Group up with someone whos character is willing to do such actions. You get the quest credit for being there, and you can RP out the consequences if necessary. It gets you around going OOC for the sake of completing a quest, and keeps your hands clean.

Regards
-Velk.

My response is this: while killing the mobs, they present a direct and immediate threat (no matter how minor), the same as warfare to a soldier. Does it excuse any action? No, but it gives a fairly comfortable rationale, “it was him/her/them or me, someone had to die, and I don’t want to die yet”, which allows a little more resistance to the bad feelings that a normal human being experiences when killing or harming something. The fact that these mobs are only a threat because you are in their vicinity (often their homes/towns/huts) is relatively inconsequential. Killing for loot and experience is the MMO way, and has been the primary way of advancing a character in a roleplaying game since the first edition of D&D. Its an accepted reality of gaming that things will have to die for your benefit.

Someone who is being tortured is generally not an immediate threat. They are either too weak to respond in kind, or somehow incapacitated to prevent them from from defending themselves. They are vulnerable, literally powerless, and we are inflicting extra pain on them *because* they are in this state of being. If they were able to defend themselves, we would kill them outright. We are being placed in the role of a sadistic oppurtunist, without any other relatively equal option, and no apparent moral backlash in the game.

As a human, most people generally feel sympathy to vulnerability. Its an internal fear for many to be at the complete mercy of someone who wants to hurt them. Its tapping into a primal sense of insecurity, that something like this could happen to us. Most people can come to terms with dying, even dying in a relatively painful way, but to be tortured, genuinely tortured, is still terrifying.

Torture, or sadistic, antisocial behaviors of the like, have generally been punished when they occur in RP games, at least in some way, whether they be tabletop, live action, or even video games. Your character is killed in the process, you become a criminal/outcast, a rock falls on you, or something happens that says what you’re doing is socially unacceptable and morally contemptible, and the powers that be will hold you accountable for your actions.

A mission like this that offers no karmic justice for doing wrong doesn’t sit well with many people. If there were some form of a punishment for the behavior, it would probably be better received, even if it still wasn’t optional. Even if the punishment was as simple as being chastised by a NPC, it would seem less wrong, I think.

Now I didn’t have a porblem with this quest at all, but I did have a issue with the DK one where you had to kill you companion(I took as lover). I actually failed the quest twice before I went ahead and killed her. I didn’t want to do it, but I had to. Also I didn’t like killing the civilains from the SC either.

But i am posting this because maybe blizzard wants to to these horrible things, as part of the storyline for the future. Thats just my opinion.

That said, one of my pipe dream game dev ideas is a game that offers real consequences for actions, and offers real progress for alternate solutions to problems. It would require a large, involved “finite state” engine, but could offer a much more rewarding experience than the “antihero” scripted offal being offered by most devs. Putting that into an MMO would be yet another order of complexity… but may well be worth it. (Though a company spending resources on writers, screenplay authors and engineering may well skimp on graphics and slide under the AAA radar.)

Morality is, after all, a highly personal thing. You shouldn’t be rewarded for conforming to the developers’ ideas of Good or Evil. But the option would be there for you, on a personal level, to have to wrestle with difficult decisions or play your character the way you wished. If you didn’t want that as a part of your gaming experience, then fine, you’ll not be punished by missing out on loot or suffering a lower Reputation score or anything.

When you think about it, the world presented by Blizzard is a TERRIBLY morally ambiguous place, with many factions willing to do many horrific things, quite convinced that they are in the right. The Scarlet Crusade is the best example of this, but many—both Alliance – and Horde-side—would hardly bat an eye at the thought of genocide or torture. The Alliance is frequently portrayed as self-righteous, aloof, uncompromising, racist, puritanical, and hypocritical (c.f. VanCleef or the Slaughtered Lamb); the Horde is barbaric, bloodthirsty, vindictive, bestial, manipulative, desperate, and morally apathetic. Much of this is propaganda spread by the other faction, but there are members of every race who represent their darker side. And, of course, we have both factions making land claims that they can’t really back up in the various battlegrounds (with the possible exception of WSG, where it seems pretty clear that the Horde are the aggressors). And this is to say nothing of the lore—the books and comics and whatnot behind the game are all rife with moral ambiguities and tough decisions, some of which we may not agree with.

All this really forces the player (the one who doesn’t ignore it all, anyway) to think about who the good guys are here. Both sides are aggressors, both sides are victims, and neither side is willing to back down … for every step towards peace, a skirmish breaks out somewhere and undoes any progress. Everyone’s just trying to survive in a very hostile world. But survival at what cost? Who are your real enemies here? Especially when one considers the subtler influences of the Burning Legion? There’s a lot of room for ethical considerations in the game. I wish Blizz would capitalize on that, and really bring it to the players outside of RP realms.

KOTOR was an amazing game. It was mentioned with some pride by Lucas Arts that the storyline was written by screenwriters. And I have to say it shows. I played my first character taking the path of the light, then started a new character and chose the dark side. The choices on the latter were far more difficult, but I am glad I played both. Despite its limited life (not an MMO and the storyline wasn’t free. i.e. it followed a structure), it was one of the best games I’ve ever played. WoW is in a totally different class, and because of it’s depth and complexity, I haven’t seen anything that compares to it.

Besides this one dude I totrured lived while the rest of his buddies died while I was trying to get the key!

The torture quest I thought about, and I thought about feeling bad about it… but then I realized I’ve killed thousands and thousands of mobs for their brains, bones, skin, dust, etc. I’ve chopped the heads off people, chewed their limbs off, etc. I’ve poisoned people, I’ve killed the other faction by drowning them, throwing them off ledges, etc. Heck, I’ve even murdered people because they tagged a node I wanted, or because I thought they were acting like a jerk quest mobs. I figured if I can deal with all that murder and mayhem from my character without really thinking about it, torturing a guy for information that supposedly saves lives isn’t any worse. Same with the Wolvar. I mean, I’ve killed thousands of mothers in this game, leaving babies orphaned… in this one I’m actually saiving babies from eventual slaughter.

As for the Death Knight quests… you’re a Death Knight. I mean, maybe they should have picked a different hero class, but it’s a Death Knight. If you have a problem with the Death Knight quests…. wouldn’t you also have a problem playing Death Knights period?