Morality and the Forge

[Ayyavazi]

Hey all,

I have noticed recently that at least 4 people including myself are working on new games centered to one degree or another on morality and ethics. Is this a new trend perhaps? Or is that kind of game pretty standard for the forge?

Personally, lacking any real information to speak of, I suspect the big three are indirectly at fault for why so many new games are being designed about morality. The first question is deceptively broad. What is your game about?

I don't know about anybody else, but when I first answered that question specifically, I thought, "Its about exceptional individuals, legends of their own world, getting together and adventuring to save the world."

Then I thought, "Thats not nearly good enough! That will be torn apart and spit back out at me as claims of Heartbreaker, copy-cat, unoriginal, and so on!"

So I modified what my game was about to include the only thing I could think of that sounded "big" enough for the big three, Morality. Has anyone else run into this? Because I think maybe if we examined the most popular games here, some of them would be about morality, but I think most would be more specialized as to what they are about, and would even have little to nothing to do with morality at all.

Of course, I could be wrong.  Anyone have any thoughts about this?

--Norm

[Egonblaidd]

That's pretty much the same thing that happened to me.  I only started playing tabletop RPGs a number of months ago, and soon after started designing my own system.  Then I came here (and a few other sites) and found a wealth of information that helped me to improve my system.  I'd still call my game a heartbreaker, or at least half heartbreaker, but that doesn't bother me, especially since it's my first one to design.

Also, I have a feeling that "Morality" is a fairly vague field.  My game is specifically about tough moral choices.  I intend for the players to be confronted with some sort of conflict that there is no easy way to resolve it, and the easier ways are less preferable from a moral perspective as far as that character goes.  You could make a game where there was no choice, the players were given the problem and told what to do (which would, consequently, be the "right" thing to do) and it would still be about morality.  Or you could make it more philosophically oriented rather than adventure oriented.  Technically, any game with "good guys" and "bad guys" is about morality in that "good guys" do "good things" and "bad guys" do "bad things".  What is odd is that so many people, myself included, are saying that their game is specifically about Morality.  As I said, I clarify it by saying it's about making tough moral choices, and specifically as some sort of adventurer, so maybe that helps to distinguish it a bit.

I don't think it's so much the Big Three as it is the first question: What is your game about?  Very quickly people realize that "going on adventures" or "fighting evil" isn't good enough.  So they try to find an answer that will still apply to the system they've been working on for some time.  Imagine if you were designing DnD (say it hadn't been design before) and thought, "You know, running around dungeons killing monsters so you can take their loot isn't a very compelling idea for a game."  So you thought about it, then thought about the Lord of the Rings (who doesn't?), and it occurred to you the latter was about an epic struggle between Good and Evil, so maybe you could do something similar.  After all, we want to be like our heroes, right?  So why not make a game where the heroes are role models?  But how would you go about this?  And thus "Alignment" was born, or something.  I've heard the Alignment system doesn't actually work that well, then again DnD really is mostly just about killing things and taking their stuff, so it doesn't have to.

The end result may be that many designers that find this info on the web for the first time and realize what RPG design is all about end up designing a modified heartbreaker.  Hopefully, they'll be able to use that experience to design more innovative and unique games afterwards, though.  And as many people have said, there's nothing wrong with heartbreakers, just don't expect to find a huge audience of willing buyers.

[Moreno R.]

The Forge grew from discussions and connections between people that began in the Sorcerer mailing list and in the Sorcerer forum at the Gaming Outpost, and Sorcerer, in his own way, is all about morality ("what would you do to get what you really want?"), so that was here from the beginning.

And, more in general, any narrativist game has a premise based on human experience, and it's very difficult to avoid touching morality when these premises are tested during the game.

If you want to look at some of the more successful games from this community that are more based in morality, the first two names I think about are "Dogs in the Vineyard" and "My Life With Master", but a complete list would be much, much longer.

[JoyWriter]

Hey Norm, to respond in a different way, have you considered not making it big but making it fun? That may sound facetious but it really is not; a friend of mine loves Saints Row over GTA, because he feels GTA went off the deep end trying to resolve the question "are games art?". Now it could be said that he is getting some fundimental value from the less intellectual game, such as interacting with absurdity and caricatures of our cultural background. It so happens he really likes playing with the ragdoll physics!

Now for your game, what fun experiences do you envisage having? If they are pursued full out with lots of testing to achieve them, then I wouldn't care that you don't have a deep moral centre to your game! Incidentally, the "are games art?" debate mirrors one in the end of the 18th century about whether art should be allowed to be "useless", for it's own sake. Don't go philosophical for the sake of it, and I say that as someone who loves philosophy! Instead put it in only when it makes the game light up, or where you feel you have a hole you need to explore. It may be that your game is not very innovative, but it's better to make a better kind of mobile phone than to make a half arsed TV, if what you really wanted was a phone but felt obliged to innovate! Sometimes design is about narrowing in on your chosen value, and making it come alive as it never has before, rather than trying to add other ideas to the outside of it to prop it up.

[JoyWriter]

Oh and in case this seems contrary to my interest in your system, I do think that your virtue system adds something to your game, but that doesn't mean you can't do the original idea too!

[Luke]

Jared and I ask the question, "What is your game about?" to a lot of people. We get all sorts of answers, but there definitely is an impulse to two extremes: Most common, people say "survival." I kid you not. That's the number one answer. The second most common is a grandiose idea like morality. To which we immediately reply, "Does your game have a strength stat?"

So, I don't think it's the question itself. I think that it's a common reaction after having played a few roleplaying games to want to inject some moral weight into them, to want to force players to make weighty decisions. Thus bald designs are formulated. "I know how to fix alignment!" The best designs are ones that address theme through play, not through a "Theme" stat.

Vincent Baker calls this the Fruitful Void. The thing that isn't in your rules, that all of your mechanics surround and point to, but don't actually do, that's what your game is about. That's where play happens and ideas are generated.

Anyway.
-L

[Vulpinoid]

I'm one of those types who believes that most roleplaying is a tool for learning about oneself.

You use it to get into situations that you might not be able to approach in real life, and consider how you might respond in such a situation. You may not be able to approach these situations in real life because you as a player don't have supernatural powers, you might not have the background of a military marksman, or you might not be able to live in a particular historical period. Whatever the situation, roleplaying sets up a premise that you get to apply a series of beliefs and ideals to, and you work through it to come to a solution that benefits the story, rewards the character, or provides insight to the player.

The deepest questions in this context are those of morality, and hence a lot of my recent work has aimed toward that. This might come in the form of systems developed to help a player reflect a morality different to their own, or it could come in the form of a reward/punishment mechanism to reflecxt how a society might perceive the moral choices of a character,

These are questions that simply aren't answered well by a lot of games. Some give it a cursory glance by pigeon-holing characters according to alignments, others offer a simple linear track of good-evil/human-inhuman/sane-insane.

If your game isn't about morality, and it isn't about asking the deep question then this might be enough, but I've been interested in developing more complex systems in this regard for just over a decade. My first explorations in this regard were simply adding new meta-systems onto existing games (eg. Adding the White Wolf Storyteller mechanism of Nature/Demeanor on top of the alignments in a D&D 3.5 game to make more realised personality types), but recent explorations have worked from the ground up.

I'd been working on questions of morality in roleplaying long before I'd come to the Forge; but in my time here, the theories have certainly been developed and refined.

I can see how this type of question would arise though given the fact that a few people have recently started examining morality more carefully in their games.

V

[Rafu]

What is your game about?

I don't know about anybody else, but when I first answered that question specifically, I thought, "Its about exceptional individuals, legends of their own world, getting together and adventuring to save the world."

Then I thought, "Thats not nearly good enough! That will be torn apart and spit back out at me as claims of Heartbreaker, copy-cat, unoriginal, and so on!"

So I modified what my game was about to include the only thing I could think of that sounded "big" enough for the big three, Morality.

If you are making major design decisions based on your expectations of how people at The Forge will react to your ideas, maybe you should start questioning why you are designing a game in the first place.

[Wordman]

Personally, lacking any real information to speak of, I suspect the big three are indirectly at fault for why so many new games are being designed about morality. The first question is deceptively broad. What is your game about?

Though I've been role-playing for over 30 years, I'm fairly new to indie games and even newer to the Forge, so consider that when reading the following...

Something that's confused me since reading about the Big Three is: why isn't everyone's answer to the "What is your game about?" question "Having fun role-playing with a group of friends"?

One obvious answer is:"well, that's just assumed, and the question is intended to dig deeper than that". If that's true, though, it doesn't seem like a very good follow up question. Wouldn't something like "Where is the fun in this game?" or something similar get more to the point of the exercise? Isn't that really what you are trying to find out with a question like "What is your game about?". Or is it something different?

[JoyWriter]

Ok, I said I love going philosophical, now I will!

The form of the question frequently implies a space for the answer; the obvious one being yes no for very closed questions. But some questions can be more tuned to the thing you are investigating than others, and some can miss the point entirely. For some people for example, there is a disconnect between "fun" and things being "about something". The latter is about justification of the real essence of play, which is the former. There are all kinds of other disconnects like that, so it's rare that one question will give you much of a clear idea of their game, more likely their ability (or lack of) to engage with that kind of language.

So what kind of things could they be missing? Well according to certain moral views, a game that is truly enjoyable must be "about" the actual players playing. It's to do with the idea that pleasure is about growing self-actualisation, and having your purpose present in your activity, rather than coming later.

So how does fantasy relate to that goal? How can it be about real people if it is about making stuff up? Now there are loads of answers to that problem, which you can see my looking at the different stances and re-asking that question. The actor stance view relates a lot to what V said, and it implies that even in combat games, the later conflicts should shift towards the players "blank experiences", allowing them to continue their growth. It's not a continuing set of events, it's looking for the shifting fictional complement for real people. Trying to "beat" people within appropriate limits produces a similar effect, but perhaps this shows up a little of that strange process that is trying to find "appropriate challenge". I suspect that the same can be applied to moral challenge.

[Wordman]

Rereading my previous question, I realize it doesn't really articulate what I wanted to ask. Also, having re-read a few more pages about the Big Three, I notice that it is apparently a real rookie question, so sorry for that.

In re-reading these pages, I noticed something that may speak to the original poster's question, and is closer to what I want to know. While a most of these pages phrase the Big Three in terms of a designer asking questions to himself, when it comes to the "What is your game about?" question, a great deal of the discussion sometimes shifts to be phrased from the standpoint of the listener learning about the game by how the designer answers it. Lots of "when I ask people this question, they say..." discussion. This is often followed by commentary about what a "good" or "correct" answer to this question is.

Which makes me wonder: does this question really serve the designer at all, or does it really serve a "spectator" to the design? Could this be why the original poster worries his answer "will be torn apart and spit back out at me"? Or, does that worry come not from the question, but from the commentary what a "proper answer" should be? And is it that commentary that selects for "big" ideas? And if it does, is that good or bad?

[JoyWriter]

Looking at your design from an outside perspective always can be helpful, not least because you will eventually be making a game for other people. Your gamer friends at least!
The problem can be that you drop what you really liked about a project because you think it is too silly to be a serious answer to the questioning. That's more fear than inspiration, and it's not what places like this are for. Ideally, this place is supposed to show you the value of things you had not considered, and allow you to get your ideas to work like they are intended, or give them up because they don't work, not because someone might insult them.

Now sometimes that feeling of "this is not enough" is just an encouragement to raise the bar in response to some very solid games, and that's really good, but sometimes the bar can be raised by carving out some almost-perfect expression of what you were going for, like dread (the d12 one).

[otspiii]

I enjoy morality and moral choice being part of a roleplaying game, but I really dislike morality mechanics.  Morality is a nuanced, subjective, self-contradictory, impossible, beautiful thing.  Dice and numeric rules really aren't powerful enough processors to even come close to capturing that.  Linear good->bad morality traits are even less realistic and more morally limiting.

Moral choice comes out of the situation more than the mechanics, so I think if you want to encourage morality in your game you should focus on it with your setting and allowed character types.  In the end, though, it's going to be the GM, not the system-author, who chooses how much morality there is going to be in a game.  I think it's more important to give them powerful tools to wield rather than to try to force them into your style of play with restrictive rules.  You can encourage a certain type of play either by giving people a reward for following it, or by using the rules to outlaw any type of play but it.  Morality rules seem like they tend to be more the latter than the former, which strikes me as the cheap way of handling things.

[Ayyavazi]

Thanks for the replies all,

To clarify, my "fear" was more a matter of thinking that if the game was about what I had originally intended, rather than the "bigger" answer, that it would not be a good enough game to warrant more than a couple of sales. The idea I am running off of, (and it could just be because I am this kind of paranoid individual), is that the first question seems to say, "If your answer isn't good enough, neither is your game." As a result, I strove to find something that would be "good enough"

Anyhow, the funny thing is that as my mechanics developed, and as I had new ideas, I changed which game I was working on entirely! About a year ago I made a world setting for a D&D 3.5 game. I added some advanced Alchemy rules using the alchemy skill, and made a world of very low magic. It made for an interesting game, though the group didn't play for longer than a week or two in the setting before we had a falling out unrelated to it. Anyhow, it was a great setting, and very much about morality in its own way. As I worked on my design, I realized this world setting was a much better fit for what I wanted to make. The other one, which I have spent considerably more work on, is more suited to a heart-breaker type of game. When I'm done with this one, I'll move on to the heartbreaker, if I haven't decided to work on either of my other two ideas, Papparazzi the RPG and Walking the RPG.

As for whether I should be designing an RPG, I should. Though it sounded like it, my motives were not to impress anyone. It was to develop a game people would have enough fun playing that they would want to own a copy of it, and pay for said copy.

Thanks again.

Cheers,
--Norm