Arushalae, Reformed Succubus
Fourth Session (9 page pdf) – We find an allegedly reformed succubus and fight a sea of enemies on her behalf, just like with a normal succubus.
So this reformed succubus sends Tabregon a dream and we go get her and kill her enemies and she’s good and we of course believe her and want her to come join the Crusade because those guys are just poopy-head racists whenever they don’t like anyone with horns.
As you can tell from the tone there I started to get a bad attitude about this time and I’ll explain why.
Here’s the problem I have – it’s partly with this adventure path, and partly with how some of our party is acting around these “redemption” plotlines. We’re just eating the plot-points like so much pablum without any real roleplaying or interesting conflict about what’s supposed to be difficult moral decisions. I’m not dumb, I’m sure she really is supposed to be good and there’s no “game success” repercussions to blindly trusting her. That’s par for the course for these Paizo storylines, they usually only have one layer of complexity to them and don’t require you to really think or make hard decisions to succeed. What I do object to is not having any realistic push-back at all. Succubi, what with the telepathy and dominate person? So we should all automatically back her? I’m sure the crusaders won’t just throw us in the hole and execute her when we return, but they *should*, or at least there should be the threat of that. “Detect evil” and metagaming shouldn’t settle every argument and some of these attempted redemptions (we’ve hauled a half dozen high level evil folks back to camp and dumped them there as possible proteges) should bite us in the ass.
I like the idea of a good campaign, and of the possibility of redeeming some foes – I’m usually the only one in most of our games suggesting we don’t just kill all our enemies out of hand. Everyone shouldn’t be unremittingly evil or there’s never any hope or changing people. But the way this is playing out, it just makes it… Cheap. There’s just no drama about it. So it makes me bored. As an Irori-ite I find Chaos just about as objectionable as Evil, but I’m sure no one in the group is interested in talking about that philosophical point so bah.
I understand some people like their games like this, but to me this kind of thing is the interesting crux of roleplaying so when it gets short shrift it drains most of the enjoyment for me – I could give a shit about killing more monzterz for their XPz. Story shouldn’t be video game cutscenes inflicted on you… I am trying to push more real in-character discussion on this stuff but we don’t have all of the group IC at the same moment pretty much ever so it’s hard to get going.
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