WWYCS: "Why Shouldn't I Kill Him?"

[Hunter]

Re: WWYCS: "Why Shouldn't I Kill Him?"

 

Hunter: "Because the bounty on him is more for taking him in alive. After I collect, then you can kill him."

[TheRavenIs]

Re: WWYCS: "Why Shouldn't I Kill Him?"

 

 

Bearcat: [sane Wolverine-homage], "Kid, I'll kill in the heat of a fight but not after, as much as you know he's evil," lighting he's cigar, "you are not going to kill him with me here, you try and if I have to I'll kill you if that is the only way I can stop you."

 

Sentinel: [Cosmic Brick], "I don think you're going to do that, if you try you'd better kill me first."

 

Crossfire; [mystic techno-ninja], finds weakness, then KO with stun only attack. Doesn't say a thing.

 

Flame: [sunfire/Human Torch homage]. "Not going to happen, you kill him, I take you in for murder."

 

Snowfall: [female Iceman homage]. "You are a Hero, act like one. We don't kill. You kill him that makes you no better than him."

 

Electric Blue: [KOS-MOS homage]. Point's a small pistol at him, "you do that and I shoot you, this won't kill you but I can promise it will hurt, and I'll keep shooting you with this till you go down, then I send you to the police, and then I will testify against you."

 

Night Warrior: [Dare Devil/Spiderman homage]. Looks at the person, "I can't let you do that, if you want to try then go thru me."

[Zed-F]

Re: WWYCS: "Why Shouldn't I Kill Him?"

 

Sylph: Believes in the sanctity of life, just not very good at expressing herself. She'd wrap the criminal up in a viny entanglement and offer to take him in, expose the corruption that prevents him being prosecuted to UNTIL, and generally try to do the right thing. If the vigilante continues to want to work outside the system rather than to work with the system, she'll entangle him as well and perhaps try to get him some counseling. But she won't hurt him except if necessary for self-defense.

 

Soulbarb is the vigilante in this story. She can directly sense the criminal's evil and murderous soul with her Soulsight, and will immediately be able to tell that he will never reform and will only further endanger innocents as long as he is able to do so. Her standard quote is: "You're going to hell anyway, I'm just making sure it's sooner rather than later."

 

Stipulations #1 and #2 of the scenario setup apply. The difficulty is stipulation #3. Usually Soulbarb runs in gameworlds where the justice system is efficacious. There is no revolving prison door, and criminals who are brought to justice are generally locked away, never to be heard from again. This is part of Soulbarb's unwritten and unspoken social contract with society. So long as the justice system works, Soulbarb is in a bronze-age or steel/diamond-age comic, and brings the criminals in rather than killing them.

 

As soon as the justice system is revealed to be compromised in the game world, the game world is revealed to be an iron age setting... and the body count starts to increase. If Soulbarb feels that she can't rely on the justice system to keep criminals off the streets and away from the innocents they prey upon, she feels no qualms about doing the job herself, permanently. And, subsequently, on focusing her efforts on rooting out and eliminating whatever is causing the corruption and preventing the justice system from doing its job.

 

Soulbarb wants to believe in the justice system, but given evidence to the contrary, she will not hesitate to investigate and act upon what she feels she must to fix it. If the price of that involves murder staining her own soul, she is willing to pay it. She has long since considered herself to be damned, regardless.

[Pariah]

Re: WWYCS: "Why Shouldn't I Kill Him?"

 

Pariah: Killing him is the wrong thing to do. You know it. I know it. And I will not allow you to do it.

 

Thunderstrike: Because you won't want some self-righteous nutcase making the same decision about you one day. Karma can be a b*tch.

Jack Diamond: Kill him? That's the best you can come up with?

[Drhoz]

Re: WWYCS: "Why Shouldn't I Kill Him?"

 

*And if we take a bare-knuckles utilitarian approach to it' date=' that life itself is valuable but killing him is okay because it preserves more lives in the grand scheme of things, we open ourselves to some truly horrible acts - by that reasoning, experimenting on unwilling human patients in the name of medical research is just as, possibly more, acceptable. [/quote']

 

Fine. Perform the medical research on the super-villain instead

 

Vitus has no Code versus Killing - in fact, the continued tendency of his teammates and other superheroes to stop him killing incapacitated murderers such as Gravitar bugs him no end, everytime. In fact, it's one reason he's seriously considering VIPER's offer, who have said they're FINE with him killing anybody he feels a need to.

 

The only time when he worked out something even better than killing the bad guy backfired too. It turned out the Slug was grateful to be turned back into a human, much to Vitus's irritation.

 

In this case, Vitus would try to find a comprimise that would satisfy everyone. "How about breaking his spine in 6 places instead?"

[assault]

Re: WWYCS: "Why Shouldn't I Kill Him?"

 

Fine. Perform the medical research on the super-villain instead

 

Because nothing could go wrong with that...

[Drhoz]

Re: WWYCS: "Why Shouldn't I Kill Him?"

 

Because nothing could go wrong with that...

 

nah.. no chance at all

[Matt Frisbee]

Re: WWYCS: "Why Shouldn't I Kill Him?"

 

Why not kill him now?

 

Because I'm not going to stand by and let you kill him, regardless of your reasoning, and I'm sure the scum will get a laugh out of the idea that a hero had to save his life from another so called hero. The moment we as heroes take the law into our own hands is the moment we lose the trust and confidence of the people and organizations we are trying to protect. When our actions indicate that we have placed ourselves above the law, most people assume that we have placed our goals and motivations above their rights. Justice must be justice for all with due process and the all the rights and procedures that the legal system entails. Sure, mistakes are made and the victims and survivors sometimes feel that they have been treated less fairly than the criminals that victimize them. But in the long run, for the vast majority of cases, the law and legal system is both fair and adequate to the task. What you are proposing is vengeance, not justice, and if you step over that line while I'm around, I will lay down my life in an attempt to stop you from carrying it out -- not because I care about this scumbag, who obviously has some sort of punishment coming, but because I care about the image we as superheroes have to the public and what we represent to them. I will not allow you to cross this line. So you either back off and let the law handle it, or get ready to kill me as well as him. He may not deserve it, but it's not a matter of earning human rights, after all -- he's entitled to his regardless. It's a matter of what's right, and taking life when not absolutely necessary and unavoidable is not right.

 

I've made my decision, so now it's up to you. So what's it going to be? The vigilante route with two dead bodies, or the heroic route where you let justice be done?

 

(Short and sweet -- this sort of moral dilema doesn't crop up in my campaigns because I require heroes to be heroes in my universe.)

 

Matt "Upholding-the-four-color-paradigms" Frisbee

[Amber Nytstar]

Re: WWYCS: "Why Shouldn't I Kill Him?"

 

Luna Moth: "To be honest, sir, I make it a policy not to let someone kill a person if I could possibly prevent it. Besides which would you prefer, my stopping you from killing him, or having this same conversation with the cops after me as they arrest you for his murder?"

*Looks back over her shoulder.*

"You have less than a minute to decide. As for me, I'm outta here." *Dashes off before the vigilante realizes what she just said and/or what vibes he picked up from her.*

 

The Flying Kittens: Trisk, "You're telling three young, impressable kids that the only way you can think of to stop this creep from destroying other innocents is to kill him?"

Blackie, "Impressable, Trisk? Where'd you pick that up from?"

Trisk, "Teacher, talking to some lady about our family. He was worried what effect Dad being a supervillain would have on us."

Midnight, "I suppose this 'creep' might have a family too. How would we feel if someone killed Mom or Dad before we chose to become heroes?"

*Trisk and Blackie think for a moment.*

Trisk, "You're right, Midnight. But this is out of our league. Usually we tangle up the villains at the scene of the crime and let the cops do the rest."

[Drhoz]

Re: WWYCS: "Why Shouldn't I Kill Him?"

 

another compromise. "fine, let him go. From the top of that office block onto his head is good. He'll have a good 15 seconds to learn how to fly"