The Horror
BLAM!
They just committed murder. Now what?
Non-player characters can seem pretty disposable. Especially when there's large groups of them, executions can seem a tempting alternative. But that's the easy route, and as game master of an action horror campaign you want there to be consequences for these actions.
To start, it's entirely possible not everyone is comfortable with this sort of execution. Player characters who are more ethically inclined should protest at the very least. And obviously, any civil-minded NPC will call the police. But what if there are no witnesses?
Some games, like Call of Cthulhu and White Wolf's World of Darkness, have mechanics to represent mental and ethical decay. It's a simple matter of penalizing the character appropriately.
On the other hand, it may not be unreasonable to assume that the executioner's actions are the beginning of a narcissistic personality spiral. When your characters are playing protagonists who know the truth and are protecting humanity from extinction, it's easy to start to thinking of people as sheep. The end justifies the means, the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, and before you know it the character is pointing a gun at a squalling infant.
If the infant is the anti-christ, does that make it okay?
As a game master, it's easy to overlook this tiny moral cost –of becoming less human and hardened as a response to seeing bad things done by bad people. But it’s their humanity and morality that makes the good guys good. So if players start to play hard ball, there's nothing wrong with reminding them of the consequences of their actions.
Perhaps a police officer or snooping reporter investigates the death of the nameless mook and evidence leads to the PC. Not enough to pin anything on him, but enough to inconvenience him at the most inopportune moments.
Friends and family might pop up, confused and saddened by the turn of events. If you really want to tug at heart strings, orphaned children asking about their parents can become a major plot point (and majorly uncomfortable).
If the character secretly harbors guilt over his murders, various psychoses could develop. Nothing quite like hallucinating about your victims when you're in the middle of a tense mission.
Or maybe the character starts to lose a sense of moral judgment. As a GM, share notes that any slightly suspicious NPC "seems guilty." Trigger-happy gunmen can quickly become a liability to a team if they start murdering everyone who looks at them the wrong way.
There's a fine line between a soldier and a murderer, a cop and a thug. Sometimes it's a matter of perspective.
Your Turn: How do you deal with trigger happy characters?
