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The Dresden Files => DFRPG => Topic started by: LCDarkwood on March 15, 2011, 11:19:44 PM
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So, very few things are less interesting to me than determining when a Law of Magic is "officially" broken. Your Story, page 284, end of commentary.
What is interesting to me is the stuff the game will do when it comes up in play. So let's talk practical and leave the fictional lawyering for others.
A Word on Killing
Consider that the game rules do not, in fact, allow for an accidental or emergent result that kills someone.
The only way you can kill someone is to take them out in a conflict and then declare you killed them. As the player who wins the conflict, you absolutely can always declare that when you throw magic at a mortal or off-limits being, that you put them in the hospital, knock them out long enough for you to achieve your goals, etc. If you're going to kill someone, it's a willful player choice to put that drama into the game.
(Though, theoretically, the GM could also propose it as a compel if you have "Anger Management Problems" or whatever as an aspect. Or, someone could take you out in a mental conflict and declare that you lose your shit and roast a guy. Whatever. The point is, the dice are never going to tell you that you killed someone. Someone at the table is choosing to bring it into play.)
So whenever you're talking about a First Law violation in your game, keep in mind that there's going to have to be, by default, some sort of consensus about crossing that line.
To Power or Not to Power
At the end of the day, a Lawbreaker power is the same as the rest in one key area - all that matters is that you can somehow justify bringing it into play.
When you're figuring out how to make that decision, I'd like to suggest that the least important question you should be asking is whether it's a fact or not that the law was broken. Instead, you should ask yourself if the impact on that character makes things more interesting or less interesting, and how.
Consider the case of Joe Wizard, who blasts a guy in a fight that's about to shoot his friend and takes a compel to say he killed that guy. He takes the stunt and shifts an aspect to "I Do What Is Necessary", which becomes the justification for more killing.
Late in this storyline, some scenarios down the road, we find out the dude he axed was actually a White Court vampire flunkie working for a more powerful boss.
Does that make the process of corruption suddenly invalid? Do we rewind everything?
Hell no! The Dark Powers are always willing to help. If I've convinced myself I have a conduit to killing magic, why would they argue with me? Magic is belief. The line between "the universe is corrupting my soul" and "I believe my soul is corrupt" is super, super thin.
So regardless of the initiating circumstances, there's something to be said for taking on the power anyway - it provides a tangible benefit to using that kind of magic again, which puts a new set of choices in front of the player every time he takes his stuff out for a spin. It puts a temptation out there for a free benefit if you're just willing to declare your magic inherently, unremittingly lethal.
Keep in mind, too, that there's nothing technically stopping you from spending one of your actual milestones on a Lawbreaker power, if you later decide that an "edge case" incident counts as a Lawbreaking as far as your character is concerned.
Aspects Work By Themselves Too
Understandably, though, this isn't always the effect you're going for. Sometimes, maybe you just want to give Joe Wizard something to think about or reflect on, an attitude adjustment, personal reflection, etc. Maybe the point is that he *almost* went over and is pushing at the boundaries of Lawbreaking with an edge case.
Every session gives you the opportunity to rename an aspect. If you want this in your game, all you have to do is change up an aspect to reflect it. Anything that happens in the story of the game can be given tangible weight by reflecting how it affects the character through renaming aspects.
This is a good option to take if, for some reason, there is serious disagreement about whether the violation is "real", but you want it to have an in-game effect anyway. So if you can't reach the consensus that says, "this is a Lawbreaking", your character can still go through "Loss of Faith in My Magic" or "Overcautious About Battle Magic" or whatever you want.
Of course, I think you get the best mileage with the Lawbreaker power *and* a changed aspect, but that's just me.
Corruption Isn't Always About Evil
We have a tendency to look at the Laws as things that turn ordinary, nice wizards into MFing Kemmler. So, it's understandable that some players are going to have an issue with the idea of being a Lawbreaker, because they don't really want their character to be an Evil Jackass.
But all we really know, as a baseline, is that breaking the Laws fundamentally changes you somehow. There's a lot of room to decide how you're going to express that change. That's why you don't have to, if you don't want to, worry about intent too much - good intentions can cause corruption just as much as bad ones.
Let's look at another Joe Wizard. This is a young dude, just getting started, who fries a mugger in self-defense because he's afraid. First Law violation, period dot.
But what if we decide the aspect is "Crippling, Massive Guilt"? 'Cause clearly, Joe's not a bad guy, right? No one expects he's going to go from magical self-defense to setting kittens on fire just to listen to them shriek.
However, what could happen is that his guilt keeps him from using his magic, even when its arguably necessary. Even when it could help people and prevent harm. Even when an innocent is being held up by the throat by a loup-garou, and he could save that person, but God, what if something goes wrong? What if he misses? What if he kills another innocent? Better that they die by the loup-garou's hand than his, right? Better he doesn't have it on his conscience, right?
And soon, this Joe Wizard finds himself utterly incapable of risk and sacrifice. His decisions become inherently selfish, all centered around keeping him, at all costs, from having to deal with that guilt again.
How is that not a kind of corruption?
So, keep in mind that you don't have to characterize this process as a descent into blistering, making-soup-with-babies sadism. Anything that people can feel can be taken too far and become destructive.
The World Doesn't Know the Difference
In terms of what happens outside the character, regardless of whether you express the incident with a Lawbreaker power, an aspect, or both, keep in mind that people in the setting are going to draw their own conclusions.
I mean, Morgan came after Harry in Storm Front for a crime he didn't even commit, and then came after him again for investigating it because of how much of a hard case Morgan is about the Laws.
The White Council doesn't have some mystical way of knowing with 100% certainty who broke the Laws and who didn't. And like any other organization, they turn a blind eye toward Lawbreaking they deem necessary to achieve their goals (see the Blackstaff).
So, whether you choose to take the power, change an aspect, both, or neither, it doesn't say anything about what's going to happen in the story relative to the incident in question. You could all agree that no Lawbreaking took place, make no changes to the character, and the White Council might still come down on you because some Warden heard you broke the Law and gets zealous.
You could take the power and an "All Kittens Must Die" aspect, and have everyone else in the setting think you were totally justified and totally off the hook. And any combination of things between these extremes. Maybe that's what's actually the interesting part about the situation - not what happens to the character, but in the world around the character.
In Sum
Whether or not the Law was broken is the most boring thing to dwell on - either you reach consensus quickly or you don't. From there, move on to what's interesting. Where the drama lies in the situation, whether for your character or the setting or both, should be your guide to playing with the Laws using any or all of the options above. Have a guy take a Lawbreaker power when everyone else thinks it was cool. Have the world tell a character he's evil and broke a Law when his sheet doesn't change. Play with the middle ground and all of its awesome potential.
And don't worry about the so-called facts.
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Forgive me from popping in to quibble but...
If the damage exceeds the character’s stress track, or occupied boxes “push” the stress off the right side of the stress track, the character is taken out, meaning the character has decisively lost the conflict. His fate is in the hands of the opponent, who may decide how the character loses. The outcome must remain within the realm of reason—very few people truly die from shame, so having someone die as a result of a duel of wits is unlikely, but having him embarrass himself and flee in disgrace is not unreasonable.
The bolded part cuts both ways. While its inappropriate to have somebody flee from a duel of wits by flapping their arms and screaming like a lunatic, you can have them embarras themselves leaving it up to the person running the character to react in a way appropriate to the character.
However, it also means that you cant (without GM intervention) just say that the weapon 10 evocation you hit the group of mortal gangbangers with left them all miraculously alive. Thats not really within the realm of reason, considering that a weapon 4 attack is a grenade (which granted, people have survived), I cant really think of something that would constitute a weapon 10 attack.
My point is you can "be forced to kill" if survival is not within the realm of reason.
Otherwise I find your post to be very interesting.
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My point is you can "be forced to kill" if survival is not within the realm of reason.
As decided by the group as a whole, with the continued enjoyment of the game for all involved being the primary concern.
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My point is you can "be forced to kill" if survival is not within the realm of reason.
I feel you. Everything is negotiation, sure. I'd be careful with your line of reasoning about the raw numbers, though. I mean, I could theoretically get 12 shifts on an attack where I punch you in the face, if I invoke/tag enough aspects. Does that make it the force-equivalent of a 12-shift evocation in the fiction? Probably not.
Interpreting that can be tough sometimes, because all a point of stress really measures is progress toward winning a conflict. It's not a statement about physics in any literal sense. You could lay me out with a three-shift Fists roll, if I only have two stress boxes on my track. I can also take 20 shifts worth of consequences (all four levels including Extreme) and choose to stay in the fight in the face of a fireball to the nose.
That said, of course it's totally fair to call ninja bullshit on a player who's all like, "Woo! 12-shift gravity hammer, eat it!" and then backtracks and goes, "Uh, but I totally pulled it enough not to kill them. Honest." You just have to judge the situation on the ground and use your people skills. No set of rules can substitute for that.
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I was talking about pure weapon rating as opposed to the roll for accuracy on an attack. Sure you can invoke your accuracy up to 12 but you'd still be swinging weapon: 0 dukes (barring claws or inhuman strength or greater, some stunts like lethal weapon or berserker). I'm talking literally about hitting somebody with the equivalent of 2 and a half grenades in the face. :)
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A character gets hit by an attack from a 'Mac truck', causing him to get Taken Out. A Mac truck is about weapon 5, significantly above a hand grenade in the non-linear scale of weapon ratings in DFRPG.
Does this mean that he was actually hi by the Mac truck? Run over? Turned into 'street pizza'?
Not necessarily.
The result could, for instance, be narrated as forcing the character to dive wildly and desperately out of the path of the truck, down the steep, but not quite sheer, cliff at the side of the mountain road, inflicting dozens of abrasions, contusions, and other individually minor injuries, along with perhaps a few bruised and broken ribs, and a fractured leg.
The character will quite reasonably survive, assuming that he is delivered to a medical facility in reasonable order, after suffering a Taken Out result from a weapon:5 attack. He'll need that medical attention, and quite possibly could end up in a hospital bed for the next few weeks, but he survived.
And there's no reason why similar lines of story logic could not be used to explain the results of a weapon:20 evocation attack from Blasty McBlastypants, the Blasty-Happy Sorceror of Legend.
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All Im saying is that in some situations it makes more sense for there to be a death than to give some wildly implausible reason for survival.
Say there is a group of 4 thugs in a parking lot which is 9 zones big (a square split into 9 pieces). They are all in the center zone, the area is completely empty and consists entirely of flat pavement. A weapon 10 effect hits every zone, tell me how they survive?
I know its a situation pretty much setup to make the only plausible outcome death, but thats sort of the point.
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Tell me what that 'weapon:10' effect is.
Is that a weapon:10 spell designed specifically to put people into a deep and dreamless sleep?
They're asleep. And will be for quite a some time. Maybe it'd be better described as a shallow coma. They might need some medical attention in the form of long-term minor life support (fluid and nutrient intake is going to be an issue for someone who's asleep for weeks or months). But, barring that, they'll live.
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I'm talking literally about hitting somebody with the equivalent of 2 and a half grenades in the face. :)
(Contextual note: I agree with you that sometimes, the nature of the attack leads to only one logical, lethal conclusion for Taken Out. I'm giving myself permission to float onto another topic because I find it fascinating. So, uh, don't assume that anything I say below is anything but what it is.)
Actually, after the defense roll is accounted for (presuming you hit, of course), you're not really talking literally about anything of the sort. A shift is a shift is a shift.
So if you have a Weapon:10 bazooka, and you roll a Great, and the defense is Fair, you inflict a 12-stress hit.
If you have Weapon:0 fists, roll a Legendary, invoke three aspects, and the defense is Fair, you inflict a 12-stress hit.
In game terms, those two results have equivalent meaning. But like I said, no one would suggest in the fiction that a 12-shift Fists punch is the force-equivalent of a 12-shift hit where you got most of your shifts from a bazooka's Weapon rating.
For a normal guy, you're still looking at taking a Moderate and Severe consequence if you want to stay in the fight. The bazooka gets no inherent privilege of effect in this case - the fact that it's a bazooka just means that your consequences are going to be "Burned to Hell" and "My Gut Has Shrapnel In It" vs. "Major Head Injury" and "Bruised Ribs".
Fate has a kind of schizophrenia about it at times, because it can often "feel" more simulative than it really is - the only thing it's trying to simulate is narrative logic. The mechanics only really represent things that are highly abstract, but those abstractions are bound in by the concerns of the fiction we're creating at the table.
So we have things like Weapon ratings, which gets bigger, ostensibly, as the weapon gets "nastier". We have them because the fiction suggests that we should pay attention to that.
But high Weapon ratings don't necessarily mean a weapon is more lethal - in game terms, all it means is that you're more likely to get a bigger result without having to invoke aspects. It doesn't magically make it more likely that a certain weapon will kill over another, because as I said in the OP, no dice result equals a killing strike automatically.
And that's intentional, because it keeps fictional interpretation where I think it should be, in the hands of the individual group. I'm okay with a game where we decide that a 12-shift knife stab kills you, but a 12-shift bazooka hit explodes nearby and tosses you about so hard that you end up shattered in the hospital, but survive. And I'm okay if we decide later in that same game to make a bazooka hit kill someone and a knife stab put them in the hospital.
For some folks, the fact that you can only situationally associate one set of constraints with the other is a bug. For some, and for me, it's a feature. So it goes.
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Well my point in using weapon rating over accuracy is more that, you can pull a punch, its hard to argue that you "pulled" the explosives in the warhead making them less lethal.
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Then again, it's a lot easier to 'miss' with a 'bazooka' and still inflict meaningful harm than it is with your fist.
Just because the dice say that you 'hit' doesn't mean they actually took a rocket propelled grenade to the face. It could easily have hit a few meters to the side, hitting them only by way of debris and shrapnel, which is very easy to justify as being highly variable in effect, and thus not necessarily lethal.
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Ultimately, DFRPG is not intended as a First-Person Shooter (I love First-Person Shooters, myself - especially Thug Simulators). It is designed to tell a story (which most FPS' are terrible at doing), so a lot of the mechanisms which appear to be about causing damage are actually about balancing and resolving story elements, as part of a shared narrative. It isn't HERO system, where you have regular attacks and Killing Attacks.
We even have Evil Hat's lead developer telling us that Weapon damage and damage shifts are intended to be abstract measures of plot effect, and they can be as "mortal" or not as is called for in the shared fiction each group is creating at their own game tables.
So, if the shared narrative at a particular gaming table is that anything above Weapon:3 is a killing blow, with commensurate consequences for indiscriminate use, then go for it, and have a great time!
But it isn't an oversight on the part of the game creators: it has been explained as a deliberate choice. One we are free to houserule, of course.
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All Im saying is that in some situations it makes more sense for there to be a death than to give some wildly implausible reason for survival.
Thought I'd chime in here. I can agree with this a bit. However there is never, ever a situation where it's ok to destroy another player's fiction without their consent. Forcing a lawbreaker on someone can do that. That kind of thing can destroy the trust at the table and can separate long time friends. If you're playing a game where everyone agreed to this rule before hand then maybe it could be ok, but that still doesn't perfectly justify it. Perhaps they agreed without thinking about the consequences. People do that. Doesn't mean that they want their character destroyed from their perspective.
That said, of course it's totally fair to call ninja bullshit on a player who's all like, "Woo! 12-shift gravity hammer, eat it!" and then backtracks and goes, "Uh, but I totally pulled it enough not to kill them. Honest." You just have to judge the situation on the ground and use your people skills. No set of rules can substitute for that.
Emphasis added. Gming is all about knowing your players, knowing what they want and telling a story that everyone enjoys. If forcing a lawbreaker power on someone is going to be good for the story and for all the players then by all means, though it may come up on it's own if that's the case. Otherwise you might want to relax a bit and just let the fiction be what it is.
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That 12-shift Attack spell could be any number of things, and it's not unreasonable, even with something like a blast of fire, to go with a Taken Out condition like "Badly burned and unconscious." It might seem like playing the system a bit- but if someone seems to be rather less than appropriately careful than they should be, you can always Compel...
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Though, theoretically, the GM could also propose it as a compel if you have "Anger Management Problems" or whatever as an aspect.
This feels like a mean thing to do.
Yes, Aspects should lead to interesting and fun drama. Compels should lead to dramatic things, things that could be very, very bad to characters.
But this is different from most compels.
Wizardly characters tend to skirt the edge of NPC-dom as far as Refresh in a lot of cases. In the face of a compel like that, a player cannot do anything but resist, if he wishes to continue playing his character.
Or in other words, compels should lead to bad things happening to the character, not to the player. To me, this kind of compel would feel more or less like 'rocks fall and you die unless you spend a FP to resist'. You certainly can have(and should) have anger influencing a character's magic, but not to the point where you compel him to use black magic.
It's sort of like the difference between compelling a RCI to feed vs. compelling him to kill. The first is valid and can lead to all sorts of interesting drama. The second is forces you to either surrender FPs or, well, lose the character.
Anyhow, just my 2 cents, I simply don't think this should be in semi-official gameplay advice.
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My opinion is that GM's shouldn't compel players out of the game, so if a GM compel someone to break the laws he should be willing to run with a lawbreaker and possibly go as far as to accept fate point debt if they are on 1 refresh.
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That said, of course it's totally fair to call ninja bullshit on a player who's all like, "Woo! 12-shift gravity hammer, eat it!" and then backtracks and goes, "Uh, but I totally pulled it enough not to kill them. Honest." You just have to judge the situation on the ground and use your people skills. No set of rules can substitute for that.
Eh, I don't think that's totally fair at all. What are you objecting to there? Is it the 12 shifts? You seem to have said that's ok. Is it the fact the PLAYER visibly enjoyed doing a big attack? Well, that's really kind of a jerk move to say "[haha] you enjoyed that too much, so the guy is dead." Players are allowed to enjoy doing big moves. They should also be allowed to make hyperboles about their big move and say things like "I'm gonna kill/slaughter/destroy you/him/whatever" without being forced to actually do it. Heck, they should be allowed to say something now and then and then say they didn't mean it like that later.
Frankly, in all this, if a player doesn't want to kill someone, you should be working with them to help that happen. If they do a 12 shift gravity attack, well, it is easy to argue that simply subjecting someone to high g forces can make them pass out (and well within the brute force nature of evocations). That said, like others have noted, being hit by a car or truck doesn't always mean death. Even if it is just EXPECTED that the average person would die to a given attack, doesn't in any way mean you should enforce death.
A lot of people have talked about compels. I'd say if you want to compel an anger aspect to get someone to kill someone they are pissed at, then that's ok. However, if they have no fate points to resist, then you should accept debt instead to avoid it. There should always be an out from getting lawbreaker on the player's end of things, unless the player is ok with it being forced on him (most aren't comfortable with this sort of thing in my experience, so this has to be discussed ahead of time). I'd also not resort to a group vote on this sort of thing, as the only thing worse than a GM forcing a player to kill someone is having the whole group vote and decide that your character does something you don't want him to do* -- ideally, of course this should all be discussed ahead of time.
*Group consensus works for a lot of things, but I think it is heinous when used to force a player's character to do something against the player's wishes.
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Of the majority or the individual, tyranny is tyranny.
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EDIT: Mods, delete this post. I shouldn't be cluttering up this thread with my opinions.
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However, it also means that you cant (without GM intervention) just say that the weapon 10 evocation you hit the group of mortal gangbangers with left them all miraculously alive. Thats not really within the realm of reason, considering that a weapon 4 attack is a grenade (which granted, people have survived), I cant really think of something that would constitute a weapon 10 attack.
My point is you can "be forced to kill" if survival is not within the realm of reason.
Otherwise I find your post to be very interesting.
Actually, if you are being "forced to kill" by the mechanics of the game, you can figure that an NPC with Average Endurance has 3 boxes of Stress. Plus 2 for Mild Consequence, plus 4 for a Moderate Consequence, plus 6 for a Severe Consequence, plus 8 for the one (and only) Extreme Consequence means that you have to do a minimum of 23 Shifts of Damage in order to guarantee a Taken Out result which you can assign the value of "Killed." This is established as a difficulty for magically Transforming a character (and it is pointed out that death is a Transformation. So "accidentally" killing another character is not going to happen. However this is just my opinion (based on the mechanics in the book) and I could be wrong.
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on the other side, when I am GMing I do not assign all NPCs with all consequences. when our thief-character sneaks into a museum and tries to silently overcome nameless_guard01 and puts him to sleep, the guard may possibly have only 3 stress and the mild consequence to keep it cineastic (people in movies whack guards ko all the time) and fast if the fight is not really important to the story.
there is the possibility in my game, that the gang - when it is just meant as an annoyance to the players - that they may only have a mild and a medium consequence.
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What Wyrdrune said. A weapon 2 pistol has a decent chance of killing someone, unless that someone is important enough to get consequences.
I generally think of consequences as a form of plot armour. Basically, they're the reason that Batman doesn't just get shot and killed as soon as a mook points a gun at him.
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there is the possibility in my game, that the gang - when it is just meant as an annoyance to the players - that they may only have a mild and a medium consequence.
Generic mooks shouldn't get any consequences at all. And I Quote:
One reason almost all nameless and
supporting NPCs qualify as minor opposition
is because they do not fight to the end—they
fight until their stress tracks get bypassed and
then either concede or are taken out.
Emphasis added.
That section goes on to say that even main baddies might not go all the way to "Extreme Consequences" to further their ends. They'll allow themselves to be taken out if they know the PCs won't kill them outright. Failing that, they'll make a Concession: fell into a "nobody could survive that" situation, only to appear a few sessions later with some pretty new scars, and a Hunger For Revenge.
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I agree that the system says you don't kill someone unless you intend to. I think, however, there is something missing from that equation. When a character is going to do something, the GM gives feedback on the action, including mentioning his/her interpretation of the outcome of that action. In the most technical of interactions, this is the GM making sure he understands the outcome.
An example;
Harry is lining up to hit a goon who is pumping lead into the air out of a semi-automatic... with his car. He doesn't want to use a spell, and he's behind the wheel, so it just makes sense. Harry's player (that Jim guy?) tells the GM "Harry spins the wheel and bears down on the guy, ducking low to avoid the bullet as he runs him down." The GM nods, and thinks quick. "All right, the Blue Beetle will hit the goon and crush him, maybe killing him." If that isn't what "Jim" intends, he needs to clarify. He could say "I think he would be clipped, spun into the trash and knocked out," and that's fine. Because what Jim intends here is that Harry gets away from the goon, and that's the way he wants Harry's story to go. If he wanted Jim to do the same with magic, casting a Fuego spell at the goon, again, the GM might blink and say "So, he'll be a smoking pair of boots?". If Jim intends Harry to incinerate the goon, he'll say so. But it's not unfair, as a GM, to go to the players for clarification, and to remind the player that, to him or her, the action sounds homicidal.
The game isn't about trapping people into actions and outcomes. The story might be, but the player gets to let his or her character get lead into those events. Where this gets tricky is, indeed, with Compels. And then you have to look at your Aspects. If a player has chosen to take homicidal Aspects, is it wrong for the GM to use them? How is the character really the character is "I Eat Babies For Mana" doesn't get compelled when the lust for power rises? Why did the player make that character anyways if they complain when the Laws of that Universe set them up for the fall?
I don't see the game as a GM vs. Player interaction. I see it as a GM + Player collaboration. And part of that collaboration is that the GM needs to remind the player that reckless, homicidal abandon is... homicidal. Part of that is for the GM to compel those reckless, misanthropic Aspects the Player put on their sheet.
I support the original post. Killing with magic is killing with magic. Having made serious errors in life, they haunt you. Forever.
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On the other hand, I see the game as a matter of choices and consequences. This means that a truly accidental killing by magic isn't a violation, since that isn't a choice. The player may want to change an aspect, but that's up to the player.
It also means that the decision to use excessive and potentially lethal force against a human is a choice, and can have consequences. Harry is well aware that he has very powerful magic, and worries about what might happen when he uses it. I don't want the wizards in my campaign throwing full-power spells around casually.
This doesn't mean that a player gets blindsided by a First Law violation. The player should always get warning of some sort. In our first session, one wizard hit a thug with a full-power spell, and the thug was slammed against the wall and collapsed to the floor, unconscious and bleeding. There's no Law against injuring somebody with a spell, but that's a suggestion that excessive magical force might kill. Nor would I allow a violation without pointing out, before the roll, that that magic might kill somebody.
I'm less concerned with the exact game mechanics here. By a strict interpretation of the rules, a character could nuke an NPC and declare that the NPC got a bad concussion, or possibly banged up by bouncing around in that refrigerator. I don't think that makes a good game, though.
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This is going to turn into my catchphrase or something, but compels are a good way to enforce First Law considerations.
But instead of offering a fate point to say, "And you lose your shit and kill the guy with a gravity bomb," maybe offer the wizard a fate point to say, "This guy's just a human grunt. If you hit him with a 4-shift force blast, he's going to die."
If he takes the fate point, then Takes Out said grunt with a 4-shift gravity bomb, then it was the player's choice to face the consequences of that compel: The mook dies and the character accidentally broke the first law. Conversely, if he takes the point and downgrades his spells to, say, 2 shifts of offensive power, then he gets to take them out non-lethally--but at the same time, maybe that 2-shift spell doesn't have the stopping power to take him out right away, giving the mook another round where he might get lucky and nail the wizard instead.
And if he buys out of the compel, then for that scene he gets to keep slamming them with full-powered, but non-lethal, spells because he paid for it.
This way, the compel is only dictating the situation, and the choice of whether to kill or not is still entirely up to the player--they just make that choice by limiting their spell strength to an agreed-upon degree rather than saying, "Yeah, I just hit him dead-on with enough force to punt a Volkeswagon into the next area code, but he's totally fine."
It's like how cops aren't supposed to use their firearms unless they intend to kill--every time a cop has to tackle a lunatic on PCP and risk getting pummeled instead of just shooting them, that cop's taking a Compel similar to what I just described.
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So, a bit of thread necromancy, but it's not something I see addressed:
If you use Conjuration to whistle up a sword (perhaps because you have Unseelie Magic, and you're conjuring up an ice sword using thaum w/ evocation speed), and then use it to stab someone to death, is that a violation of the First Law?
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You aren't killing with magic, so no. Doing that isn't all that different from killing with the Warden's Enchanted Blades.
Of course, that's just my opinion - but there are no "official rules calls" for this game.
Richard
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To be honest, the way the First Law is presented in the books doesn't seem to make any kind of sense. Let me run through the situation as I understand it.
1. Magic is the expression of belief. Therefore, you can only do something with magic if you believe it's the right thing to do, and when you use magic to do something, you will believe in the future that the magic was the correct thing to do.
2. Now, the reason we have the First Law is specifically because of the application of Point 1 to murder. In other words, if you commit murder with magic, you are the sort of person who believes murder is justified and will continue to believe so.
So far this makes sense, but then it seems to go too far.
3. It is fairly indisputable that the Council believes there are several circumstances where killing someone, specifically someone human, is not only acceptable but morally required. Why, then, is killing with magic under these circumstances still out. Or to put it another way, if you may chop someone's head off with a sword because he is a warlock, why is blowing his head off with a fireball for exactly the same reason banned? The belief that will be reinforced (that killing is acceptable under certain specific circumstances) is one the Council agrees with, so where is the problem here? As the rules now stand, a player can be punished for doing something that is arguably morally required.
3.5 To be fair, there does seem to be a proviso for using lethal force in self-defense if necessary, but that hardly seems to cover what I'm trying to get at here.
Tl;dr. Why is it wrong to kill with magic when it would be right to kill any other way?
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The White Council does not set the Laws of Magic. Rather, they take it upon themselves to execute those that do, unless they did so under circumstances the the Council deems 'acceptable'. The Council's acceptance, however, does not change whether or not an action violated one of the Laws.
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It's because magic isn't just another tool--it is, fundamentally, the wizard imposing his will on the world to make it the way he thinks it should be. And it's tied into who and what the wizard is in a much more intrinsic way than a sword or a gun would be. You hear the expression, 'You are what you eat?' Well, with magic, it's 'You are what you do with it.'
So when a magic user kills someone with magic, it's not just them making a conscious decision of, "Okay, in those specific circumstances it's okay to kill," it's them shifting toward, "I'm right to kill who I want because I have this power," on the level of their soul.
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But yet the First Law does have two exceptions as noted in Storm Front: In self-defense and to defend the innocent/defenseless. That implies that while it is killing, it is somehow different from murder.
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Those are not exceptions to the First Law. Those are exceptions to the executions imposed by the White Council for violating the First Law. The corruption of the soul has no such exception.
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It's because magic isn't just another tool--it is, fundamentally, the wizard imposing his will on the world to make it the way he thinks it should be. And it's tied into who and what the wizard is in a much more intrinsic way than a sword or a gun would be. You hear the expression, 'You are what you eat?' Well, with magic, it's 'You are what you do with it.'
So when a magic user kills someone with magic, it's not just them making a conscious decision of, "Okay, in those specific circumstances it's okay to kill," it's them shifting toward, "I'm right to kill who I want because I have this power," on the level of their soul.
But that's just the point I'm trying to get across. If your fundamental motivation for a specific killing is "protect myself" or "protect these innocents", then it is that desire, that motive, which should be reinforced.
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Those are not exceptions to the First Law. Those are exceptions to the executions imposed by the White Council for violating the First Law. The corruption of the soul has no such exception.
So, to correctly understand your position, is that the deliberate act of killing with magic, regardless of purpose or intent, is soul-corrupting, while the Cosmos may give you a pass regarding accidental killing with magic or just plain acts of stupidity/suicide ("Let's walk into this Wall of Fire, I'm sure its an illusion.").
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But that's just the point I'm trying to get across. If your fundamental motivation for a specific killing is "protect myself" or "protect these innocents", then it is that desire, that motive, which should be reinforced.
That's your conscious motivation, not the fundamental part of who you are. If you're a wizard, you can probably find out a way to protect yourself or someone else without killing using your magic.
Remember, magic isn't all about conscious, deliberate thought--it's emotion, it's your soul. Deciding, consciously, that you have to kill someone is a different thing than believing in your heart and soul that you're right to take someone's life.
You're effectively turning your own being, your own soul, into a murder weapon when you kill with magic. You can clean blood off a sword. Cleaning it off your soul's a little harder.
Basically, when you use magic to kill, what you're reinforcing is your belief that you can decide who to kill--and the more you believe you can decide who to kill, the more likely you are to see killing as a solution to problems, because that power over life and death is a rush and feels good. It becomes a mental addiction. Everything starts to look like a nail, and you're holding a really big hammer.
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Ok, a good reason to use more mundane methods than magic to do your "necessary" killing?
Magic is easier to kill with. It only takes some kind of symbolic connection or the presence of the target in order to pull it off, and as long as you're willing to put the time and effort in it's entirely possible to wipe entire civilizations off the face of the earth.
Ok, true, you can do that with mundane technology too, but not everyone has access to the red buttons. Wizards by contrast are -all- walking tactical nuke launchers. Every last damn one of them. Because they're individuals they can fortunately be limited by the Laws upheld by the Council, but only if the Laws are brutally enforced.
The whole point of the Laws has nothing to do with the corruption of your soul (though it makes a good justification for zero tolerance), it's to limit the amount of power and damage that an individual can accrue. It doesn't make things fair, it makes them survivable.
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The whole point of the Laws has nothing to do with the corruption of your soul
The fact that you can see the corruption of it through a soulgaze begs to differ on this point.
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The whole point of the Laws has nothing to do with the corruption of your soul (though it makes a good justification for zero tolerance), it's to limit the amount of power and damage that an individual can accrue. It doesn't make things fair, it makes them survivable.
There are two sides to the Laws, and one of them has everything to do with the corruption of the soul, and nothing to do with anything else. The other has nothing to do with the corruption of the soul, and, as you say, everything to do with limiting potential abuses of power by individuals who are immensely personally powerful.
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^ nailed it.
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Luccio specifically says that the Laws and the Council are not about good or evil, but about limiting power, and if they happen to do a little good along the way then so much the better.
So, no, I don't agree with you.
I do however agree with you that the use of black magic also happens to be corruptive. Of course since all magic that you perform reinforces a pattern of thought and behavior because you believe in it entirely...well, depending on your ethics then there's a lot of "legal" soul corrupting magic that people perform all the time.
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Luccio specifically says that the Laws and the Council are not about good or evil, but about limiting power, and if they happen to do a little good along the way then so much the better.
This is the perspective of the leader of the Wardens of the White Council. Understandably, it espouses the purposes of the Laws as enforced by the Council, rather than the truth of the Laws as a metaphysical fact of the Dresdenverse.
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It doesn't deny the metaphysical reality either as much as say that it's irrelevant to the purpose of the Laws.
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It's irrelevant to the purposes of the Laws from the perspective of the Council.
The Laws are two entirely different things that happen to overlap.
There are the Laws that the Council enforces, for which you may or may not be executed, and there are the Laws as metaphysical truths, which affect you regardless of what the Council thinks. The fact that these Laws typically coincide is mere coincidence.
Metaphysical truths have purpose (or not) entirely independant from any mortal political group.
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I never denied the metaphysical truths, I just said they aren't pertinent to the purpose of the Laws.
For instance, using magic to perform a bank robbery is going to leave you with the experience and know how to commit another bank robbery more easily in the future and because you've done it once before you have set a precedent for doing it again. A metaphysical truth about the corruption of the individual using Lawbreaking magic could be applied to you, but you haven't broken any Laws.
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The metaphysical truths ARE the Laws. The Laws are pertinent to themselves.
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No, the Laws are boundaries on behavior. They are given weight by the metaphysics, the metaphysics are -an- explanation for the existence of the Laws. That is the extent of the relation between the Laws and truth.
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The rules imposed by the Council are boundaries on behaviour. The rules imposed by the Council are not the only Laws.
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So you would argue that you could take a Power that functions similarly to Lawbreaker for other types of magic you might perform?
Or are you saying something more abstract? I didn't really understand your post.
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The only laws violated by robbing a bank would be mortal government ones. unless you were using no creativity you wouldn't need to violate either the council laws or the metaphysical "rules of magic"
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So you would argue that you could take a Power that functions similarly to Lawbreaker for other types of magic you might perform?
Or are you saying something more abstract? I didn't really understand your post.
The Laws of physics are no less accurately termed Laws for their lack of a police force, trials, and executions.
The metaphysical laws represented by the Lawbreaker power are The Laws upon which the White Council of Wizardry based its Laws.
There is no Law for heating a cup of tea. There is no Law for veiling a blade of grass on a lark. There is no Law for transforming the caster's own self.
The Laws make a special case of a small set of actions. We are not told why. I do not care to guess.
Houserule as you will.
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Wasn't really planning to house rule anything.
The only laws violated by robbing a bank would be mortal government ones. unless you were using no creativity you wouldn't need to violate either the council laws or the metaphysical "rules of magic"
The use of magic, or lack thereof, leads to behavioral and mental adjustment. So I think you misunderstand me, it's more of a following of the metaphysical laws than breaking of them. Do X and you will be more likely to do X again. That is the metaphysical law. The Laws of the Council exist to make sure there are certain X's you don't commit, they interact with the metaphysical law, but they aren't metaphysical in the least. That isn't metaphysical at all. One of the reason the Council Laws exist is supposedly because of the corruptive nature of the actions outlined therein, indicating a moral agenda. However there are a lot of possible actions which are morally suspect or condemnable that the Laws don't address. Like theft, or torture, which impose on, ignore or negate the free will of others and the fact that the Council doesn't bother to regulate that along with the quote from Luccio and the consideration that using magic like doing anything leads to behavioral and mental adjustments, thus theft and torture can be just as corruptive as breaking Council Law. All of that means when considered together that the Laws are not in place to prevent corruption, but to limit power. They just happen to happily prevent some of the corruptive magics one can perform as well.
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It's good you've begun to reference them as 'The Laws of the Council'. It is an important distinction from 'The Laws of Magic' which you seemed to have been referencing previously.
That clarification being in place, the corrections I would insist upon are minor enough that I no longer care to continue beyond this last restatement:
The Laws [of Magic] make a special case of a small set of actions. We are not told why. I do not care to guess.
(clarification added)
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The Laws of the Council I am referencing are the big 7 and are also called the Laws of Magic. They do nothing to describe magic itself, just a bunch of things the Council doesn't allow. So I don't see the point of your distinction.
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You still haven't gotten this?
Lawbreaker exists for 'the big 7'. No such mechanism exists for other activities, nor is justification for such a mechanism applied to other activities referenced in the fiction.
The Laws of Magic exist both as metaphysical truths and as the Laws of the Council.
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No the Laws of Magic aren't Laws in the physics sense at all. You shall not kill is a commandment, it's a restriction on behavior created by the Council, the working of magic in itself has no prohibition against it being used to kill. So there is definitely a distinction that you're not getting.
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The commandments and prohibitions of the Laws are creations of the Council. The Truth of the Laws exists independently of any mortal agency.
Phrased as their metaphysical Truths, the Laws might appear as 'Will not [these results] by magic, lest you be tainted in your soul'.
Or, without the judgement that such tainting is a thing to avoid, 'Will [these results] by magic and be tainted in your soul'.
(this phrasing obviously doesn't cover the 7th law, but that is a special case among special cases)
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Yeah that's what I've said this entire time, so thanks for reinforcing my point.
I mean, maybe I wasn't clarifying enough, I don't know.
The only thing I'd add to that is that there are many behaviors including some uses of magic not addresses by the Council's Laws which can corrupt the individual. Since those corrupting behaviors aren't addressed by the Council's Laws, despite the metaphysical law or truth that they do corrupt, the Laws of the Council cannot be considered to be wholly or even mostly concerned with the corruption of the soul.
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The only thing I'd add to that is that there are many behaviors including some uses of magic not addresses by the Council's Laws which can corrupt the individual.
Source for this corruption being anything on par with that addressed by the Laws?
Or happening at all in any meaningful way?
More than just personal theorycrafting, here, please, as I've already seen that on this (and related) thread(s) with regards to this subject.
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No, corruption is a synonym for change, although with connotations for the worse. Any behavior or use of magic that is repeatable is capable of changing or corrupting that individual to varying degrees.
As for whether or not this is a personal theory, well my evidence for my arguments come straight from the books. For instance, Harry's anger problems which Murphy confronts him about. Ok, sure he was influenced with mind mojo to start making his anger more of a problem, but he also realized that it was a problem he had and it was affecting his use of magic and whether or not he used that magic appropriately. A small corruption, but if it hadn't been some kind of corruption it wouldn't have been worthwhile to Lasciel, and it was self maintaining, and could become worse without further influence on her part once she started the ball rolling. Another instance, without mind mojo possibly confusing matters, Harry's fear of losing his fire magic, if he failed to use it once it would become harder to use in the future and slowly become impossible altogether.
An example Harry has noted about wizards in general, if you have magic you tend to start trying to solve problems with magic. It's behavioral reinforcement. Using magic is a behavior. Using magic for destructive ends creates reinforcement for that sort of destructive behavior. Which is just like saying that killing someone with magic is going to reinforce the behavior of killing with magic.
Or, without the judgement that such tainting is a thing to avoid, 'Will [these results] by magic and be tainted in your soul'.
. This quote applies to -any- repeatable action. That applies in game or out, it's simply a matter of degrees and whether or not "taint" is the right word.
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It seems obvious to me, but I should probably note that the "corruption" works in reverse too. Do good things with your magic and you will be more likely to do more good things.
You seem to be coming at this with the idea that humans are stagnant and change only when they break one of the Council's Laws, while I'd argue people are changing all the time but it's the changes wrought by breaking the Council's Laws that the Council pays attention to, and even then only to maintain the political status quo.
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So, in answer to the question of 'Do you have any source that supports your position of other activities being as 'corrupting' as those that violate the Laws?', your answer would be 'no'?
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As corrupting? Well sure, if for the sake of this argument I started drawing from real life, on which the Dresden Files is a commentary as much as it is a fantastic story then I would have ample evidence. In the setting from what we've been given? One example comes to mind, but you would probably dismiss it out of hand since it relates back to what I was saying about fantastic racism.
The example would be Harry's changing attitude towards ghouls. At first he's complacent as much as one can be about cannibals because that's just their nature. When he's exposed to something that changes that attitude he changed gears to indiscriminate hate. He uses magic viciously, the use of magic reinforces his hatred and he begins changing to react like that with his magic to all ghouls.
Actually, another example just came to me. There's also his case history overall, for instance when Marcone mentions that he'll take the bet that Harry destroys their mutual enemy. Harry ends up musing on that, more often than not his enemies end up dead; this would be because he has grown accustomed to using his magic to kill his enemies either directly or indirectly.
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Outside of Harry himself we have Binder, a thoroughly unpleasant individual who uses his magic and is corrupted by his hedonistic use of it even if he's never broken one of the Council's Laws.