Talakeal's Gaming Horror Stories Continued (not really)

[zinycor]

I really don't get this Talakeal, You say neither you nor your players had fun, which you recognize as a problem. But, at the same time, you don't see you doing anything wrong, even when pointed out to you.

A few things:

First: It may be logical, but it is still a waste of time and effort; it will be know easier to kill the trolls now than it would have been in the first place.

Players don't know the consequences of their ations before taking them, Silly of you to point this out.

Second: Evil or not, the trolls are legitimately their allies at this point, and having a tribe of trolls could be extremely helpful in the future.

As far as I understand the situation, the players don't want to kill the trolls becasue of their lack of utility, but because of the horrible acts they commited

Third: It wasn't technically mind-control. I said it was a modified Gaes, the actual effects of which are that either side takes some psychic damage if they attack the other in the mountain.


Fourth: The PCs voluntarily agreed to take a mystical oath.

Sixth: It did go both ways. Every one of the trolls also took the oath and suffers the exact same effects should they betray the party.

Doesn't make it any better. Now the players are guilty of having helped the trolls under threat of damage

Fifth: I am not sure if I agree with that premise. I can think of many situations where you would want to be mind controlled by an ally, and I don't think its weird to have something that verifies the loyalty of a potential new ally who has yet to prove their motivations.

I can't think of any situations where I would like to be mind crontrolled, I can think of several where I would rather die than being mind controlled.

The trolls where always led by a powerful shaman; I actually created the dungeon well before any of the players even signed onto the campaign, and that was always the idea.

I don't recall if the players knew this before approaching the trolls entirely, but they certainly knew this before entering their domain, when they first tried to talk to the troll lookouts they were told that they would need to speak with the shaman before an alliance could be made, and the PCs asked to be brought to the shaman.

Are you seriously saying that because a monster's leader has character levels the PCs should be quaking in their boots and hesitant about the whole adventure? Because that is the case with pretty much every adventure I have ever run, played in, or module I read through, so that seems like a pretty weird statement.

(emphasis mine) Well, yeah, that's pretty much how I act whenever i face a monster with class levels, specially one that can cast spells as incredible as a modifed version of Geass.

I will have to take your word for it that it isn't a rule in 5E. I know for a fact good characters can slay evil characters to their heart's content in 1E-3.5E, but I am afb at the moment so I don't know what 5E has to say about it. I assume that it is silent about the issue one way or the other though, leading it up to the DM to decide.

I personally don't enforce alignment as anything more than a guide line. But I do recognize that there is a distinction "fanatical guy who slays evil without mercy" and "sadist who kills anyone weaker than them for fun".

I did not say it was 5E, I said it was like E6. I am playing a simplified version of my own Heart of Darkness system which has designed to teach beginners who are new to RPGs.

Heart of Darkness is a streamlined d20 game that is the same general rules and themes as D&D, although it has gothic and western elements to the setting (think Stephen King's dark tower series) and rather than having strict classes character creation is a bit more freeform (think Exalted). But for the purposes of a story like this if you think of it as 3E D&D played at the lower-mid levels of (both literal levels and optimization) that should work fine.

My bad, however you might want to talk to your players about these moral issues, I know my table would not be okay with good characters doing genocide.