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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8323083" data-attributes="member: 42582">In <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/real-players-fantasy-worlds.680984/" target="_blank">another recent thread</a> sparked by some of these same issues, I posted that I think that aesthetics don't always track morality.When it comes to RPGing, and especially FRPGing, like you I am influenced by sword-and-sorcery and Arthurian/romantic fantasy. (I have no personal experience with combat.)Sword-and-sorcery gives us (i) a lot of consensual violence - brigands, pirates, reavers etc who live and die by the sword - and (ii) a very low threshold for defensive violence. Whatever the truth of these as real moral positions, they are coherent enough (in my view) to be incorporated into FRPGing in a way that allows our heroes to come across as tolerably heroic rather than murderous thugs.Arthurian romance also gives us consensual violence (jousts, and some chivalric warfare). It tends to frame defensive violence in more stark terms - the evildoers act in such a way that violence is the only answer (see eg the Battle of the Pelennor Fields). A third type of permissible violence that arises in the context of Arthurian-type romance is just retributive violence (this is a factor justifying the assault of Aragorn and Gandalf's forces against Mordor in the concluding scenes of Book 5 of LotR). Again, whatever one's views about punishment and retribution in reality, I think this can be incorporated into FRPGing in a reasonably coherent way.I think a long range archer sniper is somewhat dubious, although if s/he only starts shooting once the battle is on that seems less egregious. And to make a typical FRPG game work, we have to make some allowance for archer PCs.But whereas there is a plausible argument, within the broadly S&S or romantic/Arthurian framework, that a soldier who goes to battle has more-or-less consented to being shot at, the same doesn't go to striking without warning from secrecy. That doesn't rule out all ambushes - some are probably legitimate defensive violence, and if the place is known to be one where ambushes are likely (eg a disputed mountain pass) then there is at least a type of implicit consent. But assassination, sorcery delivered via long distance curses, etc all seems to me to fall on the dubious side of the line.I've got no views about hypothetically good Mindflayers. To me it seems to live in the same space as vampires in some contemporary fiction who drink cow blood or rely on blood drives or whatever. If others want to explore those possibilities of course they can go to town, but it's not something I'm going to default to in my own FRPGing.(If the players, via their PCs, redeemed a vampire or Mindflayer that would be a different thing but no doubt they would have ideas about how to cross the diet bridge and so the problem wouldn't be mine to solve purely by hypothesis.)As far as devils and typical vampires and mindflayers are concerned, I think the violence used against them is generally justifiable as defensive and/or retributive.I don't play very often. In FRPGing, my default PC is a knight of a religious order (so a cleric or paladin in D&D). But on the weekend a friend and I started <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/burning-wheel-actual-play.680804/" target="_blank">a new Burning Wheel campaign with a PC each and mutual GMing</a>.My PC is a JRRT-style Dark Elf - I think the Tolkienesque way that BW handles Elves, Dwarves and Orcs is pretty amazing. My PC Aedhros does not intend to confine himself to morally permissible violence as I've described earlier in this post: when he and Alicia (my friend's PC) were robbing an innkeeper, I (as Aedhros) was ready to stab the innkeeper with my black-metal long knife Heart-seeker. But my friend, wearing his GMing hat, insisted that I make a Steel check to commit cold-blooded murder, and I failed and hence hesitated. This gave him, in his capacity as Alicia, time to cast a Persuasion spell and thereby persuade me not to kill the innkeeper.I mention this as an example of the variety of moral textures that I think are possible in FRPGing.</blockquote>

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