Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5575726" data-attributes="member: 22779">After a bit more thought.Elf Witch - maybe an example might help.  Sorry for the gaming story.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  I recently ran an SF campaign where the PC's were interplanetary ... I guess secret agents would be the best description.  They were tasked by their superiors to perform various tasks around the galaxy.One of the tasks was to travel to a world and city, find a specific woman, observe the woman and, once the woman left the city, ensure that she arrived at her destination.  During the mission the PC's were not to be observed and they were not to make contact with the woman.  They were given various high tech toys in order to accomplish this goal.During the mission, they find the woman and observe her.  It turned out that the woman was a terrorist and was going to detonate a bomb at a political rally.  The PC's knew this for a fact.  Now, this is where the exploration of morality comes in.  Do they obey their orders, trusting that their superiors have sufficient reason for the orders, or do they disobey and prevent the bomb from detonating.  In order to ensure that this choice is based on their own perspectives, both choices have to be valid.  It can't be that choosing one results in their incarceration while the other makes them heroes.Both choices carry consequences, but none of those consequences are directly negative to the PC's.  The PC's will not be drummed out of the service if they disobey orders (although they might get a good dressing down from their superiors), nor will they be excessively punished regardless of their decision.Their decision was entirely up to them.  Had I put in place something along the lines of, "Failure to obey orders will result in your execution" then I've pretty much forced the issue towards a specific result.  Or, IOW, I've railroaded to a degree.  I hope that makes the style of play a bit clearer.</blockquote>

Verification