Official OGL Discussion Thread

[EggKookoo]

All the D&D players I see are alignment "kill them all, they'll get the afterlife they deserve, and now they don't need stuff so we can take everything not sufficently nailed down" anyways. Yes, even when the supposed "social blowback" gets talked about. You just kill them all too and end up richer.

I don't want to judge anyone else's table fun but I feel like a halfway attentive DM can create NPCs capable of constraining the party if needed.

[Telok]

I don't want to judge anyone else's table fun but I feel like a halfway attentive DM can create NPCs capable of constraining the party if needed.

That's really getting into a D&D issue: Elminster syndrome or a weirdly high level city watch or "why adventurers when a few knights are better".

You've got npcs, singly or in small groups, who are more powerful than your party of murderhobos and have the free time & ability to police the pc's actions. So why aren't they doing the job if they're so much more powerful? And if there's "constraints" to justify the pcs being used instead of npc vs weaker npc then those constraints should be applying to the npc vs weaker pc actions too. Unless we're just doing video game style invisible walls and indestructible guards that only affect players.

Forcing D&D murderhobos into socially acceptable behavior with threats of violence doesn't work well. You end up breaking combat-as-sport, "level appropriate" concepts, and/or coherent & belivable world building.

[EggKookoo]

That's really getting into a D&D issue: Elminster syndrome or a weirdly high level city watch or "why adventurers when a few knights are better".

You've got npcs, singly or in small groups, who are more powerful than your party of murderhobos and have the free time & ability to police the pc's actions. So why aren't they doing the job if they're so much more powerful? And if there's "constraints" to justify the pcs being used instead of npc vs weaker npc then those constraints should be applying to the npc vs weaker pc actions too. Unless we're just doing video game style invisible walls and indestructible guards that only affect players.

Forcing D&D murderhobos into socially acceptable behavior with threats of violence doesn't work well. You end up breaking combat-as-sport, "level appropriate" concepts, and/or coherent & belivable world building.

All right, well, we're off-topic from the off-topic topic that sprouted from the original topic, so we can let it go at least in this thread.

[KorvinStarmast]

Perhaps the "problematic" thing is that the Spelljammer adventure didn't sell well enough for the goons in accounting to greenlight anything else.

I’m pretty sure that was the joke.

Anyways, sixth-ed or seventh-ed.

Heneree the Eighth I am I am, Heneree the EIghth I am!
[QUOTE=Devils_Advocate;25722019]How is alignment useful for that? D&D ain't World of Darkness; there aren't really any special penalties for evil. Violence against your culture's enemies is as viable as in real life.

But either way, when player characters delve into monster-infested ruins of fallen civilizations to claim their lost treasures, they're plunging into enemy territory in order to loot what they can manage.

Correct.

"Is there a way in which they're better than the fanged green raiders of the human village who do the same thing?" feels like a pretty relevant question.

No, it doesn't. Those ruins or catacombs or caves or tunnels are not necessarily occupied by anyone at all; might be oozes, might be skeletons, Might be giant snakes, might be mummies.
Who is there is very setting dependent, campaign dependent, and adventure dependent.
I have pointed out before that a great many of the dungeon delves we did in the early days ran into a lot of undead and oozes, with occasional interactions that included dwarves, elves, goblins, etc.
Wraiths and wights tended to be a few levels down, but ghouls were very common and quite scary for level 1 and 2 adventurers in those early editions.

[Devils_Advocate]

Yes, it does. You can replace "How is violence against orcs better than violence against humans?" with "How is violence against the undead worse than violence against the living?" or "How is violence against beasts better than violence against humanoids?" without ever answering any of those questions or, more to the point, ever addressing the underlying questions "What justifies the use of violence?", "How is violence bad?", etc. It's murderhobos all the way down, as it were.

That's really getting into a D&D issue: Elminster syndrome or a weirdly high level city watch or "why adventurers when a few knights are better".

You've got npcs, singly or in small groups, who are more powerful than your party of murderhobos and have the free time & ability to police the pc's actions. So why aren't they doing the job if they're so much more powerful? And if there's "constraints" to justify the pcs being used instead of npc vs weaker npc then those constraints should be applying to the npc vs weaker pc actions too. Unless we're just doing video game style invisible walls and indestructible guards that only affect players.

Forcing D&D murderhobos into socially acceptable behavior with threats of violence doesn't work well. You end up breaking combat-as-sport, "level appropriate" concepts, and/or coherent & belivable world building.

Well, only up to a point. The default assumption is that greedy, bloodthirsty mercenaries — ahem, adventurers — of all levels exist in the world, but are increasingly rare with increasingly high level. And within that paradigm, you don't send dragon-slayers in to do a goblin-slaying job because that's utter overkill when you can hire goblin-slayers for a fraction of the price. The PCs presumably demand much larger piles of gold for their services at dragon-slaying level than they did at goblin-slaying level, and you can bet your sweet behind that their peers are no different! (On the other hand, actual dragon-slaying tends to pay for itself, so the hard part there is mostly finding sufficiently qualified parties.)

Now, don't get me wrong: The more powerful the player characters are, the more they can get away with, not only because stopping them is decreasingly worth the trouble, but also because them stopping bigger and bigger threats to the status quo makes it more desirable to those in power that they continue doing their thing. So if they are in the business of slaying monsters for piles of gold or magic items or huge tracts of lands or whatever, surviving long enough may well mean that they can kill the occasional commoner without much repercussion, because of how leveling up works. But while the limits of what will be tolerated change, there remain limits. If the PCs' costs to anyone ever exceed their benefits plus the cost of having the PCs, ahem, eliminated, well, it's simple math. And they can fully expect that they'll be outmatched to the same degree to which they outmatch their own foes when hired to slay monsters, because exactly the same principle applies: the employer wants someone who will get the job done for the lowest price. So the encounter should be balanced normally; the PCs are just on the opposite side from the one they're used to. Hey, they asked for hard mode!

There's always a bigger fish, and certain setting details demand that some possible courses of action will result in the PCs encountering fish larger than them instead of smaller.

[MoiMagnus]

Forcing D&D murderhobos into socially acceptable behavior with threats of violence doesn't work well. You end up breaking combat-as-sport, "level appropriate" concepts, and/or coherent & belivable world building.

"Combat as sport" and "level appropriate" are table conventions I enjoy, however like all table conventions they only make sense if they go both ways.
While a prior warning from the GM would be welcome, it's ok for the GM to break the "level appropriate" promise if the players break the "not being murdehobos" promise or do other things equally stupid (like trying to assassinate a deity or something).
[The prior warning is welcome because it's not always clear to players that they are breaking their part of the deal, so it's a good thing to remind them beforehand]

Admittedly, on a table that is fully "combat as sport", I'd halfly expect the GM to narrate the loss of the group rather than wasting time playing an unwinnable battle, but it's not mandatory.

[Telok]

Admittedly, on a table that is fully "combat as sport", I'd halfly expect the GM to narrate the loss of the group rather than wasting time playing an unwinnable battle, but it's not mandatory.

So you advise just railroad cutscene to party into a jail scenario because they're 11th level murderhobos who can legit wipe out 100+ town guards and leaders?

[Devils_Advocate]

"Combat as sport" and "level appropriate" are table conventions I enjoy, however like all table conventions they only make sense if they go both ways.

And so far as "coherent & believable world building" goes, well, turn that earlier point around. If there are reasons why higher-level NPCs don't waltz in and wipe the floor with the PCs, how do the same considerations not prevent the PCs from doing the same to lower-level NPCs?

"The PCs are the most powerful people around" is a non-standard assumption that one should fully anticipate might warp what happens at the table. Make the player characters demigods of the setting such that this small group of freaks is of comparable power to a mid-sized empire, and that naturally becomes the scale on which they operate.

If you want to go that direction, maybe look to Exalted for inspiration. (E.g., note its premise that the many parties yet more powerful than the PCs are pretty much all busy desperately fighting each other in this period of intense turmoil, thus explaining why they'd plausibly ignore the Magikarp Power weirdos whose main early advantage is "rapid leveling" until it's too late.)

[NichG]

Not a good idea to DM yourself into a corner. Don't set yourself up committing something where the possible outcomes aren't tolerable in a metagame sense: 'rocks fall everybody dies' or 'you're all arrested by the guard and imprisoned/executed' might be realistic, but game won't continue if you pull that stuff. Similarly, its not great if you end up flinching when those things are the only consequence left to you that makes sense in a situation. So the answer is don't set yourself on that road to begin with, since it doesn't go anywhere good.

[KorvinStarmast]

"How is violence against the undead worse than violence against the living?"

It isn't. See genre for why.

[Devils_Advocate]

Ugh, that should have been "better", not "worse", like in the other two questions.

Genres are pretty broad. What specifically did you see as relevant?

Anyway, dismissing victims as not being "anyone at all" is, at best, a semantic argument and not really an ethical one. That doesn't justify your disdain, it just underlines it, dig what I'm saying?

[KorvinStarmast]

Genres are pretty broad. What specifically did you see as relevant?

Might want to check out the "put a stake in a vampire's heart to destroy him" element of the genre.

... dig what I'm saying?

You put the stake in his heart whether he's in his coffin or not.

The attempt at equivalence between the living and the undead is either willful ignorance of genre conventions, or yet another failed attempt at trope subversion.

I'll admit that I find it difficult to understand others' perspectives on the matter.

Noticed that.

To me, alignment only makes sense as a setting element.

TBH, I find my self in about 90% agreement with that approach to alignment. It's a tool that can be used effectively.
It can also be used clumsily which ends up with unintended damage to the work piece.
(I was gonna mention the page count yesterday, so thanks for saving me that. Agree that this one's run its course)

[Vahnavoi]

In vampire and zombie fiction, the question of how okay it is to kill the undead has done loop-de-loops for decades. The answer depends on what specific thing they are supposed to stand for this Tuesday, which in turn depends on what author of a specific work has been smoking and whose kool-aid they've been drinking.

The more important point to take away from Devil's Advocate is that anyone wishing to concern troll can easily bog down a conversation by insincerely asking these kind of questions. The next step usually is drawing attention to hypothetical (mis)interpretations, even and especially when there is no proof anyone is acting on that interpretation.

[Segev]

In vampire and zombie fiction, the question of how okay it is to kill the undead has done loop-de-loops for decades. The answer depends on what specific thing they are supposed to stand for this Tuesday, which in turn depends on what author of a specific work has been smoking and whose kool-aid they've been drinking.

The more important point to take away from Devil's Advocate is that anyone wishing to concern troll can easily bog down a conversation by insincerely asking these kind of questions. The next step usually is drawing attention to hypothetical (mis)interpretations, even and especially when there is no proof anyone is acting on that interpretation.

"It's okay to kill [this brand of] zombies because they aren't people. No, really, the people died; those are just ambuatory corpses. Practically forces of unnatural nature. It may even be that putting them down is a mercy, as their existence may be pain. If it's anything at all."

"It's okay to kill [these] vampires because they are unabashed murderous monsters who haven't an ounce of humanity or empathy to them. They are the worst kind of rabid beast just very good at pretending to be civil until they can get their fangs into the innocent."

The ones it's not okay to kill generally are more human-like in awareness and agency. Zombies will rarely fit this bill. Vampires vary wildly between "just humans, but with powers and dietary needs and a few curses," and "monsters that only look human but lack anything that would make them count as having real agency, or at least any moral ability to use that agency for aught but mass murder."

[Vahnavoi]

And it's all fine and dandy until some author decides to turn it all on its head.

For example, in Franken Fran, if I recall right, there's a zombie segment where it's ultimately revealed the zombies are still aware of what's happening, they just can't control their actions because of a disease. When the title character shows up with a cure and explains all this, the protagonists of the segment have a mental breakdown over all the lives they took.

But the actual answers don't matter to a concern troll, because a concern troll is not interested in the answer. The question is asked only to make people worry about what (often, unnamed and unqualified) other people would think.

[KorvinStarmast]

"It's okay to kill [this brand of] zombies because they aren't people. No, really, the people died; those are just ambuatory corpses. Practically forces of unnatural nature. It may even be that putting them down is a mercy, as their existence may be pain. If it's anything at all."

"It's okay to kill [these] vampires because they are unabashed murderous monsters who haven't an ounce of humanity or empathy to them. They are the worst kind of rabid beast just very good at pretending to be civil until they can get their fangs into the innocent."

The ones it's not okay to kill generally are more human-like in awareness and agency. Zombies will rarely fit this bill. Vampires vary wildly between "just humans, but with powers and dietary needs and a few curses," and "monsters that only look human but lack anything that would make them count as having real agency, or at least any moral ability to use that agency for aught but mass murder."

It is OK to kill every vampire in the Twilight series, but since they never made the movie Blade Meets Twilight ... Hollywood failed again.

More to the point, the setting of the story and the manipulation of the trope is in the hands of an author - since this {censored} is all make believe in the first place.

[Segev]

And it's all fine and dandy until some author decides to turn it all on its head.

For example, in Franken Fran, if I recall right, there's a zombie segment where it's ultimately revealed the zombies are still aware of what's happening, they just can't control their actions because of a disease. When the title character shows up with a cure and explains all this, the protagonists of the segment have a mental breakdown over all the lives they took.

But the actual answers don't matter to a concern troll, because a concern troll is not interested in the answer. The question is asked only to make people worry about what (often, unnamed and unqualified) would think.

While it's tragic that all those lives were lost, zombies who can't control their actions and are a danger to others DO need to be contained, at the least, and if containment is not possible in a way that keeps the uninfected safe, killing them is as valid as if you were killing a determined band of rapacious gangsters in self-defense. Or orcs. Or human bandits. Or invading borg drones.

Which is to say, I totally get the characters being heartbroken and anguished over having unknowingly killed so many innocent victims, but they weren't wrong to do so unless they were making sport of it for on reason other than "acceptable targets." (I have no idea how things went in the story other than what was said in Vahnavoi's post.)

[Palanan]

Originally Poted by Vahnavoi
When the title character shows up with a cure and explains all this, the protagonists of the segment have a mental breakdown over all the lives they took.

This is pretty much the alternate ending of Will Smith’s “I Am Legend.” (Which was much better than the theatrical ending.)

Originally Posted by Vahnavoi
But the actual answers don't matter to a concern troll….

I’ve never seen this term before. What is this creature, and where do you find it?

[NichG]

Better to ask 'what are the moral implications of choosing to kill ...' than 'is it okay to kill ...' anyhow. The weight of those considerations will differ from person to person, context to context, leading to different choices even given the same premise.

But that's kind of the issue with genre or author conventions about behavior of characters within a setting - rather than presenting a situation in which there are moral implications which you can engage with or not and choose which angle to take and so on, you're starting from the conclusion. That's some of what puts an author at hazard for being seen as pushing a view of how they think the world should be rather than just impartially presenting a scenario. Presenting a scenario and letting people draw their own conclusions as to what is the proper thing to do should IMO provide some degree of insulation to the author with respect to criticisms of the morality that results. Not perfect insulation - railroading is a thing, and those methods can be used in fiction and setting design just as they can be used in play, but it mandates a much higher standard of argument than e.g. 'a bad thing exists in the setting, the author must support that bad thing'. Arguments about social harm don't obtain that same degree of insulation perhaps, though they do have to take a stance on the rationale behind the choice of which harms we do choose to permit and some we do not, and what justifies a particular harm as being on one side or the other.

[EggKookoo]

This is pretty much the alternate ending of Will Smith’s “I Am Legend.” (Which was much better than the theatrical ending.)

*stares in Vincent Price*

[Vahnavoi]

I’ve never seen this term before. What is this creature, and where do you find it?

It's a person who goes "interesting idea, but I have some concerns...", feigning support but then undermining the very idea. They thrive where ever there are well-meaning people who can't distinquish a genuine question from a rhetorical one.

[Telok]

*stares in Vincent Price

Bloody ninjas.

[Devils_Advocate]

Might want to check out the "put a stake in a vampire's heart to destroy him" element of the genre.
You put the stake in his heart whether he's in his coffin or not.

The attempt at equivalence between the living and the undead is either willful ignorance of genre conventions, or yet another failed attempt at trope subversion.

Is your point that the living in the setting are hostile to the undead? I wasn't expecting moral relativism, although that's one possible perspective. But even assuming that the right answer is whatever people say it is, there's a question of whether an individual's or culture's stance on a particular issue is at odds with other general principles that they endorse. In particular, the principle of fairness says that whatever is decided on is not ipso facto fine and dandy.

To clarify, I wasn't asking insincere rhetorical questions. More like sincere semi-rhetorical questions, since others answering them in this thread wasn't really "the point". My point was more that various works of fiction lend themselves to these sorts of questions. And I don't see that as a problem. Exploring our own values is a lot more interesting and appealing to me than "You're supposed to shut off the critical thinking part of your brain for this".

[Jack of Spades]

*stares in Vincent Price*

*Coughs in Richard Matheson*

[KorvinStarmast]

Is your point that the living in the setting are hostile to the undead?

The other way around.

[Trafalgar]

Exploring our own values is a lot more interesting and appealing to me than "You're supposed to shut off the critical thinking part of your brain for this".

Nothing we are talking about has anything to do with exploring our values or morality in the real world. Because this is all make believe. Are you saying "I value human life more than you because I refuse to allow my imaginary character kill an imaginary zombie?"

[Satinavian]

Might want to check out the "put a stake in a vampire's heart to destroy him" element of the genre.
You put the stake in his heart whether he's in his coffin or not.

Hmm, we know that vampire stories have primarily been about illicit sex for the last two hundred years. It is not exactly a new development or a twist, it is basically the core of the genre. The monster hunting is occasionally tacked on but far from universal and often just an euphemism for enforcing social mores. Twilight is not a new take, it is utterly typical and lacking any innovation. Blade is the strange one.

So in a way, questioning the vampire slaying and considering vampires as people (sexy dangerous criminal people) are basically genre convention.

None of that applies to zombies. Zombie sex stories are incredible niche and i don't know any from before the 00s. Zombie horror is a very different genre to anything involving vampires.

[EggKookoo]

Hmm, we know that vampire stories have primarily been about illicit sex for the last two hundred years.

How do we know this?

[Satinavian]

How do we know this?

Mainly because vampires were not particularly well known monsters or had all that many stories written about them before Victorian society discovered them as a vehicle to write about nightly visits of lovers and about homosexual relationships and about rape without being too crude and vulgar for civilized society. That was the first big explosion of vampire fiction and the one that pretty much codified the vampire itself (from various quite different undead myths). There were several similar vampire booms later, the last ones in living memory sparked with the Anne Rice novels (which are full of sex) and on smaller scale Twilight.


But make the following experiment :

- Name 20 somewhat well-known vampire centric IPs
- scratch those aimed at children ("The Little Vampire" and similar one)
- scratch those that have explicit sex
- scratch those that have a romance involving a vampire (and yes, that means Buffy is out as is Underworld)

You should now have less than half left.

- now consider whether the vampires action might be a metaphor for sex
- remove those where the answer is "probably yes"

Are there more left than 2 ?

[Lord Raziere]

Nothing we are talking about has anything to do with exploring our values or morality in the real world. Because this is all make believe. Are you saying "I value human life more than you because I refuse to allow my imaginary character kill an imaginary zombie?"

That question is a bit rude and assuming ridiculous things of other people.

No one in the history of wanting that kind of fun thinks what your assuming them of. No one. exploring values play like is not about determining who is more moral, its about determining WHAT can be considered moral. for one's individual moral purity is inherently meaningless and kind of egotistical compared to the implications of what good is done for everyone or others. But that doesn't mean there is only one answer to what the right thing is. multiple answers can be valid, just as multiple answers can be wrong.

Not everyone plays beer and pretzels or likes shallow comedy, and thus likes to play more seriously, thats all it is. If your confused by that, too bad subjectivism exists and I'm just as confused at brain-turn-off play.