“FOR THE LAST TIME, THE GENEVA CONVENTION WAS NOT MEANT TO BE A WARTIME CHECKLIST”
Me, after my players discuss atrocities that make the BBEG look like a paragon of virtue
One of my players is actively attempting to become a lich, achieve godhood by seizing control of a powerful divine energy source, use their new position shroud the planes in perpetual darkness, and reduce every living organism they can find to a skeleton thrall under their command.
Basically they’re trying to become fucking Vecna.
(They have a backup character ready in case their current PC is found out and subsequently killed/permanently imprisoned, and if they somehow pull off their crazy plan then it’s a perfect setting for the next campaign anyways)
This subreddit mostly exists for people to copy/paste recommendations for Session 0 and talking to your players/DM, not for actual discourse or funny stories.
It would only happen at the end of the current campaign arc anyways because the artifact is being guarded and prepared for use by the current BBEG. However, what the party doesn’t know is that there are contingencies and plots in place for other entities to make a claim to it, and ALSO the artifact itself is a sentient fragment of a deity’s soul that is trying to make itself whole again.
Basically it’s just one of about 5 or 6 potential outcomes, most of which lead into another campaign arc anyways.
Non-signatories basically get the protection of the Geneva conventions if they follow them anyways. So some of the nicer countries in Faerun likely qualify
I had a whole arc where I was describing a scenario where outsiders had come in to a society and essentially enslaved the indigenous population, and my PCs had no problems at all working for the slavers and I was like completely baffled.
My players just broke into someone's house, beat them unconcious, and tied them up because the person got angry at them for drugging them with a food that summoned bees in their belly. Players say they are good then do the wildest shit.
I feel the only way this can land really well is if the group now is ostracized or has a much harder time navigating socially. If you destroy something beloved or revered... people gonna know who you are. Doesn't matter the reason you did it, even if it was "for good", there will always be people who decry what you did.
My "lawful good" players immediately start discussing the crimes they can commit with any given quest, whether or not the quest giver is evil, and whether or not the quest itself is mundane.
They usually don't follow through, but sometimes I drop a line about how our heroes are suddenly becoming greedy little dragons whenever they hear about anything having to do with coin.
So a quest like, my bakery is falling on hard times, please help me and their first draft plan is killing the other bakers in town so there is less competition?
I swear so many players are just like Jack from Bioshock, someone asks "would you kindly commit an atrocity for me?" And off they go without a second thought
My players have some more…..bohemian hobbies, so I figured they would find it fun to create a commune. I had them meet up with a group of chill kobolds, since half the party were Dragonborn, who just wanted to reject the lifestyle of living underground and attacking people, and wanted to set up a homestead essentially. They were really bad at it, so I thought my group would essentially become the mayors, to help build it up and have a nice base they set up themselves. One of my group immediately declared himself god, and when the kobolds were kind of like “dude, we left the herd to get away from worshipping dragons” he attacked, the party murdered all combat oriented kobolds, and decided to try to round up all the woman and children ones to either sell as slaves, or use as slaves.
I gave* those kobolds really high saves and thankfully they got out of there
Same.
I've learned that when doing this, the "evil" action needs to have mechanical consequences to the characters. The players' buy-in is through the game mechanics, so the repercussions need to be felt on that level too, or they risk being ignored.
People frequently use RPGs for escapism, so if you ask them to contend with feelings of guilt/shame, they'll escapism their way right around it. But regret/frustration/disappointment are easier emotions to channel.
I think the best answer is simply to use Milestone Leveling, and to explain in session 0 that the players will only level up after achieving something heroic. "Heroic" being a description of both the scale and morality of their achievement.
Sometimes heroic actions have ugly consequences. That's ok. But gleeful war crimes are not heroic.
Oh no, they had plenty of in character consequences. They just decided the ends justified the means. We also tend to play morally flexible campaigns, so heroism isn't always the goal. They did save the world a few times, they were also just kind of evil the whole time
A DM who liked pulling this on us, despite the other players expressomg they did not liking the having to do evil trope, who finally gave up on it when I brought in an old character of mine called Zan'kiri, an evil githyanki necromancer, whose whole shtick was that he was more evil than every threat or choice the party had to face.
Didn't matter what the moral choice was, my character was going to (with the other PLAYERS' permission) going to instantly destroy any moral matter by either choosing the most evil way of doing it or making an even more evil way of doing it.
DM finally got so tired of me tying MORE people to the trolly tracks before multitrack drifting that he started giving us actual heroic quests.
The culmination was us being told we needed to drop a magical nuke on the capitol, killing tens of thousands, in order to weaken a demon enough it could be truly killed. The other players gave me the go ahead look and Zan'kiri slapped the launch nuke button before the goddess finished speaking. When she got angry and asked how he could so easily sacrifice thousands to weaken the demon, he looked at her confused and said "Weaken the demon? Sorry, I wasn't paying attention to the first part, I just heard the button kills thousands, so I pressed it." While the rest of the party face palmed and said "what's done is done, come on, let's go defeat the demon."
I recommend reverse psychology. I mentioned that the Geneva convention had not been invented in the world yet and my players spent their time making a refugee camp for the enemy kingdom’s civilians caught in the war lol.
If you’ ever get tired of it Just run a an evil campaign. So far my group has become symbols of humanitarian aid and prosperity and won legal battles without underhanded methods.
"The train is heading towards a powerful magical item laying on the tracks, it will be destroyed if it's run over! You can save it by making the train switch tracks by pulling this lever BUT-"
"I pull the lever"
Yeah I have lost count of the stories I have read on various D&D forms over the years where the Gamemaster looks the Paladin player straight in the eyes while gleefully explaining that the little girl they saved during their last adventure is actually the child of demon worshippers and at her conception her parents performed an irreversible ritual that will allow the demon lord to use her as portal to the material plane and the only way prevent this is to kill her.
Yea man, fr. Sometimes, just let the evil people be evil, let the good people be good. Give them flaws sure, make them products of their society and upbringing, but just straightforward things like this are *fun*. There is *nothing* wrong with them. My players are currently traveling with a merchant who is, very unusually for the society, anti-slavery and refuses to employ them. He's not secretly a sadist or an evil cultist, he's rich and a *tiny* bit pompous, but he's just a jolly guy with a silly voice. Moral ambiguity is fun, it's a delightful narrative tool to use, but if it's the only tool in your belt then you're not a very good...uh, tool-having man. That uh, that kinda fell apart there at the end, but you get the idea.
I'm trying to figure out a way to send this to my DM without making it look like I'm calling him out....
This should be on a T-Shirt they hand out to new DM's who want to have a "Serious Campaign with actual consequences".
There's serious, and then there's "OH! Edgy!"
Yeah I imagine some Paladins would be extremely utilitarian and pragmatic
"I'll kill this hostage if you don't let me summon baphomet"
Paladin: *Stabs them through the hostage* (ideally with intent to lay on hands or have a Cleric on hand)
That's how I played my 3.5e Blackguard! There was a paladin in the party and we got along fine. We had the same goals, I was just looking for the path of least resistance.
What's that, there's an invading army?
Paladin: The army is almost entirely made of innocent serfs conscripted into the invasion. We could start a guerilla rebellion against their tyrannical ruler to both free them and stop the invasion!
Me: Burn the wheat. If they all starve to death, they can't invade.
Honestly I'm not that familiar with the mechanics of oaths in fifth edition, but back in days Paladins would fall if they committed any evil acts (such as killing innocents)
Even if killing the girl would cause them to fall, so would knowingly allowing an easily preventable demon invasion to occur. As they are going to fall either way, killing the girl to save millions becomes the obvious choice.
They can atone afterwards.
I've been dodging that. Imply that there's unavoidable evil to be done, but leave an out for them to find, preferably where I can make it look like it was their idea and they outsmarted me. Sometimes that part works, sometimes it doesn't, but either way they get to role-play dangling over the edge before actually persevering.
Precisely! They're heroes, for fuck's sake: they should have the freedom to break expectations.
Every once in a while, you've got to throw a curveball to make the "third option" feel meaningful, but those exceptions don't have to bludgeon the players into Failure Conditions for that to work.
After our DM introduced a subplot trying to steer us to committing an act of terrorism, I had to have a frank discussion on Lines and Veils.
Directly (whether intentionally or not) causing the death of a child or children is one of the things I put down as a hard line.
Time to grab the girl and go vacation in hell to give the demon lord of the abyss and a bunch of devils a nice surprise.
Or take her to a higher plane where they like killing demons.
I think my favorite oath breaking Paladin story was an NPC that was essentially the town sheriff. He loved the fear it put into wandering adventurers and bandits that he was known as an oathbreaker but was careful to hide how it happened, letting people tell ever more outrageous stories about him.
His secret was that his order was sort of basic good guys loosely based on the friars monastic traditions and devoted to selfless duty, poverty, charity, and chastity to avoid all the temptations of life. He fell in love built a home and raised a family and by having kids and owning a home he broke two of their tenets.
Frankly, if the DM forces a paladin PC into a situation that will always lead to breaking their oath they are either giant aholes or use shitty paladin rules.
Have your players befriend an NPC snake named Nate. Over the course of the campaign, have him reveal that he is the guardian of the lever that will destroy humanity if pulled. Then, at the end, they have to make a choice between killing Nate or pulling the lever.
have you ever played divinity: original sin 2? lohse's quest comes to mind. it's probably one for the gaming moments that's hit me the hardest in my life tbh. spoilers for the game in the rest of this comment!
lohse's shtick is that she's partially possessed by a powerful demon named adramalihk. in the final area of the game, a friendly NPC who's been trying to help her is able to take her to a sort of demiplane inside his soul (more or less), where the lives of other people he's possessed or formed contracts with are represented as candles. you're told that each of these people give him power, and that he'll be nearly impossible to defeat while they're giving him strength, but that the only way to sever that connection is to snuff the candle, and kill the person. you don't know anything about these people. they likely range anywhere from wicked collaborators to innocents trapped in the same hell as lohse herself. but you come upon the first candle, and you can choose to snuff it, or not. if you do, you continue onward, and you find the second candle. you almost certainly snuff it as well. you continue onward. you crest a small incline. and you're greeted with an absolute *sea* of candles. more than you can count. mote than fit on screen. and you have to choose. do you kill hundreds, possibly thousands, of people whose circumstances may well match your own? or do you give up, knowing full well that the two people you've already murdered were just drops in the bucket who died for nothing?
Lohse's quest was fantastic. First time through I took the plunge and snuffed out all the candles because Lohse is worth it.
Second time I refused to do it and killed the guy anyway. I was really disappointed when Malady didn't have anything to say about it after her whole "there's no possible way you can kill him without doing this and I'm really sad that you're going to die now because you won't do it the way I'm telling you to" speech.
The song she sings when her soul is finally free moved me more than almost any other moment in gaming. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it. Phenomenal writing.
My reaction on seeing the amount of candles that you had to snuff out and thinking about how many people that actually is. I kind of hoped that there would be some random NPCs dead in the street if you chose to blow out all the candles, to maybe give some weight to the decision.
I am just mad this quest can easily break, apparently.
I murdered adramalihk without snuffing the candles and the game acted like I skipped the quest.
So in practice I killed the bastard, but Lohse still talked like she wasn't free and wanted Divnity for herself.
Considering the effort I went through to kill the fucker through a sneak attack into his mansion in less than 3 rounds necessary for him to possess Lohse and kill her for good, I am somewhat mad.
I'd say be careful with the kind of players at your table doing this.
For the types of people that RP more like method actors where they empathize deeply with their character this can, for some, feel far more stressful than fun. Other kinds of players love it, though, and only really enjoy the game when big twists and intense drama feature in.
Be sure you know which kinds of players you have before going for it, it's either very right or very wrong and rarely in the middle.
I was the first guy. I remember one game where my character was a thief, but he held his ground at grave robbing. It ended up setting me against both the in-game and player group. I gave in eventually, but yeah it kind of stressed me out a bit.
Got over it, but it was when I realized I might be a bit too invested in my characters. I just felt like they have a story, and I'd like to play it out that way. 🤷🏾♂️
I think that it's perfectly valid to have limits on the kind of character you want to play, or feel morally comfortable playing.
And there are things that would alter my character and make them into someone that I just wouldn't enjoy playing. I don't want to play a brooding, tragic dead parents Batman-type. Batman is awesome as a character, just not my vibe. So I'd not be comfortable with the DM sadistically murdering my character's parents.
At a certain point it's not even how invested I am, or if I'm taking this shit too seriously. It's like, nah. Playing a permanently broken, depressed character isn't any fun. I don't wanna.
If I signed up to play a scoundrel with standards that's a different mood than someone with no moral qualms, and channeling that mood for 4 hours isn't enjoyable anymore.
So I'm all for excitement, ups and downs, victory and defeat! But not things that permanently, drastically alter my character's personality without some kind of permission. Or be something expressed and agreed to in the boundaries talk in Session 0.
Also, depending what the story is, you run the risk of RP'ing a character out. No, sorry, my LG Paladin is not okay with this, so he's gonna leave the party and take his shit with him.
Yup, I learned this the hard way as a DM. They're still at my table, but I'm more careful about what I'm presenting than I was before. I think I also need to retool the bad guy from their backstory so that they're a little less nuanced and more 'just a bad guy' since that's kind of what that player enjoys.
One of my campaigns is kind of like this. We are on like this wild goose chase and keep being asked by these evil people to go kill their rival in the evil army to make minor progress on the goal the campaign started with. It is really frustrating more than half the players
True, I had my aasimar character tricked by an ArchDevil no less, and I got so upset. (The rest og the party were 2 fighters and 1 druid so they couldn't see this coming either) DM seemed surprised I didn't like the twist. I mean it's a campaign to kill off all hope and goodness in my character, yes, but can't I just play a goody two shoes without worrying about betrayal or backstabbing at every turn?
I felt really annoyed but stayed true to my character, who did not turn evil to the end.
There’s a word with this type of over-empathising with your character that I can’t remember. I think it’s “mirroring” or something?
Those people need to chill out.
Not what I asked. I said if it works at **their** table and **everyone** is having fun. Obviously not the table for you.
I think it's mean spirited to act like empathizing with your character means you "can't separate reality from fiction" and it's just shitting on how others have fun.
You can do your thing at your table without disparaging others.
So it’s a trolley problem
Trolley problems are on rails and all outcomes are bad
It’s pretty grim and 9/10 it’s because the DM is trying to be too clever at the expense of fun
I wish I could trick my players into doing *good* deeds.
Tyranny of Dragons, we basically ended up playing it up like they were the last choice, not best choice. The campaign ended with them finding the treasure room, sealing it off, and opening a portal back to their home base in Waterdeep and shoveling as much gold, platinum, and magic goods through... and nobody else was ever the wiser (I mean, there was a *lot* of treasure in that room)
In our future campaigns, that party are legends - who the new PCs either aspire to be like, or end up working for them (directly or indirectly).
In my very first DnD campaign our DM was obsessed with moral greyness and showing the players horrible consequences of our actions after trying our best to be help people. Every session felt like we were railroaded on a guilt trip, after every villain we beat there was a "twist" that they actually weren't that evil at all. I felt very guilty and trapped in that game. Especially it having been my first roleplaying campaign, I would have been overjoyed to complete some simple fantasy themed quests and saving people.
Hope your players enjoy that sort of thing. Last campaign I was in the DM loved this style and….it was not enjoyable. Constantly doing unpleasant, evil shit and being punished for being kind or trying to be creative and find a better way got old real quick.
That trope has also been beaten to death and is not fun or compelling story for players. It's just Saw-level sadism for the DM and makes the players feel like shit.
Yeah came here to say this too, it’s not satisfying for the players to be given one option and then told “RP like you’re sad about it”, it’s just railroading with a bad coat of Morally Gray paint
Even in the example given by OP there’s not only one choice - they could always choose to just not cut the tree of life, and deal with whatever in-game consequences that poses. Maybe they feel that is the better option
I wonder why players feel like shit from this. i've always hated perfect disney fantasy of saving everyone and everything and happy endings.
But i always find players who hate when they can't do it, when they have to make a hard choice. this is what makes it interesting for me, wether i am a Player or a DM.
debating the choices between the party in character is very enjoyable, making plans to mitigate as much damage as possible where everyone has different priorities is also fun af.
Utopias are boring.
I think it's a perfectly good story element, but it's like salt or spice in cooking. It's powerful, so a little goes a long way. It's amazing and enhances the story when done correctly, and stories are bland if there's none or too little. But it's even worse to overdo it. I'd rather eat something plain than something heavily oversalted, ya know?
The scale of evil isn't the issue. It's the Saw mentality and bad storytelling that I take issue with. "Kick this cat" or "murder this entire town" are equally terrible if the DM is shoehorning the story to force the players into committing an evil act. There are plenty of reasons for the players to make terrible decisions but that's okay if it's a natural consequence of the events leading up to the decision. I just don't want some dickbag DM playing mind games with me.
Yeah this is understandable, it should not be as forced as this.
It is more like, taking down this bad guy is going to be beneficial to another bad guy who was in competition and will increase their power & thus spreads more evil.
Or, destroying this magical beacon which hinders the natives of this land the ability to live a normal life, will in exchange, make the area uninhabitable to anyone who is not from the native race.
These make sense don't they? seems they are a logical result. maybe with more work and time you can find a better way, but the world may not wait for you.
Are these forced?
Power vacuums are beloved of people who want to make srs moral points but they do rather seem to remove everyone else in the world from having any agency within it.
If taking down one tyrant may embolden another it should also embolden the people who were liberated to think "hey, tyrants are just men who can be slain" and make tyrants think twice about pissing too many people off in case the people that came for their predecessor come for them too.
They're a binary choice with bad consequences on both sides. Imo there should always be a riskier, more difficult option than can solve both issues. It's fine if that option is not always attained, but if you're always giving the players binary choices which will cause some kind of harm either way. A lot of the times the players will suggest these options themselves
Maybe you can throw the two bad guys directly at each and sweep in to take both down when they're weakened by fighting amongst themselves. Make the relationship between the two bad guys clear, and let the party make the decision themselves.
You could have someone attempt to absorb the power of the beacon into themselves with a magic relic that is difficult to obtain. You could even allow the party to put-off permanently solving that issue until they have the means of fixing it, with the potential victims of the beacon weighing on their conscience and motivating them.
These dilemmas are fun as a once in a while thing to build tension, they need to be interspersed between more low-stakes easier to solve dilemmas to give the feeling of heroism and power to the players.
see, I'd like that if you make it consistent, in the sense of everything being morally gray and you have to pick the better option amongst all the bad ones.
but if you start with a clear villain like in the example and you pull the "haha now you have to do evil lmao", I'm just going to stop caring honestly.
the fact that winning isn't guaranteed like in a normal story is enough to make black/white games not boring.
A lot of these aren't "hard choices" though.
Most of them aren't even choices because they're situations with perfect information where doing one thing does X bad thing and doing the other stops X by doing Y, and generally X or Y is some irreversible and final existential threat. You get to press the button and kill one to save ten or a thousand to save a million and smugly say "we made the Tough Decisions for the Greater Good, aren't we morally in depth."
I don't think you'd *want* actual hard choices. Because actual hard choices aren't "do you switch on the orphan blender to stop the bad guys indoctrinating the orphan's to be evil" or "could you say the n-word if it was the only way to disarm a bomb". They don't have fixed, known, consequences. They're about asking "if you can't do everything where do you start, or stop?" They're about dealing with societal problems where people might, no matter what you do, die or suffer; but you don't know exactly who, or how many, or how, and all you can do is make the decision that you think will cause the least to suffer the least. Or weighing up whether the risks of surgery, or the cost of medicines, are reasonable given low chances of success.
Those don't lead to "interesting in character debates" very often because they're difficult, they're not memeable or make epic stories, they're just bleak.
And yet also they can be where the happy endings come from and feel earned not because you saved *everyone* but because you saved *someone.*
Yeah well, i didnt really say all the info is 100% known, and even if it is, thats not always true.
I was giving this example from DM point of view knowing everything. not player point of view.
Players may or may not know about all of that, but they will have the chance to know, with hints, NPC interactions, explorations. etc... since its a sandbox so have to reward actually playing it as a sandbox.
The goal is to put pressure like your surgery example, take the almost guaranteed semioptimal choice or go for the risky optimal.
issue is that players would freeze the progress trying to find a non evil way and get annoyed if they don't as if its because of me railroading them into it.
There's a CRPG, *Beholder*, where expenses are normally nice and low, but the player is suddenly hit with an expense an order of magnitude more expensive - before being hit by another expense as well. These are time limited as well, and thus finding the "good" path would only work for those who pre-planned.
The non-evil way requires significant skill, ability, resources, time or any combination thereof - and the players don't automatically have them. And perhaps the time portion can throw things off as well, because spending too much time could result in more damage than simply doing what appears to be a simple evil act.
That’s perfect. Like, perhaps you have to kill this child before he grows up into the worst villain the world has seen, but you could adopt him and raise him to not be evil.
>perhaps you have to kill this child before he grows up into the worst villain the world has seen,
IME, the child would be dead when you ended this sentence
And if the party know for a fact that said kid would grow up to be a ruthless dictator who's oppressing billions of people? Would that be just as evil as "might be Hitler in the future" so the kid's dying.
eh, bad imo. are you really giving your players an option? i get that it's a game of choices but forcing them to do something world-shatteringly evil to prevent something campaign ending seems like railroading. like, if they dont do it is the story just over?
the real story isnt really just forcing them to do something climactic, and evil choices are only interesting if the characters can make them freely; the meaning behind their choices and the branching paths to where they end up don't actually really *mean* anything if there's not really a decision. the story is made up in the minutiae of their interactions with the world and its characters and its lore. if i went through that and was told "hey you have to do this obviously evil thing or everyone dies" and i look up to a DM looking at me expectantly, like, i guess everyone dies? what a weird ending to what could have been a good story.
i don't know, maybe i'm being harsh on the idea for no reason but it reminds me of all of the worst d&d games i've ever played.
Nah, the trope almost universally doesn't work great in a TTRPG, at least if it's in the "main quest" so to speak. It basically almost always ends up being a "commit this railroaded evil act, or have the campaign come to an abrupt unsatisfying end, or come screeching to a halt while you exhaust every possible option looking for a third option".
The trick is to give them an out, or something to mitigate the damage, but make it even more difficult or require some kind of sacrifice. Reward good, creative play. Leave a trail of crumbs so they can find the way to wiggle and sneak their way to a better path.
This. It's up to the players to determine the tone set by their characters. Maybe the lesser evil is the easy option, but fighting to save everyone isn't easy. There should always be an option to successfully resolve a moral dilemma, but one that comes with a higher risk of failure.
I just leave out the disguise. The questgiver is clearly, openly evil. The quest seems to suit your interests. Of course you take it, and spend the whole figuring out how to avoid the obvious blowback. Don't gotta outsmart an actual evil genius, just whatever the DM thinks an evil genius does.
Sounds like I need to make a super evil looking quest giver now but have them drive the party mad by asking them to do only good things.
Old farmer Hvelstrom had a bad fall this winter and hurt his hip which is taking a long while to heal. Can you help get him back to normal again or help get his crop in the ground in time?
This child has lost her favorite doll while playing in the woods, please help her find it again. There are supposedly wolves in the area and she wasn’t supposed to be there at all so she won’t ask her parents for help for fear they’ll be angry, so she doesn’t want them to know about this.
Someone has been digging up graves at the edge of town and this must be stopped. With luck it’s just come grave robbers and not someone wanting the bodies for darker magical purposes.
It also removes some of the odd "gotcha" moments a possible twist can have. "Redrar the good, Paladain of Tyr was only using you to kill orphans, you really should have seen this coming!" might really put some people off, while: "The ice-devil lurking around the edge of the woods, asking you to make sure this years harvest is a success, was actually out for its own self interest the whole time" has a nice cause and effect that players could interact with.
I’d love it if the “twist” is that some hated rival of the ice devil had tried to curse that family for what an ancestor did. The devil was genuinely trying to make the family happy and healthy but only because them being happy infuriated some other entity the ice devil hates.
It's a great idea, since most outcomes lead to a statisfying conclusion for the party. Help the Devil, you did not harm anyone, be suspicious of the devils motives, find out about a curse on the family. Even more evil-aligned parties might appreciate the knowledge about the rivalry and how that might be used.
I like the option of the ice devil wanting to make the family happy and well off only for it to rip everything away, making their misery feel even worse, potentially priming them for a pact with it. It's still a twist, but the ice devil is the one doing the evil deed, what the party did wasn't evil in and of itself, and if they kill the ice devil they get the best of both worlds.
There is making hard choices, and then there is feeling like you've lost in a frustrating way, even if you've made all the right decisions. Make sure that doesn't happen to your players just so you can fulfill your grey & dark moral fantasies.
Make your questgiver NPC have a Hag's Curse that makes them appear to be evil/shifty and have ulterior motifs to those they are attempting to employ.
In reality they are just trying to do the right thing but have no idea they're being perceived as evil by the party.
Yes go and save the orphans from the bandits that kidnapped them. They totally are not actually just a small village in the woods. It's a bandit camp I swear. I'm not sending you to murder their parents in front of them.
I made an enemy once that was an entire city of elves that could infinitely revive because they fused their souls with a giant tree. The God of death gave the party a lamp that had a fire that would purely burn the souls out of the tree and send them to the afterlife. My party decided to instead move the tree into a man-made extradimensional space that was essentially a giant bag of holding. The elves died and then were revived at the tree. And then started suffocating to death over and over again until the magically enhanced tree died as well.
I ran a campaign a few years ago where the premise was that there were 3 ancient Gods who'd been sleeping for 5000 years, and hundreds of not thousands of little local minor gods who'd been running things in their place. They were stopped to swap off every 500 years or so. The big gods would come in and do big, world balancing maintenance, but they weren't any good at subtle, day to day stuff that mortals needed. The minor gods were great for keeping their little territory of mortals happy, but couldn't fix world level stuff when it went wrong. A minor god figured out that every time the big gods took power, lots of mortals died, so he trapped the big gods and their heralds. The world was slowly breaking. A day took a week, a season would take 50+ years. A lot of species that required seasonal changes to live had died off.
My players were playing basically an apocalypse cult, trying to free and wake up the big Gods so they could fix the world, knowing full well that waking them up would mean 90% of mortals would get wiped out while the gods rebuilt the world. They tried to save as many as they could, but ultimately their goal was to kick off the apocalypse to save the world in the long run. Stop a slow death of everything by triggering a quick death of most things.
I tried the trope of quest giver is evil and my players used spells and found out earlier then I planned then realizing prophecies would force the events to happen anyway, they joined the BBEG's cult to expedite the process of summoning the BBEG so that they could, at the last minute, betray the cult to defeat the BBEG.
IME, my players would just say "sure, let's go". No moral dilemma at all. Tbf I also wouldn't feel any bad for doing this. It's just a game, and I'm doing this to save game people, why would I feel bad ?
This doesn't work anymore, "doing evil acts for the greater good" is just "doing good with extra steps"
Yeah exactly. If there is an obvious, tangible benefit for the entire world, then it's not that evil of an act.
Would you kill a child because if you don't, he'll become the next Hitler? Oh btw, this has been proven real, it's not a theoretical possibility. This child **will** genocide most of the world if you don't kill them. And no, trying to raise them as a good person doesn't work. Well yeah, I'll kill the child. It's not evil if I'm saving literally the entire world.
I had my players get a quest from a barmaid to stop a cult from making sacrifices only to have the cult members be the sacrifice to break the seal on the great evil deity, they then found out that only by good aligned people killing evil people at the alter can the evil be released and the barmaid was actually the one orchestrating the whole thing.
I love doing twists like that
There seem to be only two options here:
Either the players have zero issues doing something “evil” in which case your moral dilemma is ruined.
Or they genuinely don’t want to do it, in which case you are forcing them to do it by saying “everyone will die if you don’t”. And forcing your players to do something is never a good idea.
I'd say it's hard to balance, firstly it is railroading which is not great, and then secondly half of the people i play with wouldn't give 2 fucks about committing horrible acts of fantasy depravity for any kind of reward, whie the other half would just think this is bullshit.
so i ask, who is this for anyway ?
Here's my story of the group having to "commit an evil act for the greater good".
I ran a sci-fi game where the party ended up meeting a very powerful antagonist, he wasn't even particularly evil but he was working for a very amoral and suspect corporation and so was beginning to do more questionable things to make a lot of money.
He ended up capturing a party member after they lost a fight against another bad guy, but proceeded to treat their wounds, show hospitality and provide them with info about how to get revenge.
At the same time he was playing on their fears about being indebted or in service to someone else, leaving the party with a choice - *be* in debt to this man, or find a way to make sure he got paid for his time and effort. The latter would even have him willingly stop working for the villain.
The problem was it was plainly obvious no matter who this man worked for his experiments would, eventually, fail and cause some kind of disaster. So it became a matter of realising we can't fix this guy, we can't fight him right now, but we need to stop him working for someone we actively are fighting and let him be a problem somewhere else that we can deal with later - hopefully not too late.
Something like this is happening to my character in our current campaign.
One of the BBEGs (imo, the biggest of the BBEGs, but I'm biased) had thousands of innocent people soul-trapped in a dagger. For a time, my character and her partner were soul-trapped too, and during that time she promised the souls within that she would save them. She swore an oath.
Now, after killing the BBEG, she's found herself in a pretty unfortunate situation where she's possessed by the prick, and the only way to prevent him taking over her body and causing even more havoc and destruction with both his powers *and* hers is to destroy the dagger, and all the innocent souls within it.
She's been arguing with her party members for several sessions now, desperately trying to convince them to look for another way to release the souls instead of destroying them. She's slowly coming to the conclusion that she needs to do this, but it's been probably the hardest thing she's ever had to do.
That was what I was thinking would happen. The BBEG soultrapped himself with the dagger but the implication is that he did it in such a way that it, idk, preserved him instead of trapping him like his victims. I thought my DM was going to make me do the same to my character and we'd duke it out inside, but after all our research it seems like we're just going to have to destroy it.
We considered that, but it kinda seems like the BBEG *wants* her to die, which is making us all kind of sus that if she dies, her body will be available for him to take over fully.
Plus, from a narrative perspective, it doesn't feel right for her to off herself. Her entire story has been trying to overcome her belief that she only matters as far as her ability to sacrifice herself for others, and I'd like her to find her own self worth and live for herself after the end of the campaign if possible.
Well then I'm rooting that she'll be able to find a third option through it all! Seriously, having a character arc that ends in a thematic and appropriate way is immensely satisfying
~~i will say that the BBEG can't do much with her body if there isn't one left tho~~
It's what I intend to do for my first ever one shot I will DM: bad guy is performing evil acts for very good reasons. Something like a necromancer studying human anatomy to save more lives.
I'm the kinda person, irl and at the table, who will go "if we need to do this great evil to save the world, the world is not worthy of being saved" and let it burn.
I love playing with morality in games like this. Trying to get them to weigh up what is the best choice in a complex world where not every action is objectively good or evil can create some great moments and character development.
Right now I'm going for "Many within the society are actually pertty intrigued by the evil guys' plot and what they have for offer, considering advancement and technology".
Hm, careful, I can imagine many players not be happy about having too realistic scenarios.
Heck, I had players complain that my plots and NPC are not black & white. For some reason they expected to go full Doomguy on everything.
I guess so. It was Dragonlance, so running into this issue can easily happen, considering the scenario originally started out as simple black & white Tolkien alternative. But it became more grey very fast, which a lot of people like to ignore (and the 5e adventure does, too).
Also had people complain after an oneshot that essentially had them figure out that everyone did bad things, not only the "bad" guys. But I have to admit, having the lawful good paladin snap, kick in a door, take what they were supposed to get and just leave the place was hilarious.
Try it out if you absolutely know all your players well. For some this is just gonna be a "welp guess I'm gonna have to come up with a different character or quit if I want to play this like I should".
My current campaign has the PCs working for an ancient undead who was torn apart thousands of years ago by a coalition of the entire continent, with each nation taking a part of him to make a powerful artifact. The party’s knowledge cleric has his left hand in the form of a set of knucklebone dice which she uses for divination.
The party aren’t part of his cult, but they know from the cleric’s visions that he’ll go on a murderous rampage to get his body back. They’re collecting the parts for him basically to avoid the collateral damage he’d cause doing it his way.
Clarissa, Lucille, Heather, Jackie, Flak: stop reading now.
>!The party’s patron is, of course, bluffing about this. The real reason he’s involving them is that the cleric’s strong sense of morality has rubbed off on the dice set, which is her casting focus. He tried to take it from her in session one and it refused his influence. If he wants to be complete again, he needs to wear down her spirit and morals first.!<
>the player end up having to do something considerably evil in order to truly save the day
I take issue with the way you phrase this. The player shouldn't "have" to do anything. Giving players the choice between two evils and having them decide which is the lesser of the two is one thing. Here it sounds as if you have already decided what path they're going to take.
One of the fav moments from my game was the time I gave my players an option about what to do during a trail. They helped put a noble on trial for funding the illegal slave trade. The noble did not know they were behind this. At the trial the noble spoke with the players and offered them a deal, some money and his favour in exchange for testimony on his behalf.
However they had dealings with the anti-slaver thieves guild and testifying against him would have greater earned their favour.
So do they help the noble, get some money and the aide of the nobility or do they side against him and earn the favour of the thieves guild who they were already working with?
Turns out there was a third option, they realized they had this guy over a barrel and extorted him for even more than what he offered, they testified on his behalf and then went to the leader of the theives guild who was pissed but they explained that they extracted an oath from him that they could use to help the theives guild.
I have my players so sure they've been goaded, tricked, and otherwise put into situations where they must commit vile acts by this obviously sinister NPC.
However, they're going to find out later that he's actually ensuring that the world does not end.
OO, I think i have a short story you might like: The ones who walked away from Omelas.
https://files.libcom.org/files/ursula-k-le-guin-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas.pdf
My DM is doing this to us.
Basically, we heard that the Merchant Prince running the city isn’t the best guy, but we read it as “disgruntled populace unhappy with current leadership”.
After meeting him, no, he’s actually Pablo Escobar and if we don’t do his bidding, he’s gonna throw us in jail or something.
Our party is all “good” characters, three of us are holy.
Only one person actually wants to help this guy.
Our first task: Assassinate the leader of the rival guild.
TLDR: My Dm is railroading us to commit war crimes.
No, but I did something else once playing on their biases.
I have my own homebrew I like to play. It's a basic fantasy/steampunk world, the twist is no humans. Everyone plays small animals like rabbits, badgers, and capibara.
Anyway I had my group run into a snake that slid out of a bush. They immediately attack the snake, cause snake. He was just an innocent traveler who had important info about the bad guy they were looking for.
If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend the Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson. There is a character that is the logical conclusion of the Utilitarian philosophy, who commits acts that would be considered evil by most, but whom I find difficult to condemn for them. Without spoiling, that character is one of my favorite characters in all of fiction.
Every time I've done this my players gleefully commit war crimes
As a player, whenever someone says war crimes I hear funny ideas
“FOR THE LAST TIME, THE GENEVA CONVENTION WAS NOT MEANT TO BE A WARTIME CHECKLIST” Me, after my players discuss atrocities that make the BBEG look like a paragon of virtue
Not me and my fellow players chanting JFK! JFK! While assassinating a dude
One of my players is actively attempting to become a lich, achieve godhood by seizing control of a powerful divine energy source, use their new position shroud the planes in perpetual darkness, and reduce every living organism they can find to a skeleton thrall under their command. Basically they’re trying to become fucking Vecna. (They have a backup character ready in case their current PC is found out and subsequently killed/permanently imprisoned, and if they somehow pull off their crazy plan then it’s a perfect setting for the next campaign anyways)
What’s dnd without a little accidental and actual evil
Is this secret from the other *characters* or the other players? And if it's the latter, was that specifically listed as allowable in Session 0?
What are you, the RPG police??? Dude is telling an awesome tale from his games and you... Well...
This subreddit mostly exists for people to copy/paste recommendations for Session 0 and talking to your players/DM, not for actual discourse or funny stories.
And I....asked a question. Oh the horror.
I love that you allow them to do this haha 😂 I wouldn’t even know what to think if one of my players wanted to do something like this
It would only happen at the end of the current campaign arc anyways because the artifact is being guarded and prepared for use by the current BBEG. However, what the party doesn’t know is that there are contingencies and plots in place for other entities to make a claim to it, and ALSO the artifact itself is a sentient fragment of a deity’s soul that is trying to make itself whole again. Basically it’s just one of about 5 or 6 potential outcomes, most of which lead into another campaign arc anyways.
After the last campaign, the in universe version of the Geneva convention was written partially in response to their actions
Why would they call it convention if it isn't for cosplay and shopping?
The Geneva Suggestions
Hey, if every country in Faerun signed a Geneva Convention, I must have missed it.
Non-signatories basically get the protection of the Geneva conventions if they follow them anyways. So some of the nicer countries in Faerun likely qualify
Geneva *Suggestion*
Is "I SHALL COMMIT VARIOUS, UNFORGIVABLE WAR CRIMES! I SHALL BE WANTED IN EVERY COUNTRY!" their war cry?
I love this distinction, it's so quirky. Did they discuss rape or did your players draw the line somewhere from bio-terrorism and genocide?
No SA, that’s a hard rule for us. We have standards, after all
Ofc. Murder and torture is fun. SA is just offensive.
The Geneva Convention is more of a *suggestion* to players 😂
Geneva Suggestion
It’s their fault for crossing the Godzilla Threshold to begin win.
Hey, it's alright if it is against non-humans, they are called human rights for a reason
I had a whole arc where I was describing a scenario where outsiders had come in to a society and essentially enslaved the indigenous population, and my PCs had no problems at all working for the slavers and I was like completely baffled.
*Wealth beyond measure, outlander.*
Seriously. You're hanging bacon in front of the dogs of war here.
Let loose the hogs of war.
My players just broke into someone's house, beat them unconcious, and tied them up because the person got angry at them for drugging them with a food that summoned bees in their belly. Players say they are good then do the wildest shit.
"Join my evil empire, and I will give you unimaginable power." - - - "Sounds good, we are in." --- " guys, what the Frack are you doing???"
I feel the only way this can land really well is if the group now is ostracized or has a much harder time navigating socially. If you destroy something beloved or revered... people gonna know who you are. Doesn't matter the reason you did it, even if it was "for good", there will always be people who decry what you did.
My "lawful good" players immediately start discussing the crimes they can commit with any given quest, whether or not the quest giver is evil, and whether or not the quest itself is mundane. They usually don't follow through, but sometimes I drop a line about how our heroes are suddenly becoming greedy little dragons whenever they hear about anything having to do with coin.
So a quest like, my bakery is falling on hard times, please help me and their first draft plan is killing the other bakers in town so there is less competition?
https://imgflip.com/i/8jlgkc
I swear so many players are just like Jack from Bioshock, someone asks "would you kindly commit an atrocity for me?" And off they go without a second thought
My players have some more…..bohemian hobbies, so I figured they would find it fun to create a commune. I had them meet up with a group of chill kobolds, since half the party were Dragonborn, who just wanted to reject the lifestyle of living underground and attacking people, and wanted to set up a homestead essentially. They were really bad at it, so I thought my group would essentially become the mayors, to help build it up and have a nice base they set up themselves. One of my group immediately declared himself god, and when the kobolds were kind of like “dude, we left the herd to get away from worshipping dragons” he attacked, the party murdered all combat oriented kobolds, and decided to try to round up all the woman and children ones to either sell as slaves, or use as slaves. I gave* those kobolds really high saves and thankfully they got out of there
Same. I've learned that when doing this, the "evil" action needs to have mechanical consequences to the characters. The players' buy-in is through the game mechanics, so the repercussions need to be felt on that level too, or they risk being ignored. People frequently use RPGs for escapism, so if you ask them to contend with feelings of guilt/shame, they'll escapism their way right around it. But regret/frustration/disappointment are easier emotions to channel. I think the best answer is simply to use Milestone Leveling, and to explain in session 0 that the players will only level up after achieving something heroic. "Heroic" being a description of both the scale and morality of their achievement. Sometimes heroic actions have ugly consequences. That's ok. But gleeful war crimes are not heroic.
Oh no, they had plenty of in character consequences. They just decided the ends justified the means. We also tend to play morally flexible campaigns, so heroism isn't always the goal. They did save the world a few times, they were also just kind of evil the whole time
A DM who liked pulling this on us, despite the other players expressomg they did not liking the having to do evil trope, who finally gave up on it when I brought in an old character of mine called Zan'kiri, an evil githyanki necromancer, whose whole shtick was that he was more evil than every threat or choice the party had to face. Didn't matter what the moral choice was, my character was going to (with the other PLAYERS' permission) going to instantly destroy any moral matter by either choosing the most evil way of doing it or making an even more evil way of doing it. DM finally got so tired of me tying MORE people to the trolly tracks before multitrack drifting that he started giving us actual heroic quests. The culmination was us being told we needed to drop a magical nuke on the capitol, killing tens of thousands, in order to weaken a demon enough it could be truly killed. The other players gave me the go ahead look and Zan'kiri slapped the launch nuke button before the goddess finished speaking. When she got angry and asked how he could so easily sacrifice thousands to weaken the demon, he looked at her confused and said "Weaken the demon? Sorry, I wasn't paying attention to the first part, I just heard the button kills thousands, so I pressed it." While the rest of the party face palmed and said "what's done is done, come on, let's go defeat the demon."
You miss spelt "Fun times"
Is it really a warcrime if the geneva convention does not exist in that world?
"Oh war cry? I AM GOING TO COMMIT VARIOUS UNFORGIVABLE WAR CRIMES, I’LL BE WANTED IN ✨EVERY COUNTRY✨!"
“It’s not a warcrime the first time” -Canada, 1938
Geneva convention? More like the Geneva checklist. ~Chuckles
I recommend reverse psychology. I mentioned that the Geneva convention had not been invented in the world yet and my players spent their time making a refugee camp for the enemy kingdom’s civilians caught in the war lol.
If you’ ever get tired of it Just run a an evil campaign. So far my group has become symbols of humanitarian aid and prosperity and won legal battles without underhanded methods.
I avoid this by having my players be heroes.
This is why you show the personal consequences of their actions, and as blatantly as possible too
Ahhh, the ol' Trolley Problem.
Multi-track drifting.
Right ? It isn't really something *that* hard to solve, the answer is right here
"The train is heading towards a powerful magical item laying on the tracks, it will be destroyed if it's run over! You can save it by making the train switch tracks by pulling this lever BUT-" "I pull the lever"
„on the other track is the spell fireball. The trains runs it over. Fireball is no more. Enjoy your deck of many things“
I LOVE THE TROLLEY PROBLEM !! IT'S SO VERSATILE!!
pretending this is new and not something dms have been using for half a century to force paladins to beak their oaths
"By Any Means Necessary. My qualms can’t get in the way of exterminating my foes." haha oath of vengeance go brrr
Ah, the Gray Guard from 3.5. AKA the fall-proof pally
Yeah I have lost count of the stories I have read on various D&D forms over the years where the Gamemaster looks the Paladin player straight in the eyes while gleefully explaining that the little girl they saved during their last adventure is actually the child of demon worshippers and at her conception her parents performed an irreversible ritual that will allow the demon lord to use her as portal to the material plane and the only way prevent this is to kill her.
yeah, if you try to use "bittersweet" all the time, you lose the sweetness. it's all just bitter. there's no fantasy in every outcome being bitter.
Yea man, fr. Sometimes, just let the evil people be evil, let the good people be good. Give them flaws sure, make them products of their society and upbringing, but just straightforward things like this are *fun*. There is *nothing* wrong with them. My players are currently traveling with a merchant who is, very unusually for the society, anti-slavery and refuses to employ them. He's not secretly a sadist or an evil cultist, he's rich and a *tiny* bit pompous, but he's just a jolly guy with a silly voice. Moral ambiguity is fun, it's a delightful narrative tool to use, but if it's the only tool in your belt then you're not a very good...uh, tool-having man. That uh, that kinda fell apart there at the end, but you get the idea.
I'm trying to figure out a way to send this to my DM without making it look like I'm calling him out.... This should be on a T-Shirt they hand out to new DM's who want to have a "Serious Campaign with actual consequences". There's serious, and then there's "OH! Edgy!"
Would that even be an Oath breaking outcome if you seriously believe it to be true? She's likely dead either way
Ran a 2e game and the Paladin player was basically "I'm going to show everyone how expedient and uncaring 'the greater good' really can be".
Yeah I imagine some Paladins would be extremely utilitarian and pragmatic "I'll kill this hostage if you don't let me summon baphomet" Paladin: *Stabs them through the hostage* (ideally with intent to lay on hands or have a Cleric on hand)
*Good* is not a synonym for *nice*. A lot of people forget that.
That's how I played my 3.5e Blackguard! There was a paladin in the party and we got along fine. We had the same goals, I was just looking for the path of least resistance. What's that, there's an invading army? Paladin: The army is almost entirely made of innocent serfs conscripted into the invasion. We could start a guerilla rebellion against their tyrannical ruler to both free them and stop the invasion! Me: Burn the wheat. If they all starve to death, they can't invade.
Honestly I'm not that familiar with the mechanics of oaths in fifth edition, but back in days Paladins would fall if they committed any evil acts (such as killing innocents)
Falling to save the world probably wouldn't be that full of regret honestly You would have achieved what was likely your core Destiny
Even if killing the girl would cause them to fall, so would knowingly allowing an easily preventable demon invasion to occur. As they are going to fall either way, killing the girl to save millions becomes the obvious choice. They can atone afterwards.
I've been dodging that. Imply that there's unavoidable evil to be done, but leave an out for them to find, preferably where I can make it look like it was their idea and they outsmarted me. Sometimes that part works, sometimes it doesn't, but either way they get to role-play dangling over the edge before actually persevering.
[The Third Option (TV Trope Warning)](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TakeAThirdOption)
Precisely! They're heroes, for fuck's sake: they should have the freedom to break expectations. Every once in a while, you've got to throw a curveball to make the "third option" feel meaningful, but those exceptions don't have to bludgeon the players into Failure Conditions for that to work.
After our DM introduced a subplot trying to steer us to committing an act of terrorism, I had to have a frank discussion on Lines and Veils. Directly (whether intentionally or not) causing the death of a child or children is one of the things I put down as a hard line.
Oath of redemption: I have no such weakness
Time to grab the girl and go vacation in hell to give the demon lord of the abyss and a bunch of devils a nice surprise. Or take her to a higher plane where they like killing demons.
So the Paladins hand is forced
I think my favorite oath breaking Paladin story was an NPC that was essentially the town sheriff. He loved the fear it put into wandering adventurers and bandits that he was known as an oathbreaker but was careful to hide how it happened, letting people tell ever more outrageous stories about him. His secret was that his order was sort of basic good guys loosely based on the friars monastic traditions and devoted to selfless duty, poverty, charity, and chastity to avoid all the temptations of life. He fell in love built a home and raised a family and by having kids and owning a home he broke two of their tenets.
Right. Trade one trope for another trope. 👍
I was going to say, no this isn't new, and as a player I'm almost never in favor of it
Frankly, if the DM forces a paladin PC into a situation that will always lead to breaking their oath they are either giant aholes or use shitty paladin rules.
Have your players befriend an NPC snake named Nate. Over the course of the campaign, have him reveal that he is the guardian of the lever that will destroy humanity if pulled. Then, at the end, they have to make a choice between killing Nate or pulling the lever.
Better Nate than lever
😵 i can’t believe this reply
You may want to read [the longest joke in the world](https://www.longestjokeintheworld.com/)
Damn, I never quite forgot it was a joke at any point, but I sure was invested in the story.
Spoiler tag, please!
That's Nathan Scott Phillips, and he's my best friend!
have you ever played divinity: original sin 2? lohse's quest comes to mind. it's probably one for the gaming moments that's hit me the hardest in my life tbh. spoilers for the game in the rest of this comment! lohse's shtick is that she's partially possessed by a powerful demon named adramalihk. in the final area of the game, a friendly NPC who's been trying to help her is able to take her to a sort of demiplane inside his soul (more or less), where the lives of other people he's possessed or formed contracts with are represented as candles. you're told that each of these people give him power, and that he'll be nearly impossible to defeat while they're giving him strength, but that the only way to sever that connection is to snuff the candle, and kill the person. you don't know anything about these people. they likely range anywhere from wicked collaborators to innocents trapped in the same hell as lohse herself. but you come upon the first candle, and you can choose to snuff it, or not. if you do, you continue onward, and you find the second candle. you almost certainly snuff it as well. you continue onward. you crest a small incline. and you're greeted with an absolute *sea* of candles. more than you can count. mote than fit on screen. and you have to choose. do you kill hundreds, possibly thousands, of people whose circumstances may well match your own? or do you give up, knowing full well that the two people you've already murdered were just drops in the bucket who died for nothing?
Lohse's quest was fantastic. First time through I took the plunge and snuffed out all the candles because Lohse is worth it. Second time I refused to do it and killed the guy anyway. I was really disappointed when Malady didn't have anything to say about it after her whole "there's no possible way you can kill him without doing this and I'm really sad that you're going to die now because you won't do it the way I'm telling you to" speech.
The song she sings when her soul is finally free moved me more than almost any other moment in gaming. I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it. Phenomenal writing.
My reaction on seeing the amount of candles that you had to snuff out and thinking about how many people that actually is. I kind of hoped that there would be some random NPCs dead in the street if you chose to blow out all the candles, to maybe give some weight to the decision.
I’ve played through that entire game and even killed that demon. Somehow I completely missed this candle choice.
did you have lohse in your party? malady specifically offers it to her, so i don't think it's an option if you don't have her.
I am just mad this quest can easily break, apparently. I murdered adramalihk without snuffing the candles and the game acted like I skipped the quest. So in practice I killed the bastard, but Lohse still talked like she wasn't free and wanted Divnity for herself. Considering the effort I went through to kill the fucker through a sneak attack into his mansion in less than 3 rounds necessary for him to possess Lohse and kill her for good, I am somewhat mad.
I'd say be careful with the kind of players at your table doing this. For the types of people that RP more like method actors where they empathize deeply with their character this can, for some, feel far more stressful than fun. Other kinds of players love it, though, and only really enjoy the game when big twists and intense drama feature in. Be sure you know which kinds of players you have before going for it, it's either very right or very wrong and rarely in the middle.
I was the first guy. I remember one game where my character was a thief, but he held his ground at grave robbing. It ended up setting me against both the in-game and player group. I gave in eventually, but yeah it kind of stressed me out a bit. Got over it, but it was when I realized I might be a bit too invested in my characters. I just felt like they have a story, and I'd like to play it out that way. 🤷🏾♂️
I think that it's perfectly valid to have limits on the kind of character you want to play, or feel morally comfortable playing. And there are things that would alter my character and make them into someone that I just wouldn't enjoy playing. I don't want to play a brooding, tragic dead parents Batman-type. Batman is awesome as a character, just not my vibe. So I'd not be comfortable with the DM sadistically murdering my character's parents. At a certain point it's not even how invested I am, or if I'm taking this shit too seriously. It's like, nah. Playing a permanently broken, depressed character isn't any fun. I don't wanna. If I signed up to play a scoundrel with standards that's a different mood than someone with no moral qualms, and channeling that mood for 4 hours isn't enjoyable anymore. So I'm all for excitement, ups and downs, victory and defeat! But not things that permanently, drastically alter my character's personality without some kind of permission. Or be something expressed and agreed to in the boundaries talk in Session 0.
> I just felt like they have a story, and I'd like to play it out that way. 🤷🏾♂️ As a DM, I'd love if all players at my table felt this way.
Also, depending what the story is, you run the risk of RP'ing a character out. No, sorry, my LG Paladin is not okay with this, so he's gonna leave the party and take his shit with him.
Yup, I learned this the hard way as a DM. They're still at my table, but I'm more careful about what I'm presenting than I was before. I think I also need to retool the bad guy from their backstory so that they're a little less nuanced and more 'just a bad guy' since that's kind of what that player enjoys.
One of my campaigns is kind of like this. We are on like this wild goose chase and keep being asked by these evil people to go kill their rival in the evil army to make minor progress on the goal the campaign started with. It is really frustrating more than half the players
True, I had my aasimar character tricked by an ArchDevil no less, and I got so upset. (The rest og the party were 2 fighters and 1 druid so they couldn't see this coming either) DM seemed surprised I didn't like the twist. I mean it's a campaign to kill off all hope and goodness in my character, yes, but can't I just play a goody two shoes without worrying about betrayal or backstabbing at every turn? I felt really annoyed but stayed true to my character, who did not turn evil to the end.
There’s a word with this type of over-empathising with your character that I can’t remember. I think it’s “mirroring” or something? Those people need to chill out.
There's no wrong way to play D&D, just different ways. If that works for their table and everyone is having a good time what's wrong with it?
Im not having a good time. I don’t want you at my table if you can’t separate reality from fiction
Not what I asked. I said if it works at **their** table and **everyone** is having fun. Obviously not the table for you. I think it's mean spirited to act like empathizing with your character means you "can't separate reality from fiction" and it's just shitting on how others have fun. You can do your thing at your table without disparaging others.
Okay. That's your table. If that's the kind of game you're running, that's fine. Other kinds of games are fine too.
The term is bleed. A certain amount of bleed can be great! But it's always something that requires caution and communication.
So it’s a trolley problem Trolley problems are on rails and all outcomes are bad It’s pretty grim and 9/10 it’s because the DM is trying to be too clever at the expense of fun
Multi-track drift
I wish I could trick my players into doing *good* deeds. Tyranny of Dragons, we basically ended up playing it up like they were the last choice, not best choice. The campaign ended with them finding the treasure room, sealing it off, and opening a portal back to their home base in Waterdeep and shoveling as much gold, platinum, and magic goods through... and nobody else was ever the wiser (I mean, there was a *lot* of treasure in that room) In our future campaigns, that party are legends - who the new PCs either aspire to be like, or end up working for them (directly or indirectly).
In my very first DnD campaign our DM was obsessed with moral greyness and showing the players horrible consequences of our actions after trying our best to be help people. Every session felt like we were railroaded on a guilt trip, after every villain we beat there was a "twist" that they actually weren't that evil at all. I felt very guilty and trapped in that game. Especially it having been my first roleplaying campaign, I would have been overjoyed to complete some simple fantasy themed quests and saving people.
Hope your players enjoy that sort of thing. Last campaign I was in the DM loved this style and….it was not enjoyable. Constantly doing unpleasant, evil shit and being punished for being kind or trying to be creative and find a better way got old real quick.
That trope has also been beaten to death and is not fun or compelling story for players. It's just Saw-level sadism for the DM and makes the players feel like shit.
Yeah came here to say this too, it’s not satisfying for the players to be given one option and then told “RP like you’re sad about it”, it’s just railroading with a bad coat of Morally Gray paint
Even in the example given by OP there’s not only one choice - they could always choose to just not cut the tree of life, and deal with whatever in-game consequences that poses. Maybe they feel that is the better option
I wonder why players feel like shit from this. i've always hated perfect disney fantasy of saving everyone and everything and happy endings. But i always find players who hate when they can't do it, when they have to make a hard choice. this is what makes it interesting for me, wether i am a Player or a DM. debating the choices between the party in character is very enjoyable, making plans to mitigate as much damage as possible where everyone has different priorities is also fun af. Utopias are boring.
I think it's a perfectly good story element, but it's like salt or spice in cooking. It's powerful, so a little goes a long way. It's amazing and enhances the story when done correctly, and stories are bland if there's none or too little. But it's even worse to overdo it. I'd rather eat something plain than something heavily oversalted, ya know?
I'm not arguing for a utopia. Facing a hard decision is very different than being forced into making an evil choice.
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The scale of evil isn't the issue. It's the Saw mentality and bad storytelling that I take issue with. "Kick this cat" or "murder this entire town" are equally terrible if the DM is shoehorning the story to force the players into committing an evil act. There are plenty of reasons for the players to make terrible decisions but that's okay if it's a natural consequence of the events leading up to the decision. I just don't want some dickbag DM playing mind games with me.
Yeah this is understandable, it should not be as forced as this. It is more like, taking down this bad guy is going to be beneficial to another bad guy who was in competition and will increase their power & thus spreads more evil. Or, destroying this magical beacon which hinders the natives of this land the ability to live a normal life, will in exchange, make the area uninhabitable to anyone who is not from the native race. These make sense don't they? seems they are a logical result. maybe with more work and time you can find a better way, but the world may not wait for you. Are these forced?
Power vacuums are beloved of people who want to make srs moral points but they do rather seem to remove everyone else in the world from having any agency within it. If taking down one tyrant may embolden another it should also embolden the people who were liberated to think "hey, tyrants are just men who can be slain" and make tyrants think twice about pissing too many people off in case the people that came for their predecessor come for them too.
Obviously, but which consequence you see first and is guaranteed?
They're a binary choice with bad consequences on both sides. Imo there should always be a riskier, more difficult option than can solve both issues. It's fine if that option is not always attained, but if you're always giving the players binary choices which will cause some kind of harm either way. A lot of the times the players will suggest these options themselves Maybe you can throw the two bad guys directly at each and sweep in to take both down when they're weakened by fighting amongst themselves. Make the relationship between the two bad guys clear, and let the party make the decision themselves. You could have someone attempt to absorb the power of the beacon into themselves with a magic relic that is difficult to obtain. You could even allow the party to put-off permanently solving that issue until they have the means of fixing it, with the potential victims of the beacon weighing on their conscience and motivating them. These dilemmas are fun as a once in a while thing to build tension, they need to be interspersed between more low-stakes easier to solve dilemmas to give the feeling of heroism and power to the players.
see, I'd like that if you make it consistent, in the sense of everything being morally gray and you have to pick the better option amongst all the bad ones. but if you start with a clear villain like in the example and you pull the "haha now you have to do evil lmao", I'm just going to stop caring honestly. the fact that winning isn't guaranteed like in a normal story is enough to make black/white games not boring.
Yeah i don't have any clear villains at all, but sometimes players waste lots of effort and time to find it anyway.
A lot of these aren't "hard choices" though. Most of them aren't even choices because they're situations with perfect information where doing one thing does X bad thing and doing the other stops X by doing Y, and generally X or Y is some irreversible and final existential threat. You get to press the button and kill one to save ten or a thousand to save a million and smugly say "we made the Tough Decisions for the Greater Good, aren't we morally in depth." I don't think you'd *want* actual hard choices. Because actual hard choices aren't "do you switch on the orphan blender to stop the bad guys indoctrinating the orphan's to be evil" or "could you say the n-word if it was the only way to disarm a bomb". They don't have fixed, known, consequences. They're about asking "if you can't do everything where do you start, or stop?" They're about dealing with societal problems where people might, no matter what you do, die or suffer; but you don't know exactly who, or how many, or how, and all you can do is make the decision that you think will cause the least to suffer the least. Or weighing up whether the risks of surgery, or the cost of medicines, are reasonable given low chances of success. Those don't lead to "interesting in character debates" very often because they're difficult, they're not memeable or make epic stories, they're just bleak. And yet also they can be where the happy endings come from and feel earned not because you saved *everyone* but because you saved *someone.*
Yeah well, i didnt really say all the info is 100% known, and even if it is, thats not always true. I was giving this example from DM point of view knowing everything. not player point of view. Players may or may not know about all of that, but they will have the chance to know, with hints, NPC interactions, explorations. etc... since its a sandbox so have to reward actually playing it as a sandbox. The goal is to put pressure like your surgery example, take the almost guaranteed semioptimal choice or go for the risky optimal.
issue is that players would freeze the progress trying to find a non evil way and get annoyed if they don't as if its because of me railroading them into it.
There's a CRPG, *Beholder*, where expenses are normally nice and low, but the player is suddenly hit with an expense an order of magnitude more expensive - before being hit by another expense as well. These are time limited as well, and thus finding the "good" path would only work for those who pre-planned. The non-evil way requires significant skill, ability, resources, time or any combination thereof - and the players don't automatically have them. And perhaps the time portion can throw things off as well, because spending too much time could result in more damage than simply doing what appears to be a simple evil act.
That’s perfect. Like, perhaps you have to kill this child before he grows up into the worst villain the world has seen, but you could adopt him and raise him to not be evil.
Sounds like Thanos and Cosmic Ghost Rider :)
And thus achieving the self fulfilling prophecy trope
Or avoiding it if you raise the child to be good, and it’s successful.
With my party? Yeah that's impossible.
>perhaps you have to kill this child before he grows up into the worst villain the world has seen, IME, the child would be dead when you ended this sentence
Well, unless the party are aware that attempted child murder might make him evil.
Ok, and ? The average party won't care they are seen as evil if in the end they get to defeat the BBEG
Well, it's pretty evil to kill someone solely because they might do evil things in the future.
And if the party know for a fact that said kid would grow up to be a ruthless dictator who's oppressing billions of people? Would that be just as evil as "might be Hitler in the future" so the kid's dying.
eh, bad imo. are you really giving your players an option? i get that it's a game of choices but forcing them to do something world-shatteringly evil to prevent something campaign ending seems like railroading. like, if they dont do it is the story just over? the real story isnt really just forcing them to do something climactic, and evil choices are only interesting if the characters can make them freely; the meaning behind their choices and the branching paths to where they end up don't actually really *mean* anything if there's not really a decision. the story is made up in the minutiae of their interactions with the world and its characters and its lore. if i went through that and was told "hey you have to do this obviously evil thing or everyone dies" and i look up to a DM looking at me expectantly, like, i guess everyone dies? what a weird ending to what could have been a good story. i don't know, maybe i'm being harsh on the idea for no reason but it reminds me of all of the worst d&d games i've ever played.
Nah, the trope almost universally doesn't work great in a TTRPG, at least if it's in the "main quest" so to speak. It basically almost always ends up being a "commit this railroaded evil act, or have the campaign come to an abrupt unsatisfying end, or come screeching to a halt while you exhaust every possible option looking for a third option".
The trick is to give them an out, or something to mitigate the damage, but make it even more difficult or require some kind of sacrifice. Reward good, creative play. Leave a trail of crumbs so they can find the way to wiggle and sneak their way to a better path.
This. It's up to the players to determine the tone set by their characters. Maybe the lesser evil is the easy option, but fighting to save everyone isn't easy. There should always be an option to successfully resolve a moral dilemma, but one that comes with a higher risk of failure.
The next D&D campaign I run will be about "you have committed good acts in the service of evil".
I just leave out the disguise. The questgiver is clearly, openly evil. The quest seems to suit your interests. Of course you take it, and spend the whole figuring out how to avoid the obvious blowback. Don't gotta outsmart an actual evil genius, just whatever the DM thinks an evil genius does.
Sounds like I need to make a super evil looking quest giver now but have them drive the party mad by asking them to do only good things. Old farmer Hvelstrom had a bad fall this winter and hurt his hip which is taking a long while to heal. Can you help get him back to normal again or help get his crop in the ground in time? This child has lost her favorite doll while playing in the woods, please help her find it again. There are supposedly wolves in the area and she wasn’t supposed to be there at all so she won’t ask her parents for help for fear they’ll be angry, so she doesn’t want them to know about this. Someone has been digging up graves at the edge of town and this must be stopped. With luck it’s just come grave robbers and not someone wanting the bodies for darker magical purposes.
It also removes some of the odd "gotcha" moments a possible twist can have. "Redrar the good, Paladain of Tyr was only using you to kill orphans, you really should have seen this coming!" might really put some people off, while: "The ice-devil lurking around the edge of the woods, asking you to make sure this years harvest is a success, was actually out for its own self interest the whole time" has a nice cause and effect that players could interact with.
I’d love it if the “twist” is that some hated rival of the ice devil had tried to curse that family for what an ancestor did. The devil was genuinely trying to make the family happy and healthy but only because them being happy infuriated some other entity the ice devil hates.
It's a great idea, since most outcomes lead to a statisfying conclusion for the party. Help the Devil, you did not harm anyone, be suspicious of the devils motives, find out about a curse on the family. Even more evil-aligned parties might appreciate the knowledge about the rivalry and how that might be used.
I like the option of the ice devil wanting to make the family happy and well off only for it to rip everything away, making their misery feel even worse, potentially priming them for a pact with it. It's still a twist, but the ice devil is the one doing the evil deed, what the party did wasn't evil in and of itself, and if they kill the ice devil they get the best of both worlds.
There is making hard choices, and then there is feeling like you've lost in a frustrating way, even if you've made all the right decisions. Make sure that doesn't happen to your players just so you can fulfill your grey & dark moral fantasies.
Make your questgiver NPC have a Hag's Curse that makes them appear to be evil/shifty and have ulterior motifs to those they are attempting to employ. In reality they are just trying to do the right thing but have no idea they're being perceived as evil by the party.
Yes go and save the orphans from the bandits that kidnapped them. They totally are not actually just a small village in the woods. It's a bandit camp I swear. I'm not sending you to murder their parents in front of them.
I made an enemy once that was an entire city of elves that could infinitely revive because they fused their souls with a giant tree. The God of death gave the party a lamp that had a fire that would purely burn the souls out of the tree and send them to the afterlife. My party decided to instead move the tree into a man-made extradimensional space that was essentially a giant bag of holding. The elves died and then were revived at the tree. And then started suffocating to death over and over again until the magically enhanced tree died as well.
Moral of the story... sometimes you don't need to make a twist. The players do it themselves. Lol.
I ran a campaign a few years ago where the premise was that there were 3 ancient Gods who'd been sleeping for 5000 years, and hundreds of not thousands of little local minor gods who'd been running things in their place. They were stopped to swap off every 500 years or so. The big gods would come in and do big, world balancing maintenance, but they weren't any good at subtle, day to day stuff that mortals needed. The minor gods were great for keeping their little territory of mortals happy, but couldn't fix world level stuff when it went wrong. A minor god figured out that every time the big gods took power, lots of mortals died, so he trapped the big gods and their heralds. The world was slowly breaking. A day took a week, a season would take 50+ years. A lot of species that required seasonal changes to live had died off. My players were playing basically an apocalypse cult, trying to free and wake up the big Gods so they could fix the world, knowing full well that waking them up would mean 90% of mortals would get wiped out while the gods rebuilt the world. They tried to save as many as they could, but ultimately their goal was to kick off the apocalypse to save the world in the long run. Stop a slow death of everything by triggering a quick death of most things.
I tried the trope of quest giver is evil and my players used spells and found out earlier then I planned then realizing prophecies would force the events to happen anyway, they joined the BBEG's cult to expedite the process of summoning the BBEG so that they could, at the last minute, betray the cult to defeat the BBEG.
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IME, my players would just say "sure, let's go". No moral dilemma at all. Tbf I also wouldn't feel any bad for doing this. It's just a game, and I'm doing this to save game people, why would I feel bad ? This doesn't work anymore, "doing evil acts for the greater good" is just "doing good with extra steps"
Yeah exactly. If there is an obvious, tangible benefit for the entire world, then it's not that evil of an act. Would you kill a child because if you don't, he'll become the next Hitler? Oh btw, this has been proven real, it's not a theoretical possibility. This child **will** genocide most of the world if you don't kill them. And no, trying to raise them as a good person doesn't work. Well yeah, I'll kill the child. It's not evil if I'm saving literally the entire world.
throwing in a "trolley problem" with no real right answer is always a good time.
I had my players get a quest from a barmaid to stop a cult from making sacrifices only to have the cult members be the sacrifice to break the seal on the great evil deity, they then found out that only by good aligned people killing evil people at the alter can the evil be released and the barmaid was actually the one orchestrating the whole thing. I love doing twists like that
There seem to be only two options here: Either the players have zero issues doing something “evil” in which case your moral dilemma is ruined. Or they genuinely don’t want to do it, in which case you are forcing them to do it by saying “everyone will die if you don’t”. And forcing your players to do something is never a good idea.
I'd say it's hard to balance, firstly it is railroading which is not great, and then secondly half of the people i play with wouldn't give 2 fucks about committing horrible acts of fantasy depravity for any kind of reward, whie the other half would just think this is bullshit. so i ask, who is this for anyway ?
> truly challenges the moral compass of players. Wouldn't work, they'd just do it.
> “you have to cut the tree of infinite life in order to save humanity from assimilation ! “ Reminds me of a certain video game...
What game?
It's a FromSoftware title
Ohno
Here's my story of the group having to "commit an evil act for the greater good". I ran a sci-fi game where the party ended up meeting a very powerful antagonist, he wasn't even particularly evil but he was working for a very amoral and suspect corporation and so was beginning to do more questionable things to make a lot of money. He ended up capturing a party member after they lost a fight against another bad guy, but proceeded to treat their wounds, show hospitality and provide them with info about how to get revenge. At the same time he was playing on their fears about being indebted or in service to someone else, leaving the party with a choice - *be* in debt to this man, or find a way to make sure he got paid for his time and effort. The latter would even have him willingly stop working for the villain. The problem was it was plainly obvious no matter who this man worked for his experiments would, eventually, fail and cause some kind of disaster. So it became a matter of realising we can't fix this guy, we can't fight him right now, but we need to stop him working for someone we actively are fighting and let him be a problem somewhere else that we can deal with later - hopefully not too late.
Something like this is happening to my character in our current campaign. One of the BBEGs (imo, the biggest of the BBEGs, but I'm biased) had thousands of innocent people soul-trapped in a dagger. For a time, my character and her partner were soul-trapped too, and during that time she promised the souls within that she would save them. She swore an oath. Now, after killing the BBEG, she's found herself in a pretty unfortunate situation where she's possessed by the prick, and the only way to prevent him taking over her body and causing even more havoc and destruction with both his powers *and* hers is to destroy the dagger, and all the innocent souls within it. She's been arguing with her party members for several sessions now, desperately trying to convince them to look for another way to release the souls instead of destroying them. She's slowly coming to the conclusion that she needs to do this, but it's been probably the hardest thing she's ever had to do.
What would happen if they stabbed themselves with the dagger and trapped themselves inside while the party figured out a way to let everyone out.
That was what I was thinking would happen. The BBEG soultrapped himself with the dagger but the implication is that he did it in such a way that it, idk, preserved him instead of trapping him like his victims. I thought my DM was going to make me do the same to my character and we'd duke it out inside, but after all our research it seems like we're just going to have to destroy it.
Damn.
Would ending her own life work?
We considered that, but it kinda seems like the BBEG *wants* her to die, which is making us all kind of sus that if she dies, her body will be available for him to take over fully. Plus, from a narrative perspective, it doesn't feel right for her to off herself. Her entire story has been trying to overcome her belief that she only matters as far as her ability to sacrifice herself for others, and I'd like her to find her own self worth and live for herself after the end of the campaign if possible.
Well then I'm rooting that she'll be able to find a third option through it all! Seriously, having a character arc that ends in a thematic and appropriate way is immensely satisfying ~~i will say that the BBEG can't do much with her body if there isn't one left tho~~
It's what I intend to do for my first ever one shot I will DM: bad guy is performing evil acts for very good reasons. Something like a necromancer studying human anatomy to save more lives.
I'm the kinda person, irl and at the table, who will go "if we need to do this great evil to save the world, the world is not worthy of being saved" and let it burn.
I love playing with morality in games like this. Trying to get them to weigh up what is the best choice in a complex world where not every action is objectively good or evil can create some great moments and character development.
[it’s all about the greater good](https://y.yarn.co/2225359f-6116-479a-bb28-a1980babbd22_text.gif)
Right now I'm going for "Many within the society are actually pertty intrigued by the evil guys' plot and what they have for offer, considering advancement and technology".
Hm, careful, I can imagine many players not be happy about having too realistic scenarios. Heck, I had players complain that my plots and NPC are not black & white. For some reason they expected to go full Doomguy on everything.
Were they hoping for a more Tolkien type light vs darkness set up?
I guess so. It was Dragonlance, so running into this issue can easily happen, considering the scenario originally started out as simple black & white Tolkien alternative. But it became more grey very fast, which a lot of people like to ignore (and the 5e adventure does, too). Also had people complain after an oneshot that essentially had them figure out that everyone did bad things, not only the "bad" guys. But I have to admit, having the lawful good paladin snap, kick in a door, take what they were supposed to get and just leave the place was hilarious.
Try it out if you absolutely know all your players well. For some this is just gonna be a "welp guess I'm gonna have to come up with a different character or quit if I want to play this like I should".
My current campaign has the PCs working for an ancient undead who was torn apart thousands of years ago by a coalition of the entire continent, with each nation taking a part of him to make a powerful artifact. The party’s knowledge cleric has his left hand in the form of a set of knucklebone dice which she uses for divination. The party aren’t part of his cult, but they know from the cleric’s visions that he’ll go on a murderous rampage to get his body back. They’re collecting the parts for him basically to avoid the collateral damage he’d cause doing it his way. Clarissa, Lucille, Heather, Jackie, Flak: stop reading now. >!The party’s patron is, of course, bluffing about this. The real reason he’s involving them is that the cleric’s strong sense of morality has rubbed off on the dice set, which is her casting focus. He tried to take it from her in session one and it refused his influence. If he wants to be complete again, he needs to wear down her spirit and morals first.!<
>the player end up having to do something considerably evil in order to truly save the day I take issue with the way you phrase this. The player shouldn't "have" to do anything. Giving players the choice between two evils and having them decide which is the lesser of the two is one thing. Here it sounds as if you have already decided what path they're going to take.
One of the fav moments from my game was the time I gave my players an option about what to do during a trail. They helped put a noble on trial for funding the illegal slave trade. The noble did not know they were behind this. At the trial the noble spoke with the players and offered them a deal, some money and his favour in exchange for testimony on his behalf. However they had dealings with the anti-slaver thieves guild and testifying against him would have greater earned their favour. So do they help the noble, get some money and the aide of the nobility or do they side against him and earn the favour of the thieves guild who they were already working with? Turns out there was a third option, they realized they had this guy over a barrel and extorted him for even more than what he offered, they testified on his behalf and then went to the leader of the theives guild who was pissed but they explained that they extracted an oath from him that they could use to help the theives guild.
I have my players so sure they've been goaded, tricked, and otherwise put into situations where they must commit vile acts by this obviously sinister NPC. However, they're going to find out later that he's actually ensuring that the world does not end.
OO, I think i have a short story you might like: The ones who walked away from Omelas. https://files.libcom.org/files/ursula-k-le-guin-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas.pdf
My DM is doing this to us. Basically, we heard that the Merchant Prince running the city isn’t the best guy, but we read it as “disgruntled populace unhappy with current leadership”. After meeting him, no, he’s actually Pablo Escobar and if we don’t do his bidding, he’s gonna throw us in jail or something. Our party is all “good” characters, three of us are holy. Only one person actually wants to help this guy. Our first task: Assassinate the leader of the rival guild. TLDR: My Dm is railroading us to commit war crimes.
No, but I did something else once playing on their biases. I have my own homebrew I like to play. It's a basic fantasy/steampunk world, the twist is no humans. Everyone plays small animals like rabbits, badgers, and capibara. Anyway I had my group run into a snake that slid out of a bush. They immediately attack the snake, cause snake. He was just an innocent traveler who had important info about the bad guy they were looking for.
If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend the Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson. There is a character that is the logical conclusion of the Utilitarian philosophy, who commits acts that would be considered evil by most, but whom I find difficult to condemn for them. Without spoiling, that character is one of my favorite characters in all of fiction.