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Old 01-15-2021, 11:57 PM
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StainlessSteelCynic StainlessSteelCynic is offline
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I haven't run a lot of military games where the opportunity to put collaborators or traitors into the game has come up.
However, in some horror or conspiracy games, I have had NPCs playing both sides. Not quite double agents, more so individuals seeking to get the most out of two different groups who are pressuring the NPC to work for them.
Most of the time the PCs didn't find out the NPC was doing this and a few other times, the PCs actually never made use of the NPC so it was barely used in the game.
I've also had one NPC who was actually innocent but used by a global corporation in a scheme to root out enemy spies within the corporation. The NPC was accused of stealing sensitive data and therefore of being a traitor to the corporation and the PCs were hired to track her down and kill her.

Remember the PC wanting to kill another PC in the back of a helicopter I mentioned above? That was the game.
The PCs located the traitor and were quite prepared to execute the traitor as ordered by the corporation... until they discovered the traitor was a clueless young woman (I gave the Players very little information, just that the traitor would be wearing certain coloured clothes and be at a specific location at a specific time, gender was never mentioned and none of the Players thought to ask).
The corporation had supplied all the comms gear for the mission so they were able to listen in on everything the PCs said over their radios. They also sent an armed light aircraft to escort the helicopter during the extraction phase because there was a threat of another corporation intervening to headhunt the woman (due to the information it was alleged she was stealing - a ploy by the hiring corporation to uncover any spies their rivals might have planted within the organization, the reason for the entire mission)
However (curveball alert), this aircraft was mistaken by the PCs as a threat and not an escort.

This started the situation where one PC decided they had to kill the woman or they would be shot down and the other PC said "it ain't right so we are not killing an innocent woman". He presumed she was innocent, a lucky guess on his part because she was in fact innocent, a pawn in a much larger game.
Then the pistol was drawn and the Player informed me of his intentions to kill the other PC and then kill the woman.
The other PCs became aware of the situation in short order and more weapons were drawn but against the PC threatening to kill the woman.

Ultimately it would not matter if the PCs killed the woman or not and they choose to refuse the kill order (except for one PC obviously). They were not punished for refusing the order and instead paid off and told to say nothing or face legal action. In fact some of them insisted on knowing what her fate would be and even with assurances from the CEO of the corp. they were still not prepared to trust the corp.
Lots of grey areas for the Players to negotiate, lots of situations for trust and mistrust.
My idea was that the real evil was the corporations, organizations who viewed even their own employees as fodder for their goals.

But back on topic... I think collaborators and traitors are another item in the GM toolbox, another way to create moral, ethical grey areas. Was the person collaborating because they were forced to? Were they simply trying to survive a bad situation? Were they actually oblivious to the consequences of their actions (this particularly applied to young people, even those into their 20s, they don't necessarily have the foresight to see what consequences their actions will have in the future).
Was the traitor just a selfish individual motivated by self-gain? Was the traitor blackmailed into that course of action?
Again, lots of ways to use these types of NPCs that take the situation from clear cut into murky.

And if you have a Player you can rely on to role play it, having a double agent, collaborator or traitor PC can make for some interesting game sessions. I think this is one of the times when you can afford to let the metagame come into the session, that is to say, regardless of what happens to the bad guy PC in the end, the Player gets rewarded for good role playing. Maybe that means letting them have some minor benefit for their next PC, maybe it means letting their bad guy PC escape punishment for the short term, maybe it means letting the PC live on as a bad guy NPC for the PCs to encounter later or maybe it means letting the PC decide how their bad guy NPC leaves the game (retires, murdered, suicide, imprisoned etc. etc.)

So to try and form some sort of conclusion out of all my rambling, what I am saying is that yes, I like to include moral dilemmas and ethical quandaries for the PCs and I like to let the Players have the agency to make those decisions. However the full weight of consequence hangs over them if they deliberately choose to do a bad/malicious/evil thing. Sometimes circumstances force good people to do things they would rather not do, I don't want to punish Players for that because I as GM put their PCs into that situation in the first place, specifically to cause them that dilemma.
Do you let a traitor live because he was blackmailed into becoming a traitor? What if leaving him alive will cause the injury or death of innocent people?
Do the PCs ignore a job they don't particularly feel comfortable with or do they let some group of lowlifes take the job with the chance that the lowlifes will harm a lot of innocent people?
I tend to think these situations will never have a completely right or completely wrong answer and so they are good tools for the GM to make Players think about the actions of their PCs.


And again! Another 5000 word essay from me
Okay, that's an exaggeration... but only a little one
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