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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7109819" data-attributes="member: 6775031">You're treating NPCs like they're second-class citizens, by not giving them the same basic considerations that you give to the PCs. It's unreasonable to blame the players for not caring about the NPCs, and whether they live or die, when the underlying reason for why they are allowed to die is just because they're NPCs.I'm reminded of why I stopped playing 4E, and switched to Pathfinder, back in 2009 or so. I was one of the players, and we were supposed to rescue some dwarven NPCs from a mine, where they were being kept as slave labor by drow. We managed to free them, but on our way out of the mine, we were attacked. One of the drow cast an area-effect magic web spell on the entire party, which was something like difficult terrain coupled with little spiders that bit for ~3 damage every round. Of course, this was enough to utterly and irrevocably murder every single one of the dwarves we were in the process of rescuing, because they were inexplicably being modeled as minions. That's when I gave up on 4E, because I didn't feel bad about failing to protect these people; I felt betrayed by the system, for making me think of them as people at all, when they were never anything more than plot points.It's the same thing, in your example. When the peasants are murdered by gnolls, it's not the players' or the PCs' fault that they died. It's not the peasants' fault, or even the gnolls' fault really. The only real blame lies in the system, choosing to model them as plot points rather than as people.</blockquote>

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