nadriel: (Default)
nadriel ([personal profile] nadriel) wrote2005-06-12 10:12 pm

Morality playing

I was doing some LARP today, playing my evil wizard (who is reasonable, helpful and competent- thus making it a lot harder for most goodly characters to justify killing him).

Anyway, for his latest head game to give the goodly types in the party a headache, he presented the following situation as handled by a predominantly goodly party and a predominantly evil one.

Situation: Party has been hired to rescue some innocent villagers from being sacrificed by an evil cult. The cult is guarded by some innocent dupe guards.

Goodly: Spends time talking their way round the various guards without harming them, as they're not the enemy. Gets to the sacrifice room too late to prevent the sacrifice, kills the resulting demon and associated cultists.

Evil: Kills the innocent guards, gets to the cultists before the sacrifice is done, kills them too, rescues the innocent victims, gets paid, goes down the pub and celebrates another successful mission.

When asked which of those two was more wrong, the goodly types could only come up with "the evil one, because they're evil", thus losing lots of kudos with the neutral party members (which was the plan on my part anyway).

So, can any of you do better?

[identity profile] iamseph.livejournal.com 2005-06-13 01:43 am (UTC)(link)
Isn't poisoning generally considered an underhand and deceitful tactic? Something generally looked down upon by your hardcore do-gooder types?
Of course, once you've snuck past/illusioned/knocked out the guards you can just go in and beat the cultists to a bloody smear anyway, albeit with slightly greater risk than poisoning them first. Well, except that you're dealing with a contact poison so touching the cultists might get the adventurers weakened anyway.