D&D General The child stealing food to survive scenario, for alignment

[Bitbrain]

If I was playing at a table where alignment was used, and it was my character in this situation...

LG & NG: catch the kid, make him give the loaf back, then give the kid some gold to buy himself some food. Get the kid a job if the PC is feeling especially charitable.

CG: let the kid get away, then pay the baker for the loss.

LN: catch the kid, and make him return it. Deliver him to the authorities for extra lawfulness.

N or CN: do nothing.

LE: beat the kid senseless, and then push the authorities to give the kid the maximum punishment for theft.

NE or CE: kill the kid and then have a good laugh about it. Maybe steal the loaf of bread from him for extra cruelty.

 

[ccs]

Thinking of my last three LG characters;

* Corbin, 1/2E Ranger - probably wouldn't pay it much mind at all unless a fuss was being made. It's a kid, involved in petty theft. It's what kids do & he's got adult/adventuring concerns. As a minor Nobel he actually does have the right to dispense justice within the kingdom though. So if it came to it he'd simply reimburse the baker in the name of the Kingdom, rule the case dismissed, issue a writ & get on with his business.

* Bree Burrfoot, 1/2ling Warlock - Is a 10 year old (going on 11) kid herself. She's been raised right. She'd agree that stealing is wrong. But she wouldn't try & catch the kid or anything. And it wouldn't cross her mind to pay for the stolen bread.

* Rose Burrfoot, 1/2ling Barbarian & Bree's 20 yr old sister - If she could catch the kid, say as they ran past her, she'd snag them, present them to the baker so they could return the bread & apologize. (just like a parent cracking down on a wayward child, just like she'd do with Bree....). Then she'd buy the kid the bread, give them some coin so they didn't have to steal in the future, & send them away.
If she couldn't easily grab the kid, she would NOT chase them down.
"Armed adventurer chases down child.... Over bread." No.
Once the kids gone she'd talk to the baker. She'd find out how much he loses to theft in a year (total) & simply pay for about two years worth. {Yes, she might get taken advantage of on this deal - but as she's plundered the treasury of Martek she won't be running short of $ for several lifetimes....}

 

[Eltab]

LG should be thinking about getting the child back to family (if any) and open contact behind the child / family and a charity. LG now has an open-ended excuse to review the orphanage / charity's operations to insure they really do what they claim - and are not a front for the Thieves Guild or kidnappers or something. Oh and pay the merchant for the stolen food.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

I think the answer is very obvious for what a NG or CG character would do, in that they'd at least let the child go. But for LG characters this might be more of an internal conflict to them.

Not at all. "Theft is wrong" is not exclusive to Lawful alignment.

Catching the kid and giving them a sound thrashing would fit in with any aligment.

 

[ccs]

LG should be thinking about getting the child back to family (if any) and open contact behind the child / family and a charity. LG now has an open-ended excuse to review the orphanage / charity's operations to insure they really do what they claim - and are not a front for the Thieves Guild or kidnappers or something. Oh and pay the merchant for the stolen food.

Honestly the only reason I would do any of that, beyond pay for the food, would be if I (as the player) suspected that this was something more than a random encounter.
Otherwise I'm going to treat it as flavor/set dressing & proceed onto adventure. Wich auditing an orphanage/charity is not. Doing so is not within my characters interests or skill sets. And it's definitely not within this players interests. So if that was a DMs intended hook to something....

 

[Eltab]

Honestly the only reason I would do any of that, beyond pay for the food, would be if I (as the player) suspected that this was something more than a random encounter.
Otherwise I'm going to treat it as flavor/set dressing & proceed onto adventure. Wich auditing an orphanage/charity is not. Doing so is not within my characters interests or skill sets. And it's definitely not within this players interests. So if that was a DMs intended hook to something....

Downtime activity: get personally involved with a charity. When you just drug your own weight in gold coins out of a dungeon, "giving money"sounds cheap.

 

[billd91]

Catching the kid and giving them a sound thrashing would fit in with any aligment.

I submit that, given the scenario that the kid is stealing bread to avoid starvation, this statement is obviously incorrect.

 

[ccs]

Downtime activity: get personally involved with a charity. When you just drug your own weight in gold coins out of a dungeon, "giving money"sounds cheap.

Downtime still doesn't place it within my characters skill sets or interests. Absolutely not in this players interest.
And you can carry quite a bit of wealth around in a relatively small # coin for daily purposes.

 

[Cadence]

LG should be thinking about getting the child back to family (if any) and open contact behind the child / family and a charity. LG now has an open-ended excuse to review the orphanage / charity's operations to insure they really do what they claim - and are not a front for the Thieves Guild or kidnappers or something. Oh and pay the merchant for the stolen food.

Honestly the only reason I would do any of that, beyond pay for the food, would be if I (as the player) suspected that this was something more than a random encounter.
Otherwise I'm going to treat it as flavor/set dressing & proceed onto adventure. Wich auditing an orphanage/charity is not. Doing so is not within my characters interests or skill sets. And it's definitely not within this players interests. So if that was a DMs intended hook to something....

I don't remember if we caught the child stealing or we just found her being harassed by a gang, but, in a Conan setting 3.5 game, our party returned a young girl to her father. On finding the father was preparing to beat the naughty word out of her, something my Neutral character's background would have made her off-the-charts angry about, my character bought the child from the father and essentially adopted her. It gave some extra things to worry about in down-time, and ate up my characters share of the money, when she had to hire quality folks in the next town to watch after the child while they were out. It seemed the better part of valor though since the only alternative my character could think of would have involved brutalizing the father and probably getting the party arrested (which would have been a disaster in that town for our low-level party). A half dozen sessions later and the down time turned into finding appropriate tutors. I certainly didn't have that planned, and I don't think the DM did either, but it fit and worked out.

 

[Oofta]

I submit that, given the scenario that the kid is stealing bread to avoid starvation, this statement is obviously incorrect.

Well, that assumes the kid was starving. In my scenario my PC just saw a kid stealing some food. For all I knew he was some rich kid's spoiled brat who just did it for the hell of it. Even if they were starving if you let them off, they're still going to be starving, still going to be stealing the very next day.

Better to stop the kid and at least try to turn their life around. Or at least stop petty theft if you can't help them. In my particular scenario, I'm sure this was just supposed to be set dressing. In my own campaign things like this have potential for long term campaign impact.