What would you have done?

[kigmatzomat]

As it stands, I agree to disagree with you that they didn't perform gratuitous violence, the killed the Vet because he refused to give intelligence on his fellows. That was unnecessary, and morally reprehensible.

Yup, we're disagreeing. Just to explain why I didn't feel it was gratuitous, since your campaign does not allow Detect Evil to work on non-supernaturals, aiding the evil Zhentish regime despite being under duress is essentially swearing allegiance. At that point he goes from "possibly unwilling minion of evil" to "loyal and active servant of evil."

As such, executing him is at worst a neutral act. (He's not an innocent but they aren't willing to make any personal sacrifices.) If you consider the fact that he could have earned his freedom by lying to the party, they might be willing to make a limited sacrifice since he could hook up with a unit that was nearby and get them killed.

BTW: I did not mean to insult you in any fashion. I've got a half-dozen friends on necesary mind-altering medications and if anyone drifts too far out of my definition of "rational" it cues the "are you taking your meds?" sequence. There have been times in my life that after the fact I wished someone had said to me "You're not acting normal. You should get some kind of help."

 

[Rel]

"Evil deserves whatever it gets"?

So good guys can do whatever they want to evil foes and remain good? How about not just kill or execute but torture?

Evil deserves whatever it gets my foot. Evil should be stopped. What anybody deserves is a separate question.

Saying executing evil is still on the good side of a moral line is different from saying anything goes against evil.

I meant what I said. You'll note that I didn't say you had to run your games that way.

I don't always run games where the characters are out to do Good. Sometimes they're just in it for the pursuit of the characters personal agendas.

But saving innocent lives, be it an individual, a family, a village, a kingdom or the world is serious business. Whatever gets the job done is fine by me.

Interestingly, even with this lax interpretation of alignment, I can scarcely recall an incident of torture ever cropping up in our games. I think there have been occasional threats and there have certainly been an execution or three and a memorable branding. But virtually nothing in the way of torture.

If a player began to have his character torture the bad guys for important information on a regular basis, I'd ask whether it was all "just for the common good" or whether the PC was starting to take any sense of satisfaction or pleasure in the suffering of these evil doers. If the answer was yes then I'd likely slide their alignment toward Evil.

 

[Mallus]

The short answer is that moral delimma's are just more interesting than hack and slash backed by high handed morality. However as self proclaimed hero's I do expect them to play the part... and the rewards for it have been rich.

See that's where we differ (and perhaps that's why I had trouble understanding where you were coming from). I expect my players to become involved in the world I present (and I hope to do a good job presenting it). I expect them to make characters, but not neccessarily to like them, or approve of their actions .

When I do present moral dilemmas, I stay neutral. I never establish 'what the DM thinks is right'. I'm not interested in 'teaching' the players a value system. I give them morally-charged situations and watch what they do. I think its fascinating to watch good players flesh out their own characters moral codes.

Characters act, and my NPC's react. Without any pronoucements from 'on high'.

edit: not that I'm criticizing.

 

[twofalls]

BTW: I did not mean to insult you in any fashion. I've got a half-dozen friends on necesary mind-altering medications and if anyone drifts too far out of my definition of "rational" it cues the "are you taking your meds?" sequence. There have been times in my life that after the fact I wished someone had said to me "You're not acting normal. You should get some kind of help."

Okay, I can see that. Thank you for the explanation. And I do understand your position, I just don't stand side by side with you on it.

 

[twofalls]

See that's where we differ (and perhaps that's why I had trouble understanding where you were coming from).

Agreed.

I expect my players to become involved in the world I present (and I hope to do a good job presenting it). I expect them to make characters, but not neccessarily to like them, or approve of their actions .

I think most any decent GM wants players to become involved... otherwise you are just orating a story to them aren't you? I don't like Gnaut at all (the character played by best friend Marco, who did the butchering in the swamp). I think he's a self interested mercenary bastard, but he is an interesting fellow none the less, and more importantly Marco likes him because he is so different than himself.

When I do present moral dilemmas, I stay neutral. I never establish 'what the DM thinks is right'. I'm not interested in 'teaching' the players a value system. I give them morally-charged situations and watch what they do. I think its fascinating to watch good players flesh out their own characters moral codes.

I do to a degree. I've told the players and will tell anyone else I GM for, I have no interest in running an evil group of PC's. They want to play scum, find a new GM. I can read stories about scum by opening up CNN's web page any time of the day. I run stories about Hero's, doing the right things in difficult situations. I don't demand every player play a Paladin (otherwise Gnaut wouldn't be in the game), but I expect them to play Hero's or find a different game.

Characters act, and my NPC's react. Without any pronoucements from 'on high'.

I think you are going a bit far on this one, but if thats how you see what happened then OK. I've admitted several times that my reaction was overboard as well as atypical, but somehow my printing that seems to not ever be read in this post.

edit: not that I'm criticizing.

Well, you kind of are really, but you aren't being rude about it.

 

[Runesong42]

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".

As I recall, that was the way to play CN in the older ediions of DnD. To be fair, the second half of your statement "Who cares? I can do what I want." pretty much summarizes CN in the 3rd edition.

As a Chaotic, he is free to act outside whatever laws are set forth by the governemt/country/king, relying instead on his internal moral compass and what he feels is the right action for the situation at hand.

Being Neutral with respects to Good and Evil, he is just as likely to kill a prisoner outright as he is to release him. Circumstances would dictate how he would act, based again on his interpretation of the situation. How his actions are viewed by other people are irrelevant to him.

They (CN) 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.

An alternative, yes, but let's not forget that the CN character doesn't have to use local laws in his rationale for dealing with the prisoners. As far as he was concerned (and I'm guessing here), they were evil soldiers serving an evil society, and to allow them to continue to do so wouldn't be in his or the party's best interest.

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.

And what's wrong with that? If the chatacter had killed them without putting them to sleep, does that make the situation any more or less evil? More honorable, sure. But so what? He's Chaotic Neutral. Asleep or awake, they're enemies, and putting them to sleep makes eliminating his foes that much easier and is more efficient.

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.

To be fair, I would consider the character a bloodthirsty killer, and a drift to evil wouldn't be unreasonable. But do consider his other actions in the game against his killing his enemies. A grim, merciless opponent only to his enemies doesn't make him a ruthless psychopath that should be locked up to protect society.

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.

And that's a great way to handle alignment. I haven't used alignment in DnD in about a decade, and when 3rd edition came out, I decided to use alignment only for weapons and spells that affect specifically evil opponents (for things such as holy weapons etc). 'Evil', to me, is beter respresented by demons and other horrors rather than people... that is to say, being 'evil' is more a supernatural condition rather than a statement of morality. Some people could still be 'evil' (tainted by their foul deeds) but not necessarily as a direct result of their lack of morality.

 

[John Morrow]

I do to a degree. I've told the players and will tell anyone else I GM for, I have no interest in running an evil group of PC's. They want to play scum, find a new GM. I can read stories about scum by opening up CNN's web page any time of the day. I run stories about Hero's, doing the right things in difficult situations. I don't demand every player play a Paladin (otherwise Gnaut wouldn't be in the game), but I expect them to play Hero's or find a different game.

For whatever it's worth, I feel much the same way. I'm not all that interested in running a party of villains (nor do I want to run a PC in such a group) and a GM isn't obliged to run scenarios for characters they don't enjoy running.

That said, I tend to draw my line for "heroes" at what I call "action movie movality". That means that I'm willing to run and play Neutral heroes (so long as they don't get too sloppy with the lives of innocents) and I'm willing to give them some flexibility when it comes to dealing with the bad guys and their minions. So while I might not have considered what happened in your game a hero's finest hour, it wouldn't have bothered me all that much because the heroes in action movies do that sort of thing all the time. I'm more concerned with how they deal with innocents and bystanders (e.g., the example of not stopping a rape would have bothered me).

Out of curiosity, do you have the same sort of gut response to, say, James Bond killing innocent Russian police officers in Goldeneye (I keep using that example because it did bother me) or the George Clooney character in The Peacemaker executing several bad guys with a gun while they were trapped in a wrecked car (that scene didn't bother me but I was amazed at how blunt it was)? And, no, I'm not calling all protagonists heroes (e.g., the protagonists in Pulp Fiction are not what I'd call heroes, though Butch might qualify).

What makes such a person a "hero" and not a bad guy? The bad guys are all about hurting innocents while the good guys are fighting to protect them from the bad guys. The good guys do have compassion, even if it's limited to innocent folks and they have none for the bad guys. And I think that distinction makes all the difference in the world. Of course I'm not personally a moral relativist and YMMV.

 

[twofalls]

I think my objection moved through a series of emotions, from initial suprise and disbelief, to outrage when they defended it the way they did, to disgust as I dwelt upon it afterwards. I've gamed with these guys in some cases for decades, and they are my close personal friends. When I was told that they would have personally done the same thing if they were in the same exact situation (which is actually abusurd since they haven't ever, nor will they likely ever be in that same situation) it became personal to me and thats where folks started getting offended. I took it too far and remembered that it was just a game when one of my best freinds told me that folks were getting ready to walk from the table over it.

 

[jmichels]

Very interesting thread. I read to this point but I'm still not quite sure what would have been the right thing to do in your eyes. It seems you backed the players into a corner where they had no other choice but to go the execute route. It seems like a no-right answer situation for them to me.

I think it may have been tying them up in the shack and leaving them there. But, I'm not sure. That would have made them a helpless if some Ettercap wandered by and slowly ate them bit by bit. Or if their friends didn't find them they get to die of hunger/thirst instead. Either way they would probably suffer much more then if their throats were slit.

If the party executed them more humanely (choked them to death, or stabbed them in the heart) would you have reacted differently? I think mental image of your friends (they said they would do it in real life if in the same situation IIRC) slitting the throat of a career military man (in the army of Evil though) was too much for you to take.

Releasing them would have arguably been worse. If the party left them unarmed they had a pretty good chance (15% survival rate) of dying in the forest. So that meant getting stuck in a web and slowly exsanguinaded by some terrible spider. Or getting lost and then starving to death.

I would rule that letting the mage go would be a worse offense then executing him. Every gnome slowly cooked by his magic or tortured for fun is on the heads of the PCs. I guess they could have blinded the mage or cut out his tongue or something but that is surely worse then a quick death.

The party could have marched them back to the authorities. That meant putting the gnomes into direct danger and possibly getting Randal Morn killed. So this meant that *many* innocents would have died for 3 evil men. I don't think their lord (or the dead gnomes) would have made that trade. Too bad they were too low level to teleport or the PCs didn't have a portable hole.

Finally, they could have tied them up and took them with along with the party. This makes it so that they will try to escape and cause mayhem at the first opportunity. This would have endangered the mission and possibly got alot of gnomes killed. I think the PCs need to buy a portable hole (and you need to rule that air enters the thing when folded) if you are going to let other NPCs surrender to them in the future.

About the only thing I could think of to do if I was in the clerics position is humanely execute the mage (who seems evil and unredeemable) and ask questions of his dead body. Then cast a Zone of Truth and asked each soldier if they would attack them if they were let go with their full equipment. If they lie they die. If they tell the truth then let them go and at least give them a better then 15% chance of saving their lives.

The problem with this course of action though is that if they are alive they will probably kill innocents again (they were evil right?) These innocent deaths would be a direct result of your inability to carry out a field execution. My PC would have a hard time dealing with the fact that I potentially let a murderer go free and allowed him to murder again.

As a DM you would almost have to have the escaped men thank the PCs after they changed their lives (or die in the forest.) If you had the NPCs escape and then tell the Zhents where the party was so they can go right after the gnome village (knowing the PCs are out traipsing in the forest) the PCs would know that they indirectly caused the extermination of an entire people. They would be even more upset at being put into a box like this.

 

[twofalls]

You have a good argument, though the facts are a little mixed. The Zhents cared nothing for the Gnomes. The Undead Sorceress who ruled (in very loose terms) the Spiderhaunt Forest was slowly exterminating them. The Gnomes were a side thread to the Randal Morn adventure, though in truth, they are long term more important to the PC's than Randal Morn ever was. They don't know this yet though, so Shhhh! The Zhents wanted the Sword of the Dales which the PC's carried on them (and still do incidentally), and to a lesser degree they wanted to execute these troublemaker PCs who had caused them so many headaches in other situations. The Sword of the Dales was the prime Zhent goal however.

The Zhents weren't even aware that Randal Morn was a captive of the Sorceress or they would be going after her as well to make sure of Morn's death.

Delay was the risk to the Gnome village. It was under seige by Giant Spiders and Ettercaps who had been slowly over centuries mind poisoned against all intelligent inhabitants of the woods. The PC's were afraid of two things, if they took the captives back to the village either the place would fall to the onslaught (the villlage was tottering on the brink), or Randal Morn (the bait the Sorceress was using to lure the PC's to her ruined tower in their dreams) would be killed before they arrived to rescue him. Neither would have happened, but they didn't know this.

Regardless, slaying the Vet was wrong IMO, and since I have to judge these things in my game that was my ruling. Where I went wrong was when I personalized it.

Edit: However I can't discount the many points you and the other posters here on this thread have brought up. It's been a lot of food for thought over the past couple of days.