What would you have done?

[John Morrow]

I don't wish to take this thread into discussions on the merits of the death penalty. I recognize that there are very strong opinions on the matter and don't feel this is the correct forum for that conversation. I just wanted other folks views on what happened in a RPG session that I ran a year ago. So no disrepect intended, but I choose to decline to answer that question.

Fair enough, and I don't want to debate the merits of the death penalty here, either (for the record, I'm of mixed mind about it so I can sympathize with both sides). But I do think that how you feel about it may be relevant (even if you don't answer the question). Something for you to think about. Treat it as a rhetorical question if you want.

 

[Ds Da Man]

PC D&D, gotta love it!

Guards attacked me, tried to kill me, and more are going to be coming? Them sukka's are DEAD!

 

[Samothdm]

I'm not sure that it necessarily causes a slip into an Evil alignment, either. If you wanted to rule that repeated expedient killing makes one Evil because it becomes casual and shows a lack of compunction against killing as a first coarse of action, I think I'd agree.

Yep. You'll note in my example that it happened twice, and after the second time, I pulled the player aside and told him that, next time, afterwards, I would note a change of the character's alignment to chaotic evil. Three times would be enough for me to indicate a pattern.

Seems like a lot of my original notes and posts are getting lost or glossed over. I get the impression that some people think that I ruled on shifting this guy's alignment after the first time this happened. It happened twice, and I told him that after the third time (which never came, BTW), his alignment would change to evil.

So long as you come to an agreement before the game, that's fine. But as I've stated in other alignment threads, I think alignment is designed to serve a specific purpose in D&D. It's designed to identify the "teams" and identify the good guys and bad guys. As such, an Evil alignment is like a black hat in an old Western, a Nazi uniform in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or a Stormtrooper helmet in Star Wars. If you've got a player who expects that approach and then toss them an innocent farm hand with a black hat, a reluctant Nazi who really hates Hitler, or a Stormtrooper with a picture of his family tucked in his armor, you are going to have problems. In most action movies as well as plenty of first-person shooters, guards are targets to be killed, not real people. If that's not the case and the players don't know it, one can run into problems.

Yeah, that's the classical view of alignment in D&D but we don't adhere too closely to that definition. Your examples of action movies and first-person shooters are accurate, but the influences of my campaign world do not include those particular references. I gave my players a big list of campaign influences before the game started and so they knew this.

What I'd noticed in another game I played in was the Paladin and her detect evil ability. Everytime we encountered someone, she'd declare "I'm going to detect evil". If the npc/creature/thing/whatever radiated as evil, she would declare, "I'm going to kill it." There was no interacting with these evil NPCs for the rest of us players. The DM got a little frustrated, too, saying that just because someone had an evil alignment did not give her "permission" to kill it.

To avoid this problem in my campaign, I talked about this with my players and explained that people committed actions which determined their alignment. There alignment was going to probably slide a little bit along the ethical and the moral axes from time to time, based on their actions. There would be cases of "good" aligned orcs and evil-aligned creatures that they normally would have considered good. These things were meant to make them think beyond just the normal alignment structure of classic D&D.

If I'd had access to it at the time, I would have used an article that ran in Dragon not that long ago that talked about replacements for detect evil such as detect sin and detect heresy.

I think it makes all the difference in the world. Most RPGs that I've ever seen have a vigilante element to them. That means that the PCs roam around and dispense justice. Whether the bad guys are evil is as relevant as whether the person in an electric chair is guilty of mass murder or not. It's the whole justification for vigilante justice.

I see what you're saying, but my game's a little different and my characters have paid the price before for dispensing vigilante justice.

Remember that most of the people that criminal justice systems execute are helpless, whether they have their hands tied behind their back when they are shot or hung or they are strapped into an electric chair or a hospital gurney at the time they are killed. If their death is a foregone conclusion, then letting them defend themselves is a mere technicality, especially if the PCs are superior (see the example of the elf ranger and the hobgoblins). Letting them plead or beg only makes things more difficult if, again, their death is a foregone conclusion. So I'm not sure why any of that matters, though it might to an individual code of honor.

The PCs in this case were not in an authoritative position to dispense legal justice.

Then why were the characters engaged in vigilante activity?

Your guess is as good as mine. The consequences of all this came up later.

I got my examples crossed. In this case, killing the guards doesn't sound justified. It sounds casual and sounds like they didn't make any attempt to establish whether these guards were particularly bad. That does show a lack of compunction for killing innocents. But I think that example differs substantially from the one that started the thread.

Yes, you're right. I probably shouldn't have derailed the thread this way.

Fair enough. And I agree with that, and I don't think "I'm Chaotic Neutral" necessarily means "I can do whatever I want" in the 3E SRD definition because both Chaotic and Neutral have boundaries.

I definitely don't think that and had made it quite clear before we started that I did not view the alignment that way. There were two players who wanted to use that alignment despite my speechifying about how I would not simply turn away and let CN characters act any way
they chose.

Yes, I think there are relative levels of cruelty, especially if killing is justified or necessary. There are always humane and cruel ways to kill.

Yes, there are. But, I think that being cruel is being cruel. Either you act cruelly or you don't.

I think it would be fair to call the player on having no compunctions against killing the innocent. Again, I got my signals crossed between the examples.

Cool - no problem.

Fair enough. I'm not advocating excuse making or abuse of the CN alignment. But the question remains whether the actions could fall within that alignment, independent of the excuse-making. That's what I'm trying to address. In my assessment, for Neutral to occupy a space between Good and Evil (rather than being a depthless dividing line), it needs to include characters that are "More good than absolute Neutral but still not quite Good" and characters that are "More evil than absolute Neutral but still not quite Evil".

Yes, I agree, but I look at it more in terms of the character's actions. Sometimes the individual character would act "more good than absolute neutral but still not quite Good" and sometimes the character would act "more evil than absolute Neutral but still not quite Evil". In the case of my player, he was continuing a pattern of behavior each time that was becoming indicative of him having a preference for that certain type of behavior, which in this case I found to be "more evil than absolute Neutral".

Looking for a functional interpretation of the SRD definitions, I've drawn my lines at ideological rather than pragmatic behavior. The Neutral character works in a soup kitchen to feed the poor because they will be praised for it (a pragmatic reason). The Good character works at a soup kitchen to feed the poor because they want to help the poor and could care less about praise (an ideological reason). The Neutral character beats up or tortures a villain because it's the only way to get information from them (a pragmatic reason). The Evil character buts up or tortures others because they enjoy inflicting pain (an ideological reason). Because of that, my interpretation of Neutral seems to be a lot wider than a lot of the other interpretations here.

That's a good way of looking at it. I can appreciate those definitions. To fit your definitions, though, the player in my game would have needed a pragmatic reason for his actions. When pressed, he could not provide any.

 

[TimSmith]

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.

Exactly! I can definitely see both sides of the moral argument. On the one hand, in the spider haunt woods situation, what they did (or maybe had to do) was not very heroic/good, but does being "good" mean you have to be suicidal and put everyone at risk in order to give scum another chance? Its not like our own code of civilisation can realistically be applied to a frontier war against baby killers and slavers. Or can it? Perhaps the truly good guys can uphold this goodness despite the situation.

You could argue it either way, but the point is that you must make your expectations clear to the players. They are not mind readers. You didn't even hint they were in the wrong until after the session. If I felt strongly, I would have told the "Good" characters that they felt uncomfortable with the way this was going etc etc and gradually built up the "guidance" until they had definitely got the message. At least then they would know what was "expected."

It sounds to me as though you were more upset that your friends (as opposed to their characters) thought these actions were acceptable and you were disappointed in them as a result. I am sure your mates would not really slaughter prisoners out of hand, but as others have said, this is escapism and not reality, and they are in an action movie world where they do lots of things they couldn't/wouldn't/shouldn't and the baddies are all larger than life.

Its nice to hear that everyone got over the misunderstanding and moved on-this shows even more clearly that it was not an insurmountable difference between you all.

 

[moritheil]

DnD is not such a great system to run actual moral dilemmas in - systems such as In Nomine are much better for that - but this post intrigued me.

What would I have done? The entire matter hinges around the particulars of their alignment.

IIRC, a paladin has a code that says that prisoners should be treated with respect, so a paladin is in definite danger of losing paladinhood.

The line about the American military is totally irrelevant, but I will answer that according to some Vietnam stories, it has in fact been done, so it depends on whether or not you believe those stories.

In one iteration of the DnD alignment system, Neutral Good was an "ends justify the means" deal - any method could be used so long as it clearly served a greater good - so if the player could reasonably say their character thought they were serving a greater good, they are acting in an NG fashion (again, in one iteration of the alignment system, and not in the 3.5 version).

Now, let's get to the particulars.

Alignment violation costing xp - I do not do this for non-clerical, non-priest types who do not derive their power from a divine source. I simply say their alignment changes. And IMC, changing from Neutral to Good is much harder than changing from Good to Neutral.

Violation of ethos - that depends on the patron. In real life, Western society is informed by the Judeochristian concepts of justice and mercy. This, I think, is where you draw your ideas about good from. Prior to the influence of monotheism, many acts that we would now consider savage and barbaric were accepted as parts of daily life - including the torture of captured enemies. In fact, they may well have been mandated as part of law. More to the point, "mercy" and "good" are not necessarily associated in DnD as we as a society tend to associate them in real life. I doubt that a cleric or paladin of Helm from the FR setting is going to be merciful, and indeed many would view it as a dereliction of duty to grant mercy. Paladins in that setting would be grim avengers and disciplined killing machines, not chivalrous knights. (Remember, irredeemable evil is widespread in DnD, whereas people do not consider it widespread in real life.)

At any rate, if characters take the view (and if it is true in your campaign) that all Zhentarim are irredeemably evil, just as fiends are evil, then it is their solemn duty to exterminate them, and as such they have not committed any infraction of their alignment.

If you take the view (and I suspect you do) that the Zhentarim are often morally neutral, only fighting because they were born into a system that they can do nothing about, AND that this completely excuses their evil acts, then killing the mage (who called upon the power of evil, and was dangerous to boot) was not an alignment infraction, but killing the soldiers was unnecessary and therefore a violation of alignment.

I've been running a 3.0 FR game now for just over 3 years (the characters are now 13th level), and a year ago I had a situation that really bothered me and nearly broke up a game group that has been strong for over 8 years. I handled it poorly, and it's water under the bridge now, but I wonder how other GM's would have dealt with it.

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. The party was adventuring in the Spiderhaunt woods going through a heavily modified version of the Sword of the Dales/Randal Morn adventure series. They were camped out in a bog in a ramshackle hunters shack when they were quietly cut off by one of several groups of Zhentarim combat squads sent out to eliminate them. 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.

They began to question them by threatening to torture them if they didn't talk. The Neutral character (a fighter called Gnaut) brandished a wicked looking dagger before them. The mage silenced the two soldiers by invoking the name of the Diety of Tyranny Bane, and Gnaut quickly slit the Mage's throat. He gurgled pitiously and then after a few seconds dropped over and bled to death in the muck. The two soldiers reacted differently. One, a young fellow began to weep silently, the other a grizzled vetran sat up stiff and straight and refused to look at any of the PC's. They turned to the vetran, told him that if he talked they would free him, otherwise he was worm food. They asked him questions about his masters and the number and compliment of the forces sent out to find them. He answered with his name, rank, and the regiment he was attached to but nothing else. Gnaut slit his throat. By this time I was extremely upset, but was holding my tounge.

Next they turned to the young soldier and asked him the same questions. So terrified that he lost control of his digestive system he told them everything he knew. Once they had soaked him for all the info they could, they cut his bonds, gave him a waterskin and a short blade and turned him loose into the Spiderhaunt (essentially consigning him to a slow death).

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. 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.

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.

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.

What would you have done?

 

[moritheil]

Yup. They fell asleep. For all of, what, less than 10 minutes?

Sleep is 1 min/level.

So, leave the guards just snoozing, and what's going to happen? They're going to wake up before you're done.

And can you honestly take the time to tie them up (if, given 3e's rules for rope use, you can tie them up effectively at all...).

"They will wake up in 10 minutes" is honestly one of the worst justifications for the slitting of throats that I have ever heard.

In most action movies as well as plenty of first-person shooters, guards are targets to be killed, not real people. If that's not the case and the players don't know it, one can run into problems.

Most people who would be identified as "evil" in real life (the most prevalent example being Hitler) were real people as well. Hitler, history records, often closed the curtains when his train rolled past concentration camps and the like, because he worried that he would be unable to stomach the sight.

I'm not sure that one can say that merely being homo sapiens makes someone undeserving of death no matter what they do. And if you agree that "real people" can be evil and that merely belonging to a species does not excuse evil, then you agree that "real people" can be targets to be killed as well.

 

[Storm Raven]

OK, as to the first sentence, are you talking about the characters, or the players?

The characters and the players should be ashamed in this situation. The characters, because they behaved in an evil fashion, and the players because, despite playing characters who are supposed to be "good" (and probably cheerfully claimed any benefits that accrue with that decision) they had their characters behave in an evil fashion, and then had the gall to get angry with the DM when he pointed that out, and get huffy about it. Killing prisoners isn't even a really gray area, it is pretty much a textbook case of "evil".

If you mean 'their characters should be ashamed of their actions', then I agree. At least some might be. They choose expediency over morality in a life or death situation. Some people can live that. Some can't, and it haunts them for rest of their lives. Either way, its terrific grist for roleplaying mill.

However, no matter how you cut it, what they did falls into the 'evil' category with respect to the morality implanted in D&D. Hence, they arenot playing 'good' characters, and those characters should have their alignments shifted.

As for the rest of it... how are players in the wrong for playing their characters in the manner in which they see fit? So they choose to do an evil thing. So what? Its not as if they decided to wreck the campaing out of idle spite. They faced a moral test, intentionally thrown their way, and choose a reasonable, though non-good course of action.

And then tried to argue that their evil actions actually weren't. If they has responded "yeah, what our characters did was evil, but we didn't think we had a choice", that's one thing. Responding with venom and anger when they were called on their actions is a problem.

What's the point of a DM engineering moral tests if he or she isn't willing to proceed from either/any possible choice.

There are right choices and wrong choices in every situation, sometimes the right choice is not the expedient one. If all choices were equally valid, then you would never have moral dilemmas, since the most expedient choice would always be the best one to make. Sometimes the "good" choice is difficult to adhere to, but that's the nature of "good".

 

[diaglo]

convert the alignment of the PCs to evil.

they ain't good.

 

[Goblyns Hoard]

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).

Wow - serendipity or what!
Sorry I'll explain

Last night on BBC2 there was a program called "We Have Ways of Making You Talk". It was quite disturbing but very interesting. A documentary on the history of the use of torture by various organisations since the Algerian struggle for independence. It included interviews with French military in Algeria, British police/intelligence services in Northern Ireland, Chinese/Russian/Korean counterintelligence/propaganda in North Korea, US military and CIA in Vietnam and Iraq, Argentinian Police, South African death squads, and Israel's Shin Bet. If it comes to a service near you I highly recommend it. There was also coverage of tests run by Yale to see how easily someone would undertake torture if ordered to do so (an experiment in administering what they thought were electric shocks to another volunteer) and the rapidly halted experiments in politics of power (TV show on guards and prisoners) that took place in the US.*

*Interesting point - a similar experiment in the UK a couple of years back had disturbingly similar results in terms of power abuse and mental breakdown and was also halted prematurely

The conclusion of EVERY ONE of the torturers that worked for a regime that has not yet been discredited (i.e. the French, British, American and Israeli) was that torture was JUSTIFIABLE and SMART and should not be apologized for. They justified it in terms of the need for information to save their own lives, those of their military/intelligence comrades and those of other innocents that they were protecting (French, British, South Vietnamese, Israeli citizens). Many of the torturers from other regimes found it harder to justify because they have since come to the conclusion that they were supporting a regime or practice that could not be justified, and so the torture could not be justified.

In other words as long as you're fighting for what is right and good then the ends justify the means (my summary of the arguments presented... still not sure whether or not I actually agree)

The Vietnam VET interviewed said that this was rife THROUGHOUT Vietnam (not commenting on the actions of your buddy - just what the vet said on the show - and given he was admitting to horrific actions on his own part, both physical and mental, it didn't sound like he was trying to evade the truth). He said that when he was the new guy in country he was shocked when his CO started prodding a suspected VC's still open wounds with his pen in order to get him to talk, but that as no one else protested neither did he. He went on from merely witnessing to being actively involved, and eventually developing his own techniques for breaking prisoners. And to this day he still considers himself a 'good guy' who was doing 'the right thing' in order to shorten the war and ultimately save lives.

As an aside the program also concluded that any regime that has made widespread use of torture in the past has gone on to either collapse or to realise that it only fosters more problems by converting more of your victims against you, convincing them that you are truly evil... OK venturing too far into the politics going to stop there.

The really interesting aspect was how easy it was for an innocent individual to be convinced of the need to inflict what he thought was a dangerous, and potentially lethal electric shock to another volunteer - just by telling him that he was devoid of all responsibility and that Yale was responsible. When asked about it afterwards the guy's justification for doing it was scarily similar to the "I was just following orders" argument that failed to convince in the Nurnburg trials.

The overall conclusion I have is that whilst clearly unpleasant this is the type of thing that most people will find a way to justify - scarily close to all of us would resort to this (particularly according to the guy that was the subject of the Yale experiments). If you're running a morally grey area game then that is the type of thing that will come up.

If your characters were Exalted in any way then yes they should lose that status, but those that aren't I wouldn't have punished. The aspiring Paladin should find his quest that much harder now, but should only need to atone if he was going to continue the quest to become a Paladin.

I don't think I would have docked the xp... I like to think I would have just taken note of the actions and considered it in light of further actions. Of course if this behaviour became something they began to use regularly or look forward to then it's a very different matter, and alignment changes should need to be considered. And in game the fact should have got back to the Zhents - making them that much more interested in the PCs. And of course if they were ever captured by the Zhents then the treatment should have NO difference, and those that don't talk are rolling up new PCs (maybe even those that do... these are the Zhents afterall). It would also have been fitting for rumours of these actions to eventually make it back to the PCs allies... giving them real concern about the actions of the party and whether or not they can continue to associate with them (particularly if they are of Exalted status).

On the moral compass of D&D there is real good and real evil - and that (IMO) is not the case in the real world (oh dear venturing near religion now as well ). So in the D&D world there should be those that will never undertake this sort of thing - the Exalted. Then there are those that are fighting the good fight but are willing to be ruthless to save innocent lives - that's what your PCs did. It doesn't stop them from being good or fighting the good fight - it means they've forever cut themselves off from being Exalted. If you're running a Superman type game then your decision was the right one... if you're running Batman (and it sounds to me like you were) then the good guys are that bit less shining white, and their actions will reflect that.


Edit - A couple of posters have said that torture was not involved - I disagree completely. That young soldier was tortured in being forced to watch his comrades being butchered and knowing that he was next. Torture is NOT just physical

 

[diaglo]

[edited: Diaglo, please don't post politically. -Pielorinho]

Look above this one.