One single question:
Is it human in the eyes of the council?
Yes makes killing it a No-No.
No makes it acceptable.
That's really all there is to it. Were-People like Billy are nothing more but "Wizards" able to cast one single transformation spell.
Hence human, hence NoNo.
Pure mortals only... no, because if so, why would harry have been made a 1st lawbreaker for killing Justin.
Well, it's really difficult to know when you can use lethal magic... sucks eh? :P
Well, unfortunately at this point, the err... Point gets a little muddled... Billy and the Alphas are a definate no on the kill list, but thats already been mentioned...
But maybe... And I don't know, I COULD be going outa the water on this.. Maybe, while the White Council may not bat an eyelash at killing most White Court Vampires, you also wouldn't have to normally worry about the lawbreaker stunt... But if you were to kill someone like Thomas, who has a positive refresh, and attempts to keep a hold on his hunger, THAT would be breaking the First Law.. The Council may not do anything about it, but you might still walk away from the encounter with a Lawbreaker Stunt...
Maybe it could follow along the idea, that if a "creature" that could be considered fairly alien still has a positive refresh, it may fall under lawbreaker territory?
Unfortunately the only way to be safe on this is to sit down with your st and figure out how they interpret lawbreaker. Due to Mr. Hicks dislike of universal consolidated rules they where written in a very nebulous manner meaning that you will find a different interpretation every time you play the game.
I suppose if it comes up I can ask at the table.
id actually suggest that you talk to the gm before hand. its not the kind of thing you want to be surprised by.
Well, I partially want to get a community consensus because I may be stepping in and GMing if/when our GM wants to play a character.
Plus, since everyone in my group is new to this system and I have read the book 6 times and lurked in these forums so often, I've kind of found a niche as the "rules guy".
While the GM gets final say, the sheer expedient that I've spent so much time trying to understand the rules and I don't play favorites (even with myself) means that my opinion is at least listened to.
That's actually why I post so often of late. I'm trying to understand the community's agreement on everything - not just the things that affect my character.
Yeah, even if people are free to come to their own conclusions I agree that I do like finding the community's consensus on these topics which I think are the most interesting. My personal favorite interpretation is that Harry did get a +1 to the bonus from lawbreaker and thatIt's more interesting to me to think that you gain lawbreaker when you kill anything that has a soul and that the White Council simply hasn't realized that wampires count since they've never engaged them in large scale combat (and they tend to take the traditional view that monsters are bad).(click to show/hide)
Alternatively the ensouled and positive refresh is an ok idea but it fails when you consider that most warlocks probably would have gone into negative refresh based on how lawbreaker works. I find it hard to believe though that wardens (or ancient wizards for that matter) wouldn't eventually notice that there were no metaphysical consequences for using magic against warlocks.
For the purposes of the RPG, it would be pretty crappy if PC defended themselves from a White Court Vampire (notice the "vampire" in the name) and lost a point of refresh from it, effectively making them lose their character for most wizards. Sad
I tend to agree with Bruce on the interpretation of "What is human" with the singular exception that I believe that all Whampires at least have the potentiality for a soul (Thomas' soulgaze would imply as much), and therefore the law may apply.
As for lawbreaker bear, you really shouldn't be worried about it. There should be no situation that should give you the lawbreaker power without your say so. Either you will find a situation that you deem justified to twist your character, or you'll describe whatever other outcome to take someone out. Any GM that is holding that over someone or who surprises anyone with it is just being vindictive and needs to rethink their priorities as a GM.
Killing with magic against Denarians is ok.
Not arguing with this (cause the novels seem fairly clear) but it just seems really weird to me. Technically you aren't harming the possessing entity at any point. Even if the host dies the Denarian will be fine. So it seems to that you're totally killing the mortal part of the equation...
The Denarian thing is *very* weird.
Two ways I can see to look at it:
1) in borderline cases it depends on the wizard's belief. Killing with magic is tainting at least partially because it makes you, deeply, the kind of person who *would* kill another person. So if you're thinking of the Denarian, loup-garou, White Court vampire as a monster, there's some insulation. But wizards aren't going to think of other wizards as less human, so they are just as tainting to kill as ordinary mortals. In this view, if the wizard knew the were-creature was a human practitioner, it would count as human, but if they just killed a werewolf that jumped them in wolf-form, it might well not.
2) Wizards & other practitioners are 'more human' than White Court vampires, Denarians, other humans-with-magic. Unlike the others, there's no sharp line between wizard and mundane -- it seems that magic is a pretty common human ability in the DV, so weak it's irrelevant in most people, quite a few people have a touch of talent that can be more if trained, a few have serious sorcerer talents, and one in a million are Council-level. But even the strongest wizards are just an exceptional form of a trait already inherent in humanity at some level; wizards aren't a 'supernatural race'. In this case, the human-practitioner kind of werewolf that the Alphas are would count as human. [Hexenwolves might theoretically be like Denarians, at least while in beast form... not sure about them.
The second seems closer to the feel I get from the books, personally...
See... that doesn't make any sense because the Laws have nothing to do with morality.
I cannot help but think that if there /were/ a solid line in the sand drawn between things that are killable and things that aren't, all wizards including Harry would know of it.
As for whether the council comes after you, I think that has to do more with whether a wizard killed "one of us" or not. It seems like the Council is pretty xenophobic. Anything not human is not a person and a-ok to kill
The Council's position about one-strike warlocks like Harry after Justin or Molly in PG is a lot shakier than their position toward nonhuman intelligences. If anything, given that they seem to claim some sort of protection of humanity, and given the levels of supernatural predation Harry suggests in DB, they're arguably not hitting the ghouls and vampiresand such as hard as they should be -- I've argued for a while that if they really *believed* their protecting-humanity rhetoric rather than just used it as an excuse for why the survival of the Council in its current form is absolutely necessary, they'd be a lot more proactive against supernatural predators. Given the situation we see in WN, where a pretty major operation *actually aimed at the WC itself long-term* would probably have been missed by 'normal' (=Not Harry) White Council Wardens till too late... I'm not convinced they provide any meaningful protection against them at all. So Listens-to-Wind's idea that the fall of the Council would mean humanity taken over by predators seems a bit questionable in light of this and his Senior Council position. (And if we're really to accept potentially tens to hundreds of thousands of deaths *per year* from supernatural predators in the US alone, in what sense are they not --already-- taken over? How many supernatural predators *are* there anyway?)(click to show/hide)
I'm not talking about morality, I'm talking about belief shaping how your magic works... I don't think WCVs inherently 'count', but if you *believe* they do the effect on your soul via killing them with magic might be the same.
By the rules accidental killing counts (that's what it recommends, generally speaking*). Killing non-humans like Fae on purpose doesn't seem to count even if you consider them close enough to people. So personally I think an explanation that goes belief makes the most sense.
*They seem to make an exception for Harry.