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Message: <blockquote data-quote="malcolypse" data-source="post: 5822000" data-attributes="member: 92042">2 hours sleep + 2 pots of coffee + my opinions and experience =Fair warning: In this post, I veer off topic, incorporate my love of all things Mel Brooks, plot to make my players cry, and hopefully get across that I agree with Elf Witch and Broken Druid for the most part on this subject.Long story short: To get the players to really sink their teeth in, you have to address their personal ethical standing. Long, possibly incoherent, rambling story longer: I'm about to start a Classic Deadlands game. I don't know about medieval ethics coming into play, but in the setting, both the north and the south freed the slaves within the last decade (terrible, extra-dimensional monsters have kept the civil war going through 1776 through covert manipulation), and I plan on seeing how my players react to the newly emancipated slaves (I expect hilarity to ensue the first time they come across a black sheriff and I can start quoting Mel Brooks movies).Alas, none of my players will be playing female characters (who are much more empowered in a world with the male population depleted by a great deal due to ongoing war, but still don't have the right to vote, for example), or I'd dig into that as well. One of the characters is a proper southern gentleman, so I can't wait to see how he reacts to a gunfight with a woman. I'm planning on reminding him that his upbringing demands a "ladies first" mentality that may get him dead.I enjoy pushing my players buttons, and plan on doing so. I personally am very hard to offend, and if I'm made uncomfortable by a game I just dig into my character more. If I do manage to offend a player, I'll back off for their sake, but I won't edit myself because of the possibility of offending someone. If I'm presenting a grim, offensive thing to my players and they're not grimly offended, then I'm not doing my job. They shouldn't want to fight monsters for their loot, they should want to fight evil in all it's forms because it's terrible and needs to be destroyed for the good of humanity. Their morality is a tool that I can use to explore the gamut of emotions with them, to corner them like rodents, or to have them rise above their preconceived limitations.That requires that as a GM I use the players personal ethics to affect their character, and that they as players try to let their character's ethics trump their own. Essentially both sides of the screen should be working at the same thing from opposite directions, and if it works immersion magic happens (hopefully).</blockquote>

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