| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Wow, that is just... shockingly ahistorical. Most of the land you're talking about was empty desert the first time a European set eyes on it, mostly from the plague that was always going to happen the first time someone from anywhere else on the world landed on these shores. The Lewis and Clark expedition described most of it as a worthless, empty desert wasteland, not villages, orchards, and croplands. The villages that were eventually burned were largely a consequence of people like the Blackfoot putting on other people's markings and making just absolutely horrific attacks as false flags. I would know - I'm Blackfoot. But I'm not sure why you would bring any of that up. It's not exactly relevant.
There were many different nations already existing throughout the American West, from North to South. Lewis and Clark never went to the south west and very little of the land they surveyed could possibly have been called desert. The US army burned Hopi peach Orchards before surveyors ever got there with the intention of Wastelanding what was being used as fertile cropland, an agricultural feat that we can just barely replicate today. Even in the North West, Lewis’s and Clark would have been dead several times over if they had not followed pre existing trade routes and engaged in diplomacy and commerce with people along the way. The history of the American Weat is not a singular story, but one shaped by many different people’s telling, all of which relates to trying to establish the “official correct moral action” in the OP situation by pointing out that everyone here insisting on there being one morally correct way to proceed is assuming the legitimacy of some immediate “civilized” legal system, of which the captives may or may not have been beholden to (we were not told). But, that could be a perfectly fine assumption if it is the assumption of everyone at the table, because the GM and the table define those assumptions for themselves, not people arguing on the internet.
The behavior of one character acting “in character” against the will of the rest of the players is the potentially real problematic behavior here, not the originally proposed scenario or action, which either could or could not be ethical or moral based upon the desires of the players, since none of the characters involved are actual, real people, and the ethical considerations we observers from the internet want to project on the scenario could or could not be relevant to that table’s game experience.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
But none of those you say were the stated justifications.The justification given from the player was "it's ok to kill them, they attacked us first".
As I said, there may be legitimate reasons to kill, but that ain't one.
That's a reason given from kindergarten kids of why they fight.
Why aren't they the stated justifications? Because they're true. We're talking about a scenario with a band of murderous bandit cannibals. Why are you stripping it down to a generic "attack"? We are talking about murder, and you're muddying the waters, introducing the idea of a harmless attack and then equating the two.
No one is talking about a mischievous kid. We're talking about murderers. Have been all along.
Sometimes you stick to the OP's scenario, when it fits your narrative.
Sometimes you do not when it would not fit.
This does not feel like a good faith attempt at rational debate.
|
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So, despite using the term "Wild West," you're talking about one incident in the Southwest and not common practice in areas more commonly associated with the period, such as Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, etc. Seems an odd choice.
But I actually do appreciate your other point a great deal. Assumptions based on existing under a unified modern justice system don't really apply. Everyone's operating under different assumptions and conditions. Different legal systems, different cultures, no one's entirely sure which, if any, are applicable, and posters here tend to be quite blind as to the existence and relevance of values, mores, traditions, and systems not their own.
You do seem to labor under an awful lot of assumptions about other posters.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Alignment threads are as tenacious as always I see.
Next time a group of people attacks the party in the hills, the party should wipe them out, not knowing if they're cannibal bandits or a defense force that got anxious and assumed the party were raiders?
Absolutely none of that matters. If someone is actively trying to kill you, and you have no reasonable recourse for immediate escape, you must kill them. Anything else is a foolhardy deathwish.
Because if you don't, you're dead, and nothing else will matter anyways.
If you pull your punches, then you're either not in immediate mortal danger in the first place, value the life of your attacker(s) over your own, or are just going to get yourself killed.
It doesn't matter who they are or what their reasons for trying to kill you are. All that matters in the moment is that your life, and possibly the lives of others, is under immediate threat. Such threats needs to be dealt with swiftly and with brutal efficiency, or you're all gonna' die.
It's not good. It's not evil. It's survival.
Of course, that's all moot in the scenario the OP proposed, so I digress.
First of all, sorry. I didn't know you had such experience, I don't and as such can't easily have the same point of view you have.
Also, I'm engaging in good faith. Please, don't consider otherwise.
On reflection, I think the reason I'm not asking them is that it wouldn't occur to me to give murderers input on the consequences of their actions.
You said that so I assumed you were not asking them anything (and anyway, in the OP case there was no questionning).
You don't need to dehumanize someone to kill them. Trust me on this. It doesn't feel great, but can be necessary.
I fully agree. The process of dehumanization is used to avoid bad feelings not to avoid killing people.
I feel that our point of disagreement comes with how the OP handled the execution. The OP doesn't talk about any attempt at being fair or anything, but just a mere execution based on self-defense as an excuse and cannibalism/brigandry as a justification. That's what I call evil. If a proper process of questionning/judging has been done and if the situation is the best that the party came up with, then it may be less evil. It's not perfect, but we are anyway dealing with imperfection in this case.
As a side note, my Paladin of Vildeis ended up in the same circumstance after capturing a follower of Dahak. She told him that she had to bring him to justice, in that case the Ekujae Elves. The cultist said he didn't want to and prefered to be killed here and now, preferably with a weapon at hand. So she untied him, gave him a dagger (as she uses daggers) and killed him. It was murder, definitely. But I think it was made in such a way that no one considered it an evil act. Not a good one, for sure, but not one that would cause a Paladin to fall.
Edit: So many posts in an hour...
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I really think cannibalism is so low on the totem pole of things that should warrant execution, and banditry potentially as well given circumstances. I frankly do not believe in good and evil, nor do I necessarily think moral language is particularly pro-social in many cases. Cannibalism in most cases is an important social thing among some cultures and the distain for it is a disgust response not a rational one. Bandits and banditry are also loose here. What did these people even do exactly?
If you think "killing is always wrong" you can still kill people in self-defense. It's just not a great thing to do. Killing people NOT in self-defense is, well, wrong.
Revolution is one such case I think directly proves this point wrong. Toppling a regime is offensive, not defensive, and it is beneficial and killing for such reasons is justifiable
I've approached this topic many times, and I think I'll try to refocus this by presenting an abstracted version of OPs scenario that has certainty and removes extraneous details.
You have complete custody of the bandits, for now. The captive bandits have killed people before, and have been remorseless bandits for the majority of their lifetime. However it was managed, you have determined they would attempt to return to a life of banditry if given the chance. For this scenario, that includes killing people.
.
Any angle of punishment for past crimes should be boxed away for now. If you do or don't think the past banditry deserves punishment, try to shelf it for later.
IMO, the reason this scenario in particular has kicked up so much dust is that it's not about punishment or self-defense, it's about Future Crime ™.
A noble paladin, sword drawn and ready in this scenario might say: "It has little to do with the crimes of these pitiable souls here. Now that I know these free-willed bandits will kill innocent people, I must protect those innocent people, even if the method is grim."
.
Now, if the party came across those bandits running rampant over a caravan of traders, few(er) people would take issue with a paladin using a lethal-only bow to save as many innocent lives by killing the bandits.
In that scenario, the immediacy of the bandit violence and the future innocent death being seconds away, that removes doubt about said future and confronts the witnesses with the consequences of their inaction. Even when the paladin would have more agency by being present, or put themself at risk by choosing non-lethal methods, few would object if the paladin swings to kill.
Lethal defense of others, killing the killers, will rarely draw any objections. Yet, is that not what OP's scenario is, only separated by time?
.
The reason why arguments against "saving future victims" logic fail to interact with it, is because the core moral quandary is around our ability to predict and have confidence in the future.
We cannot know for certain about the future, and even the past is hard to be objective about.
I have seen those who do speak to the issue beneath rush to a "you can't know for certain they will kill again, ∴ execution is evil. Any attempt toward forced rehab(imprisonment)/ect is the answer" type response and wash their hands of it.
.
.
However, I'd like to take it a bit further than that. Certainty does not exist within anything, to the point that once your measurements become impossibly tiny, you start working with probabilities (quantum stuff quite literally, but even machining always comes with an error margin / tolerance rating, ect).
I want to say that the idea of trusting one's own predictive ability, especially in matters of life and death, can be *deeply* uncomfortable for some people (and automatic non-issues for others). The snag of "what if I'm wrong" can be a big one. It's not a moral failing or anything.
While at some point, someone *will* have to make a decision based on uncertain facts to enact a more desirable future, there's nothing wrong with abdicating a judgement to the rest of your party.
.
So as much as we would like to be idealistic and say "execution never, the person could always change"
the reality is, as always, an uncertain grey of "What is good enough evidence to be confident this action is saving a victim?"
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Actually, if you reread the OP, they had patched up and interrogated the prisoners. That's why they knew the prisoners were bandits and cannibals.
True, but the OP also indicates that bringing them to civilization was possible. Which is why I consider that your extrapolation changes the problem entirely. If you can't bring them to civilization no matter what then proper trial can't exist. In that situation, you have to resort to something else and it may be another form of trial.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The situation hinges on the following.
After an argument, we brought the remaining bandits back to civilization and turned them over to authorities.
The party was able to hand the bandits over to the authories, evidently with no particular trouble as it only warranted a single sentence. Killing people because it is mildly more convenient than going to the authorities is a bad start. Can it be justified? Potentially. But it is dependent on factors we don't have from the OP (and probably won't get since this kind of feels like a fire starter thread posted to several different forums from a new account with zero other posts.)
Maybe the authorities worship Torag and would have executed the bandits anyway, in which case the PCs would just be "passing the buck." But maybe the authorities worship Saranrae and would want to imprison the bandits and rehabilitate them. (In D&D this would be conflating lawful with good, but Pathfinder doesn't have Alignment anymore so I think it is fine.)
As a general rule of thumb, killing people when there are less extreme measures available to prevent them from hurting others isn't good. You can manufacture reasons to do it anyway, but those weren't presented in the OP, and I think if you're arguing in favor of killing someone the burden of proof should be on you.
If someone broke into your home with the intention to harm you, but instead was easily subdued by you... Could you really argue you should just kill the person rather than wait five minutes for the cops to arrive? Yes, modern day sensibilities, fantasy setting, blah blah blah. But we really don't have anything else to go on here. And we really need that before we can make hard and fast rules in a setting like Pathfinder. The bandits could have been mind controlled by a hag into their acts for all we know.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Yes, modern day sensibilities, fantasy setting, blah blah blah.
I prefer modern day sensibilities applied to a fantasy setting than fantasized fantasy sensibilities based on modern day sensibilities and inaccurate vision of medieval times.
Any moral argument starting with "but this is medieval times" can hardly be taken seriously.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'll add that Unicore and Raptor Jesus are correct in that what really matters is not trying to apply my arm chair philosophy but how the table as a whole felt about it. Failing to agree on this bodes well for the longevity of the table.
A friend and I were once invited to join a table and the GM specified "no evil characters." We took that as a signal that playing good aligned defender of justice types would be a good fit. I made an Inquisitor, my friend a mknk. The problem was the game already had an evil bard in it. He framed an innocent man in order to steal a sword. He wanted to restart a drug ring we busted up which sold stimulants that mutated people into rampaging Hulk monsters. And we found out that before we joined he'd used Charm Person in the most despicable ways imaginable. It became unclear to me why my Inquisitor shouldn't just kill this bard.
But the bard player and GM did not think the bard qualified as evil. And in discussing it, I realized we had very different takes on real world morality too. I realized not only was this party chemistry doomed to fail, but I didn't really want to hang out with these dudes anymore.
That's really the problem here. One player has such different view on morality than his teammates and it is likely to cause further problems in the future. Also, echoing Unicore that this is why the dying rules don't normally apply to NPCs.
|
|
...Yeah, it's cool. Sometimes we forget the Internet has all kinds of people on it.
Actually, if you reread the OP, they had patched up and interrogated the prisoners. That's why they knew the prisoners were bandits and cannibals.
In today's society, people tend to be conditioned to let police hold the monopoly on force, let them handle the apprehension of criminals and everything after. I have a different perspective, as if I am the victim of an attack, law enforcement might be here in as soon as half an hour. I have literally no one to rely on in an emergency except myself and my family. That's why people outside cities like to be armed.
Now, extrapolate that out to, say, parts of Alaska without roads. Say a work crew up there was attacked. They successfully fight off their attackers. Some attackers are injured, but captured. The crew learns that the attackers meant to kill the crew and burglarize the site.
By the standards of most of this thread, that crew is obligated to provide care, food, and transportation to the nearest law enforcement installation. They might well not have the supplies or equipment to manage that journey while keeping the prisoners secure. If they can, it might jeopardize their entire operation. Law enforcement certainly can't make it out to site. The crew DEFINITELY doesn't have the spare food for these guys. What can they do?
Keep in mind that, as an American, I do not view the government nor its institutions as sacred. That's more of a French thing. I do my very best to abide by the law, but the law is created by a group of people and enforced by a bunch of people. The people aren't superior to me, and the laws aren't spiritual. It functions where it can, but it breaks a lot. Especially when you're a long way away.
TBH it feels like you're trying to push a very specific kind of morality on the rest of us. One that we should recognize as the real true one because you know better.
Which is ironic considering your previous complaints in this thread about people trying to push their sensibilities as the one good way.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The bad fish smell for me about this whole scenario is "what was the GM trying to do here?"
I don't mean this in a judgy--the GM had bad intentions--way, I mean it in that GM fiat was clearly used to create this situation in the first place because these run of the mill bandits didn't die when they reached 0 hit points. So if the party decided to revive them afterwards to probe them for information, then the party really should have been contending with the decision from the beginning of the encounter with attacking non-lethally. But if it was because the GM was encouraging the party to act with mercy and try to tend enemies because it felt like the morally responsible thing to do at the table, why let one player act unilaterally at the end of the encounter? That does nothing to foster a positive space for the players to have discussions about morality at the gaming table and is setting everyone up for bad feelings and an argument.
Before any characters take action, if one player is insistent that their character has a right to act in a certain way that will cause enough tension for one of the players to go to the internet to ask others for some kind of ruling that will probably reinforce their own desired take on the situation, then the game needed to stop before the action was taken because you don't have a party playing a game together anymore.
I recognize that some people have a lot of fun with PvP games and characters with mysterious objectives that might class with other players characters, but it is clear from the player behavior after this situation that this is not the kind of agreed upon situation. Very basic rule 0 issues are being ignored at the table before the ethicality of the situation can even be evaluated.
Again, these things happen in games. The GM Core has suggestions for GMs to help avoid them in the first place, and talking through what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future is a really good idea, but returning to the table and saying "actually, this is what a truly good character would do, because the internet said so" is not a really good idea in this situation.
The bad smell for me for this entire thread is that it was brought to the internet at large in the first place.
Vague scenario, inflammatory topic, deliberately asking for judgemental opinions from people who don't have any relationship to the players actually playing. At best it is someone wanting to strong-arm their fellow players using an appeal to popular opinion fallacy. At worst, I'm surprised it doesn't have a link to a marketing website randomly placed on one of the words.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Yes, modern day sensibilities, fantasy setting, blah blah blah.I prefer modern day sensibilities applied to a fantasy setting than fantasized fantasy sensibilities based on modern day sensibilities and inaccurate vision of medieval times.
Any moral argument starting with "but this is medieval times" can hardly be taken seriously.
I agree... Up to a point. As you and Calliope both note, there are circumstance where modern sensibilities break down. I'm just not convinced this was one of them.
I ran a campaign set in war torn Nirmathas where the party captured a hag alive but unconscious. One player was extremely uncomfortable with killing them instead of handing them over to a rightful authority. The problem was Nirmathas doesn't do centralized authority. The high level PCs were leading the local militia, which basically made them the highest accessible authority. The one player suggested making the hag stand trial in an open military tribunal. But even that was impossible because the hag had too many escape options like gasesous form and dimension door. In the end, player settled for a closed door tribunal and the hag was executed. It wasn't ideal, but at least there was a record of the decision (as opposed to real world military regimes which just disappear people.)
In another campaign, the PCs were first level, teenage scouts in training for a hunter/gatherer following of the Broken Tusk. The PCs encountered scouts they didn't recognize who attacked them on sight. The party took them alive to interrogate. These two were from a much larger following with a lethal grudge against the PC's tribe. The enemy scouts showed no remorse, and a zealous devotion to their cause. The Broken Tusk did not have food to spare, nor could it afford these enemy scouts reporting back. Leaving them tied to a tree would just mean death by starvation, exposure, or wild animals. One of the PC's made the decision to snap the neck of these warriors so his friends wouldn't have to. He also conducted funeral rites for them, but the decision still haunted him. It was the first time he had to kill another human being. It would not be the last.
Both these PCs get a morality thumbs up from me which the OP's killer does not. It doesn't hurt that the party deliberated on the decision and took it seriously. Life and death tends to come cheap in Pathfinder and I think the story is often poorer for it. I also thoroughly enjoyed both sessions, but not everyone would. I'd talk to those players and figure out why, and see if there's a mutually satisfying solution to their problem. But there's a chance my table might not be the right one for them, and that is ok.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The bad fish smell for me about this whole scenario is "what was the GM trying to do here?"
I don't mean this in a judgy--the GM had bad intentions--way, I mean it in that GM fiat was clearly used to create this situation in the first place because these run of the mill bandits didn't die when they reached 0 hit points. So if the party decided to revive them afterwards to probe them for information, then the party really should have been contending with the decision from the beginning of the encounter with attacking non-lethally. But if it was because the GM was encouraging the party to act with mercy and try to tend enemies because it felt like the morally responsible thing to do at the table, why let one player act unilaterally at the end of the encounter? That does nothing to foster a positive space for the players to have discussions about morality at the gaming table and is setting everyone up for bad feelings and an argument.
I mean, for all we know, the players themselves could have seen the humanoid opponents and opted for non-lethal.
It's not always on the GM if a party decides to get prisoners.
In this specific case we know Unicore is right because the OP specifies stabilizing the bandits, which doesn't happen with non-lethal damage. (And we have to take that as gospel because again this is a troll thread with no follow up.)
As a general rule of thumb, killing people when there are less extreme measures available to prevent them from hurting others isn't good. You can manufacture reasons to do it anyway, but those weren't presented in the OP, and I think if you're arguing in favor of killing someone the burden of proof should be on you.
If someone broke into your home with the intention to harm you, but instead was easily subdued by you... Could you really argue you should just kill the person rather than wait five minutes for the cops to arrive? Yes, modern day sensibilities, fantasy setting, blah blah blah. But we really don't have anything else to go on here. And we really need that before we can make hard and fast rules in a setting like Pathfinder. The bandits could have been mind controlled by a hag into their acts for all we know.
While I appreciate seeing "general rule" and other qualifiers, your example of "waiting five minutes" paired with absurdly unlikely "what if mind control" caveats seems a little disingenuous and avoids engaging with the messy reality (of the fiction).
.
It's always about "how much is reasonable? How much can we afford?"
How much can a party of PCs afford to derail their current travel/objective to forcefully transport captive bandits to the regional justice?
Two day's delay?
A week? 3?
When does the simple burden of moving the prisoners for imprisonment/ect become a greater cost than executing them?
.
People can be *extremely* uncomfortable with putting a price to a life, especially devaluing one beneath your own, even if they are cannibal bandits (99% the GM did NOT want the party to detour & cart the bandits).
Yet, that's the messy truth of it. No matter how you approach your judgement process, someone needs to say
"Yes, the detour will be 3 days, we can risk delaying our rescue of the princess and take these bandits to town."or
"No, I'm sorry you lot, but we can't afford the delay, and we can't let you go to prey upon more people."
It's why I have a great appreciation for fantasy that takes the RL historical costs of things seriously, especially when it's something as morally hazardous as prisoners. For a long time the basics like food and shelter were the majority of what work could create/produce. Having a population of prisoners was outright infeasible (and why prisoner-slaves were so common). We've only recently reached the point where it's extremely inexpensive to lock people up.
.
In GoT, I think it was the very first episode where the guy you are supposed to root for, Stark, executes someone that in a modern context, could easily have been rehabilitated.
That fictitious scenario of the man in charge doing it himself was *better* than the RL history. You ever seen those sack-masks that cover an executioner's whole face? It was a real job that someone had to do, and that was to protect/help the executioner avoid vengeful reprisal (and another pop-history tidbit is that it was usually a job for someone from the next town over)
The job must have SUCKED.
IMO it's great that some of that real weight can transfer through a ttrpg like this, where it can be painfully obvious that sometimes PCs *should* provide summary executions.
.
.
IMO people need to engage with a setting like Golarion, and a profession like adventuring, honestly. The players special ability is supremacy of violence.
If one group TPKs, another will take their place. In PF2E, a bbeg might succeed in a scheme, but the party always wins in the end.
If your role is that of being the biggest stick of violence, and for 99% of tables that's what the game is, not only is it OK to have conflict around how you should and should not use that power, but I think confrontations like OP's captive bandits can create wonderful food for thought.
.
RaW, even if there is GM discretion on enemies going Dying instead of dead, nonlethal damage is not hard to do. The Stabilize cantrip, Mercy rune/spells, ect.
PF2E is a game with a whole lot of avoidable killing.
Many players and tables don't like the idea of admitting that "we could take most of our kills alive" and they never work through the uncomfortable thought process surrounding it. Many who do think through it end up at the "executing cannibal bandits" stage.
.
While this may sound harsh/incendiary, I think calling the idea of carting off every sapient bandit to be "naive" is the best way to phrase it. It's idealistic in a world where a monster getting a crit on a 3rd Strike will put PCs from 100% HP to dying 2 before they have a chance to act.
What if the bandits are goblins, and the nearby town does not want them? Are you going to stop your adventure to re-educate the goblins at gunpoint, force them to farm, because as free willed sapient people, they *could* change their ways?
Sorry to say, but that attacking goblin/"demi-human" scenario is extremely routine, and is at the core of the issue.
.
.
I say this as most forms of "cannibal bandit mercy" I've been party to have stunk with the hypocrisy of the corpses we had already left in our wake.
I've learned how to handle it a bit more tactfully at a table, as no one reacts well to being told they stink. That their PC could have just use the cantrip they already have, or their monk can non-lethal punch as easily as kill.
Just mentioning that a single 70gp Merciful rune is perma-non-lethal for even bows might ruffle some feathers.
.
Overall I think it's great that people are engaging with this topic, and going through this tumble-dryer of a moral tumbleweed that inevitably arises when thinking on the issue of how supremacy of violence should and should not be used.
.
.
While my own stance on "yes, killing helpless bandits can, and often is, the right call."
I would like to say that, some pledge to law aside, there's nearly no scenario in which adventurers are on the hook and *responsible for* killing the bandits. The PCs likely will not be executioners (though many knightly oaths actually do involve stuff like that, so be careful/mindful).
Many of these sticky quandaries can be truthfully solved with
"Our job is to hunt that mad wizard, this is not our job. Foreseeing the bandits' future crimes does NOT make us accomplice to their crimes. Choosing inaction is a choice we can make. The bandits' status as independent and free-willed absolves us of their choices."
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
As a general rule of thumb, killing people when there are less extreme measures available to prevent them from hurting others isn't good. You can manufacture reasons to do it anyway, but those weren't presented in the OP, and I think if you're arguing in favor of killing someone the burden of proof should be on you.
If someone broke into your home with the intention to harm you, but instead was easily subdued by you... Could you really argue you should just kill the person rather than wait five minutes for the cops to arrive? Yes, modern day sensibilities, fantasy setting, blah blah blah. But we really don't have anything else to go on here. And we really need that before we can make hard and fast rules in a setting like Pathfinder. The bandits could have been mind controlled by a hag into their acts for all we know.
While I appreciate seeing "general rule" and other qualifiers, your example of "waiting five minutes" paired with absurdly unlikely "what if mind control" caveats seems a little disingenuous and avoids engaging with the messy reality (of the fiction).
It's always about "how much is reasonable? How much can we afford?"
How much can a party of PCs afford to derail their current travel/objective to forcefully transport captive bandits to the regional justice?
Two day's delay?
A week? 3?
When does the simple burden of moving the prisoners for imprisonment/ect become a greater cost than executing them?
.
People can be *extremely* uncomfortable with putting a price to a life, especially devaluing one beneath your own, even if they are cannibal bandits (99% the GM did NOT want the party to detour & cart the bandits).
Yet, that's the messy truth of it. No matter how you approach your judgement process, someone needs to say
"Yes, the detour will be 3 days, we can risk delaying our rescue of the princess and take these bandits to town."or"No, I'm sorry you lot, but we can't afford the delay, and we...
That is a super long way to say that evil is justified by logistics. I really don't see what you're saying as any kind of ethical or meta-ethical argument about when an action is moral or immoral, just a detailed explanation of what makes being truly good very inconvenient.
Players in my game constantly take and then release prisoners. And, in fact, by my light your quote either undermines your post, or undermines itself, because if these bandits are free willed it's impossible in principle to know whether or not they will commit future crimes at all.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I am very glad that PF2 remastered has abandoned alignment and left these discussions for players at the table and not to try to be resolved by comparing actions with a general guide about alignment in a game rulebook. I mean any character could have an anathma against killing unarmed foes, and that is perfectly fine as long as it plays well with the other players at the table. It doesn't need to be rooted in good or evil to be valid. The group I play with has pretty much adopted an anathema against using magic to influence or control the actions of NPCs because it makes them uncomfortable, and knowing this, I can make sure to not push against it, even if I don't necessarily think that the magic distinction makes sense to me personally. I know as a player and a GM not to push this because other players don't think that these kinds of scenarios would be fun.
Larger conversations about ethicality don't really matter because I could play with other folks/play other games if exploring those stories is something I want to do. Morality could be about more, but fundamentally we know that it is about social interactions between people and anything more than that is about belief systems and faith. Be careful about using the pretense of playing games to force anyone into discussions that they don't really want to have.
|
|
As a general rule of thumb, killing people when there are less extreme measures available to prevent them from hurting others isn't good. You can manufacture reasons to do it anyway, but those weren't presented in the OP, and I think if you're arguing in favor of killing someone the burden of proof should be on you.
If someone broke into your home with the intention to harm you, but instead was easily subdued by you... Could you really argue you should just kill the person rather than wait five minutes for the cops to arrive? Yes, modern day sensibilities, fantasy setting, blah blah blah. But we really don't have anything else to go on here. And we really need that before we can make hard and fast rules in a setting like Pathfinder. The bandits could have been mind controlled by a hag into their acts for all we know.
While I appreciate seeing "general rule" and other qualifiers, your example of "waiting five minutes" paired with absurdly unlikely "what if mind control" caveats seems a little disingenuous and avoids engaging with the messy reality (of the fiction).
.
It's always about "how much is reasonable? How much can we afford?"
How much can a party of PCs afford to derail their current travel/objective to forcefully transport captive bandits to the regional justice?
Two day's delay?
A week? 3?
When does the simple burden of moving the prisoners for imprisonment/ect become a greater cost than executing them?
.
People can be *extremely* uncomfortable with putting a price to a life, especially devaluing one beneath your own, even if they are cannibal bandits (99% the GM did NOT want the party to detour & cart the bandits).
Yet, that's the messy truth of it. No matter how you approach your judgement process, someone needs to say
"Yes, the detour will be 3 days, we can risk delaying our rescue of the princess and take these bandits to town."or"No, I'm sorry you lot, but we can't afford the delay, and we...
Honestly, I have seen far more killing and even more unsavory things done for giggles because NPCs are not real people.
If dealing with the bandits is not the PCs' job, then executing them is not their job either.
And if you let them go, there could even be a bounty on their heads next time you're in the neighbourhood.
To me it's not even a debate, the character that killed the bandit did an evil act, full stop. Because if you've already managed to subdue the enemy enough to where all they can do is lay there and answer questions, the encounter is over. The threat this person poses is done, and it doesn't seem like there's any kind of pressing time limit. You should have killed them when you were fighting if you didn't want to be evil, instead of ending the fight and then killing them anyway.
That is a super long way to say that evil is justified by logistics. I really don't see what you're saying as any kind of ethical or meta-ethical argument about when an action is moral or immoral, just a detailed explanation of what makes being truly good very inconvenient.
Players in my game constantly take and then release prisoners. And, in fact, by my light your quote either undermines your post, or undermines itself, because if these bandits are free willed it's impossible in principle to know whether or not they will commit future crimes at all.
Dude...
No.
Evil, and good, are contextual. Harm is the word I try to use when think/discussing non-relative bad acts.
Doing harm is not doing evil.
I doubt you would claim that lethal self-defense is evil. If so, your version of "evil" is not really workable in conversation.
.
All anyone does is justify their actions, there's no escaping that. Attempting to only results in thoughtless moral decisions and plenty of blind-spot hypocrisy.
For example, now that you know 60 gp can buy a Merciful rune to grant non-lethal damage, are you being evil by not spending the gold/slot to use it?
Sure it would be "inconvenient," but if killing people is objectively, always evil, then what moral soul could ever bear to swing a sword without such a rune?
.
There's plenty of "valid" reasons why one may choose non-action. "no future certainty" is a fine one.
However, don't be surprised if a town gets royally pissed, and runs the party out with literal pitchforks, if they learn that the party had the cannibal bandits at their mercy, but chose to let them go.
If you engage the fiction seriously, and you discover that your tied up prisoners are not desperate migrants out of supplies, but literal bandit cannibals by choice, it's kinda evil to let the loose to prey upon the area, tbh. I have a hard time imagining a locale that's not sending the bandits straight to the gallows.
And not so fun fact, but bandits and highwaymen were a reason *for* historical executions.
Banishing someone from a town, or other non-lethal sentences were often a *source* of maladapted people *becoming* such predators. Though, the flip-side to that is plenty people would have fled and become said bandits if they suspected they would be executed for a crime, it's all about future predictions and how they create a endless hairball of wonderful solutions and terrible problems.
.
I personally use the "not my job to be executioner" angle as my default for PCs. Though tbh now I'm itching to buy that Merciful rune for my primary Chiurgeon...
Locked for flags
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Flags have been cleared. Thread will remain locked.