Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 2145727" data-attributes="member: 3400">Interestingly, and this experiment is covered often in methodology classes, the Milgram shock experiment is notorious for being both interesting and unethical by current standards. The 1960s Milgram experiment found out that people were stunningly willing to inflict pain if they were told they weren't responsible. The poor guy they thought they were shocking was just a recording so nobody was really hurt, but the study is considered unethical by today's standards because the true test subjects, the volunteers pulling the switches, didn't know they were test subjects.  Anyway, back on the direct topic...I guess I wonder what you expected back then (or would expect if you presented a similar situation again)? Did you expect them to actually take and keep prisoners in enemy territory? It may not be good to butch anyone you capture, but let's remember that good isn't stupid. If the stakes are high for failure, as it sounds like they were, there are greater goods that must be upheld (like the survival of the gnome village) to the point where individual lives and consciences have to be set aside. It may not be very idealistic, but it's closer to reality. While there may be dispute about whether regular soldiers would truly act in this fashion (some say yes, some say no, I suppose it partly depends on your reading of history and how it meshes with romanticism/cynicism about the military), I think you can't really consider a group of adventurers in enemy territory as being much like regular soldiers. They nature of their organization, training, and mission would be far more like commandos, who often cannot afford the luxury of taking prisoners unless directly supported by a way to transport them without jeopardizing the mission.While it's all fine and good to expect the highly moral PCs to uphold that morality when they can, I think you have to keep their ultimate goals in mind. One dirty little secret of life (and any campaign that has shades of grey or moral questions) is that the ends really do justify the means. It's just that good and moral people are very picky about which ends are important enough to jusify wallowing in dubious means.Does saving the gnome village (that was the main goal right? This thread got pretty detailed and I hope I'm not mixing posts in my brain) justify not making prisoners out of 3 Zhent agents because of the risks of doing so? If so, just tell them their consciences twinge a bit and bring it up in future sessions about feeling bad and periodically dwelling on it until they do something to personally atone, and move on.That's what I would have done. And as a player, had you harangued me about killing the prisoners, I would have said, yes, it wasn't good, but doing so wasn't the wrong thing to do under the circumstances and with the current stakes. Sometimes good may not have the luxury to be as good as it wants to be.The crux of much of this is testing moral questions and not getting the response you expect. By putting up moral dilemas, you should make sure that you aren't setting the players up to fail before your own moral standards. You may not like what you see if you and your players don't see eye to eye on some justifications.</blockquote>

Verification