[Fabula] Test your heroes!

[Tomas HVM]

A scene in todays roleplaying game:

The human characters contrived to capture two orc-NPCs. The humans are convinced the orcs were after their great magical ring (actually it is a legendary orc ring, and the characters are bringing it to a great orc chief, to secure peace between men and orcs). The orcs are bound with strong ropes and interrogated, but they deny everything, claiming to be guides to the men, and nothing but guides. The characters can't trust them, so they start discussing what to do with them. Two of the characters are heroes, and they will loose their mighty hero-points if the captives are killed. So they decide to take the orcs with them, as captives.

It's a pain to drag captives along on a march in the mountains. They have to be cared for and guarded all the time, and helped over the most difficult terrain. The characters chance into a wild looking orc, with a great mace and loincloth and fierce teeth. The wild-orc offers them money for the captives, and they accept the meagre payment (good to be rid of them). He takes the captives, and immediately beats one of them to death. He's about to bash the other one too, when our heroes stop him, with sword in hand.

He gets mightily annoyed! They sold them to him! These captives are his to eat now, he explains them. So they offer to buy them back. He immediately start haggling; he'll keep the dead, and sell them the other one back for five times the prize they got! They protest. He tells them that they sold the orc to him, so the orc is his property, and he will sell his property for any amount he choose to, or not. The savage one get the whiff of a good trade here; him keeping most of the meat and earning a fair share as well. And right he is:

The characters pay up, and goes on with the surviving orc, still bound. He starts complaing though, feeling quite safe now; that their moral codex forbid them to kill a captive. He calls them names, tells them what pitiful heroes they are; selling a captive as food, just to be rid of him. He bemoans his dead friend, being savage supper now. He whines on until one of the characters loose patience, and bash his head in. That's it! The orc is dead. The filthy thief will whine no more...

What about our two heroes? Will they revenge him, by killing their fellow adventurer? Or will they leave the orc unrevenged, and loose their precious hero-points, for failing to protect or revenge their captive?

When faced with this dilemma, the players starts whining. They moan about the unfairness of it all!

Unfair!? Your characters are very much alive! My NPC has been bound and interrogated, sold as food to a savage wild-orc, and killed in the most brutal way, by his captors, while being utterly defenseless! That's the unfair side of it!!!

(I've always meant that REAL HEROES should be next to saints, and that they should be tested at regular intervals, to make sure their heroism is not withering...)

[Callan S.]

When faced with this dilemma, the players starts whining. They moan about the unfairness of it all!

Was it agreed pre game that the premise to address was something like 'The expectations of a hero'? If so, what system encouragement is there to address this?

If not, I think your players may have a similar view, but the emphasis is different. Real heroes should be tested, indeed. But they haven't actually done any heroics in the session described (certainly they may have done some in the past, but a re-affirmation of it in the session is healthy). Without their being heroes, it becomes "Average joes should be tested, as they should be next to saints", which is either unfair to joes or makes light of sainthood.

[Loki]

More importantly, is the code of the hero spelled-out and understood by the players, and do they buy it? If not, they're being put into the position of losing in-game benefits (the "hero points") for not playing their characters according to someone else's idea of what a character should be. That would be about as fair as penalizing a character for wearing a black hat because a real hero wears a white hat.

OTOH if the players all agreed that white is the color of a hero's hat, then go nuts.

p.s. I don't know the game (fabula) so the above might reflect my ignorance.