[DF] On Sense of Duty (Nature) and Stealing Flying, Fire-Breathing Reptiles' Eggs

[Stripe]

Say you have a Dungeon Fantasy character with the Sense of Duty (Nature) disadvantage—you play a Druid or an elf, for example. From Dungeon Fantasy 3: The Next Level, p. 6, "[Sense of Duty (Nature) is] functionally equivalent to Charitable and Pacifism toward any plant or animal that isn’t actively in the process of eating the elf, and extends to beast-men, faeries, wildmen, and other non-technological races."

In the Dungeon Fantasy Role-Playing Game, Sense of Duty (Nature) disadvantage is defined in Adventurers on p. 66: "You’ll never harm a plant or animal that isn’t trying to harm you. If one is in need or danger, you’ll react as if Charitable (p. 58) or Selfless (p. 65). You must oppose plans that involve setting wildfires, felling trees, etc. You always side with wilderness over civilization."

At the start of the session while the PC party is in Town, the GM makes a successful quest-finding roll on your behalf that results in a quest to fetch a few reptile eggs out of the wild.

These SM +1 reptiles can fly and breath fire and have GURPS IQ 3 (and ST 12-15 or so)—they're animals, not "dragons." Their kind is sometimes legitimately known to attack villagers (e.g., children playing in the fields) and property such as goats and swine. There is no human settlement that won't complain if these animals are anywhere around, but of course, that also would be the case whether there are actual attacks by these animals or not.

Sometimes, the reptiles will form communal nests, and if so, they are known to guard their eggs until they hatch. However, they are usually solitary animals and eggs are abandoned once laid.

The game is a standard Dungeon Fantasy down-and-town dungeon crawl. Below are my questions to the reader. If your answer depends on some piece of information not presented, try to make a guess or assumption.

Would you participate in the quest or would you oppose it?

Would you take a loose egg from the wild if you found it unguarded? Would you buy one from the market if you found one on sale (and that was allowed by the quest)?

Would you steal the eggs from a protected nest? Kill the mother or mothers? Preemptively?

If you oppose taking the quest, would you try to stop the other PCs who would undertake it, or would you at least accompany them? If so, would you defend a comrade who was being attacked by a mother defending her egg? Save his or her life at the cost of the reptile's? Would you heal a comrade if he or she was injured in the fight when there are more reptiles to harm and eggs to steal?

Now, it's less important to my game—so I would rather get answers to the above questions—but what if fetching eggs wasn't part of the quest; instead, the quest is unrelated but the PC party encounters a group of these reptiles. The reptiles attack and are killed. There are a few of these eggs around and this is their natural habitat. Your PC party is their only unnatural threat. They're each worth $10,000 at town.

Would you harvest the eggs? Would you stop your comrades from harvesting them?

Thanks for reading and for sharing your personal opinions and insight!