Hey everyone,
So here is my question to you, and lets assume no class or racial feature is enforcing morality or depravity and that it is entirely character driven.
Do you reward or punish depravity and/or morality?
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I reward whatever brings their character to life.
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With many good PCs, at least some degree of morality and minimal depravity would be sensible. (That being said, a good aligned worshipper of Calistria or Cayden Cailean might have a different definition of 'depravity' than a good worshippers of Abadar or Iomedae.)
For an evil PC, there's little call for morality for morality's sake, but there may well be plenty of call for what *appears* to be morality purely out of enlightened self interest (rescuing someone just so that they are indebted to you, for instance, or helping the forces of good to root out a competing evil, leaving an 'evil power vacuum' that you can then replace), while not all evil faiths or philosophies in any way encourage 'depravity for depravities sake.' A worshipper of Lamashtu might have very real reasons to engage in acts that others consider depraved (breeding a better class of monster, for instance), while a follower of Norgorber (as the Reaper of Reputation) might consider an act of overt over-the-top cackling evil to be stupid, short-sighted and just a bit tacky, preferring more behind-the-scenes intrigue and deception, to just running around in Skinsaw marks randomly butchering people. Similarly, a Zon-Kuthonite might consider the sort of butchery and petty sadism that goes on among ogre tribes to be terribly unenlightened, and a waste of perfectly good suffering, which is meant to elevate, enlighten and strengthen the worshipper, not degrade some random schmuck who wandered into the wrong backwater. And yet, to a Shelynite, their own acts of disfigurement could be seen as depraved, as they destroy their own beauty.
When 'morality' is the sensible and most profitable potential choice, it's in the best interests of evil to choose the path that *appears* moral, and to avoid acts of 'depravity' that serve no end other than to make their own evil schemes that much harder.
As a GM, I don't have to really worry about rewarding or punishing either choice.
Game assumptions and human nature do a fair job of arranging for selfish or short-sighted players to have a harder time of it, while more cooperatively minded players tend to end up with NPC allies, more loot, free drinks from grateful tavern owners, and, most usefully, other PCs who are willing to go out on a limb for them because they've earned the trust of the other players at the table.
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I agree with Set, and would like to add that I don't really see how depravity and morality are exactly opposites in any way.
That is because they are not opposites, depravity and morality are both wholly subjective to the situation, alignment, and character.
Depravity is the corruption of morality, and morality is the resistance to that corruption. This seems to be a single sliding scales of moral VS depravity until one breaks morals down to their baser parts, at which we realize the single sliding scale is actually hundreds, if not thousands, of small sliding scales.
A good character can be depraved in many ways, while a villain can be moral in many others. Part of what makes characters interesting is seeing where they are moral, where they are depraved, where they simply have no stance, and how these elements struggle against one another.
Ha! This turned into a philosophical discussion whereas the original question was one of mere preference.
I'll answer the original question, as my stance on Morality and Depravity is more objective than yours and don't see a point in getting into it.
All my players know that in my setting; typically Good is aided (i.e. in the epic-poetics mentality of "Good Always Triumphs Over Evil" with a sub-script of "...eventually" added in. I can pull punches at times against the good guys. I make fortune favor them too.
However, if a player(or players) wants to make an evil character, then they know that no-holds-barred. I don't hold anything back and anything they get, it's because they've earned it twice over.
I find it makes my heroes (actual heroes, none of this "I'm good-aligned, so pay me PLEASE"-nonsense) idealistic without making them "anti-hero-ish" while making my villains that much more desperate. They've earned it all, so like hell they're going to give it up just because some schmuck with a sword is going to take it all away.
As for depravity, I don't approve of players being depraved in the traditional sense. No PC is allowed to commit any blatantly depraved act that requires any real amount of detail for "role-playing purposes".
Being Evil is one thing, but at least have some damn class.
All actions have consequences that logically stem from what happens after.
There is no need to game the system in favor of virtuous or villainous actions.
The evil gods are no less powerful in the PF world than the good ones. None has enough agency to make the universe tip one way or another.
For rewards and punishments, I take em as I see's em. I will generally let a player attempt to do anything they want with their character, intervening only when I feel they don't fully understand the rules/risk involved, and that they wouldn't attempt it if they did. I'll still give them the choice then, but likely everyone else at the table will convince them otherwise.
Like, for instance, using Enlarge Person on the really strong cult leader for the purpose of making shooting him in the crotch slightly easier.
Getting back on topic, I "reward" the players with what I think should happen. If they succeed all their stealth checks to clean out the wealthy noble's house, they get some sweet loot. If they give all of that loot to the struggling innkeeper, they get place to stay free of charge for the rest of their lives.
All of which are subject to the whim of the GM, since he's determining how NPCs react.
Often logical consequences (which are really only "what the GM thinks should happen") can encourage the game to go in a direction that neither the players or the GM really want to pursue.
A game shouldn't go in a direction the players and GM don't want to pursue. That would qualify as an illogical consequence.
The OP asked "do you reward or punish...". I was, therefore, answering what I do.
I do believe that it would ruin the verisimilitude of a game if one of the players murdered the innkeeper and his family in cold blood - and the GM decided that the NPCs in the town didn't have a serious reaction.
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Do you reward or punish depravity and/or morality?
Neither, 'rewarding' behaviour would be oddly meta.
Getting some slaying in is not depravity.
:D
Do you reward or punish depravity and/or morality?Neither, 'rewarding' behaviour would be oddly meta.
The world cares not, and carries on. The pieces react as they will.
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The world cares not, and carries on. The pieces react as they will.
Exactly. "Rewarding" behaviour sounds like I'm supposed to be teaching my gaming groups lessons about right and wrong. :p
But speaking GMs rewarding/punishing behaviour, I played in this Greyhawk game once. The group had uncovered some kind of artifact that we didn't really know what to do with, there wasn't any clues to go on. We have a couple of different options, but agree to visit some loremaster types living in a relatively nearby village, to ask for advice and get a chance at figuring out what's going on.
That night we're ambushed by demons and narrowly manages to fight them up.
The following night we're ambushed by the same, only slightly bigger, group of demons and get pretty banged up. At this point we're in pretty bad shape, but we're assuming the demons are attracted by the artifact, so we decide to hurry up because, well, we can't take this much longer.
That night we're attacked by even more demons. How we all survive is anyone's guess but our healers are pretty taxed at this point.
And that's when it dawns on us. The artifact isn't summoning demons. The demons aren't related to the plot at all. The GM is just upset that we've apparently gone off rails, and is punishing us by sending more and more demons at us until we either die or 'get' that we're moving in the wrong direction.
We were not supposed to think of those loremasters. We're supposed to be going somewhere else.
*le sigh*
You are level 1 adventurers. You veer off track.
A hobgoblin army ambushes you, defeats the party, takes your stuff and imprisons the party. One player is fed their own horse. You are saved by an npc (feel that helplessness).
That is the worst example of dm punishment for not following their plans I've got.
And that's when it dawns on us. The artifact isn't summoning demons. The demons aren't related to the plot at all. The GM is just upset that we've apparently gone off rails, and is punishing us by sending more and more demons at us until we either die or 'get' that we're moving in the wrong direction.
We were not supposed to think of those loremasters. We're supposed to be going somewhere else.
*le sigh*
That's too bad, that sounded like a pretty epic start to a campaign up until this point. "Why do the demons want this artifact? What threat does it have to them? Surely we need to know! On to the loremasters! Perhaps they know the sordid history of this cursed thing."
Bam, instant plot... unfortunately, not the one the GM had in mind apparently.
As a dm, I am really guilty of note taking and running with ideas when a player suggests something really great.
As in, wouldn't it be funny if, and the game then changes.
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As a dm, I am really guilty of note taking and running with ideas when a player suggests something really great.
Had I tell you about that time when one of my Fading Suns players completely accidentally ended civil war on planet Midian some half a year (or more) ahead of plot schedule?
It all happened just as another group of church military NPCs reached Midian with inquisition-issued orders to arrest the head of rebellion. The catch was that the orders were false and easy to prove being invalid... With party out of the way the poor Brother Battle contingent had no idea that they are tools of someone else and eliminated the rebellion command staff after the rebels refused to surrender to the arrest.
This had a long term repercussions, as the post-rebellion Midian became an important plot element in future intrigues... While rebellion-bound Midian wouldn't influence local politics so much.
I've actually done that exact plotline... the right way.
That sounds like a good way to go about it. There are, of course, consequences to your actions. In my case, however, it was more a case of "you guys are going the wrong way and I am going to throw more and more monsters at you 'till you either get it or die."
Which was really lame.
(Especially since we started out thinking it was a cool plot point, and reacted to it with IC logic.)
As a DM, I adjudicate the consequences of PC actions. I try to do so fairly and logically.
IMO, Good actions tend to lead to good consequences more often than Evil ones do. Not always, but on the whole. So I don't do anything consciously or specifically to promote Good actions or punish Evil ones - but. e.g., if you go out of the way to save the shrewish, bigoted innkeeper from a pack of vampires she may treat you rather better afterwards.
...The GM is just upset that we've apparently gone off rails, and is punishing us by sending more and more demons at us until we either die or 'get' that we're moving in the wrong direction...That's too bad, that sounded like a pretty epic start to a campaign up until this point...Yeah, I'm strongly opposed to the GM using in-game events to punish out-of-game decisions. Gently influence, perhaps, but not "You Dare Defy Me? The Bestiaries Shall Be Unleashed To Punish Your Temerity, Puny Ones!"
I've actually done that exact plotline... the right way. My PCs were going through Lost Shrine of Tamoachan and pillaged an altar of Zotzilaha the bat-god ("Note to the DM: Robbing this altar results in the wrath of the bat god...") Two weeks later - the new moon - they're attacked by fiendish bats. Four weeks later - the next new moon - they're attacked by more fiendish bats. Four weeks after that, they're attacked by a whole lotta fiendish bats. At this point they caught onto the pattern... but they weren't sure what to do about it. Four weeks after that, they were plundering a dungeon in an orc-occupied city, and a swirling cloud of ordinary everyday bats gathered over the dungeon entrance, squeaking and making a spectacle of themselves. When the party came out, they realized the dungeon entrance was surrounded by about 400 inquisitive orcs. Battle, imprisonment, escape... and they immediately set out to get an atonement before four more weeks could go by.
That is glorious. I am stealing that.
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I try and reward both depending on how the players go about it. Want to play a good aligned character and be heroic? Denifitely rewarding in its own way. Want to try and be cunning foxes who take over the kingdom via fancy skill checks? Also very rewarding. Most dms I've known let it boil down to the player's actions. One really cool thing I saw was good and evil characters in the same party who didn't trust each other enough to know where they stood in regards to morality. So the good aligned pcs struggle against doing immoral acts. The evil aligned ones struggled against commiting good acts with insufficient wickedness attached. Throughout the process, they were trying to conceal their internal struggles. Everyone saw each other as being neutral. Lots of fun times and plot hooks.
Also put champions of chaos and the old ones, and heroes of a lawful kingdom in the one party. It doesn't turn out exactly how you might think.
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I've actually done that exact plotline... the right way.That sounds like a good way to go about it. There are, of course, consequences to your actions. In my case, however, it was more a case of "you guys are going the wrong way and I am going to throw more and more monsters at you 'till you either get it or die."
Which was really lame.
(Especially since we started out thinking it was a cool plot point, and reacted to it with IC logic.)
I personally like to adapt to the players in this sort of open-world "Let's pick a direction to investigate" sort of thing. For instance:
My players were rebuilding a town and exploring the outer areas and found a ruined temple. At this point I had firmly decided nothing beyond the existence of these temples: where they would be found, and exactly what treasures they would contain, would be random.
After they found the second one, one of my players, who had been drawing his own map, noticed that the two temples were the same distance away from the destroyed town (which was not a correct assumption, since they only knew which hex the temples were in), and the treasures matched the location in some way (which was purely coincidence). From this, he guessed there were more temples surrounding this area that fit their locations, arrayed in a circle.
Rather than letting them spend days travelling in one area only to have this theory thrown out the window by dice rolls, I made it accurate, and as time went on, it became clearer that the temples were arrayed in a circle around the town, and they're starting to wonder what that means their town was built over.
The world cares not, and carries on. The pieces react as they will.Exactly. "Rewarding" behaviour sounds like I'm supposed to be teaching my gaming groups lessons about right and wrong. :p
But speaking GMs rewarding/punishing behaviour, I played in this Greyhawk game once. The group had uncovered some kind of artifact that we didn't really know what to do with, there wasn't any clues to go on. We have a couple of different options, but agree to visit some loremaster types living in a relatively nearby village, to ask for advice and get a chance at figuring out what's going on.
That night we're ambushed by demons and narrowly manages to fight them up.
The following night we're ambushed by the same, only slightly bigger, group of demons and get pretty banged up. At this point we're in pretty bad shape, but we're assuming the demons are attracted by the artifact, so we decide to hurry up because, well, we can't take this much longer.
That night we're attacked by even more demons. How we all survive is anyone's guess but our healers are pretty taxed at this point.
And that's when it dawns on us. The artifact isn't summoning demons. The demons aren't related to the plot at all. The GM is just upset that we've apparently gone off rails, and is punishing us by sending more and more demons at us until we either die or 'get' that we're moving in the wrong direction.
We were not supposed to think of those loremasters. We're supposed to be going somewhere else.
*le sigh*
I love stories like this. Did he eventually tell you that was what he was doing? And did the whole party produce socks with bars of soap in them while holding him down after?
This reads to me like a setting/theme question.
That is, "What type of world do I want to build, and what do I want the tone of my game to be?"