Moral dilemmas, the thread. Share your most compelling and most problematic, tell horror stories about character's utter lack of emotion, how their moral code was twisted into a hollow mockery of itself as they drowned in their own ideals.
I'll start off with a scenario; the party has just defeated an arc villain, and has them at their mercy. In what may or may not be a show of bravado, they demands you kill them there and then. If you don't, he'll never stop plotting revenge, and he'll almost undoubtedly succeed eventually. At this point, the wizard/tech guy/ Dr. Mesmero step in and note that there's another option: they can use their abilities to wipe the villain's memory and replace it with something more amenable to living in society, allowing them to potentially be a powerful force for good.
So the question is this: Which option is more moral? Is it better to allow them to die as themselves, or does life hold intrinsic value such that the villain can be redeemed, even if the person they were was wiped out to make it happen? Is using what is effectively mind control to rehabilitate a villain the only humane thing to do, or just a self-righteous way to feel as though your hands are clean? Feel free to answer as yourself, or talk about how the party you're in currently would respond.
That depends on whether the person performing the action would lose enough alignment points to actually shift alignment. If not, then it's technically moral. I mean, good doesn't mean nice.
Of course, that has the side effect where some people are mechanically justified to do certain actions that would cause another to fall because "they don't have enough karma points", which is dumb.
Elijah Adams
When we're talking about wiping his memory, do we mean all of it or do we surgically remove all the evil thoughts and such? If he loses all his power, or even becomes a drooling retard with a mind of a newborn, he's not much use to the society.
Easton Phillips
That depends entirely on the nature of people in that setting. Mindkilling may be just as much killing as sticking a sword in them, in which case programming their mindwiped body to be a good person would be the same as creating a good-aligned person from scratch, even if you used the scraps left of the villain to do so.
Now the new moral dilemma would be if it is moral to create people with coded in moral alignments.
Gabriel Sullivan
>Let him die Another soldier for the Abyss
>Mind wipe Original evil personality probably erased forever
Jaxson Torres
>Which option is more moral?
Mind wipe. It is the objectively more constructive of the two options: this isn't a matter of opinion.
When you die, you shit your pants and microorganisms start having an orgy in your liquefying carcass. Its not what I would call "dignified."
Logan Thomas
Actually on second thought if they just become a babbling retard afterwards, a horrific baby in adult form, then yeah its probably better to kill them.
Yeah, but after you set that precedent, where do you draw the line? It's not that big a jump from 'mind control is a useful means to remove threats to society' to 'mind control is the default response to people disagreeing with the government.'
Adam Lewis
I'd sort of thought about it as him waking up as an amnesiac under someone else's name. The party might or might not be there to tell him who he is.
Adrian Collins
Mind wiping works out pretty well.
pic related
Zachary Lee
Made an unintentional dilemma for one of my players once. Looking back at it, it was retarded not to notice this was a massive burden of a choice.
Player was a monk, past skilled magician. To become a magician, one have to be born with a talent, and everyone is forcefully drawn into the magical academy, but after finishing studies of the art of magic (and learning to control own powers) they are given a choice: stay and become a full fledged magician or leave (with a magical badge proving one had studied, adults with talent and without the badge could be killed on sight).
So he was travelling with some documents his boss needed (it was a banished princess that wanted to overthrow her brother and become the queen) for some political intrigue, and while doing so, he encountered a band of knights. Magical knights, dudes from the academy.
Knights found a village with dozen or so children that were born with the talent, but there was no space in the academy, so they gathered them all on the edge of the forest and wanted to execute them. Mind that this was a unit of knights specifically trained for this stuff, not a random bunch of psychos.
At this moment, player wanted to take a break from playing. He told me to let the rest play, because he had to think about this. So I did comply, made and attempt at assassinating the princess and went back to the monk. He decided to invoke his past authority as a high ranked magician and convinced the knights to let him take at least part of the children with him back to the academy. He literally went to the pit where they were held, walked among them and grabbed several, leaving the rest to be executed (he was specifically told how many he can take). He went back and in completely different direction he was previously travelling, just to escort the children to the academy. He abandoned his important mission for a while just to save these kids.
Colton Clark
I improvised this whole encounter, just so the player wouldn't be bored (the party was completely split, one was faking being a mercenary and captured a castle from the inside, the queen, a player as well, was visiting some lords and wanted to form an alliance by marrying one of them and the monk was going for these darn documents).
Sadly, I was very shit at GM'in that game and players got bored quickly. That's how it goes when you want to write a fucking script instead of a session (we planned on playing max two sessions and I made a whole fucking campaign, I felt very stupid afterwards). It's even more saddening, because I know they would enjoy it (they were having fun until it became obvious we won't finish on time) if I didn't fucked up as simple thing as MG'ing an one-shot and proposed this as a short campaign (because there really was material for maybe 10 sessions).
Mason Myers
Kill him unless there's some bounty to bring him in alive.
Julian Allen
>Mind-wiping magic That's funny, because despite being developed for that exact reason (a wizard wanted to get rid of his less tasteful impulses), it's been weaponized to the extreme by one of my villains, who uses it to literally steal the experience of his victims. As he can only hold so much in his mind at once, he can transfer some of it to warforged droids, who he sculpts after a weaker version of himself as his most capable servants.
Colton Richardson
Hmmm did you say something? I was too busy decapitating this self-admittedly unrepentant villain.
Cooper Jones
If you mind-wipe him, he will inevitably regain his memories and carry through on his revenge-scheme. Of course, if you kill him, it's possible that any minions or friends he has left would bring him back from the dead to carry out his revenge-scheme.
Xavier Bell
This is actually one of the finest moral issues I've seen in a game (tabletop or otherwise). Tons of people use it, Mass Effect 2 in regards to the Geth is probably the most famous one.
Camden Ward
I rather thought so. I always chose to destroy the Geth in that instance. Killing is terrible and wasteful and utterly immoral in most every situation that isn't explicitly direct self-defense, but it always seemed to me to be the better option than depriving a thinking being of it's agency at the most fundamental level. I had a player that was a linguist in real life that decided to play a wizard and 'fix' the world in a comparable manner. They got to level twenty and used Wish to remove the words for Evil and for every negative emotion from every intelligent races' language. The logic was that if people were unable to express and define the concept of Evil, it would gradually fade away, in large part because cultists could no longer pray to evil deities because their names no longer existed. Correspondingly, all knowledge of demons, devils, and the Evil Planes was wiped from the memory of every civilization. It was such a small, but fundamental change I had to end the game, because I couldn't properly decide how to represent that. 'You would recognize that you've done something terrible and irreversible, but you no longer have the capacity to do so. Return to your peaceful lives.'
