this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

... this list contains like 3 items phrased differently ~7 times each.

"This person had a family/friends" "This person was supporting someone else" "This person liked their pets"

repeat ...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Well yeah. The goal is to humanize the person they just killed, to make the players potentially regret their murderhobo ways for a brief moment. And one of the fastest ways to make a character (at least shallowly) altruistic is to have them pet the dog. Do something kind for something/someone innocent. It’s often used to show that an antagonist isn’t entirely evil, and is acting against the party due to a specific goal (rather than simply being evil for evil’s sake).

It’s the inverse of the “kick the dog” trope, where a character does something obviously evil for no narrative purpose other than proving that they are evil.