Mercenary - Code of Honor

[roguebfl]

A relevent quote

Originally Posted by Death Masks

"What about him?" I asked the Archive, and nodded towards Kincaid. "Can he be trusted?"
"Kincaid?" the girl asked, her voice whimsical. "Can you be trusted?"
"You're paid up through April," the man replied, his eyes still scanning the street. "After that, I might get a better offer."
"There," the girl said to me. "Kincaid can be trusted until April. He's an ethical man, in his way."

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Carlos

What is the meaning of "Stay Bought"?
Sorry, I'm not a native english speaker)

Is something like "Always get the job done"? (once you start it, you'll want to finish it and doesn't have nothing to do with contract).

Something like. In practice it was quite common in history for mercenaries to switch sides. A mercenary that always does his best to fulfill his contract would be a quite high class one and could charge more.

[samd6]

There is a minor difference between "will not sell out" and "Takes an unreasonable amount of money to break contract"

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Something like. In practice it was quite common in history for mercenaries to switch sides. A mercenary that always does his best to fulfill his contract would be a quite high class one and could charge more.

depends on the time period. Mercenaries were very common in the thirty years war. There were never any betrayals.

As for the example samd6 gave, I'm not too sure that universe is a good place to find mercenaries with a code of honor. They have sense of duty towards each other, but phrases like "the customer is number three" and "we fulfilled our contracts: you hired us to take out them and they hired us to take you" abound.

[Lord Carnifex]

Whereas the Dorsai will fulfill a contract or die trying. If they ever didn't, people would stop hiring them.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by ericthered

depends on the time period. Mercenaries were very common in the thirty years war. There were never any betrayals.

As for the example samd6 gave, I'm not too sure that universe is a good place to find mercenaries with a code of honor. They have sense of duty towards each other, but phrases like "the customer is number three" and "we fulfilled our contracts: you hired us to take out them and they hired us to take you" abound.

Not in that sense. If I remember it was common enough for POWs to switch sides. Given the incentive it was understandable.

[Curmudgeon]

re: Stays Bought

This discussion may need to hive off into a separate thread but I'll give a couple of fictional examples that may clear up the commonly used meaning without necessarily adhering to the disadvantage in RAW.

Stays Bought is both more and less than "does whatever he needs to, to get the job done."

One of the earliest examples of someone who stays bought in cinema was Lee Van Clef's character (Angel-Eyes?) in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. That character might even be the original source and inspiration for the disadvantage. (I can't recall any earlier instances, though there may be.)

In the opening sequences for that character, he kills a man that he's been paid to, despite his victim's offer to pay him off/bribe him to let him go. The character does however take the money that his victim offered him and returns to his employer to report that the job is done. As soon as he is done reporting, he draws on his employer and just before killing him explains of his victim, "I think he wanted me to kill you." Staying bought doesn't necessarily preclude taking on other jobs, even jobs inimical to the current employer as long as they don't prevent the current job from being completed.

As a negative example, Paladin in Have Gun, Will Travel didn't have the stays bought disadvantage. If events made keeping to his contract likely to lead to unethical or immoral results, Paladin would return the payment and terminate the agreement. In at least one episode, he outright lied to his employer, saying that he had been unable to find the person he had been hired to but she was likely dead as reported, even though he had personally met her and knew who she was. Since he had to deceive his employer, he didn't even offer to return his payment.

Although I don't think it appears as part of the disadvantage write-up, there's a fairly clear implication in thought, that once someone who stays bought accepts payment, signs the contract or does whatever "seals the deal", he'll carry out the job to the bitter end, no matter how personally distasteful and won't deliberately use less than his best efforts to fulfil the terms of the contract. I.E., if he's tracking someone, he won't ignore faint signs left by that person, just because they're faint and he could claim not to have noticed them, if he can find them and he will look for those faint signs of the person's passage.

There's also a very old joke to the effect that an honest politician is one who once he's bought, he stays bought. The implication there being that he's been bought for the duration of his career rather than for the passage of a particular piece of legislation.

I hope this helps clear the meaning up.