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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chrisling" data-source="post: 404817" data-attributes="member: 6816">Cavalier Attitudes About Torture and MutilationBeing a reasonably humane guy, I'm of the opinion that torture is in all times and all places evil.  As is mutilation.  But this story isn't about me, so much . . . .I've gamed in Nevada, California, South Carolina, Texas and Maine -- places I've lived.  Save in Nevada, where I grew up and "trained" my players, hehe, in every other place I gamed I found it was pretty routine for the players, when capturing an "enemy" magician to torture and mutilate the magician.  They'd go, "Well, in order to prevent him from casting spells, we've got to cut off his hands, gouge out his tongue and pluck out his eyes."  Then they'd get confused when I was horrified, telling them that this would certainly get their characters into evil alignments, particularly given the cavalier attitude they seemed to have towards this horrific torture and mutilation.They'd give me the old, "Well, he's a magician.  If we don't do this, he'll escape."  Which is, perhaps, true.  But it's true of any character, really.  I mean, a good rogue is at least as likely to escape as a magician -- so is it okay to routinely mutilate rogues you've captured?  The same is true of monks -- many monks laugh at attempts to hold them.  Should we go around mutilating monks?Eventually, the players shut up.  Some of them even see the point -- but a lot of them don't.  They don't see that torturing people to prevent them from escaping is completely wrong; that it's evil.The same holds true of prisoners that get captured.  After knocking out a person they're fighting, the usual response is, "We'll kill them, otherwise we'll just have to fight them, again."  It's much easier not to take them prisoner at all!  Again, I usually get these blank looks when I say murdering helpless people -- even if they're you're enemies -- is evil.  Geneva Convention, anyone?  There are laws, built on solid moral principles, that say killing helpless enemy combatants is just WRONG.  This is also standard in any police force in any country anyone wants to live in; it's illegal and evil to "finish off" even the most reprehensible people.  Yet, despite this being out there -- not to mention all my players living in a society whose dominate religion is Christianity, which has this bit about "thou shall not murder" -- and known, I still get these blank looks when I say that finishing off foes that are down is evil.*finishes rant*  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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