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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7817967" data-attributes="member: 42582">I didn't say anything about GMing. Nor did I imply anything about GMing.I explained the differnce between failing to rescue someone to who no duty of rescue is owed, and expediently sacrificing someone who is in your care. That is a distinction that (while obviously admitting of marginal cases and producing millions of words of trolley-problem and related lliterature) is, in its fundamentals, relatively straightforward and widely recognised in law as well as philosophy.There are a million ways to run interesting RPG scenarios in which the ideals of honour, duty, chivalry etc can be explored, tested, and refuted or vindicated. Very few paladin threads exemplify any of those ways, though. But that tells us nothing about the issue I was responding to.If you want to see how I approach GMing a knightly game, <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/another-prince-valiant-session-report.667558/" target="_blank">here's my most recent Prince Valiant actual play report</a>. I don't have actual play posts for the Burning Wheel game where play a knight of a holy military order, but in the last session that I played of that game I was doing battle with a demon to keep it away from my companion (who had swooned from the strain of casting a spell). Knowing my own stats, and having a rough sense of the stats of the demon, I knew I had no chance to defeat it. I was able to hold it off long enough that its tie to the material world dissolved. As a result I gained an infamous reputation, in Hell, as an intransigent demon foe.My PCs Beliefs are: *The Lord of Battle will lead me to glory *I am a Knight of the Iron Tower: by devotion and example I will lead the righteous to glorious victory *Harm and infamy will befall Auxol [my ancestral homeland] no more! *Aramina [my companion] will need my protectionAnd my PC's Instincts include:If an innocent is threatened, interpose myselfSo it would be inconceivable for me to bargain with the demon for my safety at the expense of Aramina's.The main obligation of the GM in Burning Wheel is to establsh situations that put the PCs' Beliefs to the test. The main obligation of a player is to play his/her PC to the hilt! I trust my GM to be fair, in the sense of not arbitrarily hosing my PC. But loss and suffering are completely fair game. In the BW campaign in which I am GM and my GM is a player, his PC - as a result of pursuing his Beilefs - has spent the last two sessions in a dungeon cell, trying to escape while having to make hard bargains with the various NPCs (allied and opposed) who have come to speak with him.But to reiterate - good and bad GMing techniques have nothing to do with the inner logic of a morality of duty and an ethic of honour.</blockquote>

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