On 5/22/2015 9:15 PM, Jim Vassilakos wrote:
> Hence, I think a GM would be remiss to not include some sort of moral
> themes in the setting and/or adventures. This is different from
> railroading. When you railroad the players, you really take away their
> freedom. But by including a moral dilemma here and there, you give
> them the opportunity to exercise their superegos, which, to my way of
> thinking, is all part of playing a fully-realized character.

This is very good.  One thing I've always tried to keep in mind as a ran
games, either one shots or campaigns, was that actions have consequences
(for good or ill) and that when the situation is over that the players
and characters (either individually or collectively) don't have a right
to feel "good" about the decisions they made.  This is different from
enjoying the game which is, and always will be, the prime directive.

By not having a right to feel "good" about the decisions they made, it
means that if they want to do something and the resulting consequences
will be bad, they'll see it in living color.  In one case they were on a
backwater world and they had a chance to take one of two jobs; the first
was from a rather rich patron who thought that because he was wealthy
and controlled the local mine and had the biggest ranch that he could
treat everyone like serfs.  He wanted to hire the players to take some
of his prized horses to a race and then remain on hand and bring them
back when the race was over.  For this, he'd pay them Cr.50,000.  Not
bad for three days work.

The other was from a group of ranchers from a village about 50km from
the town.  They needed the players to travel to the capital city which
was on the other side of the planet and contact an apothecary to
formulate a medicine that they needed to fight off a local disease that
was running rampant through their community and at the same time,
acquire a medical supplement for their livestock to prevent them from
catching a less virulent strain of the disease and thus destroy their
value.  They could pay the PCs Cr.5,000 and some other little perks that
were of the "cool, but not very valuable in credits" category.

The players chose to go for the big cash and transported the horses.
Four days later they were back in town and feeling pretty good about the
easy money they just made and decided to check on the ranchers.  When
they arrived in the village they discovered that several people were in
the terminal stages of the disease and that the herds were about 40%
infected.  From the rancher's perspective, they'd pretty much lost a
generation's worth of work.

In the end, neither the players nor the characters really felt too good
about what they'd done, but during the adventure with the horses and
that plot thread, they had a blast.

--
Kurt Feltenberger
xxxxxx@thepaw.org/xxxxxx@yahoo.com
“Before today, I was scared to live, after today, I'm scared I'm not
living enough." - Me