“Great I’ll put it in the bag of holding. How much is it worth? I rolled a 20, you have to tell me”
… this list contains like 3 items phrased differently ~7 times each.
“This person had a family/friends” “This person was supporting someone else” “This person liked their pets”
repeat …
Well yeah. The goal is to humanize the person they just killed, to make the players potentially regret their murderhobo ways for a brief moment. And one of the fastest ways to make a character (at least shallowly) altruistic is to have them pet the dog. Do something kind for something/someone innocent. It’s often used to show that an antagonist isn’t entirely evil, and is acting against the party due to a specific goal (rather than simply being evil for evil’s sake).
It’s the inverse of the “kick the dog” trope, where a character does something obviously evil for no narrative purpose other than proving that they are evil.
“My dearest Delilah, how I long to sit with you and our beautiful daughter…”
Okay sure but this guy jumped out of a bush with a flaming axe and said he’d eat our spleens. And Vilrod here identified the axe as +1 against spleens.
This reminded me of how system really affects player behavior. I was playing a game where doing some things would trigger a check to avoid consequences.
There was a lot of “I’m gonna shoot him” -> “ok but you’ll have to roll for humanity loss” -> “…fine, nevermind, I’ll talk to him instead”
“Drenched from head to toe in the blood of your opponent, you stand over their crumpled body.”
“Sweet! I loot the corpse. What do you I find?”
“A small note: ‘Note to self: get cure for horrible blood plague.’”
“…fuck.”
“Ah shit… I think I just killed the protagonist of Bloodborne.”
+1 insight
Remember to save these for when the party are getting a little too “morally grey”, because unless you’re running a “dark and gritty” campaign then it will discourage them from ever wanting to get in a fight!
DM: Trying his best to write an emotional moment
You loot the kobold’s body. You find a note that reads:
“Dear Krag, I miss you so much, and I pray for you to return soon. Our clutch of eggs is due to hatch, and more than anything I want the first thing they see is their devoted father…”
And then there’s my fighter, who killed three pirates after hearing about their hopes and dreams.
