DMG- Good-aligned torture?? [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

Grey Watcher

2014-12-10, 06:49 PM

In the tables about dungeon rooms, "torture chamber" shows up as possibility for temples/shrines. It had a note that Good/Neutral groups have them for inquisition, while Evil has them for the lulz.
(don't have my DMG right now, so I'll get an exact page number and quote later)

So, is it just me, or did the DMG just suggest Good PCs can torture people? Of course, it's up to the DM (I know I wouldn't allow it), but I imagine alignment debates are about to get even worse. And here I am, giving them a little push.

Personally, I'd spin the backstory such that whatever Inquisition-type organizations would set up such a facility were NOT Good-aligned, even if they were attached to an otherwise Good-aligned faith. Might make a neat bit of backstory if, say, the players discover a secret cabal of zealots within the Church of Bahamut who get so focused on the "punishing the wicked" part they overlook the "protecting the innocent" part. Probably most of the Good-aligned priests that are ever considered for membership are rejected for being too "soft".

But that's just my take on how alignment would fit into this scenario. The officially published materials are, frankly, a mess that varies between vague and contradictory ideas, so I just use it as a jumping-off point.

Janus

2014-12-10, 06:55 PM

Personally, I'd spin the backstory such that whatever Inquisition-type organizations would set up such a facility were NOT Good-aligned, even if they were attached to an otherwise Good-aligned faith. Might make a neat bit of backstory if, say, the players discover a secret cabal of zealots within the Church of Bahamut who get so focused on the "punishing the wicked" part they overlook the "protecting the innocent" part. Probably most of the Good-aligned priests that are ever considered for membership are rejected for being too "soft".
I'd be down with a game like that. Reminds me of the idea I've had for years now about a paladin that's not Lawful Stupid getting hunted down by his peers for "heresy."

EvilAnagram

2014-12-10, 07:36 PM

Personally, I'd spin the backstory such that whatever Inquisition-type organizations would set up such a facility were NOT Good-aligned, even if they were attached to an otherwise Good-aligned faith.

I'm usually against applying alignment to organizations. It doesn't make sense for an entity made of individuals to have its own alignment. It's more likely that people genuinely followed the faith, but in fanatically pursuing what they thought their god wanted, they slipped into something else.

Is using torture against a creature that kills innocent people and children bad? Eye for an eye sort of thinking maybe? If you torture evil, are you not punishing it? In the name of goodness?
Yes, it's evil.

Is the mass genocide of such and such demi-human race evil? Even if they themselves are evil?
Yes, because you can't declare that such-and-such race is entirely evil. If they are sentient, and they are some sort of outsider, and they have free will, then you can't simply declare them evil as a race. Evil happens because of choices and actions. The only things that are completely evil are fiends.

Questions that have plagued D&D since the beginning.
Yeah, I hate these questions. You can't really apply moral philosophy and still stick to the basic rules.

Quarterling

2014-12-10, 07:42 PM

Galen

2014-12-10, 07:48 PM

Eh, I'd say the "do terrible things to achieve the goal no matter what" is definitely not Lawful Good. It's the trope of the renegade mad dog in the service of an otherwise-lawful-good organization, who thinks his superiors are "too soft" and "if it wasn't for me, things weren't getting done".

Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men, if you will. He serves a LG organization, but is hardly LG himself.

"General, did you authorize the construction of a torture chamber at the Order of the Light facility in Waterdeep?"
"Objection, counsel, you are out of line!"
"General, I want the truth, did you authorize the construction of a torture chamber at the Order of the Light facility in Waterdeep?"
"You want the truth? You cannot handle the truth!"

Solaris

2014-12-10, 07:59 PM

Well, look at it this way: If you had the means to extract crucial information from a bad guy that could save innocent lives, wouldn't it be an evil act to refuse to do so? To be more concerned with not getting your hands dirty and doing something unpleasant than with doing what needs to be done for the greater good?
If they didn't want to be interrogated, they shouldn't have put innocent lives at risk.

Also, this is D&D. In previous editions, at least, there were many ways to extract information from someone without so much as making a mean face at them.

If it is okay for humans to torture and kill orcs because orcs torture and kill humans, than it is okay for orcs to torture and kill humans because humans torture and kill orcs. Either there are moral standards that create true moral distinctions, or there aren't.

Considering the orcs are generally the aggressors, this one kind of falls apart.

Galen

2014-12-10, 08:03 PM

EvilAnagram

2014-12-10, 08:06 PM

I've always played and ruled that lawful good is not lawful nice you can be a crusading general that murders an entire army for the sake of defending a kingdom or tortures a spy to save other people you can be lawful and good and do terrible things
First, murder is necessarily not Lawful Good. Murder is the unlawful killing of a sentient being.

Second, there's a big difference between killing members of an attacking army (which is fairly neutral) and intentionally inflicting horrific pain and harm on a defenseless person (which is evil). Torture, like rape, is one of those actions that are inherently evil. Even if a law allows for it, it's an unjust law that the LG character should disobey.

Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men, if you will. He serves a LG organization, but is hardly LG himself.

{scrubbed}

Galen

2014-12-10, 08:07 PM

{scrubbed}To clarify, I was talking about the characters and organizations as they are depicted in the film A Few Good Men.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-10, 08:15 PM

Well, look at it this way: If you had the means to extract crucial information from a bad guy that could save innocent lives, wouldn't it be an evil act to refuse to do so?
No. If you are going to claim to have some sort of moral standards, you don't let them slip because it's convenient. Either torture is a contemptible act that is completely unacceptable, or it's not. Even in a society that permits it, the suspect would have to go through some sort of judicial process in order to be LG.

To be more concerned with not getting your hands dirty and doing something unpleasant than with doing what needs to be done for the greater good?
It's not about "getting your hands dirty," it's about casting aside the notion of laws and morality in order to expedite the information gathering process. It's also a woefully inefficient method that immediately cedes the moral high ground to evil entities.

If they didn't want to be interrogated, they shouldn't have put innocent lives at risk.
The premise does not follow a logical path to the conclusion.

Considering the orcs are generally the aggressors, this one kind of falls apart.
They aren't necessarily always the aggressors.

Selkirk

2014-12-10, 08:45 PM

i like to think of paladins as crusaders (holy warriors who kill/convert all non believers)...in their eyes they are good. and medieval times were actually pretty brutal, any read on punishments sounds exactly like torture. now, it's easier and probably better in d&d to make the black and white hat distinctions...just makes the game flow better and characters aren't tied in constant moral knots.

but even if one applies 'high fantasy'/modern mores to an rpg campaign wouldn't detect evil be different for say a lawful good cleric and a chaotic neutral cleric?

EvilAnagram

2014-12-10, 08:57 PM

MaxWilson

2014-12-10, 08:58 PM

It's not about "getting your hands dirty," it's about casting aside the notion of laws and morality in order to expedite the information gathering process. It's also a woefully inefficient method that immediately cedes the moral high ground to evil entities.

Uh, what? How is intimidation "inefficient"? In D&D terms, you just need to combine a sky-high Insight score with a good Intimidation score, or a mediocre Intimidation score boosted by torture. There are two main methods, the quick way and the scary way.

The quick way: cut off one finger, ask your question. "Are there any more messengers behind you?" If they lie to you (according to your Insight roll), cut off another finger and ask again.

The scary way: separate the prisoners into groups and interrogate them separately. Start off by asking them questions you secretly already know the answer to. "How many messengers came before you?" "What is your companion's name?" No matter what answer you get, purse your lips, nod, and leave the room. If they lied to you, come back a few minutes or hours later and cut off a finger. Then go away, and come back eventually and ask another question. Continue this process until they are scared to death of lying to you because you are apparently omniscient and very vengeful, and then gradually start asking questions to which you do not already know the answers. Check those answers against the other prisoners' answers and punish both parties whenever discrepancies arise. Give them lots of time to stew. Etc.

Evil? Yes. Scarily effective? Well, it would work on me.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-10, 09:05 PM

Uh, what? How is intimidation "inefficient"? In D&D terms, you just need to combine a sky-high Insight score with a good Intimidation score, or a mediocre Intimidation score boosted by torture. There are two main methods, the quick way and the scary way.
Torture is woefully inefficient because people will say anything to get the torture to stop. It's a great way to get terrible information that you can't trust, both in real life and in D&D.

MaxWilson

2014-12-10, 09:13 PM

Torture is woefully inefficient because people will say anything to get the torture to stop. It's a great way to get terrible information that you can't trust, both in real life and in D&D.

That's why you use your Insight checks and/or known-answer questions to discern the reliability of the information, and use Intimidation (and/or torture) purely as a conditioning mechanism. You're not trying to elicit a "confession," you're employing behavioral conditioning. (It's true that you can also use torture to elicit confessions for propaganda purposes, but that has nothing to do with information-gathering, it's just infowar.)

In D&D terms, you just need to combine a sky-high Insight score with a good Intimidation score, or a mediocre Intimidation score boosted by torture. There are two main methods, the quick way and the scary way.

The quick way: cut off one finger, ask your question. "Are there any more messengers behind you?" If they lie to you (according to your Insight roll), cut off another finger and ask again.

The scary way: separate the prisoners into groups and interrogate them separately. Start off by asking them questions you secretly already know the answer to. "How many messengers came before you?" "What is your companion's name?" No matter what answer you get, purse your lips, nod, and leave the room. If they lied to you, come back a few minutes or hours later and cut off a finger. Then go away, and come back eventually and ask another question. Continue this process until they are scared to death of lying to you because you are apparently omniscient and very vengeful, and then gradually start asking questions to which you do not already know the answers. Check those answers against the other prisoners' answers and punish both parties whenever discrepancies arise. Give them lots of time to stew. Etc.

Evil? Yes. Scarily effective? Well, it would work on me.

Sartharina

2014-12-10, 09:38 PM

Yes, it's evil. Actually - it's lawful good, as noted above by Gygax himself
First, murder is necessarily not Lawful Good. Murder is the unlawful killing of a sentient being.It can be Neutral Good or Chaotic Good, though, depending on if the person deserves to die or not.

Second, there's a big difference between killing members of an attacking army (which is fairly neutral) and intentionally inflicting horrific pain and harm on a defenseless person (which is evil)A defenseless non-evil person. Or is putting bullies in their place an Evil act because they're just as defenseless against you as their victims are defenseless against them?
Also - sapience is not a binary thing. Compared to Illlithids and many types of dragons, humans are nonsapiant.

No. If you are going to claim to have some sort of moral standards, you don't let them slip because it's convenient. Either torture is a contemptible act that is completely unacceptable, or it's not. Even in a society that permits it, the suspect would have to go through some sort of judicial process in order to be LG.Or you don't abide by a rigid deontological morality that doesn't pay attention to circumstance.

They aren't necessarily always the aggressors.But when they aren't, they aren't murdered/tortured.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-10, 11:13 PM

Actually - it's lawful good, as noted above by Gygax himself
Gygax is not a moral philosopher. I also tend to reject arguments from authority, especially since this authority has had very little to do with D&D for quite some time.

A defenseless non-evil person. Or is putting bullies in their place an Evil act because they're just as defenseless against you as their victims are defenseless against them?
Justice is not the same as petty vengeance. The desire to gratify yourself by inflicting harm on another is very understandable and quite natural to mammals such as us, but it is not Just. If you are Lawful Good, Justice is adhering to the proper punishments meant to prevent the wicked from harming others. If you are Neutral Good, Justice is preventing harm to others. If you are Chaotic Good, Justice is protecting the freedom of others. There are overlaps between them, but this is principally where they disagree. Torture for the sake of "putting bullies in their place" is never Just.

Also - sapience is not a binary thing. Compared to Illlithids and many types of dragons, humans are nonsapiant.
I agree. It is not binary, but the definition of sapience will always be fluid, and that's where philosophy comes into play.

Or you don't abide by a rigid deontological morality that doesn't pay attention to circumstance.
Lawful Good is necessarily a Deontological system of ethics, but I would argue that most systems of moral philosophy tend to come down hard against torture, and for good reason.

But when they aren't, they aren't murdered/tortured.
That is not necessarily true. The fact that someone is tortured or murdered does not necessarily indicate that they are guilty of a crime.

Sartharina

2014-12-10, 11:34 PM

Gygax is not a moral philosopher. I also tend to reject arguments from authority, especially since this authority has had very little to do with D&D for quite some time.Then you are Unaligned. Gygax is D&D.

Justice is not the same as petty vengeance. The desire to gratify yourself by inflicting harm on another is very understandable and quite natural to mammals such as us, but it is not Just. If you are Lawful Good, Justice is adhering to the proper punishments meant to prevent the wicked from harming others. If you are Neutral Good, Justice is preventing harm to others. If you are Chaotic Good, Justice is protecting the freedom of others. There are overlaps between them, but this is principally where they disagree. Torture for the sake of "putting bullies in their place" is never Just.What goes around comes around.

That is not necessarily true. The fact that someone is tortured or murdered does not necessarily indicate that they are guilty of a crime.In those cases the humans are at fault.

Janus

2014-12-10, 11:48 PM

Updated first post with page and quote:
Page 294, option 81-82= "Torture chamber, used in inquisitions (in good or neutral temples with a lawful bent) or for the sheer joy of causing pain (evil temples)"

I think that one of the problems with interrogation in games is that players and DMs alike rarely know anything about how interrogation is actually supposed to work. Torture makes for dramatic stories, so that's the go-to.

*torture methods*
So scarily effective you had to tell us twice?

Demonic Spoon

2014-12-10, 11:49 PM

Good and Ethical are not the same thing. Nothing says that two Good characters have to agree or even like each other. Good represents the abstract concept of altruism and selflessness. If your motives are to save the villagers from brutal slaughter at the hand of the tyrant's armies, and your method is torturing one of the tyrant's spies for crucial information, you are Good. Your actions might also be completely reprehensible and other Good creatures might object and even fight you over that point, but that doesn't change the fact that your intentions were ultimately selfless.

MaxWilson

2014-12-10, 11:51 PM

{scrubbed}

EvilAnagram

2014-12-10, 11:52 PM

Then you are Unaligned. Gygax is D&D.
Heretics are not necessarily unaligned, and D&D has grown far beyond what Gygax ever envisioned, which is a testament to his accomplishments.

What goes around comes around.
I tend not to find playground morality very compelling.

And the same argument justifies torture against any member of the city under attack, which is a major problem with the introduction of torture into societies.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-10, 11:56 PM

Galen

2014-12-10, 11:59 PM

If your motives are to save the villagers from brutal slaughter at the hand of the tyrant's armies, and your method is torturing one of the tyrant's spies for crucial information, you are Good.Does not follow. Maybe you just like the villagers because the best years of your youth were spent in a village. Maybe you just enjoy torturing people and are selling yourself a story that "it's all for the greater good". Maybe you, just like most murderhobo adventurers, are in it for the bounty and glory, and the protection of the village is incidental. I don't see a reason why you'd necessarily be Good in this scenario.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-11, 12:03 AM

{scrubbed}

However, if you want a specific counterargument:

That's why you use your Insight checks and/or known-answer questions to discern the reliability of the information, and use Intimidation (and/or torture) purely as a conditioning mechanism. You're not trying to elicit a "confession," you're employing behavioral conditioning. (It's true that you can also use torture to elicit confessions for propaganda purposes, but that has nothing to do with information-gathering, it's just infowar.)
As the torture increases, it becomes more difficult to discern the truth from fiction, and information that was already pretty unreliable because of the basic nature of torture becomes completely unreliable. If you use psychological methods to distort someone's sense of reality - and your method does to an extent - their info is almost guaranteed to be crap.

Besides, like you said, it's still evil, which is the question at hand.

MaxWilson

2014-12-11, 12:16 AM

However, if you want a specific counterargument:

As the torture increases, it becomes more difficult to discern the truth from fiction, and information that was already pretty unreliable because of the basic nature of torture becomes completely unreliable. If you use psychological methods to distort someone's sense of reality - and your method does to an extent - their info is almost guaranteed to be crap.

Besides, like you said, it's still evil, which is the question at hand.

I think your ideas on reality-distortion under duress are bogus (it's actually harder to make up self-consistent falsehoods under intense psychological stress than it is to simply regurgitate a pre-existing information schema, i.e. the truth, unless you have intensely trained yourself to prepare an alternative schema which is as vivid as the truth--so falsehoods will be more easily detected over time, not less) but at least we both agree that torture is evil.

Caveat here: this doesn't mean a good person couldn't employ torture, but the process of intentionally inflicting suffering on another creature will cause him psychological trauma and, if continued, will warp him in a bad direction. The cost is not to the victim alone but is also born by the torturer. A Paladin of Vengeance might do it, but he'd probably have nightmares afterward. (I bet a lot of Paladins of Vengeance wind up alcoholics.)

SowZ

2014-12-11, 12:20 AM

Well, look at it this way: If you had the means to extract crucial information from a bad guy that could save innocent lives, wouldn't it be an evil act to refuse to do so? To be more concerned with not getting your hands dirty and doing something unpleasant than with doing what needs to be done for the greater good?
If they didn't want to be interrogated, they shouldn't have put innocent lives at risk.

Also, this is D&D. In previous editions, at least, there were many ways to extract information from someone without so much as making a mean face at them.

Considering the orcs are generally the aggressors, this one kind of falls apart.

No, that doesn't make any sense. If orcs being the aggressors justifies humans being aggressors in retaliation, then the orcs are justified in taking aggressive action in response to the humans being aggressive. This is the most consistent way to look at it. You can't have it both ways. If it is okay for humans to raid orcs because orcs raid them, then it is okay for orcs to raid humans because humans raid orcs. When one side is allowed to take action X because the other side took action X, now both sides are doing the same thing and both are justified by the same standard.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-11, 12:29 AM

I think your ideas on reality-distortion under duress are bogus (it's actually harder to make up self-consistent falsehoods under intense psychological stress than it is to simply regurgitate a pre-existing information schema, i.e. the truth, unless you have intensely trained yourself to prepare an alternative schema which is as vivid as the truth--so falsehoods will be more easily detected over time, not less) but at least we both agree that torture is evil.
I did not say that self-consistent falsehoods will be more easy to spout under extreme duress, I said that the prisoner would lose his or her grip on reality and agree with anything you suggest to make the pain stop. Prisoners who lose track of what is real because they are so consumed by pain do not lie consistently, but they also lose their grip on what is and isn't true.

You create a situation in which what is true does not matter. The only thing that matters is what keeps you from harming them. This is why torture tends to provide terrible information.

Caveat here: this doesn't mean a good person couldn't employ torture, but the process of intentionally inflicting suffering on another creature will cause him psychological trauma and, if continued, will warp him in a bad direction. The cost is not to the victim alone but is also born by the torturer. A Paladin of Vengeance might do it, but he'd probably have nightmares afterward. (I bet a lot of Paladins of Vengeance wind up alcoholics.)
I would say that an otherwise good person who tortures someone has already started to slide towards another alignment.

JoeJ

2014-12-11, 12:30 AM

pwykersotz

2014-12-11, 12:36 AM

Eh, my own opinions on morality aside, I find it fascinating and fun to embrace older ideologies than I do to model my current ones in game. It's the same reason that I accept the elements as earth, fire, air, and water instead of the periodic table and why I subscribe to the great wheel cosmology instead of a single material universe. If I try to apply my own knowledge I lose a lot of the mysticism and magic that comes with telling or playing in a fantasy story.

EvilAnagram, what you have to remember is you shouldn't be debating what you believe to be the moral truth, as most of us (or at least some) are not actually arguing what we personally believe but how we play the game. It's more efficient in these discussions to offer up how your interpretation of alignment affects your game world for the better. How that style of alignment makes the game more fun and perhaps more immersive and dramatic.

That said, don't let me stop you if you want to keep going. I love alignment threads. :smallbiggrin:

Demonic Spoon

2014-12-11, 12:37 AM

By failing to extend any empathy to the spy who is helpless at your hands, you are failing to act Good. Possibly not enough for an alignment shift, but still not good.

You can't extend empathy to everyone. If an orc is attacking an innocent person, the most empathetic response would be to disable the orc and send him on his way. By your logic, killing him involves failing to extend empathy to someone who is helpless and thus evil...but most people would agree that you either need to kill or imprison the orc or he's just going to come right back and kill a bunch of people.

Does not follow. Maybe you just like the villagers because the best years of your youth were spent in a village. Maybe you just enjoy torturing people and are selling yourself a story that "it's all for the greater good". Maybe you, just like most murderhobo adventurers, are in it for the bounty and glory, and the protection of the village is incidental. I don't see a reason why you'd necessarily be Good in this scenario.

That's exactly why I prefaced the scenario with "if your motives are..."

Motives are everything with alignment. To do that thing and still be classified as good, you have to truly be doing this thing because you think it helps people. Any of the other scenarios you mentioned are absolutely possible and would imply that you aren't good.

Galen

2014-12-11, 12:40 AM

Demonic Spoon

2014-12-11, 12:47 AM

EvilAnagram

2014-12-11, 12:48 AM

EvilAnagram, what you have to remember is you shouldn't be debating what you believe to be the moral truth, as most of us (or at least some) are not actually arguing what we personally believe but how we play the game. It's more efficient in these discussions to offer up how your interpretation of alignment affects your game world for the better. How that style of alignment makes the game more fun and perhaps more immersive and dramatic.
Right, but I really am only considering the question through the alignment paradigm. I dedicated a whole post to analyzing the notions of justice between Good alignments. I simply believe that when the question of what is morally good comes up in D&D, torture must necessarily be excluded from that category.

You can't extend empathy to everyone. Even the most empathetic and passive adventurer is willing to kill if, say, it's an orc swinging an axe at his head.
Come on, now. That's a false equivocation. There's a difference between defending yourself from someone attacking you and inflicting tremendous pain on someone who cannot defend his- or herself.

Motives are everything with alignment. To do that thing and still be classified as good, you have to truly be doing this thing because you think it helps people. Any of the other scenarios you mentioned are absolutely possible and would imply that you aren't good.
That's an iffy proposition at best. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. For example, if you wish to protect everyone by creating a tyrannical police state that uses whatever means necessary to keep the population from committing crime, you have slipped into Lawful Evil, or at the very least Lawful Neutral.

Galen

2014-12-11, 12:53 AM

I can absolutely see it, but there's a difference between someone whose motivations are legitimately altruistic and someone who uses the greater good as an excuse to ease his conscious while they act in an evil manner.Just so we're absolutely clear on this, can you please clearly state who is in charge of distinguishing between the "legitimately altruistic" and "using the greater good as an excuse"?

I would chance a guess it's not going to be the person being tortured?

SowZ

2014-12-11, 12:54 AM

I also find it incredibly silly how this excerpt encourages stupid evil. Eeeeevviilll people torture people for the Evulz and laugh about it while sitting on their thrones made of live puppies.

Demonic Spoon

2014-12-11, 12:57 AM

Come on, now. That's a false equivocation. There's a difference between defending yourself from someone attacking you and inflicting tremendous pain on someone who cannot defend his- or herself.

I edited the scenario to be a bit clearer. With any orc, you can knock him out and send him on his way in order to minimize the discomfort you're adding to his life.

That's an iffy proposition at best. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. For example, if you wish to protect everyone by creating a tyrannical police state that uses whatever means necessary to keep the population from committing crime, you have slipped into Lawful Evil, or at the very least Lawful Neutral.

Only if the rulers in question only are willing to use "whatever means necessary" because they believe that it's going to result in the best outcome for people as a whole. Also, a hypothetical police state run by LG would invariably be taken advantage of by people looking to use the system for personal gain regardless of the intentions of the system's original creator.

I'd also say that the LG-torturer or the LG-tyrannical-overlord, while not impossible, would be pretty rare simply because people who value other peoples' lives have an empathetic aversion to hurting people making such things very unpleasant and emotionally draining.

Just so we're absolutely clear on this, can you please clearly state who is in charge of distinguishing between the "legitimately altruistic" and "using the greater good as an excuse"?

I would chance a guess it's not going to be the person being tortured?

In a real-world sense, no one is, because self-delusion and rationalization is a thing people do.

In a game sense, the player knows why his character is doing a certain thing.

JoeJ

2014-12-11, 01:00 AM

I also find it incredibly silly how this excerpt encourages stupid evil. Eeeeevviilll people torture people for the Evulz and laugh about it while sitting on their thrones made of live puppies.

Evil characters use torture primarily to create fear, not to gain information. Not only is the victim terrorized into submission, so is everybody else who hears about it. Especially if what they hear is just whispered rumors.

Galen

2014-12-11, 01:03 AM

In a real-world sense, no one is, because self-delusion and rationalization is a thing people do. Yes. Yes they do.

In a game sense, the player knows why his character is doing a certain thing.This is a contradiction. The player is an entity that exists in real life, and as you stated above, self-delusion and rationalization is a thing people do. Why would you make your hypothetical player immune to rationalization and self-delusion in the very next paragraph?

Demonic Spoon

2014-12-11, 01:05 AM

This is a contradiction. The player is an entity that exists in real life, and as you stated above, self-delusion and rationalization is a thing people do. Why would you make your hypothetical player immune to rationalization and self-delusion in the very next paragraph?

Because presumably the player isn't as emotionally wrapped up in a situation as a real person would be. A player is more comfortable saying My character is torturing this guy, because my character is a bit of an ******* than the character would be.

Of course, even that isn't totally bulletproof (a player can totally try to present his character as a LG hero while being a raging murderhobo).

MaxWilson

2014-12-11, 01:06 AM

I did not say that self-consistent falsehoods will be more easy to spout under extreme duress, I said that the prisoner would lose his or her grip on reality and agree with anything you suggest to make the pain stop. Prisoners who lose track of what is real because they are so consumed by pain do not lie consistently, but they also lose their grip on what is and isn't true.

You create a situation in which what is true does not matter. The only thing that matters is what keeps you from harming them. This is why torture tends to provide terrible information.

I don't think you're understanding the scenario here. You don't suggest things to the prisoner. That would be stupid since you're trying to elicit information, not a confession. You ask him questions. Detailed questions, and you pay attention to the answers, compare those answers with answers he's given already and answers other prisoners have given on the same subject. If he tells you there are 5000 troops in the hobgoblin army, you ask him who the general is, and to describe the legion banner, and you ask him the names of the battalions and who the commanders are, and what the food is like, and what time they usually eat at, and how long it takes, and who his bunkmate was, and what his captain's name is, and who that captain reported to, and (oh, look, why doesn't the captain report to the battalion commander instead of directly to the 'general'?) thank you for your cooperation, but I hate it when you lie to me, and now you're going to be punished. Tomorrow we'll go over all this again.

It doesn't matter how desperate he is to "agree to anything I suggest" because I'm not suggesting anything to him. And "what keeps me from harming him" is telling the truth.

It's not deliberately making up falsehoods that makes this method unreliable, it's that the torture victim will wholeheartedly confirm any theory that the torturer comes up with, confessing to whatever is suggested to them. Any leading questions, or even questions that can be misinterpreted as leading, will affect what the victim says, and sometimes it will even influence what the victim believes.

The torturer doesn't report his theories to the victim at all, he reports his theories to his superiors. The prisoner is used only for information extraction. Does the above scenario help you understand how this works?

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 01:07 AM

Well, back in 3.5, there was this beautiful book called the Book of Exalted Deeds. While the crunch of that book is no longer effective, the ethical dissertations at the beginning of the book remain so.

Evil means for good ends remain evil, and good deities won't stand for it. If a good cleric tries that nonsense, he'll cast no more spells. And Paladins will find themselves oathbreakers. No iffs ands or buts about it. Even the Oath of Vengeance can't get away with torture. To clarify, Miko Miyazaki, in 5E, would be an Oath of Vengeance Paladin...but even under 5E rules, she still can't torture people.

It boils down to this...

D&D is a world of magic. There's no reason to torture people when you can cast charm person and have a nice conversation about it.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-11, 01:09 AM

I edited the scenario to be a bit clearer. With any orc, you can knock him out and send him on his way in order to minimize the discomfort you're adding to his life.
For this example, let's assume I am LG and under attack from orcs.

I defend myself, as adventurers tend to, with deadly force because A: I do not know if the orc will be willing to go on his way, B: the orc will not necessarily be easily knocked out (my group has special KO rules), C: the orcs will not necessarily stay unconscious long enough to end the conflict, and D: I know that using deadly force (matching theirs) will prevent them from harming others. I'm operating within the law and within an internally consistent code of ethics.

If an orc surrenders, I don't kill him, torture him, or otherwise mistreat him because his threat is gone. To torture him would be evil because he cannot defend himself and has not been judged by a legal authority.

Citrakayah

2014-12-11, 01:09 AM

It's true that, if you could reliably get accurate information, if there was no other way, if people would die otherwise, torture would be justified. Indeed, it would be evil to not torture the individual. Still would be evil, just the least evil choice.

If.

IF.

IF.

In reality, it simply doesn't work that way. Torture does not give reliable information, there are other ways (especially in Dungeons and Dragons), and death happens to be reversible and not the end of consciousness.

I'm a utilitarian, yeah, so I consider some pretty horrific things to be the best option under the right circumstances (mind controlling an enemy, murdering someone whom the justice system can't prosecute and will continue to commit particularly vicious crimes, theft), but those things are only justified if you actually don't have a choice. If you can slap restraints on the enemy wizard and drag them to a dungeon, you don't get to mind control them. If you can provide proof to the justice system or prevent the person from harming more people then murdering the guilty person is evil, if you can use create food and water you don't get to steal from people to pay for food.

EDIT: To expand: Gary is incorrect. An eye for an eye is evil. As someone Good, your primary objective when dealing with a rampaging orc isn't to punish them. It's to keep them from hurting other people (we'll ignore deterrence here). That's why, for instance, you try to avoid particularly painful methods of killing them, even if they deliberately caused agony--the priority is to make them no longer a threat, not to indulge in revenge for the sake of feeling good.

Demonic Spoon

2014-12-11, 01:19 AM

I defend myself, as adventurers tend to, with deadly force because A: I do not know if the orc will be willing to go on his way, B: the orc will not necessarily be easily knocked out (my group has special KO rules), C: the orcs will not necessarily stay unconscious long enough to end the conflict, and D: I know that using deadly force (matching theirs) will prevent them from harming others. I'm operating within the law and within an internally consistent code of ethics.

If an orc surrenders, I don't kill him, torture him, or otherwise mistreat him because his threat is gone. To torture him would be evil because he cannot defend himself and has not been judged by a legal authority.

Is the threat gone? So, once the orc surrenders, you bid him good day and let him go?

It's true that, if you could reliably get accurate information, if there was no other way, if people would die otherwise, torture would be justified. Indeed, it would be evil to not torture the individual. Still would be evil, just the least evil choice.

If.

IF.

IF.

In reality, it simply doesn't work that way. Torture does not give reliable information, there are other ways (especially in Dungeons and Dragons), and death happens to be reversible and not the end of consciousness.

I'm a utilitarian, yeah, so I consider some pretty horrific things to be the best option under the right circumstances (mind controlling an enemy, murdering someone whom the justice system can't prosecute and will continue to commit particularly vicious crimes, theft), but those things are only justified if you actually don't have a choice. If you can slap restraints on the enemy wizard and drag them to a dungeon, you don't get to mind control them. If you can provide proof to the justice system or prevent the person from harming more people then murdering the guilty person is evil, if you can use create food and water you don't get to steal from people to pay for food.

I agree. I wasn't attempting to paint torture as a positive or even ethical thing, and few characters performing torture would be doing so because it's the good thing to do as opposed to the convenient or 'fun' thing to do. I was simply arguing that it is not an intrinsically evil action because it could hypothetically be done by someone with good intentions and motivations are what count.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-11, 01:19 AM

I don't think you're understanding the scenario here. You don't suggest things to the prisoner. That would be stupid since you're trying to elicit information, not a confession. You ask him questions. Detailed questions, and you pay attention to the answers, compare those answers with answers he's given already and answers other prisoners have given on the same subject.
Right, but the victim will still be trying to give whatever answers he believes the torturer wants. If the honest answer is, "I don't know," but the torturer thinks he does, he will not associate honesty with reducing the amount of pain he feels.

If he tells you there are 5000 troops in the hobgoblin army, you ask him who the general is, and to describe the legion banner, and you ask him the names of the battalions and who the commanders are, and what the food is like, and what time they usually eat at, and how long it takes, and who his bunkmate was, and what his captain's name is, and who that captain reported to, and (oh, look, why doesn't the captain report to the battalion commander instead of directly to the 'general'?) thank you for your cooperation, but I hate it when you lie to me, and now you're going to be punished. Tomorrow we'll go over all this again.

It doesn't matter how desperate he is to "agree to anything I suggest" because I'm not suggesting anything to him.

But you are. In the methodology you first described, when two prisoners give conflicting answers, the response is to cut off a finger from each of them. If one of them had been telling the truth, this reinforces the notion that honesty has nothing to do with avoiding pain. If he makes an honest attempt to answer your questions, but there are discrepancies in his account (as there tend to be for anything you try to remember under duress), he will be tortured again. Again, this reinforces the idea that the torture has nothing to do with honesty.

So your methodology encourages people to do whatever they can to keep themselves from feeling pain, which will mean poor information.

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 01:22 AM

...Ahem. Reiterating. Evil deeds remain evil, regardless of circumstance.

'Kill this baby and I'll spare a million lives'

"No, thanks. I'm not responsible for YOUR evil...only the evil I do myself."

TheDeadlyShoe

2014-12-11, 01:24 AM

I think the whole point of alignments is to exist beyond purely utilitarian considerations. It's a mistake to analyze it on such a basis.

In any case, as pointed out earlier, torture for information makes little sense in D&D. Charm spells, magical potions, and divinations are far easier and more reliable.

I also find it incredibly silly how this excerpt encourages stupid evil. Eeeeevviilll people torture people for the Evulz and laugh about it while sitting on their thrones made of live puppies.
Not every Evil-aligned person will be a sadist, but many will. In an entire temple dedicated to an evil god there's probably going to be a lot of sadists.

'Kill this baby and I'll spare a million lives'

"No, thanks. I'm not responsible for YOUR evil...only the evil I do myself."
yes, this is a good point. Ultimately you cannot control others actions.

I think this is true in law as well, you are responsible for crimes you commit even if you are being coerced into them.

Galen

2014-12-11, 01:26 AM

I was simply arguing that it is not an intrinsically evil action because it could hypothetically be done by someone with good intentions and motivations are what count.I like it how you still keep hammering the "it's all about intentions" point, even after admitting self-delusion and rationalization are prevalent.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-11, 01:29 AM

Is the threat gone? So, once the orc surrenders, you bid him good day and let him go?
No. He attacked you, so you arrest him and turn him into the local authorities. Or you strip him of his weapons and send him naked into the forest. You do not shirk your obligation, but you do not give in to barbarism.

I agree. I wasn't attempting to paint torture as a positive or even ethical thing, and few characters performing torture would be doing so because it's the good thing to do as opposed to the convenient or 'fun' thing to do. I was simply arguing that it is not an intrinsically evil action because it could hypothetically be done by someone with good intentions and motivations are what count.

{scrubbed}

MaxWilson

2014-12-11, 01:32 AM

But you are. In the methodology you first described, when two prisoners give conflicting answers, the response is to cut off a finger from each of them. If one of them had been telling the truth, this reinforces the notion that honesty has nothing to do with avoiding pain. If he makes an honest attempt to answer your questions, but there are discrepancies in his account (as there tend to be for anything you try to remember under duress), he will be tortured again. Again, this reinforces the idea that the torture has nothing to do with honesty.

So your methodology encourages people to do whatever they can to keep themselves from feeling pain, which will mean poor information.

Citation please? In the methodology I described, you punish the prisoners not for conflicting information but for lying to you. Emphasis in bold below:

The scary way: separate the prisoners into groups and interrogate them separately. Start off by asking them questions you secretly already know the answer to. "How many messengers came before you?" "What is your companion's name?" No matter what answer you get, purse your lips, nod, and leave the room. If they lied to you, come back a few minutes or hours later and cut off a finger. Then go away, and come back eventually and ask another question. Continue this process until they are scared to death of lying to you because you are apparently omniscient and very vengeful, and then gradually start asking questions to which you do not already know the answers. Check those answers against the other prisoners' answers and punish both parties whenever discrepancies arise. Give them lots of time to stew. Etc.

(I'm not actually an expert on torturing people so it took me a while to remember the details of effective interrogation, so the quote above doesn't mention detailed questioning and continuous cross-examination; also, cutting off fingers is probably more suited to "the quick way" than "the scary way" because you want to leave actual physical mutilation as something to dread for the future, not something which has already happened in the past.)

If torture were ineffective, it wouldn't be an ethical dilemma at all, it would just be an obvious choice. "No, don't do stupid, evil stuff that doesn't work." But it does work (when done competently), and therein lies the dilemma.

Citrakayah

2014-12-11, 01:35 AM

The problem is that torture simply doesn't work... so there really won't be situations in which it's the right thing to do, not in any campaign setting that has zone of truth or charm.
..

...Ahem. Reiterating. Evil deeds remain evil, regardless of circumstance.

'Kill this baby and I'll spare a million lives'

"No, thanks. I'm not responsible for YOUR evil...only the evil I do myself."

A million people whom you could have saved are now dead, because you were too busy congratulating yourself on how wonderfully good you are. Entire communities have been shattered, families lost, because you were too busy being self-righteous to do what could have averted a whole lot of harm.

The idea you propose is fundamentally evil and self centered. Under it, we may freely go about our business without regard to the pain of others, so long as we personally aren't actively taking part. Tyranny, economic disenfranchisement, genocide... we may cheerfully refuse to lift a finger, since after all we aren't responsible for the evil of others.

This absolutist "any deed that is evil, no matter how much good results from it, must be avoided" junk spells doom for civilizations in a campaign world. And, sometimes, in our world as well...

Galen

2014-12-11, 01:35 AM

I'm not actually an expert on torturing peopleBest news I read on this forum today.

Demonic Spoon

2014-12-11, 01:47 AM

No. He attacked you, so you arrest him and turn him into the local authorities. Or you strip him of his weapons and send him naked into the forest. You do not shirk your obligation, but you do not give in to barbarism.

Even if you don't kill him, you're either risking his life by sending him off into dangerous terrain without any equipment or food, or condemning him to a life of imprisonment. Surely a good character who has empathy would act in the best interests of his fellow sapient being, the orc, and just let him go with no questions asked. If the orc comes back later and murders a bunch of people, hey, that's on him.

{scrubbed}

{scrubbed}

Citrakayah

2014-12-11, 01:48 AM

I think the whole point of alignments is to exist beyond purely utilitarian considerations. It's a mistake to analyze it on such a basis.

All my games run fully on utilitarian ethics. Works well, has no inconsistencies, and makes intuitive sense. Much better than the ridiculous alignment system in the main text, which has poison as evil even if it's painless as opposed to hitting people with a sword (and poisons/biological warfare can be used by good creatures if they're "made out of good"), prohibits raising mindless skeletons even if the people whose skeletons they are are okay with it, makes entire species evil for no apparent reason, et cetera.

Do not mistake my utilitarian considerations for lack of morals, either (if you are doing so, which I am not sure you are).

yes, this is a good point. Ultimately you cannot control others actions.

I think this is true in law as well, you are responsible for crimes you commit even if you are being coerced into them.

You are also responsible for this little thing called "depraved indifference."

Also, citation needed for that last sentence.

Gnome Alone

2014-12-11, 01:56 AM

I bet that's where the church gives its weekly sermons.
New idea: the Church of Hilarious Torture. Motto: Ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaa

Clerics of the CoHT may be Lawful Stupid or Chaotic Stupid, but they definitely have to be stupid.

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 01:59 AM

The problem is that torture simply doesn't work... so there really won't be situations in which it's the right thing to do, not in any campaign setting that has zone of truth or charm.
..

A million people whom you could have saved are now dead, because you were too busy congratulating yourself on how wonderfully good you are. Entire communities have been shattered, families lost, because you were too busy being self-righteous to do what could have averted a whole lot of harm.

The idea you propose is fundamentally evil and self centered. Under it, we may freely go about our business without regard to the pain of others, so long as we personally aren't actively taking part. Tyranny, economic disenfranchisement, genocide... we may cheerfully refuse to lift a finger, since after all we aren't responsible for the evil of others.

This absolutist "any deed that is evil, no matter how much good results from it, must be avoided" junk spells doom for civilizations in a campaign world. And, sometimes, in our world as well...

However, According to the Book of Exalted Deeds...Which is a published book, by the way...this is the correct choice to make. The fallacy you commit here is in thinking your spiritual purity is a commodity that can simply be traded away for a greater good. It isn't. Your spiritual purity is actually of higher worth then any greater good. The Celestials themselves work this way, which is why they don't see eye to eye with mortals often. "Why won't you help me save these people?" "Because I'd have to do something evil to do so. SOL is you." Exalted characters, in turn, behave similarly.

Now, in the 'kill this baby' example, nothing prevents the uber holy guy/celestial from smiting the holy hell out of whoever was making such a demand. But under no circumstance is he to kill the baby. There is no acceptable excuse for evil deeds. Now, would you try to stop the villain from pushing the big red button of doom? Certainly. You can throw whatever powers you've got at him.

Essentially, if the villain says 'kill this baby', your job is to be Batman. Does Batman let 1 million people? No. Does he let the baby die? Nope. Might the villain get away? Sometimes, but having the Dark Knight on your tail never ends well.

JoeJ

2014-12-11, 02:30 AM

Citation please? In the methodology I described, you punish the prisoners not for conflicting information but for lying to you.

"Many survivors of torture report that the truthful information they revealed was intentionally incomplete or mixed with false information (Harbury, 2005). The goal was to appease the torturer, not to reveal the truth. And, because the interrogators were not omniscient, they could not discern which bits of information were true and which were false. Misreading their victims, torturers often failed to recognize the truth and continued to inflict pain. Victims continued to disclose, often fabricating information to in an effort to stop the pain"

"The basic finding from decades of research on criminal interrogations is that strong coercion increases the probability of false confessions."

"The people who possess the most valuable information are also the ones most likely to be able to resist torture. That is, the people in possession of vital information are precisely those who have been selected and trained to withhold true information when tortured and to provide disinformation to their captors when interrogated."

All quotations taken from The Effects and Effectiveness of Using Torture as an Interrogation Device: Using Research to Inform the Policy Debate (https://www.cgu.edu/pdffiles/sbos/costanzo_effects_of_interrogation.pdf) by Mark A. Costanzo and Ellen Gerrity, Social Issues and Policy Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2009, pp. 179-210.

Yoroichi

2014-12-11, 02:52 AM

tl;dr

Good and evil are objective in D&D. It is always fun to mix alignments in but it does not work.

Good will battle evil, even if evil is doing good acts, just because they are evil.

You can factor in morality but it gets confusing on how to play the NPC's and monsters and you will eventually have to abandon alignments.

MaxWilson

2014-12-11, 03:09 AM

All quotations taken from The Effects and Effectiveness of Using Torture as an Interrogation Device: Using Research to Inform the Policy Debate (https://www.cgu.edu/pdffiles/sbos/costanzo_effects_of_interrogation.pdf) by Mark A. Costanzo and Ellen Gerrity, Social Issues and Policy Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2009, pp. 179-210.

Thanks for the reference, JoeJ, and I will read it, but that isn't responsive to the issue I asked for a citation on, which was a claim about my own words on this thread.

Edit: Okay, having read it and looked up the Harbury cite, the argument isn't impressive. The Costanzo/Gerrity paper's analysis of the issue is perfunctory, not much deeper than the little snippet you quoted, and no discussion occurs of behavioral conditioning techniques such as the ones I described previously. One gets the impression that Costanzo/Gerrity's knowledge of interrogation techniques is limited to the simplistic method of inflicting pain until a confession is obtained, with no independent verification. Take this statement for example: 'We know from the civilian criminal justice system that people cannot easily recognize false confessions. Indeed, researchers have found that when184 Costanzo and Gerrity criminal defendants falsely confess, then plead “not guilty” and proceed to trial, they are nonetheless convicted 81% of the time (Drizin & Leo, 2004), often on the basis of their confessions alone."
The brief cite to "Harbury, 2005" doesn't help much because Harbury's book (on Guatemalan torture of her husband) is, well, a whole book, and Costanzo and Gerrity don't even provide a page number to back up their case. I don't doubt that Harbury probably cites false confessions somewhere in her book, but without knowing the details of the method which extracted those false confessions, there's no way at all to apply critical analysis to her case.

The paper also makes misleading claims, such as claiming that "polygraphers" are unable to correctly distinguish truth from lies. I hesitate to call this claim "false" because the fact is that polygraph research shows that polygraphs are reasonably accurate (about 15% false positive rate, about 15% false negative rate) but that does not necessarily mean that polygraphers possess any special expertise at evaluating truth/lie using social skills; rather, they are trained to use machines which are accurate. So this claim is more willfully misleading than false per se.

Ultimately, the Costanzo/Gerrity paper is tendentious, agenda-driven, misleading in important respects, and superficial in its analysis and conclusions. I wish I could say that my own analysis of the paper was more than superficial, but unfortunately life is short and one can only spend so long on analyzing a random paper on the Internet. If you, JoeJ, have a cite to a paper which actually evaluates enhanced interrogation techniques as used by trained interrogators I'm open to it, but this paper doesn't meet the bar.

hamishspence

2014-12-11, 03:16 AM

If you go right back to 1978's "Eric Holmes Edition" of Basic D&D (with 5 alignments rather than 3 or 7) it discusses "acting against one's alignment" - says DMs are justified in giving an XP penalty to player characters that do this - and the example given, was "A good character who tortures or kills a prisoner".

So- even way back then, D&D writers were going against "Gygaxian morality".

TheDeadlyShoe

2014-12-11, 03:16 AM

You are also responsible for this little thing called "depraved indifference."

Also, citation needed for that last sentence.

http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=786

All my games run fully on utilitarian ethics. Works well, has no inconsistencies, and makes intuitive sense. Much better than the ridiculous alignment system in the main text, which has poison as evil even if it's painless as opposed to hitting people with a sword (and poisons/biological warfare can be used by good creatures if they're "made out of good"), prohibits raising mindless skeletons even if the people whose skeletons they are are okay with it, makes entire species evil for no apparent reason, et cetera.

Do not mistake my utilitarian considerations for lack of morals, either (if you are doing so, which I am not sure you are).

IMO the problem with utilitarian ethics (even in an RPG) is that there is a pretense of making absolute judgements - but in the end it is reliant on judgement calls. You can't ever really know that killing one baby will save one million, for example. A DM could construct such a choice with their godlike fiat, but personally it would always ring false and forced.

A lot of it does come down to cosmology. Evil races are evil because they were made that way, or they chose to be. Undead are evil because they are animated with negative (anti-life) energy. IIRC, even the most good-aligned skeleton army is a single missed day of spell casting from going on a murder spree.

I don't know about poison. I don't recall reading any such thing. Is that a 5e reference or more Book of Exalted Deeds? Poison does strikes me as inherently Chaotic, at least outside the context of blowpipes and ritual killings.

hamishspence

2014-12-11, 06:56 AM

I recall reading that "Poison use is Evil" originated with Gygax rather than BOED.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-11, 07:54 AM

Citation please? In the methodology I described, you punish the prisoners not for conflicting information but for lying to you.
You discover that they are lying to you by realizing that there are discrepancies between their stories. The fact that there are discrepancies doesn't necessarily indicate that both lied, only that at least one did. If one told the truth, theyes get punished for telling the truth.

It's also unlikely that they both break at the same time.

If torture were ineffective, it wouldn't be an ethical dilemma at all, it would just be an obvious choice. "No, don't do stupid, evil stuff that doesn't work." But it does work (when done competently), and therein lies the dilemma.
All the data we have on torture suggests that it is a terrible way to gain information. This has been true since a man, on his daughter's execution by the Inquisition, kidnapped an Inquisitor and suspended him by his thumbs until he signed a document confessing that he was a donkey.

So yeah, it's not much of a dilemma, but people like to think of torture as being a method that works, despite the fact that we know it doesn't. Or, at least it won't gain you accurate information.

MunkeeGamer

2014-12-11, 09:37 AM

This thread cut out and started having loading issues on page two. So I'm gonna work from there.

I have a thought about this alignment stuff. Morality in the real world is based on thinkers staring into the void of the universe and attempting to make sense of it. Morality in D&D is defined by actual, real, creator gods that people frequently interact with. The creators of the multiverse are present and accounted for. Their intentions are made clear through angels and envoys and miracles and magic and shared visions. The intentions of the gods are what define morality.

So we can continue to debate real life morality, that's what humans do. But to answer the OP, I say divine torture chambers being "good" is fully realistic. The good deity commanded his followers to torture a prisoner. To disobey would be blasphemy. It would be unethical to do the torture but to be moral is to follow the immutable commands of God.

Now, as a DM, are you going to have your good-aligned god command followers to torture a prisoner?

Probably not.

Is it more likely that you would have a corrupt priest leading a radical cult within the church operating under the guise of "goodness"? Follow up- Would that priest have a torture chamber in the secret basement of the church?

Probably.

Further, the DMG specifically says LG and LN temples would have the device "with a lawful bent". This to me means something like 80% lawful, 20% good. A religion at that ratio might be revolted by the idea of torture but follow through anyway because the ancient edicts command it.

Just my two cents.

hamishspence

2014-12-11, 09:54 AM

I have a thought about this alignment stuff. Morality in the real world is based on thinkers staring into the void of the universe and attempting to make sense of it. Morality in D&D is defined by actual, real, creator gods that people frequently interact with. The creators of the multiverse are present and accounted for.

Going by Elder Evils - the gods didn't create the multiverse - it was there before them.

And indeed, in D&D fiction, it's not unheard of for good deities to do immoral things - and be called on it by their own worshippers. The Forgotten Realms novel Tymora's Luck has an example.

pwykersotz

2014-12-11, 12:28 PM

It's also worth noting that in one of the many Asmodeus origin stories, mortals were causing havoc and being disobedient. Asmodeus convinced the gods that punishment for wickedness was the only way to deter mortals, since removing free will was not an option. So Asmodeus set up his torture chambers in heaven, where the screams of the damned filled the whole plane. The gods hated it, but rather than stop the punishment, they gave Asmodeus the go-ahead to take the souls to Baator instead so they wouldn't have their perfect heaven spoiled.

So, to paraphrase the gods: Torture is okay for the people who deserve it, as long as we don't have to hear it.

Note this is one of many origin stories and may not be true, and also conflicts with how I run D&D, but I feel it's worth mentioning in the context of this thread.

Citrakayah

2014-12-11, 01:16 PM

However, According to the Book of Exalted Deeds...Which is a published book, by the way...this is the correct choice to make.

This is the same book that promotes mind rape as a way to deal with evil creatures and tries to justify ravages with "Well, poison is evil, but this is GOOD POISON." I refuse to take it seriously as a guide to dealing with good.

The fallacy you commit here is in thinking your spiritual purity is a commodity that can simply be traded away for a greater good. It isn't.

Yes, because the notion of "spiritual purity" is bunk.

Your spiritual purity is actually of higher worth then any greater good.

How very self-absorbed.

Essentially, if the villain says 'kill this baby', your job is to be Batman. Does Batman let 1 million people? No. Does he let the baby die? Nope. Might the villain get away? Sometimes, but having the Dark Knight on your tail never ends well.

Your scenario presumes that we have only two options. Obviously, the baby not dying and the million people not dying is preferable, but if you are given the choice between killing someone or letting a nation die--say, sacrificing someone to interrupt a ritual--the correct choice is obvious.

Knaight

2014-12-11, 01:22 PM

All the data we have on torture suggests that it is a terrible way to gain information. This has been true since a man, on his daughter's execution by the Inquisition, kidnapped an Inquisitor and suspended him by his thumbs until he signed a document confessing that he was a donkey.

So yeah, it's not much of a dilemma, but people like to think of torture as being a method that works, despite the fact that we know it doesn't. Or, at least it won't gain you accurate information.

It's not just that. Witch trials routinely involved torture, where people would confess to literal witchcraft. Torture is a terror technique used to control a population, not a method for gathering information. Consider the inquisition - one of the biggest effects it had was to get people to largely stop professing what the inquisition considered heresy. This isn't finding "heretics", this is shutting them up because they are afraid of being tortured and killed. It's similar in effect to the extremely gruesome methods of execution that tended to be employed by ancient empires, or policies wherein offenders would be punished along with large numbers of their families. They are all terror tactics used to repress a population and hold power.

Oderint dum metuant ("let them hate, so long as they fear"). That's practically the guiding motto behind the institution of torture, and it's role in statecraft. Historical examples displaying that are downright easy to find. Heck, modern examples are downright easy to find, but that crosses the politics line and as such I won't go into it.

The only way torture chambers make sense in the context of a good temple is if the standards for good are significantly lowered. If the system of D&D morality in place is generally medieval, and what is considered good is good by medieval thinking even if it's reprehensible by modern morality, then it makes sense. There's already a lot of that baked into the assumptions behind the system, such as the way it is built for violence to routinely be the moral option.

pwykersotz

2014-12-11, 02:10 PM

This is the same book that promotes mind rape as a way to deal with evil creatures and tries to justify ravages with "Well, poison is evil, but this is GOOD POISON." I refuse to take it seriously as a guide to dealing with good.

Yes, because the notion of "spiritual purity" is bunk.

How very self-absorbed.

Your scenario presumes that we have only two options. Obviously, the baby not dying and the million people not dying is preferable, but if you are given the choice between killing someone or letting a nation die--say, sacrificing someone to interrupt a ritual--the correct choice is obvious.

Your responses indicate you put more priority on using a palatable morality system than on trying to play the game as it presents itself. Which is nifty and all, but your responses are also very subjective and hence meaningless if someone is subscribing to an alternate morality.

hamishspence

2014-12-11, 02:17 PM

The only way torture chambers make sense in the context of a good temple is if the standards for good are significantly lowered.

As one of the characters in YAFGC puts it: "The difference between Good and Evil is that Good pretends not to enjoy this sort of thing."

Shining Wrath

2014-12-11, 02:20 PM

So a lawful good temple can torture people as part of an inquisition.

Does everything done by a lawful good person automatically become good? This may be an overemphasis on law at the expense of good.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-11, 02:22 PM

As one of the characters in YAFGC puts it: "The difference between Good and Evil is that Good pretends not to enjoy this sort of thing."
i would not expect that character to be a very moral person. The difference between Good and Evil is that Good resists the temptation to inflict unnecessary pain on others, even when you wold enjoy it. Torture is absolutely an Evil act.

Shining Wrath

2014-12-11, 02:25 PM

hamishspence

2014-12-11, 02:25 PM

i would not expect that character to be a very moral person.That was an Evil character, to another one, both of whom were about to be tortured by the "Good Guys".

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 02:34 PM

Ahem. The Book of Exalted Deeds is a published book. You are not a published book. You are, of course, free to Rule 0 as you please in your game, but the default is not with you.

The default is spiritual purity of the saint>Greater Good. Whether you agree with it isn't relevant. That's how it's set up. The Paladin faced with kill this baby or I blow up a million people still becomes an oathbreaker (or fallen in older editions) and a cleric who does it still loses his spellcasting.

You are not obligated to like it. You are obligated to accept it.

CrusaderJoe

2014-12-11, 02:49 PM

Ahem. The Book of Exalted Deeds is a published book. You are not a published book. You are, of course, free to Rule 0 as you please in your game, but the default is not with you.

Wait, when did they release 5e Book of Exalted Deeds???

Since we can use previous rules from other editions in 5e I'm brining in my 2e Psionic characters to the adventure league!

Finieous

2014-12-11, 02:58 PM

The only way torture chambers make sense in the context of a good temple is if the standards for good are significantly lowered.

Maybe you're just locked in a room and forced to listen to harp music and The Waltons reruns.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-11, 03:01 PM

That was an Evil character, to another one, both of whom were about to be tortured by the "Good Guys".

The "Good Guys" may have been protagonists, but that doesn't make their actions moral or right. If the author was trying to pass their actions off as moral, then the author strikes me as quite mistaken.

hamishspence

2014-12-11, 03:06 PM

I think the author was trying to portray it as a somewhat grimdark world, in which the "Forces of Good" are disturbingly ruthless.

Most of the protagonists are the "Evil Guys".

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 03:08 PM

SowZ

2014-12-11, 03:16 PM

Evil characters use torture primarily to create fear, not to gain information. Not only is the victim terrorized into submission, so is everybody else who hears about it. Especially if what they hear is just whispered rumors.

It specifically says they do it for fun, not to intimidate people. So it perpetuates the Stupid Evil stereotypes.

CrusaderJoe

2014-12-11, 03:17 PM

You're confusing fluff with crunch.

The crunch is outdated. The fluff is not.

Anyways.

The basic point I'm trying to get across is: Good divine casters cannot get away with torture. Ever. No, not even then.

No.

This is a new game with similar stuff. Using stuff from another edition is Houserules. I want to see the ruling in the PHB that says fluff from previous editions still hold true.

I'm not arguing about good guys can or can't do torture but your reference to the BoED doesn't make sense. Hell, if it is just fluff then it doesn't effect the rules at all.

Knaight

2014-12-11, 03:20 PM

You're confusing fluff with crunch.

The crunch is outdated. The fluff is not.

It's not outdated, it's from a different game. 5e appears to be tacitly endorsing torture, given that it explicitly states that good temples might have torture chambers - though this could be a nod towards them being corrupted through valuing order far too much (the strong lawful bent was explicitly stated).

With that said, it's also a bit that can be easily ignored, which is exactly what I plan to do. Maybe the better churches torture people, but they're not getting called Good if they do that, and if that's the standard then either the setting is explicitly a horrible place in general or even the better churches are among the more despicable entities in it.

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 03:37 PM

Well...

I'm not saying good aligned churches wouldn't do it, I'm saying they lose all spellcasting and divinely granted powers when they do.

Further, everyone up the ladder who knows it's going on also loses powers. The next person up the ladder who doesn't know what's going on gets a strongly worded vision about the misbehavior of his subordinates and is told to go fix it in short order. Since the misbehaving priests/paladins are now powerless, it's a trivial matter to round them up and make them face trial for their crimes. Even if the trial amounts to 'Cast Cure Light wounds. You can't? Well, guilty.'

Knaight

2014-12-11, 03:38 PM

CrusaderJoe

2014-12-11, 03:43 PM

pwykersotz

2014-12-11, 03:46 PM

Better let people know about your house rules before you start a game. If anyone is middle management they might lose their class features.

I'm growing to dislike this meme. I'd much rather surprise and be surprised with occasional plot twists than have everything laid out. Obviously there has to be some degree of consistency in the world, but this is getting silly. It's turning into a way to subtly bash anyone who has a different way of running a table.

Knaight

2014-12-11, 03:58 PM

I'm growing to dislike this meme. I'd much rather surprise and be surprised with occasional plot twists than have everything laid out. Obviously there has to be some degree of consistency in the world, but this is getting silly. It's turning into a way to subtly bash anyone who has a different way of running a table.

Highlighting the changes in how divine magic works hardly removes the plot twists. This actually happening remains a plot twist.

pwykersotz

2014-12-11, 04:07 PM

Highlighting the changes in how divine magic works hardly removes the plot twists. This actually happening remains a plot twist.

You missed my point, though perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm not saying clarification in the game is bad. I'm saying that not every change is necessary to pre-list, and the way it's advised is often passive-aggressive.

Knaight

2014-12-11, 04:23 PM

You missed my point, though perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm not saying clarification in the game is bad. I'm saying that not every change is necessary to pre-list, and the way it's advised is often passive-aggressive.

Fair enough. Personally I don't see it, largely because I'm fond of clarifying the game to a high degree before it starts (it's a habit that comes from heavily using generic systems) - and I say that as someone who is extremely liberal with house rules.

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 04:29 PM

Nah. I never spring traps on players. Instead, if a PC of mine were middle management, he might have a subordinate say 'we need to torture this guy to get all this information out of him.'

The answer I expect from my PC is 'Hell no you are not going to do that.'

Alternatively, they might be the one getting a memo from their deity about somebody misbehaving, and be told to go clean it up. They do not lose powers when the vision comes in.

Finieous

2014-12-11, 04:36 PM

Does it work the same way for "evil" churches? If the local priest screws up and, say, heals an injured child, are his powers in jeopardy? And are all good deities in your world judge archetypes whose priority is to enforce moral commandments, or is this only some of them? Are there any crusader archetypes, for example, whose priority is to defeat the forces of evil, or protector archetypes who are mainly concerned with defending the innocent from the predations of evildoers? If all good deities are judge types, why is that?

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 04:42 PM

hamishspence

2014-12-11, 04:46 PM

Torm's church did actually become corrupt in the lead-up to the Time of Troubles. Torm was not happy when he found out.

Faerun gods aren't exactly infallible - even about their own followers.

Finieous

2014-12-11, 05:00 PM

Evil has more latitude. It's called the quick and easy path for a reason. If the evil cleric has to heal a kid, he may well have ulterior motives...anything from seducing the mom to extracting money to who knows what. He might even be playing a long game to get political power. So long as his reasons for doing so are ultimately selfish, he is in general acting in accordance with evil.

What if he's an otherwise "normal" person, except that he's dedicated himself to an evil deity in return for power? He's got a wife he loves, and children he cares about, a brother up in Waterdeep he sometimes quarrels with but would always be there for, in a pinch. I guess I'm wondering if the gods allow people to be real and complex, or if they're all required to be one-dimensional?

As for good deities...5E is set in Faerun, last I checked. Torm, Lathander, and Sune are all going to be equally irate about torture. The reasoning might be slightly different, but none of them are going to put up with it.

If they even noticed, they might act depending on what was done and who it was done to. I haven't read all the novels, but I haven't gotten the impression that every good Faerunian deity is constantly watching and judging every action of his followers, and enforcing his/her moral precepts by withholding divine power. You can certainly play it that way, but I don't think you have to play it that way.

hamishspence

2014-12-11, 05:07 PM

Knaight

2014-12-11, 05:28 PM

What if he's an otherwise "normal" person, except that he's dedicated himself to an evil deity in return for power? He's got a wife he loves, and children he cares about, a brother up in Waterdeep he sometimes quarrels with but would always be there for, in a pinch. I guess I'm wondering if the gods allow people to be real and complex, or if they're all required to be one-dimensional?

The thing is, even lots of mass murderers, serial killers and similar fit into this. It's a large part of the reason that just about every time there's a mass shooting or a serial killer is caught there's a cavalcade of neighbors announcing that they always seemed nice and it was such a shock. If a good-evil system is employed as a categorization scheme, this sort of thing is where the evil line should probably be put.

pwykersotz

2014-12-11, 05:30 PM

What if he's an otherwise "normal" person, except that he's dedicated himself to an evil deity in return for power? He's got a wife he loves, and children he cares about, a brother up in Waterdeep he sometimes quarrels with but would always be there for, in a pinch. I guess I'm wondering if the gods allow people to be real and complex, or if they're all required to be one-dimensional?

What have you seen that indicates otherwise? If you actually worship a deity, you die and go to their divine realm upon death. If you have no deity, you go to the plane that most closely resembles your alignment. In Forgotten Realms, if you reject the gods, you end up at the wall of the faithless. (Disclaimer: In previous editions, and I've seen no contradictions in this one so far.)

All three of those leave room for 'real people' with complex natures. A single action may defy an ideal, but you're measured on much more than one action.

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 05:59 PM

The time of troubles was probably Torm's portfolio sense at its weakest, if he even had it at all. That wasn't exactly the standard procedure for him. Also, he's a much stronger deity now then he was then too.

But even when he's not infallible, key phrase there is 'was not happy about it.'

Sartharina

2014-12-11, 06:06 PM

A lot of villains tell themselves the story that they're "doing it for the people sake", that the people "need a strong leader" that will protect them from what's "on the other side of the wall". With your notion of a "hero" torturing people "for selfless reasons" you have created pretty much a cliche villain, I'm surprised you can't see it.It depends on whether the 'villain' is Right or not, which he very well may be. One person's hero is another's villain, after all.

Well, back in 3.5, there was this beautiful book called the Book of Exalted Deeds. While the crunch of that book is no longer effective, the ethical dissertations at the beginning of the book remain so.Not necessarily.
Alignment is Alignment, not Morality or Personality. It's a cosmic jersey.

Evil means for good ends remain evil, and good deities won't stand for it. If a good cleric tries that nonsense, he'll cast no more spells. And Paladins will find themselves oathbreakers. No iffs ands or buts about it. Even the Oath of Vengeance can't get away with torture. To clarify, Miko Miyazaki, in 5E, would be an Oath of Vengeance Paladin...but even under 5E rules, she still can't torture people. Actually, Miko is Oath of Devotion, not Vengeance. She upholds the oath of the Sapphire Guard and protection of Azure City even from the throne and its corrupt leadership itself. And, Paladins are not required to be Good - only if they break their Oath do they become Oathbreakers. Paladins of Vengeance can torture others if it means bringing their quarry to justice faster. Oath of Devotion Paladins can torture others as chastisement of their failures (Yes, they CAN hold others to their same standards).

D&D is a world of magic. There's no reason to torture people when you can cast charm person and have a nice conversation about it.Please, tell me again how any fighter, thief, assassin, ranger, druid, paladin, ranger, cleric (Other than trickery), or Monk is going to cast charm person?

I'm not saying good aligned churches wouldn't do it, I'm saying they lose all spellcasting and divinely granted powers when they do. No they don't. Deities and their churches are loyal to their deities first, their alignment second or not at all. Inquisitions are perfectly acceptable in Good-aligned churches.

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 06:09 PM

A couple feats gives anyone access to charm person. Presumably, the Church Interrogator will have those feats.

Problem solved.

Sartharina

2014-12-11, 06:11 PM

A couple feats gives anyone access to charm person. Presumably, the Church Interrogator will have those feats.

Problem solved.Friends don't betray friends, not even to other friends.

hamishspence

2014-12-11, 06:11 PM

Actually, Miko is Oath of Devotion, not Vengeance. She upholds the oath of the Sapphire Guard and protection of Azure City even from the throne and its corrupt leadership itself.

Shojo's leadership wasn't exactly corrupt- just Chaotic:

This idea that all governmental Chaos leads directly to warfare, and all warfare is evil, so therefore Chaotic rulership is evil is ridiculous.

If you take away the external threat of Xykon, the most likely outcome of Shojo's rule is that he dies (whether from Miko or old age), and the more Lawful Hinjo takes over. He reforms the system and the nobles either fall in line or get crushed by his much larger army. The only reason Kubota takes the risky actions he takes is because Hinjo has virtually no army anymore, and Kubota has no ancestral holdings to lose. It is a highly unusual vulnerability on Hinjo's part that certainly could not have been predicted by Shojo.

Further, this idea that Shojo "should have known" that his actions would lead to open rebellion is silly. They didn't. They led to 50+ years of prosperity, peppered with a few instances of violence against him. Which I'm sure he would argue was his risk to take. This is the whole point behind his final lines: He has no regrets over his actions, because he did it all for his people at the possible expense of his own safety or liberty should his transgressions be discovered.

I can't really wrap my head against this idea that his reign wasn't Good because the things he did could have lead to other people performing Evil acts at some vague future point, even though it didn't. The only way his rule would be non-Good is if there was no other outcome except for there to be an increase in Evil, AND he knew it. And we know that isn't the case because that's not what happened.

Zrak

2014-12-11, 06:12 PM

Edit: Okay, having read it and looked up the Harbury cite, the argument isn't impressive. The Costanzo/Gerrity paper's analysis of the issue is perfunctory, not much deeper than the little snippet you quoted, and no discussion occurs of behavioral conditioning techniques such as the ones I described previously.

One reason for this is because the requirements your "behavioral conditioning" make it a poor method in any non-hypothetical scenario for four major reasons. First, "I don't know" pretty much sinks your whole approach. If the guy says he doesn't know how many messengers came before him, there's not a good way to tell if he's lying. If you cut off his finger for not knowing, he's going to make something up whenever he doesn't know the answer; if he tells the truth he loses a finger no-matter what, if he lies he only loses a finger if you catch him. Second, your approach is contingent upon the information you already have being perfectly accurate. Say there have been six messengers before him, but one of them escaped your notice; because you "know" there were five previous messengers, you will actually let him get away with a lie and cut his finger off for telling the truth. Third, the efficacy of the approach depends on both the amount of perfectly accurate information you possess and the unwillingness of the target to tell you the truth; if your victim is still lying when you run out of "test" questions, all you achieved by maiming some poor messenger is a big waste of your time. Fourth, the approach totally falls apart if your victim knows what information you possess.
A method of interrogation, morally abhorrent or otherwise, that relies upon the interrogator a) having an essentially unlimited supply of perfectly accurate information that the subject does not know he possesses and b) asking only questions to which the subject definitely knows the answer is not going to be a very useful method in pretty much any scenario.

Sartharina

2014-12-11, 06:14 PM

Shojo's leadership wasn't exactly corrupt- just Chaotic:It was Corrupt, but also Good. He defied and violated the laws upon which the nation was founded... and Lawful people are obsessed with deontological categorizations and effect of precedent. "If he flaunted the law to do Good Act X, there's nothing stopping him from flaunting the law to do Evil Act Y"... and if even if they can accept trusting one guy to do what he can with no oversight, how can they turn around and NOT trust his successor (Who may abuse that position of power to go all abhorrent)?

hamishspence

2014-12-11, 06:17 PM

It was Corrupt, but also Good. He defied and violated the laws upon which the nation was founded...

Which laws were those? He violates a few of the Sapphire Guard's rules - but that's not the same thing - Azure City has been around longer than the Sapphire Guard has.

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 06:19 PM

MaxWilson

2014-12-11, 06:21 PM

And, Paladins are not required to be Good - only if they break their Oath do they become Oathbreakers. Paladins of Vengeance can torture others if it means bringing their quarry to justice faster. Oath of Devotion Paladins can torture others as chastisement of their failures (Yes, they CAN hold others to their same standards).

In fact, Paladins of Vengeance are required to torture others if it means bringing their quarry to justice faster. (The at-any-price aspect of their oath is one of the reasons I would not play one even though mechanically they are nice IMHO than Oath of Devotion.) They're required to make deals with devils, sacrifice babies, lie/cheat/steal/etc., anything that it takes to stop the BBEG from transforming Desdemoria into a kingdom full of undead skeletons because that is worse than sacrificing a baby.

hamishspence

2014-12-11, 06:21 PM

That is the difference between CG and CN.

CG Robin Hood robs from the rich to give to the poor.
If he slipped to CN, he'd start robbing from the rich to give to himself.
If he slipped to CE, he'd rob from EVERYBODY to give to himself.How about the character who robs only the rich, not for moral reasons - but because "they're the only ones with high value low weight goods"?

I could see such a person being CE rather than CN.

Kyutaru

2014-12-11, 06:39 PM

There's lots of good reasons to torture someone. Can't just focus on the Spanish Inquisition. {scrubbed}

Need to know when the attack is planned, who is involved, and what the target is? Torture works. Saves countless lives in the process and you don't have to enjoy it or do it for any evil motivation. You're simply exercising the most effective means of information extraction in a time sensitive scenario, and the torture stops as soon as the other guy gives up the info. If he's still being tortured, it's because he's being stubborn. You make the rules clear from the start. Tell us what you know and the torture stops.

This is also a time period where mental illnesses weren't understood or accepted. That mad wizard in the tower was nothing but a threat to be dispatched by adventurers. Crazy people were locked in prisons like common criminals! Torture was seen as a method of rehabilitation and/or conversion therapy. You can torture the crazy out of someone by pushing them to their breaking point. Of course a TEMPLE would be the first place you'd look for such a noble and righteous cause. Heck, we still practice this to this very day with electroshock therapy.

Torture! Not just for Evils anymore.

Shining Wrath

2014-12-11, 06:41 PM

The thing is, even lots of mass murderers, serial killers and similar fit into this. It's a large part of the reason that just about every time there's a mass shooting or a serial killer is caught there's a cavalcade of neighbors announcing that they always seemed nice and it was such a shock. If a good-evil system is employed as a categorization scheme, this sort of thing is where the evil line should probably be put.

Evil means on balance you are evil. Absolute evil if for the denizens of the lower planes.

MaxWilson

2014-12-11, 06:44 PM

One reason for this is because the requirements your "behavioral conditioning" make it a poor method in any non-hypothetical scenario for four major reasons. First, "I don't know" pretty much sinks your whole approach. If the guy says he doesn't know how many messengers came before him, there's not a good way to tell if he's lying. If you cut off his finger for not knowing, he's going to make something up whenever he doesn't know the answer; if he tells the truth he loses a finger no-matter what, if he lies he only loses a finger if you catch him. Second, your approach is contingent upon the information you already have being perfectly accurate. Say there have been six messengers before him, but one of them escaped your notice; because you "know" there were five previous messengers, you will actually let him get away with a lie and cut his finger off for telling the truth. Third, the efficacy of the approach depends on both the amount of perfectly accurate information you possess and the unwillingness of the target to tell you the truth; if your victim is still lying when you run out of "test" questions, all you achieved by maiming some poor messenger is a big waste of your time. Fourth, the approach totally falls apart if your victim knows what information you possess.

Hi Zrak,

Thanks for actually engaging on the issue here.

I don't agree that "I don't know" sinks the whole approach. It may be that your expectations are higher than mine for what kind of information you're hoping to extract, but if someone says he "doesn't know" who all the battalion commanders are, he could indeed be telling the truth. However, if he also doesn't know who his own captain is or what his bunkmate's name is, you can be pretty sure he's uncooperative and should be punished. It's a judgment call (and, in D&D, your Insight score will help determine the accuracy of those judgments).

Your other arguments basically boil down to "the method is not infallible." That's true, it isn't. Just like any intelligence-gathering techique, it can lead you to a false conclusion. Scoping out a house in advance before you burgle it can lead you to falsely believe it will be empty on the night of the robbery, but if you simply don't know or notice that the owner returned home the morning of, you'll be expecting an empty house and you'll be wrong. And yeah, if your "known answer" priming questions have the wrong answers, or if your target is able to read you so well that he knows exactly what information you're looking for (and so do all the other guys you're interrogating), you'll get the wrong answers. The same thing can happen if you get the right answers from interrogation, but the wrong answers from physical reconnaissance, and you choose to believe the physical answers and not the ones from interrogation. ("Interrogation reports of captured soldiers indicate that is a whole battalion holed up in that fort, but we know that can't be true because physical observations show only enough supply wagons to feed an understrength company." Oops, the observers missed the storage cavern underneath the keep.)

A method of interrogation, morally abhorrent or otherwise, that relies upon the interrogator a) having an essentially unlimited supply of perfectly accurate information that the subject does not know he possesses and b) asking only questions to which the subject definitely knows the answer is not going to be a very useful method in pretty much any scenario.

You're exaggerating here, or maybe you just have outsized expectations for what kind of information you're going to extract. It would be more accurate to claim that the method a) is useful in proportion to the supply of accurate information you already possess, b) is not attempting to extract any information which the subject can plausibly deny knowledge of. I would use torture to reconstruct a spy network in low-fantasy D&D (or else just use Zone of Truth/ESP for the same effect sans torture, although Zone of Truth might require some Intimidation/torture to keep the source talking once he realizes he can't lie), because you can't reasonably deny knowledge of targets you have personably observed or contacts you have made. But I wouldn't expect any given captured spy to just tell me who his ultimate boss is and what he's planning, because as you say, he can plausibly deny knowledge of that. (ObBatman: "I never knew! It was in the Narrows! Cops only go there when they're in force!" "Do I look like a cop?" [end interrogation])

I never claimed that torture was infallible, and it may often be unnecessary (especially given D&D alternatives). I just pointed out that people who claim it's useless because "people will say anything to get the pain to stop" don't know how to torture people for information. A technique with, say, a 10% false positive rate and a 10% false negative rate isn't infallible, but you can sure use it to update your Bayesian priors. (I wonder if D&D characters know what Bayesian reasoning is.)

-Max

EvilAnagram

2014-12-11, 06:44 PM

In fact, Paladins of Vengeance are required to torture others if it means bringing their quarry to justice faster. (The at-any-price aspect of their oath is one of the reasons I would not play one even though mechanically they are nice IMHO than Oath of Devotion.) They're required to make deals with devils, sacrifice babies, lie/cheat/steal/etc., anything that it takes to stop the BBEG from transforming Desdemoria into a kingdom full of undead skeletons because that is worse than sacrificing a baby.

I don't think you've actually read the requirements of the Oath of Vengeance. They are required to protect the innocent first and foremost, even to the detriment of their chase.

toapat

2014-12-11, 06:46 PM

I think your ideas on reality-distortion under duress are bogus (it's actually harder to make up self-consistent falsehoods under intense psychological stress than it is to simply regurgitate a pre-existing information schema, i.e. the truth, unless you have intensely trained yourself to prepare an alternative schema which is as vivid as the truth--so falsehoods will be more easily detected over time, not less) but at least we both agree that torture is evil.

Caveat here: this doesn't mean a good person couldn't employ torture, but the process of intentionally inflicting suffering on another creature will cause him psychological trauma and, if continued, will warp him in a bad direction. The cost is not to the victim alone but is also born by the torturer. A Paladin of Vengeance might do it, but he'd probably have nightmares afterward. (I bet a lot of Paladins of Vengeance wind up alcoholics.)

Torture techniques besides sleep deprivation do not distort the thought processes of the subject. Believing they do completely misses the point and has no perspective on just how able a person, human or demi, is able to just ignore stimulous in order to sleep. Pain also doesnt dull your ability to be creative (it actually improves it slightly, survival and all. its just still also pain), while waterboarding is more effective at completely breaking the subject's mind then actually getting useful information as mythbusters tried to test. If Torture was useful, then the Geneva Convention wouldnt have banned it outright and entirely.

Pain: gets you the fastest lie
Sleep Deprivation: so difficult to time properly that you either get lies or incoherence
Waterboarding: like pain, but also rapidly breaks the subject's perception of reality. useless.

Also, Paladins of Vengeance have to exclusively be Sober. They already went through Alcoholism and found Badass on the other side

Kyutaru

2014-12-11, 06:47 PM

How about the character who robs only the rich, not for moral reasons - but because "they're the only ones with high value low weight goods"?

I could see such a person being CE rather than CN.

Do not confuse intelligence with the moral compass. A character can be CN and still determine the most effective targets as being those who are rich. Being neutral simply means it's nothing personal when he victimizes someone, it's just necessity or business. An evil character would delight in selfish exploitation of others regardless of social status, but still might only calculate the risks as being worthwhile for rich targets.

Essentially, the character can be either alignment. Heck, the character can also be of Good alignment forced into a moral quandary where he doesn't feel comfortable robbing someone, but sees it as necessary at the immediate moment. A rich target would also suffer the loss less than a poor target so it can serve as a small justification for choosing to prey upon the wealthy.

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 06:50 PM

Oath of Vengeance boils down to 'Protect the Innocent, kill evil ASAP.' Torture is inefficient, because in the time it takes to do it, you could've been off stopping more evil. Oath of Vengeance may be relatively kill happy, but they'll still insist on clean kills.

hamishspence

2014-12-11, 06:50 PM

Being neutral simply means it's nothing personal when he victimizes someone, it's just necessity or business. An evil character would delight in selfish exploitation of others regardless of social status, but still might only calculate the risks as being worthwhile for rich targets.Depends on the version of Evil. "Does a higher proportion of Evil acts than good ones" kind of Evil could be a "nothing personal" "takes no delight in it" character. Some crimelords might be this kind of Evil.

Finieous

2014-12-11, 06:52 PM

What have you seen that indicates otherwise?

Well, in response to my query, Angelalex suggested that the evil priest might be allowed to heal an injured child as long as it was for ultimately selfish reasons, in order to be "in accord" with evil. In context, I believe her position is that he would be in danger of losing his divine spellcasting abilities if he ever acted "good" or insufficiently "evil." I was contending that it's fine to play it that way, but it's certainly not required.

Anyway, my thoughts:

* If you're playing some interpretation of Gygaxian alignment, then alignment is some spiritual essence that attaches to sapient beings, rather than a quality that attaches to actions. Is prosecuting a military campaign to slaughter a specific group of sapients "good" or "evil"? It's Iconic D&D Good if the perpetrators are paladins and the subjects are fiends. It's Iconic D&D Evil if the perpetrators are orcs and the subjects are human peasants. The moral quality of any particular action will necessarily depend on who is acting and who is being acted upon, rather than the action itself.

* If you're playing some more pragmatic form of alignment (which I think 5E tends toward), then just saying "torture is evil" is too simplistic. You need to define torture, for starters. Using invasive magic to master a sapient's will and coerce them into betraying their deepest convictions would likely inflict great distress and suffering. Does that count as "torture"? What if you lock the captive in a cell and deprive them of sleep? What if you use extreme heat or cold to inflict discomfort, though short of lasting harm? What about good old fashioned whipping? I can certainly imagine plenty of lawful good justice temples being okay with whipping. Then, once you've defined torture, you have to ask whether it matters who the captive is and why the information is so important. So you probably can't gouge out the eyes, pluck the fingernails, and apply hot irons to orc raider #6. But maybe you can whip the evil cultist abducted by your paladins in the act of sacrificing a child as part of a credible plot to summon Cthulhu and destroy the world. And finally, if you do go too far, is your god the sort that watches over and judges your every action, or is your god the sort that is concerned with other things and doesn't notice or enforce mortal conduct?

So...there are options, and not all campaigns will be alike. Some good temples might have "torture rooms," though it may be more likely an ice cell or a chamber with a whipping post than one filled with racks and iron maidens.

Shining Wrath

2014-12-11, 07:04 PM

Hi Zrak,

Thanks for actually engaging on the issue here.

I don't agree that "I don't know" sinks the whole approach. It may be that your expectations are higher than mine for what kind of information you're hoping to extract, but if someone says he "doesn't know" who all the battalion commanders are, he could indeed be telling the truth. However, if he also doesn't know who his own captain is or what his bunkmate's name is, you can be pretty sure he's uncooperative and should be punished. It's a judgment call (and, in D&D, your Insight score will help determine the accuracy of those judgments).

Your other arguments basically boil down to "the method is not infallible." That's true, it isn't. Just like any intelligence-gathering techique, it can lead you to a false conclusion. Scoping out a house in advance before you burgle it can lead you to falsely believe it will be empty on the night of the robbery, but if you simply don't know or notice that the owner returned home the morning of, you'll be expecting an empty house and you'll be wrong. And yeah, if your "known answer" priming questions have the wrong answers, or if your target is able to read you so well that he knows exactly what information you're looking for (and so do all the other guys you're interrogating), you'll get the wrong answers. The same thing can happen if you get the right answers from interrogation, but the wrong answers from physical reconnaissance, and you choose to believe the physical answers and not the ones from interrogation. ("Interrogation reports of captured soldiers indicate that is a whole battalion holed up in that fort, but we know that can't be true because physical observations show only enough supply wagons to feed an understrength company." Oops, the observers missed the storage cavern underneath the keep.)

You're exaggerating here, or maybe you just have outsized expectations for what kind of information you're going to extract. It would be more accurate to claim that the method a) is useful in proportion to the supply of accurate information you already possess, b) is not attempting to extract any information which the subject can plausibly deny knowledge of. I would use torture to reconstruct a spy network in low-fantasy D&D (or else just use Zone of Truth/ESP for the same effect sans torture, although Zone of Truth might require some Intimidation/torture to keep the source talking once he realizes he can't lie), because you can't reasonably deny knowledge of targets you have personably observed or contacts you have made. But I wouldn't expect any given captured spy to just tell me who his ultimate boss is and what he's planning, because as you say, he can plausibly deny knowledge of that. (ObBatman: "I never knew! It was in the Narrows! Cops only go there when they're in force!" "Do I look like a cop?" [end interrogation])

I never claimed that torture was infallible, and it may often be unnecessary (especially given D&D alternatives). I just pointed out that people who claim it's useless because "people will say anything to get the pain to stop" don't know how to torture people for information. A technique with, say, a 10% false positive rate and a 10% false negative rate isn't infallible, but you can sure use it to update your Bayesian priors. (I wonder if D&D characters know what Bayesian reasoning is.)

-Max

You have to know a lot about your subject and have a mechanism for distinguishing when he is lying. That right there reduces your utility to corner cases.

You also need to deal with people who are dedicated to their cause and will endure pain rather than betray it. Or are more afraid of someone else than they are of you - for example, you may be able to cut off fingers, but the Big Bad will kill everyone he loves if the subject betrays said Big Bad.

At the risk of bringing real-world politics into this, the best USMC interrogator during WWII - the Marines asked him to train their other interrogators - eschewed even forcing the subject to stand up when the interrogator entered the room. Real-world experience indicates that torture is, almost always, done for other purposes than gaining actionable intelligence.

Kyutaru

2014-12-11, 07:04 PM

Evil is being taken too strictly here. Good people can still perform Evil acts. Emotions come into play to twist our sense of right and wrong all the time. If a good person seeks vengeance against the man who murdered his wife, is that some kind of alignment shift? Or heck, if you as an upstanding Good student steal the favorite stuffed animal of some Evil harpy who is lusting after your boyfriend and take satisfaction in her being miserable over it, did you just take a massive alignment leap or do you feel righteously justified in putting that wicked **** in her place?

Good and Evil are black and white terms... but the world itself is Fifty Shades of Grey.

pwykersotz

2014-12-11, 07:11 PM

Well, in response to my query, Angelalex suggested that the evil priest might be allowed to heal an injured child as long as it was for ultimately selfish reasons, in order to be "in accord" with evil. In context, I believe her position is that he would be in danger of losing his divine spellcasting abilities if he ever acted "good" or insufficiently "evil." I was contending that it's fine to play it that way, but it's certainly not required.

*snip for space*

Ah, I misunderstood the context of your question. Good post. I agree that this discussion would be more meaningful with clarification, though I don't think any consensus will be forthcoming. :smallwink:

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 07:15 PM

Why do people keep mistaking me for female? There's an icon under my name, folks...look at it!

Back on topic...

If you're dedicated to an evil god, you should be fairly dedicated to evil. Now...we're talking about Faerun deities, so evil according to Loviatar looks pretty different then evil according to Cyric, but you do need to be generally in line with the evil your god preaches.

pwykersotz

2014-12-11, 07:25 PM

MaxWilson

2014-12-11, 07:30 PM

You have to know a lot about your subject and have a mechanism for distinguishing when he is lying. That right there reduces your utility to corner cases. *snip*

I snipped the points I generally agree with, but I take issue with the above.

1.) In the D&D context, "a mechanism for distinguishing when he is lying" is simply an Insight roll. Note that D&D characters are orders of magnitude better at picking out lies based on non-verbal cues than real-life people are (we barely do better than 50%).
2.) You're not restricted to non-verbal cues. An obvious way of discovering whether a subject is lying is to, you know, verify the information.

It reduces your utility, but doesn't have to restrict it to corner cases. It just means that you end up having to do actual work instead of getting the answer handed to you on a platter.

This is more something you would do in an Intrigue-based D&D game though than the regular Heroic Fantasy style (and especially not in Epic Fantasy). You'll be spending a lot of time piecing together information and testing deductions, and relatively little time hitting things with pointy objects.

I wouldn't personally be interested in that type of a game but I think one of my occasional players would. I gave him an adventure hook wherein he was hired by a freedom-fighting organization to steal plans from the hobgoblin fortress--I thought it would be an action-oriented adventure, and I prepared side encounters with Medusas and Galeb Duhrs and several alternate avenues of approach. Instead, he walked right up to the fortress, demanded an audience with the hobgoblin captain, and offered to sell him information about the rebel alliance and/or give them false plans in order to make the hobgoblin's pending attack more crushingly successful, thus earning the hobgoblin captain a promotion...

Why do people keep mistaking me for female? There's an icon under my name, folks...look at it!

Count me as one of the folks who thought yours was a shared account between two people named Angela and Alex... like some people have Facebook accounts for "BobAndJudy Caesaro."

Sartharina

2014-12-11, 07:57 PM

I don't think you've actually read the requirements of the Oath of Vengeance. They are required to protect the innocent first and foremost, even to the detriment of their chase.No, they aren't. First and foremost, they are to punish wrongdoers by any means necessary.

The 'closest' thing they have to "Protect the Innocent" is "Restitution". A person that they give a Jack Bauer interrogation to is rarely innocent, and doesn't deserve any sort of protection anyway. If they wrongly torture someone, all their code requires is an apology and maybe Macy's Gift Card and/or a future "IOU" for assistance.

1.) In the D&D context, "a mechanism for distinguishing when he is lying" is simply an Insight roll. Note that D&D characters are orders of magnitude better at picking out lies based on non-verbal cues than real-life people are (we barely do better than 50%).Where are you getting this from?

Count me as one of the folks who thought yours was a shared account between two people named Angela and Alex... like some people have Facebook accounts for "BobAndJudy Caesaro."I'm pretty sure that this is against the forum rules...

MaxWilson

2014-12-11, 08:09 PM

Where are you getting this from?

Can you clarify your question? Are you asking where I'm getting my rules for Insight, or where I'm getting my real-life statistics on picking out lies?

If the former, then I think I'm getting it from the PHB (AFB right now but I believe it mentions this use-case for insight). If the latter, then I'm getting the 50%-ish figure from JoeJ's paper from earlier in this thread, which had some discussion of how bad "trained interrogators" and "polygraphers" were at picking out liars in an experiment (in one case, worse than college students). Of course, that neglects the ability of a trained interrogator to manipulate the circumstances of an actual questioning, which in D&D terms translates to knowing how to impose penalties on opposing rolls, but the point is that a D&D character with a high Wisdom, Insight training, and Expertise (Insight) or Enhance Ability (Wisdom) on has a pretty good chance to just straight-up KNOW who's lying to him.

Hmmm, now I kind of want to make a Rogue "Inquisitor" character.

I'm pretty sure that this is against the forum rules...

Might be. Either way, when I saw that name, my brain's deductive process did not flag it as "impossible due to forum rules," so I saw "Angela_Alex" and not "Angel_Alex".

Zrak

2014-12-11, 08:28 PM

I don't agree that "I don't know" sinks the whole approach. It may be that your expectations are higher than mine for what kind of information you're hoping to extract, but if someone says he "doesn't know" who all the battalion commanders are, he could indeed be telling the truth. However, if he also doesn't know who his own captain is or what his bunkmate's name is, you can be pretty sure he's uncooperative and should be punished. It's a judgment call (and, in D&D, your Insight score will help determine the accuracy of those judgments).
True, but you're now dependent on information that you already know lining up with information the target is likely to know. If you ask him his bunkmate's name, you also have to know his bunkmate's name. Otherwise, he can lie with impunity because you won't be able to tell if he's cooperating. So you basically need to find a subject who is likely to know information you already know, also likely know information you don't know but want to know, and unlikely to know what information you know. Then you have to successfully capture that subject alive. Then you interrogate them, hoping your conditioning takes before the overlap in your information runs out or you're back to square one, looking for another subject meeting your criteria to capture alive. Oh, and any of the information on which you're basing all of the above judgments could be wrong.

Your other arguments basically boil down to "the method is not infallible." That's true, it isn't. Just like any intelligence-gathering techique, it can lead you to a false conclusion.
The other arguments do not boil down to fallibility, they boil down to likelihood of failure; your rebuttal here untenably conflates all levels of likelihood. I am not arguing that the method you propose isn't a bad method because it has a chance of failure, I'm arguing it's a bad method because it has a high chance of failure; it's not that something could go wrong, it's the sheer number and variety of things that absolutely have to go right. There are simply too many moving parts, too many variables totally outside of your control, for the method you describe to be a remotely reliable source of information.

You're exaggerating here, or maybe you just have outsized expectations for what kind of information you're going to extract. It would be more accurate to claim that the method a) is useful in proportion to the supply of accurate information you already possess, b) is not attempting to extract any information which the subject can plausibly deny knowledge of. I would use torture to reconstruct a spy network in low-fantasy D&D (or else just use Zone of Truth/ESP for the same effect sans torture, although Zone of Truth might require some Intimidation/torture to keep the source talking once he realizes he can't lie), because you can't reasonably deny knowledge of targets you have personably observed or contacts you have made.
I am not. I think you are severely underestimating the difficulty in, say, reconstructing a spy ring. I think you're overconfident about the ability to obtain information that is both reliable and relevant to your program of "behavioral conditioning," your ability to keep that information itself secret, and the ability to discern whether or not a subject will have the information you want. Basically, you appear to be operating under the assumption that covert organizations are so bafflingly incompetent as to not even have the most rudimentary countermeasures in place.

MaxWilson

2014-12-11, 08:42 PM

True, but you're now dependent on information that you already know lining up with information the target is likely to know. If you ask him his bunkmate's name, you also have to know his bunkmate's name. Otherwise, he can lie with impunity because you won't be able to tell if he's cooperating. *snip*

I am not. I think you are severely underestimating the difficulty in, say, reconstructing a spy ring. I think you're overconfident about the ability to obtain information that is both reliable and relevant to your program of "behavioral conditioning," your ability to keep that information itself secret, and the ability to discern whether or not a subject will have the information you want. Basically, you appear to be operating under the assumption that covert organizations are so bafflingly incompetent as to not even have the most rudimentary countermeasures in place.

Of course you can tell if he's lying. Unless lies are extremely carefully prepared, they are inconsistent and hard to remember. Even if he does remember to lie to you about his bunkmate's name, he's not going to remember next time which lie he told you last time, so the truth about minor lies becomes obvious over time... and then you have a baseline to start with the next prisoner.

When you say, "reliable and relevant to your program of behavioral conditioning," what do you imagine is the criteria for "relevance"? You speak as if the bar is set pretty high.

What "rudimentary countermeasures" do you have in mind that would prevent anyone from gaining useful information through interrogation of captured subjects?

Edit: I'm going to have to bow out of this thread pretty soon, because countering you guys' charges that "doing X via Y is impossible!" requires me to actually think through how I would do X via Y. That's fine when it comes to killing the Tarrasque or Tiamat, but if X is "break a spy ring" and Y is "torture" that requires me to actually plan out how to torture information out of you and then use it to acquire further information... which is psychically stressful because torture is evil. I'll answer a couple more posts but probably not a lot more than that.

Zrak

2014-12-11, 09:09 PM

Of course you can tell if he's lying. Unless lies are extremely carefully prepared, they are inconsistent and hard to remember. Even if he does remember to lie to you about his bunkmate's name, he's not going to remember next time which lie he told you last time, so the truth about minor lies becomes obvious over time... and then you have a baseline to start with the next prisoner.
Except the first time he gets away with the lie, he shatters the illusion of omniscience you're trying to instill; the first time he gets away with lying, he knows he can get away with lying. Even you catch him in the lie, later, he knows that you can't tell when he's lying; you caught on to an inconsistency, not the initial lie. Also, by the time you manage to actually get this information it's probably outdated; I mean, at the rate you're describing the enemy army will have taken over the city by the time you find out where in the forest they're camped.

Also, why would the next prisoner know the name of the first guy's bunk-mate?

When you say, "reliable and relevant to your program of behavioral conditioning," what do you imagine is the criteria for "relevance"? You speak as if the bar is set pretty high.

Information isn't relevant unless your target is certain or almost certain to know it.

What "rudimentary countermeasures" do you have in mind that would prevent anyone from gaining useful information through interrogation of captured subjects?

For a spy ring? Avoid any meetings between members of the ring unless absolutely necessary. Necessary meetings are arranged between anonymous assets through coded messages placed in changing drop locations. The guy you captured doesn't know who he met, why he met him, what information he was given, or who ordered the meeting. He picks up a piece of paper he can read, memorizes what it says and burns it. Then he goes to the location it says, says the code word and waits for the response, gets a piece of paper he can't read and leaves it in a different drop location, and so on. Basically, any information he can give you is outdated by the time you have him in a cell, let alone by the time you've actually gotten an answer out of him.

Angelalex242

2014-12-11, 09:10 PM

My name actually came from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Angel. The noble vampire was 242 years old at the time I took the name.

In later years, I could sometimes spin the 'Angel' part as referring to the fact my Paladin PCs often are personally responsible for the Half Celestial Template used back in 3.5, and often ended up with celestial wives.

...back on topic.

Torture is evil. Good people don't do it. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

MaxWilson

2014-12-11, 09:39 PM

Except the first time he gets away with the lie, he shatters the illusion of omniscience you're trying to instill; the first time he gets away with lying, he knows he can get away with lying. Even you catch him in the lie, later, he knows that you can't tell when he's lying; you caught on to an inconsistency, not the initial lie. Also, by the time you manage to actually get this information it's probably outdated; I mean, at the rate you're describing the enemy army will have taken over the city by the time you find out where in the forest they're camped.

Also, why would the next prisoner know the name of the first guy's bunk-mate?

1.) What makes you think he gets away with the lie the first time? All he knows is that he's been captured, someone put him in a mud hole with mosquitos, some time later someone dragged him out of there, asked him a bunch of questions about himself and his unit, and then beat him a few times and threw him back in. What about that scenario screams, "Aha! My captors are not omniscient!" It's not like you tell the guy up front, "We're trying to trick you into gradually coming to associate lying to us with inevitable pain."

2.) Because they're in the same unit? If I'm asking you who your bunk-mate is (basically as a random question that I don't care about the answer to, except inasmuch as I can get someone to lie to me), I might as well ask you everybody else's bunk mates at the same time.

Information isn't relevant unless your target is certain or almost certain to know it.

It's pretty reasonable to expect a soldier to know his unit organization. That's actionable info right there.

For a spy ring? Avoid any meetings between members of the ring unless absolutely necessary. Necessary meetings are arranged between anonymous assets through coded messages placed in changing drop locations. The guy you captured doesn't know who he met, why he met him, what information he was given, or who ordered the meeting. He picks up a piece of paper he can read, memorizes what it says and burns it. Then he goes to the location it says, says the code word and waits for the response, gets a piece of paper he can't read and leaves it in a different drop location, and so on. Basically, any information he can give you is outdated by the time you have him in a cell, let alone by the time you've actually gotten an answer out of him.

You just gave me operational information right there. I bet I could extract some more if I were actively questioning you.

Zrak

2014-12-11, 10:30 PM

1.) What makes you think he gets away with the lie the first time? All he knows is that he's been captured, someone put him in a mud hole with mosquitos, some time later someone dragged him out of there, asked him a bunch of questions about himself and his unit, and then beat him a few times and threw him back in. What about that scenario screams, "Aha! My captors are not omniscient!" It's not like you tell the guy up front, "We're trying to trick you into gradually coming to associate lying to us with inevitable pain."
This isn't your initial methodology. As described earlier, your interrogator purses his lips and leaves after getting an answer then returns to cut off a finger if the information given is a lie, thereby establishing that he can tell when the subject is lying and will punish them for doing so. What you've described here achieves neither of those things; if the victim is beaten regardless of the answer given, it is neither established that the interrogator can detect a lie or that lying is what's punished.

2.) Because they're in the same unit? If I'm asking you who your bunk-mate is (basically as a random question that I don't care about the answer to, except inasmuch as I can get someone to lie to me), I might as well ask you everybody else's bunk mates at the same time.
So, how do you know everybody's bunk mate? If you don't, you have to figure that out accurately before it's useful information for conditioning. Meanwhile, if any of them figure out that you've learned the information, it ceases to become useful because they can give you information they know you know without reservation. Of course, you have to do all of this (and hope you do it right) before whatever information they may have about the rest of the army, if any, is outdated.
It's not that it's impossible to get the information you want this way. I'm just saying that it's an inefficient method even if everything goes just right and there's a not insubstantial chance that something won't go right.

You just gave me operational information right there. I bet I could extract some more if I were actively questioning you.
What? Of course I did. You asked me to explain it. I'm not trying to hide my spy ring from you, I'm trying to explain to you how espionage works.
If you mean him not knowing any of that information itself gives you information, it actually doesn't. The point isn't even that he actually doesn't know any of this information, it's that you have no way of knowing if he knows any of this information.

archaeo

2014-12-11, 11:50 PM

To the OP's general point: I don't think 5e, in any way whatsoever, is implying that torture is "good," but that a theocratic society that tends toward the Lawful may very well engage in an Inquisition. A nice example from fiction would be Wheel of Time's Whitecloaks, an organization that presents itself as Lawful Good despite its brutal methodology.

There's lots of good reasons to torture someone.

In reality, and in any game in which the DM is trying to be broadly realistic, I don't think you can honestly claim that torture is an efficacious method of gathering intelligence. The simplified, headline version of the consensus view seems to be that torture is a great way to get someone to do something you want, but not a particularly good way to ensure that someone is telling the truth. If torture tends to be bad at getting people to tell the objective truth as opposed to the truth they think the torturer wants to hear, the list of both good and "Good, Lawful or Otherwise" reasons to do it seem to disappear entirely.

Angelalex242

2014-12-12, 12:08 AM

Well, there are such things as magic items. I suppose...for an evil religion, they could combine a Ring of Truth with a torture device.

Sartharina

2014-12-12, 12:09 AM

Flickerdart

2014-12-12, 12:15 AM

Even a Good temple can have Evil clerics (with Heretic of the Faith) as well as Neutral ones who would be more willing to use less pointy methods of coercion (such as Chinese water torture, or Coldplay) to encourage captives to spill the beans instead of just sitting there and trying to wait it out.

I think the unreliability of torture is dramatically overrated to try to dissuade people from doing it. If it were 'obviously' so bad at getting information, people would have caught on and let it slip out of favor. At the end of the day, though... it works, and works well.
Yeah, about that. I'm not going to say anything specific, but go watch the news sometime.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-12, 12:31 AM

I think the unreliability of torture is dramatically overrated to try to dissuade people from doing it. If it were 'obviously' so bad at getting information, people would have caught on and let it slip out of favor. At the end of the day, though... it works, and works well.

Let us look at the words of an incredible general and ruthless pragmatist:

The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know.

--On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128

Also, all the academic scholarship on the subject has found torture to be a terrible means of gathering information, so it's kind of your ad hoc opinion against all accumulated human knowledge on the subject.

archaeo

2014-12-12, 12:33 AM

I think the unreliability of torture is dramatically overrated to try to dissuade people from doing it. If it were 'obviously' so bad at getting information, people would have caught on and let it slip out of favor. At the end of the day, though... it works, and works well.

This is a facile argument. Torture does work well, just not at gathering information. It works as a method for creating fear, it works to create compliance, it works to coerce the subject into saying anything that gets the torture to stop.

In terms of D&D, where this conversation should probably stay if people want this abominable thread to remain open, I find it difficult to imagine a "good" society which would ever have to stoop to torture as we understand it in order to gather information. In 5e's default setting, magical information gathering completely obsoletes torturing people. Why would anyone torture someone when a number of low-level spells can do it better, faster, and with less, you know, torture? How can it be "good" to terrorize someone into providing information when a wizard can just spend a few seconds and immediately receive the answers?

Citrakayah

2014-12-12, 12:41 AM

Your responses indicate you put more priority on using a palatable morality system than on trying to play the game as it presents itself. Which is nifty and all, but your responses are also very subjective and hence meaningless if someone is subscribing to an alternate morality.

True. Still, it isn't exactly uncommon for people to point out that large parts of Dungeons and Dragons are objectionable. And I prefer the terms "good" and "evil" to actually have some relevance to how they actually work here, rather than being a bunch of poorly thought out arbitrary standards.

Now, if you want to argue that, as written in Book X that Y regarding morality is the case, fine. But my point isn't that, as written, you can get away with using poison as an exalted character, my point is that rules as written are stupid, so unless you want the kind of game where good and evil are reduced to Saturday morning cartoons and poor stereotypes and glaring logical inconsistencies or inanities become obvious with a passing glance, you should ignore them.

Ahem. The Book of Exalted Deeds is a published book. You are not a published book. You are, of course, free to Rule 0 as you please in your game, but the default is not with you.

Crunch works that way, yes. Fluff... doesn't really.

The default is spiritual purity of the saint>Greater Good. Whether you agree with it isn't relevant. That's how it's set up. The Paladin faced with kill this baby or I blow up a million people still becomes an oathbreaker (or fallen in older editions) and a cleric who does it still loses his spellcasting.

You know, there's a game, Genius: the Transgression, where things like killing someone--even in self defense--lowers your Obligation (ie morality meter). Not because it's evil, but because by doing so you're putting yourself in the opposite state of mind from where you need to be not to become an Unmada.

Paladins and clerics make sense like this. Paladins are supposed to be righteous noble crusaders, so even if resorting to underhanded measures like poison isn't evil, it's still the opposite of what a paladin is supposed to be. Note that you can fall as a paladin and not have your alignment in any real danger, and that the code of conduct for clerics and paladins is not simply stated as obeying your alignment.

You are not obligated to like it. You are obligated to accept it.

No, I am not obligated to accept it, because it's stupid. Just like I can point out that "you may only declare war against evil if they are actively harming you" is completely at odds with "we can use magic diseases that only target evil beings." And, if that's too questionable for you, how about the fact that right in front of the section on ravages and afflictions, it states "Using poison that deals ability damage is an evil act because it causes undue suffering in the process of incapacitating or killing an opponent."

Leaving aside the fact there are a number of poisons that are fairly painless, look at the descriptions for ravages and afflictions. They are agonizing, deliberately so. Golden ice makes you feel like your body is freezing over. Depraved decadence makes you starve to death, eating away at you. Raging desire makes you, and I quote, "[experience] insatiable sexual desire while preventing any possible fulfillment of that desire."

There are, also, a multitude of poisons which deal strength damage, or dexterity damage--ideal for immobalizing opponents and taking them alive, so you don't have to kill them. Yet these are evil too?

As a side note, you'll note that the Book of Exalted Deeds disagrees with the guy who made Dungeons and Dragons in the first place, so...

Sartharina

2014-12-12, 12:56 AM

As a side note, you'll note that the Book of Exalted Deeds disagrees with the guy who made Dungeons and Dragons in the first place, so...It also disagrees with 5e.

The BoED is no longer relevant to D&D morality.

Angelalex242

2014-12-12, 12:59 AM

I doubt D&D is going to publish another ethics books of similar style. At least, not anytime soon.

the_david

2014-12-12, 01:16 AM

Angelalex242

2014-12-12, 01:20 AM

You know, torture doesn't work. At some point, the prisoner will break and tell you everything you want to hear. Torturing people so you can continue your merciless crusade against the buckriders or the witches of Salem is not lawful good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGL9B_TPTI

There are people from good religions who practice torture. However...they sound pretty much like Judge Claude Frollo, here. However...the name of the song suggests they're headed for a Lawful Evil plane when they die...

MaxWilson

2014-12-12, 02:08 AM

This isn't your initial methodology. As described earlier, your interrogator purses his lips and leaves after getting an answer then returns to cut off a finger if the information given is a lie, thereby establishing that he can tell when the subject is lying and will punish them for doing so. What you've described here achieves neither of those things; if the victim is beaten regardless of the answer given, it is neither established that the interrogator can detect a lie or that lying is what's punished.

Yes. You may recall me saying, several posts back, that I am not an expert in torture (triggering a sarcastic comment from Galen) and that it took me a minute to remember the details of running an effective interrogation, including the importance of detailed questioning and cross-examination. So yes, my initial post in and of itself was not a complete and fully-actionable plan for all aspects of torturing information out of a subject. Do you have a problem with that?

At any rate, is it clear to you know how the method generally works, or do you want to quibble some more about the details of the initial post?

So, how do you know everybody's bunk mate? If you don't, you have to figure that out accurately before it's useful information for conditioning. Meanwhile, if any of them figure out that you've learned the information, it ceases to become useful because they can give you information they know you know without reservation. Of course, you have to do all of this (and hope you do it right) before whatever information they may have about the rest of the army, if any, is outdated.
It's not that it's impossible to get the information you want this way. I'm just saying that it's an inefficient method even if everything goes just right and there's a not insubstantial chance that something won't go right.

1.) Because you just spent two hours interviewing each of your captives, and commonplace minutiae such as this are some of the things you questioned them on. I don't even know why you're arguing about this in the first place--it's not going to even occur to anybody to lie about bunkmates (of all things) in the first place, and even if they did, it would be obvious which of the captives was lying because he'd be the odd man out.

2.) If he lies about bunkmates, he probably lies about some of the other subjects covered during your extensive interview. It doesn't ultimately matter which lie you catch him in because you're not going to tell him, "Aha! I know you were lying about the size of your unit, because you said Captain Hornswaggle's office is across the hall from Colonel Bumbershoot's because he reports to him, but earlier you claimed that 'General Bumbershoot' was in charge of a whole division! Liar!" All that matters is that you know who is still lying to you and who is broken. Now, maybe you will, from time to time, gloatingly reveal some of your knowledge to subjects who lie in order to build the omniscience illusion ("why do you continue to lie? it is pointless, Colonel Bumbershoot and his men are likely dead already, but now we must throw you back in the pit"), but you're not going to do so on the first day of the first interrogation you ever do.

What? Of course I did. You asked me to explain it. I'm not trying to hide my spy ring from you, I'm trying to explain to you how espionage works.
If you mean him not knowing any of that information itself gives you information, it actually doesn't. The point isn't even that he actually doesn't know any of this information, it's that you have no way of knowing if he knows any of this information.

But he does know all of the information in your post and more, because he was there, and he did it. He knows which drop locations he used, he knows that passwords are exchanged, he knows that the organization is sophisticated enough to use multi-layer blind drops because he sometimes acted as the dropper himself, so there isn't just one messenger to be caught. He knows that he is working for a fairly sophisticated organization that uses more than merely "rudimentary" precautions. That's useful information, and your precautions don't prevent interrogation from disclosing it. If I didn't interrogate him I wouldn't have any information at all.

You accuse me "severely underestimating the difficulty in, say, reconstructing a spy ring" but I think that's just because of your original mistake: as I said before, "maybe you just have outsized expectations for what kind of information you're going to extract." To me the operational information detailed above is useful enough information to (potentially) justify the effort expended rooting out the spy ring. Now, the process of actually extracting that information from him is a somewhat different subject from the "rudimentary precautions" which are the current topic of discussion... but it's late and I'm tired of trying to invent new ways to terrorize innocents and not-so-innocents, so I'll do what I said a few posts ago: bow out of this thread.

Kyutaru

2014-12-12, 02:16 AM

Whether the information is accurate or not only matters in time sensitive situations. Even the police interrogate criminals and they have to work around possible lies. The solution they have in place is fairly simple. The sooner you are honest, the better the deal they'll cut with you because you're looking at hell either way. Additionally, once the interrogation is over they still have the prisoner locked up for further interrogations while other officers run fact-checking missions to see if it all holds up as possibly true. Even then you run into situations where someone has played you like a champ! Heck, many dramatic action movies feature this type of deception and betrayal. That doesn't mean the hundreds of cases you've closed through interrogation should up and dry out because a couple of instances you were lied to.

The judicial system is also flawed in reality. Innocent people are convicted and sent to prison all the time. That doesn't mean we should chuck the legal system out the window just because it has its flaws. It still works properly most of the time, as does torture. Difference here is that we are dealing with a magical world that has countless more possibilities for extracting information than the real world.

CrusaderJoe

2014-12-12, 02:22 AM

{scrubbed}

Angelalex242

2014-12-12, 03:03 AM

About Judicial Sytems:

They are probably considerably LESS flawed in a magical world like D&D. There's ways of enforcing people to tell the truth. Notably, the Ring of Truth. If you wear it, it reveals all lies you hear, but also renders the wearer unable to lie. Sounds like every decent court should have one of those for the witness stand.

And then there's all the magical ways of convincing people to speak honestly.

While it's possible to fool magic, it is significantly more difficult, and I'd guess D&D's criminal justice system is in fact highly efficient. At least for innocent/guilty. Even better, there's usually an entire religion devoted to Justice in most realms. Clerics of that religion generally run the court system. Their whole faith is based on seeing justice done, and they're generally quite good at it.

MaxWilson

2014-12-12, 03:17 AM

{scrubbed}

They are probably considerably LESS flawed in a magical world like D&D. There's ways of enforcing people to tell the truth. Notably, the Ring of Truth. If you wear it, it reveals all lies you hear, but also renders the wearer unable to lie. Sounds like every decent court should have one of those for the witness stand.

You can have some RP fun with this one by making statements which are literally true but misleading.

"I believe he killed himself." -Vlad Taltos, when questioned under the Orb concerning the apparent suicide of his first boss, Tazhikatn.

There are those who suspect that Vlad may have been less than forthcoming, and that Tajishtaken should not have been able to shove a stiletto knife four inches deep into his own eye socket, but the Orb said he was telling the truth and so the Justicers had to let him go. (Privately, Vlad was more forthcoming. "I believe that by annoying me, he as good as committed suicide," or words to that effect.)

hamishspence

2014-12-12, 03:24 AM

The phrase "counterproductive" and the implication that you won't get "good accurate information" and the statement that people will forget some of the info they already have -

all seem to me like "it doesn't work well"

EvilAnagram

2014-12-12, 04:09 AM

It still works properly most of the time, as does torture. Difference here is that we are dealing with a magical world that has countless more possibilities for extracting information than the real world.
That's a disgusting and untrue equivocation.

Unless you're saying that torture works as a means of terrorizing populations, there's really no argument for its being effective as a tool for gathering information.

Forum Explorer

2014-12-12, 04:24 AM

It also disagrees with 5e.

The BoED is no longer relevant to D&D morality.

And yet people still bring it up in 5e discussions.

Anyways, yeah I'd say that torturing, let's say an orc, for information is both inefficient and evil. However as others have noted torture does have other uses, in maintaining stability, or deterring threats. It's also can be used when the alternative is killing the opponent. But even in those cases it's hardly a good act. (Neither for that matter is murder for the record)

Shining Wrath

2014-12-12, 10:34 AM

I think the unreliability of torture is dramatically overrated to try to dissuade people from doing it. If it were 'obviously' so bad at getting information, people would have caught on and let it slip out of favor. At the end of the day, though... it works, and works well.

It works well at humiliating and savagely brutalizing a hated foe. It is close to worthless as an intelligence gathering technique. How precisely do you distinguish between a true answer and one given to end the pain? Once the enemy knows torture is on the table, how do you distinguish between a true answer and one prepared in advance to lead you into a lethal trap? Once the enemy knows torture is likely, how do you ever take anyone alive?

I'm fairly well read in these matters, and I cannot think of a single RW example of torture revealing an important secret. If you've got the counterexample, provide it.

CrusaderJoe

2014-12-12, 11:05 AM

{scrubbed}

Angelalex242

2014-12-12, 11:08 AM

Technical truth only gets you so far. A halfway decent lawyer will ask enough questions in enough different ways that the actual truth would come out eventually.

pwykersotz

2014-12-12, 12:25 PM

Effectiveness at information gathering aside for a moment, is there any circumstance where deliberately causing pain to a living being might be considered a good act within the scope of D&D? Certainly it can be evil, and it can definitely fall on either the lawful (justice) spectrum or the chaos one.

Let's assume no magic on either side, and no mystic connection to exploit. The torture itself is the focus. Do the forces of good in the universe (on any scale) gain anything in goodness by inflicting suffering?

One example (from previous canon, but then we don't have much in 5e yet) might be Pelor creating vampires. Technically it's a punishment for turning to evil magic. And another one by Pelor, casting down the drow. Admittedly less direct, but he stripped away their life and so they lived in shadows desperately coveting it.

Anyone have any thoughts on that, or can we categorically reject it?

Angelalex242

2014-12-12, 12:52 PM

The creation of vampires feels more like turning them over to a more appropriate deity...in Greyhawk's case, that'd be Nerull. As Nerull is the deity of undeath, he gave them a form appropriate to their new master's wishes.

The drow is also a case of 'more appropriate deity', between Corellon Laetherin and Lloth.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-12, 12:53 PM

Stuff.

That's an interesting question. I don't think that the act of intentionally causing pain to a living being is ever Good. It can be Lawful, and it can be Neutral, but never Good.

Defending an innocent, for example, is Good. But putting forth the effort to maximize your enemy's pain is not. Executing a murderer is Lawful and Good, but taking your time to make them suffer cannot be Good. If the true purpose of the Law is to protect the innocent, then dragging out the execution of an offender cannot be in keeping with the purpose of righteous Laws. Likewise, the use of punishment by torture is not in keeping with the notion of Good because the purpose of Just Law (protecting people and their property and rights) has been perverted. It could be neutral, but not good.

Something Vimes had learned as a young guard drifted up from memory. If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat.

They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar.

So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.

JoeJ

2014-12-12, 01:28 PM

CrusaderJoe

2014-12-12, 02:11 PM

Punishment that is intended to bring about a positive change in the target's behavior, and that is actually likely to do so.

Actually negative reinforcement doesn't work all that well.

Being punished in most ways doesn't change behavior, a lot of people who commit crimes are repeat offenders.

pwykersotz

2014-12-12, 02:17 PM

Actually negative reinforcement doesn't work all that well.

Being punished in most ways doesn't change behavior, a lot of people who commit crimes are repeat offenders.

The question is then how does that compare to the number who are not repeat offenders? And negative reinforcement works fine on some levels.

For (anecdotal) example, when I was two my dad turned on the stove to low until it was just hot enough to be uncomfortable. He then told me "Hot" and touched my tiny hand to it. He did it to my siblings too. None of us ever burned ourselves.

MaxWilson

2014-12-12, 02:32 PM

Punishment that is intended to bring about a positive change in the target's behavior, and that is actually likely to do so.

For example, "Stop hitting your sister and go to your room" undoubtedly causes some pain and humiliation to the kid. Actually, any kind of correction causes pain. Giving somebody a D on a paper when they really, really needed a C to stay on the football team causes pain.

It's a mistake to equate "good" (acting in the best interests of others as well as self) with "nice" (eschews inflicting short-term pain to anyone).

(/tangent)

JoeJ

2014-12-12, 02:38 PM

Actually negative reinforcement doesn't work all that well.

Being punished in most ways doesn't change behavior, a lot of people who commit crimes are repeat offenders.

A few forms of punishment fail with most people; most forms of punishment fail with a few people. For everyone in between, knowing an individual well and having a high Wis score would let a character figure out what it likely to be effective and what is not.

CrusaderJoe

2014-12-12, 02:59 PM

The question is then how does that compare to the number who are not repeat offenders? And negative reinforcement works fine on some levels.

For (anecdotal) example, when I was two my dad turned on the stove to low until it was just hot enough to be uncomfortable. He then told me "Hot" and touched my tiny hand to it. He did it to my siblings too. None of us ever burned ourselves.

That wasn't a punishment, or negative reinforcement, a punishment would have been to let you touch a really hot stove once and then ask "what did you learn?".

Or, in the case of my cousin and uncle... My cousin had a wire (we were young... Like 4-6?) and was trying to stick it into the electrical socket. I told my uncle and he came into the room and after a minute or two my cousin got shocked. My uncle just said " serves you right, don't do that again". I remember this day like it was yesterday...

There is a difference between learning and negative reinforcement. :)

Galen

2014-12-12, 03:10 PM

There is a difference between learning and negative reinforcement. :)
Indeed

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_difference.png

pwykersotz

2014-12-12, 03:16 PM

Eh, I was going by this definition (http://psychology.about.com/od/operantconditioning/f/negative-reinforcement.htm). Not at the time, but I looked it up to justify my point. But that's a tangent, negative reinforcement can indeed work from the shock example too. So the question is, can/should that apply to torture from the perspective of a good creature?

Finieous

2014-12-12, 03:29 PM

I mean, if the rationale often used by the Spanish Inquisition were actually true ("A short period of physical torment in order to save the soul from an eternity of infinitely worse torment"), then such an action would be "good." But even then, I don't think you could reasonably claim that this transaction or the deity who requires it is "good."

ETA: I'd be willing to extend this to any true case of the "mercy stroke." A true coup de grace is a good act, one of kindness and mercy.

EvilAnagram

2014-12-12, 04:13 PM

ETA: I'd be willing to extend this to any true case of the "mercy stroke." A true coup de grace is a good act, one of kindness and mercy.

Yes, but a coup de grace is intended to reduce a person's pain and suffering, while torture is intended to increase it.

Finieous

2014-12-12, 04:17 PM

Yes, but a coup de grace is intended to reduce a person's pain and suffering, while torture is intended to increase it.

Okay? The question was, "is there any circumstance where deliberately causing pain to a living being might be considered a good act within the scope of D&D?"

Sartharina

2014-12-12, 06:15 PM

Actually negative reinforcement doesn't work all that well.

Being punished in most ways doesn't change behavior, a lot of people who commit crimes are repeat offenders.What type of negative reinforcement are we talking about? Firm smacks and sudden blows at the time of the offense work wonders. Incarceration is the absolute worst way to try to reform someone. (In fact, from personal experience, I'd consider incarceration for any significant length of time to usually be a worse atrocity to commit against someone than rape or straight-up murder). Incarceration does two things:
1. Physically prevents the perpetrator from committing more crimes for the duration of his incarceration
2. Terrify people into obeying the law because of just how horrific it is.

However, confinement, rape and youth-drain (See: Any prison system) does not work, though.
Yes, but a coup de grace is intended to reduce a person's pain and suffering, while torture is intended to increase it.Not an inquisitional torture. 2-24 hours of mortally-bearable torment is infinitely better than 10∞ months/years/decades/centuries/millenia/eons of incomprehensible incarceration and torment. It's supposed to be an 'eye-opener' experience.

Kyutaru

2014-12-12, 11:23 PM

Actually negative reinforcement doesn't work all that well.

Being punished in most ways doesn't change behavior, a lot of people who commit crimes are repeat offenders.

So you're invalidating the existence of all correctional facilities. Prison doesn't work in your view of the world because people are incapable of change.

Then there's electroshock therapy which has been frequently called into question as being torture. But it has its results...

archaeo

2014-12-12, 11:43 PM

Then there's electroshock therapy which has been frequently called into question as being torture. But it has its results...

This is wildly incorrect. Maybe back in the day when they also thought lobotomies were solid mental health treatments, sure, but today's electroconvulsive therapy is performed under anesthesia and is widely considered an effective treatment, especially in cases where conventional treatments have failed. We don't know exactly why it works, but it has absolutely nothing to do with torture.

Of course, in Dungeons & Dragons, the game we're ostensibly here to discuss, this kind of therapy is unnecessary in worlds where greater restoration exists.

Sartharina

2014-12-13, 02:06 AM

"Let me show you a fraction of what awaits your soul if you do not amend your ways"

Angelalex242

2014-12-13, 02:27 AM

The problem is, you know who I can best imagine saying that?

Emperor Palpatine. (Sure wrong game, but...)

GuesssWho

2014-12-13, 02:44 AM

In the real world, torture is pretty ****ing evil.

In the D&D world, torture is absolutely diabolical and should not even be the slightest bit considered by anyone at all, because they have truth spells.

Mandrake

2014-12-13, 02:55 AM

Torture, like rape, is one of those actions that are inherently evil.[/COLOR][/I]

(Emphasis mine).

No such thing as inherently evil, IMO. No action on it's own is evil or good, moral or not moral, because actions have no positive or negative demarcation. We, the people, put those bounds.
It's an old and ongoing dispute among philosophers regarding ethics, anyways, I'm just saying I'm on this side. Killing someone can be a good thing.

Cazero

2014-12-13, 09:13 AM

In the D&D world, torture is absolutely diabolical and should not even be the slightest bit considered by anyone at all, because they have truth spells.

On the contrary, truth spells are making torture a more effective and therefore valid interrogation method.
Take truth spell alone. Your prisoner will simply say "I refuse to answer" or shut his mouth.
Take torture alone. Your prisonner might say anything to make the pain stop, including false confessions, straight lies and made up stories.
Combine both. Your prisonner have to speak to make the pain stop, and can't make up a story or otherwise lie to you. Only the most badass of badasses will keep their mouth shut until the end.

Now, good or evil? Definitly sliding towards evil. I would say premeditated torture using advanced equipment like a torture chamber is always evil, while a spontaneous punching because you have an ultimatum might be rather neutral.

Killer Angel

2014-12-13, 09:20 AM

I wonder if a torture ala "Saw", with the main objective to put someone in front of danger of death, to teach him/her the value of life, can have some shade of goodness...

Citrakayah

2014-12-13, 11:40 AM

On the contrary, truth spells are making torture a more effective and therefore valid interrogation method.
Take truth spell alone. Your prisoner will simply say "I refuse to answer" or shut his mouth.
Take torture alone. Your prisonner might say anything to make the pain stop, including false confessions, straight lies and made up stories.
Combine both. Your prisonner have to speak to make the pain stop, and can't make up a story or otherwise lie to you. Only the most badass of badasses will keep their mouth shut until the end.

This is what charm spells and dominate spells--and, for that matter, divinations--are for.

Sartharina

2014-12-13, 11:42 AM

This is what charm spells and dominate spells--and, for that matter, divinations--are for.Where the hell are you getting all these spells for a CR 2 noncaster NPC!? And Charm does not work the way you seem to think it does.

hamishspence

2014-12-13, 11:45 AM

Where the hell are you getting all these spells for a CR 2 noncaster NPC!?

What's a CR2 noncaster NPC doing in charge of interrogation in the first place, without any assistance? If a situation is as urgent as all that - wouldn't the temple have brought all their resources to bear?

Sartharina

2014-12-13, 11:52 AM

What's a CR2 noncaster NPC doing in charge of interrogation in the first place, without any assistance? If a situation is as urgent as all that - wouldn't the temple have brought all their resources to bear?This CR2 noncaster NPC IS all the resources they are able to bring to bear at such short notice. And the more powerful elements are all dealing with the dozens of other crisis going on at the same time.

Citrakayah

2014-12-13, 01:39 PM

Where the hell are you getting all these spells for a CR 2 noncaster NPC!? And Charm does not work the way you seem to think it does.

Charm explicitly works well enough that it turns a barghest trying to maul you to a barghest trying to give you a great big hug and your wizard friend into someone who clearly needs to be stopped from harming your new friend. While this won't allow you to flawlessly get answers, it would prove a much greater aid than torture.

Also, if this is a CR 2 noncaster, they don't get truth spells... which means that you're limited to regular torture, which is less than useless.

Not to mention that if this person had actual valuable information, you don't stick a noncaster CR 2 NPC in with them to do the interrogation. Certainly not without a magic item or two... like some wands.

MaxWilson

2014-12-13, 02:04 PM

This CR2 noncaster NPC IS all the resources they are able to bring to bear at such short notice. And the more powerful elements are all dealing with the dozens of other crisis going on at the same time.

It never rains but it pours...

Charm explicitly works well enough that it turns a barghest trying to maul you to a barghest trying to give you a great big hug and your wizard friend into someone who clearly needs to be stopped from harming your new friend.

Do Barghests usually hug their friendly acquaintances? They don't seem like the huggy type to me. It stops it from attacking you ("oh, hey, sorry, I didn't recognize you. Let me just kill these adventurers and then let's catch up.") but friendly NPCs, per the DMG, are inclined to help you automatically only if it costs them nothing. Anything more than that requires a persuasion roll. Basically, if Charm Person worked, you wouldn't need it, because you could also just disguise yourself as his mother and ask him that way... or maybe even get the subject's actual mother to beg him to cooperate. ("I don't know what you're mixed up in, but tell the police what you know and let's go home!")

Re-read the Charm Person spell and the Charmed condition in the 5E PHB.

Citrakayah

2014-12-13, 02:18 PM

It never rains but it pours...

Do Barghests usually hug their friendly acquaintances? They don't seem like the huggy type to me. It stops it from attacking you ("oh, hey, sorry, I didn't recognize you. Let me just kill these adventurers and then let's catch up.") but friendly NPCs, per the DMG, are inclined to help you automatically only if it costs them nothing. Anything more than that requires a persuasion roll. Basically, if Charm Person worked, you wouldn't need it, because you could also just disguise yourself as his mother and ask him that way... or maybe even get the subject's actual mother to beg him to cooperate. ("I don't know what you're mixed up in, but tell the police what you know and let's go home!")

Re-read the Charm Person spell and the Charmed condition in the 5E PHB.

Never mind me, I momentarily forgot which forum I was in and looked at the wrong edition's DMG.

Coidzor

2014-12-13, 02:24 PM

(Emphasis mine).

No such thing as inherently evil, IMO. No action on it's own is evil or good, moral or not moral, because actions have no positive or negative demarcation. We, the people, put those bounds.
It's an old and ongoing dispute among philosophers regarding ethics, anyways, I'm just saying I'm on this side. Killing someone can be a good thing.

You really don't want to take the position that you can justify raping someone, though. You really, really do not.

You don't need torture or rape to be justifiable in order to have killing be justifiable, D&D already accomplished that back in 3rd. Remarkably well given the doggerel that's generally put out by the official sources on alignment and morality.

Angelalex242

2014-12-13, 03:30 PM

I think that's the point of this thread. Torture is just as unjustifiable.

Kyutaru

2014-12-13, 03:49 PM

I'm not jumping on the rape bandwagon because that can be passed off as animal instinct over-sensitized by modern society. It's wrong by our standards now but it was common practice in eras bygone and still is in the animal kingdom.

(Emphasis mine).

No such thing as inherently evil, IMO. No action on it's own is evil or good, moral or not moral, because actions have no positive or negative demarcation. We, the people, put those bounds.
It's an old and ongoing dispute among philosophers regarding ethics, anyways, I'm just saying I'm on this side. Killing someone can be a good thing.

What I will say is how does stealing someone's soul fit into this theory?

Citrakayah

2014-12-13, 03:55 PM

I'm not jumping on the rape bandwagon because that can be passed off as animal instinct over-sensitized by modern society. It's wrong by our standards now but it was common practice in eras bygone and still is in the animal kingdom.

So is cannibalism, torture, casual murder, infanticide, et cetera. I'm confused as to what exactly your point is.

Angelalex242

2014-12-13, 04:01 PM

Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny... </wronggame>

GuesssWho

2014-12-13, 04:31 PM

So is cannibalism, torture, casual murder, infanticide, et cetera. I'm confused as to what exactly your point is.

In fact, I can justify cannibalism and infanticide WAY easier than rape. Rape is one of the most pointlessly brutal acts of torture known to man.

Sartharina

2014-12-13, 06:27 PM

The spirit of the terms Murder and Rape are tautologically evil (The terms might get muddied up in the legal definitions, though) - if it's not Evil, it's not Murder or Rape.

Forum Explorer

2014-12-13, 06:46 PM

The spirit of the terms Murder and Rape are tautologically evil (The terms might get muddied up in the legal definitions, though) - if it's not Evil, it's not Murder or Rape.

Murder isn't though, not really. Well, depending on your definition (if you define it as 'the evil killing of an individual', well...)

But going by the definition of an 'unlawful and premeditated killing of an individual.' Well I can see a lot of times where that can be seen as not evil, or even as good. Assassinating an evil tyrant to ensure a peaceful succession rather then a bloody civil war for example. It's certainly illegal and premeditated.

Also, also I don't really believe in the 'spirit' of any term. Words mean what they mean. They don't carry any intentions all by themselves. They can carry intentions in how they are used, but in isolation they do not.

As for Rape being evil, well I literally cannot imagine a situation where it wouldn't be a horrible act to inflict on another person for the personal pleasure of an individual. So yeah, it seems pretty evil from a human perspective.

Janus

2014-12-13, 11:20 PM

Angelalex242

2014-12-13, 11:33 PM

They also drink from toilets and are the friendliest, happiest creatures on the earth. (most of the time)

The point being I would rather be trapped on an island with a dog or two then people and/or characters who do things mentioned in this thread.

pwykersotz

2014-12-13, 11:45 PM

Janus

2014-12-14, 03:10 AM

What (if any) types of torture are Neutral? Does negative reinforcement fall better here? How about setting an example of the tortured person so that others might not do the same?

ROUND 2...FIGHT!!! :smalltongue:
Motive!
Good Torture: "This hurts me more than it hurts you." *applies waterboard*
Neutral Torture: "This hurts us equally." *applies thumbscrews*
Evil Torture: "This hurts you more than it hurts me." *applies pear of anguish*

Mandrake

2014-12-14, 04:07 AM

You really don't want to take the position that you can justify raping someone, though. You really, really do not.

You don't need torture or rape to be justifiable in order to have killing be justifiable, D&D already accomplished that back in 3rd. Remarkably well given the doggerel that's generally put out by the official sources on alignment and morality.

I don't know which message to quote, so I'll just use this one, and relate to all others.

I suggest we look at this from another angle. Is eating an apple an evil act? Some would say no, but add in context, which can (especially in fantasy) be as wide as you wish - it's an apple that blocks heaven, it's an apple that supports all life on earth, it's an apple a starving man next to you desperately needed.
In other words, a seemingly neutral act can fit into a wide array of morality judgments. Same goes for anything else. How can I justify taking someone's soul? Well, what's the context? Maybe by showing that that will save souls of everybody else (I would gleefully donate my own). How can I justify killing a person? It was the only means I was able to stop that person from killing others.

And if you start down the road of "I'm responsible for my actions only", then remember that not stopping, or not acting is a choice you made and an action you took. You cannot flee from responsibility into an imaginary world of "as if I wasn't there". You are there, and sometimes it comes to that that there is no one else but you who makes the choice. No higher moral authority, no principle, no nothing. Just you. And you make your choice, but be careful not to condemn many people into sufferance just because you are unable to have forceful intercourse (which is disgusting and really won't happen anytime, I'm talking in theory right now). Also, others make similar choices and have the right to do so. A set of rules that streamlines all of our judgments maybe leads to general peace and well-being, but if we really want a good society, than we should teach everyone about being honest and good and most importantly responsible, as we all inevitably are.

I'll stop my ramble for now.

JAL_1138

2014-12-14, 07:41 AM

So we found a tenuous thread of something that if you squint sideways long enough through a prism, you can kind of justify as Good-aligned torture in a slim few alignment systems. Negative reinforcement.

How about Neutral? Surely a Good person who commits neutral acts is in less danger of their alignment being in danger. And churches of good might think of neutrality as a reasonable alternative to evil in many cases when they are unable/unwilling to find good alternatives.

What (if any) types of torture are Neutral? Does negative reinforcement fall better here? How about setting an example of the tortured person so that others might not do the same?

ROUND 2...FIGHT!!! :smalltongue:

Not sure if I can justify torture as neutral, nor want to--but a neutral person using evil methods some of the time, for ostensibly good-aligned goals, or in compliance with uncritically-accepted law and tradition? That's much easier. "It's unfortunate/unpleasant, but sometimes necessary..." or "It's harsh, but it's been the law for hundreds of years..." etc.

Sartharina

2014-12-14, 09:10 AM

"Hey - look on the bright side - at least you'll be able to go back to your family, friends and job after a few minutes/hours/tomorrow/by the end of the week. If you don't want to come back here, never pull a bull**** stunt like that again. Sure, your back will always ache, and you might need to get a prosthetic to replace your hand, but you should still be able to figure it out and manage."

... Unless you'd rather be stripped of all personal belongings and dignity and locked in a chaotic complex surrounded by thousands of other, far worse and more violent criminals than yourself, with peace barely maintained by power-crazed, underpaid guards unwilling to risk their lives to save you from the others, where you have to become the most ruthless and toughest bastard imaginable just to keep your ass unviolated for the next few years/decades of your youth, all while your trade skills atrophy, your coworkers and friends forget about you, your career is permanently over, your family languishes without you... and when you do get out again, you're never going to be able to have the dignity of gainful employment nor have a voice in your community ever again. Oh yeah... and the mental trauma will never go away either."

Deal, or No Deal?

Citrakayah

2014-12-14, 09:40 AM

I don't know which message to quote, so I'll just use this one, and relate to all others.

I suggest we look at this from another angle. Is eating an apple an evil act? Some would say no, but add in context, which can (especially in fantasy) be as wide as you wish - it's an apple that blocks heaven, it's an apple that supports all life on earth, it's an apple a starving man next to you desperately needed.
In other words, a seemingly neutral act can fit into a wide array of morality judgments. Same goes for anything else. How can I justify taking someone's soul? Well, what's the context? Maybe by showing that that will save souls of everybody else (I would gleefully donate my own). How can I justify killing a person? It was the only means I was able to stop that person from killing others.

And if you start down the road of "I'm responsible for my actions only", then remember that not stopping, or not acting is a choice you made and an action you took. You cannot flee from responsibility into an imaginary world of "as if I wasn't there". You are there, and sometimes it comes to that that there is no one else but you who makes the choice. No higher moral authority, no principle, no nothing. Just you. And you make your choice, but be careful not to condemn many people into sufferance just because you are unable to have forceful intercourse (which is disgusting and really won't happen anytime, I'm talking in theory right now). Also, others make similar choices and have the right to do so. A set of rules that streamlines all of our judgments maybe leads to general peace and well-being, but if we really want a good society, than we should teach everyone about being honest and good and most importantly responsible, as we all inevitably are.

I'll stop my ramble for now.

Look, if your DM is putting you in a situation where either you rape someone or a bajillion people suffer agonizing torture for eternity, you need to find a new DM.