D&D General What are your reasons for doing something because "It's what my character would do"?

[DammitVictor]

The whole point of a D&D world or a similar setting is that the monopoly of violence has broken down and private individuals are allowed to kill and steal with impunity or even the approval of authorities.

I am an American, sir. For us, that is the point of the first Tuesday in every November.

And your  fantasy in this scenario is to deliberately antagonize the only people in the world willing to protect you from all the others? I used to think that D&D characters having minimum INT and WIS scores of 6 was for the benefit of munchkins... now, I realize it's for the sake of realism so that the standard D&D party is composed of people who'd survive their first foray into a dungenon with a standard D&D party.

I feel like I owe Monte Cook an apology and I will never forgive you for that.

 

[AlViking]

The whole point of a D&D world or a similar setting is that the monopoly of violence has broken down and private individuals are allowed to kill and steal with impunity or even the approval of authorities.

That may be true in your D&D campaigns, it's not true in every D&D campaign. My campaign world is more violent than the modern world, but in most cases the real world was far more violent throughout history until quite recently. Still doesn't mean the characters can be murder-hoboes.

 

[GothmogIV]

ah, nice bait-and-switch

Thanks!

 

[Thomas Shey]

That may be true in your D&D campaigns, it's not true in every D&D campaign. My campaign world is more violent than the modern world, but in most cases the real world was far more violent throughout history until quite recently. Still doesn't mean the characters can be murder-hoboes.

I'd say it tends to be the case in D&D settings that there's more tolerance for situational violence than their is in our world--and less assumed governmental monopoly on violence. Which, as you say, was true of a lot of our own world throughout a lot of history once you got away from very heavily regulated areas. We're kind of biased by the assumptions carried in a lot of places in, honestly, just the last century and a half or thereabouts (and even there selectively geographically).

 

[AlViking]

I'd say it tends to be the case in D&D settings that there's more tolerance for situational violence than their is in our world--and less assumed governmental monopoly on violence. Which, as you say, was true of a lot of our own world throughout a lot of history once you got away from very heavily regulated areas. We're kind of biased by the assumptions carried in a lot of places in, honestly, just the last century and a half or thereabouts (and even there selectively geographically).

In our modern day "civilized" world we make a lot of assumptions about thing like ... prisons which for the most part are a pretty recent invention, or basing convictions on evidence. I don't want to run a game for murder-hoboes but at the same time I accept that my campaigns are set in a violent world.