What would you have done?

[Pielorinho]

It was an evil act, in a dark and gritty world. It was mostly shocking to the audience of the show because it was not something that good guys are supposed to do.

Really? When I saw it, I shouted, "YEAH!"

I wouldn't do it in real life, but then, I live a different real life in a different setting from Mal. I thought it was great what he did, and I wholeheartedly applauded it.

Different takes on what we like in our fantasy, I guess.

Daniel

 

[gizmo33]

I like everything else about what you propose, gizmo33, but not that last word there. I think that having an alignment system than can be used against your players when they violate it but then not telling them what the boundaries are is just dirty pool. And I'll take it one step further:

Colaborate with your players when you make up that list. Get their perspectives and have a definition of the various alignments that is consistant within the group. THEN the players can assign alignments to their characacters and have no justification for crying foul when you enforce the guidelines they themselves helped to create.

To be clear - I tried to say that sharing the LIST with the players was optional, but informing the players as to whether or not their character's actions were of a certain alignment was best (and perhaps I understate this) done BEFORE the players are the victims of their action - in most cases (see below).

I made the list optional because I could conceive of an example, in a certain campaign world, where a Paladin PC allows a shadow to pass over his food and suddenly loses his ability to cast spells. He goes to the temple of his God of Light and:

Paladin: "God of Light, why hast thou forsaken me"
God of Light: "Didn't you read the law against letting shadows touch your food. That law is clearly spelled out in the Lost Book of the Light God"
Paladin: "God of Light, such a book is indeed lost to us, and so I had no knowledge of your law"
God of Light: "Ok, go into the Dungeon of Doom, recover the book, and teach it's contents to your bretheren. Do this and I will restore your powers."

So my point is - you need not share all of the details of your campaign "morality" with the players. Just be polite in not calling the PLAYER an evil scumbag when his character does something that's evil in your world. IMO it's not the DMs business to be telling other PEOPLE that they're evil - just their CHARACTERS.

You can get your players advice on alignment, or get their advice on how many vorpal blades exist in your campaign world for that matter. I don't care that much, but I don't recommend it. I would suggest that you instead distinguish your opinion about what is good/evil/etc. in your campaign from what those terms mean in the real world. So when you call someone's character evil, tell them that you're not making a statement, nor do you care, about the PLAYER's capacity to judge good and evil.

 

[Mr. Kaze]

DM was wrong to dock XP for behavior.

Anybody claiming to be Lawful in this case is lying. Anybody claiming to be good in this case is just having a bad day -- people are still evil, shackled or not, so killing them whether they're expecting it or not is of the same moral grain.

I've seen two somewhat similar situations, once as a player, once as a DM.

1) As a player, we went against a (I think) Derro compound where they threw *everything* at us. Thier sorcerors cast all of their spells and then immediately said "We Surrender!" To a PC with Sense Motive, that was simply a matter of "We're out of ammo!" and isn't a particularly compelling reason to show mercy. The DM then taught our party's lead fighter (military guy, amusingly enough) a lesson about mercy when he went chasing an enemy fighter through the compound -- he encountered women and children. He's not sure how to react to this... until the women doused him with boiling water from cooking pots. Net result: To the PCs, enemy combatants are always enemy combatants unless/until they can be locked up by people who can afford to lock them up. Generally, the difference between life and death is a 6-second full round action.

2) As a DM in a "nobody's particularly good" campaign, the party leader got a prisoner and tortured him to death. Now killing a prisoner is dodgy (hence this thread), but torturing him to death made me squeamish. In the next session, the leader's patron mazoku (minor deity -- he had 4 worshippers and they were the PCs ) shows up and scares off a dragon the PCs were getting buffed up to fight, gives them a ride in a wagon back to town and reminds the leader that a primary point of his dogma is "Never do for yourself what other people will happily do for you" -- in other words, torturing people to death makes them incapable of being tricked into doing anything useful and is therefore not theologically sound. No other reprimand given. The leader asked "Have I done something wrong, sir?" and the mazoku replied, "I don't know; should I go back and check?" They were disappointed by the dragon getting away, but they seemed to otherwise appreciate how the line was drawn without ex-post facto rulings or metagame expectations.

How this applies here:
1) Cleric was still casting spells and was therefore still an active combatant. Finishing him off is less reprehensible than killing somebody under the effects of Hold Person that has no recourse at all.

2) Veteran was a troublemaker and behaving like a combatant. If he were freed, he'd probably hold a grudge. PCs know better than to let enemy combatants hold grudges. His execution was unfortunate, but expedient. Be glad that they didn't actually torture him.

3) Last guy was successfully intimidated and released, knowing that he probably couldn't go back to active duty after having given them the information that they wanted. Realistically, he should be quite thankful that the party asked the veteran first -- if he hadn't been intimidated into submission by the veteran's death, then they'd probably both have been executed.

::Kaze (notes that the party he was DMing had a troll in it... and why are trolls evil besides being further up the food chain than the folks that wrote the Monster Manual, hrm?)

 

[John Morrow]

It was an evil act, in a dark and gritty world. It was mostly shocking to the audience of the show because it was not something that good guys are supposed to do.

Do you think that's how most of the people watching it interpreted it?

 

[John Morrow]

No. And if this sort of thing is typical of the series then I might have to buy the DVD.

Buy the DVDs. I doubt you'll regret it. In fact, the whole series plays with the idea of what's right, what's wrong, and what it means to be a hero.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Paladin: "God of Light, why hast thou forsaken me"
God of Light: "Didn't you read the law against letting shadows touch your food. That law is clearly spelled out in the Lost Book of the Light God"
Paladin: "God of Light, such a book is indeed lost to us, and so I had no knowledge of your law"
God of Light: "Ok, go into the Dungeon of Doom, recover the book, and teach it's contents to your bretheren. Do this and I will restore your powers."

"Stupid God of Light, what a jerk. You should have told him to go find his own damn book."
"Dude, he's the God of Light! You tell him that."

Your conception of morality sounds suspiciously like it follows the rules of Calvinball.

 

[gizmo33]

"Stupid God of Light, what a jerk. You should have told him to go find his own damn book."
"Dude, he's the God of Light! You tell him that."

Your conception of morality sounds suspiciously like it follows the rules of Calvinball.

This sounds like every gaming session I DM - replace "God of Light" with "king", "fairy godmother" or "adventure pimp" at your option.

Player: Stupid adventure pimp. You should have told him to find his own damn artifact.
Adventure Pimp: Ladies, don't make me use Bigby's Hand on you. Get in your party order, get in the dungeon, and get the job done!

I don't know who this god Calvinball is that you're talking about, but I have to assume that he is Chaotic Evil.

 

[TimSmith]

If the characters had been evil, and they had decided not to kill the prisoners (lack of interest, perhaps), would you have changed their Evil alignments to Neutral as well? How does one questionable act shatter your alignment enough to change the way that metaphysics itself (ie. your susceptibility to spells) changes with respect to you? We are to understand, then, that the world is predominantly populated by Neutrals, since one non-good (and/or non-evil) act shatters that house of cards known as Good Alignment?

A paladin, I can understand. They've taken vows, and they toe a hard line. But there was no paladin, only a paladin-wannabe. He hasn't taken vows, and isn't in a position to fall.

But, as they say, alignment is not a stick with which to beat your players. It's descriptive, not prescriptive. Which means, if the character consistently behaves in a manner suitable for a specific alignment, and that alignment isn't what's on the sheet, an alignment change is probably in order. If the character every now an again tends toward neutrality, well, maybe he's not as intently Good as Bob the Paladin, but he's still more or less good. Alignment isn't a binary (trinary? nonary?) condition. It's a description of a general tendency to act.

I really don't understand the whole "oh, you did one bad thing, now you're Neutral" attitude. As much as I am fond of the alignment system, it's one of the things I'm always being frustrated by in various gaming groups. If someone's playing Chaotic Good, you can expect them to bleed into Neutral Good and Chaotic Neutral a bit, probably represented by acts such as these, where some specific circumstance causes them to compromise or temporarily forget their principles because something important is happening.

The funny thing is, you don't see this attitude for Law and Chaos. I've never heard a DM say "oh, your Chaotic character decides to work with the local government to protect the farmers from trolls? I'm afraid that's a lawful act, so I'm going to have to rule that your character is Neutral now." It's a double-standard, and it makes no sense.

Good characters are at the mercy of the DM's interpretation of their alignment, but no other characters are. If the DM and the player disagree on what constitutes maintaining a good alignment, it will cause trouble, but no other alignments cause that problem. This kind of behaviour, that is, punishing the players for having characters that aren't two-dimensional, discourages them from playing Good characters. Might as well play Neutral, because they're going to end up that way anyway as soon if they're forced to step out of line just once by an irresolvable moral dilemma.

Good points all. I suppose we all think of "good" as the ideal to aspire to, so it is harder to maintain, but as you say, the same standards in reverse should apply to evil, and probably some sort of equally demanding neutral requirements.

Your mention of Law vs Chaos also gets me thinking- are the player characters in the original example actually acting CHAOTICALLY rather than EVILLY? The prisoners are evil and therefore deserving of execution (for the sake of this argument) but the characters are not a properly constituted court, nor are they the lawful representatives of Mourngrym Lord of Shadowdale, empowered to dispense his justice. Who are they to decide if the prisoners are deserving of death? Perhaps to a GOOD character it doesn't matter who kills them (passing the buck to someone else doesn't alter the fact that they will/should die so its hypocritical to do so). But to a LAWFUL character it DOES matter as the law should be done and be seen to be done....Perhaps a lawful character would naturally demand a contract of employment/rules of engagement/letter of marque from Mourngrym before he would undertake a mission (just so that there's no mistake in his rights and responsibilities and he has "proper authority" for what he does).

 

[Storm Raven]

Really? When I saw it, I shouted, "YEAH!"

I wouldn't do it in real life, but then, I live a different real life in a different setting from Mal. I thought it was great what he did, and I wholeheartedly applauded it.

But it was only unusual and exciting because according to the normal genre conventions, he wouldn't have done it. In an episode of Star Trek, or in a classic western, or some other similar show, the "good guy" would never have kicked a guy into certain death just to intimidate someone. That's what makes the scene memorable, because it runs counter to what "good guys" are expected to do.

 

[Storm Raven]

Do you think that's how most of the people watching it interpreted it?

Did they interpret it as "evil" or "good" in the D&D sense? Probably not, because most people watching probably have never opened a D&D bopok in their lives. But in a strict D&D defined sense, what he did was evil.

Now, do I think most people were surprised by the outcome because it violated genre conventions of what "good guys" do? Sure. That's the whole point of the scene. If kicking a captive into a jet engine didn't violate genre conventions, then it wouldn't have been a memorable scene. It would have been a routine scene.