We don't tell you how to play your game.
We help you use our game to do it.
Paul was just on another Round the Table panel, this time for morality systems in TTRPGs (likely out in August), and we've been thinking about them a lot to make sure he'll be ready.
Does An RPG Need A Morality System?
In a word, No. GURPS, Traveller, Shadowrun... Paranoia. All perfectly functional games, none of them particularly invested in tracking whether your character is a good person. A lot of tables handwave alignment right out of D&D without losing anything they miss. One of the panelists was Fern of Studio Hex whose upcoming Kickstarter, BIOPHAGE, is another great example - two players, one host body, and you have to do terrible things to survive... The setting is rich ground for moral dilemmas, but the rules don't need to intrude.
Can you imagine someone trying to bolt a serious morality system onto Paranoia?
Please, Troubleshooter...no.
Don't get me wrong - people generally play Pendragon to be a knight. They play Blades in the Dark to be part of a back-alley gang of thieves. Can you do one in the other? ...Maybe, but the mechanics are going to fight you. I think the real point, as supported by the panel discussion, is that what we usually really want is to know how committed the character is to whatever is important to them.
Most games have an intended "default" way to play them baked in.
Pendragon and BitD each make some assumptions. Shadowrun has more in common with BitD, but does even less with the characters "morals" in the rules - though it does have some opinions about what cyberware should do to your worldview and behavior. BitD has vices, but Shadowrun Essence loss is more like a known depression symptom as the cost of your chome.
You can think of most morality systems as implicit arguments about what kind of game the designer expects you to play - what sort of table you're supposed to be.
They are like CATS conversations the designer had without you.
(We mentioned O'Leary's C.A.T.S. method last year in Troubles With Tone;
In your Session Zero, make sure everyone is on the same page for the game's intended
Context, Aim, Tone, and Safety.)
D&D alignment says: you're a table where good and evil are cosmologically real, and characters have defined positions on that axis. Dwarf? Lawful Good. Orc? Chaotic Evil. Player character? Oh, well, never mind, you just write down whatever you like; nothing to see here folks! Move along...
Vampire: the Masquerade's Humanity says: you're a table exploring the cost of monstrosity and the fragility of conscience. You've been given immortality, strength, powers and senses and indoctrination into the society of real apex predators, so naturally we expect you to be all angsty and pine for the days when your days were numbered! ...Honestly, that's how I like to play it, but what if I didn't?
Pendragon's trait pairs say: you're a table playing archetypal Arthurian knights, and the dice will hold you to that.
The designer made those decisions before you sat down, without asking you - which is sometimes exactly right. A game built around a specific moral position isn't failing to be universal - it's succeeding at being itself. The limitation is the point. Pendragon isn't Blades, but it's worth naming what's happening: the game is supporting a specific style of play, usually at the cost of variation.
Make a difference on what system you choose? It should. If you want to be unmitigated hellspawn, maybe play In Nomine instead of Pendragon. Pick something that matches the game you want to play.
Rules vs Game
Don't get me wrong - I believe that good players can play a good game in nearly any system, or none, but our longest running game was literally decades with a dedicated party of three:
A "Chaotic Rude"(Neutral) Half-Ogre Barbarian tank,
A Lawful Evil Sorcerer/Conjuror artillery,
And me, a Neutral Good Bard, the jack of all trades who filled in the gaps.
We made it work because everyone was present, invested, playing the same game together. The moral tension was fun, but the game rules offered nothing more than vague suggestions.
Our group struggled for years to find a system that matched what the players wanted to do, that intuitively made characters we wanted to play and gave them the problems and rewards we wanted to live through, in the stories we wanted to tell.
Endless adventures, dragons slain, diplomatic missions, a shadow war with doppelgangers trying to take over our city... but what I remember most clearly and fondly is the frequent image of us around an evening campfire, debating the philosophical value of being loved vs being feared as we passed bowls of stew around. The pranks, the sacrifices, the mutual sense of honor and the friendship that made us all grind our teeth when another member of the group did something hard to accept.
Where were the rules for that?
A member of our panel today claimed the D&D alignment system makes things simple - if a door is enchanted so "only the Pure of Heart may pass" then obviously you'd put the Paladin forward; but in our party we had a CN Barbarian, a NG Bard, and a LE Conjuror. The "good" bard was probably the only one who couldn't pass. The Conjuror would have snorted derision and walked right through, because he was pure. The Barbarian thought about it less, but the same was true.
And how would that door keep out those that aren't "pure" of heart? How did it define pure? Mostly by arbitrary fiat. Calling it a "save vs death" if your sheet doesn't say LG in the right box is lame, but there's really not a lot of ways in D&D to check a PCs devotion to their stated ideals. Our Conjuror was a rigorous philosopher. The Barbarian was a zealot. The Bard was dedicated, but not married to any way of doing things, as long as it served the Greater Good.
Commitment, Not Virtue
The most useful shift in thinking about morality systems - for me, anyway - is moving away from classical virtue as the primary axis, and toward commitment. Moral relativism can be genuinely interesting.
Virtue asks: is the character good or evil?
Commitment asks: is the character true to what they said they were?
Those are very different questions. A villain can have profound commitment. A hero can be a hypocrite.
A character playing a Paladin is making a claim about the character, and they have chosen to make the two questions functionally the same, but the samurai whose honor depends on obedience to the lord that demands a massacre is in a very different position.
The same guy who played the Conjuror above played another game as a Ranger who acquired the Sword of Kas. It was an ever-present influence, a growing taint on his reputation, and no matter how good he was, it would outlast him.
Artifacts can only be destroyed in very specific ways. In our campaign, the only way to destroy the Sword of Kas was for a PC recognized for it to fall on the blade, knowingly and willingly sacrificing themselves. There was no resurrection after that, no healing, no reincarnation. Character GONE.
He did it. Player and character both chewed their tongues and wrestled with the Ranger's commitment to doing the Right Thing, and eventually he managed the only Artifact destruction story our game ever completed. It was one of the most epic character arcs in our group's gaming history, and it was awesome and fun, but when it came down to dice, D&D just isn't equipped to make it feel any different. It was anticlimactic. We did it pro forma and got on to the next game.
So What's The Answer?
Some games tell you what to think. Some hand you tools and let you decide.
A system that sets arbitrary guardrails without acknowledging it is naive hypocrisy.
A system that ignores the question entirely is often naive negligence, though at least maybe it trusts the players.
If the whole premise of the game is based on a certain viewpoint, then if that viewpoint represents the game you want to play, you're golden! ...but I don't want every game to be the same story, and I don't love switching to new system every time I want to do something just a little different.
The honest answer lives in the pregame conversation - supported but not replaced by the appropriate system. I like generic, setting-agnostic systems. I've played a LOT of GURPS and Fate.
GURPS doesn't do moral dilemmas so well IM(ns)HO. Can it? Sure, but mechanically? Not so much.
Fate is narrative-focused; better, but runs hot and cold, either too freeform or too structured. It's by far my favorite from the widely available choices, but...
"If there's a book you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."
-- Toni Morrison
And so here we are. We have tried very hard to write a system that lets players define PCs for the game they want to play and easily communicate that to the GM, mechanically supports and rewards them for playing the character they said they wanted, allows them to grow and change over the PC's story arc without penalizing the evolution, and gets the hell out of the way when you just want to play without forcing you to swim against the current.
That's a tall order, but I think we did ok.
Comments
Post a Comment