Ideas for "Grey morality" optional side quests

[Alexander Atoz]

I'm trying to put together a few quests that a villain might hire the PCs to go on. To keep him feeling like a villain, the quests have to be iffy in terms of morals, but not so much so that the players will refuse them. (This is to be posted on a blog, not for a game, so assume average players.)

These are the two that I've thought of so far:

1) The villain asks them to bring him a magical item with the potential to cause a minor catastrophe. (Perhaps a gem in which a high-level demon is imprisoned.) He wants it for his collection, not to use it, and the players have some means of verifying that this is the truth. The paladin order, or their equivalent, obviously want the item destroyed so that it will never end up being used, even centuries later.
To back up the villain's side, they wouldn't know about the item at all if it wasn't for the villain, and it is safer with him than where it is now.

2) The villain wants them to obtain an item or treasure held by a good-aligned person or creature. The item was originally the villain's before the current owner's father robbed/captured it from him.

(Disclaimer: As mentioned above, this is for use on a blog.)

Thanks to anyone who wants to help

[J-H]

Deliver a small box containing 3 sealed vials (wax seal + arcane mark so nobody can tamper) to someone a city over by deliberately smuggling it through some method other than "through the gates" so it doesn't trigger the city's wards or detection systems.
Two weeks later, the heir in that city dies of a mysterious magical poison.
Villain was just selling a product to a buyer.

The villain has purchased the deed to an iron mine from a noble. Problem: The mine is still occupied by "squatters" who've been working it for a decade. Includes a full set of dwarven miners and a priest of Moradin. Legally, the villain is in the right. Morally, does the party really want to kill three dozen dwarves?

[Vahnavoi]

Consider: basic description of Chaos is placing the individual above the group.

Also consider: one basic description of Evil is debasing or killing others for fun or profit. The most obvious example of this is the Assassin class, with original AD&D rules saying that murder of other for profit is plainly Evil - but this can be extended to virtually any character class when they are acting in a chiefly mercenary way.

Now consider: many player characters are armed vagrants with few ties to larger society, mainly motivated by self-centered pursuit of personal power (experience points) and wealth (gold and magic items), their main method lethal violence in various forms. Many such characters could rightly be considered Chaotic Evil, if not for the facade that D&D is about "heroic adventurers" fighting forces of Evil.

Point being: moral greyness and even moral blackness are extremely lows bars to clear. The average player is often happy to go slaughter any number of imaginary foes if the imaginary rewards are high enough - because they already see "kill things for fun or profit" as what the game is about and what "heroic adventurers" are supposed to do. Just stop inventing excuses for them. The example with dwarven squatters, above, exemplifies this. If it was goblins or kobolds or orcs, it would just be another adventuring day - by switching the target of the usual raping & pillaging to something even mildly sympathetic, it highlights that this whole "heroic adventurer" business is already ethically suspect.

[King of Nowhere]

the villain is facing a paesants uprising. while the villain is somwhat tyrannical, he does keep some measure of decency, and the rebels are of the "kill everyone who does not seem enthusiastic enough" variety, so that both sides have pros and cons.
if the players, by putting extra effort into it, manage to help the rebels while curtailing their more destructive tendencies, or if they manage to broker a deal where the bloody revolution is averted but the villain is forced into improving the commoner conditions, let the players enjoy their golden ending.

[MonochromeTiger]

I'm trying to put together a few quests that a villain might hire the PCs to go on. To keep him feeling like a villain, the quests have to be iffy in terms of morals, but not so much so that the players will refuse them. (This is to be posted on a blog, not for a game, so assume average players.)

Define "average players." You haven't mentioned a system this blog is focused on so I'm assuming you don't mean average skill level which is good because that fluctuates wildly depending on who you ask and the groups they've played with.

If you mean average player in terms of outlook then the "average players" I know are more likely to go with the escapism of "we're the heroes here to save the day for nice-and-happy-topia" than consider their characters contributing to something actually bad. And yes that does include a massive blind spot for what they'd consider unlawful but good like stealing from the rich to give to the poor or brief forays into edgy backstories; or if we want to go to the extent Vahnavoi is and say "they're all evil monsters because they kill for selfish reasons like leveling up" then it would still be true that the average player generally doesn't want someone hanging over their shoulder saying "you should feel bad for playing this game" and instead want to hold everything in what they can see as heroic or selfless motives.

Now I really don't suggest going Vahnavoi's route and labeling every single player character as a pure evil killing machine and the context of the adventure just being "excuses". Not only is it generally not well received but it's pointlessly antagonistic, even in a blog where you aren't actually running these adventures yourself, to frame everything around the idea that the players are going to be shamed for their vile and evil choice of, and I must emphasize this point, just being invited to play a game with their friends.

For "morally grey" to work with the average hope and sunshine craving player you need both some plausible deniability and a way of closing things out without just slapping them over the head with some atrocity the villain committed and saying "this happened because of something you did." If they see the job is coming from someone you want to be the clear antagonist the ones I know would immediately refuse or try to find some way of countering it, someone wanting to be the hero of a story isn't exactly going to trust that Sauron asking them to deliver some girl scout cookies his kid can't will end in any way other than obvious disaster. In some ways, if you're willing to exploit those biases and risk upsetting those players, that in itself can lead to some morally grey situations.

Not every villain is all hate all the time, some can have the occasional good motive or line they won't cross and players can absolutely cause a situation to get much darker and more questionable by not realizing that. Possibly in line with your first scenario one way of doing that is to have a scenario where handing things off to the villain might legitimately be the best option, it may mean giving them a powerful weapon or bargaining chip but it's entirely possible that they're one of the people with the biggest reasons not to let anyone use it while the more traditional good guys' only way of really getting rid of it is risky and dangerous and could easily result in innocent casualties. If the players do recognize this then it opens the door to them being more willing to cooperate and help the villain and opens up more of a range for questionable behavior to be accepted. That said it can just as easily result in the "average player" getting upset and assuming their DM/GM just gave them a no win scenario stepping all over their hero fantasy.

[gbaji]

I'm trying to put together a few quests that a villain might hire the PCs to go on. To keep him feeling like a villain, the quests have to be iffy in terms of morals, but not so much so that the players will refuse them. (This is to be posted on a blog, not for a game, so assume average players.)

I'm going to kinda second the above post a bit here. You need to ask yourself what you're actually trying to do here. In the subect line, you ask about "morally grey" side quests, but in the body it seems more like the objective is to "trick the players" into doing somehing for a bad guy whom they don't realize is a bad guy, and to do things they don't realize are bad at the time they do them.

What is the "pay off" for doing this? If the only pay off is "make the players realize they got tricked", that's likely not going to go over nearly as well as you may think. It's unclear from your examples what the pay off is (are the players going to be made aware of the facts of things at some point?).

This is one of those areas of GMing that can be very interesting to play out, but is also like a third rail. You can very very easily just end up with pissed off players. The reason is that, as the GM, you are in control of the information the players recieve about the world they play their characters in. You can *always* trick them, if you really want to. So it's a very very fine line between "gave them enough to figure it out" (in which case, they usually will, and the "twist" of the adventure is lost) and "didn't give them enough to figure it out" (in which case they are upset becaues they rightly feel that whatever negatives they feel or experience are not deserved).

If that's literally the entire "twist" of the adventure, then I'd recommend not doing it. However, if it's part of a larger set of events going on in a setting and/or the setup for something else (ie: "intro to the bad guy"), you *can* get away with this (but carefully!). I've run scenerios in which the bad guys "trick" the PCs into doing things they wanted, but it was not about tricking them into doing something directly and immediately harmful, but that it set up some situation where the actual "good" action did in fact do good things, and helped people and all that jazz, but also had some minor and mostly unnoticed effect that benefited the bad guys long term plans. But to make this well received by the players, the immediate "harm" must be relatively minor, and the immediate "good" must be significant. They have to be able to rationalize it after the fact that "well, yeah, that turned out to help that guy after the fact, but we had to do it anyway, or <worse things> would happen".

If the only effect the "trick" has is the trick itself? Probably not going to be well received by the players IME.

An example of one that will work:

The bbeg manipulates one of his opposing evil rivals into engaging in some evil operation, and leaks information about said operation to our heroes. They follow up on this, and stomp said evil operation and bad guy, saivng the day, preventing <whatever> from happening, but not realizing at the time, that they helped the "real bbeg" gain some power and position. He'll use that in a later adventure, but for now they are the heroes. This puts the past action into the historical background category, and doesn't tend to make the players feel bad (cause they still stopped someone's evil plot).

One that wont work:

The bbeg manipulates the PCs into doing something directly for him. Once they deliver the mcguffin, or kill the whatever, he shows up, twirls his moustache and thanks them for helping his grand evil plans. Muahahaha. Yeah. Never makes the players feel good. Heck. Even if he doesn't do the villain gloat, if they at some point in the future learn that "oh yeah. That guy you've been doing odd jobs for? He's really the bbeg, and you've been helping him collect the <5 objects of evil power or whatever>", it will not be well recieved. Again. If the payoff at some point is "you helped by bad guy directly, but didn't know it", the players tend not to like that. Like... a lot.


Those may seem only subtly different, but that difference is significant. If the only effect what they did is to do something beneficial for the bad guy, the players will tend not to appreciate it. If there is some other "good" involved, they'll tend to accept it and move on. And yes. It's tricky to be sure where that dividing line is. I've made the mistake of crossing it a couple times. Never a good thing.

I'll also revisit the point that neither of those are really "grey morality" in the first place. To be grey morality, the PCS have to know that what they are doing is harmful to someone. If they honestly think they are performing a good task, but it's really something evil (which they only learn after the fact), then that has nothing to do with a moral test. It's about whether they figured out they were being used. Though to be fair, your second scenario *could* have that element to it, depending on how they go about retrieving the stolen item. But it still mostly rests on the foundation of "do they figure out the the guy who stole the item is good and the guy it was stolen from (and how is hiring us to get it back) is actually evil"?


An actual morally grey scenario I ran not too long ago (and wrote about on this forum):

The PCs are part of a kingdom. One of the neighboring kingdoms is ruled by a somewhat stereotypical "evil king" (but more just the normal level of "not a nice guy" though). Some decades back an even more evil warlord took power in another kingdom to the south of that one. As a result a number of that kingdoms northern nobles left that kingdom and joined the one to their north (the current "evil kingdom"). Once the warlord was eliminated (which the PCs may have had a hand in, given the guy was really into some bad stuff), things went through some turbulent times, but have since stabliized. Now, these nobles would kinda like to go back to being part of the previous kingdom.

The PCs are traveling through the southern aress of this kingdom and stop in a small town. To make a long story short, this small town is near where one of the hold out barons goes hunting in the summer months, and the locals have hired some mercenaries to kill him while he's in the area and relatively unprotected (and his son is more in line with the "leave this kingdom and rejoin the old one" faction). Of course, as such things happen, the party happens into town right about the time the townsfolks are expecting the mercs to arrive. A bit of mistaken identity occurs, and the party is basically presented with the question:

1. Do we do the job (assassinate the baron), for the "second half of the payment" we are being offered?

2. Do we inform the baron about this plot against him?

3. Do we tell the villagers that we're not the mercs and go on our way?

4. Do we just go on our way and not do or say anything at all?

Or... something elses they come up with? I honestly presented this with absolutely no idea how the players might act. It wasn't super critical either way (though the baron living or dying might affect some political stuff in the long term). The PCs themselves very much are interested in anything that might weaken this particular kingdom, but would they be willing to actually assassinate someone who, as far as they know, is not "evil" at all, but perhaps merely believes in maintaining loyalty to his liege?

I was quite surprised by their decision actually.

[Alexander Atoz]

I was quite surprised by their decision actually.

Okay, you can't just write that and leave it there. (What Happened!?]

I want to correct a mistake that seems to have crept it. I am working to come up with interesting "Morally grey" side quests where the players [I]know[/I that it's morally grey, they know all or most of the details, and they have a choice whether to go for it. I don't want quests where the players are tricked. (Overall, I agree with what's been written here about it being a bad idea. Someone posted an idea like that, and it seems to have taken off.)
If you look at the 2 quests that I gave at the beginning, you'll see that they assume that the players have all the information (including information that it's questionable how they could get it, but that's another story.)

Thanks very much to everyone who gave suggestions so far.

[Vahnavoi]

@MonoChrome Tiger:

That's a funny strawman you built out of my post.

Firstly, your idea that "average player" has deep-seated aversion to playing Evil is ill-established. Look outside narrow domain of D&D and consider: there are multiple vastly popular game franchises, such as Grand Theft Auto, where players play explicitly violent criminals. Note that such play is largely free of shame and guilt. So simply acknowledging player characters as murderers-for-hire when they are acting like murderers-for-hire does not by itself constitute saying players should feel bad for playing a game.

Secondly, moral greyness is characterized by there being no unambiguous best option. The corollary for that is that any choice in a morally grey game has room for players feeling regret, shame, guilt etc.. That kind of introspection is pretty much the point. Without such introspection, you don't get moral greyness, you get moral blackness of games like Grand Theft Auto mentioned above, where players remorselessly shoot cops and drive over civilians, simply because that is what the game allows them to do.

Thirdly, your claim that my idea boils down to labeling every player character as "evil monster" or "pure evil killing machine" presumes players have no choice on the matter, which is not what I said. I said to acknowledge player characters as Evil when they act like murderers-for-hire, for the same reason D&D alignment acknowledges any other murderer-for-hire as Evil. Players who actually want to play good ought to be capable of NOT playing their characters like murderers-for-hire - it's only when players are either unwilling or unable to do that when they need excuses to be counted as "heroic adventurers".

[KorvinStarmast]

the villain is facing a paesants uprising. while the villain is somwhat tyrannical, he does keep some measure of decency, and the rebels are of the "kill everyone who does not seem enthusiastic enough" variety, so that both sides have pros and cons.
if the players, by putting extra effort into it, manage to help the rebels while curtailing their more destructive tendencies, or if they manage to broker a deal where the bloody revolution is averted but the villain is forced into improving the commoner conditions, let the players enjoy their golden ending.

Neat idea. I may steal this.

Firstly, your idea that "average player" has deep-seated aversion to playing Evil is ill-established. Look outside narrow domain of D&D and consider: there are multiple vastly popular game franchises, such as Grand Theft Auto, where players play explicitly violent criminals. Note that such play is largely free of shame and guilt.

My wife refused to allow that game to be played in our house...And there I was, playing Starcraft, with its gross zerg ooze/creep and a bit of bloodshed. Son had to be 12 before he was allowed to play Starcraft (and then only if his homework was done, etc).

Secondly, moral greyness is characterized by there being no unambiguous best option.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. There were some tough and rewarding training scenarios along these lines when I was in the military. I also got asked a bunch of those hypothetical 'what if' questions at aircraft commanders boards: no win situation, what would you do?

The corollary for that is that any choice in a morally grey game has room for players feeling regret, shame, guilt etc.. That kind of introspection is pretty much the point.

Thirdly, your claim that my idea boils down to labeling every player character as "evil monster" or "pure evil killing machine" presumes players have no choice on the matter, which is not what I said. I said to acknowledge player characters as Evil when they act like murderers-for-hire, for the same reason D&D alignment acknowledges any other murderer-for-hire as Evil. Players who actually want to play good ought to be capable of NOT playing their characters like murderers-for-hire - it's only when players are either unwilling or unable to do that when they need excuses to be counted as "heroic adventurers".

Good rebuttal.

[gbaji]

Okay, you can't just write that and leave it there. (What Happened!?]

The decided to assassinate the baron. Turned out, they happened to have a very capable set of spells and abilities to do so, as well. One of the party had a control animals ability. Another had a spell that enhanced natural weapons damage. Yet another was really good at concealment. They hid near where the baron was out on a hunt, waited for him to ride by, one controlled the horse, while the other enhanced its damage. It bucked the baron off, and then trampled him to death. Oh. And I think another character hit the baron with some sort of confusion causing spell at the same time, so as to prevent him doing anything intelligent to protect himself. It was brutally effective.

Note that this is in a game where resurrection is rare and there are no alignment rules (other than law/chaos, which is more like sides in a cosmic conflict). None of them were woshippers of deities in which "ambush/assasination" is prohibited, so... I was surprised that the went that route, but the players basically looked at their set of characters, realised that none of them were playing particularly goodie two shoes types, then realized they had a combination of spells and abilities to do what was asked, and just went from there.

The value of "this baron dies, his son takes over, swings the vote in favor of the whole set of nobles changing alegances, and that's good for us" outweighed the action they were taking in their minds. Which, from a black/covert ops perspective, maybe works. Hey. I just set up the scenario. The choice was 100% theirs.

I want to correct a mistake that seems to have crept it. I am working to come up with interesting "Morally grey" side quests where the players [I]know[/I that it's morally grey, they know all or most of the details, and they have a choice whether to go for it. I don't want quests where the players are tricked. (Overall, I agree with what's been written here about it being a bad idea. Someone posted an idea like that, and it seems to have taken off.)

Yeah. That works.

If you look at the 2 quests that I gave at the beginning, you'll see that they assume that the players have all the information (including information that it's questionable how they could get it, but that's another story.)

Ok. It wasn't clear from the examples how much the players would know, versus how much just the GM knows.

I do have a question about them though. What makes the villains... villains? I ask because, as someone who regularly plays in a game that doesnt have alignment (so there's no firm "I'm good, you are evil" dynamic), typically what makes someone a villain is that they are actively doing "bad things" (typically from the perspective of the PCs). So if you know this person is someone who does things you oppose, why would you work for them, even if it's just "get an object they want"? And if you don't, then why does the label matter?

If the villain is a villain only because his alignment is "evil", but has otherwise never done something in opposition to the PCs or their friends/allies/whatever, then... why is this morally grey? The second example is particularly problematic, unless we make alignment assumptions. The alignment of the current holder of the object should not matter at all to that scenario. You're either willing to retrieve a stolen object from the son of the person who stole it, or you are not (and there's a host of ways to go about that, I suppose).


I guess where it kinda stumps me, is that there's an implication in the label "villain" that said person is doing something "villainous", to earn that title. Is this something the PCs already know? Or something they will learn only later? And if these tasks never tie in to any actual "villainous plans", then the label really doesn't matter. I'm never going to feel morally conflicted because I helped a guy recover a stolen item (but otherwise irrelevant in any other way), and then years later discover that same guy was involved in a some unrelated evil activities. My actions didn't facilitate his later evil deeds, so...

And if the situation really is "Evil bad guy we've clashed with a dozen times, comes up to us and asks us to retrieve an old family heirloom, or powerful object that he insists is safer in his hands", I'm not sure why the PCs would ever go for that in the first place. Either the job is truely meaningless/harmless, in which case "why do a favor for someone we hate/oppose?", or it's not (or we just suspect it's not and he's doing something nefarious), in which case we arrive at the same answer. It's why I went to the whole "GM tricking the players" assumption. There's no actual reason to mention this is a villain unless there's some kind of evil plot involved, and some sort of consequence, not just for doing the job, but specifically doing the job for that person.

[MonochromeTiger]

@MonoChrome Tiger:

That's a funny strawman you built out of my post.

Firstly, your idea that "average player" has deep-seated aversion to playing Evil is ill-established. Look outside narrow domain of D&D and consider: there are multiple vastly popular game franchises, such as Grand Theft Auto, where players play explicitly violent criminals. Note that such play is largely free of shame and guilt. So simply acknowledging player characters as murderers-for-hire when they are acting like murderers-for-hire does not by itself constitute saying players should feel bad for playing a game.

You may have noticed the quotation marks I tried to keep around "average player" the entire time, in fact you even use them yourself when commenting on it. That is in part my acknowledgement that I am not talking about some nebulous true average for player behavior, I am talking about the average for the players I know. And that includes many of the players I am aware of from other sources but is still not a definitive statement on all players. Yes, there are people outside D&D, Pathfinder, and other similar RPGs, there are people who play videogames where they are the badguy, but in many cases even those tend to have such an absurd element to them that people dismiss it as (usually bad) satire or still somehow manage to find ways to say "but I'm still the good guy in this situation."

But we aren't talking about people playing Grand Theft Auto, we're talking about people playing RPGs. A group that rather consistently dismisses the idea of Evil campaigns as edgy nonsense or just somebody's excuse to be creepy. The group that has several times more stories about saving the world and rescuing the princess but still regularly dismisses the significantly rarer "you're actually mercenaries" or "you're at war with another country that isn't obviously Evil" as overdone. So obviously I keep to the ones playing RPGs where they tend to put themselves in the shoes of their character not the ones playing videogames where there's a much easier method of separation.

Secondly, moral greyness is characterized by there being no unambiguous best option. The corollary for that is that any choice in a morally grey game has room for players feeling regret, shame, guilt etc.. That kind of introspection is pretty much the point. Without such introspection, you don't get moral greyness, you get moral blackness of games like Grand Theft Auto mentioned above, where players remorselessly shoot cops and drive over civilians, simply because that is what the game allows them to do.

I'm aware that what I mentioned wasn't true moral greyness. You'll notice that when I actually said morally grey it was also in quotation marks. It wasn't even trying for true moral greyness because the "average players" I know wouldn't accept actual moral greyness. They play the game for escapism, they don't play to be told they have absolutely no good options so they have to settle for what they think is least bad. They play to be the hero and do something "Good" and feel like they accomplished something because that's rarely an option in the real world where they have to constantly worry about money and social standing and keeping on the good side of somebody with no sense of empathy who managed to become the boss of their boss's boss.

Thirdly, your claim that my idea boils down to labeling every player character as "evil monster" or "pure evil killing machine" presumes players have no choice on the matter, which is not what I said. I said to acknowledge player characters as Evil when they act like murderers-for-hire, for the same reason D&D alignment acknowledges any other murderer-for-hire as Evil.

Your initial points were:

Consider: basic description of Chaos is placing the individual above the group.

Also consider: one basic description of Evil is debasing or killing others for fun or profit. The most obvious example of this is the Assassin class, with original AD&D rules saying that murder of other for profit is plainly Evil - but this can be extended to virtually any character class when they are acting in a chiefly mercenary way.

Now consider: many player characters are armed vagrants with few ties to larger society, mainly motivated by self-centered pursuit of personal power (experience points) and wealth (gold and magic items), their main method lethal violence in various forms. Many such characters could rightly be considered Chaotic Evil, if not for the facade that D&D is about "heroic adventurers" fighting forces of Evil.

You use the first to say that they're Chaotic for their characters wandering, you know adventuring, wanting experience, gold, and items which are all necessary to survive and deal with bigger threats and Evil for going straight to fighting in a game where fighting is the main method of conflict resolution the system is built around. That main design point isn't even unique to D&D because even with the systems that try to be different most of them fall in line on the idea that the excitement of the system is from action and action usually means a fight.

None of that is some grand and revelatory statement, it's a massive "well technically" that I'd expect to hear out of someone trying to rules lawyer their way into making every Paladin in a setting automatically break their oaths.

Players who actually want to play good ought to be capable of NOT playing their characters like murderers-for-hire - it's only when players are either unwilling or unable to do that when they need excuses to be counted as "heroic adventurers".

You actively ended your point with the assumption that the average player is that person and that moral greyness or moral blackness just required "not giving them excuses." Is it truly shocking that such a sweeping generalization lead to my response? Are you truly shocked that walking up to the average player and telling them "actually your character should be evil, you'd probably be fine slaughtering villagers and miners for not moving when someone new got the deed to the land" would be badly received?

[Alexander Atoz]

I do have a question about them though. What makes the villains... villains?

I was thinking of just going with a monster type that is generally accepted to always be evil (but not the type of evil that would set out to corrupt people, like devils and hags, as that would immediately lead the game in a different direction.) I was thinking green dragon, but lich, mind flayer, beholder (I think they're still considered evil, despite Xanther's), and doubtless many others should work.
(My examples are from D&D, which is the RPG I know, but I would assume that all/most RPGs with a monster manual would have monsters that could be used for this.)

And thank you very much for the story. I was curious.

[KorvinStarmast]

I was thinking green dragon, but lich, mind flayer, beholder (I think they're still considered evil, despite Xanther's), and doubtless many others should work.

Lich is a very good choice, as is a Rakshasa. The nice thing about a Rahshasa as big bad is the whole deception thing. Green Dragon is pretty normal/standard, see Lost Mines of Phandelver, among others.

[Morgaln]

I'm trying to put together a few quests that a villain might hire the PCs to go on. To keep him feeling like a villain, the quests have to be iffy in terms of morals, but not so much so that the players will refuse them. (This is to be posted on a blog, not for a game, so assume average players.)

These are the two that I've thought of so far:

1) The villain asks them to bring him a magical item with the potential to cause a minor catastrophe. (Perhaps a gem in which a high-level demon is imprisoned.) He wants it for his collection, not to use it, and the players have some means of verifying that this is the truth. The paladin order, or their equivalent, obviously want the item destroyed so that it will never end up being used, even centuries later.
To back up the villain's side, they wouldn't know about the item at all if it wasn't for the villain, and it is safer with him than where it is now.

2) The villain wants them to obtain an item or treasure held by a good-aligned person or creature. The item was originally the villain's before the current owner's father robbed/captured it from him.

(Disclaimer: As mentioned above, this is for use on a blog.)

Thanks to anyone who wants to help

Honestly, I don't think these are all that morally grey, or at least not grey on grey.
Example one is white on grey (bordering on black). Destroying the gem in example one is the obvious choice for good heroes. Giving the gem to the villain instead is grey if they don't know the villain is evil, black if they do.
Example two isn't even a moral choice, unless said item is more than a mundane object. Otherwise, just offer to buy it off the current owner. If they don't want to sell, tough luck.

For a choice to be truly grey on grey, whatever you choose needs to have both positive and negative consequences. Note that the players not getting paid does not count as a negative consequence here. In a grey morality choice, whatever the players choose should allow someone to look at them and go "how could you do that" and be morally right from their standpoint.

For example, your first scenario becomes grey morality if what the villain is offering in exchange for the gem is a cure for the plague that is ravaging a neighboring kingdom. Thus destroying the gem means the players also condemn those people to death.
Another variation of example one would be if the gem is already held by a villain who is using it. He cannot be beaten while he has that gem. The players have a choice of leaving it in said villain's hands (thus letting them keep their power source) or destroying the gem and setting the demon inside free. They have to decide which is the lesser evil.

[Vahnavoi]

You may have noticed the quotation marks I tried to keep around "average player" the entire time, in fact you even use them yourself when commenting on it. That is in part my acknowledgement that I am not talking about some nebulous true average for player behavior, I am talking about the average for the players I know.

I can, and do, extend my criticism of your argument to players you claim to know.

And that includes many of the players I am aware of from other sources but is still not a definitive statement on all players. Yes, there are people outside D&D, Pathfinder, and other similar RPGs, there are people who play videogames where they are the badguy, but in many cases even those tend to have such an absurd element to them that people dismiss it as (usually bad) satire or still somehow manage to find ways to say "but I'm still the good guy in this situation."

And what of this do you consider proof that acknowledging player characters as murderers-for-hire when they are acting like murderers-for-hire constitutes hanging behind someone's shoulder and going "you should feel bad"? Because based on your own observation, these players should be fine with that, either realizing the acknowledgement satirizes inherent absurdity of D&D adventuring, or shrugging it off since in their heart they know "but I'm still the good guy in this situation" even if a game labels them as Evil.

But we aren't talking about people playing Grand Theft Auto, we're talking about people playing RPGs. A group that rather consistently dismisses the idea of Evil campaigns as edgy nonsense or just somebody's excuse to be creepy. The group that has several times more stories about saving the world and rescuing the princess but still regularly dismisses the significantly rarer "you're actually mercenaries" or "you're at war with another country that isn't obviously Evil" as overdone. So obviously I keep to the ones playing RPGs where they tend to put themselves in the shoes of their character not the ones playing videogames where there's a much easier method of separation.

People playing tabletop roleplaying games are not some separate group from players of other games. To the contrary, majority of contemporary tabletop roleplayers play or have played videogames. Chances are good that majority of players you yourself know have played a game comparable to GTA at some point & enjoyed it. The idea that they can't do the same on tabletop remains ill-established.

Yes, I know tabletop gamers talk like playing Evil is somehow especially hard. You don't seem to understand that I don't think people who say that are correct - you yourself describe them arguing in a self-contradictory manner, dismissing as "overdone" something they supposedly don't do. That alone should tip you that something's off.

As far as I'm concerned, tabletop gamers saying such things are repeating a bunch of moralistic nonsense that was tacked on to the hobby during the transition from 1st to 2nd edition of AD&D. You don't seem to remember that exactly the same sort of claims were made of the entire medium of videogaming and games like GTA got significant bad press due to it. Yet the course of history shows entirely normal people can play and like that sort of game. You can claim it's because videogames have a "much easier form of separation", but that's another thing I consider ill-established: I don't have to believe you and I don't, since no-one has shown it to be true and nothing in my experience backs this up.

Further proof of how the talk doesn't prove what you think it does, comes in the shape of a D&D trope that became increasingly prominent as a direct result of the idea that playing Evil is especially hard or forbidden: players trying to argue and lawyer game rules so that game masters wouldn't throw them out due to an alignment change. In other words: inventing the very excuses I'm telling the OP to throw out. That's what you miss. Just because a game is nominally about saving a princess or the world, doesn't mean players actually stop playing in a mercenary way. It just means they stretch a definition so it covers the way they want to play.

I'm aware that what I mentioned wasn't true moral greyness. You'll notice that when I actually said morally grey it was also in quotation marks. It wasn't even trying for true moral greyness because the "average players" I know wouldn't accept actual moral greyness. They play the game for escapism, they don't play to be told they have absolutely no good options so they have to settle for what they think is least bad. They play to be the hero and do something "Good" and feel like they accomplished something because that's rarely an option in the real world where they have to constantly worry about money and social standing and keeping on the good side of somebody with no sense of empathy who managed to become the boss of their boss's boss.

If you think your "average player" wouldn't accept genuine moral greyness, please shut up and let the people who find actual value in the thing speak. Your argument is equivalent to saying that because people sometimes eat icecream because they want something sweet & creamy, they are therefore unable to appreciate a good chili, or any other type of food for that matter. People play games for escapism, yes, but that's hardly the only reason to play games, and even people who mostly play escapist games are usually capable of playing and appreciating other types of games.

Your initial points were:

The point you missed, and still do: "many" is not "every". That is where you fell into a strawman.

You use the first to say that they're Chaotic for their characters wandering, you know adventuring, wanting experience, gold, and items which are all necessary to survive and deal with bigger threats and Evil for going straight to fighting in a game where fighting is the main method of conflict resolution the system is built around. That main design point isn't even unique to D&D because even with the systems that try to be different most of them fall in line on the idea that the excitement of the system is from action and action usually means a fight.

None of that is some grand and revelatory statement, it's a massive "well technically" that I'd expect to hear out of someone trying to rules lawyer their way into making every Paladin in a setting automatically break their oaths.

Congratulations on reiterating my point while simultaneously missing it. You have, accurately, described the system-level incentive to play a murderer-for-hire. You didn't stop to consider that a player still doesn't have to play that way. Let me break this down for you:

There doesn't have to be a "bigger threat" that justifies endlessly accumulating wealth and power.

A player character doesn't have to be a vagrant. They can have a permanent residence that they periodically return to, and older version of D&D outright presume characters will acquire such permanent residences as they progress even if they start without.

A player character can have more than a few ties to the larger society. An AD&D Paladin would be a good example, since not only are they presumed to be part of a knightly order (which why they're beholden to common rules), they are expected to donate significant chunk of their income to worthy causes, such as charities and religions. But just as well, a Druid would be accountable to the Druidic circle and a Thief or Assassin could be accountable to a Guild.

A player character doesn't have to be self-centered - they can act on behalf of other player characters or in-game entities such as aforementioned orders, religions, circles and guilds, demonstrating this by forgoing rewards of personal power and wealth when this would conflict with interests of such larger groups.

A player character doesn't have to fight to kill. Even if they want to make a career out of fighting, they can opt to do so in a non-lethal environment, such as a sport arena.

And finally, even if a player character fights to kill, it doesn't have to be for profit. A Paladin, for example, can simply decline any job, quest or offer where they're given money for killing a sentient being. They can opt to only use lethal violence when necessary to defend themselves or others from attack, and they can forgo any profit they might gain from doing so by either donating the loot or surrendering it to the deceased's next of kin.

Even if we restrict ourselves to version of D&D, a player has a choice in how they play their character - to claim otherwise reduces the game to a stereotype of itself.

You actively ended your point with the assumption that the average player is that person and that moral greyness or moral blackness just required "not giving them excuses." Is it truly shocking that such a sweeping generalization lead to my response? Are you truly shocked that walking up to the average player and telling them "actually your character should be evil, you'd probably be fine slaughtering villagers and miners for not moving when someone new got the deed to the land" would be badly received?

There's nothing shocking about someone on the net making a strawman out of an argument. Again: "many" is not "every".

Furthermore, if a player is shocked that killing dwarven squatters for wealth and XP is an Evil act, that's not an argument against anything I've said. In a game of D&D with modicum of self-awareness, that is a gaming day like any other. Killing others for profit is called Evil by the rules and it is the dungeon master who is the ultimate judge of character alignment. A dungeon master is both allowed and meant to, by design of the system, adjust character alignment based on how a player plays their character. Sometimes, this is a surprise or not to a player's liking. The same is true of a hidden monster ambushing a character, a trap triggering and causing them damage, or rust monster eating a piece of equipment due to a failed saving throw (etc.). The same player can still be perfectly willing to eat the penalty and do the evil act anyway if the reward is sufficiently high.

Go ahead. Try it. Play this scenario and place a much higher-than-usual reward for going through with the Evil act.

[MonochromeTiger]

I can, and do, extend my criticism of your argument to players you claim to know.

Yes, it's amazing how easy it is to make an argument that's incorrect because you don't actually know the same people I do.

And what of this do you consider proof that acknowledging player characters as murderers-for-hire when they are acting like murderers-for-hire constitutes hanging behind someone's shoulder and going "you should feel bad"? Because based on your own observation, these players should be fine with that, either realizing the acknowledgement satirizes inherent absurdity of D&D adventuring, or shrugging it off since in their heart they know "but I'm still the good guy in this situation" even if a game labels them as Evil.

People playing tabletop roleplaying games are not some separate group from players of other games. To the contrary, majority of contemporary tabletop roleplayers play or have played videogames. Chances are good that majority of players you yourself know have played a game comparable to GTA at some point & enjoyed it. The idea that they can't do the same on tabletop remains ill-established.

You really don't understand the very basic idea that it's easier for some people to separate themselves from some premade fleshed out character with a backstory and personality they didn't have an actual influence in than for them to separate themselves from a character they created from the ground up and likely put some of themselves into? Okay, simple way of looking at it. Even with the extra separation videogame characters have some people genuinely feel bad for picking the evil or rude choices in videogames where they have a choice of how to act. Somehow that's supposed to be less common when they're much more personally invested in the character?

Yes, I know tabletop gamers talk like playing Evil is somehow especially hard. You don't seem to understand that I don't think people who say that are correct - you yourself describe them arguing in a self-contradictory manner, dismissing as "overdone" something they supposedly don't do. That alone should tip you that something's off.

Yes, something is off. They hold a very opposing view on the topic of playing Evil or even morally grey in games from me and would object to being in situations I'm perfectly comfortable in. That grand horror of, gasp, not liking the same things or agreeing with me and wanting things to conform to their biases instead of mine!

As far as I'm concerned, tabletop gamers saying such things are repeating a bunch of moralistic nonsense that was tacked on to the hobby during the transition from 1st to 2nd edition of AD&D.

I agree. It doesn't mean they don't believe it though, nor does it mean that they react well to attempts to get them to try it out when they've already voiced opposition to it. My usual group regularly has to tone down or completely change our plans when we have other people join because they aren't comfortable with some things even as tame as "there's a war going on for valid reasons but neither side is Evil, just desperate and lacking other options."

You don't seem to remember that exactly the same sort of claims were made of the entire medium of videogaming and games like GTA got significant bad press due to it.

Considering your outrage over me making a "straw man" by using your original statement in the manner it was given don't you feel it's a little inappropriate to throw around "you don't seem to remember" and treat me like I'm magically ignorant of a topic that still routinely comes up? Yes, video games get bad press. It's fear mongering and throwing blame on whatever some people don't understand for problems where the actual causes are complex and difficult to deal with. That doesn't change the fact that some people are genuinely uncomfortable because they take in that idea as fact or have their own personal reasons.

Yet the course of history shows entirely normal people can play and like that sort of game. You can claim it's because videogames have a "much easier form of separation", but that's another thing I consider ill-established: I don't have to believe you and I don't, since no-one has shown it to be true and nothing in my experience backs this up.

And again, it's amazing how easy it is to just argue past each other because both of us are arguing based on personal views and people we know and, amazingly, we don't know the same people or have the same life experiences. However, like last time, it really doesn't matter if you've never run into someone who you didn't think was serious about their disdain for morally grey or Evil games because your disbelief doesn't make them suddenly stop existing.

Further proof of how the talk doesn't prove what you think it does, comes in the shape of a D&D trope that became increasingly prominent as a direct result of the idea that playing Evil is especially hard or forbidden: players trying to argue and lawyer game rules so that game masters wouldn't throw them out due to an alignment change. In other words: inventing the very excuses I'm telling the OP to throw out. That's what you miss. Just because a game is nominally about saving a princess or the world, doesn't mean players actually stop playing in a mercenary way. It just means they stretch a definition so it covers the way they want to play.

This may surprise you but "some players started a stereotype when they didn't want their character taking away because the DM personally thought they took things too far" doesn't actually invalidate my argument. It means some players were willing to do some things that their DM thought qualified as Evil. Different groups have different tolerances and thresholds for that, I've had a group where poison and assassination were perfectly fine because at the end of the day they're just another way of killing something only to turn around and immediately find a group where if you so much as suggested poisoning the Evil baby eating Demon worshiping warlord in armor too tough to penetrate you'd lose your character and if you kept it up you'd be deemed a bad fit for the table.

Not everyone conforms to your experience. Not everyone conforms to the stereotypes. Some people genuinely do have a zero tolerance view for breaking their heroic fantasy and as disturbing and desperate as I consider their world view to be I know a worryingly large number of them.

If you think your "average player" wouldn't accept genuine moral greyness, please shut up and let the people who find actual value in the thing speak.

You know, you could've saved quite a bit of time by just leading with this, or just saying "your experience with some players doesn't seem to contribute much to the thread." Personally I'd prefer the one where we pretend for a moment to have an ounce of civility instead of just putting "please" in front of the actual demand to shut up but hey, arguing on the internet.

Your argument is equivalent to saying that because people sometimes eat icecream because they want something sweet & creamy, they are therefore unable to appreciate a good chili, or any other type of food for that matter. People play games for escapism, yes, but that's hardly the only reason to play games, and even people who mostly play escapist games are usually capable of playing and appreciating other types of games.



The point you missed, and still do: "many" is not "every". That is where you fell into a strawman.

You seem remarkably willing to take my points to contrived extremes for someone who accuses me of a straw man for reacting to your original words as they were written instead of reading in conditions and limits.

Frankly, I'd go through the rest and there's absolutely room to do so I can already see some places where you completely change what I'm saying and continue to feel insulted for things you yourself are doing, but this is getting nowhere. Anything I say other than agreement will, as you've shown, be dismissed because you don't have the same players I do. Anything I say about people actually sticking to their low-zero tolerance stance on their escapism being impeded will be dismissed because you somehow haven't run into anyone who is like that yourself (congratulations on that by the way because they tend to be insufferable and expect you to either accommodate them even in active games or go somewhere they don't have to acknowledge you, even if we do disagree this much the annoyance they can cause is not something I'd wish on someone).

So if you feel like taking that as a win go ahead. If you feel like getting the last word go ahead. We disagree and it's plainly obvious we aren't going to convince each other, I don't have the energy to scream straw man all day or selectively read arguments to try going "aha, I chose to read this in a way that says I'm right and thus you are admitting defeat in a way I can insult!" Have a good day.

[Slipjig]

Your typical local ruler will almost certainly have detractors. Unless you are actually at court for a while, it would pretty hard for PCs to tell the difference between a "good" ruler and a "bad" one.

If the opponents for any quest are one of the traditional fantasy races (including humans), a lot of them become morally gray.

The Baron hires the adventurers to evict a peasant family. Sure, this COULD arguably be an Evil act. But what if the peasant is a lazy drunk who isn't paying his taxes because he's a terrible farmer? In this case, reassigning the land to another peasant family is just responsible stewardship by the Baron.

Baron hires the PCs to retrieve a family heirloom necklace his father lost to the neighboring Viscount's father in a game of cards some time ago. It's not magical or dangerous, or even particularly valuable. But the Viscount loves to wear it off when they are both at their liege's court. If it helps, the Baron is absolutely convinced that the Viscount cheated.

The Duke's younger son wants to hire the party to permanently disappear his older brother, so he can inherit the Duchy. If the party can do that without killing him, that's ideal, but he doesn't want to know the details. This would normally be Evil, but the younger brother would clearly be a much better ruler. Maybe older brother is a drunken, not-so-bright lout who takes his buddies raiding peasants in the neighboring barony for fun, while the younger brother is a scholar who regularly sits in for their father at court, and has achieved a good reputation for just and imaginative rulings.

[KorvinStarmast]

Your typical local ruler will almost certainly have detractors. Unless you are actually at court for a while, it would pretty hard for PCs to tell the difference between a "good" ruler and a "bad" one.

If the opponents for any quest are one of the traditional fantasy races (including humans), a lot of them become morally gray.

The Baron hires the adventurers to evict a peasant family. Sure, this COULD arguably be an Evil act. But what if the peasant is a lazy drunk who isn't paying his taxes because he's a terrible farmer? In this case, reassigning the land to another peasant family is just responsible stewardship by the Baron.

Baron hires the PCs to retrieve a family heirloom necklace his father lost to the neighboring Viscount's father in a game of cards some time ago. It's not magical or dangerous, or even particularly valuable. But the Viscount loves to wear it off when they are both at their liege's court. If it helps, the Baron is absolutely convinced that the Viscount cheated.

The Duke's younger son wants to hire the party to permanently disappear his older brother, so he can inherit the Duchy. If the party can do that without killing him, that's ideal, but he doesn't want to know the details. This would normally be Evil, but the younger brother would clearly be a much better ruler. Maybe older brother is a drunken, not-so-bright lout who takes his buddies raiding peasants in the neighboring barony for fun, while the younger brother is a scholar who regularly sits in for their father at court, and has achieved a good reputation for just and imaginative rulings.

I am stealing all of these.

[Pauly]

‘Grey’ morality typically involves choosing between bad and worse, often on incomplete information.

One very good ‘grey morality’ scenario I have ripped off from “In Which We Serve” and put into sci-fi games is a situation where the enemy u-boat is hiding beneath survivors in the water and the captain has to make the choice of attacking the uboat and killing all the survivors and maybe destroying the uboat or letting the uboat escape and causing even more casualties. When I ran the scenario I did it with tight real world time pressure to make the decision.

A more fantasy friendly scenarios to adapt are;
- Quarantining a plague village for which there is no known cure. If the PCs let the apparently healthy villagers out they could infect the entire region, but if they leave them locked in they are guaranteeing their deaths.
- A convoy/caravan with a straggler in a hostile area. Leaving the straggler to their fate will lead to their certain doom. Slowing down the convoy/caravan for the straggler will lead to much higher risk of serious attacks on the main part the PCs have to protect.
- collecting ‘good only’ artifacts for an evil questgiver. The objects are in danger because another evil entity wants them for a ritual or whatever, but delivering them to the safety of the evil collector/questgiver means that ‘good’ can no longer access the artifacts.
- The plot of ‘unforgiven’ - collecting morally dubious bounties.
- The typical plot of ‘Cowboy Bebop’ - collecting bounties on morally sympathetic targets.
- Weapon X scenarios. The super serum drives the subject insane and dangerous. Capturing and returning the subject will lead to more Weapon X experiments, allowing the subject to live will cause more casualties, there is no safe place to let the subject live the rest of their life in peace. NB the operator of the Weapon X program doesn’t have to be evil, misguided or overly optimistic is sufficiently grey.

[VonKaiserstein]

Honestly, you can typically make this work with sufficiently exotic and odd fetch quests, which when combined, create an unintentionally awful outcome. a mage hires the adventurers to gather spell components. Perhaps some are strong protective items, which keep the local villages drinking fountain pure, until removed. It dries up as they carry it back. Or they rescue a princess, and their employer asks for a small vial of her blood as his reward. Weird, but he explains that it will negate the need for a virgin sacrifice, as royal blood is more potent. That's... good? And then demands the return of a certain book from his library, which leads to them battling or negotiating with a beholder to retrieve it. Ultimately, this collection of odds and sods forms a portion, but certainly not all, of the components for the employer to rise to lichdom. It is grateful, and withdraws from society... for now.

Likewise, you could gradually have a powerful being offering favors, in exchange for future favors or pledges of personal loyalty, being a hag or green dragon. A being like that, known to be evil and manipulative, gradually making fair, but more and more suspect deals will warp a player's morality faster than anything else. Especially if the being in question actively rewards intitative that it thinks advances its goals. They'll be falling all over each other to execute prisoners and eat their hearts before you know it.

[King of Nowhere]

‘Grey’ morality typically involves choosing between bad and worse, often on incomplete information.

it must be pointed out, though, that the purpose of the whole business is not to make the players feel bad, to rub their noses in their powerlessness, or to make them feel that the world is terrible and there's nothing worth fighting for. not unless you want to chase away your players, or you want to encourage sucidal tendencies - for example if you sell drugs and you see making your party depressed as a potential quick way to profit.
depending on the gaming system, the players generally have a lot of power to influence things. they can wait for the stragglers, face harder fights, and win those harder fights. they can kill both the evil baron and the bloodthirsty rebel leader and find someone more reasonable to put in charge - or even put themselves in charge and do a good job of it. they can take a penalty to avoid endangering the innocents, and overcome that penalty in other ways.
if the players go out of their way to find better options and are smart about it, one should never deny them their happy ending just because "this is supposed to be a morally grey situation". players should always be able to earn their happy ending.

[Pauly]

it must be pointed out, though, that the purpose of the whole business is not to make the players feel bad, to rub their noses in their powerlessness, or to make them feel that the world is terrible and there's nothing worth fighting for. not unless you want to chase away your players, or
...
because "this is supposed to be a morally grey situation". players should always be able to earn their happy ending.

Agree wholeheartedly.
With the possible exception of a Shadowrun type environment where the players have signed up to play in a morally grey world.

In a standard heroic fantasy morally grey should be a small part of the overall campaign. The entire reason for playing is to be the "good guys" who "make a difference". There is room for moral ambiguity, but it should be as a counterpoint to spice up the narrative. Maybe to shake the players up a bit and get them to think a bit more about their actions. But it should never be to trick the players into being the bad guys.

[gbaji]

Agree wholeheartedly.
With the possible exception of a Shadowrun type environment where the players have signed up to play in a morally grey world.

In a standard heroic fantasy morally grey should be a small part of the overall campaign. The entire reason for playing is to be the "good guys" who "make a difference". There is room for moral ambiguity, but it should be as a counterpoint to spice up the narrative. Maybe to shake the players up a bit and get them to think a bit more about their actions. But it should never be to trick the players into being the bad guys.

This I agree with 100% In most game settings/genres, the players want to be "the heroes" of the story/world/whatever. And most of the time, the adventures should focus on them actively working to "do good things". Saving people. Fighting unambigiously "bad guys". Saving the world. Stuff like that.

But yeah. It is interesting to occasionally drop something in front of them, in which there are choices to make, and they are presented with choices where things are not so clear cut on the good/evil axis. I agree with a previous poster who made an observation about being very cautious about putting the players into what they will view as a "no win" scenario. If the only choice is between "bad thing A" and "bad thing B", the players will not be happy with either. Sometimes, that may just be a natural result of other things going on, but you do probably want to avoid making that something that happens all the time. I tend to find "here's a way you can achieve something you want (and may be very good in fact!), but it may require you to use some less than great methods to achieve it" to be an interesting experiement in "grey morality". The players do have the choice to avoid anything "bad" entirely if they want. If it's just a choice between two greys, I'm not sure if it has the same impact.

On the flip side, and as a general rule, IME players are usually most happy when they get an unambigous "win". So... yeah... let them have the wins when they come along. Doesn't mean you can't build on them later, or have side things come up which are maybe tied to those wins in some way, but don't feel like you need to constantly rain on the PCs parade.

[GloatingSwine]

‘Grey’ morality typically involves choosing between bad and worse, often on incomplete information.

That's the easy way of doing it, yes.

The better way is when the choice contains both good and bad, inextricably linked. You can have either or both be fixed or variable. So make something good happen but one of a number of bad things will also happen, which price are you most willing to see paid? Or something bad is inevitable but you can salvage one of a small number of good outcomes that balance it, which one do you prefer?

[King of Nowhere]

reminds me, I crafted a situation for my campaign world that was perfect for this thread.

nerullia, the seat of the god of death, goes big on human sacrifice. like, many hundreds daily. however, they have a vital reason for it: nerull takes power from those sacrifices and bless the land. nerullia has a dry climate, it can't support agriculture outside of a few river valleys; but with the power of undeath granted by nerull, the crops can grow on the too-dry land¹, feeding the masses. the blessing extends to the people, who gain some partial benefits of undeath: increased resistance to fatigue and disease, needs less sleep and food. without human sacrifices, most of the people will starve, fast. forget decanters of endless water or self-resetting create food traps; in my campaign world those ways to get infinite resources don't work. it may be possible to relocate some of the population, but there's tens of millions of them, and no convenient empty spot on the map to dump them. there is just no way to feed that many people without sacrifices, period.
the population knows it and is pragmatic enough to accept the whole situation, a large majority supporting the system. add in that sacrifices get fair treatment in the afterlife, a good half of the people fed to the altars are genuine volunteers². To further convey this point, I had the party witness a woman about to be sacrificed making a grand speech on how happy she was to give her life back to nerull, now that all her children were grown up she had no purpose in life³, she felt useless, but nerull gave her back a new purpose, nerull accepts anyone no matter how humble, nerull is the god of inclusion and love.
nerullite society is pretty crappy anyway; once your society is founded upon the idea that some people - lots of them - must be sacrificed for the common good, and therefore that some lives are intrinsically more valuablen than others, you open the floodgates for all manners of unpleasantness. sacrificing people is nerullia's answer to everything⁴.

footnotes
1: as a collateral effect, a large field of nerullite wheat will give a weak signal on detect undead, and it does taste slightly rotten to anyone not nerullite. if you plant it outside of nerullia, it's just normal wheat.
2: volunteering is an act of free will, but it certainly gets encouraged. if you volunteer, you get somewhat better afterlife treatment, and some money for your family. meanwhile, Nerullia has no retirement plans - and the sacrifice drafting gives priority to unproductive members of society. so, as you get too old to work, you can choose to volunteer for sacrifice, get a better afterlife, and some money for your family. or you can not volunteer, you are pretty much guaranteed to be drafted anyway within a few years, and you get no benefits. dieing of old age is a privilege in nerullia, and it's considered an extravagant waste.
3: forget emancipation, when your whole survival depends on getting enough people on the altars, women are required to have as many children as possible. many of those never get to grow up.
4: and it actually works pretty well. flooding during the rain season? sacrifice, nerull will protect the cities. economic downturn? sacrifice. nerull has no control over the economy, but "removing" the unemployed and the destitutes will probably help. Climate change? Sacrifice. Nerull has no control over the climate, but reducing the number of consumers will help. civil unrest? sacrifice the unhappy people, the unrest is solved and nerull didn't even have to lift a finger. your favourite team is losing? offer yourself for sacrifice to give them a boost; yes, there's some people fanatic enough for that.

so, the party won a war against nerullia and found themselves with the power to decide what to do about them.
in the end they just put someone reasonable in charge and left the nation to itself.

[kyoryu]

Consider: basic description of Chaos is placing the individual above the group.

I think that's close, but not spot on. I consider it more as prioritizing individual choice over organization, and flexibility over planning.

Your characterization often ends up being what happens in CE situations , but I think the CG and most CN takes would be 'the best way to get the best group outcome is to prioritize individual freedom".

‘Grey’ morality typically involves choosing between bad and worse, often on incomplete information.

I think there's two fundamental grey morality choices.

1. Doing a bad/evil thing for a good (or at least less bad) result.
2. Doing a good thing that may have evil side effects (working with a bad guy to solve a problem, knowing that it benefits the goals of the bad guy, for example).

[rel]

If the villain is an authority any of these work well. If the villain is NOT an authority flip the quest over and put the PC's on the other side.

- shut down a traditionally disreputable business like a brothel, bootlegger or smuggler
- quell a worker uprising
- get rid of a desperate or altruistic gang of bandits
- silence a malcontent spreading damaging 'lies'
- embarrass and ruin the reputation of an annoying jackass
- destroy / steal some prized possession of an annoying jackass

Have the villain describe things in a biased, negative light and not give the PC's much instruction on what to do and they'll probably default to the normal approach of killing everyone and taking their stuff without much thought.

Signpost the dubious nature of the PC's actions by having do gooders call them out, putting the unpleasant aftermath of their actions on display, or having the villain congratulate them on doing such a good job and offering them more work.

[gbaji]

If the villain is an authority any of these work well. If the villain is NOT an authority flip the quest over and put the PC's on the other side.

- shut down a traditionally disreputable business like a brothel, bootlegger or smuggler
- quell a worker uprising
- get rid of a desperate or altruistic gang of bandits
- silence a malcontent spreading damaging 'lies'
- embarrass and ruin the reputation of an annoying jackass
- destroy / steal some prized possession of an annoying jackass

Have the villain describe things in a biased, negative light and not give the PC's much instruction on what to do and they'll probably default to the normal approach of killing everyone and taking their stuff without much thought.

Signpost the dubious nature of the PC's actions by having do gooders call them out, putting the unpleasant aftermath of their actions on display, or having the villain congratulate them on doing such a good job and offering them more work.

I'm going to repeat an observation about this, that was made earlier in the thread. You need to be very careful when doing stuff like this, and really think through what the objective is. If it's just to "trick the party", it's not likely to be as well recieved as you might think. If at any point you are thinking "the party would not do this if they knew what was really going on", you need to stop and really really think things though.

The payoff for such things needs to be more than the "gotcha" of revealing to the party that they inadvertently or accidentally or carelessly caused some great harm/evil/whatever. Assuming that the great harm/evil/whatever isn't actually something the players wanted to cause, or view their characters as being ok with, then the only thing you accomplish with this is to make the players feel bad.

If the PCs really are "morally grey" and willing to do such things, you should not have to decieve them in any way. So the moment you are intentionally holding information back or hiding things in order to "make this work", that's the moment you should stop and ask "what do I really want to get out of this scenario?".

As I wrote earlier, you *can* do this sort of thing, but typically the harm has to always be less than the help and something that is maybe part of a larger/longer term plan and not just an immediate "I tricked you into doing X" type thing. As a GM, you control the information that players recieve. You can always trick them if you want to. And at the end of the day, they're either going to blame you, or themselves, for being tricked. Neither of which is good for the gaming table. So yeah. Tread very cautiously in this area.

[kyoryu]

I'm going to repeat an observation about this, that was made earlier in the thread. You need to be very careful when doing stuff like this, and really think through what the objective is. If it's just to "trick the party", it's not likely to be as well recieved as you might think. If at any point you are thinking "the party would not do this if they knew what was really going on", you need to stop and really really think things though.

"The party knows what's going on, and is really conflicted about it" is a much more interesting space.

But I tend to think that most RPGs rely too much on keeping players in the dark anyway.

[gbaji]

"The party knows what's going on, and is really conflicted about it" is a much more interesting space.

Oh, yeah. Much much much more intestesting. The example I gave above from my own game. I presented them with a straightfoward (and nothing at all hidden) choice. They discover an assassination plot to kill a local baron. It is revealed to them that if this baron dies, he will be replaced by his son who holds a different position on a specific political decsion that would benefit the party's allies and harm the party's enemies. They had the choice of revealing the plot to the baron (clearly the "lawful good" answer), or staying neutral (they just walk away and if the plot succeeds on its own, then it does), or taking over the assassination attempt themselves to make sure it suceeds.

It was very revealing to me what decision they made. And I think relevant here. I think a lot of GMs do stuff to hide info, or trick players, but... honestly? Why not just give them the full story and let them play?

I could also have made this a simple choice by making the baron some kind of umambiguously bad guy. But I didn't. No one seemed to think he was evil. He wasn't kidnaping people and sacrificing them, or anything so moustsache-twirley. As far as they could tell, he was a competant steward of the lands to which he held title, and the people seemed healthy and happy and well cared for. There was just a faction who really wanted a political shift to happen, and were willing to kill the baron to acheive it, and the party kinda walked (literally) into the middle of it. So yeah. Very interesting.

But I tend to think that most RPGs rely too much on keeping players in the dark anyway.

Yup. And IMO unnecessarily. I think that GMs are afraid that if they don't hide things from the players, then they'll never play "in the grey". But... IME, there are lots of players (and lots of character concepts/roles) that can and do play well in that area, while still filling the "traditional hero" role as well (that same party would have not hesitated to risk life and limb on a "save the world" mission if it was presented to them). Obviously, some game systems and settings (and character choices) can make this more problematic than others, but it's still something that should not be shied away from. Let them decide which way they want to go with something, instead of trying to manipulate/trick them into doing it. I think a lot of GMs would be surprised at the results.


And yeah. The abundance of "...and the questgiver was really a shapeshifted green dragon in disguise" type stories just kinda makes me go "and what was the point of that?".