What would you have done?

[John Morrow]

I run a game that addresses moral issues, and the overall story arc is about the evils of the Zhentarim and their slave trade/evil practices.

Sounds somewhat similar to the game that I'm running. That's why I spent a lot of time detailing alignment, steering one player away from an alignment, and why I give the players nuanced information about the alignment auras of the bad guys.

After a long bloody fight the PC's prevail and take three captives. One was a Zhent mage, and two were Zhentarim soldiers. All were tied up with rope and forced to their knees in the muck. Keep in mind, all the PC's are of various "good" aligments save one who is true neutral. ALL the PC's had taken grevious wounds in the fighting and were tired, dirty, and in pain... and very angry.

Were all of the bad guys Evil? If so, then what does being Evil mean in your setting? Are people who are Evil redeemable to not? Are they really Evil or just a little naughty? Or is it just a label for which side they are on? Have you carefully read and interpreted the alignment descriptions in the PHB or SRD?

I don't see any alignment violation for the neutral character here. Whether it was an alignment violation for the Good character will depend on a great many things, which you have not defined here. Were these bad guys "innocent"? Where they Evil? Could they be redeemed? Were those Evil soldiers mass murderers or just misguided souls who never really hurt anyone innocent?

I think you need to remember that role-playing games are often a vigilante fantasy. And while it is against International Law for American soldiers to do things like this, it's against International Law for soldiers to do all sorts of things that Good PCs regularly do in role-playing games, from invading sovereign countries and disguising themselves to spy to mercy killings and assassinations.

Not only are a lot of those rules heavy and not fun but soldiers do have a lot of trouble follwing them in practice. In Iraq, American soldiers have been brought up on charges for a mercy killing of a horribly wounded Iraqi, mistakenly shooting innocents at checkpoints, shooting a enemy lying on the ground because the soldier thought he was a threat, and treatening to shoot an enemy leader in the head to gain important intelligence. Yeah, real soldiers who do want to be the good guys take those exact same short cuts when they are under stress. And in the real world, soldiers have been issued rules and been (in theory) given training to tell them exactly what they can and can't do. Have you trained your players in their acceptable rules of engagment for your world?

The next time you watch Saving Private Ryan, notice the scene where the American's shoot the Germans coming coming out of the bunker with their hands up. Fiction? Yes, but based on things that really happened. Guess what American soldiers did to some of the SS they found running concentration camps or to the Japanese soldiers on some of the islands who, when cut off from supplies, resorted to eating captured American pilots for food. Think they got a trial?

Unless your Evil slave-trading villains are only weakly Evil in the sense that they kick a few dogs and steal a few lollipops from babies, what are the Good guys in your campaign supposed to do with them? Turn them over to a UN Warn Crimes Tribunal? String them into a chain gang and have them follow along until they find some authorities who can hold and try them? I think that's what you really need to tell your players. What are Good players supposed to do?

In many ways, I think your players are simply following adventure movie morality. In adventure movies, the bad guys and anyone who works for them is Evil and fair game. In some sloppy cases, anyone who stands in the way of the hero is fair game. In Goldeneye, James Bond doesn't mind gunning down some Russian police officers trying to stop him from escaping a police station (they were just doing their job). He threatens and tortures bad guys for information, too. In Total Recall, the hero doesn't think twice about using the body of a shot innocent as a human shield to keep from getting shot. Nobody worried about the illegal activities of the good guys in Preditor or Tears of the Sun. Nobody cries over the Nazis that Indiana Jones kills or the fact that Indiana Jones didn't warn them that they were all about to die in the end of Raiders. And only George Lucas cares that Han Solo shot Greedo before Greedo had a chance to shoot first.

In the real world, all of those things are "barbaric", it not criminal. Yet, they are the stuff of adventure movies and their heroes, especially when you have a grey and morally vague setting and story.

Please note that I'm not advocating this sort of behavior in the real world. But a fantasy game is not the real world and dealing with these issues in the real world is very complex and prone to errors. As such, I don't think that most role-playing game players, unless they are trained in the rules of warfare or things like hostage negotiation and interrogation, are qualified to role-play through those scenarios. They don't know what to do and don't know how to handle these situations and I don't think you should expect them to know. Do you even know what they should do? And as such, they fall back on what they see in vigilante action movies, which would often be illegal if practiced in the real world.

I was beside myself as a GM, I couldn't believe that my party of "Heroes", all friends of mine who are 30 - 35 in age would behave in such a barbaric manner when claiming to play good characters. I let them have it, but good. I ended the game session, told them that I thought their behavior was cowardly and reprehensible and asked for an explanation.

What did you expect them to do? Have you told them?

I was told that even American soldiers would do such if in the same situation (in enemy territory, hunted, and in need of intelligence). We have a two campaign US war vet in our game group, but he was absent that day to refute these claims (which he did do later in absolute disgust). Everyone went home and I fumed over it for some time.

American soldiers have done such things in those situations. In fact, an officer in Iraq got in a great deal of trouble for putting a gun to the head of an Iraqi to get him to talk. He got the information he wanted and some Americans applause his action while others condemn it. While I agree things would be very different if he had actually shot some Iraqis in the process, real Iraqi insurgents don't have an alignment, don't worship dark gods, and a complex infrastructure exists to capture, hold, and try them. And don't think that this is new to Iraq.

I wrote an email to the group explaining that every good character in the game was in alignment violation, and that I was only going to award 1/4 xp for the fight they had worked so hard at during that session. The neutral character didn't have a history of such behavior so I wasn't going to doc him xp unless it became habitual. I wasn't going to force alignment changes over just one incident, but the priest and the aspiring Paladin (wasn't a Paladin yet) needed to atone for their actions.

Why was it an alignment violation for the Neutral character at all? Unless he was torturing them out of cruelty for pleasure, he showed a suitable compunction against casual killing, gave them a way out, and even lived up to his promises to let the bad guy go. The alignment doesn't say that a Neutral character can't even kill an innocent person. So long as they have some conpunctions against it and aren't doing it out of cruelty or pleasure, I think that falls squarely into Neutral. Remember, Neutral isn't Good, after all. And are you trying to argue that these people were "innocent" or not?

I was later told that my reaction to the situation had offended my friends on a personal level, and that several of them had thought about leaving the game group entirely after my email went out. I did really let me fury and disapointment show in that email (I took it too seriously... but I suppose I do that with my games as I invest a lot into them). After hearing this, I realized that no game was worth pissing off my friends and wrote an apology and dropped the whole affair. Since then they have been very careful in dealing with enemies that surrender on a battlefield and their treatment of captives.

Remember, learning how to properly deal with POWs and hostages is something that people are specially trained to do in the real world to get it right. If it came naturally, they wouldn't train people for it and there wouldn't be so many mistakes. The reality is that most people don't play role-playing games to confront the pressure and complexity of the real world, never mind the complexities of real world hostage negotiations and interrogations. Many people role-play for excapism. Being a real soldier or police officer isn't an escape. Those are highly stressful jobs where people can and do make horrible mistakes and where people break down and quite from the stress. Is that what your players are signing up for?

What would you have done?

I think you really need to clarify what the alignments mean for you, your setting, and your players and detail what you expect Good and Neutral characters to do in hostage and interrogation situations to not violate their alignment.

 

[Samothdm]

I don't see why you were so upset with the CN character. The CN is a "Free Spirit", free to act as he pleases in any given moral situation. Heck, just for fun, I'll quote the SRD on Chaotic Neutral:

"Chaotic neutral is the best alignment you can be because it represents true freedom from both society’s restrictions and a do-gooder’s zeal."

And that's why I don't like the Chaotic Neutral alignment as written. IME, people use the CN alignment as an excuse to basically have their characters just act like crazy psychopaths, and then defend their actions by saying, "Who cares? I'm chaotic neutral. I can do what I want."

Chaotic aside, for a second, consider this character's neutral viewpoint on the good-versus-evil axis (quoted from the SRD):

People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others.

They have compunctions against killing the innocent. Now, granted, guards aren't innocent babies. But, in this instance, they were magically put to sleep and presented no clear danger to the party. Tying them up and gagging them to deliver to the authorities (the character were in an urban city-based adventure) was an extremely viable alternative.

I can see instances where slitting the guards' throats would have been the only choice. In this case it wasn't. The fact that the character did it in a later session, creating a pattern, is what caused me to warn him that his character was drifting toward evil (defined below, per the SRD):

“Evil” implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient.

The character's actions, to me, indicated that he was "killing without qualms" because "doing so [was] convenient."

Nothing from a moral standpoint would prevent him from murdering the guards in their sleep, especially if they were enemies.

I disagree. Again, there are instances where this would be perhaps a necessary, and even acceptable, course of action. Doing it just because there are no consequences (meaning that his character wasn't afraid he would get hurt because the guards were asleep and therefore couldn't attack him) was definitely not a "good" act, but wasn't even, in my mind, a "neutrall" act. It showed a pattern of killing that did not seem consistent with the "Whee! I'm a free spirit!" type of Chaotic Neutral character, but rather the systematic killing of any opponents that the sorcerer character magically put to sleep.

These posts are examples of why I stopped using alignment altogether. While i find that they provide a decent concept of how I'd like to play a charater, I never would bind a player to an alignment just because the book says so. Like I said in an earlier post, even the most moral and just character will kill when he must.

I didn't bind his character at all. I simply pointed out that, by my understanding of the alignment system as written, his character was developing a pattern of going out of his way to kill any enemies the party encountered, even after said enemies had been effectively neutralized. In my way of thinking, such actions were making his character cross the line and drift from chaotic neutral to chaotic evil. I told him what I thought, and let him know the consequences of his continued actions. In the end, rather than deciding to play the character as he wanted and accept my ruling of an alignment change to chaotic evil, he decided to give up the character altogether and start a new one with a different moral outlook.

Basically, the way I see it, a character's actions dictate their alignment, not the other way around. When I see inconsistencies between what someone tells me their alignment is and their actions, I point out said inconsistencies and try to come to some sort of resolution with the player.

 

[John Morrow]

I agree with the individual that said that the alignments tend to get in the way. Besides, who decides?

The rules? They have a fairly explicit definition of Good and Evil in the PHB and SRD. It's not perfect but it's reasonably clear. And if you really want to know, have the players take this, in character:

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/20001222b

At one time we said the USSR is evil! Guess what! They believed the USA was evil! Generalizations I realize, but good enough for this discussion.

Personally, I think that generalization disputes your point, or do your believe that there really was moral equivalency there? The Soviet Union murdered more of its own citizens than than Hitler did. Some estimates put the number as high as 61 million (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM). That's about 20% of the current population of the United States, by the way. Of course Pol Pot got about a third of his population. I'm sure he called the United States Evil, too. To paraphrase Monty Python, "Look at the bones!"

Just like history is written by the victor, who was right and who was wrong is written by the victor as well.

All the victor gets to do is spin history. The future gets to decide who was right and wrong and their assessment often isn't nearly as fickle as a lot of people seem to think it is. Even though the United States won the Cold War, there are plenty of people who still question the morality of things that it did during that period.

 

[Chimera]

Ah yes.

"We can mow down guys by the hundreds as long as there is at least an illusion that they're armed and resisting. This is not evil. But if they surrender or are powerless against us, then it's evil.

So once the bad guys surrender, we're screwed. Because we're "good" and have to treat them so, even at the risk of our own personal safety."

Um, yeah. That works. Been there, done that, been kicked out of a group because I killed the evil and murderous necromancer (with my bow) rather than free her (as the rest of the group expected to do), so that she could not gather up her remaining minions to come after us (as she swore to do). The other players said I was a bad person and didn't want to play with me anymore. ("You killed her in cold blood!")


Noting as others have that only the threat of torture was used, not actual torture. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in simply killing the prisoners, they gave the lie to their threat of torture.

I do a question here. If the player had simply said "I kill him and move on to the next prisoner", would it have bothered you as much? Or was it the imagery of the throat cutting that got to you?


The bottom line is as others have pointed out - that you can't translate our modern morals and ethics into D&D very well or you'd never be able to play the game. Adventuring ("Running off to stir up trouble, commit armed robbery and kill other sentient beings") would never be acceptable to anyone NOT evil.

 

[Bladesong]

As I said. See my first paragraph.

 

[John Morrow]

They have compunctions against killing the innocent.

Please note that the word is "compunction", not prohibition. As written, Neutral characters can kill innocent people if it's necessary or perhaps even expedient. They only need to show "compunctions" against it. And remember, that's "innocents". The definition does not say that they have to show any compunctions against killing those who are not innocent, does it?

Now, granted, guards aren't innocent babies.

Were they Evil or not? What does it mean if they are Evil? Were these NPCs "innocent" in the sense that they were harmless and free of wrongdoing? Should they simply have been let go? What kind of punishment would they have faced?

But, in this instance, they were magically put to sleep and presented no clear danger to the party. Tying them up and gagging them to deliver to the authorities (the character were in an urban city-based adventure) was an extremely viable alternative.

That still doesn't change whether they were "innocent" or not. Did the players know that they were expected to do this? What were the authorities going to do about it?

The character's actions, to me, indicated that he was "killing without qualms" because "doing so [was] convenient."

If they were killing without qualms, they would have killed the first NPC simply as an example and would have slain the last one, even after he talked. I think that a big part of the problem here may be whether the players felt that their actions were necessary or not. You clearly didn't. If they didn't, then you have a point. If they did, then I don't think that you do.

Doing it just because there are no consequences (meaning that his character wasn't afraid he would get hurt because the guards were asleep and therefore couldn't attack him) was definitely not a "good" act, but wasn't even, in my mind, a "neutrall" act. It showed a pattern of killing that did not seem consistent with the "Whee! I'm a free spirit!" type of Chaotic Neutral character, but rather the systematic killing of any opponents that the sorcerer character magically put to sleep.

Did he kill all of the NPCs without giving them an out? Did he kill all of the NPCs? Was he particularly cruel? Did he get pleasure out of killing them? Does he go out of his way to kill? Remember that Neutral isn't Good. It's Neutral. In one sense, it straddles the line between Good and Evil. In this case, he may have leaned toward the Evil side but did he really cross over the line? I think you need to figure that out and let the players know.

I didn't bind his character at all. I simply pointed out that, by my understanding of the alignment system as written, his character was developing a pattern of going out of his way to kill any enemies the party encountered, even after said enemies had been effectively neutralized.

Are the NPCs he killed Evil by alignment? What does that mean to you? What does that mean to the player?

Basically, the way I see it, a character's actions dictate their alignment, not the other way around. When I see inconsistencies between what someone tells me their alignment is and their actions, I point out said inconsistencies and try to come to some sort of resolution with the player.

I do that as well, too. But I spent a considerable amount of time before I started my campaign explaining the parameters of the alignments to my players and built a cosmology to support it that's simply not our cosmology, thus avoiding the whole Geneva Convention problem. What happens to characters when they are killed in your game? What are the civilized rules of warfare?

 

[John Morrow]

As I said. See my first paragraph.

Then you should have quite while you were ahead.

 

[John Morrow]

"We can mow down guys by the hundreds as long as there is at least an illusion that they're armed and resisting. This is not evil. But if they surrender or are powerless against us, then it's evil.

And I think it's important to remember that we have trials and rules of war because we can't always tell who is good and bad at first glance. D&D has an alighment system, which allows us to peer into a person's soul to seperate the good from the bad. Similarly, the availability of detect and truth spells would produce a very different sort of justice system than we are used to. "You are charged with doing X. Did you do X? Failure to answer under the influence of a truth detection spell is admission of guilt." Think breathalyzer tests and drunk driving.

So once the bad guys surrender, we're screwed. Because we're "good" and have to treat them so, even at the risk of our own personal safety."

Just put them in Arkham Asylum. I'm sure they'll make sure they don't escape this time...

The bottom line is as others have pointed out - that you can't translate our modern morals and ethics into D&D very well or you'd never be able to play the game. Adventuring ("Running off to stir up trouble, commit armed robbery and kill other sentient beings") would never be acceptable to anyone NOT evil.

I think it works fine with modern morals and ethics so long as define the alignments appropriately and remember the cultural context is not contemporary Western civilization. Remember, "adventuring" is considered just fine and heroic when it's insurgents fighting against an Evil government like many of the partisans during WW2. If your D&D setting is as orderly and peaceful as the United Staes, Europe, or Japan and doesn't need adventurers then I think something is very wrong or misguided going on there.

 

[FreeTheSlaves]

I wouldn't have done anything as a DM, unless the behaviour was contrary to the campaign theme.

We sit down and discuss how the adventure is going to play out morality/theme-wise and that sets the tone. I'm running a CN to NE campaign within a pseudo christian kingdom with realistic consequences; while the other DM runs a hard-bitten wild west campaign with us as under-dog, square jawed, good guys & enforcing "the law" is up to us. So long as we players run things to the agreed theme, I've got no issues.

With bloody killings, I describe enough to paint the inhumanity but not enough to wallow. I've found that sort of approach discourages flippancy.

 

[Bladesong]

Did you just say "quite"? See, that is the beauty of it. I am always ahead. My opinion is always better than yours. Everyone feels the same (although the "touchie-feelie" people will say "I never said my opinion was better").

The only important rule ever made for this game is (not an exact quote) use what you want, ignore what you don't. It is supposed to be fun. If you HAVE to have detailed rules, make sure everyone wants to play with the same set, and make sure they understand them. Any time it gets personal it stops becoming a game, and definitely stops being fun. If that becomes the truth, take up "old maid" or whatever floats your boat. Some of you seem way too serious to be fun anyway (of course I admit I have never seen any of you in action). Anyway fun is fun, anger is not.