Why Your Heroes Shouldn't Kill

[esampson]

Re: Why Your Heroes Shouldn't Kill

 

Watchmen was a great work because it illustrated what could be done by breaking free of the old formulas.

 

The people who tried to use it to form new formulas completely missed the point.

[baronspam]

Re: Why Your Heroes Shouldn't Kill

 

It really depends on what sub-genre you are playing. In some games killing will be rare, if not unknown. In others characters may leave a trail of bodies behind them. This is the sort of thing you need to discuss at the start of the campaign, and make sure players understand what the campaign expectations are. Are the characters operating in cooperation with authorities, or are they vigilantes? Are you a two gun masked avenger that has a .45 caliber answer to crime or are you a guy in spandex who lives in a mansion and answers "distress calls"? Are the characters defenders of the status quo or are they trying to shake up society? In one game the characters would be expected not to use deadly force unless there were extreme circumstances. In others, it might be surprising if they didn't. The trick is to have everyone on the same page as to what the unwritten rules of the setting are.

[Chuckg]

Re: Why Your Heroes Shouldn't Kill

 

Belated entry into this thread...

 

The problem with executing him no matter how cathartic is that how to do we KNOW that he did what he was accused of?

Well, the part where he openly admitted to doing it, for one. (Note: That wasn't his first statement on the topic, just his most explicit.)

 

He was never put on trial, we the American People never saw the evidence of his guilt. I would have loved to see all of the evidence come out in trial with good attorneys arguing both sides of the case.

You will never see that happen with terrorists of bin Laden's stripe, for the simple reason that it would require disclosing in open court not only exactly what evidence we had, but who gathered it when and where. Remember, you can't use hearsay in court; you have to link every bit of eyewitness testimony to an actual name, and every bit of forensic evidence to a fully-documented chain of evidence all the way back to the technicians who originally gathered it.

 

Which in this case would mean publicly revealing the identities of undercover CIA officers and other intelligence sources in the field.

 

Which is itself way, way illegal.

 

So yeah, until and unless the legal system is rewired so that we wouldn't have to give a copy of the full roster of CIA informants in or near Al Qaeda to bin Laden's lawyer, which would require repealing the disclosure rule, which would itself be a horribly bad idea... you ain't gonna see Al Qaeda leaders in civilian court.

 

(And now you know where the promised 'civilian trial' of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed went. It went straight into the memory hole as soon as the Justice Department was finally able to explain to the White House that 'no, there's really no way we can do this without either him walking free or violating our own intelligence agents wholesale'.)

 

There's plenty of damning Video of him bragging to his followers, beyond those I would love to see the evidence. Before we go out and kill someone it would be nice if we used our laws(or at least international law) to prosecute the target in public court first.

 

Again, it wasn't war. We don't wage war on individuals.

We do, however, wage war on organizations, even non-state ones. The precedent for that goes all the way back to the Barbary Pirates. And as the leader of the organization we were at war with, well, that's what fingered him.

 

Notice that, having killed Osama, we didn't then just stop and go home. We're still out there trying to find and kill his replacement. Hell, we went through, what, four? five? second-in-commands of Al Qaeda on our way to finding bin Laden? That job had the life expectancy of a Spinal Tap drummer for a reason.

 

So, yeah, it wasn't just 'an individual' we were after. He was the first item on a long, long checklist of names. And so it will continue until Al Qaeda, the enemy we are at war with, either surrenders or ceases to be... just like any other war.

 

tldr; To quote Tom Clancy, "You can be a policeman or a soldier, but not both." War and criminal justice are two different things that will never be the same, and never even really overlap.

 

This is not the same thing as saying that war is always unjust or unnecessary. It's just saying that you can't try to treat the one like the other, not without setting yourself up to fail horribly at both.

 

Edit: Oh, and both the war in Iraq and the one in Afghanistan were in fact legally declared wars, as per US law (specifically as per the War Powers Act of 1972). Protip: Anytime Congress passes a resolution authorizing the President to use military force anywhere, that qualifies as a 'declaration of war' for legal purposes. The words 'Declaration of War' do not actually have to appear at the top in explicit language, 'Authorization For The Use of Military Force' or etc. is accepted as a legal synonym. And yes, they took that argument to the Supreme Court (in Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, 2006, to be precise), and the Supreme Court came back with just what I said here.

[Chuckg]

Re: Why Your Heroes Shouldn't Kill

 

Now, having posted that, I move on to discussing the lethal force topic as in the superhero games I have played in and DM'ed...

 

Hokay, first up, none of my players has ever taken a CvK past 'moderate', if that high. Many of them stick with the 0-point 'Reluctant to Kill'... and a few have gone all the way down to borderline Dark Champions. This is because the Silver Age 20-point CvKs only work in a Silver Age world where narrative causality chooses to reward your total non-lethalness by giving you villains that never actually manage a successful massacre of innocents. The bomb will always be defused, the nerve gas will always be blown out to sea by a lucky wind, etc, etc. Because, yes, if villains are always going to escape jail (and they are; DMs most often take the same solution to a finite supply of supervillainy that comic book companies do, i.e., recycling), then its just not fair to continually drown your players in bloodsoaked massacre after bloodsoaked massacre while they fight with STUN Only as a mandate. For those us who know Final Fantasy X, Yuna's speech to Yunalesca when the lie behind the Calm was revealed? That's what I'm saying, right there. If you keep asking heroes to die, and hordes of innocents to die, for nothing more than a temporary respite to a problem that will inevitably recur because the only action capable of permanently solving it is one you are refusing to take, then you're asking too much.

 

Or in summary; 20-point CvKs only work in a world where the genre conventions are unrealistic enough to support them.

 

Now, flipping over to the other opposite extreme, notably, killing a dude judge, jury, and executioner style...

 

Again, no. My players don't usually go here, either, and neither do I. Who wants to live in Mega-City One? You can't give infinite second chances to murderers, but neither can you just go around going 'An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of legalities!' *blam blam blam* One of the most important sociological advancements in the history of our climb from barbarism to something approximating civilization was the idea that you actually needed a reason to kill someone that would be given to you by someone or something else, as opposed to being justified just by your personal desire or your personal grudge list. This was hardly the only mental leap required to create modern civilization, no, but it was the first step... and its still a necessary foundation.

 

So yes, fighting might be necessary, killing might be necessary, war might be necessary... and because they are necessary then they should be done, even though they are unpleasant and sometimes ugly. But 'I need to do this' should never become 'I want to do this', let alone 'This should be my first option, all the time! It solves everything!'

 

tldr; Superheroes I have both run games for and played tended to act like policemen the vast majority of the time (lethal force as a last resort and only to stop an immediate threat to human life a lesser level of force would not stop in time), and soldiers in the (very) few situations where the situation had gone so far into the 'aw shit!' zone that it had become warfighting instead of peacetime law enforcement.

 

In conclusion, I leave you with this quote from a John C. Wright novel, and a follow-up quote from the Two Towers movie;

 

"Come now, Marshal! What you ask of me is unreasonable!"

 

"War is unreasonable. If it were reasonable, it would be called 'peace'."

 

"I will not risk open war."

 

"Open war is upon you, whether you risk it or not!"

 

Both of these statements are simultaneously true. And this is why you can neither be 100% in favor of killin' all the time, or 100% against killin' all the time... because unless the DM is writing his storyline with a set of genre tropes that are unrealistically flat, the situation will never be one-dimensional enough for a total 'for' or 'against' to always be the right answer.

[Tom Carman]

Re: Why Your Heroes Shouldn't Kill

 

Now, flipping over to the other opposite extreme, notably, killing a dude judge, jury, and executioner style...

 

Again, no. My players don't usually go here, either, and neither do I. Who wants to live in Mega-City One? You can't give infinite second chances to murderers, but neither can you just go around going 'An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of legalities!' *blam blam blam*

 

Bad as he was, I much prefer Judge Dredd to Judge Death: "All crimes are committed by living beings, therefore..."

[Altheus]

Re: Why Your Heroes Shouldn't Kill

 

Interestingly, Mega City One doesn't have the death penalty - Life is the penalty for first degree murder "You're taking the big ride!"

 

Of course it does sort of have the death penalty for Gross Stupidity in a Built Up Area i.e. thinking that taking pot-shots at Dredd is a good idea.

[Nuclear Fridge]

Re: Why Your Heroes Shouldn't Kill

 

Interestingly, Mega City One doesn't have the death penalty - Life is the penalty for first degree murder "You're taking the big ride!"

 

Of course it does sort of have the death penalty for Gross Stupidity in a Built Up Area i.e. thinking that taking pot-shots at Dredd is a good idea.

 

This is known, in some areas, as committing "suicide by Judge". In that, if you're foolish enough to open fire on the likes of Dredd, you really ought not to be surprised at what he does next...

[TheQuestionMan]

Re: Why Your Heroes Shouldn't Kill

 

Heroes shouldn't Murder is a more clear question/statement, but I said that already.

 

Oops!

 

QM