GM/Player Style: Grey Areas & Red Lines

[Targan]

Everybody who knows anything about my last campaign knows that I don't set many limits. My own personal red line would be if it's too disturbing for me as a GM to continue, I'd just stop.

The player of Major Po is a Doctor of Clinical Psychology. I am only half-joking when I say that in hindsight it felt like he was running an experiment on the playing group.

[wolffhound79]

one of the player reminded me today of a Time they mutilated a body and put heads of pig poles to block a road. the goal was to try and convince anyone coming down the road that it was cannibal territory so people would stay away.

[wolffhound79]

how has anyone roleplayed slavers?

[Raellus]

Originally Posted by wolffhound79

how has anyone roleplayed slavers?

You mean, the PCs were slavers? No. I should hope no one else has either.

I've incorporated them into my campaigns, though. In fact, my players actually ended up helping a town run by slavers to defeat a hostile partisan force led by a Green Beret.

Sandomierz, Poland operates sulfur mines. In my T2Ku, the town was mining the sulfur using slave labor and manufacturing gunpowder, making it a regional power of sorts. The town ORMO was made up of Poles and Red Army deserters. The town's acting mayor was a Polish-speaking ex-Soviet officer. When my players arrived in the Vistula Queen, I gave them all sorts of hints that slavery was practiced in the town (e.g. civilians under armed guard forced to unload the tug, wagon cages full of "prisoners" rolling through town) thinking they would decide to do something about it. To my surprise, they didn't bite. Instead, they agreed to help Sandomierz take on the I.P.A.T. (a partisan force led by an enigmatic Green Beret, the self-styled Hetman of Tarnobrzeg, and the remnants of his A-Team.), based upriver in Tarnobrzeg (the party had already tangled with the I.P.A.T. and decided to finish the job).

EDIT: Looking through the old IC thread (from 2008), I found this- an old priest responding to a question from a PC.

Originally Posted by Twilight Cruise, Ch. 9: Sandomierz

"All men are tyrants in their hearts. The Russian, he is no different. The people of this town are safe and they are grateful. They live in peace and relative prosperity because of the labor of others who are not so fortunate. Human bondage is a sinful practice, to be sure. But the commandant has assured those of us who have raised objections that the laborers are simply serving out a kind of indenture. They are fed, clothed, given shelter; a year of labor in the mines or the fields and they will be given citizenship. We shall see. I visit their camps and they are, on the whole, cared for... adequately. From what I have heard, Tarnobrzeg certainly has no claim to moral high ground. Yet I fear a contest between the two strongmen. This area has been quiet for many months and more death benefits no one but Lucifer. Your group should leave here and be on their way before more blood is shed."

So yeah, much to my dismay, my knowingly players cooperated with slavers.

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[StainlessSteelCynic]

It should be remembered though, that not everyone will have the same thoughts on for example, slavers. While we all generally agree that we want the good guys to be "good", some Players don't get overly invested in the situation because it is, after all, a game and not real life - thus they can safely ignore what they would usually object to.
I like it when my Players get invested in their characters, the game, the story and so on but not every Player wants to do that.

Some don't even realise that they are or are not getting invested and so I don't feel that any particular circumstance where the PCs do something "not so good" is any true indicator of how the Players will act in the future (in game or even in real life).
If a Player constantly takes the bad guy choices, then I'm going to be concerned. But because T2k has many moral grey areas, there are going to be times when the characters have to make a choice between the two evils and sometimes the lesser of the two evils isn't really any less evil. It doesn't make the PCs (or the Players for that matter) bad guys, it just means the choices they had were bad.

[Legbreaker]

Like it or not, slavery is a large part of T2k - the Robotniki of Krakow are the prime example.

There was a saying back when I was in the army - they were only allowed to work you or give orders for 23 hours and 50 minutes per day, anything more than that was slavery. Who's fault was it that the 10 minutes of freedom to do whatever the hell you wanted was inevitably while you were sleeping?

[Raellus]

Originally Posted by Legbreaker

Like it or not, slavery is a large part of T2k - the Robotniki of Krakow are the prime example.

Yes, but that doesn't make it acceptable- especially when the players are in a position to do something about it. I deliberately presented the scenario as a grey area (yes, there's slavery, but it's a one-year thing and they aren't badly mistreated...) hoping that they would make a particular choice (shut it down), but I decided to roll with it when they- much to my suprise- made a different one (not only leave the slaves to their fates, but cooperate with the local authorities in eliminating a neighboring rival). They chose to move on, and I obliged them, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed.

I guess the moral is, if you, as a ref, present a grey area scenario, you must be prepared for your players to make the less ethical choices or it's going to be a very short campaign.

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