On moral ground

[GAZKUL]

This is something that's come up once or twice on both the Clave and in games. What do you deem morally acceptable to do in a game? are there things that just make you disgusted when somebody does it? or are you an anything goes player?

[DapperAnarchist]

Do you mean as a player, or a character? If someone is playing a Slaanesh character, sexual assault might make sense as a character thing (though not if there were kids, or those who would be offended) around. I mean, one of the best things I've read in an IC post here was a sinister, charming, cunning Inquisitor... who had servitorised children for... yeah, not going there. But it was really well written, so it worked. A racist character could make sense, and so their dialogue would have to be racist.

As for a player, rules-lawyering in Inquisitor seems nearly sinful.

Basically, I'll accept anything, in a character, though I think that we should keep in mind who we are playing with. I don't think that characters mean anything about the players - I'm not a blood soaked murderer, though my latest character is. I would feel awkward about playing with someone who is unethical (well, unethical in my opinion, at least), but then I would about having a drink with them, or even sitting next to them on a bus. So that's not really Inquisitor-specific.

[Shannow]

I would say this depends very much on the spirit of the game and the character in question.

I find it hard to imagine a chaos worshipping psychopath standing next to a wounded/incapacitated character would leave them alive; BUT if player were to decide that his fairly level headed rogue trader was to stamp on the head of a generally harmless character, especially if there are other objectives in the game, then this would be bad playmanship in my opinion.

I certainly think character justification as well as the overall fun of the game, beyond anything else, are important in player decided character actions.

[Adlan]

I had my players take down Father Christmas... I don't really have a moral boundary when it comes to fantasy. So long as it's in character, and done for sound in Character reasons, I should be fine with it. Though having a character that is gratuitously disgusting for no good reason, or if in an online RP, it's nothing but gore pr0n, well, I wouldn't call that being done for sound in character reasons.


In terms of players behaviour? Rules Lawyering, arguing with the GM (discussing is fine, arguing is not), and Malice really.

[MarcoSkoll]

I had my players take down Father Christmas.

Excuse me, if we're talking about moral issues, it was you who beat up a little girl in the very next game.

[Adlan]

Good point, I'd had that mind scrubbed for the good of the imperium.

But yeah, I had my inquisitor smash a little girl out of the way with a force staff.

[InquisitorHeidfeld]

The 40k'verse is a xenophobic, paranoid place where violence is an all pervasive factor and it is generally felt best to "kill them all, let The Emperor sort them out" and we are generally playing members of a shadowy, paranoid (even by the standards of the day) organisation whose task it is to do those things which most cannot be exposed to, which most would baulk at...

"Morals are a luxury men like us cannot afford."

If a little girl gets in the way of an Inquisitor in the execution of his duty then she is potentially an enemy of the Imperium, she is lucky that a force staff was handy, had the most expedient means of removing her been a bullet then...



It is tricky to make a character behave beyond todays moral bounds however - in the same way as Gene Hunt would have been an exemplar of modern thinking IRL - simply because the writers couldn't bring themselves to make him suitably unpleasant.

[MarcoSkoll]

Gene Hunt

Now I want to do a brusque, sarcastic and politically incorrect Arbitrator...

[Aurelius 12]

Gene Hunt

Now I want to do a brusque, sarcastic and politically incorrect Arbitrator...

So an arbitrator then? 

One of my characters shot the face off of a crime boss' seven year old daughter because she wouldn't stop crying. Then he booby trapped her corpse, so when the boss walked in, saw her and clutched her bloodied form to his chest, the frag grenades she was lying on detonated.

Fun times.

[GAZKUL]

thank you, just curious cause i've taken a bit of fire by Clavers and friends alike by systematically breaking pretty much every rule set down by the Geneva convention with the chem dogs.

[DapperAnarchist]

Wouldn't get that from me -  if you made Lijah Cuu a character, then he should be Lijah Cuu, a truly evil man. Chem Dogs are the worst of the worst, a disposable terror weapon, who on some battlefields would probably be shelled and fired upon rather then let them survive. If they abide by the Geneva convention, they wouldn't be on Savlar.

Even the anti-blinding weapons one?

[GAZKUL]

just checked up on the Geneva convention, a lot of stuff about prisoners of war and non combatants, broken most of it at some point in time.

[MarcoSkoll]

With your Geneva convention breaking, I wouldn't say my problem was the immorality involved, but breaking of the veil of fiction unnecessarily. Why, for example, does it need to be Mustard gas when it could be a sci-fi biochemical weapon?

These things are banned in war because of the unpleasant way in which they kill and, to be honest, I would rather not have those unpleasantly real mental images brought to mind during a game - a game which I'm playing for my enjoyment.
Fictional equivalents can still get across the same sense of immorality, but without making your players queasy or with the negative connotations that could come across.

After all, imagine trying to explain it to an outsider. People are going to have a quite different reaction depending on whether you describe your gas attack as "Mustard Gas" or "Composition IS-IX".
They're more likely to jump to the conclusion that you're playing a sadistic and disrespectful imitation of war in the first case than in the second.

[Ynek]

They're more likely to jump to the conclusion that you're playing a sadistic and disrespectful imitation of war in the first case than in the second.

And yet, in some cases, using things that are very 'real' are often a very efficient way of inciting a particular emotional response in your peers. You've just got to be tactful with how you do it.

[MarcoSkoll]

That is true, but at the same time, using something real in a fictional setting may throw your players out of their suspension of disbelief.
In the same way that saying "All the Kasrkin then went for pizza" would, using contemporary names might well destroy the immersion for your players so should be used doubly carefully.