Making D&D morality less repulsive.

[MGuy]

Most crimes aren't on a "he deserves to die for this" level. Police may be trained to apprehend a suspect but soldiers are taught to kill.

[Chamomile]

Most crimes aren't on a "he deserves to die for this" level. Police may be trained to apprehend a suspect but soldiers are taught to kill.

In my opinion, that's a difference in the danger level of the environment, not how much the other guy deserves it. Opposing soldiers in the modern day are usually just guys with the bad luck to have been drafted by the other side, so most wouldn't say they deserve death. But the soldiers on our own side couldn't possibly win the war and defend our own innocents from the invading evil dictatorship if they tried to spare every enemy soldier, so they don't have much choice but to kill. Note that I am intentionally using a very black and white scenario where the invaders are led by Stalin and Hitler's lovechild and the defenders are paragons of goodness and light, for the sake of simplicity. I am aware that real wars are never this clear cut.

[PoliteNewb]

Nobody deserves to be killed. At best it's a regrettable necessity.

If you truly believe this, you and I have nothing to discuss. I find your belief absurd.

I also don't know why you play a game where your character normally walks around with a variety of death-dealing hardware and has spells like "kill everyone in a 10' radius" and "electrocute people".

[Psychic Robot]

I also don't know why you play a game where your character normally walks around with a variety of death-dealing hardware and has spells like "kill everyone in a 10' radius" and "electrocute people".

probably because it's a game you idiot

[Lago PARANOIA]

Pure and absolute bullshit.
Killing enemies in war or self-defense is not sociopathic. Thousands and/or millions of perfectly normal people do it all the time, in the real world, and they are (for the most part) able to re-integrate into peaceful society.

Well, first of all your latter claim is completely laughable. People develop PTSD in the real world just from being involved in one killing incident.

Second of all, killing enemies in war or self-defense is sociopathic and unjustified if you had an alternative means. That's because YOU HAVE ALTERNATIVE MEANS. Joe Blow Policeman may really have no choice other than to shoot armed bank robbers because he's a regular ass guy with no superpowers. He cannot blast the guns out of their hands. He cannot reflect bullets off of walls to make a tricky disabling shot against. He cannot casually walk forward in the middle of gunfire and hit them all with his taser. So him being exceptionally unlucky and being involved in ten bank robberies over the course of his career and racking up 20 fatalities is unfortunate and any sane police force would probably retire him well before that point. But it's very likely that all of his kills were clean or at least in the grey area.

Superman or even Spider-Man racking up that high of a kill count is extremely suspicious because they can take on all of those criminals nonfatally without risking injury to themselves or others. Them sneaking in a kill or three is immoral. Now low-level superheroes (like D&D characters) may not have alternative means. Low-level mortals are surprisingly fragile and in a world as shitty as D&D even a normally nonfatal injury will worsen into death. When heroes start being able to do things like fly under their own power or beat an anvil into the shape of a statue with their own fists it starts to become questionable.

Further, claiming that D&D "punishes" not defaulting to violence and lacks alternative solutions are entirely DM-dependent. I'm sorry you've had shitty DMs your whole life, Lago.

Yeah, because, you know it's not like 4E D&D heavily pushes a paradigm where a character is mostly composed of combat superpowers. It's not like D&D's diplomacy system is so fucked that, for example, in 3E it makes convincing hostile critters not to attack basically impossible OR doesn't make convincing evil kings much harder than ghouls. It's not like D&D doesn't punish you for getting around encounters by not giving you phat lewt. I know there's some blathering about sneaking by a sneaking minotaur should give you as much XP as killing it, but this seriously does not work in practice--read a damn module, they assume that you'll be fighting most if not all of them.

What are you talking about? If you only kill rotten sacks of crap, YES, you are definitely better than the rotten sacks of crap who kill women and kids. I didn't even realize this was seriously going to be debated. Are you seriously positing that 1 murder of a mafia hitman is as bad as 100 murders of schoolkids? Because that is some fucked-up moral equivalency you have going there.

That's really cold comfort. Sure, I shot surrendering barbarians in the back of the head after I found out they razed an innocent village to the ground, but I didn't kill women and children! At that point you're just getting into 'which is worse, rapist or a purely physical torturer' territory and even if you could find an answer to that the 'winner' damn sure shouldn't feel proud of themself.

Yes. Yes it does. If you save the lives of thousands, and all you had to do was kill a bunch of completely evil things (in some cases evil because they devour the living without mercy, and in some cases evil because they are literally MADE of evil, the evil they do notwithstanding), you are a good guy. You are a great guy, and they should throw you a parade.

No, shut the fuck up, it doesn't make you a good guy. It makes you a better person than someone who did nothing with their lives but it sure as hell doesn't excuse whatever other evil things you did. Doing good does not make you good. You're falling into the exact same trap that Iron Age comics and D&D did by making good and evil transitive. They're orthogonal at best and the latter overwhelms it. The Punisher doesn't get a ticker-tape parade just because he stopped a demon invasion. He might get one to encourage other heroics, he might get one as catharsis for the rest of the city, he might get one to appease his later wrath, he might even just get one as a naked reward in hopes of reforming him but he doesn't get one because he's 'good'. No one really doubts that he's still a bastard who will kill a dozen suspected drug dealers the next day if he gets the chance.

Yeah, the people who watch Friday the 13th movies are pretty fucked up. And the ones who watch "Saving Private Ryan". And "Indiana Jones". And just about any action movie ever.
So you're claiming that millions of Americans (and people worldwide...hell, look at what the Japanese enjoy) are profoundly fucked up, because they enjoy entertainment which portrays killing? Often in much more blatant and graphic ways than D&D ever will?

No, far from it. Seeing and enjoying violence is a sadly natural but (in of itself) harmless activity. Where it gets into creepy territory is when people try to justify it in any other way than 'boy, that backflip that ninja did before slicing the guy in two was really exciting'. Now the fact of the matter is that genuinely evil people are more likely to be the targets of violence, justified or not, since they're more likely to be in an environment where it happens or they're initiating it in the first place. And of course giving the protagonists a moral or at least understandable goal makes the carnage more sensible. It sidesteps questions as to why they just don't bail out or why they got involved in the first place.

But that's really not necessary at all. Even if there's no other reason than 'the protagonist just loves killing people' that's a-okay. It's when the story (D&D) or audience (WH40K) goes out of their way to lionize the protagonist or demonize the opposition because they just can't accept the violence for what it is. Because of the above caveat you can have a black-and-white killfest without it being morally skeevy, but oftentimes it's just not there. And instead of people just going 'eh but killing is fun!' they have to do things like invent all-evil civilizations or go out of their way to tie the heroes' hands. THAT'S the squicky part.

And the moral equivalency rears it's ugly head yet again. Apparently Lago thinks that because bastards try to justify their crimes, anyone who attempts any justification ever is automatically a bastard. Everyone is suspect, always. There are no heroes. Except the Justice League.

Of course not. Fucking OF COURSE not. The point was not to pooh-pooh justification, the point is not to just take justifications at face value. Because those justifications can if you're not careful be used to manipulate an audience into getting undeserved sympathy.

Honestly, most or all of the people on this board cannot live up to that code of heroism. Rescue people from peril at risk to yourself, keep the peace, provide protection to those who cannot protect themselves, and be willing to kill people who need killing and refrain from violence against others.

Because, you know, it's not like there's literally millions of people in the U.S. Alone devoted to rescue work, national defense, or law enforcement and if you want to narrow it down to 'people who are very likely to get shot' it's still in the hundreds of thousands; we are not exactly hurting for this kind of hero. And it's also not like someone can't fulfill every one of these duties and still be a bastard.

You're trying to pulled that old hackneyed 'they risk our lives every day for you' crap, but frankly it's just not that special. Hate to break it to you, but look past the propaganda and it simply isn't. A tour guide leading wagon trains from Missouri to California in the 1830s does most of that and does it at a historically greater risk than a SWAT Team member--even discounting lethality rates back then--that in of itself doesn't make him a hero.

If you really want to point to a hero, you need to go above and beyond, otherwise it's just diluting the term to the point of triteness. Calling this guy a hero while also calling Joe Blow Beat Cop a hero is an insult to Mr. Thompson. So yes:

You apparently just have extremely high standards.

That is correct. What do you think was the point of all of those superpowers and micromanagement of my character's background and destiny? I loved Police Quest and I actually found the dryness really immersive, but if my character in that game had Spider-Powers I'd be downright insulted by the premise and potential accomplishments of that game.

They do. Some people oppose the death penalty, but it's usually because they are pacifists, or because they have doubts about the guilt of the people being sentenced to death.

I am neither a pacifist nor would I necessarily support the death penalty even if the person's guilt was totally in doubt. This is a gross mischaracterization of the anti-death penalty movement.

All of the options you list are either pie-in-the-sky bullshit or high-level magic. And if you want to use them, no one's stopping you, and the DM will even give you XP for defeating the enemies. Why are your balls hurting?

Ha ha, funny, implying emasculation because I don't support your position. Stay classy, PN.

But anyway D&D crosses that threshold of superheroics/high magics pretty damn quickly. You're about on the level of Spider-Man a fourth or a third of the way through the game. And while you have fewer options than he does (the place you're at might not even have a jail w/in 50 km, for instance) you still have enough that you should be able to do something with it.

It will. Your desertion example seriously makes me laugh. Hell, why don't we try it in the real world? Let all those poor misunderstood murderers out on the street, give them a fair shake.

That's funny, because that's what happens in the real world. The amount of Nazis and Japanese Imperialists prosecuted after World War II was actually very small, despite the fact that you could probably find more hundreds of thousands of them, maybe even millions, of them that did some combination of stealing/raping/burning/killing. In peacetime that would probably be deserving of death if you accepted the above premises, which I don't, so why didn't we do it? Could it have been that doing so would've only created more suffering since you would have created a ton of soldiers with nothing left to lose? Moreover, how come these countries became so well behaved after de-Nazification? You'd think that having hundreds of thousands of known murderers get off scot free would've completely torn the society apart when they got back home, but nope.

In peacetime we're a lot harsher to criminals because the impetus for criminality is a lot weaker. If someone in a rich nation with plenty of accesses to resources and peace kills someone they probably either did it out of insanity or, for the lack of a better world, evil. It also doesn't destablize society to persecute such people since the amount of deviants are rather small.

First, who says killing is all you do? Maybe on your off-days, you build homes for war orphans.

Which is commendable, but doesn't excuse that other murderous hobo stuff you do.

Second...haven't there been huge long discussions on why 'changing the world' really isn't practical?
The D&D world is no shittier than the real world. Despite your efforts to portray it as horrible, none of the D&D books I read go into detail about the starvation, privation, and general horribleness that is everywhere. Usually I hear about fat happy peasants who spend most of their time quaffing ale in the tavern after a hard days work. The standard plot involves some horrible threat to their generally semi-idyllic life.

Errrr... what? I mean, seriously, what?

This really belongs in another thread, but seriously, the D&D world really is that shitty. Even if it's at its very best the landscape implies a Medieval Europe pastiche which is widely regarded as one of the worst eras to live in in history for reasons which are well known and for which D&D doesn't even try to counter. And just because the setting tries to push the image of a fat idyllic peasant doesn't mean that the image will or should hold up to scrutiny. If D&D wholesale rips off a shitty political and economic system and attempts to make no adjustments to it then saying that the shitty stuff doesn't happen is just denialism and bad writing.

Secondly, D&D has problems layered on top of that. Self-spawning undead, race wars lasting hundreds of years, dead-serious death cults with access to demons, angry dragons the size of castles, actual gods of plague who love plague, arrogant wizards who demand to be worshipped as God-Emperors, etc.. While Ninter Vale is not my cup of tea because it's done out of laziness, the idea of a world reduced to a few bastions of civilization as points of light is the closest any setting has come to making sense except for maybe Dark Sun. But that's another story. The point is that as much as you really, really want to believe that D&D is actually 'not that bad of a place' so you can justify your killing sprees just doesn't hold any water.

Because FATAL is about rape, racism, misogyny, slave-owning, and so on. D&D isn't. You can (and most people do) play D&D without being racist or misogynist, without owning (or even seeing) a single slave, and without raping a single teenager. The fact that you are even comparing them is hyperbole of the highest order.

And this is going right back to those meaningless distinctions I warned you not to get distracted by. Once you've crossed the line to murder-out-of-convenience that kind of crap is just preening vanity that hastily attempts to satisfy lesser mores. 'Oh, I'm a serial killer of ten men, but at least I didn't TORTURE them you sick bastard!'

Because it's cowardly and hypocritical. You want to make a game where being totally non-violent and holding yourself to a stupidly high standard of conduct not matched by anyone, ever is just as easy as hacking and slashing your way through everything. You then turn around and condemn people who want to create a game world where hacking and slashing your way through everything is, for whatever reason, not morally wrong. You're doing the exact same thing they are, contriving a game world where being the good guy is just as easy as being the bad guy (which calls into question why anyone would ever want to be the bad guy, like your villains for example), you're just saying that your way of doing it is somehow more morally commendable.

It seriously has to be as easy. Because as soon as you make it hard then some people will seriously go 'fuck it, I'm a bastard'--not because they actually want to play a bastard but because they'd rather enjoy the combat simulator and don't care if they have to play Killfuck Soulshitter in order to do it. People who want to roleplay nonironic heroes will find it flat-out impossible because they're playing with people who want to play for totally different reasons and unlike the people who want to play actual sociopathic heroes like Kratos just can't be reached. So either said player sighs and gives up on it or you have a fight where it's impossible to reach statis.

However, the important point is that people who play for gameplay seriously don't care whether they're being railroaded to being good. It's also not very taxing to groups when people want to play all-evil or even all-'neutral' parties because it's a lot easier to leave the train than get off of it. Furthermore:

Likewise, why not set things up so an individual character chooses at creation whether he's going to be a pacifist and deal nonlethal damage by default (taking penalties to deal lethal damage) or be a [whatever] and deal lethal damage by default (taking penalties to deal nonlethal damage)? It's not too immersion breaking to be Just That Good at not killing people from level 1 if it's what you focus on. That way, you can play both types of characters on relatively equal footing, and you can have plenty of Batman-esque paladins who don't want to kill anyone without worrying about how they're sabotaging their fight against evil by not taking the most optimal route.

You can't do it half-and-half. If Batman is in a party with The Punisher then either the Punisher needs to refrain from needless killing from then on out, Batman has to break his moral code and becomes no better than the Punisher, all of the Punisher's killing has to occur behind Batman's back, or a fight immediately ensues at the table after Batman chews the Punisher out and attempts to take him to jail. So your choices are A) Character Derailment B) Character Derailment C) A ticking time bomb for D or D) a game-ending intra-party fight. So if someone wants to play Nazinger McPaladin just for the tactical simulation gameplay they're going to be offended that another person is asking them to cripple themselves for roleplaying reasons. That's why it has to default to non-lethal damage. I mean, you can see the effect with the Wealth-by-Level system. If you don't give people a choice between 'perform better in the combat minigame' and 'roleplay being a hero' then people take the latter option a lot more easily.

What's even more amazing is that a game that flip-flops between nonlethal damage and lethal damage seamlessly does not hurt The Punisher at all. Even if he knocks all of the enemies out, there's just a cutscene afterwards that shows him slicing their throats or shooting him in the head.

[Lago PARANOIA]

That does it, PN, I'm going to open a thread in MPIMS about the death penalty because it's not going to do anything over here.

[Chamomile]

From a narrative standpoint, it is absurd to believe that there will ever be a point where killing people is no harder than nonlethally disabling them. I know how to fight people both lethally and non-lethally on a very basic level. So in order to get the proper power discrepancy, let's assume I'm fighting a nine year old girl who is also a serial arsonist, or whatever. I am entirely capable of subduing her non-lethally, and even without doing much damage. But it will be harder. Pulling out a knife is always going to be the easier option unless I am fighting Stephen Hawking, and if I'm more skilled than my opponent by a wide enough margin that I'm confident I can disable them nonlethally even though they're trying to kill me, they're not a level-appropriate encounter. Similarly, in D&D a level 15 Warrior can tear through as many Orcs without killing them as he wants, because a -4 is just not a big deal anymore.

The difference between D&D where the monster races are pure evil monsters who will never, ever stop raping and pillaging until they're dead and D&D where you automatically deal non-lethal damage at no penalty is a difference between lazy hack writing that dodges moral issues and lazy hack mechanics that dodge moral issues. There is no other difference between the two.

Incidentally, if the guy playing Batman decides to make his issues with the Punisher known by beating him up and sending him to jail, that's a party problem, not a system problem. Batman's a dick. Alternatively, if the Punisher refuses to stop killing guys because he thinks it's all dark and edgy then the Punisher is a dick and, again, you have a problem with the party, not the system.

[mean_liar]

Is there a tl;dr version of this 17p thread that I could get? Presuming anyone was interested in my input?

[darkmaster]

tl:dr version.

D&D morality sucks becuse you kill peope and take their stuff

Nahuh

yahuh

nahuh

yahuh

nahuh

yahuh

you get the idea.

By the way, I love this forum.

[fbmf]

tl:dr version.

D&D morality sucks becuse you kill kill peope and take their stuff

Nahuh

yahuh

nahuh

yahuh

nahuh

yahuh

you get the idea.

By the way, I love this forum.

That's...disturbingly accurate.

Game On,
fbmf

[mean_liar]

Wow. For 17 pages?

What does heroic fantasy, borne of SoIaF, LotR, and WoT, have to do with avoiding violence for the sake of accomplishing a goal? What would it even look like?

While some of Lago's initial bullet points are intended to push things towards a predominantly shades of grey morality with rare edge cases and that's probably good, some of it... well, this thread is 17 pages. What the hell could I possibly add?

To just jump in mid-stream, defaulting to non-lethal damage is a bad idea. I don't see how that's good for anything other than creating a completely different genre other than heroic fantasy. Street Fighter, yes. DnD, no.

[PoliteNewb]

Wow. For 17 pages?

What does heroic fantasy, borne of SoIaF, LotR, and WoT, have to do with avoiding violence for the sake of accomplishing a goal? What would it even look like?

I have no idea. I doubt it would resemble anything that goes through anyone's mind when they say "Dungeons & Dragons".

While some of Lago's initial bullet points are intended to push things towards a predominantly shades of grey morality with rare edge cases and that's probably good, some of it... well, this thread is 17 pages. What the hell could I possibly add?

Nothing, really. I really don't think I can add anything further at this point. I got halfway through composing a reply to Lago's most recent post, and gave up. Fuck it.

One last thing, Lago: when I said "why are your balls hurting?", I was not in any way attempting to criticize your masculinity. To me, that is a way of saying "what's your complaint?" or "what's the big deal?". It was a figure of speech, not a personal attack.

[Gx1080]

tl:dr version.

D&D morality sucks becuse you kill peope and take their stuff

Nahuh

yahuh

nahuh

yahuh

nahuh

yahuh

you get the idea.

By the way, I love this forum.

LOL, that's completely spot on.

BTW, just about everybody agrres that defaulting to non-lethal damage is stupid. While the complaints of the aligment axis of Good and Evil being a PITA (highly hypocritical, encourages players and DMs to act like dicks, etc) in practice and the non-combat depth of the game being massively weak are valid, the solutions put by Lago are weaksauce. Just remove the Good and Evil axis, put a decent social minigame and be done with it.

[Omegonthesane]

Argument from realism

Realism is not an innately valid goal for game mechanics. Especially given there are fireballs flying, you should feel free to sacrifice realism on the altar of fun gameplay if it comes to a choice between the two.

The difference between D&D where the monster races are pure evil monsters who will never, ever stop raping and pillaging until they're dead and D&D where you automatically deal non-lethal damage at no penalty is a difference between lazy hack writing that dodges moral issues and lazy hack mechanics that dodge moral issues. There is no other difference between the two.

Wrong. Defaulting to nonlethal allows the players to be lazy hacks, if they want to be. This is actually a Good Thing. You shouldn't penalise people for trying to play unironic heroes just because they don't want to remember to take a penalty to their attacks.

Of course, the alternate solution as repeatedly touted is - stop pretending that killing bad people and taking their stuff makes you a hero. It makes you a fucking badass, it makes your presence somewhat beneficial to the world at large, but it does not make you the good guy, even if you refrain from stabbing not bad people in the face. Of course, this sort of thing is why I have a huge issue with Paladins even existing, but that's a separate point.

Incidentally, if the guy playing Batman decides to make his issues with the Punisher known by beating him up and sending him to jail, that's a party problem, not a system problem. Batman's a dick. Alternatively, if the Punisher refuses to stop killing guys because he thinks it's all dark and edgy then the Punisher is a dick and, again, you have a problem with the party, not the system.

In the latter case the Punisher is acting completely out of character. But, yes, having two incompatible people in the party is indeed a party problem not a system one.

[Chamomile]

Wrong. Defaulting to nonlethal allows the players to be lazy hacks, if they want to be. This is actually a Good Thing.

The lazy hack option is already there, just make every Orc an eldritch abomination with no thought but for evil, regardless of whether or not that makes much sense. Defaulting to non-lethal brings up the question of why you would ever kill someone and removes the moral dilemma of killing from the game. The moral questions are made weaker by defaulting to non-lethal.

In the latter case the Punisher is acting completely out of character. But, yes, having two incompatible people in the party is indeed a party problem not a system one.

Sure, but most people playing Evil or Neutral characters aren't playing vengeance driven "I hate all criminals/orcs/whatever" characters. They're playing guys who are only in it for the hookers and blow, and it's entirely possible to balance that against any moral system that isn't zealously opposed to hookers and blow.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Defaulting to non-lethal brings up the question of why you would ever kill someone and removes the moral dilemma of killing from the game. The moral questions are made weaker by defaulting to non-lethal.

It doesn't, actually. There are still plenty of good reasons in order as to why you would kill a particular person. I think that Aang's Energybending stunt and Batman's ongoing refusal towards killing the Joker are highly immoral for example. And as shitty of a place as D&D is it's depressingly common and easy to contrive situations as to where you have no choice but to execute a bunch of people, even undeserving people like those caught in a zombie oubreak.

If you want to invent situations where this is actually a meaningful dilemma D&D has no poverty of scenarios for this, even if you get rid of Always Chaotic Evil races. But having the heroes have to second-guess their actions in a simple barfight or castle raid rather than at the climax of an adventure goes right back to DSMatticus's criticism of it being too much of a potential to derail the game.

Indeed, if you want to do this dilemma at all in D&D's high-violence environment you have to have a situation where it's likely that a hero's ideals weren't compromised up to this point. Batman or Superman angsting about killing zombiefied peasants is drama-worthy, Luke Skywalker angsting about it is just confusing and hypocritical. I mean Vash eventually ended up deciding to break his code against killing and that was milked for all it was worth, but that story just would not have worked if it was shown that he had already left a trail of bodies behind him even accidentally.

Sure, but most people playing Evil or Neutral characters aren't playing vengeance driven "I hate all criminals/orcs/whatever" characters. They're playing guys who are only in it for the hookers and blow, and it's entirely possible to balance that against any moral system that isn't zealously opposed to hookers and blow.

If you make getting hookers and blow possible without having to resort to evil (you can magic it up/campaign takes place in Amsterdam), then people won't do it. If you put up moral barriers to getting hookers and blow (the money directly funds terrorists and organized crime for example) it then people will either have to do a Han Solo-style motivation change or the character does a Mal-style 'eh, I'm all right' hazy sort of evil. Convenience is seriously probably more responsible for evil than sadism or greed even in the real world.

Of course then you run into the problem where you have Batman cockblocking Han Solo because the blow is directly used to fund the mafia. So you're faced with a palette of decisions, all unpleasant.

• Make it so that hookers and blow are easy to get without having to get in bed with the Devil. You have to do this uniformly and universally because Han Solo probably doesn't care whether he's getting his hookers from a health-inspected brothel in a welfare state and a robust economy or a Cyberpunkish hellhole in which the hookers are victims of human trafficking. If you can't do this at any point then you have to resort to one of the below options.
• Han Solo has an instant change of heart after getting a lecture from Batman.
• Batman compromises his moral code and lets Han Solo solicit a crack house.
• Han Solo ignores Batman and fucks the human-trafficked prostitute anyway after doing some typical anti-hero rationalization. Either he has to do this behind Batman's back or Batman finds out and a confrontation ensues.
• Ban Han Solo and Batman from being in the same party.

Now D&D doesn't have to resort to this grim scenario, making it somewhat of a false dilemma. There's an option 6 that lets everyone have their cake and eat it, too. Han Solo does not actually have to visit a combination crack/whorehouse, he can probably get beer that's better than cocaine in a random bar and pick up an elf that's way hotter than anything that he'll get in a brothel. Even if he couldn't, free trade cocaine seriously does exist in D&D. A 3rd-level alchemist could whip him up an entire mountain of snow and could probably cast Summon Houri for that matter.

[Chamomile]

There are still plenty of good reasons in order as to why you would kill a particular person. I think that Aang's Energybending stunt and Batman's ongoing refusal towards killing the Joker are highly immoral for example.

The energy bending stunt struck me as bad writing, but not immoral. He removed Ozai as a threat. Why kill him on top of that? You could make the argument that he deserved it, but so? What practical purpose does it serve?

But having the heroes have to second-guess their actions in a simple barfight or castle raid rather than at the climax of an adventure goes right back to DSMatticus's criticism of it being too much of a potential to derail the game.

Oh, that's easy to solve. They question themselves after the first castle raid, the characters come to their own respective rationalizations for their actions (some more legitimate than others), and then they move on. They probably go over something similar after the next few raids until they get used to it, but you don't need to go over that in any more detail than you need to go over their banal conversations at dinner every night. Of the many character arcs I've written, all of my favorite ones revolve around people's reactions to the slow build-up of trauma over the course of a war in which they are constantly forced to kill people or be killed themselves. In a situation like this, deciding not to kill people is simply moved to a moral triumph instead of the status quo, which is again something entirely doable in D&D as-written.

"Comic book morality" is a term used to describe easy, black-and-white morals with occasional angst for a reason. If that's what you want, you're not running a serious game, you're running something fun and lighthearted. Which is fine, but running a lighthearted game by defaulting to non-lethal is not in any way morally superior to running a lighthearted game by having all Orcs by biological killbots.

If you put up moral barriers to getting hookers and blow

I don't. Except in that morals sometimes bar you from accepting certain contracts, which means passing up a portion of your income. And also doing nasty things can sometimes be convenient. The whole point of this being that Good and Evil people totally can run in the same party, so long as the Good end of it has significant leverage to keep the Evil half in line (for example, if they're half the group and threaten to leave or turn against the Evil half, Evil will back down from burning the orphanage for giggles just for the sake of self preservation).

[Stubbazubba]

There are still plenty of good reasons in order as to why you would kill a particular person. I think that Aang's Energybending stunt and Batman's ongoing refusal towards killing the Joker are highly immoral for example.

I can't comment on Aang's scenario, but I've thought long and hard about Batman, and here's what I've come up with;

Batman does not give himself the right to pass judgment on the lives of others. He gives himself the right to intervene on behalf of those who cannot do so themselves, causing bodily harm in the process, sure, but when one crosses the line from a cog in the justice system to the embodiment of the justice system, including execution, you cut all real ties to the society you're defending. Batman delivers bad guys to the authorities to deal with, he takes street-level enforcement into his own hands, not the whole of judgment and execution. In that way, he is a part of that society, even though he breaks some of their rules. If he were to begin eliminating threats that he felt just shouldn't be allowed to live, he has crossed a huge line.

Look at it this way; the job Batman does is done by police officers, who are hired similarly to anyone else. The killing that the Punisher does is done by a court, whose judge has been duly appointed by a duly elected official, thus, that whole system is accountable to the people who put them there, at least in theory. Punisher goes over the will of the people and imposes his own will upon criminals, Batman does not. Punisher puts himself above morality and the social contract to achieve what he conceives to be good, but Batman does not. In this way, Batman's goal and Punisher's are inherently different; Batman is doing a job that police can't but would otherwise do, Punisher is way beyond that, fighting a crusade with only his own desires in mind.

Batman not killing Joker, then, is moral because it is a judicious decision when it comes to the power he has to do so. It goes back to With Great Power... If he killed Joker, he would be immoral because the right to kill must be granted by something more than one's own conscious. If that's all one needed to justify murder, then many of the villains would be as justified as Batman.

Admittedly, this is a moral code that is based on the philosophical writings that came out of 18th century Europe, and is thus certainly an anachronism in an Iron Age setting...kind of like the unexplained level of gender equality, social mobility, religious tolerance, and technological sophistication that is common in D&D campaigns...

One other thing; the idea that such a high standard as "non-lethal" is too much to ask of PCs, I think that's ridiculous. So is killing a dragon, overthrowing an empire, or killing a god, yet these are what you do in D&D well before you hit high level. It is completely ridiculous to say, "realistically speaking, you'd be dead if you won't kill any of your opponents," because frankly, realistically speaking, you'd be dead if you tried to kill 'em, too. Once you get past that point, it's just flavor as to whether or not killing is necessary or not, and that's entirely up to the players and GM to work out.

[kzt]

I don't. Except in that morals sometimes bar you from accepting certain contracts, which means passing up a portion of your income. And also doing nasty things can sometimes be convenient. The whole point of this being that Good and Evil people totally can run in the same party, so long as the Good end of it has significant leverage to keep the Evil half in line (for example, if they're half the group and threaten to leave or turn against the Evil half, Evil will back down from burning the orphanage for giggles just for the sake of self preservation).

The whole good/evil thing is a problem as people tend to think of it.

Let's take the previous example of the camp full of murderous orc raiders that the player show up to deal with.

Now there are lot of reasons for a given PC to attack the orcs here. He could do it because he hates orcs. He could do it because he likes to kill. He could do it because he's being paid to do it. He could do it because he's hoping that it will give him cred with someone else. He could be doing it because he thinks they have someone he wants back. All of these are valid reasons and NONE are 'good' or 'evil'.

Even the guy who just likes to kill, killing socially sanctioned targets is not inherently a bad thing, as long as it's controlled to just those targets.

It's also perfectly possible that all or some of the PCs involved are fundamentally bad people who are doing this to further goals they don't want to talk about.

As another example, going after the orcs because they stole your girlfriend is a bit different than going after them because they stole your slave concubine (when she was int the woods cutting a switch for you to beat her with), "and nobody does that to me." She might very well be quite glad to see you, but it doesn't mean you are a fundamentally good person.

The whole idea that fundamentally bad people spend their waking hours dreaming of doing vile things to helpless people and have to be restrained from this is just dumb. Psycho nut cases do that. And the Joker isn't a very valid character design for a PC in most RPGs.

[Chamomile]

This is tangential, but Stubbazubba's morality just shifts the blame onto the courts instead. They really should've figured out the Joker wasn't going to stay incarcerated sometime around the fifth time he broke out. Given that the Joker is a terrorist who is undeniably guilty of his crimes, they should probably have rushed him through the execution process the first or second time he was apprehended.

[Stubbazubba]

This is tangential, but Stubbazubba's morality just shifts the blame onto the courts instead. They really should've figured out the Joker wasn't going to stay incarcerated sometime around the fifth time he broke out. Given that the Joker is a terrorist who is undeniably guilty of his crimes, they should probably have rushed him through the execution process the first or second time he was apprehended.

Which is why Rachel Dawes and/or Harvey Dent were really important allies for Batman in Nolan's movies. Probably just as, if not more important, than Jim Gordon.

On the other hand, part of Joker's super-villain-ness comes from the uncanny ability to escape incarceration no matter how doggedly the do-gooders are trying to rush you to the chair.

Hence the moral dilemma Batman faces in the Joker; the system was working, Harvey Dent had hundreds of mobsters behind bars, with just a little impetus from the Batman on the streets, but Joker's ability to unwind that success and evade the authorities even when he's in prison himself tests Batman's position and Joker, in doing so, is deliberately trying to get him to cross the lines I outlined above, because that's the slippery slope that makes one's mind as malleable as Harvey Dent's turned out to be.

Even the guy who just likes to kill, killing socially sanctioned targets is not inherently a bad thing, as long as it's controlled to just those targets.

But it's not a hero. Lago is saying that the genre underpinnings of D&D are heroic fantasy, wherein we expect more from the main characters than this. The truth, though, is that PCs run the gamut from barely contained evil to lawful stupid Don Quixotes. The game, as is, represents that, though it's much easier to be lethal than not, for some reason. I think that lessening, but not dismissing, the penalty to deal non-lethal damage or simply a choice upon landing the incapacitating blow (kill him or not?) would give you more of the ability to be a comic-book style hero while not cheapening the effort to be non-lethal by making it the default.

[kzt]

Heroism is a lot different than morality.

The reason that it's a lot easier to kill than not in games is that it is obviously easier to kill people when hitting them with a sword or axe than to reliably incapacitate people when hitting them with a sword or axe. It's also lacking in verisimilitude if cutting a guy down with a sword or axe or shooting them full of arrows resulted in them getting knocked out for 2 hours.

Heroes in heroic fantasy leave trails of bodies behind them. Conan, Kane, Elric, John Carter didn't knock out their opponents. They also were generally not very nice guys.

[Chamomile]

Conversely, Aragorn and King Arthur weren't exactly big on non-lethal combat either, but are still considered heroic.

If you want to pull off comic book morality, I would go with just choosing to kill or not at the end of an encounter, or when you deal the killing blow. Reducing the penalty without eliminating it seems like trying to have it both ways, which typically ends up satisfying neither side.

[8headeddragon]

Isn't the fact that we now have 17 pages debating and defining morality, plus an offshoot non-gaming thread about the death penalty proof that coding morality into the game is asking for trouble and probably shouldn't be done? Many people agree there should be a death penalty but these same people have different ideas of when the time is right for killing over disputes.

Presenting that offshoot thread as Exhibit A that morality as part of the game in D&D is a bad idea, because it has to be defined first, and a heck of a lot of people will not agree on that definition.

[quanta]

Sure, I shot surrendering barbarians in the back of the head after I found out they razed an innocent village to the ground, but I didn't kill women and children! At that point you're just getting into 'which is worse, rapist or a purely physical torturer' territory and even if you could find an answer to that the 'winner' damn sure shouldn't feel proud of themself.

Gonna be honest here. I think there's are many cases of doing such a thing that would be morally defensible. Not every combat is part of a war, and surrender is not always an allowed choice. Hypothetically speaking just because somebody surrendered to me after trying to shoot or stab me in a street fight (let's say they attacked with intent to kill and I somehow won, god knows how) wouldn't make me reconsider beating them to the point of being deeply unconscious or somehow injuring them to the point I knew I was absolutely 100% safe from them. Why? Because I have no fucking reason to believe that I can really relax, and it's not a trick. The only safe enough scenarios are cops or lots of people on my side show up, or the other guy is too injured to even vaguely present a threat to me. That second one risks killing them in a lot of cases. That or I blind them, break both their elbows, hamstring them in both legs, i.e. permanently cripple them.

Anyways, I don't see why midlevel superhuman D&D heroes should face many opponents in combat that they can afford to pull their punches on (from a story point of view, obviously the game is rigged in favor of their winning). Undead? Constructs? Plants? Demons? Devils? No moral quandary. Animals? People eat animals anyways. I don't see much need to worry about moral quandaries for things besides certain magical beasts, humanoids, or monstrous humanoids. And anything that isn't a mook at that level often doesn't last long enough for players to have knowledge of whether or not its surrender is credible. And if there is such a thing, rules need to be built in so players don't decide "fuck it, the last monster who surrendered tried to backstab us, we'll just execute everyone from now on."

And quite frankly, as far as mook popping goes, I don't think people give a shit. Whether everything runs away or explodes into a cloud of bloody mist, most people probably don't care. So if you want people to not kill every mook ever, I don't see why a flavor decision of "the enemies ran away" or "the enemies exploded" can't just be left to player when a mooks HP goes to 0.