On Murder and Regret: Developing Moral Ambiguity
My characters are beginning to question some of the moral qualities of their decisions. See, it all started when they accidentally offered up a human sacrifice and thereby opened a portal to the demonic plane. They eventually discovered they needed the heart of someone who had committed an act of violence (among other things) in order to close the portal, so they eventually killed a bandit and carved the heart out of his chest (rather messily) and made it into a potion to drink and thereby get attuned to demonic energy in order to close the portal. And of course they killed a bunch of monsters along the way.
So my characters, one of whom is at least nominally Good, aren’t quite sure how to feel about their actions. They very much chose this path (so I’m not too worried about a lack of player agency), but now I sense they’re wanting to find some way to redeem themselves and I’m struggling to find a good way to tell that kind of story. DW draws on the traditional dungeon crawl experience of killing monsters to get their treasure and thereby foil evil plots that abound in the world. And, in the tradition of the genre, this largely gets resolved using violence. At some point, though, it gets hard to reconcile fighting evil with drinking a potion made from a man’s heart, even if he was a ‘bad guy’.
Have you explored this kind of moral ambiguity in your own campaigns? If so, have you had any particularly good moments where you found ways to allow the characters to find a sort of redemption for morally dubious actions? Alternately, have you had particularly good moments of descent into grim acceptance?
The challenges do not have to be physical to justify defy danger. Many of the worst threats my players have faced have been not a straight up combat but figuring out who the enemy is or who is manipulating them. Nothing is creepier than realizing you have a choice, where you are not sure of all the implications but the decision could shake the world.
My favorite moment of moral questioning was when my players, as merchants to the neighboring kingdom, tried to avoid taxes on their goods and agreed to bring some crates back with them free of charge, no questions asked. Half way into the return journey, they heard crying from inside the crates…
I am very curious how people respond, as a similar situation basically killed one of my campaigns when I failed to find a way out. (It was basically Mass Effect World of Dungeons, and they unwittingly killed a space station of innocent people because they blindly followed the orders of a terrorist organization…)
Jason Tocci
When you say it killed the campaign, do you mean that the players just didn’t feel comfortable playing anymore or you all just weren’t sure how to proceed after that kind of event?
DW is meant to emulate D&D, but my D&D I grew up with was not about dungeon crawling. In fact, running a 5-6 year campaign in the Planescape setting, most of the pivotal conflicts were about moral ambiguity. I distinctly remember when they confronted one of the Big Bad End Guys by challenging his beliefs and showing him proof that his big plan wasn’t working the way he thought.
Half of the base stats have nothing to do with physical conflict. Defy danger with Cha or Wis can go a long way towards handling social maneuvering.
Dan Bryant I’m not sure, too be honest. I tried to give a chance for redemption in the next session (they sold out the terrorists to a space cop who used to be hunting them – that’s Cerberus and a Spectre if you follow Mass Effect), and they took that opportunity, but they seemed really depressed after that session, and nobody replied when I emailed to ask about scheduling the next one. Things kind of fizzled after that.
(To be fair, they might have also gotten fatigued by playtesting rule changes for the hack every session, but that hadn’t seemed to bother them until they became unwitting mass murderers and turncoats.)
Aaron Griffin Our exposure to D&D was always pretty combat-centric, so that’s probably a big part of why this campaign has played out the way it has so far, both on my part (I come to the situation thinking combat is likely, so I end up portraying the characters as monsters) and for the players (they’re not aware of what other actions they can take.) If they had tried to find an alternative to killing a man and eating his heart, I’m sure there would’ve been one, but they just accepted that this was the ‘quest item’ and so they needed to go get it. Maybe I can blame MMORPGs. 😀
One thought I’ve had is developing the sister of the bandit whose heart they ate as an NPC, but I don’t know if that will spur the players to try to redeem themselves or if it will just come across as cruel, given that they already feel kinda bummed about what they did. I’m also struggling to think of what they could possibly do for the sister, since her main instinct would be to find out what happened to her brother.
Dan Bryant if the players want some sort of absolution, perhaps something could happen which puts them in touch with the ghost of the bandit? His ghost would probably be pissed at them for killing him, but if he gives them some task to allow him to go to his rest, they can then feel somewhat redeemed by doing something for their victim…
The task would have to be something that isn’t morally dubious, if the aim is to allow the characters to redeem themselves. Perhaps come up with the bandit’s backstory and the reason he turned to banditry… maybe he suffered some injustice, and that drove him to become an outlaw. Perhaps by addressing the original injustice, he can find rest. The sister might be involved, or perhaps she’s just someone who lives in the settlement where they have to go. She could be a potential ally, but the PCs have to decide whether they admit to her that they were the ones who ended her brother’s life.
One of the things I like most about DW is the fact that player agency defines the core of your being, not “Paladins must be lawful good” or “assassins must be evil” or some other arbitrarily defined construct (nevermind the fact that so many paladins are willing to go kill sentients because the humans say they should, which I don’t care what anyone says, is barely lawful, and certainly not good). I prefer the concept of a character who is generally good, and gets a specific concrete reward for acting on it in a stated way, but still having agency not to, than I do one where alignment restrictions kill creativity.
The players meet the 8 year old daughter of the man they murdered. Her father was kicked off the land by the local baron, after her mother was murdered by his thugs. Because he could not pay tax.
What do they do?
Dan Bryant How did your player characters acquire the bandit’s heart. Did they kill him while he was in the middle of some banditry? Did they ambush and execute him?
Michael Mendoza They had (conveniently) heard rumors that there were bandits active on one of the major trade roads, so they wandered the road trying to appear like good vulnerable targets (not too hard, since there’s only two of them.) They saw some men coming out of the trees along the path wielding weapons and decided to shoot first while they were still a ways away, assuming they were probably the bandits people had mentioned.
That sounds like a cool direction for a campaign.
I remember playing in a D&D 4th edition campaign run by one of my friends that was similar. We were trying to enlist the help of an eccentric old wizard who kept asking for stranger and stranger things before he’d help us. First he wanted a Tarrasque heart, then a Daemon’s horn, typical wizard ingredients, etc. But It got worse and worse, and we kept going along with it. It wasn’t until he wanted a tiefling infant that we were like “OKAY HOLD UP A SECOND HERE PAL” and ended up in a battle with him. I think the GM had fun seeing how far we’d go to appease this wizard and it certainly caused some healthy disagreement in the party (some of us wanted to stop at “Dwarven skull”, but others wanted to try and “find” one and appropriately cover our tracks. It was pretty messed up in retrospect!)
Personally I try and bring up the moral ambiguity of my PCs’ actions from time to time but they usually don’t really engage (or perhaps I’m not raising the stakes high enough), which isn’t really a bad thing it’s just indicative of what my players are looking for. It seems they’ll generally okay with the classic good versus evil style campaign.
One thing I am working on at the moment is finding ways for NPCs to show how they feel about what is happening and maybe also what they know of the PCs. In your situation, you could take that in a lot of ways – maybe the bards are singing of the demons’ defeat but the songs don’t cover what they really did so people assume them to be heroic paragons, maybe nobody has heard of them, but people get the impression they are good people and give them a chance for a clean sheet, so that when those NPCs are in danger the PCs have the chance to be the heroes they are believed to be. Alternately they may have a shady reputation, perhaps people are scared of them, maybe they are already the bugbears in children’s rhymes already. I have been thinking a lot about the distinction between actors and feelers in this article and I think it is relevant to this kind of topic: http://www.thoughtcrimegames.net/hyperemotion/
thoughtcrimegames.net – Hyperemotion