On 22 May 2015, at 15:37, Knapp <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

> Ah, just got back. After the first day I was starting to wonder if anyone knew what a moral was. :-) Might explain a thing or two around here. LOL.

I was perfectly happy knowing both definitions of "moral":
 1) the lesson to be learnt from the story.
 2) a code of behaviour.

The question "what is the moral?" suggests definition 1 and this is something that can be learnt, arising from the roleplay and the mistakes that are made. However, if the referee sets up a scenario just to teach a specific lesson, that needs to be handled very carefully unless the party has access to "magic-tech" healing and a very good legal team.

If you want to have a scenario that provides the players with a "moral dilemma", that should work fine - not all choices need to be easy ones - but if you are combining the two definitions to teach a moral lesson, prepare to have a high turn over of PCs, especially with competent TL 15 police.

Personally, I read adventure 8 once and the only use I ever made of it was to put it on the table to answer the question "what if we refuse?"

The idea of being taught a moral lesson by the referee reminds me of two experiences, both bad.

The first was a D&D scenario where another player and I misunderstood what the DM had in mind when he let us play high level evil characters - apparently we weren't supposed to be evil and kill people - so we threw those characters in the bin and stuck to our regular goodish party, which was, of course, allowed to kill rob and torture, just as long as the victim was an orc, goblin or otherwise of evil alignment.

The second was a Bushido campaign, run by a referee who knew more about the culture of feudal Japan that I care to and I made the mistake of playing the samurai that was responsible for the party, without any knowledge of how things worked economically or socially, apart from a few movies. Ultimately I decided that this was too much like work and not enough like fun and decided to reclaim my Sunday afternoons and evenings by dropping out of that group.

Phil Kitching