"Law Breaker" the mortal version

[Kaldra]

during a discussion of the first law several people asked why wasn't there a consequence for a mortal who kills another mortal ( refresh wise )? no matter how you get there the taking of a life is a big deal.

starting with the base LawBreaker power seems like a solid place.

after the first life you take and every X after that you gain a plus 1 on the act and loose another point of refresh. more or less like the slippery slope part of Lawbreaker.

any one else have ideas or input on the matter?

[luminos]

The reason its not this way is a setting detail.  Using magic is inextricably linked to your character, and it is impossible to be disassociated from its effects.  Just killing someone could mess you up, and doing so repeatedly could make the risk greater, but its not part of the metaphysics of the books that doing so mundanely has an ontological effect.

[Kaldra]

this may not be a option for every group but if a group did want to place a higher weight on the value of life it would be a good way of modeling it.

[Richard_Chilton]

If there's something like that then a certain Knight of the Cross is screwed - as are all the Wardens.  Micheal is able to help Dresden through his crisis over killing a man because he's been there.  He's been there many, many times - yet is still a good person.

Richard

[Kaldra]

and Micheal knew just how hard it was, it was an ordeal, also it did take its toll on morgan,

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at the end when harry soulgazed morgan he saw how tiered, worn, and stained morgans soul was after all of the years

he was a good man but all of the things he had seen and done worn on him.  

[Wyrdrune]

maybe it has also to do with the fact that magic is a power of life, generated by life. and by killing using magic you pervert part of this power and also destroy a little bit of it. (harry's words)

[Korwin]

during a discussion of the first law several people asked why wasn't there a consequence for a mortal who kills another mortal ( refresh wise )? no matter how you get there the taking of a life is a big deal.

Was that my post?
If so, I meant it the other way around.

In my game there is no Lawbreaker power. Magic or not.
But you get the same consequences if you break one of the seven laws (with or without magic), i.e. change of an Aspect.

[Richard_Chilton]

and Micheal knew just how hard it was, it was an ordeal, also it did take its toll on morgan,

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at the end when harry soulgazed morgan he saw how tiered, worn, and stained morgans soul was after all of the years

he was a good man but all of the things he had seen and done worn on him.  

It was an ordeal - but it had more to do with shifting aspects than something like lawbreaker.  As for the other example, living life as a cop does that.

Look at the change in Dresden from the first book to one of the more recent books.  His world view has dimmed.  He's getting quicker to react to things as threats... The Dresden from book one would never have come close to killing a couple of con goer the way Harry almost does in Proven Guilty, but now he sees a threat and reacts to it.  It's him seeing people die.  It's him seeing the evil in the world.  It's wanting to help to and not being able.  What has happened is changing Dresden.

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I would never have expected Dresden to turn his back on Susan, and the Dresden from the early book wouldn't have, but after all he has been through he did.  He's done things that he hates himself for.  Imagine how he'll be after hundreds of years.  That's what happened to Morgan.

I'd say that some of the people who kill other people have hit a situation where they had to swap out aspects and it made sense to include something about those killings.  Dresden, which all the mental stress he takes, could have easily said to his GM "How about we say that the battle with the demon in my head (or whatever it is that causing the stress) has got me thinking about that killing - so we work out me having nightmares over killing someone who needed killing?" and the GM saying "Sounds good - it should take you a while to work through that".

That makes more sense than someone losing refreshes over something that people did in the books - killing.

Butters has never killed anyone - but most of the reoccurring characters have.  I can't see all of them losing refreshes over it.

Here's something a little more helpful: If you go with something like that, make it easier to buy off than lawbreaker.  When you kill with magic you're not using a gun or a knife or anything like that - you are using your "you", your inner essence, maybe even your soul, and that should have a more extreme result than tossing a grenade into a room.

Richard

[Bruce Coulson]

Shifting aspects reflecting the changes killing someone (or many someones) has on a person does seem like a good way to reflect the damage done by such an act.

Consider that serial killers are almost universally sociopaths; people who are psychologically severely damaged.

And Morgan is more than a police officer who has occasionally killed as part of his job; he's also an executioner who has killed completely helpless targets.  (Whether those killings were all justified or not is another topic altogether; let's just say they were.)  If killing someone who poses absolutely no threat to you or anyone else (at that moment) doesn't bother and change you; there's already a problem.

[Richard_Chilton]

Darn, I forget what book this is in so I'll use spoiler tags.

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There's a discussion between Murphy and Dresden where Murphy says that she has known cops like Morgan.  That years on the job has worn them down and she can't imagine what it would be like to work like that for a century or more.  At the end of Turn Coat Luccio reveals how she spend centuries walling herself off emotionally - which is how she survived the job with her soul intact.  There are cops out there who see everyone as a perp and expect the worse from everyone - because they have seen the worse so many times that they can't see anything but the worse.

So it's really the job, the long grind of seeing mankind at its worse, that drags people down - not this act or that act of killing.

By the time Dresden meets him, Morgan had no problem doing the executions - anymore than Micheal had killing an evil creature.  He has seen how bad warlocks can get and knows that if they aren't stopped in time (i.e. they go into negative refreshes from Law Breaker) they will all become monsters.  When he kills them he is doing good - saving all of their future victims.  Not even Dresden can marshal any real arguments against the execution other than "we shouldn't have let things come to this - we should have spotted him before he went bad".

Richard

[Bruce Coulson]

True, the job of seeing people generally at their worst does a lot of psychic damage over time.  (Most long-term officers see the world as perps, cattle(civilians), and cops.  And there's not a lot of difference between cattle and perps.)

But killing someone is recognized as being a serious break moment; when even long-term, hardened officers can have problems.  And to be honest, we really don't want police to be comfortable with killing people.

Morgan hadn't gone completely sociopathic (otherwise making him sympathetic at all would have been impossible).  He did have serious doubts about one potential execution that we've seen.  And it's possible that Morgan (reluctantly) agreed with Harry; that each execution was in some way a failure of the White Council.  (pure speculation on my part here.)

Thought experiment:  if it could be shown that the White Council; that Morgan; had executed someone who wasn't a warlock and hadn't violated the Laws of Magic; would Morgan be more upset with the failure of the system or his complicity in it?

[JosephKell]

And Morgan has aspects to show for it
1.  Mercy has no place in the Law
2.  Zealotry in the cause of Justice is no vice
3.  Merlin's Ally
4.  Combat Veteran

Okay, maybe not the third one.

Start twisting aspects.

"To Protect and Serve" could become "To Prevent and Survey"  (Survey as in Surveillance)

[KOFFEYKID]

I was reading this and this aspect jumped into my head as a nice twist.

At first the aspect is: An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure.

After years of fighting the good fight and being exposed to the worse aspects of human nature: An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Flesh.

[Kaldra]

i like the idea of aspects getting twisted, any ideas on when the aspect twisting should start?

[Richard_Chilton]

After a traumatic event.  That could be having your mind raped by an evil ghost (Murphy had "I've had monsters in my head") or otherwise had problems (like being exposed to the supernatural, or having to kill someone).  The book talks about extreme consequences giving aspects like that.

 I don't think that there are rules for it, but if the groups agree that something would give someone a huge amount of mental stress, the type of stress that would normally take you out and leave you in the fetal position for a while, then you could call that an extreme mental consequence that chances someone.  The problem is you don't want to do it too often.  Do it too often and it's a form of railroading.

The Beckitts are a good example of this.  They held their little girl as she died (well, as far as they know she died) and it twisted the rest of their lives - yet technically they didn't suffer a single mental attack or social (or any other) attack during that scene. 

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And then there's the scene where Billy becomes William.

Richard