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The Emperor's court mage teleported to the PC's location, informing them that he had recieved magical communicades from his brother in a small town far to the west. The town had been (successfully) fighting off incursions by gnoll bandits (the leader of which the PCs had already been tasked with assassinating by their military commanders). The communicade informed the court mage that the gnolls, after having suffered several indignant defeats at the hands of town defenders, abandoned the possibility of sacking it and instead infiltrated the village during the night and kidnapped over a dozen young children as a form of enacting their revenge for their losses. The court mage, worried for his young nephew, sought out the PCs (heroes of the Empire all) and handed them orders to come with him to the town and help recover the children (their top priority). So the party goes with him. As soon as they all teleport to the town, the wizard leaves them to the villagers, who summairly rushed them off into the forest to rescue the children, who had all dissapeared into the night not 10 minutes before.
After fighting off a number of ambushes along the trail, they finally catch up to the gnoll raider's primary force at a large bridge spanning a 200-foot deep chasm. With the raiders is Paegin, the diabolist sorcerer they were tasked with tracking down and killing. At the center of the bridge are the dozen or so children, all surrounded by vicious, bloodthirsty gnoll infantry. With them, also, are a number of near-wild hyenas, a quartet of dire hyenas bearing heavily armed and armored elite gnoll cavaliers, a pair of barbed devils, and the sorcerer at the back.
Paegin tells the party, whom he and his men have fought and lost to before, that if the party surenders themselves, the children will not be harmed. I fully expected the party to come up with a clever plan, perhaps even let themselves be captured in return for the freedom of the children only to break out and beat up the bad guys once the kids were out of harm's way. I was expecting an exciting encounter, rather than the boring age-old good guys kill the bad guys in a fight scene.
Instead, the party immedietly decries this as "an impossible situation." That is, lose-lose. They could not possibly envision a scenario in which they could stop the bad guys AND rescue the children, or even to just rescue the children. Instead, they decided to take the easy way out and hit the entire bridge with a bombardment of lethal area effects. As they saw it, the children were already dead. At least this way, they could get the bad guys and later tell the townsfolk and their Emperor that they were "simply too late."
As a GM, I was absolutely stunned at this turn of events. Never thought in a million years they would do something MORE diabolically evil than Paegin himself!
Hoping to salvage the situation, I retroactively changed the children from children, into the illusion of children (a barbed devil spell-like ability after all). Paegin cursed that they saw through his cunning deception, and watched as he and his forces were handedly defeated. The real children were found further off in the woods, tied and gagged, and guarded by only a handful of gnolls. While the party blasted the bridge to pieces and slew Paegin and his men, only the party fighter thought to run through the hellish inferno of his allies' causing, in search of the missing children (whom he saved single-handedly).
I do not want something like this happening again. This is supposed to be a heroic campaign. They KNOW that. It's not supposed to be "easy" to fight the bad guys. They will rarely, if ever, get a fair fight against evil. It's kind of the defining trait of evil to not play on even terms.
I feel like they should be punished for their behavior.
To that end, I'm thinking of having the scared children report on what they saw (that the heroes were all too willing to murder them) to their families, and ultimately, to the PCs' military commanders, the court mage, and the emperor himself.
Ultimately, I think everyone will be dishonorably discharged from the military, and possibly exiled from the empire, with the sole exception of the fighter, whom will be awarded a medal of valor.
What do you think? Do you think this is a good way to set an example of what to do/what not to do? What would you do in this bizzare situation?
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They made their bed, let them lie in it.
Alter self disguised clone of the diabolist sorcerer gets up the next day and uses loads of magic...
In the mean time give the PC's enough rope to hang themselves and have them hailed as hero's and saviours, some people are suspicious, see if the PC's lap it up or play it down...
Then having set up his even more diabolical plan the sorcerer returns in the guise of a lawyer, he has witnesses to the PC's anti heroics, he is telling the truth and he's drumming up a kangaroo court to have them hung as cowards and traitors...
Theres loads of stuff you could do to teach them a lesson but being able to have the main bbeg waggle his eyebrows at them from behind his layers of disguises as he has their names trashed, their titles stripped, their treasure used to "raise" the "dead" children and their very lives threatened by the nation they defended and let down would be priceless.
Hell, i'd still have done all that even if they had rescued the kids well but at least they would have a leg to stand on.
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RD, you are going to think I am deliberately trying to criticize you, and I'm not. I generally think you contribute a great deal to these boards, more than I do for sure.
But you asked.
Moral dilemmas should be done very, very carefully. And only when the party is prepared to confront one. I know GMs who delight in putting their characters in situations like this where they have to choose between bad, worse, and pure evil, and if they choose wrong, the GM will nail their asses.
As a player when this sort of thing comes up, I admit it, I try to break the campaign. I want to do everything in my power to discourage the GM from turning what should be a fun afternoon into an agonizing dilemma with no "win" except to accept the path the GM clearly wants them to take so that they can avoid the GM's inevitable retribution.
Sometimes as a player you feel like you are in a no-win situation, even if the GM doesn't think so. If this is a recurring situation, players can grow very frustrated and do things that are completely out of character for their actual characters.
I have always considered this sort of moral dilemma to be something to approach with great care, serious contemplation and multiple opportunities to bail out if the party is not "getting it." And I do this sort of thing very, very rarely and only if my group is very mature and have shown a willingness to play their characters above all else.
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Just two things to consider:
I'm not sure any child would have the capacity to think "Hey, that could have been us.", let alone one of those kids that, in all likelihood, are scared shi...extremely scared.
Were I to have a character in that game, my defence would be to say "Of course we knew it was an illusion."; I don't think you'd find too many courts ruling against the heroes.
EDIT: Nicos beat me to it.
What you need to do is let the heros make their bad choices, and even let them cover up the choices as if they really are the heros. Let the party begin lieing to cover up their tracks.
While they are digging their graves, make sure to put a witness here, and let a bad guy go their. Have these people report to some authority about what the party is doing.
At first dont give them any repercussions, just have someone question their actions, and see if they lie, and then after a bit of time of letting them behave so badly, you should keep track of any alignment changes you deem worthy without telling them, You should start sending bounty hunters after them, and eventually conflict with the court paladin and his lackeys or something, to take them out.
Then have a nice discussion on what it means to be a good guy!
Now this is only if they really are doing bad things a decent amount of the time, and you dont have to do any of it, but I read about this while I was Stumbling, and and fell in love with the idea of letting the party become the bad guys without them really knowing it
I am a longtime DM, and I applaud your creativity, as others have. In my own opinion, take it for what you will, the players need to know you will let their actions have consequences. Retconning the children probably breaks the players' illusion that their choices are meaningful, and will make a lasting difference in the gameworld you created. Generally as a player I will resort to doing despicable things if I feel I'm left no choice but to do what the DM expects.
I have a particularly devious group of PC's who delight in little else than doing the opposite of what they think I want them to do. I try to go with the flow. If they want to ignore the quest and go rob a village instead, I let them.
You are probably right in being surprised that they were willing to sacrifice the children, but I would bet that surprising you is exactly what they're after. Don't have a villain threaten to do something despicable unless you're prepared to dole out the consequences for the 'or else'.
Again, from my own perspective, being willing to sacrifice the children in that scenario is certainly not a heroic thing, and is not a 'good' thing, but it could be seen as neutral thing. If the characters really can see no way to save the babies, then they truly are dead. Are they supposed to accept the word of the blood thirsty hyena men and expect the children will be released if they comply? Truly I don't know what resources your PC's had, but I sympathize with their perspective and yours. Let them accept the consequences and bad blood that comes from the child massacre. Let the cleric of their powerful patron augury whether or not there truly was no other way. Perhaps even work themes into the adventure somehow that make the players remorseful for what they did (Peter Parker after he lets the robber who kills his uncle go). There are a lot of possibilities that open up when you take players at face value. The game and the story are the richer for it.
I'm sure you don't need advice, and obviously your players are getting a lot out of the sessions or they wouldn't keep coming back.
This is a common effect of NPC asking the PC to surrender. It is a berserk button for lots of players. Myself I had my characters do insane things to avoid being captured (last big time in Rogue Trader when surrounded by primitives that worshipped Eldars and asked us, imperial citizen to surrender to be judged by their Eldar overlords). On the other hand I have had a few of my characters actually surrender - two or three times, maybe a bit more, but those were tough-tough decisions - and only once the decision was solely belonging to me and not the party as a whole).
On the other hand, I would probably not retconned children into illusion, forcing the PCs to live with the results of their actions.
In case of punishment: while I do believe that some sort of karmic retribution should happen to PCs, I doubt that scared children would be considered reliable accuser in this situation, citing their inability to see the scene clearly, inability to determine tactical situation.
Also, if you follow with the discharged from the military and exiled you may forget about heroic campaign at all. I doubt that they will have any incentive to act heroically as outcasts.
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Even if they convince everyone that they knew it was an illusion, that doesn't help the party paladin, who will most certainly lose his powers for letting it happen in the first place.
The paladin player informed me that "there was nothing he could do to stop the other characters" [due to the initiative order] and that he was fully willing to lose his powers over the matter if that was what it took.
I think I'm going to hold him to it.
However, he just recently acquired remove curse. As per a contract they signed with Paegin earlier in the campaign, they are all now cursed with the curse of the ages and are now aging one year for every day that passes (the contract stipulated that they could not being harm to Paegin in return for services rendered earlier in the campaign). If he loses his powers, they may all die of old age.
Paegin's soul was wisked off to hell the moment he died (having signed a contract with a contract devil for the life long services of a barbed devil) and will not be returning under any cirucmstances, much to the relief of the party.
EDIT: Also, Paegin, being a LE diabolist known for "deals" and "contracts" has yet to break his word the entire campaign. The PCs had little reason to believe he would murder the children if they turned themselves over. In fact, by killing him, they have shown themselves to be MORE dishonest than he.
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Surrendering to an evil person is idiocy. They'll just slit your throat and then dump the kids in the river.
With that said, if you want to clock in above neutral if not evil... you at least need to try to save as many of the kids as you can.
With your ret con, there's VERY little to keep the pc's from saying "ermm.. right.. i knew it was an illusion the entire time. The lighting and shadows were TOTALLY fake... and ahh.. little jimmy isn't left handed! and Marry Lu's freckles were backwards..." So i don't see how you can punish them icly without metagaming.
Okay, didn't know about the lawful evil bit, or that the party contained a paladin. That seals it, it was a bad move on the players part.
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I would have let them kill the children, become evil in the process (unknown to them that their alignments shifted, someone sees through their lies in town, detects evil, then hire bounty hunters to bring them in each dead...
The current situation that you made might have been scried by one of the townspeople's allies, thus they KNOW what the 'heroes' did and refuse to reward them.
Also, I would have stripped the Paladin of his powers as soon as he decided to lose them in the no win situation...as his god would suddenly desert him..
BigNorseWolf, not if the evil person is Lawful Evil...which every evil mastermind SHOULD be.
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Paegin tells the party, whom he and his men have fought and lost to before, that if the party surenders themselves, the children will not be harmed.
I immediately suspect that the lawful Evil person has already poisoned them and that the harm has thus taken place in the past.
One great way to have a party's evils be exposed is by letting them reach 11th level.
When an enemy casts Legend Lore on them, they can get some interesting facts to investigate and prove.
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What do you think? Do you think this is a good way to set an example of what to do/what not to do? What would you do in this bizzare situation?
I would have allowed the kids to die.
Alignments are adjusted.
The high mage is now the PC's mortal enemy.
The PC's are now guilty of murder and high treason (I assume the high mage is nobility).
The military will be looking for them, and not in a friendly way.
There is a sizable bounty posted.
And the campaign has just enjoyed a player driven plot twist.
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One thing...
Why didn't they just counter with ...
"If one child dies, you all die, your family dies, your tribe dies, your bloodline dies, and your memory dies, leaving nothing but salted earth and ashes... and us, pissing on your graves and laughing. If you leave them unharmed and walk away, nobody will be hurt. This is an offer; a mercy, despite your not deserving of it."
... I think that would give them something to think about.
Is this the same group who have been feeling railroaded, or a different group displaying a desire to express themselves by breaking your plot?
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Have the court Wizard go sour on them since his nephew was one of the kids. Possibly becoming a some-what villain, sabotaging the PCs attempts in the future. Then have the rest of the kids return as some sort of nasty undead seeking revenge on the heroes for failing to save them.
Or maybe the kids haunt the PCs dreams, making it impossible to get a restful night's sleep until the sin is atoned for.
You may think that just because the Sorc is LE, and he hasn't lied to them before that the PCs will trust him, but alignment isn't iron clad (obviously) and as others have pointed out surrendering to someone like that is idiocy. Maybe if he had offered a contract first it would have gone better. But you put the PCs in that situation, and if you punish them too harshly or irrevocably for it, they are just going to be doing more "evil" in the future.
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There are two problems here ... one is that you elected to make it an illusion of the children retroactively.
That's not the major one, though: What I really want to ask is, what way did you expect them to resolve the situation? You should have had two or three ways they could have done it in your head. I can think of a few, at least pending various circumstances, but that does not mean that they would do so.
LE can still lie.
Tough situation. Hostage situations are hard for players because the assumption is the bad guy will act on the threat. As GM you might honor the agreement but there is no reason to assume the NPC will.
I certainly understand why you retconned the situation but that is where the real consequence was. If you retcon the situation further you have to justify even if just to yourself how the kids or other "witnesses" know for a fact the PCs did not know they were illusions. How do the kids know and can speak credibly as to what really happened.
This might be more of a suggestion in the evil GM thread but if the trick is illusions why stop at the bridge. What if the kids fell to their deaths, and the party rescued allied doplegangers or some other foe that could take the place of the children. Once the children get home the BBEG gets to strike at the village and the party from the great beyond. Perhas the court mage can do some investigating of the situation find the bodies of the children in the gorge and wonder why the PC's failed to notice that fact. Perhaps another illusion obscured the parties vision.
Of course LE can still lie, that's where the role-playing comes in, you get the LE bad-guy, who's never been known to break his word, to give his word.
Instead of just 'giving up' and going against the grain. Also stealth would have worked.
I don't play lawful stupid paladins, but for my companions to decide to kill children, I'd prolly go all kinds of lawful stupid on them. Even temporarily siding with the main evil to protect the innocent.
I would let the paladin keep his powers if he turns the party in. He was after all beat by inititive and from what I can tell saved the kids post retcon.
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I know others are going to get angry at me for saying this but: what the hell is wrong with your players? In this thread and in the railroading thread you have described some truly masterful campaign design, which would keep me on the edge of my seat. If I were a player in your campaign, I would have insisted to the other players that the only choice is to surrender and allow the children to escape. How could you be more of a hero than to make a true self-sacrifice for the good of the innocent. It's like being in a great action movie.
And then the party gets to be Steve McQueen and engineer "The Great Escape" after they are captured. Come on, what's cooler than a jailbreak?
I just don't get your players, you give them gold, and they call it trash.
Again, can I play in your campaign? You deserve at least one player who appreciates your storytelling.
I know others are going to get angry at me for saying this but: what the hell is wrong with your players? In this thread and in the railroading thread you have described some truly masterful campaign design, which would keep me on the edge of my seat. If I were a player in your campaign, I would have insisted to the other players that the only choice is to surrender and allow the children to escape. How could you be more of a hero than to make a true self-sacrifice for the good of the innocent. It's like being in a great action movie.
And then the party gets to be Steve McQueen and engineer "The Great Escape" after they are captured. Come on, what's cooler than a jailbreak?
I just don't get your players, you give them gold, and they call it trash.
Again, can I play in your campaign? You deserve at least one player who appreciates your storytelling.
I definatly sympathize here and that probably would have been my choice here with most of my characters. Provided there was not straegic options avaiable. However there is absolutly no garuntee that the kids live if the players give up.
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I also find RD's elaborate and cleverly designed campaigns and encounters admirable. But that doesn't mean that his execution might not benefit from some improvement.
From the posts RD has made about his campaigns over the last several weeks, I get a picture of a campaign that has some group dynamics issues that could be improved.
Probably, just due to the tendency RD has to post something that has created an in-game question or situation, the group dynamic situation, as presented on these boards, is skewed. Since the majority of things that happen likely are not generating contention, RD doesn't post about them. So I'm sure the campaign is a whole lot of fun.
But since RD is posting about how his players are registering concern about his campaign, and because I see players reacting in ways that are fairly typical for players who feel that their options are too severely constrained, I think RD could exercise some contemplative self-examination to see if perhaps his own appreciation of his admittedly impressive campaign and encounters has perhaps led him to focus a bit more on his campaigns and encounters and a bit less on giving the players what they really want.
Just a view from the peanut gallery. We all can use some contemplative self-reflection from time to time.
Since I am a GM who invests heavily in campaign and encounter design, to the point of making up my own monsters, creating my own miniatures, constructing rather elaborate terrain models and building complex geopolitical backgrounds to explain what is going on, believe me, I know how tempting it is to nudge the players a bit to "get to the good stuff." It's a temptation I do my best to fight. As a result, as frustrating as it is to me, sometimes some of my best work goes back on the shelf until I find another opportunity to pull it out and put it on the gaming table.
I definatly sympathize here and that probably would have been my choice here with most of my characters. Provided there was not straegic options avaiable. However there is absolutly no garuntee that the kids live if the players give up.I know others are going to get angry at me for saying this but: what the hell is wrong with your players? In this thread and in the railroading thread you have described some truly masterful campaign design, which would keep me on the edge of my seat. If I were a player in your campaign, I would have insisted to the other players that the only choice is to surrender and allow the children to escape. How could you be more of a hero than to make a true self-sacrifice for the good of the innocent. It's like being in a great action movie.
And then the party gets to be Steve McQueen and engineer "The Great Escape" after they are captured. Come on, what's cooler than a jailbreak?
I just don't get your players, you give them gold, and they call it trash.
Again, can I play in your campaign? You deserve at least one player who appreciates your storytelling.
Sure, evil is evil, and maybe they do kill the kids anyway. Or maybe the players stop obsessing over how "unfair" their GM is, and try something clever like insisting that they surrender one at a time, and have the children released in a proportional number, until the last pc left is the arcane caster, who immediately teleports away with the children, and the rest of the party fights an epic battle on the rope bridge.
Or maybe even look for some GM help by saying quietly "Mr. Court Wizard, are you scrying on us right now? If so, please teleport in amongst the children and teleport them away, so we can bring justice to these vile villains."
How about, they surrender in the one-at-a-time way, and then when the children are safely away, the rogue, who has used slight-of-hand to secret a dagger on his body, cuts the rope-bridge Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom style, casters float down safely with feather fall, and martial types hang on for their dear lives, and have the climbing battle up the rope bridge with whichever enemies have not plummeted to their death.
I mean, RD has set up so much epic potential for heroism here, and instead they try to "break the game." Sad.
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My dad once had an epic blowup in a restaurant because he had spent a fortune to bring the whole family to eat a wonderful expensive meal and in his mind it was this beautiful family moment made possible by his receiving a large bonus from work.
Then my older two brothers ordered hamburgers.
Sure, evil is evil, and maybe they do kill the kids anyway. Or maybe the players stop obsessing over how "unfair" their GM is, and try something clever like insisting that they surrender one at a time, and have the children released in a proportional number, until the last pc left is the arcane caster, who immediately teleports away with the children, and the rest of the party fights an epic battle on the rope bridge.
Or maybe even look for some GM help by saying quietly "Mr. Court Wizard, are you scrying on us right now? If so, please teleport in amongst the children and teleport them away, so we can bring justice to these vile villains."
How about, they surrender in the one-at-a-time way, and then when the children are safely away, the rogue, who has used slight-of-hand to secret a dagger on his body, cuts the rope-bridge Indiana Jones and...
Except your scenario requires stupid evil villains in order to work.
Oh yeah guys you surrender? Just walk over here, no no keep the swords and armor and all your big bad magic stuff on you no worries I'm just going to send off my one bargaining chip so you can stab me to death in like 30 seconds k?
The issue is that as a player you have to assume that the enemy is going to be played at least as intelligently as you are and in that case surrender is a deathwish. And giving up your life to save a few innocents but to let evil run rampant isn't all that heroic in my book, just saying.
None of these scenarios assume stupid villains. The assumption is that you have to disarm, which is why the rogue needs to slight-of-hand to hide a knife for cutting the rope-bridge. There are plenty of mooks on the bridge, if the prisoner exchange happens, casters kill mooks, martial characters take the weapons of the fallen mooks. Sure, you are not going to have your favorite weapon, but you will have a fighting chance, and the children are away safe. The one-at-a-time release of hostages is pretty standard for hostage situations.
Kudos to RD for asking a such a tough question of his players.
I don't think the the characters were railroaded and neither do I think they made the wrong choice. Maybe a braver, smarter, abler group of adventurers could have 'won' the scenario but life isn't always about winning. Having proven to be lacking the PCs will have to live in a world that knows them to be failures, at least until they can prove themselves worthy.
About the Paladin - did you talk with him, sort of like a time out if you will, and express that as a Paladin, any Paladin, letting little kids get killed is just utterly against the tenets of LG? 'Cause if you didn't, I mean, why the heck not? It is completely okay for a DM to step in and remind players of the things that could or probably do motivate their characters.
If the Paladin shows some backbone, how much you wanna bet someone else in the party backs him up?
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Never, ever, as a GM, put the players in a situation that has moral dimensions unless you've already decided on at least 3 different ways they can avoid the 'bad' ending. Never ever put them in a situation and just 'assume' they'll find a good way out of it.
If they put themselves into a bad situation, don't bail them out, just let it go the way it turns out. The entire point is to tell a story, and a story should follow what actually happens.
If you've decided on a moral quandary, and you've given them ways out of it, and they kill the kids anyway, then you let them live with the consequences. The guy who hired them swears revenge, the parents hate them, and so on. Let the chips fall where they will.
But don't put them in that situation unless you already have several ways out for them, never put them in with the idea that they'll find a way to beat the Kobayashi Maru.
A few clarificaitons:
The bridge was made of sturdy wood, being no less than 30 feet wide and 90 feet long. No ropes to cut.
Paegin wasn't stupid. Had they surrendered, Paegin likely would have had them throw their weapons and obvious magical gear into the chasm. He then would have had his men take them into custody, dispelling the illusion shortly after they were detained. Under the impression that they couldn't/wouldn't bring harm to him directly due to their prior contractual arrangement, Paegin likely would have toyed with them for some time, trying to illicit military secrets (giving them ample opportunity to escape and make his life a living hell).
The party consists of a human sorcerer/dragon disciple, a half-elf fighter, a dwarven paladin (not in the military), and an ifrit summoner with dragon-like eidolon. All were 10th-level at the time of the encounter, now 11th.
The paladin is a self-described "paladin of the people" and follows no deity, but a rather undefined personal code (which at the very least, lines up with the paladin code).
Gnomezrule: Talking is a free action that can be taken outside of your turn. The paladin didn't so much as yell at hist teammates for attacking the children (out of game, he all but encouraged it). His inaction is what will cost him his powers, that and his being complicit in the deaths of what they thought were children (even though none died, he knows iin his heart that what he did was wrong).
Never, ever, as a GM, put the players in a situation that has moral dimensions unless you've already decided on at least 3 different ways they can avoid the 'bad' ending. Never ever put them in a situation and just 'assume' they'll find a good way out of it.
If they put themselves into a bad situation, don't bail them out, just let it go the way it turns out. The entire point is to tell a story, and a story should follow what actually happens.
If you've decided on a moral quandary, and you've given them ways out of it, and they kill the kids anyway, then you let them live with the consequences. The guy who hired them swears revenge, the parents hate them, and so on. Let the chips fall where they will.
But don't put them in that situation unless you already have several ways out for them, never put them in with the idea that they'll find a way to beat the Kobayashi Maru.
I thought of 3 different ways to handle that encounter in the 2 minutes it took me to write the post. I really feel like his players are missing the point. He is presenting them with opportunities to be truly heroic, truly clever, real action heroes, and they just think he is bullying them.
@RD: Take a look at the post where I named 3 different ways to handle the encounter: 1) prisoner exchange, which ends in caster teleporting away with the children, rest of the party fights the bbeg; 2) Party speaks out loud hoping the court wizard is scrying to get him to teleport away with the children, then fight the enemy; 3) Prisoner exchange which ends in cutting the rope-bridge Indiana Jones style, climbing fight up the cut rope-bridge.
How would you have handled each of these player choices, and specifically for #2, would you have helped them rescue the children with a little deus-ex-machina?
Paegin likely would have had them throw their weapons and obvious magical gear into the chasm.
I know, I know, it's just stuff... But you put them in a position where they had to choose to surrender and lose it all. That's a no-win situation and it pretty well sucks on the PC side of the fence.
The paladin didn't so much as yell at hist teammates for attacking the children (out of game, he all but encouraged it). His inaction is what will cost him his powers, that and his being complicit in the deaths of what they thought were children (even though none died, he knows iin his heart that what he did was wrong).
Did you remind him that it was his duty to save those kids? You know you can do that, right?
/Pally's get shafted so hard sometimes. Before shafting the Pally, please talk to the player. C'mon, think of the Pally's, man!
I thought of 3 different ways to handle that encounter in the 2 minutes it took me to write the post. I really feel like his players are missing the point. He is presenting them with opportunities to be truly heroic, truly clever, real action heroes, and they just think he is bullying them.
That was beside the point for my post. Yes, I can probably think of several different ways to handle it myself, if I bothered. The point I made was, RD didn't even bother thinking out ways to handle it. That's a major fault in a GM. The reason I say that is, he needs to know at least 3 ways to solve it so he can give them some hints while describing the setup. If you don't have ideas on how to solve it yourself, you won't be able to correctly foreshadow those methods when describing something.
Yes I did, Loaba. I made it absolutely clear that he would likely lose his powers if he continued on his present course.
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Rule #1 in my book is you aren't their daddy, so you cannot and should not "punish" the players. HOWEVER, if you have a reasonable expectation in-game, of their actions being discovered, you should go down that route, and let the cards fall as they may. Just don't force the punishment.
As to the greater meaning behind all of this, I have been doing this for more than 30 years now, and in that time you see a lot of bad behavior from gamers, both in-character, and out, that cannot be readily explained. Let this thread sit here long enough, and you will see it here, too, with posters showing up to debate the nature of the characters' and players' actions and thoughts, and the eventually devolution of the thread into total madness where some people go so far as debating whether blowing up children is actually such a bad thing to do.
I am sure most of the time, the cause of bad thinking is a mix of expediency and metagaming. In other words, there are no real world consequences for letting imaginary children die, or even killing them, so players make bad decisions because it's easier.
On the other hand, this sort of thing never fails to dismay some of us. Because many of us think of the game in heroic terms, as we think of our favorite heroic characters, such as Captain Kirk, or Captain America, or Flash Gordon, or whoever, and those guys would NEVER let this happen. They'd die first.
I won't go so far as to say that either playing style is right or wrong. But I will say this: Those players of mine who try to pull off these sorts of things in-game, are also, for some reason, even if only by coincidence, the same friends I do not trust to watch my kid. Those who think of their roles in the game as higher and loftier, also seem to work harder for my trust as friends, as I do theirs, and have earned it many times over.
I think this is something the game is holding out to us; offering it to us to help make us better people in some small way. Someday, one of us may have to risk his own life to help somebody small and helpless. I hope, if it's me, I remember my WWKD. (What Would Kirk Do?)