You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation: Plato
I have some hard rules about player behaviour and they are simple:
- First off, I'm not interested in spending my spare time with people who fantasise about being war criminals. I studied war crimes in university and some of the ugly shit I read will stay with me forever.
- Second up, torture-porn is a strange behaviour people should keep to themselves.
My players are required to be soldiers first and foremost. It is a clear war crime to murder wounded, they simply have to be left to die. It's ugly and brutal but it's a hard rule for a simple reason as written above: once it starts the classification of "mortally wounded" starts to become much larger. In a campaign I ran those executed bodies would be found, the OTK units notified and the Grom Battalion come looking for the criminals and if they find them the survivors handed over to the GRU or the Wojskowa Służba Wewnętrzna (WSW) for trial. Civilians who found out about it on the grapevine would shun the PCs, stragglers would not join the group. Most people understand what a monster is.
People often say "war is brutal" but don't seem to understand what it means. It doesn't mean you will also become brutal, it means you try and maintain your humanity amongst brutality. The rules of warfare are there to stop the troops from becoming quasi-militia with better guns. I frequently shocked that some people intimately aware of those rules immediately discard them in-game, you'd think they'd be exemplars.
As a GM I will allude to atrocities, usually by a rough description and so far my players have not made the cardinal error of assuming that vengeance by atrocity makes them any better. In fact one of the players couldn't bring himself to kill a Vari (Russian mobster who had been slaughtering, raping and mutilating civilians in the Kraków area as the man was unarmed and had surrendered.
We don't actually depict any of the realities of war. We don't depict snipers blowing PC's lungs out or entire groups of players arbitrarily being killed by artillery strikes, neither of which the players can react to. Players don't simply step on mines covered by snow or mud. We give them a choice.
So it comes down to a choice.
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