Consistency is the key
Last night I attended a session that led me to write about Morality once again. In one night of play, I witnessed two separate events played by the same character, which made me think about how important the issue of consistency and values is for a player to role-play with their character.
Let me introduce the post with a few things: I do not want to get into the merits of the player's rational process, and it is not in my interest to make judgments about what I witnessed for its own sake (proof of this is that I will not declare the alignment of the protagonist); the game, Dungeons & Dragons, allows you to play this way: Morality is a very underrated attribute (unless the character is a paladin), in my opinion similar to the way a character may choose his dressings and nothing more; transposed within VI·VIII·X, these events would have had a significantly different weight, such that they would have put the character at an objective disadvantage.
The two events can be summarized as follows:
The PCs encounter a group of NPCs of equal number and level (an equal encounter, if I understand the situation correctly; perhaps the NPCs had a lower level, but that is not relevant to the discussion). The PCs are able to get rid of all of their opponents, leaving only one alive. In the plot, the PCs are following the trail of a kidnapped character, and it is clear that every clue is important to finding him. The group's "tank," a half-orc, jumps over the last enemy, grappling him on the ground while the player declares to the GM to drop the weapon and to hit to stun him: so he starts beating the victim with his fists (non-lethal). The player's intent was clear to everyone, or, at least that was what I got: to capture at least one enemy alive for interrogation. A second player, the protagonist of this post, decides to sprint towards the half-orc and the last enemy after the first player's action and declaration, and declares that he wants to hit him with his rapier. He killed the NPC with a single hit. Silence dropped among the players in the room...
The next day, the PCs are back on the trail of the kidnapped character and find themselves in a dungeon. Voices can be heard coming from a room around a corner of the hallway. The sorcerer steps into the darkness and casts Sleep in that area. Someone falls asleep (3 NPCs out of 4). The last NPC faces the group and is easily defeated because he is alone against the party. The whole party enters the room and finds asleep a human and two goblins: the party decides to kill the two sleeping goblins and keep the human alive to interrogate him when he wakes up. The protagonist of this post explains (with some disdain) that he refuses to kill defenseless creatures because it is not in his character's Morality.
At the end of the evening, I tell the player who was the protagonist of the two events that, in my opinion, there was not much difference between the two situations, yet he moved the character in a diametrically opposed manner. The fellow replies that the situation was actually very different because one NPC was awake (i.e. had his eyes open) while the others were not. I did not want to argue that state of consciousness or unconsciousness was not the correct parameter to make this assessment, but I immediately asked myself the following question: if these actions had occurred in a VI·VIII·X session, what should the GM have done? My reaction would almost certainly have been a Morality step: depending on the PC's Path, such a circumstance would have generated a step to the PC's detriment, without even knowing what the character's Path was. This is for the simple reason that the two behaviors were objectively inconsistent: whatever Path the PC has, one of the two behaviors cannot be correct and thus bring a step in the Morality grid. This may seem like a ‘nasty’ decision by the GM, but please keep in mind that the player had a choice and was not forced to (reluctantly) opt for a solution that might conflict with his Path.
Now we get to the final considerations:
The GM in VI·VIII·X can find himself in situations of far more complex evaluation than in games where morality is a slot on the PC's sheet on a par with hair color; for this reason, one needs a fair amount of experience to GM this game.
Cases like the example in this post are not uncommon, and this is unfortunately due to game systems that do not reward these aspects of role-playing (they rather reward others that are much more meaningless).
Making such decisions, and ideally discussing them with the players involved at the end of the session, is not an easy thing to do, as it can lead to potential conflict (no one likes to be judged!); this is why I recommend having an initial ‘social contract’ and a lot (not just one!) of clarifications about how the players understand the Path they have chosen for their character.
However, instances like the one in this post can be very useful in making all players understand the weight of moral choices in a game (because rewards are directly affected), and in shifting the focus from aspects like looting to those where you think about NPCs as if they were real people; this is, after all, one of the real goals I set for myself and am pursuing with VI·VIII·X.