Recently, I found myself put in a situation in a role play game which I never thought I'd find myself, a position that is essentially a variation of the trolley problem. A difficult problem, with no easy solutions, and though I did make my choice in this situation, it made me start to wonder, what would others choose to do in such a situation.

And why? Before we continue, I want to make it explicitly clear that this is *not* an instance of a terrible jerk DM trying to make my paladin fall (it's not DnD, and I'm not playing a Paladin in anything but personality). The scenario itself is intense and difficult, but I find such things enjoyable, so please. No bad-mouthing the DM.

With that aside, I want to prod and poke and see how others would act in this situation, and why. There is a *lot* written down to give a proper timeline on all he has experienced up until now, so I'm keeping it in some separate spoilers for those who just want to glance at the question and give an answer without reading it all.

Spoiler: In which Ricardo learns about ingratitude
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First, a bit of backstory. The game in question is Mutants and Masterminds, set in comicsverse. That is, the modern day with caped crusaders and flying bricks and batmen. And chimeras. Chimeras are intelligent and strong, usually animalistic, (though sometimes not even that) humanoids developed as companions, pets and servants for the ridiculously wealthy. Chimeras are born with an adult body, starting out intellectually as teens, but emotionally as their actual age. So a three year old could happily try to learn seventh-grader math, but she'd still have a hard time grasping the concept of lying. A minor, if somewhat relevant digression.

Anyway, the character I'm playing in this game is Ricardo, a twelve year old monster chimera. His owner was a wealthy American fashion magnate who had him trained in all sorts of martial arts to make a suitable and flashy bodyguard for him. Unfortunately, or fortunately, one of Ricardo's trainers recognized that Ricardo wasn't just really strong, but also quite soft-hearted. During their discussions, she learned about his interests in electro-engineering, and his distaste for hurting others. And he learned that there might be more to life than follow the whims of a rich guy with enough arrogance and self-indulgent pride to make a lion blush. Inevitably, Ricardo had enough, and he and Leonardo parted on somewhat strenuous terms. There was gunfire involved.

His first week of freedom was... complicated. It's a real long story, and the details aren't overly relevant, but in brief terms, he fights and befriends a local vigilante. Together they learn that someone's planning a theft on Leonardo's place, and they move in to stop it. He manages to stop the theft and recover the stolen sceptre, but *she* gets shot by one of the security guards for her trouble. Ricardo manages to get her some first aid and deliver her to the paramedics, who get her to the hospital. She survives, barely. Meanwhile, Ricardo is rewarded for his good deed by Leonardo promising a ten million dollar reward for whomever can recover him. He learns about this shortly after he visits the hospital to check up on the vigilante, and they lock him up in the same room as her. A quick roof top escape, followed by escaping a mob later, and he's just about lost. So he contacts a couple friends of the vigilante, and together they plan out how to get rid of the bounty on his head by having those friends claim the reward money, and then bust him out afterwards.


Spoiler: In which Ricardo learns about loss, helplessness and feeling useless
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Of course, things ain't so easy. Almost immediately after he's returned to Leonardo, he's sold to a frenchman, Ducard, stuffed in a steel crate and shipped to Libya. On the way there he does at least learn that the Ducard person seems to be a decent man, as he and Ricardo spend a long time discussing the idea of killing Hitler by time-travel, and Ricardo being adamant that he wouldn't kill him as long as there was the potential for a solution that wouldn't involve murder. But maybe... if that was the only way to save lives, but only then! Either way, in Libya, he's dragged off to stay in some kind of weird underground bunker. He doesn't understand the language, but the locals seem to warm up to him quickly enough. Unfortunately he only stays in the bunker for three days before he's woken up one night by the sound of explosions. The bunker is under attack by what he'd end up calling the "American Hero Factory", and while he may be a trained martial artist and a chimera, he still ain't properly equipped to take on eight supers and win. Luckily, they aren't all together. He separates two of them, an ice woman, and a guy with a ton of trick boomerangs. The ice girl takes out captain boomerang with a misfired ice-blast, while he nails her in the face with one punch. Unfortunately, the ice-blast also froze up Ducard. Doubly unfortunately, everything suddenly goes completely dark, and he can hear that more people are coming for them. He takes a moment to try and hold them off, but in the complete darkness, it's a difficult fight, because he's got a crazy strong wrestler in his face, and some kind of psion hitting him from afar. He manages to score a critical hit on the wrestler, stunning her and breaking her night-vision glasses before he dashes back towards where the statue of Ducard should be, only to be barely able to make out a figure by the door. An enemy figure who has killed several of the men Ricardo has been trying to protect thus far. He knocks the man into a wall to stun him.

And then they throw a bomb at him and the man he's grappling. He manages to avoid the blast and shield the one he's grappling, but the roof caves in on them. The two are kept stuck under rubble for a while. Ricky tries to get them out, by digging, but before he can finish, the psion from before starts to remove the rubble. He gets the man he just saved to promise not to mention him, to no avail as they're found a brief second later. Ricardo dashes off in the dark, chased by bombs and even more psionic blasts. He tries to take cover behind some rubble, at which point the only clear solution is to throw more bombs at random. Through the noise he hears the crazy bomber get yelled at because her bombs ended up killing the frost woman, and Ricardo takes this opportunity to run into a nearby room. He gets in, closes the door, and gets blasted by the telepath again. At this point he's so bruised and in so much pain that he can barely even look straight. Not that it matters in complete darkness. But he musters up all the rage he can. The psion spoke out loud, so he managed to pinpoint where the psion is, before giving him a vicious punch in the face, followed by smashing him to the floor, where he tries to strangle him. For all of one round before he realizes what he's doing and lets go, standing up all shocked with himself.

It's at this point that he gets the first good news of the night. He hears Farouk, the bodyguard of Ducard, groan and push himself up. A survivor. And then the wrestler chick from before gets teleported in, and slams him into the wall, and if it weren't for the luck of the dice providing him with a lucky crit, he would probably be taken out then and there. As is, he somehow manages to slam the wrestler back into a wall and knock her out, before in a desperate attempt to save anyone, he helps Farouk out of the bunker. There were a good amount of people there. But he only managed to save one life.


Spoiler: In which Ricardo learns about cruelty
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With nowhere else to go, Ricardo and Farouk decide to travel to Egypt to rendevouz with some of Ducard's other men. But on the way they're accosted by Amazons who kidnap Ricardo's entire group. However, due to his looks, they're convinced that he's a demon, so they refuse to attack him. Ricardo is considering attacking them back, but they're thirty, armed with guns, and the guns are aimed at the other men he's travelling with, so he decides to only follow them for now. If he attacks, then people might get killed in the cross-fire.

Following them, he ends up discovering a whole city. The men are dragged off somewhere, while he is taken to a temple/palace structure of sorts. While there he meets an archaeologist whose entire group was kidnapped by these amazons, and she explains to him in simple and plain terms that the men are kidnapped in order to facilitate the city remaining women only. Or in plainer terms, a city that survives on institutionalized rape, where anyone unfortunate enough to be born male is thrown into the sandstorms. He's then taken to see the Queen. Armed with this newfound knowledge, and the archaeologist as an interpreter, he does his best to convince the Queen that this is needless barbarism. Unfortunately, he fails to get through to her. The only thing he manages to get done is ensure that Farouk get slightly better living conditions.

After the meeting, he ends up searching around the palace, but before he finds anything really useful, he meets a couple guards. Since he has no idea what language they're speaking, he also has no idea why they suddenly start shooting at him. He disarms and pins both. One faints immediately. He didn't plan on this, as he releases both immediately. He just wanted them to stop shooting, so he allows the guard to take her unconscious comrade to their medic. But since they shot at him, he does confiscate one of their guns. He takes a moment to figure out how the gun works, and empties it of bullets before tossing it aside. Then he resumes his little search, unaware that by the end of it, he gets attacked once more. First, he ends up fighting their champion in a close quarters match that takes extremely long. She keeps taking hits that she somehow manages to tough out, while he keeps on managing to writhe out of her better grapples. After a long and difficult match, he manages to finally beat her down. He allows himself a brief rest, at which point the champion manages to regain enough strength to try one last time. Ricardo manages to fight her off, tells her that he has already won and refuses to fight her any more. He's tired of fighting, so when he walks out of the room they fought in, and he spots twentyone soldiers with guns aimed at him, he raises his hands up, unwilling to keep on fighting.

Then they shoot him down... a bad idea. Thanks to his thick skin, he manages to survive, but heavily wounded and bleeding. It's at this point that he snaps and viciously attacks the soldiers, not holding back in the slightest. He throws them aside, smashes them into walls, lashes into them with blunt claws and scorpion tail, but he's still not completely lost to his murderous rage, and when he notices that he's taken it too far, and he hears the resounding "snap" of what he worries is someone's broken neck, he regains his senses enough to hold back against the final few soldiers. He succeeds. Exhausted, bleeding, and surrounded by broken bodies. Having absolutely no idea what else to do, he grabs the woman he thought he killed and staggers with her back to the archaeologist. There, he breaks down, thinking he has killed someone, not even noticing that there's another one of the amazons there. An elderly woman. Thankfully, the archaeologist is trained in medicine, and can confirm that though it was a very close call, the woman will survive with proper care.


Spoiler: In which Ricardo is given an impossible task
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At this point, the elderly woman introduces herself, and a long conversation made short, Ricardo ends up drawn into a mindmeld with her, where he learns that there are many others among the amazons who agrees that what they're doing is barbarism. He also learns that the woman is willing to help him and the doctor to escape, along with Farouk and one of the doctor's group. The car that Ricardo drove here won't accommodate more than that. He is asked that when they return to the outside world, that they let the world know about this hidden city, so that they will be forced to relate to the outside world once more.

And he is told to kill the Queen because she would declare war on the outside world.

And so, armed with nothing but a gun, still bleeding and in partial shock from everything, Ricardo staggers off to the Queen's chambers to confront her. He sneaks past her honour guard, but when he finds the Queen, he notices that one of the Queen's two personal guards is one whom he knows from earlier to be able to understand English. So, desperate for one last final solution, he all but begs the Queen to abdicate. Something that would've solved the problem. Removed the Queen from her position, so she won't send her entire nation into a suicide attack on the outside world when their crimes inevitably become clear to the world. Unfortunately, she refuses.


And that's the end of the issue, though not the end of the story. At this point, he is left with two choices. Either he pulls the trigger and kills the Queen, or he throws the gun away and flees.

In his mind, if he kills the Queen, then he might stop the war that will follow if the Queen remains in rule. He won't be able to save all the prisoners they've enslaved, but if one of the more progressive-minded individuals the old woman spoke of assumes leadership, then at least they will end up being treated better. And if nothing else, they won't be able to kidnap anyone else while the city is in uproar over having their Queen assassinated by a demon.

But that will also mean that he'll have killed someone. That this one person is never gonna get to laugh or cry, smile or hope ever again. It's an utterly irreversible act. An utterly despicable act in itself. And who is he to decide who lives and dies.

In the end, can he pull the trigger, and kill one person to potentially save hundreds of lives?