Police see you with a knife running at someone, they are not going to try and talk you down (unless they have enough time of course; in which case you'll get a 'Stop or I'll shoot!'). They're going to shoot you dead.

If you're in a dungeon, and armed or hostile ANYTHING (from Orcs, to Paladins to Dragons to Golems to whatever) come at you with hostile intent, you're within your rights to resort to reasonable force to stop that threat (this includes lethal force when warranted). You dont have to engage in a pleasant conversation first, issue a warning, attempt to negotiate or any thing of that nature (unless of course the threat is not imminent, and the use of force is not reasonable).

The instant they attack (or look like they're going to) reasonable force to protect yourself, or others, is OK.

If you walk into a room and see an unarmed Orc woman, cowering by her bed next to several Orc children, you dont just walk up and bash her (and the childrens) heads in with a hammer. If she suddenly reaches for a weapon, stab away.