Life is important

>if they end up taking a "human" life then they have to check that box
Who determines what qualifies as "human"? Character's own believes? Some supernatural arbiter? Would it consider elf to be "human"? What about gypsy?

Because unless you are psychopath or sociopath (or not high on drugs) that is hard to do for most people - a person that is right in the head makes for terrible killer

Sentient life. Would of been a better word.

Fortunately we invented a whole wide range of ideologies that let us dehumanize the victim and lighten the burden that dispatching them puts on our soul. "Faith is a shield" isn't just an empty phrase.

You mean sapient? Or that's what vegans believe?

>Once that line is crossed be it for the best or necessary reasons, that line cannot be uncrossed.
Pff. I have a time reverse spell that allows me to undo up to 6 seconds per level. I can cross it and uncross it just as easily.

>allows me to undo up to 6 seconds per level. I can cross it and uncross it just as easily.
And I need to get my mind out of the gutter, because god damn, you're giving me ideas.

By not playing a combat focused game and choosing a campaign type that doesn't imply a combat focus. When 70%+ of the rules are about taking life, what do you think the players are gonna think is the solution to all their problems?

I consider it a really big deal, and I always have. It's one of the jarring things about reading Veeky Forums-- most players are apparently quite happy to kill truckloads of "bad guys," and I was very fortunate to have played with a group that wasn't like that.

War and conflicts were part of human culture, nature and existance for all time humanity existance. For the most part of it people of diffrent city/country/culture/religion were considered to be hostile by default or approched with extra caution and viewed as second or third grade humans. And in some parts of the world it is still the case. PC by nature of adventuring are marginals of society who do odd jobs which sometimes not legal at all. Unless specified setting is noblebright or similar killing of enemies should be pretty common solution of problems.

Depends on system.

Trail of Cthulhu is awesome because killing a human being is a huge Sanity penalty.

In something like Shadowrun you can do it through how people react to killing.

You can always pull a Spec Ops: The Line sort of thing.

Railroad the players into killing people then bitch at the players for not just leaving the table rather than taking part?

A simple glance at any 3rd world or tribal shithole proves you wrong.
It's simpler than that, you just need a strong "Us and them" mentality, the actual wording of it or any ideological attachments is just icing on the cake making it even easier.

Tell me, OP, are my methods unsound?

That's what it'll devolve into anyways if the GM wants to make the party feel bad for murderhoboing

iirc unknown armies have you pass a test after killing someone for the first time. Failing draws you closer to insanity or whatever it uses for mental breakdown.

Burning wheel doesn't exactly mechanical enforce long term consequences but you would probably swoon a bit after killing someone. And then write a believe about it.
Also murder is a prompt for a corruption test. Advancing that, you can get all chaos weird, grow venom sacs and shit, but that's optional rules and mostly for mages

Make the bad guys not want to die. Have a couple bandits fall over and cry, or just run away. In an especially gruesome fight, have the surviving enemies remark on the brutality and lack of humanity of the party.

See this is a good point too. And like soldierboy from some people just dont get PTSD. Soldiers have a 5-15% rate of suffering. I guess this is because they are trained to kill both physically and mentally. But if I say alot of soldiers coming back from war have trouble having a normal life would that be questioned.

Well, even when you just take D&D, just for the argument. I don't like the system, dont hate it mind you.
There are monsters and animals. You can play a whole campaign only killing these things. You can extend this to ghosts, daemons, devils and angels who are not so much killed but just sent away
I had this idea for a while and what got me wanting to post was someone making a topic about "Killing over an insult". Murhobo is a fair way to play if thats what you want to do.
I would never run this idea in the 40k uni. Where killing someone is like brushing your teeth.

What where your ones dude.

Sure, put thats like the pulling out method. Things might already be knocked up

>How can you get your players to understand the weight it places on their souls.
get better players

>muh realism
GTFO

Is the animating idea here something like "fantasy roleplaying games simulate previous eras in human history, so the player characters should adhere to the value systems of those eras"?

This style of argument comes up on Veeky Forums a lot, and it's mostly forced me to accept the possibility that the past is an incredible shithole I do not wish to roleplay in. I've seen this same argumentative template used to assert that PCs should be accepting of slavery, rape, prostitution, and torture; presumably we've now added "casual slaughter" to the list.

note that the same people who advocate that have their chars approach problems in their fantasy games with a sense of rigour and professionalism that is way too modern for the era

Conscience rolls with a morality modifier if they are killing innocent people

If they fail the roll they have to deal with a guilt debuff that can be taken away through charitable deeds

How would these feel to play as though.
Like when a GM says this guy passes his intimidation check do you feel scared ?
Even if you get a -2 to your next roll, will you feel like your pc is shaken to his core?
While I agree with you in alot of cases I dont think this is what he was saying here. I read it more like. Unless the pcs are playing !HEROS! then they will be doing shady stuff anyway. Killing will be mired by their experiences

if you want a good story to come out of it, then forcing the player mechanically is a bad idea. it's like trying to force a kid to do his homework when they don't wanna.

actual solution?

The penalties for being a murderhobo should be established and if they are willing to accept the risk then they should be willing to roleplay with the debuff in the same way they would roleplay if their character had any other debuff such as a disease.

The option to kill them is still there so it's not railroading but for the sake of quality roleplay I think that the mental stress that comes from slaughtering innocent people should be a factor, especially if it's become a habit within your group.

Otherwise you can just talk to the group and let them know how you feel about them being plebs but going meta is never good

In fairness my groups are very good and are not hobos in the slightest. This is more of a thought experiment and to see what others thought about the whole: "Bare a sin on your soul" idea.
I seen it done in a few Japanese media
from xxxhoic a manga semi starting the lady from my first post to yakuza 0 a game while being about well the yakuza takes a very hard stance on murder

Casual slaughter was the first thing to ever be on that list.
Or did you forget that D&D was derived from a wargame?

no matter how heavy, serious, or otherwise somber the tone is, i will still make a not-so-witty one-liner upon slaying my foe

And that right there is why I'm refusing to buy/play that game.

I'm one of these odd people who didn't come to the hobby through D&D; I've probably spent far more time playing BESM and FATE. I know a bit about D&D's origins in the world of wargaming, but not much.

I replied to a comment which effectively answered OP's question with "Don't bother-- killing was a normal part of human existence for most of our history, so you shouldn't try to accentuate its ethical import." It was implied that players should adopt older value systems when playing campaigns featuring quasi-historical settings. In this case, that would mean finding it reasonable to kill foreigners for being foreign.

Any wargame features a similarly blasé attitude towards killing, but the rationale underpinning that attitude is different. A wargamer would answer OP's question with "Try playing a game that doesn't simulate war." Killing is an intrinsic part of the game, so trying to evade it or address its moral dimensions is just stupid.

I believe that what you're saying is something like "D&D has its roots in wargaming, a type of game in which killing is both necessary and of little ethical concern, and it retains these qualities; ergo, player characters shouldn't generally have any moral qualms about killing." And that's a reasonable assertion, inasmuch as D&D is weighted towards combat. However, it doesn't have anything to do with the type of ethical-justification-via-appeal-to-history argument that I initially criticized.

"killing places a weight on your soul" is a subjective, socio-cultural construct.

Only some people, raised or indoctrinated into cultures that feel it, and in the specific situations appropriate to feeling it, are going to feel that.

A homeowner in Texas shooting a looter trying to rape her? Nah.
A soldier killing the men on the opposite side who are trying to kill his comrades? Nah.
A barbarian looting a random village on a murderous raid? Nah.

Play a non-combat or combat-light game in a highly civilized setting, where violence is rare.

Think rural Victorian England (I'd say upper-middle-class America, but we have lots of video games and guns).

The parson goes duck hunting, the retired military doctor has a revolver, but violence and the tools for it are simply not on the radar of 95% of people. A murder would shock the senses, and the town.

t. psychopath.

Offer rewards or prestige for "clean" work, and players will twist themselves in knots to avoid unnecessary killing.

>t. most of humanity

The concept of killing alone being mentally scarring is recent and Western, it started in the late Victorian era, persisted in Romanticism, and was renewed in strains of early 1900s leftism - it's a side effect of Christian morality persisting through reinterpreted into secular culture.

You're a retarded imperialist if you think one narrow culture from a couple hundred year era applies to the rest of humanity. It's not even universal inside it's own founding environment.

Fate forcing you into a scenario where you have to kill a friend, or discovering your kin were on the opposite side of a battle after the fact - stuff like that is mentally scarring in many cultures. Killing people by itself is no big deal.

I'm stunned at all these people who think that killing someone would always weigh on you.

It only does if you give a shit about the person you kill. And contrary to what might accidentally have implied, it doesn't take work to be a killer. It's only after tens of thousands of years of refinement that about a third of the world's population now has a worldview that applies the value of life globally, and it has to be actively maintained or it atrophies rapidly. For most of history, someone not from your own village is already a second class citizen. A true foreigner has *way* less moral weight than your neighbour's dog when it comes to killing them upon being given a reason.

This is a good response, mainly because the most likely people here to kill and BE killed are people who know each other very well. It is not so much because these are peaceful folk: If they found an African man with a bullet through his head down by the beach, their only concern would be finding out if there were any who got away. But the most likely murder by far is if the parson accidentally hits someone's kid who was looking for frogs in the swamp, or the overambitious second son who in a fit of rage after one taunt too many decides to push his biggest obstacle to inheritance down a steep flight of stone stairs. THESE murders will eat away at them. Because the victim's absences from their lives will be a constant reminder. Because given time, they'll remember something good about that person.

I don't expect to ever start giving a fuck, like his soul is haunted or some bullshit. That would be retarded. He's not a sociopath, that's just how people naturally are unless they've chugged *so much* left-wing kool aid that it's coming out of their ears. If some random goat farmer who lives several thousand kilometres away from anything you give fucks about decides to try and shoot your head off for shiggles one day and you kill them in retaliation from 300m away...

>He's not a sociopath, that's just how people naturally are unless they've chugged *so much* left-wing kool aid that it's coming out of their ears.
I also agree that he's not a sociopath and that certain people are more mentally equipped to deal with killing than others, but I sincerely, sincerely disagree with the sentiment that people who suffer PTSD after combat engagements are just leftists who couldn't hock it or whatever you're trying to imply here

Anyway, naturalistically, most animals DO avoid fighting to the death with each other. However, this has so much more to do with the fact that a desperate animal can inflict serious wounds on the attacker in its death throes.

Animals DO absolutely kill the fuck out of each other if they haven't a reason to care, or to fear, their opponents. Most apes murder any children that aren't closely related given an opportunity to get away with it. That particular facet extends to a lot of animals.

Play in a modern setting. Or make the people in your game likeable enough that killing them is undesirable.

NPCs literally exist only to provide players with annoyance or danger. It's an acceptable break from reality, you're not destroying sentient life, you're just overcoming an obstacle your DM put there for you.
I'm also in the camp that players should never feel guilty for playing the game. Even if the character makes a mistake or does something ambiguous, it should never transfer to the player cause that's just poor game design.

PTSD occurs fine on its own. But most modern people are taught a culture that makes them more vulnerable to it than they would be otherwise. It's at a point where there's an on-again/off-again streak in modern Western military history that tries to reconcile this, debates deprogramming people out of the culture they are often fighting for, and tries to resurrect older western culture or synthesize modern variants that don't demonize acceptable violence.

Current research, to my knowledge, concluded that PTSD is unrelated to killing. It's got a lot more to do with STRESS, which in turn seems to have a lot more to do with the amount of time you spend "in the danger zone" so to speak. If you think there is a type of person more likely to get PTSD, it's presumably people who remain at full alertness during low to moderate risk times in their patrol schedule and burn themselves out, or struggle to stop thinking about the conditions of their patrol once they've left. It also probably doesn't help that they aren't necessarily happy about what they're doing.

People in ancient times didn't get PTSD at nearly the same rate. This is believed to be:
a) Because they had much less time 'in engagement'. While on the march, most ancient armies had nothing to fear. They'd fight a huge battle lasting a few hours, and then they'd have exhausted the opposing army for weeks or months, which they could spend relatively relaxed.
b) They had a lot more personal control over the flow battle. World War 1 and 2 had extremely high PTSD rates relative to anything before or since, theoretically due to the possibility of them being bombed or shelled out of existence at any fucking moment with no notice, for months at a time. In ancient times, it's down to whether or not you can beat the shit out of the dude in front of you.
c) Because their whole culture glorified being a soldier. Instead of coming back to protestors telling you what a shit bloke you were for killing those poor innocent rice farmers, you would come back to congratulations from pretty much everyone for putting an end to some foreigners and their sinister ambitions. What a good, reliable, strong person you were to be able to outfight them!

TL;DR I don't think killing is causally related to PTSD, it has much more to do with your prospects of BEING killed. It may factor in a little on point c), in that if your societal values may say your enemies lives have some worth.

Also worth mentioning that civilians who persist in warzones usually have a higher PTSD rate than soldiers, again because they have a lot less personal control over their day to day survival for a prolonged period.

>NPCs literally exist only to provide players with annoyance or danger
wew

Being 'justified' and feeling no guilt isnt the point. The point is that taking someone life changes a person.
You only get your first kiss once.
You get your first love once.
You buy your first car once.
You drink your first beer once.
You lose your virginity once.
and you kill your first person once.

Now your virginity could be lost because of peer pressure, rape, on your honeymoon, down an allly, to your one true love, in an orgy.
Just because the way it happens and how we feel about it is different. Doesn't stop us for being different afterwards.

>>(you)
I think im getting off track.
Im trying to say, it marks your hands, something you can't wash off.
Now billy bob can go around with hands as stained as a coal miner who has run out of soap on a Friday afternoon before a bank holiday Monday and be just fine with it.
But I want players to stop before they take that first kill, to hesitate just for a moment and think "Is this the right thing to do"
In real life people only need the slightest push to do horrid things
like the Milgram experiment or posting on /c/

But in setting where SOULS and gods are undeniably real this is what interests me .

If living in the world has taught me anything it's that life isn't very important in general. Life of the people who are constant in your life however is very important.

>You only get your first kiss once.
>You get your first love once.
>You buy your first car once.
>You drink your first beer once.
>You lose your virginity once.
>and you kill your first person once.

That's a provincial cultural viewpoint, user. If that's your culture, great! I'm from a similar one. But it's important to recognize that humans come from many diverse cultures. For lots of people, these are ordinary events unfreighted with special emotional significance. If you want a big Romantic theme in your game, you'll need to exclude players who prefer a more realistic, foreign, or diverse setting.

Unknown Armies has a good hardening mechanic.

If you want to play one type of game thats fine. If you( pc) wanna run around and murder people for looking at you thats cool too.
I enjoy a slap down over the top fight too. But I also want to explore out sides.
Just as everygame I play isnt zelda and every movie I watch isnt 2fast2faster

But saying blanket things like NPC are only for THIS. Means your cutting so much out your gaming life its a little sad. Try the salmon sometimes bro you might not like it, but you can get a better understanding why you like your chiknuggz.

But im not playing with people from outside of my culture. Im playing with
>the city major
>a doctor of the sciences
>a reenactment organizer (its not the same as larp d6guy. Stop saying that)
>an unemployed wizard (the 30 year old kind. Not the magic)
>an a call center worker
So saying in old times is not really anything to do with the point. People dont play there PC's in a bubble. Thats why you get the odd star wars reference during play

Do you think, if you where dropped into the "battle royale" you would just go wild? If none of your loved ones where there.

Allow me to quote a scene from a really good story.

"I was a great king, the greatest of kings. I valued myself more than anything on the planet for it was mine to inherit. So I ran an experiment I had seven of my subjects brought in. Elderly, young, noble, even a slave. I was going to kill them all simply because I could. But... I let them plead their case and after I had learned of them all I found that they all were too important to kill. Each one of them had a purpose, a cog that made my kingdom turn."

Though it doesn't end there, that's the argument against yours, now to continue he sheds light on something more akin to what you say here.

"However, this world has grown overpopulated. Filled with people who serve no purpose. It's disgusting how crowded and worthless these cities are. None of them stand for anything. If I were to have my way I would destroy this world, and those surviving would be allowed to live as they were worthy. "

The music usually chokes me up in a sad movie.

I couldn't give a shit about some dog named Marley.

I get what you're saying here and I really like it a lot. The culture guy does have a point, but I do feel like in a realistic setting everyone who wasn't trained in military combat from a young age would hesitate if they were looming over their prostrated enemy.

But more commonly, scenes like this would happen.

Day 83: I killed a man today...

Day 90: He just, came into the saloon and he started roughing up everyone. I had my trusty piece at my side and I gave him a warning point from my hip. Told him to get lost, he told me I wouldn't do shit. For the most part he was right, I didn't do anything as he kept beating on a patron. Eventually I unholstered and demanded he stopped, then he came for me. Once I saw his knife I knew it was him or me. I closed my eyes and fired. Now, I haven't slept in a week or so. Those eyes, burning in anger... I never imagined they'd look so cold.

It's easier for some people.

youtu.be/Yg-RIOATCbU

It's this kind of thing that makes me play characters who have a "won't kill" constraint sometimes - someone who will fight, but won't deal a killing blow, and may actively discourage the rest of the party from killing. Not always, mind you; I actually made it a significant event for one of my characters to lose that quality, after which he took a darker turn on personality.

The event that caused him to turn murderous was his love interest turning spy for Lilith, and as obvious as it was OOC, he didn't want to believe she was the enemy. When he finally got the picture, he was ready to kill her with his bare hands, and he nearly succeeded.

this same character eventually left the party and started working for Lilith himself, in a bit of irony that isn't lost on me. He also got a bit of Satan in his brain.

>hmmm...
>I wonder what this says about you.
>Do you worry about it?
>No judging, just interested.
Not him, but I was deployed to.
Same situation; when you fight and are heavily trained to fight, it is NOT the shocking "oh my god what did I just do" reaction that movies often have it as when you finally bump someone off.
In the heat of combat and the moment your usual response is "I am so fucking glad he's dead and I'm not" because he was just trying to kill you just then and you do NOT want to die and your reflexes hopefully kick in on time.
Thing is, it's actually distressingly easy to kill another human being and get over it when you're in the heat of the moment, which is why of course it's been happening since our species existed. Killing isn't hard wired into us or anything, but the human mind is capable of coping with significantly worse traumas and coming out perfectly functional.

Killing someone cold, a proper murder, is often not huge and shocking because of the death itself (though it might indeed be someone who matters to you rather then a stranger as in wartime), but the realization that you as a civilian just did something that has an EXTREMELY large chance of ruining your life forever. The shock doesn't come from the loss of life itself usually, but from the sudden realization of the potential consequences of the things you just did, which is why stupider or less imaginative murderers often seemed more stable afterword; they're usually too stupid or too lacking in imagination to really comprehend the consequences.

In short; your players are not valuing life of NPC's because they know there's no consequence to taking it in gameplay, and especially in real life.

Unfortunately, no.
Unless you mean like a spree-killer type guy.

Most PTSD has nothing to do with killing. My oldest friend was deployed with me and never managed to take even a single life (he was in no firefights, lucky him), but he still has it while I don't.
The real big cause of PTSD even when nothing bad happens to you and you do nothing bad?
The Army grinds out all ability to live life as a regular civilian out of you and then after you're tour is over both the Army and society give you next to ZERO tools to help you succeed and prosper in civilian life. You are basically cut adrift by a training system that removed your ability to live as a normal person outside the highly regimented and drilled lifestyle of the military and let roam free like a naked baby in the woods, which isn't sides anymore by the fact that most Army folks that recruiters go for tend to be the disaffected or aimless or outcast types who don't mind throwing away whatever life they have for Army pay.
Being trained and drilled and made to fit into a specific lifestyle and then having that removed from you and dropped into a lifestyle that you literally never had any chance to develop tends to make people just want to go back to the Army, which is of course the entire point of the thing.

>Only some people, raised or indoctrinated into cultures that feel it, and in the specific situations appropriate to feeling it, are going to feel that.
>But it's important to recognize that humans come from many diverse cultures. For lots of people, these are ordinary events unfreighted with special emotional significance.
The cultural argument is the spatial variant of the historical argument I criticized previously.

This is a reiteration of the historical argument.

This is another reiteration of the historical argument.

>He's not a sociopath, that's just how people naturally are unless they've chugged *so much* left-wing kool aid that it's coming out of their ears.
And here's what both the historical and cultural arguments are usually a stalking horse for: an attempted justification via an appeal to human nature, which, being natural, is good and right, as opposed to the "left-wing kool aid." Note that there's no actual ethical argument here-- no attempt to make any sort of direct argument about what is or isn't moral. That part rests entirely with the rhetorical sleight-of-hand which generated "left-wing kool aid."

These posts have an interesting correspondence with my feeling that "the past is an incredible shithole I do not wish to roleplay in."

How is this distinct from a purely hedonistic conception of morality, in which you're free to do whatever makes you feel good? (The assumption here is that you'd feel bad if you hurt "the people who are constant in your life.")

>How is this distinct from a purely hedonistic conception of morality, in which you're free to do whatever makes you feel good? (The assumption here is that you'd feel bad if you hurt "the people who are constant in your life.")

It seems to me that it's a simple acknowledgement that some people are just flat-out going to matter MORE in your life then others, and that most are not really much more then transient figures.
I'm guessing (unless you're still quite young or are very lucky) you know of at least one person in your lives who you knew of who died well before their time that you met at one point; it probably made you sad, but you also probably moved on.

>Unfortunately
What do you mean "unfortunately"?

Speaking as someone who went into a war zone and served and his chief goal while there was trying to get the place to stop fucking killing folks and being so dysfunctional all the goddamn time, life would be a lot simpler if people only hurt and killed other people when properly trained and properly drilled by a proper military with proper martial ethics and performance standards, so that only the people who agreed to take that risk would kill or be killed.
Real life however, abohors such simple lines and basic limitations on behavior.
>These posts have an interesting correspondence with my feeling that "the past is an incredible shithole I do not wish to roleplay in."
Unfortunately it's not just "the past".
In some of the uglier parts of the world survival is so constantly in question that you genuinely have to dehumanize people other then those who immediately matter to you just to survive. It's why civilian populations in areas like that tend to have severe PTSD; the stress of living like that for long periods does bad things to the human mind.

>How can you raise the importance of taking a life?
In a game, you really can't unless the player has already experienced it in real life and I sincerely hope they haven't.

>Are you ready to pay this cost?
I've taken a life personally. I know the costs, possibly better than you do.

>Mechanics or Story, how would you deal with this?
I wouldn't. For most people, RPGs are escapism fantasy and they don't want to or really need to deal with the realities of taking life, of killing someone. And honestly, that's ok. Escapism is what it is and there's nothing wrong with that.

Sometimes you have to let games be games and let reality be reality. Keeping them distinct is fine sometimes.

The new Delta Green book looked like it was going to get into this. Inflicting harm on other people was a major source of SAN damage, although if you killed enough/had a job built around it you could get to the level of being inured to violence, which would both let you avoid SAN damage from killing people in the future and irreparably damage one of your social stats, because you weren't able to connect to others the same way ever again.

Never got a chance to play with it, but I peeked at the design docs and it looked neat.

Having skimmed the conversation, I have to agree with the people who are saying that OP is full of shit. There is absolutely no reason that killing someone would universally, or even frequently, cause mental derangement, guilt, or even a serious mental shift in attitudes.

A sheltered suburbanite may have these problems, but Thrak who grew up among wild beasts and wilder men under a naked sky would have no such reservations.

Whoops, accidentally quoted myself instead of in my last post.

>I'm guessing (unless you're still quite young or are very lucky) you know of at least one person in your lives who you knew of who died well before their time that you met at one point; it probably made you sad, but you also probably moved on.
Well, I'm not young (36), but I haven't known anyone who died before their time; this is partly due to the fact most of the people I know are middle-class risk-averse nerds, but I think it's mostly due to the fact that that I don't know, and haven't known, many people. Until very recently, I didn't get over feeling sad, either; I've had dysthymia for more than half my life, and I didn't find an effective treatment until relatively recently.

Back to the point: acknowledging that we become more attached to some people than we do others doesn't supply us with a rational argument for treating the former better than the latter. The closest you'd get is something like "You should prioritize the people you're attached to over the people you're not attached to, because you'll be happier that way"-- which is a hedonistic moral criterion.

>In some of the uglier parts of the world survival is so constantly in question that you genuinely have to dehumanize people other then those who immediately matter to you just to survive.
That's certainly plausible, but I can't think of a good example. The ugliest part of the world that I can think of right now is the Darfur region of Sudan, but that's a matter of ethnic cleansing on the part of the Sudanese government, not a case where you have to dehumanize people to survive. (Although I suppose you might have to do that if you were part of the Sudanese government.) In any event, I don't want to play in contemporary shitholes any more than I want to play in historical ones: why would I torture myself by roleplaying the Darfur conflict?

To ROLEplay the PC's emotional world is pretty much up to the player, what you need is good communication and players who could be sconsidered emotionally self aware and empathic so they know what somebody who struggles with his own deed feels/acts like. Also good communication between the GM and the Players makes things always better.

To support it mechanically got the closest idea, CoC's insanity mechanic works pretty well for that. There is also Delta Green, whit the same mechanic but players face the situation that they need to dispose of innocent people, who just know too, much more often.

>The point is that taking someone life changes a person.
If the gas is colorless and affects the central nervous system reasonably fast, it really doesn't.

>That's certainly plausible, but I can't think of a good example.
Bosnia wasn't that long ago.

Killing enemies comes naturally, killing in cold blood doesn't. As late as world war 2, when two lines of fresh soldiers tried to fire at each other, the vast majority of them would fire at the ground/sky/not fire at all, because evolutionarily, we aren't built to kill other humans who aren't threatening our food/mates/stuff/family/body/social standing. It doesn't make sense for the survival of the species or the individual, as people who try to kill at the drop of a hat tend to die before they can mate.

Killing in cold blood is something that effects people deeply, which you could use to interesting effect depending on the system, whether with compels or aspect changes in FATE-based systems, sanity damage in systems that include that mechanic, or something more spiritual in a campaign where there are souls and an afterlife and gods. (Imagine if the God of Death, or even the God of Murder treated the ostensibly Good party with something like professional respect.)

Well put bro. As a civi its not a few point I can understand.
Thanks for sharing
You too

>How is this distinct from a purely hedonistic conception of morality, in which you're free to do whatever makes you feel good? (The assumption here is that you'd feel bad if you hurt "the people who are constant in your life.")

Tell me, do you feel equally sad reading about some stranger driving into a tree dying in the town over as if someone you knew died?
Do you feel ten times as sad when 10 people die in the country next to you?
Do you feel anything when you consider that 10 000 people, mostly children, starve to death everyday except frustration?
I'm just saying that as a human, it's very hard to care about people that are too distant from you and your life. You can have an ideological conviction about every human being equally valuable, but it's impossible not to abstract those who you never meet or know.

Those examples are of course pretty extreme compared to being forced to defend yourself against a bunch of bandits or whatever, but the same thing still applies. These people have no relations to you, except wanting to kill you for your stuff. You don't see them as individuals really, with hopes and dreams and whatever, it's just some guy doing his best to kill you for reasons unknown to you. If you compare that to trying to defend yourself from your friend who's gone berserk, someone you know extensively and have met every week for 5 years, you will be a hell of a lot more likely trying to disarm him and hold him down (if you're able) than to kill him back.

>As late as world war 2, when two lines of fresh soldiers tried to fire at each other, the vast majority of them would fire at the ground/sky/not fire at all

/k/ here, you fell for the SLA Marshall meme.

He was a famous WW2 era historian, whose work helped lay the foundation for a lot of modern killing-related psychological theory.

Then, in the late 90s after Dave Grossman wrote On Killing (review: reasonable just-so stories, zero actual science), people started looking at Marshall's data again. He was a horrific plagiarizer who made shit up out of whole cloth. Sometimes his travel dates put him on different continents from the troops he claimed to be interviewing at the time.

Listen to modern soldiers and you can get a better idea of how it is.

It was more of a way for players just not to see NPC the same as animals and killing them without thinking about it.
In games where the soul is 100% real rather then in our world where we really don't know for sure until we do pass. I feel that killing for any reason should leave a mark. Not on the mind or heart, just the soul.
I have a romantic idea in my game worlds. One of not giving up no matter how much you get slapped down. If you need moving you will win.
Things like a burning soul with passion is a powerful thing.
The army guys have really helped in thinking about this and while I'm not any clearer to getting an answer that I really want. I have had a slight change of outlook in my real world life.

In the end of the day, I want to give my players not only a fun game. But a unique one, one that stays with them. I want to find mercanics and systems that do that.
Its why I enjoy reading so many different systems. From big eyes small mouth to FATAL and while I'll never run these systems just reading them and being in games run by 'that gm' will improve me .

View point. Sorry auto correct

See, I think that your desire to play Thrak the barbarian doesn't stem from a principled commitment to historical or cultural realism. You just want to roleplay a character who kills loads of people and doesn't afraid of anything. But that's not a very satisfying rationale, and the realism argument gives you a convenient club with which to clobber people who disagree with you:
>muh immersion

(Also, a lot of people on this website seem to think that everyone REALLY thinks the way Thrak does-- or, if they don't, it's because they're "sheltered suburbanites" who have "problems" because they've "chugged *so much* left-wing kool aid that it's coming out of their ears." I.e., human rights are the product of a decadent, effete modernity doomed to extinction at the hands of less squeamish peoples. Though the people who make this type of assertion usually adopt a faux-relativist posture, it's pretty obviously a naturalistic appeal along the lines of social Darwinism.)

Most of the posters in this thread have answered OP's assertion that life is important with a resounding "No it's not!" I have to admit that I'm a little disheartened by the fact that almost nobody wants to play in a campaign where other peoples' lives are valuable.

I fail to see at which point you "criticized" the historic-cultural argument. To criticize you have to say something at all. You just said " this argument is used to justify other things beyond killing. Also I don't like that argument".

It's a perfectly valid argument. Also
>the past is an incredible shithole I do not wish to roleplay in
>the past
that is naive as fuck.
You want to roleplay in a place where everyone hates killing you're better off playing some science fiction utopia setting like star trek or some shit.

Most people get into games like this for cheap escapism, basically.
I've been to war, shot at folks, BEEN shot at by folks, got stabbed once, and still work my ass off 40 hours a week to afford food and rent all before I've even hit 30 and I don't take a break out of my day to hang with friends and play D&D to be confronted with existential truths of life and the soul and the morality of violence.

I play so I can have to NOT deal with that shit for a few hours because if I wanted to do so I have a front door on my house that takes me outside into real life.

>posting on /c/
???

>you like things I don't like
>that's hypocrisy
>disagreeing with my personal morality is also hypocrisy, maybe I can hide it from refutation with a throwaway about social Darwinism

Whatever m8

>almost nobody wants to play in a campaign where other peoples' lives are valuable
remember that those who wish to speak the loudest are usually the ones with a complaint or strong opinion. I imagine most folks would be interested in a game where death is treated as a very serious topic. They probably don't want to do it every game, but if the DM could sell it right then they would take an interest in most cases. The nice thing about fiction is that real facts are only relevant as you want them to be. If you want the game to assume that taking a life comes with a heavy cost, then it does. Real life be damned.

Personally, I would be interested in playing a game like this. I've actually been thinking about rolling a lizardfolk warrior that has been spending a lot of time of humans, elves, etc. While he still doesn't feel empathy physically like they do; he is starting to wonder if maybe he should try to force himself to care about others more. Obviously he can't overcome the way his brain works, but it could be fun to roleplay an alien mind trying to force itself to be 'less alien' if you follow what I mean.

And for the record, as a soldier I think a lot of the ridiculous right-wing pseudo-Darwinistic bullshit I hear is fucking absurd, and a lot of it seems to be spouted at patriots who love to own lots of guns and have war-fantasies about their patriotism but also never seem to actually join the military or even consider volunteering themselves.

We love the myth of "one man with a gun can make all the difference" in this country, but a lot of us seem to not want to actually attempt to prove that theory in an actual war; they'd rather wait for some paranoid Red Dawn-style militia fantasy that won't ever happen.

>almost nobody wants to play in a campaign where other peoples' lives are valuable.
If the enemies lives are so valuable, why do they throw them away?

>reiteration of the historical argument. :D:D:D:D:D:D
Ok so, you're just some kind of pansy living in a fake reality who doesn't want to see who people truly act?
I mean I got as much from the op, but this is painfully pathetic. Basically you don't want to see any violence whatsoever because you're not used to it. Banning even virtual violence. and acting as if every encounter with death is the first time for a pc, when most pc's are pseudo regulars for violence/death.

>lizard boy wants to learn how to love.
That's a real cool concept

>See, I think that your desire
See, I think that you are pulling shit out of your ass.
People usually try to play characters that fit the setting, usually in the most popular RPG system in their area.

Plus, the idea that your morality is universal is just as dumb as the idea that everyone is like thrak deep down.

I don't know much about the Bosnian conflict, but a quick look at it suggests that it was another case of ethnic cleansing intiated by a pre-existing government-- Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence, the Serbs and Croats didn't accept this, and the Serbian government (primarily) began a campaign of ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate shelling, and other things. The phrase is open to interpretation, but to me this doesn't seem like a case where "you genuinely have to dehumanize people other then those who immediately matter to you just to survive"; I don't think Serbian survival hinged on, say, systematic mass rape.

The Spanish civil war, maybe...?

I was going to say that I don't, emotionally speaking, value the lives of people I'm not close to as much as I value the lives of people I know, but then it occurred to me that I was barely affected by the death of my grandmother, yet I worry about climate change on a daily basis. So... it's not that simple, I guess.

Anyway, I don't have any rational reason to value the lives of people who I don't know less than I value the lives of people I do know, even if my own anatomy precludes me from evaluating them impartially. If I could fix that, I would.

If you could correct this irrationality in humanity at large, would you?

>These people have no relations to you, except wanting to kill you for your stuff. You don't see them as individuals really, with hopes and dreams and whatever, it's just some guy doing his best to kill you for reasons unknown to you.
Come on, we both know that most player characters have a lower threshold for murder than that. Although I guess I get that impression from Veeky Forums, given that my own group behaved differently.

I admit that I like to view this kinds of situation as puzzles or brain teasers: how can I solve this problem, or defuse this situation, with the least amount of suffering possible?

That makes perfect sense, really. I don't have anything against people playing Thrak, or adopting an escapist approach generally-- as I pointed out previously, it makes no sense to be a pacifist if you're playing a wargame. I do, however, take issue with the idea that playing Thrak's attitude towards other people is justified because it's realistic, and I'm downright annoyed by people who suggest that *not* playing a character with Thrak's ethics is somehow roleplaying incorrectly. (Which, to be clear, is not a claim I've seen in this thread, but one that I have definitely run across on Veeky Forums before.)

I don't know what you're trying to say here. I can comment on the social Darwinism angle, though. A relativist posture wouldn't have anything to say about the desirability of the Western view of morality vis-a-vis others, but the language used here, which I think resembles other claims which appear on Veeky Forums, essentially claims that the Western standard is abberant by virtue of its recency, or weak in some capacity, or artificial, or in some other way undesirable. This is, as I said, usually coupled with dire warnings about the collapse of Western civilization, and its subsequent replacement by value systems which care less about individual human suffering. This isn't an ethical argument per se, but it's definitely a claim that we ought to subordinate our values to a presumptively natural, amoral group-level selective process-- and that's what I meant when I compared it to social Darwinism.

I'm not the OP, I don't advocate banning anything, and I don't deny the reality of past or present violence. Nor do I deny the reality of cultural differences with respect to views on violence (...although I can't help but note that most people don't try to roleplay places like Sudan or Somalia).

>Casual slaughter
Bandits try to kill me on the road and I respond in kind. I'm not going to put my journey to the next city on hold so I can drag some prisoners that I don't have the food for back to town so they can be executed by the guard for banditry.

I'm not going to hunt them down if they cry mercy and try to run, as long as they aren't just getting distance so they can shoot me with a crossbow.

Leaving idiots unconscious is likely to get them eaten by wolves or something anyway.