Resurrecting my long-dead series of "Should [D&D Character] (Have) Kill(ed) [D&D Monster]," I'd like to blog about senseless violence that lead to further senseless violence. Now that the violence is mostly over, I think I'd like to blog about how senseless it all really was.
It started with a completely unrelated conflict. One D&D character got on the bad side of an Assassin (long story), and the Assassin did a great deal of damage to that character. To regain some health, the character in question used a quarterstaff with a vampiric life-drain ability to hit a rat. I'm sure he intended to kill something whose life had little value, whereby to gain healing without causing much actual harm to the world. But this rat was actually a wererat, and he survived, and he remembered.
After the Assassin had been dealt with, the party, including the character who had unwittingly attacked a wererat, spotted several shady characters lurking in an alley nearby. These shady characters with the initial wererat and a handful of his friends, hoping to confront the character and "teach him a lesson," now that they had numbers on their side, outnumbering the party two to one. I forgot exactly how this conflict started, but it doesn't much matter. Both parties would have attacked the other if the other hadn't attacked first. I think the wererats technically made the first Attack Roll, unless you count Shoving as a kind of Attack, which it technically was. Either way, both sides acted aggressively, and both sides deserved to have their aggression stopped by the other, by force if necessary. This isn't the group of wererats whose lives I consider worth pondering.
The conflict continued as the surviving wererats went into full retreat and retreated straight into the wererat lair. The Party pursued them, perhaps (charitably) hoping to end the wererats' aggression once and for all. This led the party directly into the path of some wererats whose task it was to stand guard. This was a secret lair, and the wererats' policy was to ensure that anyone who discovered their secret took said secret to their graves. The wererat guards had a "Kill on Sight" policy regarding intruders. When the party intruded, the wererat guards were prepared to fight back.
This is the conflict I find morally interesting. "Kill on Sight" is rarely a justifiable policy. Initiating aggression is rarely a morally viable move. The wererats probably shouldn't have tried to kill the party on sight, and the party probably shouldn't have tried to kill the wererats on sight. In that regard, the morality of the conflict was a wash, with both sides being equally wrong.
What complicates matters was that the wererats live in their lair. This was a home invasion, and I believe that people have a moral right (if not a legal right) to defend their homes from intruders, perhaps with force, if necessary. Does this mean that the wererats had a moral right to defend their home by attacking the aggressive intruders? I think so. By the time these two sides (the adventuring party and the wererat guards) came into contact with each other, the adventuring party had been reported as being lethally violent and had been witnessed destroying wererat property in a threatening and violent matter. The wererats had every right to assume that the party was there to kill them all, and I judge that such an assumption would have been correct. The wererats had to respond in some way to the obvious, imminent, lethal threat.
Still, I suppose the wererat guards could have surrendered. I'm not sure if it's morally justifiable to require the victims of violent threats to surrender to those who pose such threats, but it would probably have precluded further violence, so it is at least an option to consider.Yet, once a person surrenders, they reduce their ability to fight back, making them more vulnerable to threats and attacks, perhaps inadvertently encouraging further threats and attacks against other people. Surrender is not generally a good plan, and while it was later found necessary for one of the few remaining wererats to surrender, and they weren't immediately killed, I don't fully know how I feel about requiring surrender, instead of counterattack, in cases of responding to violence.
The first D&D character probably shouldn't have attacked the rat the way he did, though that action seems mostly morally justified, given the knowledge he had. The first group of wererats definitely shouldn't have threatened the party. Neither side should have attacked the other first. The party probably shouldn't have pursued the retreating wererats, except perhaps with the intention to prevent further attacks. Neither the party nor the wererat guards should have had a "Kill on Sight" policy against the other, but it may be that true that the wererat guards had a right to to defend their home against invasion. And certainly, once an attack was made, a counterattack was all but guaranteed, placing both sides in moral (and mortal) jeopardy.
I don't think the party should have immediately attacked the wererat guards. I don't know if the wererat guards would have been justified in immediately attacking the party, though I currently think I think so. A lot of moral questions were asked and left unanswered tonight. But at least they were interesting questions, well worth pondering.
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