Prisoners

[JohnSnow]

I've always tended to play D&D in rationalised fantasy worlds. In most of those, orcs tend to have a fairly brutal culture, but are not intrinsically evil. I had a good example of this recently in a low-level AD&D campaign. The party, who were second or third level, were ambushed on the road by what turned out to be a mixed group of human bandits and orc mercenaries. They weren't well organised, and we rapidly got the better of them.

One orc, who had been heard complaining about the leadership before his bow broke, and the orc next to him was knocked down, decided to surrender when I said we were working for the local human kingdom's army. I just said that as psychological warfare, but it paid off. As a mercenary, he wasn't prepared to give information until we hired him, but since then he's given good and loyal service, and provided a lot of valuable information. It probably helps that we don't discriminate against him when it comes to magical healing. Indeed, we take some care to keep him alive, since he has fewer HP than most of the party, but is a good bowman.

Now see, that sounds very cool to me. I think I would very much enjoy playing in your campaign.

But I have to ask...AD&D? Are we talking 1st? 2nd? Are you still using THAC0?

 

[John Dallman]

Now see, that sounds very cool to me. I think I would very much enjoy playing in your campaign.

But I have to ask...AD&D? Are we talking 1st? 2nd? Are you still using THAC0?

First edition, with the DM's house rules. He's been running the same world since 1976, and runs another party in it under 5e. Yes, we're still using THAC0, which doesn't give us any problem: we're all in our fifties or sixties, and learned it long ago.

 

[JohnSnow]

First edition, with the DM's house rules. He's been running the same world since 1976, and runs another party in it under 5e. Yes, we're still using THAC0, which doesn't give us any problem: we're all in our fifties or sixties, and learned it long ago.

Nice. I'm 47 myself, and I was just a wee sprat when I started playing in the late '70s. However, I kept updating editions, and even participated in the 5e playtest.

As a DM, I mostly like the new edition, although I'm currently planning to take a crack at running Savage Worlds for my group. However, the last time I got to be a player (absent one crappy Cthulian game I'd rather forget about) was in an OSR "Castles & Crusades" game back in the 3.5e days, which was pretty similar to "houseruled AD&D." All of us were old players (BECMI, 2e or earlier) who met on the WotC boards and got together to play 3.5e, but we were varying levels of dissatisfied with its "fiddly bits." So we ditched our 3.5 game to play C&C.

Sadly, our DM and one of our players moved out of state after a couple years, and the group broke up. So it goes.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I honestly can't recall.

If true, your parents were right to be concerned.

Not really. Yes, adventures did say, treat females as lesser monster X and young as lesser monster Y. But that was done because they WERE NOT HELPLESS INNOCENTS. They were evil, murdering MONSTERS, to the core, from birth, and that was why they had evil alignments. And it wasn't a matter of PC's hacking apart defenseless and weak fuzzy-wuzzys - it was a matter of PC's needing to defend themselves AGAINST those vile critters seeking their PC blood by using rocks and pointy sticks if that's all they had.

Later, other game authors and DM's inserted into D&D the idea that no monster is ever inflexibly evil and that you couldn't just gank even the worst monsters because eventually one of them was going to turn out to be LG and then it would be the players who were guilty of murder for A) not conducting detailed psychological analysis on every individual to determine their personal philosophy and beliefs instead of making blanket racist assumptions, and B) not arresting them instead and taking them back to the nearest town for trial by jury for their illegal deeds, and possibly C) turning themselves into authorities for acting like judge, jury and executioner without having been duly elected as law enforcement officials. But that's not how it was EVER intended at the outset and the females and young were not placed into adventures as morality traps for the PC's to rush headlong into because they wanted to hear the screams of dying innocents.

 

[dragoner]

Yes, adventures did say, treat females as lesser monster X and young as lesser monster Y.

Giving xp value for them as well, iirc.

 

[Eric V]

Not really. Yes, adventures did say, treat females as lesser monster X and young as lesser monster Y. But that was done because they WERE NOT HELPLESS INNOCENTS. They were evil, murdering MONSTERS, to the core, from birth, and that was why they had evil alignments. And it wasn't a matter of PC's hacking apart defenseless and weak fuzzy-wuzzys - it was a matter of PC's needing to defend themselves AGAINST those vile critters seeking their PC blood by using rocks and pointy sticks if that's all they had.

Later, other game authors and DM's inserted into D&D the idea that no monster is ever inflexibly evil and that you couldn't just gank even the worst monsters because eventually one of them was going to turn out to be LG and then it would be the players who were guilty of murder for A) not conducting detailed psychological analysis on every individual to determine their personal philosophy and beliefs instead of making blanket racist assumptions, and B) not arresting them instead and taking them back to the nearest town for trial by jury for their illegal deeds, and possibly C) turning themselves into authorities for acting like judge, jury and executioner without having been duly elected as law enforcement officials. But that's not how it was EVER intended at the outset and the females and young were not placed into adventures as morality traps for the PC's to rush headlong into because they wanted to hear the screams of dying innocents.

Presenting children as "evil, murdering MONSTERS, to the core" is problematic and should be concerning to any decent parent.

 

[aramis erak]

Weird people keep mentioning these campaigns but I've never seen them. Outside of homebrew, where is the published settings that have orcs incapable of being anything other than evil?

Any proper Tolkien-based campaign. Orcs are corruptions of Elves, and born incapable of full free will, inherently evil.

AD&D 1E somewhere advises monsters should never be more than 1 step on each axis away from the racial norms; the listed alignment is Lawful Evil. That would allow LE, LN, NE, and N. The 1E DMG implies Monster Alignments shouldn't be different from listed. Thus, early versions of AD&D, by groups who took the rules as rules, not guidelines, tended to have most monsters stuck in their alignments.

L5R, all editions, Bakemono ("goblins") are inherently evil, as they are shadowlands creatures... Meanwhile, the Naga and Nezumi, while inhuman, are capable of good, and while the Nezumi are resident in the shadowlands, they aren't shadowlands creatures.

I've run campaigns where orcs were inherently evil, and ones where they weren't. The later were different in tone. Both can be fun.

Warhammer FRP 1E limits even PCs to 1 step either side, but uses a different alignment scale, 1 axis: Lawful • Good • Neutral • Evil • Chaotic. The walking fungi called Orcs and goblins/gretchins are evil, thus individuals can only be N, E, or C.

 

[aramis erak]

Giving xp value for them as well, iirc.

Technically, for defeat. Not for killing.
Rolemaster is the one that gives extra XP for killing.

I'll note that many young GM's missed the distinction. Me included for a number of years.

 

[Gradine]

Some of the worldviews expressed in this thread shake me to my core.

As for the actual point of the thread, my PCs rarely take prisoners, and usually do so only when I offer them a prompt such as asking a player who's about to roll damage on a killing blow "is this lethal or non-lethal?". But then, I'm typically teaching new players so that kind of sign-posting is part-in-partial with how I DM. I'll usually mix up how well/easy questioning is going depending on how/what my players are doing.

Torture almost always just gets you what the subject thinks you want to hear, and as a general rule I don't like awarding such actions.

 

[pemerton]

Some of the comments in this thread about AD&D ware wrong, in the sense that they are presenting what I take to be personal experiences as if they were (i) universal and/or (ii) mandated by the rulebooks.

Appendix C of Gygax's DMG has a City/Town Encounter Matrix. On that matrix, 5% of day-time encounters and 7% of night-time encounters are with "ruffians". Page 192 describes ruffians as "fellows of shabby appearance and mean disposition . . . armed with clubs and daggers." It also tells us that "There
is a 5% chance per ruffian encountered [no encouner is 1d6+6] that an assassin of 5th to 8th level (d4 + 4) will be with the group." and that "All weapons will be concealed." A footnote to the table on p 191 says "If desired, 1 in 4 [ruffians] can be half-orc or of humanoid race (goblin, hobgoblin, kobold,, orc)."

This tells us that, at least in some moods, Gygax contemplated that a meaningful number of the thuggish types who hang out in dark alleys waiting to waylay PCs might be orcs, goblins etc. An AD&D campaign that adopts that approach is clearly not one in which orcs and the like are inherently savage monsters incapable of taming their appetites even for a moment.