Life is important

>>55183733
I don't know, anon. I actually got the opportunity to fight back when I was deployed, and it wasn't a life-changing experience at all.

The simple fact of the matter is that most people playing games do not consider taking lives to be a big deal? I mean, why would they? They're just monsters or bad guys, and by defeating them, there's nothing really lost, there's no real impact beyond making the world a better place.

I'd personally recommend using that mindset to your advantage. Pull a Drakengard or Nier, and have them keep those feelings for sometime, only to reveal just how large of an impact their murder sprees really cause. Entire villages of innocent people speaking about the party like they're the boogeymen. Local news of a woman committing suicide because her husband was murdered by people armed with powers no one in the area could even imagine. Or at the very least, show that the villains they're fighting aren't just mindless drones, but have hopes and dreams just like everyone else, and to them, the players are the villains.

>>55183733
You really can't in a way that will make sense to players, to be perfectly honest. the closest you can get is the san loss mechanics in GURPS and Call of Cthulhu, where takign a life means a san loss (minor if you save), even when it is something that used to be human. Most players nowadays go the full murderhobo route regardless.

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>>55183777
hmmm...
I wonder what this says about you.
Do you worry about it?
No judging, just interested.

>>55183797
I had two ideas.
One was just to put a small box on their sheets that they check if they kill someone. Say, the whole things about taking a life puts burden on soul and if they end up taking a "human" life then they have to check that box.
Dont tell them what it dose, or that fact it changes nothing at all. But that moment of pause. That it is a bad thing, might just be enough.

The second thing is something like the sorrow of mgs snake eater. Making a note who kills whom during the camping. Make a tiny note about know they died, how they where acting and what they feel about dieing.
Then they can all be brought back. Crying, raging and in complete despair. All willing to push these feelings onto anyone.

>>55183733
Killing costs exp

>>55183733
And why would it be important unless ingame lore reasons?

>>55183954
Talking your way out of trouble is worth more exp than just killing your opposition.
That's why you talk your way out of trouble first and then kill them anyway.

>>55183733
Only play with people who aren't sociopathic murderhobos who are only restrained from being murderhobos IRL by the law.

>>55183943
>One was just to put a small box on their sheets that they check if they kill someone
The players compare kill counts, brag about them, and try to run them up.

>>55183797
WOW YOU'RE A SHIT DM I'M NOT PLAYING WITH YOU EVER AGAIN

> When's the next session, anon?

>>55183943
>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?

>>55183982
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

>>55184026
Sentient life. Would of been a better word.

>>55184040
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.

>>55184042
You mean sapient? Or that's what vegans believe?

>>55183733
>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.

>>55184056
>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.

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>>55183733
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?

>>55183797
I consider it a really big deal, and I always have. It's one of the jarring things about reading /tg/-- 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.

>>55184040
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.

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

>>55184092

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

>>55184040
A simple glance at any 3rd world or tribal shithole proves you wrong.
>>55184048
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.

>>55183733
Tell me, OP, are my methods unsound?

>>55184101
That's what it'll devolve into anyways if the GM wants to make the party feel bad for murderhoboing

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>>55183733
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.

>>55184048
See this is a good point too. And like soldierboy from >>55183777 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.

>>55184079
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.

>>55184113
What where your ones dude.

>>55184169
Sure, put thats like the pulling out method. Things might already be knocked up

>>55183733
>How can you get your players to understand the weight it places on their souls.
get better players

>>55183777
>muh realism
GTFO

>>55184088
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 /tg/ 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.

>>55184388
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

>>55183733

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

>>55184428
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?
>>55184388
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

>>55184428
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? >>55184353

>>55184476
>>55184510

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

>>55184571
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

>>55184388
Casual slaughter was the first thing to ever be on that list.
Or did you forget that D&D was derived from a wargame?

>>55183733
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

>>55184101
And that right there is why I'm refusing to buy/play that game.

>>55184801
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.

>>55183733
"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.

>>55185244
t. psychopath.

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

>>55185461
>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 >>55184108 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.

>>55185314
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 >>55183777 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...

>>55185794
>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

>>55185794
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.

>>55183733
Play in a modern setting. Or make the people in your game likeable enough that killing them is undesirable.

>>55183733
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.

>>55185843
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.

>>55185843
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.

>>55185937
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.

>>55185925
>NPCs literally exist only to provide players with annoyance or danger
wew

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>>55185244
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.

>>55185993
>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, anon. 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.

>>55183733
Unknown Armies has a good hardening mechanic.

>>55185925
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.

>>55186061
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

>>55186006
Do you think, if you where dropped into the "battle royale" you would just go wild? If none of your loved ones where there.

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>>55186006
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. "

>>55183733
The music usually chokes me up in a sad movie.

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

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>>55185993
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.

https://youtu.be/Yg-RIOATCbU

>>55185160
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.

>>55183943
>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.

>>55184040
Unfortunately, no.
Unless you mean like a spree-killer type guy.

>>55185843
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.

>>55185244
>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.
>>55186061
>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.

>>55185769
This is a reiteration of the historical argument.

>>55185794
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."

>>55185314
>>55185160
These posts have an interesting correspondence with my feeling that "the past is an incredible shithole I do not wish to roleplay in."

>>55186006
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.")

>>55189817
>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.

>>55189672
>Unfortunately
What do you mean "unfortunately"?

>>55189955
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.

>>55183733
>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 >>55185877 in my last post.

>>55189921
>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.

>>55190036
>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?

>>55183733

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 >>55183818
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.

>>55185993
>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.

>>55190540
>That's certainly plausible, but I can't think of a good example.
Bosnia wasn't that long ago.

>>55184088
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.)

>>55189654
Well put bro. As a civi its not a few point I can understand.
Thanks for sharing
>>55190036
You too
>>55190066

>>55189817
>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.

>>55191042
>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.

>>55190327
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 .

>>55191061
View point. Sorry auto correct>>55191061

>>55190327
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.

>>55189817
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.

>>55191549
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.

>>55185993
>posting on /c/
???

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>>55191549
>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

>>55191549
>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.

>>55191549
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.

>>55191549
>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?

>>55189817
>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.

>>55191693
>lizard boy wants to learn how to love.
That's a real cool concept

>>55191549
>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.

>>55190961
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...?

>>55191092
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 /tg/, 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?

>>55191629
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 /tg/ before.)

>>55191692
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 /tg/, 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.

>>55191722
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).

>>55184388
>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.

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>>55191549
Its not a question of whether 'life has value', its a question of whether killing, regardless of motivation or context, is wrong and SHOULD leave a psychological scar.

The reality is that most soldiers don't get PTSD, that PTSD results primarily from stress not guilt, and that throughout the ages most noble, good, strong and admirable men weren't the least squeamish about killing their enemies en masse.

If you're disheartened its by the reality that your pseudo-pacifism really IS an effeminate decadence. C.S. Lewis even decries views like these, where war is viewed as some grey somber affair that should be undertaken as though one is staining their soul for the greater good of the collective, that killing itself is some heroic sacrifice.

This stands in stark contrast to the entirety of mythic fiction and the very idea of the ancient hero. To this day, the idea of a strong man who slays dozens or hundreds of people in pursuit of some great or noble object is the basis for the protagonist of most of our epic stories or action movies. Its the quintessential boyhood dream, to be strong and adventure and punch someone in the face who definitely deserves it.

The reason you see such a backlash isn't because you're saying "You shouldn't kill innocents", a sentiment that would find mass support most everywhere, its because you're spitting in the face of masculinity by demanding that any man who kills has somehow corrupted himself.

Even men who've never held a gun or blade in their life recoil at such a sentiment. There is a middle ground between edgelord and pussified faggot.

>>55191792
There almost certainly is an evolved universal moral framework underpinning human behavior, because the frequency and extent of human altruism is hard to explain otherwise.

However, I think you may have the wrong impression about my moral beliefs. I don't imagine that everyone thinks the same way I do. However, I can't say that I'm a relativist, even though the universe doesn't intrinsically contain any moral schema (although there IS that evolved moral framework...). I believe that furthering human rights is more important than preserving cultural diversity, and thus I am not particularly perturbed by the idea of altering or destroying other cultures in the name of spreading my own value system: I believe that eliminating the concrete suffering of actual, extant humans is much more important than preserving traditions or abstract world views. (Note, though, that a natural rights framework imposes a lot less than, say, a utilitarian scheme would.) Of course, this doesn't mean that I favor, say, going to war with half the world at once in an attempt to alleviate human suffering-- but I'm opposed to doing so because it wouldn't work, not because I think it's immoral.

>>55191693
The lizardfolk idea is pretty darn cool IMHO. I'm trying to avoid responding to the entire thread but I really wanted to say that.

I've been astonished, more than once, at my group's lack of empathy for life. It's one thing to set out to play a psychopath. Its another thing entirely to act like a murderhobo while at the same time attempting to take a moral highground about it.

>>55191783
>>55193155
Thanks for the support anons. I just hope I can do the concept justice. I love the idea of playing non-human characters that are similar enough be recognizable as human-like, but different enough that you would never mistaken them for a human in a costume. Lizardfolk fit that niche quite nice, but it's a challenge roleplaying an individual that is physically incapable of empathy (as we know it) and not just making them a one-dimensional character. I'm hoping that by having him intellectually interested in trying to care for others like others care for him will give me a good guide for how to play him. He's still going to fail miserably, but that's more about my love for the classic tragic hero archetype.

>>55192130
i think he means the group on the receiving end of the ethnic cleansing adopt the dehumanizing attitude to survive, and i posit rightly so as the aggressors are acting inhumanely.

>>55192950
> I do, however, take issue with the idea that playing Thrak's attitude towards other people is justified because it's realistic

What's unjustifiable about playing characters realistic to their setting? If I'm playing Jane LeShawnda, middle-aged single mom who works at Starbucks, any conflict harsher than a drunken slap is going to be quite stressing.

If I'm playing Beric the Briton, who merked his first deer at 12 and yearns to expel the Saracen from the Holy Land for his king, shattering the skull of a Turkish knight for the first time is a feat of arms to be celebrated.

>>55193268
>Its another thing entirely to act like a murderhobo while at the same time attempting to take a moral highground about it.
That's what humans do naturally, though.
Didn't you read this thread?

>>55193268
>Its another thing entirely to act like a murderhobo while at the same time attempting to take a moral highground about it.
half of the planet is doing this in real life, right fucking now.

On a side note, I always find /tg/ idea of "murderhobo" exaggerated as fuck. Your standard ass group of "murderhobos" will usually just be doing whatever the fuck the questgiver tells them to, because most players have no initiative on their own. Most of the time, any fights that happen is them being attacked first, by orcs, goblins or whatever. No matter how much you say "they're intruding on the poor little gobbos habitat" if the damn greenskins hadn't raided a caravan, attacked a village or whatever, the players wouldn't ever have bothered coming to the dungeon.

>>55193268

Life is weak, mortal, fleeting, fragile. Death is final. Death is eternal.

>>55195345
>that's what predators do naturally, though

FTFY, humans do not have a monopoly on murderhobo-ism. See: cats.

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>>55184040
>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

That idea comes from a person by the name of S.L.A. Marshall. He did interviews of soldiers during and after WW2 to see how many of them were active shooters and other details. Turns out that there was a very low rate of only 2%. Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command has his finding mostly in place.

The US army was alarm at this. However S.L.A. Marshall told them if they would just fund his studies he could improve that rate. So the US army throw money at him and low a behold in the next war (the Korea war) the active shooter rate was up to a few dozen times what it was before. A great success in improving training just by changing a few small things like target shape!

Or rather so great that people started to question the matter. Other researchers asked to see the interviews from WW2. However S.L.A. Marshall just could not find them anymore... or a number of other items of his original research that he based his claims on.

S.L.A. Marshall is a lier who made it big by inventing a problem for the US army and inventing a cure for it. That lie was that killing is very hard for most people to do.

The reason why his BS is still going around is that he did do some quality work on other subjects and had gained a lot of follower & influence by the time BS was called on Men Against Fire.

>>55183733
Life becomes important when death becomes a bigger threat.

Make resserection impossible, make the gods silent, make cosmology unknowable, make disease common, make madness real, destroy moral objectivism and make some situations hopeless.

Life isn't fair, problems aren't solved with a magic elixir, ignorance is more common than cruelty, everyone is the hero of their own mind, wisdom breeds cynicism and people scream with passionate fury into the unblinking void never to hear an answer.

Life is literally the only thing you have and the greatest thing you can steal.

>>55183733
Let's see, I believe reign solves the issue by haunting the fuck out of wanton killers. Godlike and now that I think of it this is a common thread in ore games, also has a mechanic that zip zaps away your willpower.

>>55191549
>nobody wants to play in a campaign where other peoples' lives are valuable.
I enjoy escapism for sure, but the game setting has to be internal consistent and "realistic" enough for me keep my verisimilitude intact.

For other people's lives to be valuable, things would need to be fantastical indeed. Maybe if you are the last couple hundred humans alive? Maybe something like >>55197719 where you are stuck with your victims forever?

But seriously though, under the current 'rules' of our world, and especially so in any fantasy world, people are eminently replaceable and every single one of us descends from a lineage of billions of organisms who killed trillions of others in order to survive and thrive. No matter how much window dressing our intellects allow us to drape over our core mental faculties, we need to be given specific reasons to be averse to killing people who might ever be a threat to us, and stealing their shit once we're done.

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>>55183733
Make it matter. Give reasons why the party shouldn't murder everyone they come across. Sometimes it's not appropriate to break out the assault rifles and the rocket launcher because a barfight broke out, or at least, doing so is going to cause more problems than it solves. Even in a legitimate case of self-defense, breaking a nose or an arm here or there is an easier fence to mend than killing a dozen people.

If the party gets too kill-happy, have the locals recoil in fear because this heavily armed and armored party that killed 20 mooks just for crossing them is clearly fucking dangerous.

Also, don't make every fight one that's to the death. Forcing the party to kill and then telling them to feel bad is going to rub players the wrong way. Frankly, most humans will not fight to the death. Morale is what wins battles, not wiping the map. Have enemies retreat, or at least attempt to retreat. Make it actual work to chase down fleeing enemies and kill them. If you're a typical bandit, cultist, pirate, mercenary, hapless guard, or whoever the cannon fodder in your game is, there is most likely SOME point past which you realize "Fuck this shit, I'm outta here." And if not you, then your comrades. Once a few people run the rest usually quickly follow. Let the party chase down and finish off the mooks, but make a point of it if they do. Give it a local name, the Mystic Forest Massacre, or Bloody Tuesday, something like that.

>>55195994
as said here >>55197998
>Also, don't make every fight one that's to the death.
the other reason PCs are such murder hobos is that GMs almost always make fights to the death, when really it would take quite an unreasonable, fanatical, or desperate individual to not flee at some point when death seems certain. Those goblins want to raid a lightly-defended caravan, not an adventuring party with a mage that can blow them up with his mind and a berserker that can cut three of them down with a single cleave of his greatsword and shit like that.

>>55185499
>Offer rewards or prestige for "clean" work, and players will twist themselves in knots to avoid unnecessary killing

This. Make it a possibility, don't require killing, and have actual rewards for not-killing. It works great in both video games and tabletop.

>>55193268
In general it's hard to make players empathise with an npc. And it's not really the player's fault, it's simply because pnp isn't a visual medium and things like facial expressions, body language and posture don't come across. Some gms go to great lengths to give the characters character, and they still end up with a bunch of murderhobos on the other side of the table.

>>55185932
Modern soldiers are also routinely exposed to terrifying, noisy weapons which can damage the mind even on a "miss". Just being exposed to nearby blasts (like from a firearm discharge or a bigger explosive), without even being directly caught in one, causes unexpected interactions which can result in damage to the brains of humans and mice.

So I chalk it up to the nature of human conflict changing and impacting the minds and bodies of participants in ways we don't fully understand.

>>55183943
I killed EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON. Before that boss and it took for ever to get to the end.
I didn't stop me from killing everyone after that.

>>55184062
Anon, you devil, you could almost last a whole two minutes!

>>55195994
I been in a game where a player gets stopped for shoplifting a candybar and he full on murders the shopkeeper because he saw him steal it.

So what would you say is a good way to enforce such behaviour? Reduced exp after killing people? Bad reputation when murdering?
Or rather money/exp bonuses when being "clean"?

>>55202013
Competent and resourceful law enforcement. You kill - they find you and put you away or under.
I've been to war, no fucks were given about killing. On either side. You tend to care about killing enemies less than 'bout killing cattle. And you don't kill people that aren't your enemies.

>>55183733
People mostly have no problem killing out of self-defence. As for other things, like assassinations or cruelty...

Get better players. I nearly got myself killed because I didn't want to torture a man to death for the criminal boss who captured me. I persuaded the boss to make the man fight me to death. He was a trained soldier, so I just about managed to survive. But it was worth it, as it prevented his suffering and made it easier for me to stomach the deed I couldn't refuse.

>>55202013
Have a casual adult conversation with them about it. Talk to them about what you want to see and how it could help elevate everyone's enjoyment, and ask them about their concerns and desires and what you can do to help them roleplay better.

Perhaps most important is to develop a clear vision for the tone and genre of the game you want, and communicate with the players about it for a long time before you start the game. Talk about it like you would about teaching them how to play the game.

Also make it clear what you will actually expect from the players, in detail how they are meant to do what you want, what they're trying to accomplish in out-of-game terms, why the players want it too, and give them leeway in being able to do that. Don't make them feel like you're just trying to steal their toys or remove tools from them for the sake of sadistic pleasure, or making them jump through hoops for no reason, or they will resist you at every turn. You must make this the product of a reasonable out-of-session dialogue and not an adversarial series of edicts shifting the goalposts or blindsiding them mid-stream. You must give them time to adapt their thinking through real conversations about it. They may also require assurances that you won't screw them over for acting morally or developing relations with NPCs; do not violate these if you make them, because that will damage their trust and make things harder in the long run.

Some of your players might not be mature enough to help you out even when you have had good conversations with them, or perhaps their bad behaviour runs too deep. In some extreme cases you may be better off letting some of them go, but for the majority of players I expect that kind of resistance is just a product of miscommunication or misunderstanding.

>>55183733
Have you tried not playing with edgy teenagers who think they're nihilists?

>>55202940
The problem is by no means restricted to teenagers

>>55202940
>>55202967
Out of experience, it's mostly people not being able to perceive the make-believe people as human. I have a lot of friends who are actually very decent people, but terrible roleplayers because it's easier to perceive the +4 bonus that shiny new sword will give them than the innocent guards whose lives they will have to take to acquire it. It's just a quest to them - whether they can pull it off rather than whether they should pull it off.

>>55203354
My current group had ever been the other way. While I know that NPC companion is here just to leave with everything they were foolish enough to give, they still try to provide them with decent gear, and try to keep them alive throughout even if it is outright detrimental to their goals.

>>55191615
>I fail to see at which point you "criticized" the historic-cultural argument.
Re-reading what I wrote, I think you have a reasonable point. I wound up writing something which is more like a shorthand note to myself, rather than assuming that everyone would mentally fill in the details. I'll try to explain this a little further.

I summarized what I perceived to be the thesis of the historico-cultural argument as "fantasy roleplaying games simulate previous eras in human history, so the player characters should adhere to the value systems of those eras." This is a two-part claim, and I have problems with both parts. I also think that the second half has a weak form, an assertion that player characters which adhere to different value systems should always be acceptable in campaigns which simulate different historical periods (or different cultures), and a strong form, which asserts that permitting any modern values in a campaign which simulates a different historical period (or a different culture) is Doing It Wrong. I'm going to focus on the historical variant of this argument from here on, because the most popular roleplaying settings can't reasonably be said to resemble contemporary cultures much at all.

I think I should start by saying that it is certainly justifiable to request that players emulate pre-modern value systems if historical accuracy is the explicit aim of the campaign. If you get a group together and the GM says, "Alright guys, the point of this campaign is to roleplay 19th century Uruguay as accurately as possible, so bear that in mind when you're playing your characters," then it is clearly silly to object to a player whose character espouses ideas that would be considered abhorrent in 2017. This is analogous to playing a pacifist in a wargame.

>>55204290
(cont'd)

Likewise, if a campaign is explicitly intended to be escapism, then it's unfair to object to a player whose character doesn't take moral considerations as seriously as they might in real life. If the group gets together and the GM says, "Alright guys, this is a beer-and-pretzels dungeon crawl," then it would be inappropriate to object to a player character who isn't especially put out by killing orcs (or monsters). However, it's important to note that the escapist case doesn't have anything to do with the realism argument— in fact, the two are explicitly at odds with one another.

Most roleplaying settings, and most actual roleplaying campaigns, clearly don't aim to simulate historical eras. They contain many anachronistic elements, many vaguely-specified elements, and, most obviously, many elements that are purely fantastical. (Indeed, I could have started this whole thing by observing that "realistic fantasy" is something of an oxymoron.) This aspect of fantasy roleplaying games is so plainly evident that I think anyone who denies it is simply being obtuse.

In principle, I could end the argument here: fantasy roleplaying games do not simulate previous eras in human history, so you can't use the idea that they do so to make any claims about what value systems player characters in those games should or shouldn't adopt. But proponents of the historical realism argument usually go on to claim that fantasy roleplaying games contain elements which resemble real periods of history, and that removing or altering those elements renders a game unplayable, hypocritical, inconsistent— that any game thus adulterated deserves scorn and contempt. Yet these same proponents generally accept the idea that realism is not the sine qua non of roleplaying, which means that roleplaying games must be selectively realistic.

>>55204073
Hold them close, anon, they sound great.

>>55204919
(cont'd)

To retain the notion that realism is vital to roleplaying games while acknowledging that roleplaying games are selective in their realism, one must articulate some criterion by which we can decide which realistic elements are essential and which are dispensable. In all fairness, I am sure that some kind of verisimilitude or self-consistency genuinely is crucial to most storytelling, in the sense that narratives in general would fall apart without whatever that verisimilitude-or-self-consistentcy-thing is, but it's very, very far from obvious that historical accuracy in the depiction of moral values falls into that category, for the simple reason that loads of stories featuring anachronistic values are popular (or, indeed, coherent). The historical realism argument must effectively rebut the contrary claim expressed by >>55191693:

>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.

I have never, ever, seen a proponent of historical realism come anywhere close to doing this. The attempts that I've seen are so badly muddled that I can't summarize them; I can't call them arguments at all. "Muh immersion" is really the best description I can manage. My intemperate remark towards >>55190327 (and I'm sorry about that; I shouldn't have made such a cavalier claim that you were arguing in bad faith) was really propelled by my frustration with the historical realism proponents' apparent belief that the desirability of historical realism, particularly in the realm of value systems, is self-evident. (I realize that I didn't express this very well in my initial post, which is why I'm trying to clarify it now.)

Furthermore, in the absence of such a criterion, it's trivial to extend a claim about the desirability of some purportedly realistic element to just about anything under the sun.

>>55204073
>>55205346

what's the difference between an NPC party member and a DMPC?

>>55205720
A DMPC is the DM's dedicated player character, like every regular player has his own dedicated character.

>>55205570
(cont'd)

It's trivial for a proponent of historical realism to say, "This campaign is horseshit! It doesn't feature a casual disregard for human life/slavery/torture/rape/animal abuse/prostitution/a rigid class hierarchy/pervasive sexism/an appalling lack of indoor plumbing/inexplicably pointy shoes!" I've seen this kind of shit so often, now, that I'm feeling burned out on fantasy. I really do prefer science fiction, and part of that preference lies with the fact that it's harder for someone to complain about, say, the absence of racial stereotypes or the widespread acceptance of the idea that slavery is bad. Of course, someone will often respond with a claim that such settings are unrealistic, boring Star Trek utopias, but that's actually much less irritating.

To spell out it clearly, here, my contention is that there's no identifiable difference between using the historical realism argument to justify blithe indifference to killing foreigners and using it to justify the widespread acceptance of chattel slavery.

At this point, I think I should introduce the weak and strong forms of the historical realism claim as it applies to specific campaigns and characters.

The weak form is a claim that player characters should always be permitted to adopt non-modern value systems so long as the campaign's setting vaguely resembles some historical period in which those non-modern value systems could exist. In other words, if you could plausibly have characters who grew among wild beasts and under wilder men under a naked sky, you must allow someone to play Thrak. It is often coupled with the idea that a setting is stupid if pre-modern value systems could plausibly exist but aren't in evidence.

I see no particularly good reason to accept this conclusion. There is nothing wrong with a GM saying, "Sorry, no, this is a light-hearted adventure campaign and it's just not going to have a lot of rape in it."

>>55205720
NPC party members are deliberately held back to give real agency to the players. GMPCs act like a regular player. If we're talking about a bad GM, they might be the dominant party member and take the spotlight away from the PCs. There's a very good reason why GMPCs are frowned upon.

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Players kill the most in 3.5 and Pathfinder because of the shitty rules for nonlethal damage.

In games where you can easily take out enemies nonlethally (4e, for example, 5e to a lesser extent), PCs will kill a lot less.

Prove me wrong.

>>55205900
(cont'd)

The strong form is the contention that including anachronistic values at all, ever, is Doing It Wrong. It is the idea that if you have characters that grew up among wild beasts and under wilder men, you MUST play Thrak.

This isn't an abstract, theoretical position: this thread itself illustrates that people can be triggered by the very idea of a campaign in which killing carries serious moral weight.

The cynic in me believes that the historical realism argument is usually advanced as a means of getting some game to include something that a player wants but which is generally viewed as objectionable, like slavery. If you want to accomplish this, you need something more than a request like "Could I have some elf slaves in this campaign, please, so I can rape them?" An appeal to history grants you a pseudo-objective justification— a way to say, "This campaign is horseshit! My character is TOTALLY justified in wanting an elf slave, because slavery was a thing in a period of human history which vaguely resembles this setting! And raping her is what my character would do, because he has a pre-modern mindset!"

Notably, this is essentially the attitude FATAL takes.

>>55204919
Realistic fantasy isn't an oxymoron at all. "Realistic" is an odd term in fantasy, to be sure, but not an incoherent or oxymoronic or self-contradictory one. Even in the most out-there fantasy, things are generally expected to be "like reality except where noted." So our fantasy world may have dragons, but we still expect dragons to, say, eat a lot of food based on the knowledge that large animals eat a lot of food. If an adventuring party then decided to hunt a dragon by leaving out a cow as bait, and the GM says "Actually I never SAID dragons eat a lot of food," the players would rightly call bullshit unless some pre-written or pre-established material said dragons don't eat a lot of food (due to, idk, magic?) Hence, dragons eating a lot of food could be called "realistic," even though it's entirely discussing a fictional creation.

>>55205570
The most obvious criterion to go off of is, indeed, "like reality except where noted." If, for instance, we see a typical medieval fantasy setting with a feudal society, we expect it to hold, roughly at least, the typical values system most commonly associated with a medieval feudal society. If it doesn't, that is a discrepancy that requires some explanation in order to continue to ensure the setting is consistent and logical. A typical feudal society, for obvious reasons, wouldn't be expected to hold modern views on things like civil liberty, the value of life, equal rights, and the like without explaining why those views have taken hold in an unequal, autocratic, class-based society when in our own history such views obsoleted feudal societies. This is where "historical realism" comes in.

>>55205900
>At this point, I think I should introduce the weak and strong forms of the historical realism claim
At this point, I think this could fairly be called a strawman argument - you are propping up the argument yourself in order to knock it down. Note that I'm not the one you were originally replying to, so maybe they consider your summation completely fair, but it seems to me at least you're using it as an excuse to continue arguing bad faith. Observe:

>>55205570
>My intemperate remark towards >>55190327 (and I'm sorry about that; I shouldn't have made such a cavalier claim that you were arguing in bad faith)
>>55206165
>The cynic in me believes that the historical realism argument is usually advanced as a means of getting some game to include something that a player wants but which is generally viewed as objectionable

Are you not still making the cavalier claim that other people are arguing in bad faith? Could it be that some people, at least, are genuinely interested in an exploration of another era, context, belief system, and society, and aren't simply using it as a "pseudo-objective justification" to explore their fetish or be thoughtless murderhobos or some other perceived-undesirable end?

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>>55204290
>more like a shorthand note to myself, rather than assuming that
Strike the "rather than." My posts on 4chan inhabit this weird zone where I revise things before I post them, but frequently wind up being sloppy and failing to remove every part of some clause I'd previously used.

>>55194238
Oh. That makes sense.

>>55193096
>C.S. Lewis even decries views like these, where war is viewed as some grey somber affair that should be undertaken as though one is staining their soul for the greater good of the collective, that killing itself is some heroic sacrifice.
This is another weird argumentative style I run across on 4chan, where you take some esteemed figure X and report that X concluded Y, while omitting the evidence, or the argument, that led X to conclude Y.

I feel like there's a lot of loose and poorly substantiated stuff going around here, even though I don't know this subject very well. For example, "every single one of us descends from a lineage of billions of organisms who killed trillions of others in order to survive and thrive" (>>55197889) is not, in the aggregate, all that relevant, insofar as our immediate ancestors exhibited an unusual degree of altruistic behavior and we're demonstrably more prosocial than our closest living relatives. Additionally, >>55195994 is probably incorrect in asserting that the planet is currently inhabited by 3.5 billion murderhobos. >>55191615 missed the point badly by essentially claiming that modern value systems are the same as past ones (with respect to killing, anyway). And I could fill a thread talking about >>55185850; I'll limit myself to the observation that "most animals" means "arthropods," whether you're going by biomass or diversity.

Basically, I don't believe things are quite as bad as a lot of anons are making them out to be.

I've attached a neat review on human altruism. It's kind of old and doesn't directly address a lot of this thread, but I think you might like it.

I don't actually want to bother with linking all the relevant replies, but...

History is not nearly as grimdark as "historically accurate values" guys like to imply (I'm partly looking at the GoT crowd). People weren't amoral killers and peasants (even serfs, in western Europe) had clearly defined rights and were proteced according to them. Contemporary laws have their roots in a mixture of Roman and local medieval legal tradition. They insist on the church suppressing knowledge and killing intellectuals left and right, they insist on bandits slaughtering villages all the time, but the thing is, that didn't actually happen. Human life was respected, at least in peacetime. It's just that violent brawls were more often and public scandal was punishable and punished. In wartime things weren't good, what with sacking and foraging, but they weren't ww2-tier either. You aren't being "historically accurate" by thieving or killing or whoring around or something. Hell, that's the stuff that would get you punished or possibly killed (punishment for murder would, depending on time and place, generally have been corporal). I mean, I understand grittiness and all, but that's just not how it was. People weren't that different from the way they are now.

>>55206536
>At this point, I think this could fairly be called a strawman argument - you are propping up the argument yourself in order to knock it down.
I have to, in a sense. Nobody ever provided a workable link between realism and roleplaying—the selective realism criterion I mentioned. Like I said, I could have stopped it there, or earlier, but I felt like this would be disingenuous, a way of saying, "Well, YOU never clarified YOUR argument!" But the absence of a workable criterion for selective realism really is the core problem here, and it's difficult to address something that isn't there.

The weak and strong claims are mostly observations about the flavors of this argumentative style that I think I have seen on /tg/. If you think they aren't valid categories, or don't exist, I'd like to hear about it.

>Are you not still making the cavalier claim that other people are arguing in bad faith?
Well, I do have a certain cynical suspicion that they are. But I don't know that this is the case, and it's unfair of me to accuse some specific person of arguing bad faith without a really good reason for doing so, as I did previously.

I didn't intend to assert that other people are, in fact, arguing in bad faith. However, I do have a certain nasty—and unfair, or unjustifiable—feeling that some of them are. It wouldn't have been entirely honest, I think, for me to have avoided mentioning that fact.

>>55207242
Welp, I typed a response but I closed the window by accident. So I'm going short.

You seem to be the triggered one. In this thread, I saw people who went to war who said that taking a life wasn't that much of a big deal. I saw people talking about PTSD and how it's more stress induced than guilt induced. I saw interesting arguments about how historically it was more manageable, without sources however.

What I see from you is a very big and long strawman, stating that people WANT to play some murderhobo, and is basically "I'm a pacifist, an altruist, and taking a life would shatter me, so it must shatter you too, and if it's not the case, you're a Bad Person"

You took a long time to develop your point, but it really isn't a good one. You don't fight the people saying they went to war, you fight the people who are bored with the insistence that yes, taking a life is a BIG DEAL, even if some people who actually did it say that no, really it's not.

You can have very deep personal beliefs, but you're just forcing them in our throat right now, and it isn't nice.

>>55207621
>Nobody ever provided a workable link between realism and roleplaying
My link is simple.

I create a world, in which every player will make a character. Like any good story, the characters should be compelling and coherent with the setting. We're all aware that we're not the best writers out there, so it's going to have some flaws, and we accept that, but we're going to do our best to make it work.

If you make a character that is not coherent with the world, say, a character that is an atheist in a world where gods walk upon the earth, I would ask a very, very good explanation for that. Something that make your character coherent with the world. Because otherwise, you just don't care about the game for me, you just made a character that you wanted to play and disregarded the rest.

You may argue with the "any good story" but I'll say that the reason why many fantasy and genre fiction is viewed by critics as bad is because there isn't a big interest on characters, and characters can often be incoherent with the world, shallow and not very compelling, letting the genre itself be compelling instead.

If I make a medieval iron age world, I expect that you make an iron age character. He might be a pacifist that is chocked by murder, because he's a sheltered monk that believe that all life should be protected. If you have a coherent explanation, it's fine. But making a character that is incoherent witht he world will lead, for me, to a bad game, because I will have to adapt the world to your character, or he will be completely out of place.

>>55184101
>>55184893
>people who haven't played the game and only read reviews based on the first hour of gameplay
I bet they think the white phosphorous scene is supposed to be "shocker" of the game when in reality it is one of the weakest parts

>>55183733
>Life is important
Not to sound edgy but it's really not. Not to most humans at least. Most people think in terms of consequences, not moral quandaries. This is partially why religions and ideologies are things. The average person defaults all moral questions to someone or something else. At the base humans value the lives of the people they care about and not much outside that.

You make killing costly not from guilt, but from the consequences it causes. Hatred from a faction, a town trying to lynch you, assassins out of nowhere, etc

>>55207987
And yet people give money to beggars and donate to charities anonymously, even if the chance of any kind of payoff is miniscule. And yet they return wallets to strangers even though the potential payoff is negative and no risk is involved.

Please, let's not have this conversation. I've had it so many times by now that I get diarrhea whenever I think about having it again.

>>55208308
This is because of the culture/religion/beliefs they are raised in. Also there are plenty of people who do just the opposite so I don't know what point you're making. And we're talking about killing, likely in a combat situation, people are not bothered by killing in those situations.

>>55207653
>You seem to be the triggered one.
Sure. I find the historical realism argument irritating, because I think it's poorly grounded.

>You don't fight the people saying they went to war, you fight the people who are bored with the insistence that yes, taking a life is a BIG DEAL, even if some people who actually did it say that no, really it's not.
I'm primarily concerned with the linkage between reality and roleplaying games. This doesn't involve fighting the people who went to war; I don't think I actually know enough about the psychological impact of killing, or historical and cultural views on the morality of killing, to make any authoritative statement on those matters. The argument I've made is indifferent to the accuracy of the claims about history and culture made by the proponents of realism; I assumed they are right about history and culture. (Although I do have some doubts.)

>What I see from you is a very big and long strawman, stating that people WANT to play some murderhobo, and is basically "I'm a pacifist, an altruist, and taking a life would shatter me, so it must shatter you too, and if it's not the case, you're a Bad Person"
I assure you that I am making an honest attempt to represent the position I am criticizing accurately, rather than willfully misinterpret it. If I haven't managed to do this, it's the result of genuine misunderstanding(s) on my part.

I don't think I spent a lot of time on my own beliefs. I'm not sure that you've characterized them accurately.

>You can have very deep personal beliefs, but you're just forcing them in our throat right now, and it isn't nice.
Ironically, I came back to this thread because I felt obligated to respond to >>55204290, who was right about my first post, and to apologize to >>55191615, who I treated unfairly.

I'm actually feeling very self-conscious about having written this much— I don't want to choke the thread—so I think I'm going to bow out now.

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>>55208308
I always find it funny when people beg to avoid, end, or not have a specific conversation while still having it.

It takes two to converse. Nobody's pointing a gun at you forcing you to discuss something you don't want to.

>>55206477
>Realistic fantasy isn't an oxymoron at all.
Yes, it is, but just like "jumbo shrimp" an oxymoron is not wrong, bad, or poorly formed. A realistic fantasy is indeed an oxymoron because it's a combination of two seemingly opposite concepts - e.g. a fantasy seems to contradict realism - and yet just like you can, in fact, have a jumbo sized shrimp, you can have a fantasy that is still realistic in the exact manner you just described.

Just to be clear, you're correct about the rest, you're just wrong to say it's not an oxymoron. An oxymoron isn't a bad or incoherent thing, just an observation that two terms are seemingly contradictory.

>>55208380
Dammit, I didn't feel obligated to respond to myself! I meant >>55191615! Argh!

>>55207913
anon, the reason that people don't want to buy this game is not because it's shocking or that it's subversive or horrifying
the reason is that the game forces you to use the WP and then tries to guilt trip you for a decision you were forced to do
The developers saw during playtesting that people were choosing not to use the Willie Pete and removed the choice to not do so

>>55208388
Well, it's fine in real life, as you ask the other speaker not to insist on having the conversation with you, but it's pretty ironic on anonymous Kowloonese illegal noodle selling forums, yeah.
>>55208363
I was nearly done with the response, but I really have no interest in having that conversation. If I responded, so would you and I'd get into that debate for God knows what time. Sorry.

>>55208667
and that is why it was the weakest part of the game and it is the rest of the game that makes it good

>>55206018
>>55205778

the DM is going to be playing the NPC either way. It sounds like the only difference is, if it's a character you find annoying it's a DMPC and if not it's an NPC party member

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Despite things getting a little heated. I dont think anyone has got nasty.

I thank you all for that.

Im really enjoying reading everyone view points and can see the way everyone thinking.

Two of you in particular have shown that you are clever and not prone to fits of anger even when pushed.

While I don't think anyone has really answered my question I do feel in a better place to run the subject.

>>55209144
Correct, in that it's a failure of execution on the part of the DM. Taking the part of a player when you have full control of the narrative is a bad idea.

>>55209682
It really only works in games where there is 1 or 2 players. And then its just as a support >>55209144
A DMPC doesn't have to be bad. A bad DMPC will just be ran by a bad GM. A good gm can make it work

>>55183733
It's a product of the world's time. Our setting is based off of early 1300's transylvania. Consequently, life is short, cheap, and generally not cherished unless we're talking close friends and family. Then again, nobles plotting to kill heirs isn't strange either. The solution it seems, is either set your world in a post-modern first world country, or an alternative universe where resources were aplenty and everyone was the same.

>>55211699
>The solution it seems, is either set your world in a post-modern first world country, or an alternative universe where resources were aplenty and everyone was the same.
Or one where humans are endangered.

>>55210259
It's something to be avoided unless you can fully divorce yourself from being both a player and the DM.

>>55211771
How endangered are we talking?

>>55211825
Toba? You have to make it that most of the dangers come from nature and that human lives are to be protected

>>55211885
I feel as though this leaves room for tribal conflict, unless you mean Don't Starve levels of wilderness survival

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I had a group where we had a chronic inability to actually make decisions. I mean, every fucking choice would be debated to death to the point where people were getting bored.

We eventually gained a DMPC as the party leader, which sounds godawful but actually worked really well. The DM played him as a democratic factor, who would hear the party's general arguments for as long as it was engaging but sum it up and go with what the weight of the party's wishes were around the time it went from enjoyable to dragging on. The key was never making unilateral decisions, so the DMPC more reflected the party's wants than the DM's. In that way, even a DMPC party leader respected player agency.

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>>55209499
I said I wouldn't come back to this, but I suddenly realized that Jainism is a natural fit for what you're talking about, on some level. It's a very old Indian religion which emphasizes a principle of nonviolence ("ahimsa"), and you could easily get a lot of setting ideas out of it. I don't know too much about Jainism, but the Wikipedia article seems pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism

Similar themes regarding (non)violence exist in Buddhism and Hinduism. You could definitely pillage them for setting inspiration.

I like the checkbox idea, btw.

Posting another cool altruism paper ("Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making"). You probably shouldn't take these as the final word on the subject— beware the one-paper expert!— but they're definitely interesting and thought-provoking.

>>55209144
No, that's not the only difference. Try reading it a few more times, maybe you'll figure it out.

My apologies for the late response.
>>55205346
They are, really. Best group a GM could wish for. Even though they are lawful good, even in games like Paranoia (that certainly was an unique experience), still very best group in town.
>>55205720
Emotional investment. NPC you play as a denizen of the realm you are running, it's own being with its own interests, only tangentially involved with the party at the best, and who does not chafe with the world you created. DMPC you play as a PC, that is, imaginary yourself first and foremost.
Bad DMPC happen when bad DM let DMPC they're playing grossly overshadow and overpower the party. It is not bad to let your players seek aid of someone wiser and more powerful than them, but never insert anyone to do just that unprompted, never keep them for long with the party and never make that character your avatar.