Butterfingers wrote: ↑Mon Apr 02, 2018 12:06 am
Let me me the one to voice dissenting opinion again: I'd give them all the same amount of shadow points, it doesn't matter who killed the helpless orcs, the others agreed and watched, so they're equally quilty as accomplishes. So give them all the same amount.
I think there's different degrees of being an accomplice. Egging them on, going, "yeah, slit that helpless orc's throat!" might indeed be as bad as the actual act itself. Just not trying to stop them or talk them out of it is not, in my opinion.
I think by your description, you don't consider messing up with their food a misdeed, since it wasn't a poisoning exactly, just an underhand way to even out the odds? So if they'd settled with that, you wouldn't have given them any shadow points?
That's how I would rule it. Incapacitating your enemies with no lasting effects so you can sneak in and rescue a prisoner, hopefully without violence, is perhaps not perfectly honourable, but it's not worth a shadow point. Of course you can gain shadow points just for horrible experiences that aren't your fault in any way, so the exact situation does matter.
Faramir's line about how he wouldn't "ensnare even an orc with a falsehood" is a degree of moral purity I don't expect the players' characters to live up to (no shadow points for lying and trickery, as long as no-one really gets hurt). But it's a good indication, to me, of the
ideal way to behave in Tolkien's morality, the gold standard if you like. If the heroes turn their backs on that morality, or move too far from it, they start to become likely to gain shadow points. Where exactly the line is, and how many points should be gained, is of course debatable, and may be dependent on context.
