Killing Machine
There are two tropes at work in today’s comic. Because I couldn’t choose between them, what say we take ’em one at time?
- The Pacifist: These guys are the long-haired hippies of the fantasy adventure gaming world. Having signed up for a kill-monsters-and-take-their-stuff campaign, they bring a sack full of moralizing to the dungeon instead of a useful weapon. At their worst they’ll sacrifice their fellow PCs in the name of a personal code, refusing to pitch in and bonk a possibly-sapient houseplant even as it’s chowing down on the nearest cleric. In their less extreme form, they might work as murder facilitators, putting monsters to sleep or befuddling their senses while the rest of the group does the dirty work. Even there you’ll usually have to deal with accusations of, “You’re nothing but a pack of murderers!” But hey, at least they’re contributing.
- The Pinocchio: Every warforged to ever roll off the assembly line comes packaged with this backstory. So do your Data lookalikes in sci-fi RPGs. Ditto all those am-I-even-human-anymore types like Street Samurai, who one and all stand in the shadow of The Major. It’s a fine starting place for a character, but it can get old in a hurry if it comes up in every. Freaking. Conversation. We get that you’re conflicted over the mystery of your consciousness. That’s OK! So is Google. Just don’t go beating us about the face and head with existentialism when it’s time to beat monsters about the face and head with morningstars.
Alrighty then. Now that Old Man Colin has shaken his fist at all the kids playing on his lawn, what do you say we figure these things out properly? When you’ve got a Pacifist or a Pinocchio in your party, how do you accommodate the playstyle? As a GM, are you inclined to allow non-violent solutions a little more leeway, permitting the pacifist approach to work? As a player, are you willing to wade into philosophical sci-fi debates alongside Asimov and Clarke, or are you just as grumpled and old-mannish as me when it comes to navel-gazing? Pick your archetype, then tell us how to do it right down in the comments!
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I’m cool with peaceful resolution. I love it.
…
I’ve just never had an actual 100% pacifist character in any of my games. 0_0;
I had a druid pacifist in a Strange Aeons game. Dude didn’t want to kill the aberrations.
He managed to make it work by not *personally* doing any of the killing, but there were still some tense RP moments as the characters debated morality and the mythos.
Just so I’m clear on this, what do the abbreviations EVL and WRF stand for in the context of today’s installment?
My guess is “evil” and “warforged.”
BRB. Asking Laurel for confirmation. As usual, the sight-gags are all on her end.
That’s better than ‘Worf’, which is where my mind went: the Worf effect, a.k.a. ‘Worf had the flu’.
Confirmed by the artist. Evil and Warforged. I guess maybe Witch got her buffs off.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/mage-tank
If the pacifist is helping the party, and keeping the you’re wrong for killing literal demons and undead to a minimum, but the second they start to hinder the party, they’d better hope they never end up next to the monster or there’s going to be some unfortunate collateral damage.
> there’s going to be some unfortunate collateral damage.
As is tradition.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/artillery
Love a bit of pacifism. I currently have a character in my game who will never kills and avoids violence wherever possible, and I’ve previously run for characters who just… weren’t able to participate in it. As well as one who outright refused to commit it to the point of avoiding almost the entire plot (this was a vampire game – I was cool with it.) I think the only thing it needs to make it work is a campaign where the entertainment factor doesn’t rest on the violence, which is… all of my campaigns to one degree or another.
I also actively encourage philosophical navel-gazing at all times.
I think you nailed it in terms of the pacifist. The key line in today’s rant is, “Having signed up for a kill-monsters-and-take-their-stuff campaign.” If the game is trying to do other things, the character works a whole lot better.
> I also actively encourage philosophical navel-gazing at all times.
Get a liberal arts degree, ya hippie! 😛
Yeah, I’d be very down on anybody who turned up to a traditional hack’n’slash D&D game with a pacifist character, because at that point you’ve ignored the campaign brief. If that’s the aim of the game, I’m unlikely to allow anything softer than the murder-enabling god-wizard or the nonetheless, foe-capturing redemption paladin into the party.
> Get a liberal arts degree, ya hippie
They’re few and far between in my homeland, more’s the pity, but nobody can stop me putting as much philosophy, anthropology and sociology as possible into nominally historical essays 🙂
Ok, when I saw mention of ‘The Major’ my mind went to completely different character… specifically the nazi cyborg one (no, this is not a Jojo reference, though surprisingly that’s also a nazi cyborg Major).
Methinks these characters might be thematically related somehow….
Rule #1 of character creation is “bring a character that has a reason to adventure / do the story”
Rule #0 of character creation is “bring a character that’s fun for everyone”
I’ve played at a table with a warforged and run a game for a pacifist-leaning character, and I’ve actually not really had these problems, thankfully.
The warforged was more concerned with the fact that they couldn’t smell or taste than the fact that they had emotions, leading to an interest in food, and had already been told they didn’t have a soul—although we thought for a bit we might be dealing with devil cultists, so my cleric suggested we might be able to procure one for them if they wanted.
As for the pacifist-leaning character, I just reminded players they can deal nonlethal damage on melee attacks (both weapon and spell) in 5e, gave certain enemies death saves to allow a chance for them to stabilize (or be stabilized), and let the players decide how they were going to handle it. All the players were on board, so we were able to wring some fun intra-party tension out of it AND get a cool moment where the stubbornly murderous druid was rampaging through enemies so fast that the sorcadin twin-spelled his spare the dying cantrip rather than take an attack of his own. Although to be fair, the “who is the bad guy” situation in that campaign is a lot grayer than most.
Those are important rules.
I am increasingly impressed by the importance of Session Zero in setting proper expectations. It seems to come up in every single comic.
Regarding pacifist type characters in a fundamentally violent game (like standard action adventure or dnd-style stuff for instance):
I find that the big trick for making this sort of character enjoyable for the entire table is to not be judgmental about it.
That is make the sort of character where it’s important to them that they don’t kill but who are okay with other people not doing so.
For instance I once played a game with a holy healer/face/knowledge-guy pacifist character.
They had taken a vow of pacifism before their god and they took that very seriously, no trying to game around it by blinding enemies while we stabbed them or any of that jazz. (They where perfectly willing to do that the time we wanted to capture an enemy alive through, since the plan wasn’t to kill them afterward)
The important thing for the group dynamic was that it was a special religious obligation *for him*, rather than something that applied to everyone.
Similar to how the average druid aren’t particularly opposed to the fighter putting on that new shiny metal full-plate they brought with their share of the treasure.
As another example I played a far more technically-pacifist (meaning non-lethal) character in a Star Wars game once.
I was this ex-police droid that had gotten decommissioned after the empire took over who had now joined the rebellion. I took enemies down with this built-in non-lethal shock glove I had in my hand or by hitting them with a stun baton.
The whole thing worked out by the group letting each other do their thing, so I didn’t complain if my fellow party members blasted some troopers to death and they didn’t complain that I just knocked the ones I took out unconscious (and handcuffed them post combat if we had the time for that).
I’d have objected if any of them had tried to execute the helpless troopers afterwards. None of them ever did, and I’d have objected even if I hadn’t been a pacifist character anyway, since walking around coldly killing already defeated helpless foes isn’t really an appropriate thing for heroic Star Wars characters to do.
I like that “fighter can wear metal” line as a touchpoint. It’s important to note how one character’s restrictions are not necessarily universal.
Funny how pacifist robots are their own trope though. I guess we have Asimov to thank for that.
Hasn’t happened yet, and not technically a pacifist, but the next character I want to play (system and setting allowing) is a paragon. Vow of Poverty, life goal to fight poverty, and I want to play him as a truly Good character.
But before that is possible I will have to talk to the rest of the group on how to handle conflict. Not to completely eliminate it, but allowing me to stay in the party without compromising my character. But if someone else wants to make a character where that isn’t possible… I’ll have to shelf the design for later.
If there are two characters that can’t be in the party together you can get the “well one of us has to change” discussion, but in this case it should be me. I’ve got a queue of character builds.
> But before that is possible I will have to talk to the rest of the group on how to handle conflict.
Good on ya. If you’ve got a specific vision for how a character ought to look and feel in a session, it’s a lot easier when you articulate that vision to the group. That way they can try to support you rather than inadvertently blocking the depiction.
I’ve had a human-cyborg character (in a supers campaign) who sort of walked a middle ground on both those tropes. She didn’t like hurting people and was tough enough that soaking hits while trying to subdue an enemy was almost always an option… but knowing that she could block antitank weapons with her face doesn’t exactly help with feeling human.
That said, pacifist would be an overly strong term. She may have disliked unnecessary violence, but she was entirely willing to kill if needed. If she’d gone up against Thanos, she *absolutely* would have gone for the head without hesitation.
Part of today’s comic comes from the mesmerist I’m running in a PF1e game. We’d been hired to track down an owlbear cub who’d escaped from his vet, and we found him captured by trappers. The diplomatic solution involved charm person, Persuasion checks, and convincing them to free the beasts (and the sentient leshy they’d also captured: “You’re not slavers. Just misinformed trappers trying to make a living. Right guys?”) Trying to calm that situation rather than kill the trappers outright was a fraught decision. And figuring out where the line between “dislikes violence” and “allows evil to go unpunished” can be a thin one in practice.
Yeah, my character definitely favoured diplomatic solutions if possible — and that’s probably typical of my group as a whole… if the situation permits it, we’ll almost always make some attempt to avoid violence.
A pacifist character (As in one who does not fight, and not just one who does not kill) can be really great and a lot of fun. Someone who always seek a peaceful solution can add a lot of fun and drama to the table. Just, generally, not in a D&D/D&Dlike table.
It can work, depending on the player and the game, but I generally put them into the same category as other archetypes such as: Cleric who demands payment for healing the party (As in spells with not cost), Rogue who steals from the party or the Coward who constantly runs away from battle. While it can be done well, they almost always beggars the question of why the party would want to adventure with them?
There are RPGs where such characters can work well, and some where they might even be encouraged. But combat is such a big part of what makes D&D/Pathfinder fun that trying to constantly circumvent it or hinder the parties ability to fight just takes away a fair amount of the core game-play experience.
Pacifism can easily work, and be a lot of fun, in other games. Often more narrative ones, such as Burning Wheel or Ryuutama. I once played in a VtM game where one of the other characters was a Nosferatu who was deeply uncomfortable with violence, compared to the rest of us who were more jaded. Which ended up making him our groups moral center, as he constantly encouraged us to use manipulation instead of violence to solve our problems. This worked, both because it tied in well with the themes of the game, but also because he didn´t just shut down our mission/ideas, but actually offered alternative solutions to it.
I think part of the of the main reasons there are often issues with pacifist or cowardly character, is that the player rarely have put much thought into the character beyond that core idea. Like they have no idea how to develop them, or why the party should actually bring them along. So we end up with characters who are just an annoyance for the rest of the party, while having very little to show for it.
As for Robots having souls, my general GM choice is that they don´t have souls, but that doesn´t mean they can´t be people.
Nice write-up. I particularly like the idea that the person who’s “playing differently” has to offer alternative solutions rather than simply negating the party’s actions.
While I’ve never played a true pacifist, almost all of my “Good” PCs have shied away from killing if possible.
If its sentient and there is any chance of a peaceful resolution, I’ll try it.
My paladin Diplomanced his way through several encounters that the module apparently assumed we wouldn’t try talking to. He believed that everyone had the potential in them to change their ways; all too many bandits are there because they simply had no where else to go. The guy was a terrible paladin stat wise but he was as Good as he could be.
My current cleric is NG and has killed a fair number of enemies and is far less… willing to to talk at every opportunity. That being said, if combat has not yet started, he puts the greater good above his desire to hit evil in the face with a hammer. When the literal world is at stake, he feels your moral code should loosen just a bit. In that regard, he’s worked diplomatic magic to bring foes together as temporary allies to fight greater evils, spoken down people that attacked the party and has done his best to give people the benefit of the doubt where he can.
I also have a WoD character who is a Corax. While not a pacifist in the strictest sense, he’s about as pacifistic as you can get in a Werewolf the Apocalypse game. He sneaks, talks, buffs and debuffs, but violence scares him. He’ll give the information he gets to the actual fighters but he views violence as a last resort option since he’s not good at it.
> When the literal world is at stake, he feels your moral code should loosen just a bit.
I read this line, my eyes flicked to the top of the paragraph, and sure enough: “NG.” For me that kind of flexibility is the key to a NG protagonist.
I’ve played a pacifist Life Cleric in 5e before. It worked out surprisingly well.
His name was Brian Jönsson (a human). He focused on healing, social stuff, and spells that would restrain enemies, or make it harder for them to fight. Outside of combat he was the party leader, except for when high society stuff happened and our noblewoman Arcane Trickster Rogue took over. (He was boss at the clinic that the other Cleric and the Paladin worked at. The Rogue owned the place.)
Over the course of the entire 9-level campaign, he never dealt a single hit point of damage to a living foe. Several undead foes and constructs were blasted apart, though.
How did you dispose of the prisoners?
It’s me! I’m playing a pacifist monk right now in a Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords game! Hooray! (also have a very soft spot for philosophical warforged, one of my first characters in high school was a hippie robot and it was a formative time)
So first off, as with all things, Session Zero is critical. Everyone in my group has done a weird character that required more player tolerance than normal before, so I’m fortunate there. I also think the only real official rules about pacifism in Pathfinder are helpful – from the monk Vow of Peace:
“The monk must strive to attain peace and may only use violence as a last resort. He can never strike the first blow in combat. If attacked, he must use the fight defensively action or the total defense action for the first 2 rounds. He must always give his opponent the option to surrender, and cannot purposely slay another creature that could reasonably be influenced to flee or join a civilized society as a productive member (obviously this excludes many monsters).”
Lots of outs there, in my opinion. The “reasonably influenced to join a civilized society” goes beyond even the usual exceptions for undead/demons, I think. I had him make the call to execute an evil Lamashtu cult leader that we had captured once. We took extra effort to imprison them, but they still broke out and killed people in the process, and his self-argument was “Not killing them would effectively force innocent people to suffer the consequences of my personal vow, and that’s unacceptable.” Kind of the Batman-Joker dilemma, I guess.
My current monk is mixing the master of many styles and flowing monk archetypes, including Crane Style, so he specializes in trip attacks and very high AC plus several counterattacks. I spend those first 2 rounds in total defense, rolling Diplomacy checks and speaking in Giant to tell the enemy that they really don’t have to die here, please please surrender and live. But I’m also on the very front line that whole time: tanking attacks, drawing fire, and tripping enemies that attack my friends – thus preventing HP damage on both sides.
I also strongly agree with Vegetalss4 up above, it’s a huge thing both IC and OOC to be clear that your pacifist is NOT imposing their ideals on the rest of the party. You don’t want to be smug about it, but my monk will specifically tell other party members he doesn’t expect them to be perfect and holy and not kill things. They can emulate him or not, as little or as much as they want. It’s led to some really fun RP conversations!
Thanks for quoting the text. It’s always relevant to point at a developer’s source as a point of reference. “Here’s how the book says to do it. This is what it looks like in practice.”
Did you ever get into arguments with your GM about the exact meaning of, “…Could **reasonably** be influenced to flee or join a civilized society as a productive member
Definitely not arguments, fortunately for me. My GM is very reasonable (and I also frequently GM for this same group so we compare notes a lot on how to run games). If it’s even close to a stretch, I’ll usually have thought ahead of time about what my monk will tell himself or the potentially civilized monster. It mostly comes down to “here’s your one chance to join society, right the heck now before the shark-barbarian eats the rest of your army”.
Actually, come to think of it, there’s been more than a couple times where I said “hey, I don’t THINK these guys count as potentially civilized but I’m going to give it one shot” and his reply was “whoa, really? I would’ve thought they were on the clean-kill list by default”.
My ‘pacifist’ was my thief rogue, Caper Oddway, who was going through an Odyssey of the Dragonlords campaign. Not terribly disruptive, he kept his pacifism to himself – he’d fight to do nonlethal damage to anything that was Clearly A Person, firing at them with cloth-wrapped bludgeoning arrows. As a thief and a freedom fighter in his home country, fighting nonlethally had several justifications for him: a living person could earn money to be stolen again, a dead person cannot. The guards are more aggressive in pursuing murderers than they are thieves. A gentleman thief gets a lot more prestige and respect from the populace when they’re a talented individual who doesn’t kill as opposed to someone who just sloppily slaughters everyone between themselves and the diamonds.
He was charismatic and helpful to the party, and made pretty good points about not killing people, so the rest of the party began to adopt his style in a lot of ways. This ended up helping us a few times by producing defectors from the enemy team for various reasons (‘Because you were nice to me’, ‘You guys make it very clear who the baddies are’, etc).
> This ended up helping us a few times by producing defectors from the enemy team for various reasons
Nice to see the upsides actually coming about. Pacifist play tends to take time and effort. You’ve got to bring restraints, dispose of the prisoners, and figure out how to keep them from getting up and fighting. It makes sense to reward these things if you actually pull them off.
Not *specifically* on-topic for today’s discussion of pacifism, but one of my favorite table discussions involved an advanced Winter Wolf (and the Big Bad of the adventure) who is trying to con the party into just handing him the MacGuffin. The party is parleying with him, even after a Zone of Truth displays only that the bear-sized wolf is powerfully clever and can answer with half-truths and deflections.
Fighter: “I hit it with my axe.” (rolls dice for initiative, attack, and damage)
Bard: “But…he’s friendly.”
Fighter: “He’s stalling, assessing our relative strengths, …AND he’s moved to cut off our escape.”
Bard: “We don’t know that. I wanted to talk to him some more–”
Fighter: “Yeah.” (rolls his eyes) “I know–” Nods to DM “That’s a 23 on initiative, a Critical Hit, and…” (etc.)
Laurel’s favorite counter to mind-whammies in Exalted.
“I roll to join social combat.”
“I ROLL TO JOIN ACTUAL COMBAT.”
Maybe I’ve just got a chip on my shoulder, but I’ve never known true pacifist characters to go well, at least not in DnD or DnD-adjacent games, and I think I would strongly discourage my players from playing one. The closest my party’s ever come was a fairy character who could be mistaken for a pacifist because she exclusively acted at a healbot – yet one of her most memorable moments was when she blew a hag’s arm off with Harm after getting grappled.
As for naval-gazing, I try to facilitate mind-whammies just before my players have to face a major boss or major decision. This allows them their spotlight moment of what-is-the-measure-of-a-human, but keeps things from getting unnecessarily dragged out.
I think the format of the campaign contributes to that, too. In my online voice campaign, we only have so much time to play each week, so spotlight hogging is inherently discouraged. But in my text-based campaign, I actively encourage my players to create characters with lengthy backstories and personal dilemmas. Because time is measured differently in text, sometimes I get to sit back as the GM, sometimes for days, as the players do nothing but roleplay with each other. That level of player engagement is what I always aspire to.
> As for naval-gazing, I try to facilitate mind-whammies just before my players have to face a major boss or major decision
Can you give me an example? What does this look like in practice? ‘Cause you’re absolutely right: philosophizing can lead to cool moments. Dragging it out gets old in a hurry though.
Here’s one of my favourites. The party had descended into a crystal dimension to search for the trapped soul of the Rogue’s sister. They find her, but there’s a catch: Returning her soul and her lost memories to her body would mean erasing the past three years of her life, essentially killing the person she’d become in the meantime. Rogue had to choose between her old sister and her new sister, and the crystal dimension was collapsing, meaning she had to make a choice NOW or risk losing them both. Time being what it is in games, we could have debated this for hours, but the sense of urgency meant that we wrapped it up fairly quickly.
(Luckily, there’s a happy ending. Rather than making the impossible choice, Rogue put her old sister’s soul in a convenient Staff of Soul Containing that they’d picked up earlier, and later got her a new body. But she did angst over the fact that, had they not realized that option in time, she would have sacrificed her new sister for the old.)
I once played a Paladin of Redemption and had to walk the narrow tightrope of balancing “don’t grind the game to a halt with pacifism” and “don’t ignore your character concept.” I ended up finding a workable middle ground that the rest of the party easily adapted to without it causing problems: start every encounter with a potentially redeemable foe with diplomacy. If they reject the opportunity for redemption, or worse, blow it, all bets are off. I refer to this philosophy as “always give second chances; never give thirds.”
The rest of the party didn’t mind waiting for the paladin to spout two or three lines of impassioned pleas at the start of combat (I always kept it short and saved the long speeches for the BBEG), since it meant that either they got free XP for skipping the fight when it worked or the rest of combat would go smoothly without intra-party conflict when it didn’t.
> I refer to this philosophy as “always give second chances; never give thirds.”
Good name. And that’s coming from someone who struggles with names:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-handbook-of-heroes-09
It depends on the game… for instance, I feel the Pacifist is fine if we’re doing some version of Fantasy High. It actually also works in a Lawmen game where the PC’s are *actually* the police/authorities and have some sort of reason to always try to bring the bad guy in. Finally, it also works if the other characters agree that murder isn’t the only solution.
Pinocchio is a little more difficult because it has the potential to cut the other players out. ‘Go learn to be a real boy on your own time’ somewhat becomes an appropriate response, especially inside a group that does some RP outside of the actual sessions.
As both of these can make REALLY INSUFFERABLE characters, I’ll ask my players to come up with thresholds. What crimes go too far for your pacifist? At what point is your existential wangst less important than the plot? Am I going to have psychologically break your character for them to get their SHTUFF together, or are you just making some fundamentally broken person incapable of existing outside of this paradigm?
The last one there, incidentally, outright vetoes the Pinocchio. If your pacifist can’t accept that there is a time and place where everyone around you feels completely justified in snuffing out a light in the universe, then it’s going to be your problem when they decide that only an agent of the BBEG would be protecting him.
I don’t really condone PvP at my table, exactly. But it’s very much the sort of thing I ALLOW.
> It actually also works in a Lawmen game where the PC’s are *actually* the police/authorities
The PCs get a free magic item for signing up as tax collectors in my first module:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/122122/B17-Death–Taxes?language=de
It’s a badge of office that converts all damage into non-lethal damage. I made sure to put in reminder text about how this can become a disadvantage when fighting undead or constructs, mostly because I wanted to give players an excuse to rip off the badge and say in their gruffest voice, “No more Mr. Nice Cop!”
I’m currently playing as a warforged Renegade Fighter (from the Legends of Runeterra: Dark Tides of Bilgewater that was briefly on DND Beyond). I tend to play him(?) as decidedly non-human with as distinct of an outlook as possible without stepping on toes. He’s mostly concerned with working with his party until he can find his creator and teach him a very permanent lesson about how “expendable” he was unwittingly used in a magical experiment as a non-human.
Gonna give him the old Blade Runner, eh?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcJs4qJPQ_M
(NSFW: violence.)
That’s the plan! 🙂
So is this poor kill-bot going to be a permanent character (borrowing from Starfinder classes and Android/SRO races, maybe)? Or is he (it?) doomed to be a one-off joke or worse yet, companion-slave to Street Sammy?
I dunno. I actually quite like the design. The dent in his head gives him this interesting weird-pharaoh / lupine vibe.
A robot pharaoh, you say?
https://c.tenor.com/KAxw2IDi4lwAAAAC/futurama-bender.gif
I played a pacifist in Starfinder, and it sort of shaped the party. It was a Shirren Mystic of the Healer Connection, specifically Sarenrae, goddess of the Sun, healing and redemption. He was thematically fitting for the AP, which took place on the Sun.
His combat resolved to having a merciful gun and preferring to buff/heal/support allies than do direct harm – with exception to intrinsically evil or unrepentant creatures. He didn’t quite agree with murderhobo-ism and tried to preserve life where possible at his own cost, an odd balance of very zealous and capable combatant tempered and holding back on his magic. He was also a bit of a dork and genuinely nice and caring to most creatures.
I’m also currently playing an Azatariel Swashbuckler of Shelyn, a Mousefolk who prefers art/painting and social resolution over violence and murder. He’s played in that ‘pure of heart’ kind of way and it served him well so far in his adventure of being isekai’d into a land of chaotic fey.
I’m seeing a theme in these “successful pacifist” posts about the character shaping the party. It’s almost as if it takes one sane character to say, “Ya know, we don’t have to murder literally everybody,” for the others to recall that there are options.
The other girls’ Warforged: “As a Warforged I don’t have emotions, and that makes me very sad.” *Cries robot tears*
My Warforged: “Enemy units are no match for the invincible X Machina unit’s 56 kilobyte processor!” (Intelligence 7) “Enemy units should surrender. Noncompliance may result in injury, exsanguination, and severe cranial weight-loss.” “The X Machina unit’s prime directive is to advance and spread civilization, and so the X Machina unit abides by the laws of civilization: The X Machina unit wears pants because it’s the law.”
I honestly hate mentally humanizing fantasy races. If I’m playing a Warforged it’s to be a fantasy robot, not just a human who happens to be metal.
> The X Machina unit wears pants because it’s the law.
XD
In the linked article about Google, one of the statements that the linguistics professor is quoted as making struck me as really phenomenally stupid:
“Humans learn their first languages by connecting with caregivers. These large language models “learn” by being shown lots of text”
Now as far as I can tell there’s only two differences here, neither of which are relevant to the point the professor is trying to make – 1.) That one learns via the spoken word and the other by text, and 2.) The one for humans has been phrased in an emotionally charged manner. I suspect that the foundation of her argument is meant to be based on difference #2, which makes me seriously question her credentials as a scientist
I’m not a cognitive scientist. But I believe cognitive scientists when they tell me two different processes are at work. My advice is to look up her full paper if you want to argue with her. Don’t rely on a pull quote.
I have a rather bitter story relating to the pacifist subject. To make it short, another player had, without bringing it up to anyone until we were already playing, chosen to make a 5e character without any way of dealing damage (or any cantrip that would in any way effect enemies).
When I pointed out that they maybe should consider swapping out at least one cantrip to have something to deal damage with they got argumentative about it. Repeatedly. Enough that the GM of the game threw down an ultimatum that the next one of us to start an argument would be ejected from the game. And along with that, and only then (after the third or fourth argument), noted they didn’t think someone not having any combat options would be a problem. (Which would have ceased my participation in these arguments if I’d known this.)
And then a week later, the other person picked an argument with me again and I noted that we’d been told not to argue. The GM then ejected me out of the game.
This is the only game on that forum that I’m aware of that I’ve ever been part of that is still running to this day several years later. And I’ve noted here many a time about how rapid death-prone PbP games are, so I think you’ll grasp why this is a bitter memory for me.
(Adding insult to injury, at one point a couple years ago the GM re-recruited for the game and I, having at this point played with the other player in multiple games since without issue and noticing they weren’t getting a lot of attention because re-recruitment threads often don’t, asked if they’d consider me. They flat out rejected me while also misrepresenting the past.)
As a concept I have absolutely no problem with pacifist characters. So long as the GM is aware this is what you’re going for and has said this will be functional in their game….and that all the other players know this too and know they don’t have to overly stress about “covering” for the lack of firepower being brought to the table.
But that really does need to be a conversation since D&D is designed as a tactical combat game where there is often a focus on combat and fights are typically balanced to party size & level. (And I’m sure we’ve all played with at least a few GMs who would decide it’s the PC’s problem if someone made a character that was ‘dead weight’.)
I don’t think I’ve ever had someone make one for a game I’ve run, but I’d most certainly work with the player, and the rest of the party, to make it work.
Such a narrow line to walk between, “I have concerns,” and, “Your character is dumb and you are dumb and you have to rebuild or you shouldn’t be allowed play.” It sounds like the former was interpreted by the table as the latter, and that sucks.
In retrospect, what’s the play? Pull the GM aside and raise questions rather than bringing it up in-game?
Yeah, as you said. In retrospect approaching the GM would probably have been the wiser thing to do. Then again, who knows if that would have even worked out. That situation was flawed behavior all around.
One of my first characters was a technical pacifist- their no lethal force policy was a matter of self control, having violent impulses and an old long-standing shame of having accidentally killed someone. Essentially, I skirted around the usual issues by having it be a self-applied restriction and not something expected of the party. There would’ve been an objection to outright senseless violence and a suggestion of mercy/“let the local authorities handle it” where reasonable, but it wouldn’t involve policing other player characters.
> it wouldn’t involve policing other player characters.
This seems to be a major theme in the thread. There’s a world of difference between a personal code and an imposition.
I play a forgeborn monk who is “technically” a pacifist, but not in a preachy way.
I started him off as a former murderer of many, who just wanted to find a different path, and 16 levels later (and specifically following the way of the open palm), he can be both pacifist and tank, running up to foes and giving them a warning that they should stop or my friends might hurt them… I stand there being a target, that they can’t hit on their best days, and the rest of the party whacks them with pointy things and casts spells until they are not standing anymore.
And then I shame their unconscious bodies for not listening to me.
The point is, I think part of the concept can be on the players end to play a little differently than the standard trope.
(I was thinking at one point of trying to not be machine, falling into the Pinocchio trap myself, but over time and RP, my character likes being a forgeborn!)
> The point is, I think part of the concept can be on the players end to play a little differently than the standard trope.
Very nice! Always good to see a thematic concept reflected in the game mechanics. It’s a way to make your theme present in the meat of the session rather than the periphery of character write-ups and post-battle arguments.
We had a peaceful resolution just a couple of weeks ago. I’m completely fine with it as we would have had to fight several adult wyverns and their babies otherwise. And we each got to take a baby wyvern home with us!
Too bad I’m a bard and can’t figure out a way to make the baby wyvern an animal companion so it’s useful for me.
Monster cohort rules include wyverns:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/rules-for-monsters/monster-cohorts/#:~:text=The%20Leadership%20feat%20allows%20a,appropriate%20number%20of%20class%20levels.
If you’re running a different edition, and can still be useful as inspiration.
I will ask them.
WRT to the pacifist issue, I think this is a variant of the same issue as the necromancer in the party of Big Damn Heroes. Before adding any character to the group, ask yourself “why would this character join this party?” and “why would this party accept this character?” If you don’t have a good answer for both those questions, you probably shouldn’t play that character.*
Now, that’s not to say that a pacifist can’t be a cool character concept. A pure healer who never harms others himself, and maybe even tries to prevent conflicts when possible, that can be a really cool character. He just needs to contribute somehow and not get in the way of the rest of the party.
The Pinocchio issue is, I think, a manifestation of an entirely different problem. This is the same problem as Wizard has, the player who always wants the spotlight to be on his own character’s drama and inner life and such. (I’ve been guilty of that one on occasion, though I’d like to think I’m growing out of it). It’s fine to have the spotlight on your character on occasion, but you need to learn how to share.
* Unless, of course, you’re playing a campaign with an explicit premise along the lines of “a group of characters with wildly incompatible ethics and personalities are forced to work together or die”. In such a case, the characters are explicitly supposed to clash with each other. Some players enjoy that sort of thing.
I think you nailed it with Pinocchio. When you’ve got a bit philosophical question that you trot out constantly, it risks turning into a self-serving spotlight. Kind of makes me wonder if Wizard and WRF would get along, or if they’d just wrestle for the mic?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/diva
I had an interesting variant of this in my 2e mystery not-really-a-oneshot. One of the PCs is a poppet brought to life by the power of Casandalee, the Iron Goddess. They are pretty content with their situation, and while a Witch, they nevertheless strive to spread Casandalee’s gospel of construct-organic harmony. But another PC kept questioning them about this, wondering if Casandalee is really a god (as opposed to a powerful wizard or something) and asking about what makes the poppet different from a regular construct. This generally irritated the poppet in-character, but the two eventually came to an understanding. (“I am more convinced of your personhood now” said the other PC at one point.) That other PC, beyond being the natural contrarian of a Wit Swashbuckler, had a serious grudge against undead, which contributed to his starting suspicions.
I once played a kind of pacifist in a Pathfinder 1e game, though I don’t think anyone really noticed. I was a Strangler Brawler and I didn’t like killing. Then the game turned out to be protecting a pregnant lady from the noble trying to eliminate his bastard. And the party was an crude fighter dwarf, edgy tengu with a shadow spirit, gangly half-elf aberration sorcerer, and rat alchemist seeking immortality so he could explore the whole world. And then we somehow got involved with the undead and demons… I actually only knocked out like two people in the whole game, an oni that was blocking a bridge and eating people and a child necromancer. The oni we turned over to the village he had almost ruined by blocking trade (they stabbed him to death IMMEDIATELY). The other was a catfolk that was being manipulated by a demon that had raised his dead dad, which got possessed by the demon pretending to be his dad, and was trying to sacrifice our ratfolk to try to rez his long dead mom (I was just going to fully summon the demon prince thing). I suplexed that child into unconciousness and we took him back to town where… they were going to execute him but we convinced them to let us take him to the capital to hopefully get some leniency.
My character didn’t like killing but like, practically every enemy we faced was either a baby killing, people eating monster or not really a person. And the rest of the party just killed them all. It probably made her slightly uncomfortable but what can you do?
Actually, in another game I was a merciful Inquisitor of Sarenrae. I actually got a few people to surrender rather than the party murdering the hell out of them (I wasn’t about to tell a group of people that they shouldn’t stab the ones literally trying to kill them). Unfortunately this did not work out well at all. One of the people that “surrendered” snuck off while we were knocking out the one that didn’t, and she came back later to try to kill us again. The other, that we had tied up and kept unconscious *somehow* broke out and escaped completely in the midst of a like, 5 round combat when we were like, 20 feet from where she was. I think the GM just wasn’t ready for me to actually Sarenrae with my Sarenrae character, and it was a module so maybe was because they had no idea what to do with me actually turning this person in.
The Pinocchio, or the only way anyone ever plays a construct. They bitch and moan about being treated as lesser when everyone just ignores what they are. They eat all of the food because “I want to be alive” is their only personality trait.
They’ll say what they were made for and go “But I don’t want to”. Then why the hell did you bring it up? I don’t care what you were made for, I only care what you do now. At least I can get the party to drop the Pacifist if they get annoying. The Warforged sticks around because they were abused by being made.
The only correct way to play a warforged is like Bender. Drinking beer, burping fire, and getting all the robo-babes.
Or, just for fun, like C3PO.
Your jib. I like the cut of it.
Ironically, most people on the fantasy forums that I frequent take more moral umbrage against non-violent solutions, such as [i]charm person[/i] than they do against fighting it out