Killing Slavers

[Tinman]

In my games it totally depends on the context.

My DF games are all set in Yrth/Banestorm. Slavery is rampant in that setting.
I've had one group play as slavers & they had a great time. I've also had campaigns that mostly don't focus on it or had slavers as encounters to fight.

One big factor in ancient/medieval slavery is (as others here have pointed out) a more moral alternative to slaughtering defeated enemies or conquered populations. A big problem for many people today is the inability to look back & see problems & solutions through the eyes of people back then. They only judge the solutions by modern standards.

In my modern day MH campaigns slavery is of course totally evil but, almost never present.

[AlexanderHowl]

I disagree, the writings that we have over the last 2500 years suggest that people understood that slavery was evil, they just wanted the convenience associated with labor slavery and sexual slavery. Yes, some people attempted to justify it as a humane alternative to genocide, but that was just to assuage their guilt over the evils that they committed or to counter the arguments of their critics who wanted to shut down their lucrative business. The alternative to genocide is to not commit genocide, not to enslave a population of subject them for generations afterwards to torture, rape, and murder.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

… the writings that we have over the last 2500 years suggest that people understood that slavery was evil, they just wanted the convenience associated with labor slavery and sexual slavery.

Some people understood it was evil. I think you're severely underestimating humans' ability to believe that things that are convenient and profitable for them are also exemplars of morality.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I disagree, the writings that we have over the last 2500 years suggest that people understood that slavery was evil, t

They also suggest that people felt that slavery was just fine, downright beneficial to the slaves and the only way civilization could work. It just depends on which people you are talking about.

The alternative to genocide is to not commit genocide

But not necessarily an acceptable alternative to people who would face the prisoners they released returning to fight against them again next season.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I disagree, the writings that we have over the last 2500 years suggest that people understood that slavery was evil, they just wanted the convenience associated with labor slavery and sexual slavery. Yes, some people attempted to justify it as a humane alternative to genocide, but that was just to assuage their guilt over the evils that they committed or to counter the arguments of their critics who wanted to shut down their lucrative business. The alternative to genocide is to not commit genocide, not to enslave a population of subject them for generations afterwards to torture, rape, and murder.

I suspect this may be overthinking it - as far as I can tell our ancestors looked on slavery not as "evil" per se but as one of many bad things that could happen to someone. There seem to be few, if any, cultures that have advanced beyond hunter gatherer without practicing slavery (and I think there may be some cultures that invented it without even getting that far). After all, there was work to be done and someone had to do it - that role was commonly allocated on the basis of "sucks to be you", and if people thought about it at all, ideas such as karma might come into play. The Romans, IIRC held that it was always a choice to be a slave - since their taboo against suicide was much weaker than ours - and that someone prepared to be a slave was naturally suited to be such since otherwise they would have killed themselves or found some other route.
War captives were enslaved because that was the fate of those who lost wars - in most cases, if the roles had been reversed, there would have been little difference. Criminals and debtors were enslaved because ... well, what else do you do with someone who owes reparation and can't pay? And possibly cannot be trusted to have control of their own life?
Individual freedom is an extremely modern idea - and not universal to all modern cultures either - it's hardly surprising that people who didn't hold it as a cardinal virtue would accept slavery as part of the natural order.

Which brings us back to the roleplaying aspect - part of the challenge of being a good roleplayer is getting into the skin of someone from a different mindset - if we can expect someone to imagine their way into the mind of a different species, why not that of someone whose world view would be similar to one of their own ancestors? After all, we take it for granted that our PCs solve their problems with violence ... and I doubt many of us think the same way by default.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The alternative to genocide is to not commit genocide...

The alternatives to genocide are many and varied each with different costs. What you consider to be flat out 'evil' others may see as 'the lesser of many evils'.

[Humabout]

Whenever I've included slavery in my games, "slave" has been a more temporary status that, because of socioeconomic forces, tended to be permanent. A slave could buy his own freedom at any time he had the money to do so, and any freeman could sell himself into slavery and keep the proceeds. In fact, this was something occasionally done to survive when a person didn't have enough food or fell on hard times. The person was still a person, just of lower standing.

Similarly, a slave owner had a social obligation to provide a certain minimum standard of living for his slaves. Random cruelty was extremely frowned upon; it was equally unacceptable to abuse your horse. Slaves could and did own property. They could earn money that was theirs; they did this on their own time. And slaves could buy themselves out of slavery. It wasn't even uncommon for slave owners to emancipate their slaves as a reward and the former slaves stay on to continue working for their former owner - just for pay now.

What made being a slave generally undesirable, aside from the social stigma of being in a lower social class, was that you had to spend a portion of your time working for free. That limited your mobility, hampered your earning potential, etc.

I give all of this as background for when I say I've never had a player have issues interacting with slave owners in a game that was automatically hostile or out of character for the setting. I do not run the sort of slavery that was present in the American South unless I want to illicit that reaction.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Before the Civil War, there were significant numbers of black people who risked their lives to leave the plantations and travel to the North or to Canada to lived in freedom. The traffic in the other direction was negiigible. I think that's a pretty compelling case of "voting with their feet" in favor of the risks and hardships of freedom over the security of slavery. And if the South hadn't maintained fugitive slave patrols to capture runaways and take them back, there might well have been a lot more such votes; plantation owners certainly feared that this would happen.

Yep, exactly

It's also not like the punishment for running away was a slap on the wrist either, and yet they still did it.

IIRC early on one of the reasons why they went with slaves form Africa rather than trying enslave the indigenous people already there was that the indigenous people would find it easier to escape and more importantly stay escaped than transplanted africans (who didn't know the territory, were very conspicuous and didn't have any potential allies on hand).

[Lord Azagthoth]

The players in my campaign encountered slaves (and their slavers/owners) twice. Once on Ryloth (where the female Twi'lek slaves come from) and once on Nar Shaddaa where they encountered lots of Lepi slaves.

In both cases, it was in a region where slavery was not forbidden (although it was forbidden in the Republic at that time). If they would have killed a slave owner without cause they would get into trouble. If it was done by a Force user, he would slide further towards the dark side (there are less violent ways to help the slaves and not all slave owners are evil people, some even marry their slave).

On Nar Shaddaa it was another case. The slaves where of the same species as one of the player's character with a Sense of Duty towards his clan (and some of the Lepi where of his clan) and the oweners where members of a crime syndicate.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I disagree, the writings that we have over the last 2500 years suggest that people understood that slavery was evil.

Eh, the general historical pattern is "it's wrong to enslave people like me", with varying definitions of 'like me'.