Hi there!
My players PC committed murder and is now evil. He was sentenced to a special "resocialization treatment" and has to pass the Halls of Trials, some bizarre dungeon where he is confronted with opportunities to do good or evil acts.
Cause he's no lunatic i plan to push him a little to lose his temper, not enough to justify violence.
If he is about to do an evil act, the "resocialization treatment" will punish him for doing so (e.g. magically causing intense pain).
I'm not quite sure how to pull this off so i'd be happy to get advice for two things:
1) situations he can be brought into to test him
2) a good method to punish him aside from pain or torture
Thanks for the help!
a kitten is in the room, to the left hangs a sword and a bat, to the right hangs petfood. Weapons have a trap on them.
on a more serious note, you can only test if he knows good from evil.
Else you could have him give all his money and equipment to charity, make him neutral, and check in with the local parole paladin who perhaps a detect evil on him.
Mark of justice is a good way to enforce pain when and if he does certain things.
I want you to kill this unaligned ant!
I think this could work, done right. So what you really want is artificial situations where you can choose to be selfish or unselfish, and the selfish actions backfire in some way.
In order for this to work, you need other people in there. So it could be some kind of inter-plane journey through weird micro-environments, or it could be, say, a prison where all the other prisoners are there to test you. (Any of this could be some kind of illusion or magical construct.)
Then it's a question of thinking up situations where you can help others or take advantage of them, and the good deed is better for you. Off the top of my head, you have the opportunity to rescue someone from a trap. He promises eternal gratitude. He then betrays you, steals something off you, and runs off, directly into another trap. If you don't help him, then you are going to trigger the trap yourself.
how about, don't tell the PC it's an alignment test, but rather a trial by dungeon (like witches who were pushed of a cliff).
After a few rooms, a thief comes in and says he tought there was treasure, and now he's trapped too, perhaps the PC could help.
Now will the PC share his last meal with the thief, altough he doesn't know how long he'll be in the dungeon.
Will he trust the thief to pull him up once he's helped him up first etc.
Perhaps the thief will try to steal at the end, the PC might kill him for it, or show mercy.
Make clear that the thief is a lowlife who's out for his personal gain, but doesn't deserve death.
Sounds like A Clockwork Orange. In the film, they bound Malcolm McDowel to a seat in a movie theater, and made him watch clips of intense violence, all the while his eyes held open by little metal brackets. To the images, they scored music from his very favorite composer, Beethoven. The music had been precious to him, and now it was being turned against him as a means of reconditioning him.
I suppose you could do something similar. The pain alone may not be enough to recondition the murderer; you might try including some thing that is important to him, perhaps images of those close to him also experiencing the pain, so that he makes a personal connection to the reconditioning.
That said, note that "conditioning" of this sort, or any sort of negative reinforcement, has shown a tendency not to work in real life. Or, if it works, the side effects are often just as bad, as violence and pain met against offenders tends to condition them to accept and get used to violence and pain, rather than to flee from it. You may get them to verbally agree not to repeat the same mistake, but you paradoxically also will have reinforced the notion that the correction for disagreeable acts is more pain and violence, increasing the likelihood of recidivism.
Whatever works for your fantasy game, is fine. I just thought it worth mentioning. Depending on your level of realism, or of what the player wants for realism, you may consider that the arc of this PC is going to be a long, unhappy, nasty one. Reformation takes years in real life, if it ever happens at all, and it cannot be forced. It must be wanted by the recipient. Even then, it is a long, hard struggle. One that is for the most part, internal, not external.
Make the last "room" be with the person who sent him there. Make it seem like he's actually gone back to town, been freed, and then meet up with the bastard who sent him there.
Its not a test of morality when you think you're being watched.
It also seems very "Saw-like"
You could use those movies for inspiration. Of course it would be wise to actually have the people within the rooms actually be illusions. The important part of this is for each room to teach a lesson. Seven deadly sins- seven rooms of lessons.
Wow, thanks for all the helpful replies!
Mark of justice is a good way to enforce pain when and if he does certain things.
I'm going to use this, thanks. Maybe I can find a good way to limit his actions without pain and without limiting his ways of thought.
I'm wondering at the act that made him "evil" and the alignment of the person who made the "Hall of Trials" and sees fit to administer it.
Anyone with half a brain who sees this sort of thing is going to figure out how to game the system to give whoever came up with the "trials" the answer they want and won't be convinced of anything except the trial-maker's hypocrisy. What kind of "good" person puts kittens in a death trap in a dungeon, and if they're not real kittens, how much "evil" does it cause to drop illusory kittens into boiling lava?
SAW works because the person who sets up the trials is a sociopath. The "good" dungeon of rehabilitation? A bit more difficult to pull off, unless the point is that the system is completely bogus and the "good" guys are not really good.
Make sure the last part is the kicker... a trick question. He is given a collar that has Detect evil at will. Inside the room is a girl/guy/child being lowered into a cauldrun by a guy. The collar detects the guy is not evil but the person hanging is. yet they are an innocent and if questioned have done nothing wrong other than being alignment evil and he was ordered to kill them. If he sides with the guy he stays evil because killing an innocent is evil act and just being evil does not justify murder of an innocent. The correct action will be stopping the person (but in a non violent way) as killing the guy also is an evil act since he is following orders.
How does the innocent have an evil alignment?
Make sure the last part is the kicker... a trick question. He is given a collar that has Detect evil at will. Inside the room is a girl/guy/child being lowered into a cauldrun by a guy. The collar detects the guy is not evil but the person hanging is. yet they are an innocent and if questioned have done nothing wrong other than being alignment evil and he was ordered to kill them. If he sides with the guy he stays evil because killing an innocent is evil act and just being evil does not justify murder of an innocent. The correct action will be stopping the person (but in a non violent way) as killing the guy also is an evil act since he is following orders.How does the innocent have an evil alignment?
They are a baby goblin?
Jokes aside, this whole concept seems like a bad idea to me. BigNorseWolf has it right. Morality isn't generally something you can test practically if the subject knows they are being tested.
The best that can be hoped for is a series of thought exercises a'la your average college ethics class.
In the end, it's going to be a whole lot more a test of the Player's grasp on ethics than the Character's, and chances are the player won't really appreciate it.
If a civilization has the resources to put this much effort into rehabilitating an evil person, they have the resources to make a few helms of Opposite Alignment, or to just cast Geas or Quest on bad people. Heck, even a properly worded Curse would probably do the trick.
In a setting with things like Detect Alignment, morality isn't the least bit subjective. Evil and Good are easily measured by higher powers and divinations. That means a curse with the phrasing "don't be evil." is perfectly valid.
If the character wants to insist on being evil, they can do it with a -6 to all stats.
Jokes (and Adventure Time quotes) aside, this runs the real risk of turning your game cartoonish. I don't think it would be a wise idea.
There are myriad cartoonish things baked into the game. Definitely add alignment-themed dungeons to the mix.
It is amusing that the best concepts for alignment-test dungeons would be made by evil people. Most of them involve tests where the subject knowingly takes an innocent life. A good person would never devise such a test (nor would most neutral people, without an incentive).
I suspect that in a good society some kind of powerful divination is vastly preferable. Alignment is rather difficult to discern without being subject to Alignment considerations one's self.
Even so, The Rule of Cool would say: the test is definitely an elaborate dungeon.
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While 're-socializing' him to eschew evil acts, make sure to play his favorite music in the background, so that he ends up associating his Beethoven with evil and discomfort.
If you're gonna go this route, might as well do it right and honor the classics.
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On a more serious note, don't reward / punish immediately, but set the situation up to produce a lesson later.
Example: He's given an opportunity to free some prisoners, or just take their stuff, heaped outside the cells, and leave them to rot. Later, he meets an encounter which they could have easily beaten, but is far more than he could handle, if with their gear, since he's only got two arms, and having a half dozen masterwork blades, breastplates and bows is meaningless to his combat effectiveness. He might be able to retreat back into the prison, and get another chance to make the 'right choice,' only now it's more difficult, because the prisoners are less inclined to help him, since they know that his first impulse was to steal their stuff and leave them to rot, and that he only came back to 'rescue' them because he was getting his butt kicked by himself.
The movie Eyes Wide Shut is full of this sort of stuff. Spoilers
Every time the character chooses something like quick riches, it turns out to be a terrible monkey paw sort of choice (the gold weighs him down so much that he nearly drowns in the water-filled pit trap in the next room, the magic item stolen from the paladin's crypt turns out to be cursed, the person he was cruel to turns out to be a polymorphed ogre magi who rewards him with a cone of cold to the face), while the selfless choices (giving coin to a beggar, or giving some of his own food to a captive, or rescuing someone who seems to have nothing to offer him and to be nothing more than an enormous hindrance, like a blind cripple, turns out to be great choices, because the blind cripple is the guy who designed this dungeon, and can remember where the traps and secret doors are, or the hungry prisoner was a cursed celestial that will grant a boon to the person that frees him, or something like that).
Instead of coming up with random stuff, look up the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Saintly Virtues, and design a seven encounter mini-dungeon beneath some keep that paladin initiates are sent through to train them in appropriate action. Each Vice has a corresponding Virtue (in some schemes, anyway), and it should be simple enough to come up with a scenario for each Virtue / Vice combination, that makes the Vice choice turn out to be dangerous / punitive, and the Virtuous choice turn out to be rewarding.
You could even have six challenges, and even if the character misses a few of them, he could find out that the seventh challenge is a test of forgiveness, and that, if the character can figure out that he needs to forgive himself (and recognize what he's done that requires forgiveness, and how it must be applied to others as well), the powers of good will recognize that, and forgive him as well, granting him a second chance.
If set in Golarion, having the seven Sin challenges be representation of the appropriate Runelord, and having them be defeatable only by action that defy their respective Sin (defeating Karzoug through an act of generosity, defeating Araznist through an act of temperance and peaceful restraint, etc.), could be an option.
If not in Golarion, you could still anthropomorphize the Sins, and have the character 'defeat' them through exercising the appropriate Virtue.
You're aware of the fact that pc parties typically commit murder on a regular basis correct? Please give more information about the situation and his moral perspectives.
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Actually, the Death-of-Aroden scenario I play with for my own games is this: Iomedae took the test of the Starstone. She failed. Aroden sacrificed his own divinity to save his most favored follower, making her the Inheritor in the truest sense of the word and also giving her a huge guilt complex.
This gives the Starstone ascensions a nice sort of symmetry: Aroden passed the test properly; Cayden Cailean passed the test by blind luck; Norgorber cheated, giving him Achilles' heel where if it's ever found out how he cheated, he'll lose his divinity; Iomedae failed the test but had Aroden intervene and save her by giving her his own Starstone-granted divinity.
Admittedly, this is non-canon, but it's an interpretation that fits into the canon as truth for a particular game. Also helps to give Iomedae one hell of a complex.
First of all, question yourself about "what is evil in my world"?
Some people in this thread talked about "turn the game cartoonish", I can see that because in my opininion, the alignment system IS already cartoonish - "pure evil" and "pure good" might work in Dragonball Z but if you get serious, it doesn't even work when demons and angels are part of the game (I mean, just read the bible - angels are supposed to be good, yet one becomes the devil, god likes to nuke people he doesn't like and commands genocide and is directly responsible for some people acting evil like the pharao or king Saul...)
No serious movie features such stuff (some comic based do, some "patriotic" ones do plus those based on simple old tales like star wars)
If your world is this kind of black and white (don't misunderstand me, that's not bad, we don't study social behavior, we play a game, also star wars rules) do simple stuff. For some ideas, get a walkthrough of Baldur's Gate 2, there's a dungeon centered around that ("skin of several lovely nymphs, whipped to death" "shall one member of your party suffer some minor damage or do you want to permanently loose CON?")
If you like it more complex, make the dungeon a major illusion - the character actually thinks, he is in charge of something and then the problems begin. Let's say he is in charge of a town and this one is full of criminals and beggars and corrupt guardsmen, every "good" approach seems to be futile... compell him to go lawfull evil on that b##~~
(WoD: Werewolf the Apokalypse did a fun thing on "detect evil": some werewolves got the ability to sense "the scent of the Wyrm" (Wyrm is the force of destruction they hunt) which really works like a smell: innocents that come in contact with it have it, for example someone who ate something from a corrupted facility - there's even a box in the rule book about the ability not being detect evil ^^)
Sounds like A Clockwork Orange. (...)The music had been precious to him, and now it was being turned against him as a means of reconditioning him.
Well err problem is that Alex is not turned good, he only feels sick when confronted with violence, I mean, one of the first things he want to do is smash in the face of his parents adopted son - the violence is still in him (which is a major point of the movie/book)
Dunno if anybody has already suggested it, but there is a test for the wizards in Dragonlance - at the end, by their acts during the trial, they are awarded the white (mostly good), red (good and evil in balance) or black (mostly evil) robes representing their (new) alignment. Maybe you can adopt it kinda.
The idea can be found in one of the setting books (Tower of High Sorcery?).
Ruyan.
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I once had a woman screaming for help on dock that was being hurt by several men. when paladin used detect evil to gauge where the screams coming from he found that all of them were evil even the woman. (thus the problem, paladins can not knowingly help evil but they can not knowingly allow an innocent to suffer when they can stop it) Thus a moral block. what is the way to go.
Why is the paladin waiting the 18 seconds to determine who is evil in that situation??
Gang violence is occurring now. Gang violence is evil. Evil must be stopped. End of line.The woman might be evil, but she's not currently committing evil acts. Stopping the gang takes priority, he can deal with the woman later. I can't think of any Golarion Deity who would permit their paladin inaction in this case:
Abadar- Gang violence isn't civilized and it hurts trade.
Erastil- Roving gangs hurt the community.
Iomedae- The gang (and perhaps the woman) should be brought to Justice, vigilantism is not acceptable.
Sarenrae- The woman deserves a second chance, and should be saved.
Shelyn- Violence is an ugly last resort and should be prevented whenever possible.
Torag- The woman is being attacked and should be protected.
Did I miss anyone?
The other two examples (goblin noncombatants and benevolent vampire lord) I could see some differences. A paladin of Abadar (LN) would be fine with the lord vampire running the show, provided someone kept a close watch, and more or less okay with 'exterminating' goblin vermin. A paladin of Sarenrae (NG), however would find goblin genocide abhorrent, and would chafe under the thumb of a filthy bloodsucking monstrosity.
Back to the OP, I had a character want to take the Test of the Starstone, and I made the Cathedral a customized morality dungeon, spontaneously generated by the Starstone. I think you need to think about who designed/modified/uses the dungeon to come up with the tests. A good person would tend towards not seriously risking any lives. An evil person would lean towards crazy Saw-style tests and impossible choices. A lawfully designed dungeon would likely make the 'right path' clearer and the rules well defined, while a chaotic dungeon would have more arbitrary traps that would make all but the extremely lucky leave with some kind of scarring.
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If a person is born in a society that is lawful good and he is lawful good and becomes a Law oficer and the law states that it is illegal to jay walk and if you do jay walk the law is to immediatly die no matter the circumstance.
This law isn't one from a lawful good society. Let's look into it a bit.
1) Illegal to jaywalk. Strict order. No impact to individual or social well being. That's lawful neutral.
2) Immediate punishment. Again, strict order. Distinct lack of justice, and huge margin for error. That's lawful evil.
3) Summary execution. That's nearly chaotic, but certainly evil.
This kind of society would attract only evil or neutral authority figures, which is a key sign that your entire premise is flawed. Would a LG character enforce LE laws? Probably not.
why is it that when you change the laws you change what is considered good or bad?
Because 'good' vs 'bad' aren't alignment terms. 'Good' behavior in Drow society is probably evil. The observers may be relativistic, but the alignment system is not.
All I am saying is alignment is used to often as a crutch and needs to be loosened a little.
I propose that your interpretation of the system is indeed weaker than the actual system itself. I'd suggest you stop trying to make it fit into the real world and work on understanding what it is. I'd further put forward that if you can grasp the intention behind it, you may just find that it DOES fit into the real world rather well. Or at least as well as any system could describe on a page or two in a rule book.
This is a Fantasy game, this one act of murder should not immediatly change an alignment but since op ruled it will unless he can pass some test.
On this we likely agree. One act shouldn't change an alignment unless it is egregious. Even so, it probably would only cause a slip by one slot unless it was obvious that the player WANTED the alignment change to happen.
Very much don't buy into the 'trap the evil path' concepts. You don't want someone who will try to be more sneaky and careful in doing evil. If your goal is to test their evilness, the system should constantly reward and encourage them for doing evil things while good becomes more and more difficult to pursue.
When they crawl out ragged on their hands and knees, having been offered the possibility of physical perfection and wealth, you know you're dealing with someone with some serious moral determination.
Very much don't buy into the 'trap the evil path' concepts. You don't want someone who will try to be more sneaky and careful in doing evil. If your goal is to test their evilness, the system should constantly reward and encourage them for doing evil things while good becomes more and more difficult to pursue.
When they crawl out ragged on their hands and knees, having been offered the possibility of physical perfection and wealth, you know you're dealing with someone with some serious moral determination.
I agree.
the really capital "G" Good people in history and mythology have been tempted more than tested. Jesus in the desert, Bhuddah under his tree, uh...I actually can't think of any more examples. Luke Skywalker maybe?
But yeah, don't make it an obvious alignment test where the options are to feed a kitten or behead it.
On an interesting side note, the group I play with almost always plays Evil characters, and my characters have a damn hard time getting xp when the entire adventure revolves around invading a forest, murdering a bunch of elves, and selling the women and children as slaves to the drow. ( very profitable endeavor for the party btw)