I'm DM-ing my first 5e game, set in the Forgotten Realms. When the players were making characters, I asked them all to be all mostly Good-aligned. No evil stuff. They're currently 3rd level.
Basic Story:
The bare bones of my story, is that there is a guy attempting to collect the pieces of this tapestry. Tapestry holds an elven city that has been locked away in a pocket plane just adjacent to the Nine Hells (story is a side-branch I made from the Ghost Elf story in the old Dragon magazine: https://www.realmshelps.net/charbuild/races/elf/ghostelf.shtml). Basically, most of the ghost elves escaped, but there was a second settlement of them in the Hells that was given to this pit fiend's 'daughter' to play with in her own pocket dimension. During the fight, the tapestry got ripped up, trapping the devil daughter and a city of devils and ghost elves in this locked off Hell plane. The 'villain' trying to collect this tapestry managed to escape (I'm heavily implying that he's part some fey, and it was through some of that weird magic that he was able to pull himself out) and is now trying to bring the city back to material plane.
Obviously, this brings the threat of bunch of devils suddenly being unleashed. A powerful pit fiend's daughter. And this group of ghost elves has been locked up in this horrible plan for generations - who is to say that they're even elves anymore? Not to mention the physical and potentially earth-shattering ramifications of a city suddenly appearing in the middle of Faerun.
The first piece of tapestry was being held in a safe underneath a temple of Waukeen. The party basically broke into the temple in the middle of this heist. They fought - kinda won, but the bad guy escaped with the piece he was looking for. And two NPCs the characters liked died - which really set the players against this bad guy. They wanted to stop him. It was great.
Jump to this last session.
The group is now in Silverymoon, and they've been tipped off about an eccentric professor that's been studying the tapestry (though he doesn't know there are forces out to get it yet). He has a piece. The group meets up with him and his assistant (which was this graduate student type that had been paired with the professor. She was very sarcastic about everything but generally well-meaning).
Cut to, the professor assures the group that his piece of tapestry is safe. He goes to his office and gasp it's already been stolen. But he has a tracking spell on it. He gathers the party (and the assistant) and they teleport to a different part of Silverymoon. The group spots the bad guy darting into an alley. They follow. The bad guy has hired thugs now. They confront the party.
Dramatic alley fight.
Bad guy gets away during. Lead thug takes the assistant hostage with some brutal magic. Most of his team has been defeated, he's been cornered. Demands the group surrender or the assistant will die. The professor surrenders right away (the magic he was holding the assistant hostage with was already proving to be incredibly powerful and painful). The cleric in the group stops. The sorcerer...would've stopped but she was unconscious. The party advances. Thug causes incredible pain to assistant. Says: "If you take one more step, the girl is done." They throw an axe at him. He essentially explodes the girl. She's done.
The professor is heart-broken by this and leaves them (the cleric tried to console him, but rolled INSANELY low on charisma checks). He blames the party for not surrendering when the guy they were actually after was long gone.
Now two the players are super heart-broken about this (seemingly in real life too) and the other three are either (a) trying to justify their actions by saying they though the thug was bluffing (when he had clearly demonstrated the magic he had at his disposal) or (b) saying they actually didn't like the assistant or (c) saying they were killing this guy because he worked for the main bad guy and it was for the greater good.
As a DM, I did not expect this turn of events. I kinda expected my mostly good-aligned to not sacrifice a random innocent in an alley fight. The professor was going to be key in this adventure too (I made him a master of teleportation/plane-jumping) and was going to help the players investigate the tapestry - but I have a hard time seeing him want to do that now. He did eventually just throw a bunch of random research at the party because they went back to his office and started harassing him (exposition!) so the party has some clues to work from....but man, I had some cool ideas to run with the party and the professor/his assistant. The actions in the alley also caused a bit of a fissure in the party (both in-game and in real life. Some people seem genuinely mad at one another).
TLDR: Party made a bad decision and it resulted in a death of what would've been an important NPC. Now they're mad at one another and I'm struggling to rewrite aspects of my game.
Story Questions: - Should I allow some side quest to bring back the assistant? The group has already been like 'We'll just pay to resurrect her' but they definitely don't have the cash for that and I feel like that would make death seem like MUCH less of a consequence. Any ideas here? This might help bring the professor back into the fold too. Or should dead stay dead? - If I don't bring this professor back, should I just replace him with another character so I can more-or-less keep with the same plot points? Professor's role was to help them travel places and help decipher old artifacts to bring them closer to the final piece of tapestry...so I could theoretically just put anything in those shoes. Good idea?
Table Question: - My table seems to have greatly differing opinions on what 'good' is. No one that pushed the thug to executing the assistant seem to feel bad and they all seem to feel like they were 100% doing the right thing. Any way to center everyone's moral compasses? - Some people seem mad at one another now and I honestly feel a bit bad about it (since it was me that actually killed the girl). Anyone deal with something like this before? Any good ideas to bring the party back together? Should I have a random filler-session with a random dungeon crawl or something to give them something non-heavy to digest?
Story question 1: if the setting you’re presenting is one in which resurrection magic exists and is used, that should be an option. They don’t have the cash to just pay for it, but it could be a good way to introduce some kind of quest in lieu of money. With the understanding that I don’t like having innocent NPCs get murdered any more than anyone else, I think resurrection cheapens the narrative, and I severely limit it in my own game, but if you’re going to let resurrection be a thing, you have to let it be a thing. “It only works for the PCs” is going to cheapen the entire setting a lot more.
Story question 2: This one’s up to you. Letting them do some quest to get the resurrection and repair their relationship with the professor obviously eliminates the need to answer this one, but in the case that that doesn’t end up happening, you could use the events as a way to move everything in a different direction. Or, if you like what you originally wanted to do, you could just slot in a different character who’d do basically the same stuff. Personally, I would shift the story toward “dealing with the consequences of this experience” one way or another. Maybe the fact that they don’t have this professor’s help somehow because a Main Plot problem. But DMs always have limited time and creative energy, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with keeping your original plan and just changing some names.
Table question 1: Most D&D settings are worlds in which good and evil are objective cosmic truths. As the DM, you’re allowed to say “this was an objectively evil act that you’ve committed, and if you don’t demonstrate some character growth, we’re going to have to revisit your alignment.” Even if your world doesn’t have objective ideas of morality, you as the DM still get to have an opinion. For what it’s worth trying to rationalize a terrible decision that resulted in an innocent’s death by saying “well we didn’t really like her anyway” is about as close as it gets to objectively evil even by real-world standards, where objective morality is much farther away than in D&D. So as to your question of how to center everyone’s moral compasses? Define north, and make sure everyone knows where that is.
Table question 2: This is the hardest to answer without knowing your particular players. My group are all adults who have been friends for ten years. When there’s some in-game drama that spills out into real life, we just cool off and get over it. Not every group has that kind of interpersonal dynamic though. I think doing something unrelated and light, letting them forget about this before everything surrounding it gets resolved is narratively less impactful and worse, but I’m a third party who doesn’t have to deal with any of the fallout, so I have the luxury of thinking that. Don’t put a story above the feelings of real people.
In addition to the fine points made by @SagaTympana:
As a DM make sure to have a minimum of three "paths" to uncover the "route" to the plot. Also, NOT having a powerful NPC help the party should be preferred. It strengthens player agency and character impact on the world. Also avoids the entire "why doesn't powerful NPC simply take care of this stuff themselves?" type questions.
For Good/Evil especially when it comes to "sacrificing an innocent" the question gets very tricky. And that's before we throw in resurrection magic. Does the greater good of the overall goal outweigh the cost of a single life? That is a debate which has raged for ages, and one can be on either side and still be "good". If we use a very basic definition of good being "helping others or seeing to others needs over one's self wants/needs" then once again, do the needs of the few (the assistant) outweigh the needs of the many (the trapped city)? One can easily argue it either way, even in the context of "an alley fight".
Good/Neutral/Evil are not three absolute points, rather they are a large scale, and while the difference between White and Black is obvious, the tints and shades in between are numerous, flexible, and travererable without an actual alignment change. One thing to take note, if you the DM are measuring everyone's "moral compass" than you should be providing a Rubric so the players have a reference.
With that out of the way, my opinion:
Story 1: Resurrect is fine. Story 2: I don't like the idea of having a powerful NPC help the party in the first place.
Table 1: Up to you, if you are going to "center" it you will need to provide a Rubric which defines the "grading system". Personally, having ambiguity is better for overall story, and having intra-character "tension" is a good thing. (One character wants to reform evil another wants to destroy evil, are not both serving "good" but with conflicting methodology?) Table 2: You didn't kill the girl. The thug did. The player's probably are more mad at you for taking away their agency, you put them into an unwinnable situation (NEVER expect your players to surrender or be captured without EXTENSIVE out of game talk preparing them for it and assuring them it will be temporary and will make the story/plot/theme much better). I can easily see the choice from their perspective of "she dies or I lose all my stuff". A "better" unwinnable situation would have been to have this "powerful magic "thug"" simply teleport/disappear/etc. away with the hostage, thus creating a rescue mission. (There is a BIG problem with your powerful thug, if the thug was that powerful to begin with, should have wiped the floor with the characters. Whole thing screams Deus Ex Machina to me.) It is better to give bad guys "plot armour" than "plot weapons", still frustrating to the players, but is not as offensive (pun intended).
Everyone has given you good answers to your questions so I won't re-iterate what they've said. I will say that you're learning what I consider the first rule of being a DM.
The players will break the campaign! No matter how much you plan or set things up in a way that you think is completely logical and understandable you're players will find a way around it. Intentionally or not. As Pedroig said you need to have several fall back options and perhaps more fluidity in your thinking of the structure of the campaign to accommodate the players choices. The important thing to remember is that you're steering them to an end game. One other thing I wanted to note is that if your players are feeling this kind of tension than you're doing a good job as a DM. It means they are engaged!
I’m going to have to say I don’t think the party’s actions as you describe them were inherently evil. Intent matters. They didn’t kill the assistant, the bad guy did. They threw an ax trying to save the assistant. I mean, there’s 101 movies, tv shows and video games out there where there’s a similar hostage situation and the hero shoots the bad guy in the head and saves the day, probably they were going for something like that. If they had critted on the ax roll and killed the bad guy, everyone would have breathed a sigh of relief and things would have moved on as normal. Now, the party seems to have come up with some rationalizations that could be evil, but in the moment, I don’t agree they were necessarily evil. I think you played it exactly right with the wizard getting angry and leaving, but he could, after a cooling off period, decide the party’s heart was in the right place and maybe agree to work with them again. He would never fully trust them again. I doubt he’d be willing to go anywhere with them again, and certainly not into danger. But he could realize the party is still his best hope and so grudgingly give them assistance. Or, the wizard could recruit a new party to go do the things. But the wizard has a rival who reaches out to the party and offers to help them because the rival is also trying to get their hands on the tapestry. Now you get a race for different pieces, surely the other party will get one or two and eventually everyone will either need to agree to work together or fight it out.
Defining 'good' is a challenge. A lawful good approach to a situation may widely depart from the chaotic good solution. I think this tension is actually good for a party as long as you have/are developing a close bond within the party. If the goody goody approach always wins, this will be hard for those who see that the ends justify the means.
You always have the ability to reshape the story. Instead of killing the assistant, she is knocked into a state of some sort that takes her from the story. Noone but you knows the truth. I find having hard definition of if "x happens then y is the result' can more often then not paint DMs into situation. If you have plans for a NPC, do what you can that works in the story to keep them around (with reprecussions of course).
Story question 1: if the setting you’re presenting is one in which resurrection magic exists and is used, that should be an option. They don’t have the cash to just pay for it, but it could be a good way to introduce some kind of quest in lieu of money. With the understanding that I don’t like having innocent NPCs get murdered any more than anyone else, I think resurrection cheapens the narrative, and I severely limit it in my own game, but if you’re going to let resurrection be a thing, you have to let it be a thing. “It only works for the PCs” is going to cheapen the entire setting a lot more.
Definitely a fair point. I've thought about this a bit, and I'm created what I hope to be a dangerous (but epic) 'filler' session to bring the assistant back (if the players want to go that route). Otherwise, I'm going to let them go on their own without the professor.
In addition to the fine points made by @SagaTympana:
As a DM make sure to have a minimum of three "paths" to uncover the "route" to the plot. Also, NOT having a powerful NPC help the party should be preferred. It strengthens player agency and character impact on the world. Also avoids the entire "why doesn't powerful NPC simply take care of this stuff themselves?" type questions.
The professor character isn't really there to act as a powerful NPC. He's learning about the macguffin at about the same time as the players. I mostly want him around to help with travel (I've dropped little hints that he's using academically-unpopular theoretical teleportation magic) and so I can use him to drop the occasion clue if the party gets stuck somewhere. We all recently got out of a game where we basically wasted two entire sessions at camp because we mis-remembered exactly what an NPC told us and the DM wouldn't drop any hints ("You should've written it down.") - I really want to avoid that in way that isn't me just going 'Roll some dice and lets see if you get a clue.'
Table 2: You didn't kill the girl. The thug did. The player's probably are more mad at you for taking away their agency, you put them into an unwinnable situation (NEVER expect your players to surrender or be captured without EXTENSIVE out of game talk preparing them for it and assuring them it will be temporary and will make the story/plot/theme much better). I can easily see the choice from their perspective of "she dies or I lose all my stuff". A "better" unwinnable situation would have been to have this "powerful magic "thug"" simply teleport/disappear/etc. away with the hostage, thus creating a rescue mission. (There is a BIG problem with your powerful thug, if the thug was that powerful to begin with, should have wiped the floor with the characters. Whole thing screams Deus Ex Machina to me.) It is better to give bad guys "plot armour" than "plot weapons", still frustrating to the players, but is not as offensive (pun intended).
I agree with you a lot here - I don't like putting in unwinnable situations, but the party lost track of their goal because a handful of thugs stepped in their way. When I thought this bit up, they were suppose to go on a crazy chase through the alleys of Silverymoon with the thugs chasing them (I had a cool thematic chase table written up!).
Instead, they all (well, one tried to chase) stopped to fight and the main target just kept going. Eventually it got to a point where I figured there was no way they'd find him, and I tried to give them an option to just stop the fight and back out to re-assess. I also kinda wanted to use my named thug leader again, because he was cool. Instead, they killed him and set off his hostage-killing magic - all for a target that they shouldn't have been interested in at all?
It was not something I expected them to do, especially since in the last two sessions they were very goal-oriented.
I think you played it exactly right with the wizard getting angry and leaving, but he could, after a cooling off period, decide the party’s heart was in the right place and maybe agree to work with them again. He would never fully trust them again. I doubt he’d be willing to go anywhere with them again, and certainly not into danger. But he could realize the party is still his best hope and so grudgingly give them assistance.
Or, the wizard could recruit a new party to go do the things. But the wizard has a rival who reaches out to the party and offers to help them because the rival is also trying to get their hands on the tapestry. Now you get a race for different pieces, surely the other party will get one or two and eventually everyone will either need to agree to work together or fight it out.
That's an interesting thought. My ideas of keeping the professor in game were to either have him have his own internal alignment switch (wanting to destroy the macguffin in front of the bad guy) or have the party convince them to help (which they've been utterly failing at so far). He just threw a bunch of his research at them, so a rival academic swooping in might not be a bad idea.
Defining 'good' is a challenge. A lawful good approach to a situation may widely depart from the chaotic good solution. I think this tension is actually good for a party as long as you have/are developing a close bond within the party. If the goody goody approach always wins, this will be hard for those who see that the ends justify the means.
Yeah, based on a lot of the comments I've gotten so far on this, I think I'm going to let the party work out what 'good' means. It should be a team decision.
That said, an advantage of telling a group before a game to make 'mostly good' characters is that it does give the DM some idea of how to plan out an adventure. What happened in this session took me very much by surprised, because I thought 'Okay, stand down to protect this innocent - that's probably the move they'll make' (especially after I hinted at what the thug leader was able to do with his magic). Them pushing forward without much though was unexpected.
Side note: Was checking their sheets later that night, and noticed that tank had written "Eh, pretty good" as his alignment. Hadn't noticed that initially.
Got a lot of good advice about dealing with players in person. Important thing to note is that we're all housemates, so having that much tension in the air after a game was very noticeable and very uncomfortable (with the pandemic thing, it's hard to get away from one another). At this point, people seem to have chilled out.
My current plan is to give them a chance for a one-time 'take back' of what they did (super dangerous, epic 'filler' session) or just let them go on on their own, and see what they do to get to the endgame.
Personally, I'd turn and look at the player who said "well I didn't like the assistant anyway" and say "By the way, your alignment is now Neutral, not Good." If it was already Neutral, then it's Evil instead. Allowing someone to die simply because you didn't like them is, at best, borderline between Neutral and Evil. It's anything but Good.
Given the setup - thug taking an innocent hostage - I would have 100% thought the "good" decision would have been "try to kill the thug and rescue the hostage" rather than "surrender." As a player, I would have been doubly frustrated if by trying to rescue a hostage the DM would have branded my character "evil."
Given the setup - thug taking an innocent hostage - I would have 100% thought the "good" decision would have been "try to kill the thug and rescue the hostage" rather than "surrender." As a player, I would have been doubly frustrated if by trying to rescue a hostage the DM would have branded my character "evil."
I don't think anyone's trying to brand the characters evil for trying to kill the thug. That wasn't an evil decision, just an incredibly stupid one (unless, at the time, their state of mind sincerely was "I don't care what happens to the hostage," but I don't think anyone's suggested that). What's evil is how they're handling the aftermath.
Disclaimer: I haven't read the entire thread, so if someone said this before, then [insert quote here].
Sometimes good decisions go bad, sometimes bad decisions go good and sometimes the dice roll as they may.
As for what I would do with this:
Personally, I would keep the assistant dead (actions have consequences) but for the sake of the group, maybe not let the death be meaningless. It turns out the research that the professor had thrown at them has some notes by the assistant outlying some sort of secret/[plot device] that she had discovered but wasn't ready to present her evidence yet, and so told no one.
They can either go back to the professor and reignite that investigative fire because the discovery was just that important, or even attempt to solve it themselves so you have a reason to write the professor out of the picture but not impact the flow of the story. Her work lives on, and is only now brought to light because of her death. Incomplete, but at least others now know about it.
Given the setup - thug taking an innocent hostage - I would have 100% thought the "good" decision would have been "try to kill the thug and rescue the hostage" rather than "surrender." As a player, I would have been doubly frustrated if by trying to rescue a hostage the DM would have branded my character "evil."
I don't think anyone's trying to brand the characters evil for trying to kill the thug. That wasn't an evil decision, just an incredibly stupid one (unless, at the time, their state of mind sincerely was "I don't care what happens to the hostage," but I don't think anyone's suggested that). What's evil is how they're handling the aftermath.
By rationalizing it? That seems normal and human for people of all alignments.
Rationalizing it with "well I didn't like her anyway" is not at all normal unless you're a sociopath.
I would not go that far. But it will raise some serious eyebrows about your morality. At best, you just don't care about other people (Neutral). At worst, you are glad they are dead because they annoy you (Evil).
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I'm DM-ing my first 5e game, set in the Forgotten Realms. When the players were making characters, I asked them all to be all mostly Good-aligned. No evil stuff. They're currently 3rd level.
Basic Story:
The bare bones of my story, is that there is a guy attempting to collect the pieces of this tapestry. Tapestry holds an elven city that has been locked away in a pocket plane just adjacent to the Nine Hells (story is a side-branch I made from the Ghost Elf story in the old Dragon magazine: https://www.realmshelps.net/charbuild/races/elf/ghostelf.shtml). Basically, most of the ghost elves escaped, but there was a second settlement of them in the Hells that was given to this pit fiend's 'daughter' to play with in her own pocket dimension. During the fight, the tapestry got ripped up, trapping the devil daughter and a city of devils and ghost elves in this locked off Hell plane. The 'villain' trying to collect this tapestry managed to escape (I'm heavily implying that he's part some fey, and it was through some of that weird magic that he was able to pull himself out) and is now trying to bring the city back to material plane.
Obviously, this brings the threat of bunch of devils suddenly being unleashed. A powerful pit fiend's daughter. And this group of ghost elves has been locked up in this horrible plan for generations - who is to say that they're even elves anymore? Not to mention the physical and potentially earth-shattering ramifications of a city suddenly appearing in the middle of Faerun.
The first piece of tapestry was being held in a safe underneath a temple of Waukeen. The party basically broke into the temple in the middle of this heist. They fought - kinda won, but the bad guy escaped with the piece he was looking for. And two NPCs the characters liked died - which really set the players against this bad guy. They wanted to stop him. It was great.
Jump to this last session.
The group is now in Silverymoon, and they've been tipped off about an eccentric professor that's been studying the tapestry (though he doesn't know there are forces out to get it yet). He has a piece. The group meets up with him and his assistant (which was this graduate student type that had been paired with the professor. She was very sarcastic about everything but generally well-meaning).
Cut to, the professor assures the group that his piece of tapestry is safe. He goes to his office and gasp it's already been stolen. But he has a tracking spell on it. He gathers the party (and the assistant) and they teleport to a different part of Silverymoon. The group spots the bad guy darting into an alley. They follow. The bad guy has hired thugs now. They confront the party.
Dramatic alley fight.
Bad guy gets away during. Lead thug takes the assistant hostage with some brutal magic. Most of his team has been defeated, he's been cornered. Demands the group surrender or the assistant will die. The professor surrenders right away (the magic he was holding the assistant hostage with was already proving to be incredibly powerful and painful). The cleric in the group stops. The sorcerer...would've stopped but she was unconscious. The party advances. Thug causes incredible pain to assistant. Says: "If you take one more step, the girl is done." They throw an axe at him. He essentially explodes the girl. She's done.
The professor is heart-broken by this and leaves them (the cleric tried to console him, but rolled INSANELY low on charisma checks). He blames the party for not surrendering when the guy they were actually after was long gone.
Now two the players are super heart-broken about this (seemingly in real life too) and the other three are either (a) trying to justify their actions by saying they though the thug was bluffing (when he had clearly demonstrated the magic he had at his disposal) or (b) saying they actually didn't like the assistant or (c) saying they were killing this guy because he worked for the main bad guy and it was for the greater good.
As a DM, I did not expect this turn of events. I kinda expected my mostly good-aligned to not sacrifice a random innocent in an alley fight. The professor was going to be key in this adventure too (I made him a master of teleportation/plane-jumping) and was going to help the players investigate the tapestry - but I have a hard time seeing him want to do that now. He did eventually just throw a bunch of random research at the party because they went back to his office and started harassing him (exposition!) so the party has some clues to work from....but man, I had some cool ideas to run with the party and the professor/his assistant. The actions in the alley also caused a bit of a fissure in the party (both in-game and in real life. Some people seem genuinely mad at one another).
TLDR: Party made a bad decision and it resulted in a death of what would've been an important NPC. Now they're mad at one another and I'm struggling to rewrite aspects of my game.
Story Questions:
- Should I allow some side quest to bring back the assistant? The group has already been like 'We'll just pay to resurrect her' but they definitely don't have the cash for that and I feel like that would make death seem like MUCH less of a consequence. Any ideas here? This might help bring the professor back into the fold too. Or should dead stay dead?
- If I don't bring this professor back, should I just replace him with another character so I can more-or-less keep with the same plot points? Professor's role was to help them travel places and help decipher old artifacts to bring them closer to the final piece of tapestry...so I could theoretically just put anything in those shoes. Good idea?
Table Question:
- My table seems to have greatly differing opinions on what 'good' is. No one that pushed the thug to executing the assistant seem to feel bad and they all seem to feel like they were 100% doing the right thing. Any way to center everyone's moral compasses?
- Some people seem mad at one another now and I honestly feel a bit bad about it (since it was me that actually killed the girl). Anyone deal with something like this before? Any good ideas to bring the party back together? Should I have a random filler-session with a random dungeon crawl or something to give them something non-heavy to digest?
Gonna tackle these in order:
Story question 1: if the setting you’re presenting is one in which resurrection magic exists and is used, that should be an option. They don’t have the cash to just pay for it, but it could be a good way to introduce some kind of quest in lieu of money. With the understanding that I don’t like having innocent NPCs get murdered any more than anyone else, I think resurrection cheapens the narrative, and I severely limit it in my own game, but if you’re going to let resurrection be a thing, you have to let it be a thing. “It only works for the PCs” is going to cheapen the entire setting a lot more.
Story question 2: This one’s up to you. Letting them do some quest to get the resurrection and repair their relationship with the professor obviously eliminates the need to answer this one, but in the case that that doesn’t end up happening, you could use the events as a way to move everything in a different direction. Or, if you like what you originally wanted to do, you could just slot in a different character who’d do basically the same stuff. Personally, I would shift the story toward “dealing with the consequences of this experience” one way or another. Maybe the fact that they don’t have this professor’s help somehow because a Main Plot problem. But DMs always have limited time and creative energy, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with keeping your original plan and just changing some names.
Table question 1: Most D&D settings are worlds in which good and evil are objective cosmic truths. As the DM, you’re allowed to say “this was an objectively evil act that you’ve committed, and if you don’t demonstrate some character growth, we’re going to have to revisit your alignment.” Even if your world doesn’t have objective ideas of morality, you as the DM still get to have an opinion. For what it’s worth trying to rationalize a terrible decision that resulted in an innocent’s death by saying “well we didn’t really like her anyway” is about as close as it gets to objectively evil even by real-world standards, where objective morality is much farther away than in D&D. So as to your question of how to center everyone’s moral compasses? Define north, and make sure everyone knows where that is.
Table question 2: This is the hardest to answer without knowing your particular players. My group are all adults who have been friends for ten years. When there’s some in-game drama that spills out into real life, we just cool off and get over it. Not every group has that kind of interpersonal dynamic though. I think doing something unrelated and light, letting them forget about this before everything surrounding it gets resolved is narratively less impactful and worse, but I’m a third party who doesn’t have to deal with any of the fallout, so I have the luxury of thinking that. Don’t put a story above the feelings of real people.
In addition to the fine points made by @SagaTympana:
As a DM make sure to have a minimum of three "paths" to uncover the "route" to the plot. Also, NOT having a powerful NPC help the party should be preferred. It strengthens player agency and character impact on the world. Also avoids the entire "why doesn't powerful NPC simply take care of this stuff themselves?" type questions.
For Good/Evil especially when it comes to "sacrificing an innocent" the question gets very tricky. And that's before we throw in resurrection magic. Does the greater good of the overall goal outweigh the cost of a single life? That is a debate which has raged for ages, and one can be on either side and still be "good". If we use a very basic definition of good being "helping others or seeing to others needs over one's self wants/needs" then once again, do the needs of the few (the assistant) outweigh the needs of the many (the trapped city)? One can easily argue it either way, even in the context of "an alley fight".
Good/Neutral/Evil are not three absolute points, rather they are a large scale, and while the difference between White and Black is obvious, the tints and shades in between are numerous, flexible, and travererable without an actual alignment change. One thing to take note, if you the DM are measuring everyone's "moral compass" than you should be providing a Rubric so the players have a reference.
With that out of the way, my opinion:
Story 1: Resurrect is fine.
Story 2: I don't like the idea of having a powerful NPC help the party in the first place.
Table 1: Up to you, if you are going to "center" it you will need to provide a Rubric which defines the "grading system". Personally, having ambiguity is better for overall story, and having intra-character "tension" is a good thing. (One character wants to reform evil another wants to destroy evil, are not both serving "good" but with conflicting methodology?)
Table 2: You didn't kill the girl. The thug did. The player's probably are more mad at you for taking away their agency, you put them into an unwinnable situation (NEVER expect your players to surrender or be captured without EXTENSIVE out of game talk preparing them for it and assuring them it will be temporary and will make the story/plot/theme much better). I can easily see the choice from their perspective of "she dies or I lose all my stuff". A "better" unwinnable situation would have been to have this "powerful magic "thug"" simply teleport/disappear/etc. away with the hostage, thus creating a rescue mission. (There is a BIG problem with your powerful thug, if the thug was that powerful to begin with, should have wiped the floor with the characters. Whole thing screams Deus Ex Machina to me.) It is better to give bad guys "plot armour" than "plot weapons", still frustrating to the players, but is not as offensive (pun intended).
Everyone has given you good answers to your questions so I won't re-iterate what they've said. I will say that you're learning what I consider the first rule of being a DM.
The players will break the campaign! No matter how much you plan or set things up in a way that you think is completely logical and understandable you're players will find a way around it. Intentionally or not. As Pedroig said you need to have several fall back options and perhaps more fluidity in your thinking of the structure of the campaign to accommodate the players choices. The important thing to remember is that you're steering them to an end game. One other thing I wanted to note is that if your players are feeling this kind of tension than you're doing a good job as a DM. It means they are engaged!
That's what happens when you wear a helmet your whole life!
My house rules
I’m going to have to say I don’t think the party’s actions as you describe them were inherently evil. Intent matters. They didn’t kill the assistant, the bad guy did. They threw an ax trying to save the assistant. I mean, there’s 101 movies, tv shows and video games out there where there’s a similar hostage situation and the hero shoots the bad guy in the head and saves the day, probably they were going for something like that. If they had critted on the ax roll and killed the bad guy, everyone would have breathed a sigh of relief and things would have moved on as normal.
Now, the party seems to have come up with some rationalizations that could be evil, but in the moment, I don’t agree they were necessarily evil.
I think you played it exactly right with the wizard getting angry and leaving, but he could, after a cooling off period, decide the party’s heart was in the right place and maybe agree to work with them again. He would never fully trust them again. I doubt he’d be willing to go anywhere with them again, and certainly not into danger. But he could realize the party is still his best hope and so grudgingly give them assistance.
Or, the wizard could recruit a new party to go do the things. But the wizard has a rival who reaches out to the party and offers to help them because the rival is also trying to get their hands on the tapestry. Now you get a race for different pieces, surely the other party will get one or two and eventually everyone will either need to agree to work together or fight it out.
Defining 'good' is a challenge. A lawful good approach to a situation may widely depart from the chaotic good solution. I think this tension is actually good for a party as long as you have/are developing a close bond within the party. If the goody goody approach always wins, this will be hard for those who see that the ends justify the means.
You always have the ability to reshape the story. Instead of killing the assistant, she is knocked into a state of some sort that takes her from the story. Noone but you knows the truth. I find having hard definition of if "x happens then y is the result' can more often then not paint DMs into situation. If you have plans for a NPC, do what you can that works in the story to keep them around (with reprecussions of course).
Definitely a fair point. I've thought about this a bit, and I'm created what I hope to be a dangerous (but epic) 'filler' session to bring the assistant back (if the players want to go that route). Otherwise, I'm going to let them go on their own without the professor.
The professor character isn't really there to act as a powerful NPC. He's learning about the macguffin at about the same time as the players. I mostly want him around to help with travel (I've dropped little hints that he's using academically-unpopular theoretical teleportation magic) and so I can use him to drop the occasion clue if the party gets stuck somewhere. We all recently got out of a game where we basically wasted two entire sessions at camp because we mis-remembered exactly what an NPC told us and the DM wouldn't drop any hints ("You should've written it down.") - I really want to avoid that in way that isn't me just going 'Roll some dice and lets see if you get a clue.'
I agree with you a lot here - I don't like putting in unwinnable situations, but the party lost track of their goal because a handful of thugs stepped in their way. When I thought this bit up, they were suppose to go on a crazy chase through the alleys of Silverymoon with the thugs chasing them (I had a cool thematic chase table written up!).
Instead, they all (well, one tried to chase) stopped to fight and the main target just kept going. Eventually it got to a point where I figured there was no way they'd find him, and I tried to give them an option to just stop the fight and back out to re-assess. I also kinda wanted to use my named thug leader again, because he was cool. Instead, they killed him and set off his hostage-killing magic - all for a target that they shouldn't have been interested in at all?
It was not something I expected them to do, especially since in the last two sessions they were very goal-oriented.
That's an interesting thought. My ideas of keeping the professor in game were to either have him have his own internal alignment switch (wanting to destroy the macguffin in front of the bad guy) or have the party convince them to help (which they've been utterly failing at so far). He just threw a bunch of his research at them, so a rival academic swooping in might not be a bad idea.
Yeah, based on a lot of the comments I've gotten so far on this, I think I'm going to let the party work out what 'good' means. It should be a team decision.
That said, an advantage of telling a group before a game to make 'mostly good' characters is that it does give the DM some idea of how to plan out an adventure. What happened in this session took me very much by surprised, because I thought 'Okay, stand down to protect this innocent - that's probably the move they'll make' (especially after I hinted at what the thug leader was able to do with his magic). Them pushing forward without much though was unexpected.
Side note: Was checking their sheets later that night, and noticed that tank had written "Eh, pretty good" as his alignment. Hadn't noticed that initially.
Got a lot of good advice about dealing with players in person. Important thing to note is that we're all housemates, so having that much tension in the air after a game was very noticeable and very uncomfortable (with the pandemic thing, it's hard to get away from one another). At this point, people seem to have chilled out.
My current plan is to give them a chance for a one-time 'take back' of what they did (super dangerous, epic 'filler' session) or just let them go on on their own, and see what they do to get to the endgame.
Personally, I'd turn and look at the player who said "well I didn't like the assistant anyway" and say "By the way, your alignment is now Neutral, not Good." If it was already Neutral, then it's Evil instead. Allowing someone to die simply because you didn't like them is, at best, borderline between Neutral and Evil. It's anything but Good.
Given the setup - thug taking an innocent hostage - I would have 100% thought the "good" decision would have been "try to kill the thug and rescue the hostage" rather than "surrender." As a player, I would have been doubly frustrated if by trying to rescue a hostage the DM would have branded my character "evil."
I don't think anyone's trying to brand the characters evil for trying to kill the thug. That wasn't an evil decision, just an incredibly stupid one (unless, at the time, their state of mind sincerely was "I don't care what happens to the hostage," but I don't think anyone's suggested that). What's evil is how they're handling the aftermath.
Disclaimer: I haven't read the entire thread, so if someone said this before, then [insert quote here].
Sometimes good decisions go bad, sometimes bad decisions go good and sometimes the dice roll as they may.
As for what I would do with this:
Personally, I would keep the assistant dead (actions have consequences) but for the sake of the group, maybe not let the death be meaningless. It turns out the research that the professor had thrown at them has some notes by the assistant outlying some sort of secret/[plot device] that she had discovered but wasn't ready to present her evidence yet, and so told no one.
They can either go back to the professor and reignite that investigative fire because the discovery was just that important, or even attempt to solve it themselves so you have a reason to write the professor out of the picture but not impact the flow of the story. Her work lives on, and is only now brought to light because of her death. Incomplete, but at least others now know about it.
By rationalizing it? That seems normal and human for people of all alignments.
Rationalizing it with "well I didn't like her anyway" is not at all normal unless you're a sociopath.
I would not go that far. But it will raise some serious eyebrows about your morality. At best, you just don't care about other people (Neutral). At worst, you are glad they are dead because they annoy you (Evil).