Quote from: flyingmice;219174Military leaders in the medieval times took prisoners all the time. The lower class soldiers were mostly stripped of their equipment and wealth and allowed to depart. As for the wealthy prisoners, the military loved to take prisoners - they could always ransom them. In ancient times, prisoners were sold into slavery, from which they could possibly buy their way out - ancient slavery was not like American chattel slavery.

-clash

If you have defeated your enemy, yes. If the campaign is ongoing, maybe not so much. Also, do not be too literal here. I am not saying a military victor would lay waste and kill an opposing army to the last man, but they would not leave an enemy in good form behind them.

To take it to the dungeon, if you could convince the orcs to join you, cool. If they spit in your face or no one spoke orcish, what then. Disarm them and send them on their way...behind you...where they know the terrain better than you. Yeah, I don't want to paint a picture of wanton killing but there are times when killing the temporarily disabled opponent is necessary. Read that as convenient at times. It is never a good idea to leave a capable opponent behind you and your military tacticians would agree. It would be the equivalent of accepting the surrender of an enemy, allowing them to keep all their weapons and sending them on their way while you press further into their territory. Your supply lines stretch and they know the terrain, move ahead, regroup with reserves or muster more troops and meet you on their terms.

Now, if I have a moral compulsion to not do so I can rationalize the living crap out of it. It is one of the reasons I use Codes and not alignments.

Bill

Edit to add: It also is, as others have mentioned, a matter of the GM. If I am GMing a game, just stripping the locals and sending them on the way as you go deeper into their territory will mean you will see those faces again. You might get away with it if you strip them and just leave since they will have less incentive to risk their lives. And you better believe the next time you face them they will employ less upfront tactics;i.e. a tunnel may cave in on you.

Quote from: Balbinus;219189I'd suggest that if you have a big issue with treating orcs as quintessentially evil beings incapable of redemption, you're probably better off with something other than D&D.

It's a game of absolute morality, absolute alignments.  Orcs are inherently evil, orcish prisoners will either languish suffering in a dungeon or if freed will kill people.  They cannot be redeemed.  As such, killing them is closer to pest control than murder.

Now, it doesn't have to be played that way and most of us have played it otherwise, but I do think the game is set up with those assumptions.

The absolute morality is of course why many of us sought other games, and why many more others chose not to.

Mr. Balbinus? There's a black man with two scimitars and a giant cat here to see you. He's looks pretty peeved, so I'm just gonna go ahead and let him in then take my lunch break.

Quote from: James McMurray;219237

Mr. Balbinus? There's a black man with two scimitars and a giant cat here to see you. He's looks pretty peeved, so I'm just gonna go ahead and let him in then take my lunch break.

I'll get him talking and slip out the window while he's mid-monologue.

Quote from: Haffrung;219207Sounds like your humanoids were just more primitive humans with some superficial differences in physiology.

In our D&D, if a monster is evil, it is genuinely evil. Not just a bit cowardly or bullying. Or prone to theft (the mischievous little blighters!), but evil in the sense of desiring to cause real harm for its own sake. So orcs aren't just a marginalized group of primitizes who can be taught loyalty and love if shown a bit of affection; they are monsters who relish killing, torturing, and eating humans.

And with rare exceptions, evil monsters are irredeemably evil by nature. That's certainly not a modern approach to behaviour and morality, but then we never saw any appeal in applying modern attitudes to our D&D.

In my own game world, orcs are a twisted and savage race abandoned by the gods.  They have no souls, and their hearts are filled with darkness and rage.  They cannot be redeemed, only contained.  Several times my party has had to hack down unarmed, unarmored orc females because they are so savage they just attacked with their claws.  In one memorable encounter, the had an opportunity to spy on an orc nursery, and watched the matron watching the whelps encourage a group of orc pups to gang up on, tear apart, and eat one of the other children.  When they entered the room and demand surrender, the matron picked up an orc child and hurled it at them, and suddenly they were being mobbed by savage orc toddlers.

Fuck this "It's not right to kill children!" shit.  That's only true if the children are sweet little innocents.  Orc whelps are every bit as savage and violent as orc adults, just not as clever.

Goblins are even worse, since goblins don't breed like mammals.  Goblins in my campaign spawn from piles of garbage, like they used to think maggots generated from rotting meat.  A pile of rotting crap will get infected with a goblin seed, and -- as long as someone keeps feeding more garbage into the pile -- will keep generating goblins.  There are "young goblins" -- they take about a month or so to reach maturity, and then live for about three years.  My players just squash baby goblins with their boots.  They're literally viewed as cockroaches, something that needs to be exterminated.  They're too stupid, too vicious, and too short lived to be redeemed.

The only "evil humanoids" in my campaign that aren't actually irredeemably evil  are kobolds, troglodytes and lizardmen, all of whom are vaguely related to each other.  Those races are xenophoic and don't trust the "smoothskins," so while humans and the scalefolk can't live in harmony with each other, they can respect each other's borders and not live in conflict.  Very rarely, a human will find himself living amongst these races, or one of these races will explore human society.  Consequently, my players are far more likely to attempt to parlay with scalefolk.

Quote from: HinterWelt;219220To take it to the dungeon, if you could convince the orcs to join you, cool. If they spit in your face or no one spoke orcish, what then. Disarm them and send them on their way...behind you...where they know the terrain better than you. Yeah, I don't want to paint a picture of wanton killing but there are times when killing the temporarily disabled opponent is necessary. Read that as convenient at times. It is never a good idea to leave a capable opponent behind you and your military tacticians would agree. It would be the equivalent of accepting the surrender of an enemy, allowing them to keep all their weapons and sending them on their way while you press further into their territory. Your supply lines stretch and they know the terrain, move ahead, regroup with reserves or muster more troops and meet you on their terms.

In the campaign I play in, I play a knight.  I cannot attack a helpless foe.  This would be problematic, except my knight is a member of a organization with some legal authority, so when we take prisoners, she lines them up, hands bound behind their back, down on their knees.  Then she reads a list of charges, finds them guilty on summation, and then executes them in due accordance with the law, generally by means of a sword blow to the back of the neck.  Though we've had a few lynchings.

The one time we let a bad guy flee without his weapons and nothing more than a promise, the motherfucker scrounged up a sword on his way out of the dungeon, killed our henchman who was outside tending the horses (and we liked Hans!  He was good people!), and killed our horses, including the charger I had just bought.

I had to drag my horse's chain barding twenty three miles, moving 5' per round (even with an 18 STR, I was so ladden with treasure I could barely move).  That's never happening again.

Quote from: Jackalope;219253The one time we let a bad guy flee without his weapons and nothing more than a promise, the motherfucker scrounged up a sword on his way out of the dungeon, killed our henchman who was outside tending the horses (and we liked Hans!  He was good people!), and killed our horses, including the charger I had just bought.

This is your GM letting you know how they want you to play the game.  I'm sure after that you didn't let any more bad guys escape...

I like the Goblins from Garbage concept -- I'm really into that sort of thing.

I don't care for scenarios with monster children you're encouraged to kill though.  (That's, again, your GM letting you know how they want you to play the game)

Quote from: Stuart;219259This is your GM letting you know how they want you to play the game.  I'm sure after that you didn't let any more bad guys escape...

I like the Goblins from Garbage concept -- I'm really into that sort of thing.

I don't care for scenarios with monster children you're encouraged to kill though.  (That's, again, your GM letting you know how they want you to play the game)

Hmm, tough one here and I am pretty sure I will not communicate my thought properly. Here is my effort:

The GMs job is to arbitrate. To allow things to work out as they would in a world with magic. It is not to tell me how to play. The group should determine from the get go what will be acceptable, what they are comfortable with. So, if no evil is allowed,t he group should decide that, not the GM. That said, if you then choose a paladin, you are bound to a certain behavior and the GM should enforce it as the nature of that class.

So, all things being equal, it will be a case of the GM portraying the nature of the prisoner. There are many ways to do this. If the party is o.k. with executing prisoners, then they must make a judgment call. If the prisoner is unrepentant then death, if repentant then mercy. Alternatively, whatever fate the party determines.

I would not argue though, that killing a disabled enemy is not a good act but I do not know that it is simply an evil one. Jackalope's example is how I have rationalized my knights killing whole families before. Why? Because they broke the law and that is all that mattered.

So, key points would be group should determine play not GM (although the GM is part of the group) and once in play, the GM enforces the tropes of the characters and setting.

It still did not come off great but hopefully it made some sense.

Bill

Quote from: HinterWelt;219273The GMs job is to arbitrate. To allow things to work out as they would in a world with magic. It is not to tell me how to play. The group should determine from the get go what will be acceptable, what they are comfortable with. So, if no evil is allowed,t he group should decide that, not the GM.

It's the GM's job is to arbitrate.  But the person in the GM chair is often also the person writing the adventure.  They draw the map, and add the encounters.  So when they add "monstrous daycare" you can't overlook how that will affect the game.  

Even during arbitration they're making decisions based on how they think things are "supposed to work" in that world.  That could be a very gritty world, or it could be a very heroic one.

I agree that the group should make decisions about what is / isn't allowed in the game.  For our group (both long ago and more recently) it's a matter of genre emulation.  Fantasy adventure stories (books and movies) with good guys and bad guys.  Indiana Jones.  Harry Potter.  Labyrinth.  The Goonies.  I don't think it's a matter of majority rules either.  It needs to be a consensus.  If even one person at the table really doesn't want some sort of element included (spiders, evil PCs, graphic descriptions of violence / sex) then I don't think those things should be included.  It's only a game after all, and the object is for everyone to have a good time.

It has often been the other players who would say something when somebody wanted to act out of alignment.  "You wouldn't do that -- you're lawful" and so on.

Quote from: Stuart;219259This is your GM letting you know how they want you to play the game.  I'm sure after that you didn't let any more bad guys escape...

I like the Goblins from Garbage concept -- I'm really into that sort of thing.

I don't care for scenarios with monster children you're encouraged to kill though.  (That's, again, your GM letting you know how they want you to play the game)

My players have certain expectations of me.  They expect me to take them to very dark and scary places, to pull out all the stops.  Being attacked by a horde of vicious little toddlers with claws and fangs is disturbing.  My players were actually visibly creeped out by it.

It was a great scene, because the slaughter of orc warriors tends to be a light hearted affair.  You get into a groove of mindlessly killing, and it doesn't affect you.  You don't think about what you're doing.  then suddenly the Dm throws something like demon children at you, and suddenly it's not so much fun, it becomes freaky and scary and traumatizing.

I like traumatizing my players.  We play without a safety net.

If I would pull out stuff like that I would be greeted by laughter. My players are not the kind to get scared by horrorshockers. Or perhaps they get scared and mask it with laughter, I don't know.
What I know is that they prefer enemies to have a soul, less horror-shock, more tragic-epic if you want so.

Out of curiosity... how do you keep up the horror tension for the characters. I mean with scenes like that they should quickly go "meh, I've seen everything".

In the campaign world Paul and I use for D&D, good and evil are real concepts, derived from real physical and metaphysical properties of the universe in which the game takes place. However, sentient beings contain greater or lesser proportions of good and evil, largely in accord with their genetics and upbringing. Goblins aren't all irredeemably evil, for instance, although some individual goblins [okay, most] indeed are, lacking the mental capacity to self-analyze to a sufficient degree to overcome their experiences in life, and the darkness within their own bloodlines.

Because of this moral complexity, issues such as those being discussed in this thread arise nearly every session. Indeed, these challenges, far from being decided, are one of the things we enjoy most about the game. Is it right to kill this child because of its bloodline? Can we take the hand of the gods as our own, and decide this being might never be redeemed? Should we, say, tie the bad guys to a tree and let nature sort it out? [Did that once; ended up with Gleep, the Goblin cleric, following us about for months after his conversion.]

But our metaphysic was designed to some degree with this kind of complexity in mind, and with the idea that some of the people within that world might still have very absolutist opinions about these matters. [One group of paladins, for instance, have become lazy in their devotion, and their hallmark in our minds is that they never leave a living member of a supposedly evil race living, no matter its behavior or possibility of conversion; that absolutism even in pursuit of good is seen as one of the greatest evils in our games says something, something powerful I suppose, about our game.]

Beings of pure evil or good can certainly exist in this context, but it is a rare white which is not leavened by some touch of black, and a rare black not touched by white. But good and evil aren't the only reasons to kill, or not kill, someone in any case: humans have been killing each other in a world with no absolute morality for hundreds of thousands of years.

[edit: I know I mentioned it briefly, but it bears repetition: we do all this with D&D 3.5e, and it's never made our metaphysic difficult or impossible. The idea that D&D isn't a good game choice if you're interested in moral complexity is, in my experience, incorrect.]

Quote from: Saphim;219316Out of curiosity... how do you keep up the horror tension for the characters. I mean with scenes like that they should quickly go "meh, I've seen everything".

I keep the game light and comedic, let everyone get nice and relaxed and joking around, and then throw the shit at them.  If it's everyday, all the time, it loses its power to shock and horrify.

Basically I decided before any battle if I'm going to play it for Comedy, for Awesome, or for Horror.  

Battles with minions tend to run towards the comedic, with orcs attacking each other mid-battle for "trying to steal my kill!,"or charging into a room, seeing the PCs surrounded by dead orcs, "shrieking like a little girl," and running for the hills.  Boss monsters that grab their own minions and strangle them after they whiff several times in a roll in a fit of Vaderesque pique.

Battles with bosses and named villains -- the guys who get to draw their own critical hit cards, and who get to roll to confirm their fumbles (unnamed minions always confirm fumbles, and only do normal critical hits) -- tend to be played for the Awesome, and I pull out all the stops.  Dudes leaping off tables, flaming wreckage collapsing around the players, detailed visceral descriptions of player hits, anything i can pull out to make my players go "Whoa, cool!" or "I did that?  I rock!"

And then, every once in awhile, when they're getting complacent, I hit them with the horrific.  Like in my Iron Kingdoms game, the party was investigating a series of murders in a small town centered around a peat mining operation.  They discovered that the owner of the peat log factory had made deals with the Cryx, and let them set up a laboratory under the factory.  A Cryx necrotech ("Varric Khrule," a truly great villain name) was interested in experimenting with the bodies that were always being found persevered in the peat (the whole area had been the site of several major battles in past wars), and was creating "Bog Thralls" -- pith soaked mechanithralls whose furnaces would cause them to burst into flame after a few rounds of combat.  The players took that in stride.  Zombies, even steamtech powered zombies that burst into flame, are cool but not discomforting.

But they also knew that a local girl had gone missing, and they feared she was in the clutches of the necrotech.  They were hoping to find her and rescue her, not only because she was a young woman (and everybody loves rescuing young women), but because local gossip held that she was pregnant at the time of her capture.  They did find her, in Khrule's lab.  As they burst through the door, he was fleeing out his escape hatch.  He stuck around exactly long enough to say "You've ruined my plans this time, but you won't survive my masterpiece.  Prepare to die heroes, prepare to die at the hands of my WOMB THRALL!"

And then I revealed the womb thrall.  Khrule had kileld the girl, hooked her up to a bunch of necrotech, and turned her into something straight of an H.R. Giger painting, a massive bloated zombie woman that generated a seemingly endless stream of flying undead fetus zombies that shot out of her crotch with a wet popping sound. "Splurch.  Splurch.  Splurch."

One of my players actually turned green.  We really thought he was going to blow chunks.  That I was actually able to find minis of little flying demon babies made it all that much worse.

Also, permanently cemented in my players mind one idea with crystal clarity: The Cryx are pure, unmitigated evil.

I wish that campaign hadn't collapsed.

Quote from: Jackalope;219323I keep the game light and comedic, let everyone get nice and relaxed and joking around, and then throw the shit at them.

Uh... that's just a figure of speech right?

When I want to evoke horror in the minds of my players, I have Paris Hilton call. (true story)

Quote from: Engine;219317The idea that D&D isn't a good game choice if you're interested in moral complexity is, in my experience, incorrect.]

Yeah, I may have implied this in my post, but it wasn't exactly what I meant. I mean that, as a baseline expectation using the rules as written, I have no problem with the "sleep-then-slaughter" tactic vs. "evil" humanoids. The game can support different expectations but in my opinion they all require varying degrees of interpretation or simply throwing out the alignment system altogether.