Hypotheticals and RPGers...

[seawasp]

So my good online friend burger_eater  posted this question on his LJ today. (Summary: your only child, a 5 year old girl, has been turned to a vampire without warning, and without knowledge of how. Knowing she'll live forever as a child will you turn yourselves into vampires to care for her?

My response was: 

Too too too many variables in that to answer. I need the specs on the type ov vampire, variations base on age (do you get stronger as you age, etc), position of vampires in society, existence or not of organization surrounding either or both vampires and hunters, etc., etc., and so on. Without that, reasonable answers range from "Hell yeah, we're changing!" to staking my own daughter out of mercy and necessity. And I do have a 6 year old daughter who was five only a week ago.

burger_eater responded with "you can't find out that information", and the discussion went a couple on in that vein.

I sensed some frustration there in that I think he felt it was a chilling but fairly clear choice one way or the other. To me, though, any such hypothetical can't be presented that way, because the decision is predicated on the precise details of the situation. This may come from the fact that I've been a roleplaying gamer (RPGer) for... um... 34 years now. Present me with a character-type choice, I'll analyze it the way I would playing the game. I want to know the rules. I want the stats of my opposition. I want to know the limits and advantages of the choices. It's like asking "would you throw the switch on a condemned prisoner"? Some people may answer "yes" automatically, and others may answer "no" automatically, but I'll answer "What was he condemned for? Do I think he got a raw deal on the trial? Why am I in the position of throwing the switch -- what's my authority?" and so on.

In that specific case, of course, he presented it in a context that is a VERY strong emotional one for any parent. As I pointed out, I *have* a little girl about that age, and so making a snap decision about how to address it just wouldn't EVER happen. I'd exhaust all possible resources to address and define the problem before making any decisions.

How many others out there are like me? Or are most of you more able to block out the questions and just answer the hypotheticals as framed?

Comments

[remus-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Not having had children of my own, I'm already convinced that all five year olds are the spawn of the devil and should be staked on general principles. But that's just me.

[muirecan.livejournal.com]

Need more context of course. It isn't a simple stake/change question. What kind of vampire leads the questions and no that isn't being cute. Even with out the variant there are to many types of vampires in myth to simply make a yes/no answer to this. Again which of the varieties of vampire are we talking about? From what culture and what background?

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

So far the critical issue among the commentators seems to be the mental problems; the original poster has a form of vampirism where the kid won't become an adult mind in an undead child's body, but rather an undead kid with some form of learning disability or anterograde amnesia. For obvious reasons, many posters are wondering how taking on the same mental health problems would help.

There also seems to be an implied game-rule that even afflicted bystanders must maintain the Masquerade, although panicky governmental over-reaction has been brought up more often than irate vampire enforcers.

[seawasp]

But the Masquerade is inherently impossible in this scenario, unless the parents in question happen to be pretty wealthy and properly situated. I can't even begin to imagine how I could hide such a condition; my little girl goes to school, there's MANY people who would come to inquire if she stopped going, and medical excuses require medical examination and certification. And a medical exam is going to bust the masquerade WIDE open.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I concur. Oh, it would be possible to move every two years or so, but someone's going to start asking questions sooner or later. burger_eater seems to think that the only government response is to kill all vampires no matter how friendly or co-operative they are; I am unconvinced.

[othercat.livejournal.com]

I think I'm a "find out all background information pertaining to the situation" type, even if I don't game very much.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

I'll join with Burger Eater - too many of my interesting (to me) hypotheticals seem to hang up on people bringing demands for what seems to me to be irrelevant information. When I am posing a hypothetical I am not usually postulating a complete and consistent world - rather the world's borders extend to the end of the question and from there on it is turtles all the way down. Verbal shorthands I or other people have developed in order to cut these digressions out and get to the question itself include "Alien Space Bats [do something]" - to skip how it was done, or why and "If you were a Brustian(*) god would you ...." to remove the reply of "I wouldn't do either one - both are immoral".


(*) Brustian god - Some of the Dragerans in Stephen Brust's Vlad Taltosh universe define a god as 'someone who may morally perform an action that would be immoral if it were not performed by a god.'

[seawasp]

To me, it's only irrelevant information if the question you ask is already well-formed and bounded, so that I can actually understand it.

It also matters HOW you phrase a question. Phrasing it "your only child, a 5-year old" is very different than "a child has been made into a vampire". The first MAKES it a roleplaying scenario, in a sense; it brings ME into the mix, with all my knowledge, all my resources, all of my expectations, hopes, and fears. And equally it brings in my way of handling a problem.

To me, questions like that aren't any different from "Who'd win, the Enterprise or the Death Star". The answers depend on the start conditions, the universal assumptions, and a host of other things that need to be defined before you can even begin to arrive at a reasonable answer.

(RE "Brustian god": the definition makes no sense to me; if it's immoral, it's immoral, doesn't matter if you're a god or not. Being a god may help you GET AWAY with doing it easier, of course.)

[purplekitte.livejournal.com]

The problem is that 'vampire' is such a broad term, so I agree with the 'wait and find out more' and wanting the stats of everything. There are plenty of hypothetical questions that I can answer instantly or are meant to be that way, but I can think of situations where my answer in this case would be different because there are so many different types of vampires I've seen in fiction.