That is an interesting point of view. How does it work out in Divinity, where a lot of the side missions require that you actively seek out and kill people who would otherwise never be a threat to you? Do you just ignore those missions, and forfeit the XP? (For example, you don't have to carry out any of the bounty hunting quests in Broken Valley; it should be possible to sneak around most of the bandit camps.)
For my part, I long ago decided not to let myself be bothered by the things my character personas do in-game. Most of them do things that I would never do, and vice versa. If I started to apply my personal morals to the in-game characters, I would hardly be able to play any game at all. And part of the role-playing experience, for me, is to act out roles that are very different from myself, with very different values and motivations.
That said, my core values have a decided influence on how I interpret the various roles. While some of the RPG characters I play can be rather ruthless, I almost never create a character that is downright evil. It simply isn't very fun to play a totally bad person. If I am to enjoy an RPG, I must have at least some amount of empathy for the role I play. This means, among other things, that I usually take an option to solve a quest peaceably whenever possible. If nothing else, this is usually the most interesting way to go.
The mood of the game in question also matters a lot. In Assassin's Creed 2, for example, the protagonist Ezio Auditore kills not only the main villains of the plot, but also quite a large number of city guards. This is partially rationalised in the game by generally depicting those city guards as bullies and thugs, but the main reason why these killings doesn't stain Ezio's character is, as I see it, the mood of the game: It's an action adventure with a swashbuckling hero, who needs that kind of minion opponents to act out the back-alley fights and daring rooftop chases. But the game does make a point of the fact that Ezio doesn't kill innocents (that is, ordinary citizens) - if the player of the game makes him do that more than twice, the game reboots to the last save.
The 'Hitman' series, on the other hand, features a completely different kind of assassin. Agent 47 is portrayed by the game as being utterly ruthless and cold-blooded, and in the movie cut scenes he projects a lack of emotional response that suggests a very deep-seated kind of psychosis - but he is as far from a mindless killer as it is possible to get. Everything he does is calculated, or at least it can be - it is up to the player to choose how to complete an assignment. The ideal way to do this is typically by creating as little noise and collateral damage as possible. Some assignments can be completed without killing anyone except the target, and having the target die by "accidental causes" (I'm referring mainly to 'Hitman - Blood Money', here). Needless to say, I do not project my own set of values into agent 47 when playing Hitman - that would make me a rather disturbing kind of individual - but I try to follow and appreciate the mood of the game.
Questions of morality arise not only in the context of killing. On a side note:
In a lot of games where the accumulation of loot is a factor, money and items can be found in various containers, such as barrels or boxes, throughout the game. Oblivion and Fallout 3 make a difference between things you find lying around in the wilderness (so to speak), and things that actually belong to other people. If you take the latter kind of stuff, you commit a theft, which can lead to a fight or some other kind of penalty if you are caught. In Divinity, however, no one seems to mind what you do, even if you take their gold under their very noses. Also, you can't actually fight anyone who isn't a designated enemy in the game.
If characters in Oblivion or Fallout 3 take stuff from other people, they are clearly thieves. I solved this moral dilemma by making my character in Oblivion a rather amoral kind of person (who is also, as it happens, a member of the Thieves' Guild). My character in Fallout 3, on the other hand, doesn't generally steal from those she considers to be "good people", such as her neighbours in Megaton.
In Divinity, these kinds of questions do not arise in the game mechanics, since no one objects to being robbed. Nevertheless, if the player character takes gold from a coffer in a private house, by normal standards this would make him or her a thief - which would be a rather petty and small-minded thing to be, for such an exalted and powerful individual. In my game, I solved this as a Dragon Slayer by regarding the stuff I took as gifts to the Slayers from a grateful populace (we did protect them from the wicked dragons, after all), and as a Dragon Knight, I regard it as taxes paid to the rightful ruler of the land (at least, this is the current ambition of my Dragon Knight). But it could just as well be described as protection money - which would make the Dragon Knight only another kind of gangster, ruling by might rather than right.
This was a very long, and perhaps boring, response. But I find questions such as these interesting - nuanaces between what is right and wrong, or good and evil, add to the experience in any good RPG.
