Party acting on good intentions that backfire spectacularly by not thinking through all the consequences makes for much better material than party acting in rational self-interest.
Party acting on good intentions that backfire spectacularly by not thinking through all the consequences makes for much better material than party act...
'kay, didn't click on the pic.
>'kay, didn't click on the pic.
Yeah you did
You're clearly aware that the pic's content are worthy enough to mention that you ignored it knowing it could piss someone off.
No, it just means the DM is a dick. Also quit posting screenshots from porn games.
>please talk to this shitty comic with me!
>i used the word "party" in the OP so it's on topic 🙂
Jannys really do fall for this?
If you do it like this you're just going to piss your players off something fierce. You'll simply make them not care about the human element at all. One example from my own games that I think was more reasonable saw an impulsive PC set fire to the private box of a fighting pit to try and get them all out of a pretty nasty battle that saw them surrounded by cultists. This was a bad move because they were still in the building, had previous evidence that these cult fighters were suicidal dedicated (unlike most enemies they fought) and because the pit was in an old converted warehouse. They risked considerable danger to save bystanders in the resulting chaos, once the fight was done and they managed to avoid suffocation.
Why don't you just use your mod powers to delete the thread?
Unintended consequences to good actions can and should be done in RPGs. But they shouldn't be done as a shitty 'Gotcha! Ha ha you tried to do a good thing but it was actually a bad thing!' Instead, you do it as a 'Good job, hero. But your job isn't over yet.'
Like, like the OP image? These are all fricking solvable problems. Freeing the slaves was fine, its just there is *more to do after*. Like, yeah, of course they still need protection and food and shit. No fricking duh. Take the supplies from whatever caravan was transporting these guys anyway, escort them to safety, and leave them with a reasonable plan for how they can survive on their own. This isn't difficult to imagine shit, treating it as a 'moral quandry' because 'slavery was good actually!' is a complete brainlet take.
For someone versed in diplomacy and logistics like Alphinaud from FF14, this wouldn't even be an issue. When you overthrow the evil empire, you need to nationbuild afterwards, when you restore the king to his rightful throne you need to make sure that he has the finances to pay his military so he can keep it, etc. This isn't boring minutia, these are seeds for *the next adventure*.
Crystal Braves btw
To be completely fair, as much as Alphinaud fricked up with the crystal braves the reason it exploded was because he trusted people he should not have trusted. Which is still his failing, but its even MORE Raubahn's failing. Raubahn was the one who vouched for Ilberd and talked him up as a steadfast man of character and good commander for the Crystal Braves, not knowing that the man had been bought off by the world's most terminally stupid moneygoblin. Without a corrupt Illberd at the top of the organization, the Crystal Braves probably would have been fine. But Raubahn vouched for a friend, and paid for it dearly.
> FF14 actually fricking excels at the whole "hero with good intentions accidentally makes situation worse" plots
As far as we can tell, thats basically how the Ascians cause most calamities. Find the strongest heroes they can and trick them into destroying their own worlds. Thats how you get Ardbert, after all.
>Thats how you get Ardbert, after all.
It's also what happened in the 13th now that we know Golbezante caused it's downfall because Igeyorhm told him the Watcher did everything and he decided to slash first, ask questions later.
I'm kind of disappointed that in the end we didn't get a "WoL and Y'shtola frick around with the shards and accidentally cause a rejoining and have to make a public apology" plot. Shame it became obvious these patches were just a filler arc and at most set up.
It would be kind of funny if the Ascians wrote off the 13th as 'literally can't be rejoined, too fricked' and Y'shtola did it somehow by accident. It would probably just be a mini-rejoining since most of the 13ths aether is fricking *gone*. You can have just a little Calamity, as a treat.
But honestly what I wanted out of the 13th adventure was that we think its going very well, and then when we return home its like 3-5 years later and we are like "Oh, right. Time gets out of synch between shards. How did we forget about that?" and everyone on the Source has had to move on without us. So places have had to rebuild, new situations evolves, some characters grew noticeably older in our absence, etc. Just a nice, soft reset of the board to open things up to get re-acquainted with them.
Well, a mini-rejoining was pretty much what Golbez was gonna cause, it did get discussed that his plan would inevitably result in a calamity. So yeah, Ascians being goofs as usual.
And at this point I don't even know what's the deal with the time synch since nobody seems to give a frick. I think it could have been excused if the first time we sent the nixies into the portal that had doubled as a test for how worn they get with time too, but it's just flat out nobody mentioning it which seems uncharacteristically careless. I really hope the writers aren't just trying to pretend like the time synch isn't a meaningful factor when they had SB, which was just a few months, last A WHOLE FRICKING CENTURY on the First. G'raha had to sit around for 100 years just because his point of reference was the Source. And we know the variance can switch really fast since the shards had to be on about the same speed during the Warriors of Darkness plot or else they wouldn't have had time to go back. Shard travel is honestly risky af and even WoL casually travelling to the First just to do quests should actually be a risk since we don't know if it can shoot up the other way too. Y'shtola's whole test to shard travel is gonna have to incorporate some way to check the other side, and specially once we start hopping more than once for the other shards with each step making the probability higher, or we might come back to a completely different world.
>Well, a mini-rejoining was pretty much what Golbez was gonna cause, it did get discussed that his plan would inevitably result in a calamity.
I thought he was just going to open a big rift and pour through all of the voidsent to the source, leaving the rest of the void behind. Not giving a shit about a rejoining, just giving an exit door to their world and inviting them all to use it. From their perspective, coming to the source is a pure positive outcome: either they get to feast on aether and live fat and happy, or they die on the source and they get to DIE. This would be a massive disaster from the perspective of the source, millions would die in the bloodshed, but its not a Calamity with the big C.
That said, its kind of impressive that when you lay it out on paper "Millions of demons pour into the world and a big frickoff war happens" is a reasonable course of action that might even actually be a good thing. Its actually a legitimately less fricked situation than letting the voidsent continue as they are, an objectively better outcome for a people who have been trapped in a nightmarish existence through no fault of their own with no way out for thousands of years.
Well the thing with that is that we don't really know what happens if all those voidsent die on the Source. Does them entering that lifestream mean they stay there until their shard dies and then they rejoin there one by one? Do they just reincarnate as a native would? Y'shtola theorizes that so many people, all of them aspected towards darkness, dying at once and entering a foreign lifestream could have absolutely catastrophic consequences and it would actually be a Calamity with capital C as it would tilt the whole world's balance.
> Raubahn was the one who vouched for Ilberd and talked him up as a steadfast man of character and good commander for the Crystal Braves, not knowing that the man had been bought off by the world's most terminally stupid moneygoblin.
Considering his motivations, a lot could have been solved if Alphinaud had simply told Illberd up front "I hope that, once the Crystal Braves are established and trusted and strong enough, we can even try liberating Ala Mhigo". Because thats really all that Illberd wants to do, and being in command of an army where he can DO that is all he's really gunning for. Though he probably still would have pulled a Stormblood at the first sign of Alphinaud having cold feet over starting a war.
Which, hilariously, brings us to sort of a mirror image of the thread topic: Illberd was an absolute frick of a human being who betrayed everyone around him and led his own men to unknowing slaughter so that he could use them as a blood sacrifice to summon a primal against his enemies. He orchestrated a false flag operation that dragged the entire Eorzean continent into a war they desperately did not want to fight against a superior foe.
And if he had not done ALL of that, the world would have ended. He didn't know that, he had none of that perspective or information. But multiple countries (including his homeland) were freed from an oppressive empire and the engines thats were set in motion to bring about the apocalypse were smashed... but all of those good things could never have happened if Ilberd was not an absolute bastard man to kick it all off.
He can't take credit for any of it, but it is going to be a funny quirk of history that Illberd doing every war crime he could think of at once was a big part of why there is still anyone left alive after.
>Considering his motivations, a lot could have been solved if Alphinaud had simply told Illberd up front "I hope that, once the Crystal Braves are established and trusted and strong enough, we can even try liberating Ala Mhigo".
I don't think that was ever going to be a thing. Alphinaud never formed the Crystal Braves with the intention of fighting Garlemald or liberating any of the provinces. He formed them just to have an independent GC that would answer to threats without political interference, literally "What if the Scions, but it's an army instead of secret super agents". I don't think he ever intended for the Crystal Braves to go on the offensive against a particular target, Alphinaud was arrogant but his arrogance was still contained to just wanting to defend people, not wanting to decide the fate of countries. He's the first one to say he'd rather negotiate with the garleans after all.
Also you just summarized why I love the character of Ilberd. Just a villain gone completely off the deep end, killing his own allies out of spite, killing himself with a maniac smile on his face just for the possibility that EVERYONE involved in the conflict might die, and in the end he set up like a dozen plot points that were all necessary to achieve the good ending. Probably my favorite ironic villain.
You are probably right about Alphinaud, I'm conflating too much OOC information. If the Crystal Braves had gone 'perfectly' and lasted as a major fighting force, it was literally inevitable that they would have fought Garlemald. There just isn't a way out of the situation they are in that doesn't involve the Eorzean Alliance fighting the Garleans in a real war, and the Braves would have inevitably been a part of that. But that being true does not mean that it was something Alphinaud was thinking about at the time, much less liberation.
It wouldn't have worked, Ilberd had heard it before and was hideously blackpilled on the "we'll liberate your home SOMEDAY" shit. In the end he didn't even believe his lazy, shiftless people deserved it, he just wanted to take his anger out on the Empire.
Tbqh FF14 sometimes does it to a fastidious level. There are times I just want to yell at the screen that I don't need to see yet again how we fix the victim's lifes afterwards, I can just assume we do and move on to that next adventure.
At the same time and like
says, FF14 actually fricking excels at the whole "hero with good intentions accidentally makes situation worse" plots, I'm pretty sure every single Scion except maybe Tataru and Alisaie has had a plot like that by now, to different degrees.
>These are all fricking solvable problems.
In the OPs case they really aren't solvable then and there for Cecily who is a lone actor with minimal backing. The only "safety" that exists are a handful of horrifically overburdened walled cities that are going to being overrun any day now. Sure she could reach her objective of removing the corrupt elements from the government who are thriving on the suffering of refugees but that won't solve the reasons said refugees exist. 95 to 99% of the continent is being overrun with cannibalistic murderrape goblins, endless hordes of cannibalistic undead, a fishman uprising, and a growing parasitic mass that has turned the largest city and the surrounding country into a living hive. All of which is being caused/empowered(except the undead, a based moron is doing that to "help") by some unknown upstart that's leeching power from some local pagan "gods" that only the player is vaguely aware of.
The point isn't "slavery was good actually", it's that the setting is suppose to be a hopeless grimdark shithole a moment away from being completely destroyed with what little humanity and naivety remains struggling to not be crushed under the oppressive reality of multiple apocalypse scenarios being stacked together.
Sure players could always receive a slap on the ass and a 'good job', but a hollow victory that puts the player's actions/methods into consideration could also be the thing that motivates them to go bigger, look deeper into the issues they face and can be the seed for the next adventure, which is what is happening in the OP scene. Of course this always depends on your game, setting, and group. I had a GM that could pull it off after the table asked for these type of consequences, the players kept forcing the GM to bite us in the ass and it was creating conflict between some of the players since they didn't want the GM to hold back.
>except the undead, a based moron is doing that to "help"
Kinda rude, the necro maid is developmentally stunted by circumstances of her childhood, but she's not stupid.
>Laughs in Crystal Braves
Most players don't care about your gay 'consequences,' and if you sprung the op situation on them they'd kill the slaves and quip 'now your problems are over' at least half the time.
That seems excessive overreaction, pragmatically speaking you could just kill one and feed him to the others.
Players are all about overreaction, though.
This is neat for a character struggle moment in a novel, but for a game, I think it's better to find your enemies and fight them and encounter enemies to fight by being found, where the only real consequences are losing some time and resources at best, and wiping the party or getting some other game over state at worst.
Making the consequences primarily about combat is very D&D-centric approach.
No it isn't.
D&Dgays are all about being Critical Role and having character moments backed by the DM fudging dice.
Very anti-gameplay.
The opposite, the entire meme about current D&D state is a skirmish wargame that refuses to aknowledge combat and avoids it and violent solutions as much.
That sounds boring as shit.
Neat.
Write your stories, then, but don't call them games.
What Game is this?
Lona RPG
Your porn game example is good at showing why this is such a terrible idea. See, it's just wrong. Ex slaves would never react like that. Being a slave is genuine, unmitigated misery. That's why there were so many slave rebellions despite the almost certain knowledge they were going to fail. You can tell that the author doesn't really know anything about slavery and is kinda looking around for possible reasons the woman could have messed up. If you scrabble for some time ah to "gotcha" your players for not thinking through all consequences...you'll get it wrong.
It's pretty obviously framed as a joke. A more earnest implementation is ASoIaF, where Dany smashes the slave economy of a city without filling the structural vacuum and leaves, leading to unrest and disorder. Granted I do think she blames herself too much, she did leave the slaves with some acclaimed slaves as rulers and they chimped out.
You missed the point
There's old saying that slaves happily become tyrants should they ever get a chance. She literally gave them that chance and they literally became tyrants.
I'm not talking about ASoIaF, I'm talking about the shitty game in the OP. It doesn't even work as a joke, although it's clear the author was desperately trying to make it work.
Then what are you even saying? They pointed out it was a joke. Whether it's a funny one or not is not germane.
I genuinely do not understand what could be confusing in my post.
It's a misery porn game. Everyone is wrong. The "slaves" were owned by organ harvesters.
You're legitimately wrong. Look up the interviews the US did to former slaves. Many pined for the old days because they had a "sense of community" and had kind masters.
Slavery isn't Hollywood; if you relentlessly mistreat your slaves, they just become cripples or die and you just incinerated a shit ton of money. Try to use your brain a bit.
That was the US. I doubt any of the oarsmen who were castrated, had their feet cut off and were chained to the oars on Arabic slave ships would share the same sentiment.
Completely moronic comic
>Slaver lives, slaves were just rescued
If they like slavery so much they can just go back
>Slaver is dead
The slaves can just do what they do now (work the land) and get to keep the gains rather than have them all go to the slaver
inb4
>the authorities would just assume they killed the slaver and kill them
The rescuer is a Noble, so clearly the nobility is against, or isn’t in blanket favour of slavery and would be supportive of their freedom or at least allow them to swear fealty rather than execute them.
It's kind of like Game of Thrones, where the gladiators who fought for Dany realized that their lives were actually WORSE after being freed. They basically all went back to being gladiators, since it was all they knew.
As one guy said:
>"When I was a slave, I slept on furs and ate meat three times a day. Now I'm free, I sleep in a hut and eat fish once a day if I'm lucky."
Gladiators are a special case, though, because despite being slaves they got special treatment. They were literally celebrities, we can go back to ancient Roman records and find famous gladiators giving *endorsements* for businesses and politicians. They were essentially doing fricking commercials. Of course freedom for them means a different thing than freedom for a common slave.
What fricked them up wasn't even actually being freed, that part was fine. It was that dany ALSO banned bloodsports in the arena. The freedom wasn't the problem, the destruction of their livelihood was.
She should've just given them soldierly careers, killed the worthless ones/revanchists and made it look like the city's nobility. Frankly she should've just killed all the nobility and all former prominent slave owners with no present utility. Her rapprochement route might have eventually worked had she not gotten fed up with kissing the asses of people she (rightly) considers her inferiors.
Someone remind me, were the gladiator game in GoT the "hurr gladiators die every fricking day by the dozen, I train these frickers for months if not years giving them premium care only to lose them on the first fight" kind or the actual realistic "this is basically just ancient wrestling" kind?
Death in gladiatorial arenas was a thing, 'it was just WWE' is an exaggerated reddit meme. To your point, prize gladiators were more often paired against trash like criminals or captured enemy soldiers, as well as animals.
>Death in gladiatorial arenas was a thing
Sure, but generally speaking, it only happened in one of three cases. Accidental deaths (or maybe just workplace politics, it's not like people were above "accidental" murder); clandestine fights; or an event big enough that whoever was organizing it thought having a bunch of gladiators die to show he could afford it was a good idea, and only the absolute cream of the crop could afford that.
In general, gladiators died very little. Of course, that's not counting people sentenced to die in the arena or big frick ups fighting against beasts. Saying it was just like wrestling is just refering more to how they were more concerned with putting on a show than actually fighting "correctly" as if their life was on the line, so to speak.
Gladiators died often enough that their average life expectancy was five years lower than the average (piss-poor) Roman.
IMO something of an equivalent is MMA. MMA is often thought of as an ultra gritty real martial art thing, but it's not. It has rules in place simply to make it more fun to watch. If they were really intending to show actual real life style fights then there wouldn't be any banned moves and people would have weapons. There wouldn't be weight classes. There wouldn't be time limits. It's ultimately entertainment and sport rather than actual fighting (duh, lol). And yet it's also brutal as hell and people are absolutely trying to beat the shit out of each other for real.
Gladiatorial combat wasn't an actual fight to the death and it was modified to make it fun to watch, but you would be giving your opponent a hell of a lot of legitimate injuries and you actually could just kill them. You were meant to use your weapons in the same way an MMA fighter is meant to use their fists (among other body parts). It's MMA for a society that doesn't find it shocking if the MMA fighter dies.
>Gladiators died often enough that their average life expectancy was five years lower than the average (piss-poor) Roman.
You could probably say the same for real fighters or even sportsball players.
Well, okay, good point. But there's a crucial difference:
Modern contact athletes die earlier because they live to 75, get alzheimers and pop their clogs. Gladiators had a life expectancy of thirty. They weren't dying of long-term illnesses stemming from a lifetime of sport, they were dying in the arena.
This is itself Ganker contrarianism. For starters, gladiators existed for centuries, and early fights were to the death. That was their purpose, as they were funerary sacrifices for the wealthy. The later professional games were far less lethal, and gladiators fought maybe once a month, much like professional athletes. Gladiators who fought against animals were their whole entire own category, and the idea of having a specially trained, valuable show fighter face off against a literal wild animal in order to spare him is fricking moronic. As is the idea of same, but with an actual soldier instead of an animal. Yeah, just let Spiculus fight this head-taking Thracian for his off day. Whatever could do wrong?
People realy underestimate how similar in some ways societies have always been. Byzantine Chariot-Racer fans were even literally just footbal hooligans on crack, to the point where even normies might know about the Nika riots.
The idea that ancient people were basically aliens to modern humans is just stupid post-enlightenment egotism made by philosophers who thought they were so much better than everyone else they literally called themselves 'enlightened'
It'd be more accurate to say that ancient societies are alien to modern 1st world westerners. The idea of selling your children into slavery, or killing your daughter on a whim seem horrendous to modern 1st world westerners, but these ideas weren't that strange in the ancient world nor in the 3rd world today.
>The idea of selling your children into slavery
Throwing them out into the world at 18 years in an utterly horrible economic situation, essentially turning them into debt slaves for life?
>or killing your daughter on a whim
No, they just kill them before they're born.
Again, not that differnet.
>Throwing them out into the world at 18 years in an utterly horrible economic situation
Also considered horrendous today in the 1st world.
>No, they just kill them before they're born.
Was still done by the ancient societies. The fact that people today consider killing after birth to be wrong is a huge improvement.
>Also considered horrendous today in the 1st world.
By the people who get thrown out, yes. I'm certain the children of the people who got enslaved didn't like it either. Hell, the entire reason why gladiators stopped existing was because people thought they were immoral when christianism took over.
>Was still done by the ancient societies
Not even close to the scale done today.
>The fact that people today consider killing after birth to be wrong is a huge improvement.
Again, it's not like all child murder was considered a-okay.
Thinking that we're especialy enlightened and ultra-special because we have le heckin technologies is just egotistic.
>By the people who get thrown out, yes
And by wider society, yes. You wouldn't say that rape is acceptable in society because the rapists are okay with it.
>Not even close to the scale done today.
No need to abort when you can just kill the kid or sell them into slavery if they inconvenience you.
>And by wider society, yes
Which is why of course there is zero punishment for it outside of said younger generation that had ot deal with it thinking it sucks.
>No need to abort when you can just kill the kid or sell them into slavery if they inconvenience you.
Sounds like they just chose a different kind of solution.
>Which is why of course there is zero punishment for it outside of said younger generation that had ot deal with it thinking it sucks.
Hence why there's so many government programs for providing for people who get into those situations.
>Sounds like they just chose a different kind of solution.
The one with slavery, yes.
>Hence why there's so many government programs for providing for people who get into those situations.
There are programs for poors, generally, not them in specific. Programs for poors are neither new nor novel.
>Programs for poors are neither new nor novel.
The idea that all the poors should get it is fairly new and novel though.
..No?
...yes? You didn't exactly see this sort of compassion extended to the slaves being worked to death in the salt mines.
There are STILL slaves in mines that no one cares about. Just because they pretend to give a frick without ever bothering to lift a finger doesn't change that. In fact, there are more slaves today than there ever were.
>There are STILL slaves in mines that no one cares about
Yes, in the aforementioned 3rd world countries. The 1st world western nations are the only nations that have progressed socially or morally. Everyone else is still stuck in the ancienet mindset.
Who do you think owns the Lithium mines where the slaves are at? It sure as hell ain't the natives.
It ain't the 1st world western governments either.
The governments themselves don’t, but most slaves have always been owned by private bodies
Yes, but they typically didn't have to own those slaves outside of their government's territory because said governments made it illegal to own slaves. You wouldn't see Roman oligarchs forced to work slaves in Persia because slavery was banned in the Roman Empire itself.
>In fact, there are more slaves today than there ever were.
There's more free people too, more men, more women too, more alcoholics, more disabled, more able-bodied. I wonder what could be causing this. Maybe the fact that there's more people in total?
So i guess we aren't that enlightened and alien after all.
Ancient Roman "bread and circus" was literally about giving poors food, for free.
They were very alien and very familiar at the same time. They had wildly different values and idea, but they were all also identical in their humanity to us today. People see the alien stuff, apply the (very human) attitude that we've seen a direct rising line in terms of improvement since the past, and make assumptions. I think one fun example is a man with hirsutism from Renaissance Italy. He's mentioned enough in period writing that we know people straight up did not consider him human, but... that's kind of it. Because we know about him because he was wealthy enough to commission portraits of himself, and we know he lived to a ripe, old age because he's mentioned as attending some event for his granddaughter. People also typically assume ancient peoples were living hand to mouth and must have killed weaker children, yet we find the corpses of well cared for handicapped people. One of whom died due to tooth decay because they kept spoiling her with sweets.
Especially with Rome we see a lot of parallels because they were a large, wealthy empire with a massive capital city. It's kind of funny to read "modern" stuff like wealthy Romans falling in love with a Greek city they were tourists in together with "ancient" stuff like Romans plundering such a city as a means to pay for the military campaign. Or Sulla being insulted by a meme lord Greek tyrant, and getting so pissed he ordered damn near everyone in that city slaughtered.
>he's mentioned as attending some event for his granddaughter.
In renaissance Italy? Having a granddaughter means he lived until age of 30.
>Having a granddaughter means he lived until age of 30.
That's not how 'life expectancy' works you moronic midwit. What, do you think people just aged faster back then? Idiot.
His name was Petrus Golsavus, and he died at age 81. Wikipedia does mention his children were "gifted" to other nobles as curiosities, so there was more to him not being considered human. Though, that said, such a life clearly didn't do him wrong.
Now that's an impressive age for the era.
But yeah, unusually looking individuals being denied recognition as people was totally happening in the past, and sometimes even in relatively recent history.
Gladiators also suffered from infame. I think it's our modern day inability to grasp infame which makes it hard for so many people to understand how shit slavery was.
For example, it meant you could be raped by your owner at any point and for any amount of times. See, you weren't a real person, really. You were property. There's no such THING as sex without your consent, because you can't give consent. Only someone with actual agency and free will can consent. That's not you. Any gladiator could be raped by their owner and there would be absolutely nothing they could ever do about it, because as far as the law was concerned...everything happened as it should. (Now, if you willingly or semi-willingly became a gladiator then you could have it in your contract that you couldn't be used for sex, but if you were a prisoner of war or sold by your previous owner? Lmao.)
It also meant you weren't part of polite society. You would cheer like hell for your favourite gladiator in the ring...but you didn't want to see them in actual public. You don't want to see them at your library, reading to kids. You don't want to eat next to them. They're entertainment. They're a good bit of sleazy fun. They're not upstanding men like you and your friends. They literally sold their bodies for your entertainment; good god, they're like the lowest class of prostitute. And you will NEVER escape that taint. No matter how rich and famous you become after you retire in freedom, you will NEVER be allowed to associate with the actual respectable classes.
This lasted well into the 17th century at least, with executioners. People clamored for death, but the hangman was an untouchable and his kin often inherited his infamy.
Actors, dancers, and musicians were another group of people who many societies would love to admire the talents of but would never, ever treat as part of polite society, basically because they were prostitutes.
we should start treating hollywood actors like this
This, Gladiators were basically the equivalent of sport stars. Most fights didn't even end in death because there'd be no long-running stars. Trying to compare a gladiator to a debt slave working in some latifundiae is stupid.
Still moronic. homie, why are you not still sleeping on furs? Were the salvers load-bearing slavers and all the furs just up and vanished as soon as they died? homie, maybe you're sleeping in a hut, but it's your fricking hut. If you want a bigger house, fricking build one. homie, you can still eat meat three times a day; you just gotta talk to the butcher and fricking buy it from him. Is walking your ass down to where they cut the meat too big a chore for you? Because if it is, I guess you don't actually want to eat meat that badly.
Dany made the entire economy collapse, and she killed all the slave-masters. There was like, a massive orgy of looting, rape and murder (except for her own soldiers, meaning they're poorer than the rabble).
How are the former gladiator-slaves going to afford it? You know, with food being at a premium and all the wealth redistributed via cultural enrichment?
Oh yeah, now they've helped her liberate the city, they don't want to join her army permanently, they're not interested in signing on to be just another soldier.
A bit of context there, slaver lives but is not present at the scene, caravan was ambushed in transit between two settlements, armed quards were slain or scattered, it's 2 or 3 days of travel back to civilization and countryside is fairly dangerous.
Toiling the land is better proposition in the long term but doesn't solve immediate situation, crops take some time to grow.
>The rescuer is a Noble, so clearly the nobility is against,
Rescuer is rebellious idealist, majority of nobility and merchants is pro-slavery.
The example in the pic is like the lowest effort lowest creativity way to do this. If that exact plot is used as a throwaway sidequest in an assassins creed game you know it is the bottom of the barrel lmao
That looks like a cool game let me look up a price
>it's porn
God damn it.
It's made by Ganker drawgay, of course it's porn.
Only when it isn't forced like it is 70% of the time so the DM can say gotcha.
Acting on bad intention never loses.
>burn down a tavern out of spite because barkeep didn't serve you for free
>it was also cult hideout and fire killed the cultists
>this averted demon invasion they were about to summon
now either change your alignment to Chaotic Good or take 50% xp penalty for staying Evil and acting out of alignment
>Paladin sells a magical weapon to a merchant
>Bandits catch wind and kill merchant to steal weapon
>Paladin you caused the merchant's death. Change your alignment to Evil.
This is you. You are moronic.
Choices have consequences. Sometimes the concequence is unforeseen, perhaps because the choice was made on incomplete information or because the choice was downright stupid. If you don't like it maybe ttrpgs aren't hobby for you.
Granted if the idea is we get to avenge the merchant and give the sword to his next of kin or something. If you're constantly pulling edgelord reversal of fortune shit on your players like this it makes you an butthole
What the frick does that have to do with alignment, though? Alignment is specifically about your choices and the motivation behind those choices, it's descriptive. Consequences are entirely separate from that as far as alignment is concerned.
>alignment
>that time when your anti-gay marriage campaigning saved the kingdom from the necromancer's armies
That story is a part of all TTRPG mythos and I love it.
knight errant
... ok?
Let me ask you a simple question: are you writing a novel, a movie script or one of those shitty modules that assumes up-front how players are going to behave?
>le good things are... LE BAD!
This is That GM behavior and you should have a nice day for thinking otherwise.
Your players don't have a picture of the world and logic as clear as you do. Without proper foreshadowing and warning most stuff in the games feel uncalled for.
One thing's for sure: subversion of expectations and twisting tropes for no other purpose than surprising your players and going "Gotcha!" is universally a bad thing to do. Shows a selfish and close minded approach to the situation where the surprise was more important than the impact, consequences or long lasting changes it would create.
One of the things that makes an adventure feel as such is seeing the impact on the world your actions have. If the impact is arbitrary or unexpected because you wanted to do things different or spice things up, the adventure will feel like trash, since the message going through is "do good things, get punished"
Grimderp DMs tongue my anus
Chink is peak schizo dev - on one hand you got grimdark extremes like ubiquitous slavery and marauding hordes of rape goblins, on the other cutesy things like headpats being a game mechanic and bunch of genuinely cheerful NPC. And on yet another hand, meta jokes and pop culture references that would put Fallout 2 to shame.
He also hates us now for some reason.
>for some reason.
? Gankerers don't even like eachother.
>for some reason
I can imagine how coming back from circa 2012's Ganker and seeing what the place became recently fills one with overwhelming sense of disdain.
Or he just got b& for some anti-American or anti-Chinese outburst.
>He also hates us now for some reason.
From what I remember this happened because he started using patreon and everyone got butthurt because of it
Game is excellent enough to make me jump through hoops to get it. But in no way does it have good moral narrative when the world is literally the toilet of the gods.
>knight's errand
is this a misunderstanding of knight-errant
What's with japanese fantasy settings and saying 'actually, slavery is good'
What's with Americans looking at any setting and saying 'actually, slavery is bad'. Perhaps projecting from their own history?
Besides, that thing isn't Japanese, it's Taiwanese.
'Slavery is bad' isn't an particularly american viewpoint. Hell, even most societies who practiced it didn't go and say 'It's good', they said 'We do it because we can' or 'Theyre neanderthal morons who can't function in society' .It's the ricepeople who keep writing fantasy settings where the characters go 'Um....slavery...is good for the slaves'
>.It's the ricepeople
Remind me what working conditions are like in their countries
FF16 does this too and it's just as equally stupid there. Shit even Song of Ice and Fire does it. Moral ambiguity only works if the people at play aren't morons set up to lose from the start.
>Moral ambiguity only works if the people at play aren't morons set up to lose from the start.
Because if they are it's called noir.
>sure, whatever. how much exp did we get?
>dm describes situation
>you and group solve it
>dm smugly talks about consequences due to things your character would’ve been aware of but you as a player would not
Always one of my favourite greentexts.
Stuff like this is why grimdark is so shit, it doesn't really work as anything other than a smug 'see you were wrong!'
There's nothing interesting there after the shock factor is gone
If they cannot bear to live free then I will make sure they at least die free
>Activates every combat ability
Only thing I can think of was when I were GM'ing runequest for my regular DnD group.
They had difficulties adjusting to orlanthi morality.
>feuds
When another clan burned a stead and killed several of their clan-mates, including the uncle of one character, they went for revenge but when it came to actually doing the deed they ended up only taking cows and goods.
The result was that the mood in their own clan remained sour and the enemies of the clan were emboldened to slay more of them.
>Thralldom
One of the PC's thought that the enemey clan had the right idea since they kept no thralls. He had to have a conversation with the chief where the chief asked "whence do all their prisoners go?" well, surely they are ransomed "and if the ransom not paid?"
they are killed, of course. If you have a warrior prisoner and you let him go then any death he deals on your clan afterwards is partly your fault. This invites kinstrife.