Another D&D question

  • Thread starter Thread starter CeaselessMedik
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
C

CeaselessMedik

Guest
A lot of enemies in D&D are sentient and, I would say, usually have the system’s idea if a soul. When is killing it/him/her acceptable? Soldiers can kill in war even if they have the drop on enemy combatants, but police always try to capture the criminal alive. How should I handle these scenarios?
 
I think the response to this question is the same as the ones given by many posters in the thread ‘Killing goblins’.

D&D is a role-playing game. The players should role-play their characters. They should make moral decisions based on the moral outlook of their characters, not themselves.

Handle the scenarios in accordance with the system(s) of morality of the campaign world, and the alignments and motivating influences of the player characters, NPCs and monsters. The characters may or may not adhere to a belief system that includes the concept of anything like a soul. It depends on your campaign world.

I don’t see how anyone else can advise you without knowing all the details of your D&D campaign. Although I have no doubt that many people could offer suggestions . . .
 
D&D is a game, plain and simple. You could run through the streets slaughtering every person you come across, and all you’d have done is drop a piece of paper’s hit points down to zero. You haven’t killed a person, you haven’t committed a sin, you’ve just played a game.

That being said, I’ve never been able to play an evil character in an RPG… except once in Fable 2…because I don’t even like entertaining the notion of killing innocent people. I don’t think it’s sinful to kill a game character, but I just don’t like the idea. If the idea of killing a sentient RPG creature bothers you, then don’t kill them.

That being said, almost all of the sentient monsters in D&D are thoroughly evil. Goblins kill indiscriminately, succubi drain the souls out of people, vampires kill people, kobolds swarm cities… etc. If if were a human doing these things, I think we’d universally agree that it would not be immoral to put an end to their actions, even if that end was brought about by their death. Applying that same principle to the D&D creature, since they are almost invariably awful, it would be licit to kill them to prevent them from harming other players or NPCs.

Again though… I’d like to stress that this is a game, and so long as it doesn’t lead you to think that you can kill people and animals in real life, I wouldn’t worry about it.
 
Games have no moral footprint to them, as nobody having actual life is involved in the “killing.”

D&D has received a lot of opprobrium, most of it IMNAAHO undeserved, as with the suicide issue in the late 1900s. Just play the game and enjoy it until you outgrow it, but remember, it’s not real.

ICXC NIKA.
 
ProdglArchitect said:
D&D is a game, plain and simple. You could run through the streets slaughtering every person you come across, and all you’d have done is drop a piece of paper’s hit points down to zero. You haven’t killed a person, you haven’t committed a sin, you’ve just played a game.

That being said, I’ve never been able to play an evil character in an RPG… except once in Fable 2…because I don’t even like entertaining the notion of killing innocent people. I don’t think it’s sinful to kill a game character, but I just don’t like the idea. If the idea of killing a sentient RPG creature bothers you, then don’t kill them.
Click to expand...
I wouldn’t entirely agree with this. If we use another analogy, watching and enjoying the mindless violence of a movie series such as Saw is not acceptable, and the movie reviews from the Catholic Conference of Bishops is starkly opposed to such films, whereas watching a violent movie such as Saving Private Ryan or Braveheart or The Passion of the Christ would be different, because the violence is part of the immersion of the story and of the struggles that take place, and its purpose is not to indulge in the pleasure of violence just for violence’s sake, in the way that one would have done it if they went to watch the gladiator games in ancient times. It’s the same difference between the statue of David and a pornographic film, because the sin isn’t the nudity in itself but in how the nudity is being used.

So it wouldn’t be acceptable for a person to roleplay and get base carnal enjoyment from mindlessly massacring innocent people and then claiming that it’s harmless because it’s all in the imaginary realm of the game. It is possible to commit a sin without it directly involving another person.

Now, this can get more complicated, because it isn’t considered sinful for a person to play the role of a villain in a play or movie, so much of it could boil down to the intentions and disposition of the person. It can easily be the case that a person roleplays doing evil things as a form of venting and carnal pleasure, and this would not be acceptable.
 
TK421 said:
I wouldn’t entirely agree with this. If we use another analogy, watching and enjoying the mindless violence of a movie series such as Saw is not acceptable, whereas watching a violent movie such as Saving Private Ryan or Braveheart or The Passion of the Christ would be different, because the violence is part of the immersion of the story and of the struggles that take place, and its purpose is not to indulge in the pleasure of violence just for violence’s sake, in the way that one would have done it if they went to watch the gladiator games in ancient times. It’s the same difference between the statue of David and a pornographic film, because the sin isn’t the nudity in itself but in how the nudity is being used.

So it wouldn’t be acceptable for a person to roleplay and get base carnal enjoyment from mindlessly massacring innocent people and then claiming that its harmless because its all in the imaginary realm of the game. It is possible to commit a sin without it directly involving another person.
Click to expand...
Quite true, I agree with all of this. thank you for the additional clarification.
 
40.png
CeaselessMedik:
Which of the sentient creatures in the monster manual isn’t just plain awful?
 
The ki-rin isn’t awful. Neither is the coatl.

Those were first edition: which is the only edition worth a hoot.

More recent stuff is junk IMHO.

Original question: just play the game already! This is bordering on scrupulosity if it’s not already there.

Be nice to me or my lawful evil cleric will fix you!
 
In D&D you kill fake people on graph paper. How many innocents did Tolkien and Lewis kill in their pages? I’m no expert on Catholic morals but I don’t think anyone considers Toliken’s literary murders a sin. D&D is a narrative, the game is a story. You’re just playing the part as the narrator or hero. If a certain story arc makes you uncomfortable then by all means avoid it. The game should be fun, and when it stops being fun then some thing is going wrong.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top