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<blockquote data-quote="jgsugden" data-source="post: 1253023" data-attributes="member: 2629"><p>Fine. But realize that you are using <strong>house rules</strong> to do so. The game is written with few 'shades of grey'. It is written with as much black and white as possible.</p><p></p><p>As for 'shades of grey' helping to attain some level of internal logical consistency, if carried to an extreme, you end up with the same problems that haunt many young authors that try to avoid the 'black and white' that most successful authors use: Everything that the protagonists do is ethically questionable and the players/readers never get a sense of satisfaction from doing/reading questionable triumphs. I've seen quite a few games derailed when players left a session depressed because they killed the orc chief and all his warriors, but were forced to either slaughter the orc women and children or leave the widows and orphans to be picked off by neighboring monsters. Fantasy settings where things are balck and white instead of 'shades of grey' often fall into easier logic than real world situations where there is no single right answer and a variety of answers that are different degrees of wrong.</p><p></p><p>Many DMs really enjoy giving their PCs 'real world' shades of grey in the campaign. In my experience (24 years of pretty solid role playing with dozens of different groups), this often is far more enjoyable for the DM than the players. Players enjoy the sense of satisfaction from besting a truly vile foe. They feel less happy when their heroic character is forced to battle to the death with a champion that is only trying to protect his tribe from people with conflicting goals. This is not true of all players, but even those that profess that they enjoy the moral quandries have shown themselves to really enjoy kicking the butt of a great evil.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="jgsugden, post: 1253023, member: 2629"] Fine. But realize that you are using [B]house rules[/B] to do so. The game is written with few 'shades of grey'. It is written with as much black and white as possible. As for 'shades of grey' helping to attain some level of internal logical consistency, if carried to an extreme, you end up with the same problems that haunt many young authors that try to avoid the 'black and white' that most successful authors use: Everything that the protagonists do is ethically questionable and the players/readers never get a sense of satisfaction from doing/reading questionable triumphs. I've seen quite a few games derailed when players left a session depressed because they killed the orc chief and all his warriors, but were forced to either slaughter the orc women and children or leave the widows and orphans to be picked off by neighboring monsters. Fantasy settings where things are balck and white instead of 'shades of grey' often fall into easier logic than real world situations where there is no single right answer and a variety of answers that are different degrees of wrong. Many DMs really enjoy giving their PCs 'real world' shades of grey in the campaign. In my experience (24 years of pretty solid role playing with dozens of different groups), this often is far more enjoyable for the DM than the players. Players enjoy the sense of satisfaction from besting a truly vile foe. They feel less happy when their heroic character is forced to battle to the death with a champion that is only trying to protect his tribe from people with conflicting goals. This is not true of all players, but even those that profess that they enjoy the moral quandries have shown themselves to really enjoy kicking the butt of a great evil. [/QUOTE]
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