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Jorren
2020-05-26, 02:57 PM
No, this isn’t an alignment thread. Particularly since I haven’t played D&D since 3E.

No, this is about the notion of professional adventurers, as typically portrayed in rpgs; a default I suppose for many genres. Nor does it apply to games that treat adventuring as an infrequent event (such as Ars Magica). Rather the idea that the group is a small band that takes on dangerous missions on a (more or less) full-time basis.

I’ve played with a number or groups and played a variety of games over the past 40 years, but with the group I played with the longest there was a consistent dynamic with how we treated the adventuring group. Namely, that despite having a variety of talents and resources at our disposal our job was to kill, and to kill efficiently. This tended to be consistent even among differing personalities and goals of individual player characters. While we had our share of support characters, faces, healers, etc., and we often took a variety of approaches such as stealth, diplomacy, trickery, etc., the group still often kept a general identity of professional killers and mercenaries.

Over time as we tended to play the same characters over a long period, we had a bit of fun trying to get into the headspace of pcs who have been adventuring for years and years. Now no one went full Colonel Kurtz (a la Apocalypse Now), but it was more of a black humor thing rather than anything particularly grimdark. As in ‘what are we gonna do with this captured bugbear this time? That orcish obstacle course thing is kinda getting old now.’ The group identity over time became something along the lines of thugs who try to pass themselves off as respectable adventurers. We tended to act reasonable and law-abiding until we were in a situation where no one was looking or we were far from civilized areas, whence we tended to go back to our preferred methods of expediency. Some guys did keep their heroic original concept that they had when they built their character (and usually ended up bringing in someone else after role-playing the eventual fallout with the group) but just as many had fun with the gradual slide into questionable behavior.

Granted that most rpgs don’t try to model anything resembling the detailed psychology of pcs, but I was curious as to whether anyone else had looked at the effect of extended activities of the sort that longtime adventuring might have on pcs in a game that normally doesn’t model it. I know that games like Unknown Armies, Vampire, and Call of Cthulhu have mechanics that sort of cover this sort of thing but I was more interested in the players themselves making an attempt to model this sort of thing separate from the game mechanics. More of in a semi-serious entertaining way as opposed to some sort of dry academic thing (something like Watchmen except with more joking around).

Democratus
2020-05-26, 04:28 PM
Depends on the kind of story you want to tell.

Heracles travelled the world murdering and slaying all the way. Up until the point that he was tricked into killing his own family, he was just fine. Slaying monsters is what heroes do in the Greek world.

Viking epic tradition is much the same. Go out. Kill all the things. Get all the treasure. And make a name that will never be forgotten!

For some kind of "mental fatigue" rule in D&D, there is Adventures in Middle Earth: a 5e expansion that has a mechanic called 'Shadow Points'. One way to build them up is to do intentional misdeeds. Too many Shadow Points and your character becomes Miserable. This state can cause mental instability and even eventually to the loss of the character as a PC.

mucat
2020-05-26, 04:56 PM
I don't know if our group is unusual in that we've never really played characters who see themselves as "full-time adventurers". Adventure is a thing that happens while you were making other plans...and the characters fully believe they'll be returning to those other plans once this crisis is over. As players, of course, we know the "crisis" won't let up until we're ready to wrap up the campaign...

But yes, many of them do end up, through sheer necessity, doing things that would once have horrified them. I don't mean convenience-that-we-call-necessity-because-it-sounds-better, although that sometimes happens too...but actual necessity, where no matter what they do, someone's gonna be hurt, and all they can do is try to nudge the landslide of events away from the things they value most, and live (or not) with the consequences.

If we're playing a d20-type system, the GM usually doesn't try to model the psychological toll in game rules, though we'll talk between sessions about how the characters are dealing with game events, and how it might change them. One of our GMs does like to assign new Pathfinder traits (which are a sort of mini-feat) to reflect the characters' accomplishments or scars, and we might also find a way to model things like addictions in game terms.

In a system like FATE, on the other hand, the character's beliefs and passions are directly tied to their game mechanics; an Aspect like "Vive la France!" or "Nothing Lies Beyond the Reach of Science!" gives a very real mechanical edge to the character it belongs to. The gradual shifts that these Aspects undergo is at least as big a part of a character's development as the skill points they gain. When your naive idealist becomes a hard-drinking cynic, she not only feels different, but she plays different...and those few Aspects you might leave on her sheet that form a sort of bridge to who she used to be -- or the player's choice to drop those Aspects and burn that bridge -- take on real importance.

Ignimortis
2020-05-26, 11:19 PM
Granted that most rpgs don’t try to model anything resembling the detailed psychology of pcs, but I was curious as to whether anyone else had looked at the effect of extended activities of the sort that longtime adventuring might have on pcs in a game that normally doesn’t model it. I know that games like Unknown Armies, Vampire, and Call of Cthulhu have mechanics that sort of cover this sort of thing but I was more interested in the players themselves making an attempt to model this sort of thing separate from the game mechanics. More of in a semi-serious entertaining way as opposed to some sort of dry academic thing (something like Watchmen except with more joking around).

Frankly, the only times I had fun with roleplaying doubts and mental instability over murder is when the system didn't try and force me. Vampire felt best when the ST just said "alright, as long as you don't do anything really heinous and limit yourself to somewhat justified murder, your Humanity won't go below 5", and that felt just right to me.

But our next game was Shadowrun, and after a year I'm still not done roleplaying the whole psychological thing my streetsam developed over once being an unrepentant mass murderer (well, killer, since all of them were armed and technically dangerous - just not to a person who is five times as fast and can tank small arms fire almost indefinitely) and then suddenly gaining just a little bit of insight and empathy for what other people feel.

D&D is just mythic. You save the innocent, and the wicked get what they deserve.

MoiMagnus
2020-05-27, 03:32 AM
Granted that most rpgs don’t try to model anything resembling the detailed psychology of pcs, but I was curious as to whether anyone else had looked at the effect of extended activities of the sort that longtime adventuring might have on pcs in a game that normally doesn’t model it. I know that games like Unknown Armies, Vampire, and Call of Cthulhu have mechanics that sort of cover this sort of thing but I was more interested in the players themselves making an attempt to model this sort of thing separate from the game mechanics. More of in a semi-serious entertaining way as opposed to some sort of dry academic thing (something like Watchmen except with more joking around).

Something that works quite well in D&D is once your reach ~1/3 of the campaign (so the personality of the PCs is well established), you can portray for every PC "what kind of madness they are leaning toward".
[Ours were Mage -> pyromaniac; Paladin -> dangerously masochist; Priest -> god-level arrogance; Party's leader -> paranoia/distrust of the team; Rogue -> hopelessness and running away (and joining evil?)]
This allowed (1) to represent that all the horrible things we lived, combined with the high level of power we obtained, had an influence over us, and (2) for the DM's homebrew effects that dealt with loss of control to madness, or nightmares, to have some easy interpretation.

EggKookoo
2020-05-27, 05:42 AM
I tend to present threats as kill-or-be-killed, so it doesn't impact the PCs' morality all that much. My current campaign is not very kick-in-the-door but rather the PCs are typically on a mission to find something or escape from something or otherwise have a larger goal prompting them to enter the dungeon or complex or whatever. Monsters attack while trying to prevent that, so fighting is often a necessity. Still, unless the the PCs explicitly say they finish off a creature that they've reduced to 0 HP, I reserve the right to have it stabilize eventually and scurry off. So even when they "kill" they're not always actually killing.

But even so, a career of this will eventually wear on them. But I don't expect to need a mechanical system for it. More that the PCs will develop some level of PTSD, which in turn will affect how NPCs view them. It's a roleplaying guide, mostly for me when describing the aura their thousand-yard stare generates.

King of Nowhere
2020-05-27, 10:59 AM
didn't happen at my table. what happened is that every pc started with a different level of idealism, and eventually we compromised around an average. we didn't take a slippery slope of becoming more callous. in fact, we are perhaps a bit less callous than we were in the beginning, because now we are so powerful that we don't have to worry about stuff killing us too much. you can afford the luxury of sparing an opponent when that opponent is not dangerous to you

The Shoeless
2020-05-27, 11:55 AM
When I am the GM, I keep my hands of the player characters minds. Feels much to Gotcha!. I have yet to find a system for mental stability that I like.

On the rare occasion I am a player rather than the GM, when one or more players up the murderhoboing to eleven and still consider themselves heroes it can be a very fun scene to call them out on that.

GM: "Your force arrow hits the last of the fleeing pickpockets in the back, and he tumbles to the ground. After the dust settles, you quickly find your missing gold pieces on his body."
Knight-Mage Overhero: "Peace and law have been restored. That's for touching my stuff, guys!"
Me: "I look at the body. How old do I guess the young man was?"

Sounds silly, but in my experience, a characters sanity check is not as useful as a players reality check to get some very good roleplaying out of some of the more questionable decisions. Let the player decide how the characters looks at themselves in the mirror each morning.

Jorren
2020-05-27, 03:52 PM
GM: "Your force arrow hits the last of the fleeing pickpockets in the back, and he tumbles to the ground. After the dust settles, you quickly find your missing gold pieces on his body."
Knight-Mage Overhero: "Peace and law have been restored. That's for touching my stuff, guys!"
Me: "I look at the body. How old do I guess the young man was?"

Sounds silly, but in my experience, a characters sanity check is not as useful as a players reality check to get some very good roleplaying out of some of the more questionable decisions. Let the player decide how the characters looks at themselves in the mirror each morning.

Yeah, this is more in the vein of what I was talking about. Some the mechanics of modern games cover these things in a general sense, but many of them (like oWOD's humanity system) feel clunky. I think this can be facilitated by the game master by giving out small details in the game as opposed to 'you get a dark side point' or similar. Our DM in the past was also more of hands-off guy in terms of heroics vs. not-so heroic, so that helped too.

I particularly like Delta Green's system of bonds, even though I haven't actually given it a spin in actual play. I also like the aspect of horror in the game being drawn not so much from the cosmic horrors that the characters are facing, as much as it is what extent the characters are willing to go to to combat those forces.

awa
2020-05-27, 03:56 PM
As a general statement I'm not found of mechanically enforced morality they are usually clunky at best and are often bizarre like making you go insane for killing someone.

Though I do tend to believe that pcs are a little bit off, and I do have fun with that; I remember once talking with the other players about how the npcs we rescued must see us. A handful of blood stained manics bursting into the slaves room gore dripping from our weapons, wearing equitment taken fresh off corpses as we meticulously steal every thing of value as we then smash open their cells and take them out past an entire bandit/slaver gang that has been scattered through the cave system.


to shoeless
part of that can run into player dm disconnect.

For instance I ran into a situation similar to that except the pickpockets tried to fight, and while we were much higher level and the fight was a joke we did not buy that a level 5 rouge with over a thousand gold worth of equipment could be a desperate down on his luck guy. While the dm apparently though that an Oliver twist type should have a master work short sword some alchemist items and multiple class levels. In his mind it was someone we should have spared in are mind we had zero interest in him trying to guilt us after the fact.

Now that was an extreme disconnect but some times part of the problem is not just the players but also the dms description and peoples setting expectations.

On top of that prisoners are rarely fun, you need to stop them from stabbing you in your sleep, running always, ect. If your tracking food and water now they deduct from that. While the moral thing may be to take them to the authorities first they need to be in a head space where that is even an option and second they need to be willing to put up with the inconvenience on their fun.

Of course all that assumes a prison is even viable whats a level 1 town guard going to do to hold a level 10 barbarian.

This gets back to what I was saying before any one of these things may seem like a problem which if the dm/player on not on the same wave length can throw a wrench in thinks. Its not just on the players side, not all dms have the exact same strengths and suddenly trying to talk to multiple captured bandits and stuff can derail what they have planed.

The Shoeless
2020-05-27, 06:09 PM
part of that can run into player dm disconnect.

For instance I ran into a situation similar to that except the pickpockets tried to fight, and while we were much higher level and the fight was a joke we did not buy that a level 5 rouge with over a thousand gold worth of equipment could be a desperate down on his luck guy. While the dm apparently though that an Oliver twist type should have a master work short sword some alchemist items and multiple class levels. In his mind it was someone we should have spared in are mind we had zero interest in him trying to guilt us after the fact.

Now that was an extreme disconnect but some times part of the problem is not just the players but also the dms description and peoples setting expectations.


I agree completely. The DM can't judge on this topic without risking disconnect. They can try via NPCs voicing moral opinions, but at least with those a character can choose to disagree :smallamused:


On top of that prisoners are rarely fun, you need to stop them from stabbing you in your sleep, running always, ect. If your tracking food and water now they deduct from that. While the moral thing may be to take them to the authorities first they need to be in a head space where that is even an option and second they need to be willing to put up with the inconvenience on their fun.

Of course all that assumes a prison is even viable whats a level 1 town guard going to do to hold a level 10 barbarian.

This gets back to what I was saying before any one of these things may seem like a problem which if the dm/player on not on the same wave length can throw a wrench in thinks. Its not just on the players side, not all dms have the exact same strengths and suddenly trying to talk to multiple captured bandits and stuff can derail what they have planed.

Also agreed. Though I sometimes think this is a design flaw of D20 systems. Rather than the players murderhoboing or the GM railroading, the game pushes everyone in a specific direction. Just the start of an idea right now, I will give this some thought.

awa
2020-05-27, 07:01 PM
Well if you want to hear my solution to it in the current game. The party has a group of npc followers who follow along off screen carrying supplies and taking care of horses. They stay far enough back that they are largely ignored during game play but they are close enough to take charge of captives.

there are other things going on that also contribute to this but those are setting specific like the fact that the gods are active in the setting and care about oaths, if foes surrender and then try and unsurrender latter they risk being cursed.

RazorChain
2020-05-27, 09:16 PM
I named the current campaign I'm running: Are we the bad guys? I'm using no mechanics for morality but the PC's have been forced so many times to compromise their morality and that has taken toll. It's fun to see how this has hardened them and how callous they have become in comparison how they first started out.

jjordan
2020-05-27, 09:51 PM
PTSD is a possible result of near death experiences in my game. This can manifest in different ways including nightmares that prevent/interrupt sleep (and potentially prevent long-rest recovery), hallucinations, or sudden episodes of lowered functionality when triggered by certain conditions. But I leave the internal soul-searching to the players.

I know that Order of the Stick caused me to re-evaluate how I play the game. Last game I was in I negotiated an ending to a fight with a bunch of goblins. Not because we couldn't win, we had them cold, but because I understood why they were raiding and didn't see any point to killing them. It's a toss up who was more confused, the DM or the other players.

Rerednaw
2020-05-28, 12:27 PM
Well there is the separation of the game from reality. The game is an escape, a fantasy, you yourself (hopefully!) would not relish the idea of breaking into someone's home, slaughtering everyone and looting their bodies as they life's blood still drips of your armor and weapons.

Then again in most RPGs I also played many diplomats or used non-lethal methods (sleep, stun, etc.) as their combat style. If the group was nothing but Diablo-esque kill reward repeat, my characters could leave. As for myself if I want a video game experience, I will play a video game. But even I will admit after a crappy week at work sometimes I want to fire up ol' Mardar Habo the Grimslayer as well. :)

mindstalk
2020-06-09, 05:45 PM
Depends what you're killing. Bestial monsters or intelligent ones?

I haven't been in many long games, but I tend to play hero types, who will try to be non-lethal, and take prisoners. In the Exalted game the players were largely on board. In the Pathfinder game my PC had to exert stubbornness and alternatives (like taking Read Thoughts to avoid the other PCs torturing prisoners) and tended to get her way through "this is my line in the sand". Use of Slumber to take prisoners, though less so after my GM found it's full-action rather than standard-action. City prisoners got turned over to authorities (or "authorities"), outside ones tended to get released minus their gear, high-ranking casters might get killed for inherent danger and past crimes. (Our recurrent opposition was the Emerald Claw, a terrorist group; my PC tried to understand them and convert at least captured underlings.)