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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 243194" data-attributes="member: 4720">A planned murder is not more evil than an unplanned murder.  That's the difference between lawful and chaotic, not good and evil.Killing someone in combat is COMPLETELY different than killing a tied up prisoner who irritated you.  CdG on a combatant you managed to knock out and who, if allowed to awaken, would pose a continuing threat is an entirely different matter than a greedy little mage tied to a chair who's just trying to weasel his way out of punishment.In the Old West, a marshall killing a wanted man was one thing.  Killing someone who lied to him and put him in danger was something else entirely.  There's a big difference between being given license to hunt down Billy the Kid and killing someone because you don't like their haircut.  That aside, just because law was played fast and loose in the Old West, doesn't mean it was that way previously.The samurai doesn't even apply.  The person on the receiving end sees it as a blessing, and the moral code of the society sees it as good.I also wasn't aware that killing someone who doesn't want to die isn't cruel.  I'm not exactly a bleeding heart.  I'm in favor of the death penalty, among other things, but killing someone who's committed murder is very different from killing someone who lied to you.Medieval settings for fantasy games are all based on heroic literature.  Why this insistence on Old West moral relativism?  In the literature, good is good, evil is evil, and neutral characters carried the tack if they showed up at all.  In the real medieval world, evil to the class below you was ignored, but you needed to be good when it came to other nobility.  But do we really want to play a D&D game where it's a good act to "selflessly" give some of your serfs to your neighbor to be cannon fodder in his border dispute?  And where whipping those serfs who try to flee is not considered evil?  But actually injuring a captured nobleman is evil, even if he's a nasty, brutish warlord?  If we're asking for that level of "realism" we better forego dragons, magic rings, and elves while we're at it.</blockquote>

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