As a technique, it seems promising, because it can tell you as GM what the players are individually expecting.. without needing to ask them personally. In this case, the decision isn’t the key bit; it’s how they make the decision out of character that matters. In this case, I think it best to force each player to make their own ‘devil’s choice’ that contributes to the group’s choice as a whole, but provide an overall choice that serves to make it easier to tell early on who might be a bad fit for the group, or who the unspoken leader is, at least in a new group.

Plus, no person’s likely to be too attached to the game/characters yet, so it’s a lot less likely to create major disagreements than it would later on, if you make it one that the players dislike, the overall whole isn’t damaged too much.

It’s harder to create the necessary “devil’s choice” aspect, though; without that built-up attachment to one aspect of the game or character, you have to present things that ping less strongly on the individuals’ passions.

In this case, I’d say the classic “two kingdoms are at war, and the PCs are stuck in the middle” scenario is the sort that works best, as it focusing the game’s flavor by either forcing players to adventure in one area (and thus reducing effort on the GM’s part) or by making the game at least semi-focused on the power shifts between the two factions.

But I feel that this sort of choice is something that you need to carefully execute, lest it leave a bad taste in the players’ mouths…

I’m not sure we’re saying different things here — I’d view both of these examples as devil’s choices. Whichever option the PCs take, something bad happens because they didn’t take the other one, right?

While moving along one of the trade roads the PCs came across a young girl crying and injured at the bottom of a nearby ravine. Once they had pulled her out of the ravine and had mended her broken leg, they discovered that she was running away from home. While tending to her the healer in the group had noticed that for such a young child she had many badly healed wounds, and bruises that did not fit with the injuries she had sustained from her fall into the ravine. After speaking with the girl the party leader discovered that the girl had been physically and sexually abused by her father not long after her mother’s death.
Horrified, the leader of the party, and one of the two female players in the group, decided she would not return the girl to her village. This would have been fine, if the PCs, who were traveling with a merchant caravan, could have gone around the town. As it was, the caravan needed to stop in the village and local law held that all female children under child bearing age were essentially property to their family elders until they were married, and their were no laws forbidding the father’s acts.
The PCs spent the whole game arguing over what they should do. The parties resident scoundrel offered to kill the father should the party leader wish it. She refused, believing there was another way. They spoke with the village elders, who would not bend their laws and traditions for outsiders. They spoke to the villagers, who confirmed that the father had been rumored to have abused his daughters when he drank, and had turned to drinking heavily after his wife’s death. Finally they talked with the father who seemed to genuinely regret his actions, but would make no promise to stop his drinking.

In the end the PCs decided that they would have to burn their bridges with the town and kill the father. To their dismay the father was brutally slain by an uknown monster before the party’s scoundrel had arrived and the murder was pinned on the PCs anyway. Not very much happened that session, and not a single die was thrown, but it was probably some of the best roleplaying I had witnessed in my few years of GMing.

One player left the game a few months ago. The ex-player’s PC (founder of the PC team) has now been caught by his rival (the captain of the party’s original rival team) and turned into a half-golem. The PCs will manage to acquire the “remote control” for their newly-templated friend. What to do? Destroy their friend, now a Neutral Evil monster? Leave him alive with a murderous hatred of mortal beings? Turn him into the authorities, and forever question his fate? Or will the PCs surprise me with an unforeseen plan? I mostly want to see how they resolve this moral dilemma. I’m not so much interested in the result, as I am interested in the reasoning for the decision.

The hard choices I prefer are ones in which the characters have to decide what is most *immediately* important or what is primary in their hierarchy. Disarm the bomb or get the prisoners to safety? Go home and help your family or finish your mission for the king?

I find that this is where your real role-playing comes in because choices the players have made previously really come into play. Do you have allies that can help you cover all the bases simultaneously? If not, your players should be *kicking* themselves that they weren’t more polite to the NPC’s. Can you hire someone to do the job for you? I’ll bet you’re wishing you saved some of your loot, now, instead of spending it all on the Uberweapon. Doing things like this makes the acquisition of several different kinds of resources an important part of the game.

The nice thing about “third option” tough choices is that you can *fill* your game with them without pissing off your players. Every single problem can be an apparent choice between two obviously poor alternatives.

Do you scramble through the narrow tunnel to where you know enemies are prepared to pick you off one at a time? Or do you risk climbing up through the hole in the ceiling which is a.) noisy and b.) risky?

Do you leave your injured friend behind and risk something bad happening to him, or do you take him along and risk something bad happening to the entire party because he’s a liability in his current state? On and on and on. When your players solve the problems in novel ways that allow them to bypass the problems entirely, it is fun for everyone.

This, however, only applies if you are running a good party. Evil characters should rightly be faced with devil’s choices because it is in the nature of evil people to try and have their cake and eat it, too. As in:

You’ve kidnapped the woman you love, but her current paramour is your hated rival. If you kill him, she’ll hate you forever, but if you don’t, he’ll keep coming after you with larger and larger forces.

Or

You’ve stolen the Jewel of Ultimate Power for your employer . . . do you actually give it to your boss, or keep it for yourself in the hopes that you can figure out how to use it before he can get to you?

Simply put: don’t punish your good characters for their virtues. It is precisely those traits, if they hold true to them, that should grant them success in the long run.

A plague ravages a village, and a scant few are likely to survive. The King’s Guard wants to burn the plague (and the villagers) away before it can spread. How do the PC’s step in?

OTOH, you should also be able to leaf through a copy of Ghosts of Albion while you’re there, if George (Vasilakos) is lucky.

The players found the child’s foster parents, but found no other leads to where the child was. The foster parents swore that the child had been taken to another family, but the parents seemed eerie. The players (already being sought by the law) decided to don ski masks and fake a burglary into their home to find evidence. They found two other children bound and ganged upstairs and a video camera tripod…you get the jist. The players decided that he must know something of the child, and they believed he was involved.

The devil’s choice was difficult. Either torture the parents to know what happened to the girl and risk the cops showing while they were there, or dispense their own sense of justice which meant no more foster parents

The players found an alternative around this puzzle. They knocked out the foster father and took his keys. they stuffed both of them in their SUV. One drove while the other one used “excessive” force in interrogating the The foster parents admitted to accidentally killing the child while abusing her and then covering it up.

the player took vigilante justice and burned the SUV with them inside. Since we were playing WoD, they took a morality hit for their cold-blooded justice, but it helped define the characters. I apologize if the subject matter was too graphic. But I thought thought this was an interesting example, and the players jokingly tell me that that game has tainted their minds When you’re GMing WoD, no pulling punches.

Every choice in your campaigns shouldn’t be a devil’s choice, either. These kinds of choices can lead to some powerful roleplaying, and are best reserved for climactic or otherwise highly significant moments.

Too many devil’s choices tend to leave your players (or their characters) feeling like no matter what they do, their characters get screwed over. So they need to be used sparingly, and preferably on players who really enjoy drama and character-building. Also, no matter how attached you are to your devil’s choice, if someone comes up with a particularly clever way around it, it’s really obnoxious to subvert that just because you’re wedded to the idea of having your devil’s choice. See above point about players feeling they’re being randomly screwed.

I absolutely love these moments, but part of what makes them so great is their rarity and their climactic nature.