The Cardinal Emotions

[TempvsMortis]

Okay, I'm making a game where the primary division of social group and abilities is based on emotions. (It relates to how they use their powers.) The thing is, I don't want obscure, specific things because it's free-form in its "magic" system (the only limitation on what you can do is if it applies to your emotion, and the difficulty the gm determines) so I have to leave them as broad as possible to allow freedom, but still different enough that you can tell what one guy can do and another can't. I came up with it after seeing a program on Ovation! late at night about emotion in art, which addressed the five primal emotions that all paintings and sculptures can be classified into: Joy, Anguish, Rage, Passion, and Triumph. Of course that would have been fine, except I needed more. Originally I had 9 castes, but I managed to eliminate one of them (through back-story reasons) so now I only need 8 (though I did come up with a 9th, but it's a little too ambiguous for the game).

These are what I came up with:

- Triumph/Satisfaction
- Rage/Anger
- Bliss/Joy
- Passion/Desire
(These are basically all subdivisions of Anguish, which I thought was too broad in the program's definition)
- Anguish/Sorrow (being the opposite of Bliss)
- Terror/Fear (being the opposite of Passion)
- Shame/Distress (being the opposite of Triumph)
(And then this one is more of a neutrality of emotion, than an emotion itself)
- Peace/Stoicism

Now I've thought pretty hard about it, and I think that covers everything (Awe/Wonder is the 9th). What I'm asking is that you guys look over that and see if maybe there are better alternatives or whatnot. Remember, they need to be open enough to allow a wide variety of interpretations, but still be definitive enough that none of them should overlap too much with any of the others.

[TempvsMortis]

Or maybe I should collapse it back down those three to just anguish and rethink my emotion assignment... Darn it! I can't decide!

[madunkieg]

I've been down this path with a homebrew, and I after a bit of experimentation, I ended up with desire, anger, fear, and courage.

Now, that's obviously not a complete set of emotions. For example, sadness is missing, and that's because I found it came up very rarely, especially with the setting the game used. Courage is also tricky to define as an emotion, but it worked because I was left with four emotions that could easily be translated into actions. Joy might be a good replacement for courage. If you wanted, I could see peace being a balance emotion, with sadness or sorrow as its opposite.

Here's the trick: allow emotions to be paired together. For example, desire and anger are paired to become jealousy. With just the 4, add pairs and you've suddenly got 10. With peace and sadness added into the system, 6 emotions would become 15.

[Brendan Day]

Check out http://www.yplab.com/research/images/Plutchikfig6_small.jpg.  Something like that might work for the eight castes.

I like the way that each emotion has three levels of intensity.  Perhaps the characters have to attain mastery over each in turn.  A novice in the yellow school would be limited to serenity magic at first, but after a few years she would start to practice joy magic.  A sage in the yellow school would be able to snap her fingers and send everyone her into a fit of ecstatic dancing.

The yellow school is opposed by its complement in the color wheel, the dark blue school of pensiveness, sadness, and despair (grief isn't quite strong enough, in my opinion).  If our yellow master encounters a novice of the dark blue school on the road, we would see a contest between joy and pensiveness.

I'd definitely want each character to practice more than one kind of magic, since otherwise the game would become quite repetitive.  The dark blue novice would just wander around being anxious all the time, and making everyone nervous.

[TempvsMortis]

Well, first they're not for normal actions. I have a whole system for that. It's pretty abstract, but basically one of the primary abilities of the PCs in it is to shape the world according to whatever emotions they control, so things like "courage" don't work. They have to be clear things that would let the player's know what they can do, but not limit them to a handful of actions. (In some ways that dooms them to overlap, but there's a certain degree of that up to which I can tolerate.)

As for that little chart, vigilance doesn't really work. Again, it's like courage, it's more a state of mind than an emotion. Ecstasy is Bliss in mine, admiration and amazement sort of go together as awe (which is the secret 9th no-one can use), loathing and rage go together as rage because they both involve similar feelings of aggression towards another (or a thing), grief is anguish in mine, and i have terror.

Hrm... This isn't easy. That's part of the reason I asked: it's very hard to narrow down the fundamental principles of emotion.

Well, I sort of worked it out in my thing. I'll keep the casts, but I decided that instead of each having its own emotion, they would be combos of two, so that I could remove Shame/Distress. I'm pretty happy with it now, the only problem being that damn Triumph.

You see, what the PCs can do is utilize an emotion to change the world according to that emotion. So on the most minor scale they can make people feel that emotion or make an object exude that emotion (make a pot look sad), and on the most extreme scale they can distort the very basic parts of reality like making screaming facing come out of the walls (terror) or beautiful statues come alive (passion) or blades shoot up out of the ground (anguish). Now for everything (minus shame, which is why i removed it) I can think of a thing like the things listed above, *except* for Triumph. How can you win a fight with triumph? You're triumphant *after* the fight, so it seems a little too vague and counter-intuitive.

Damn it this is tough stuff...

[Mickey]

Perhaps Triumph/Satisfaction and Peace/Stoicism could be combined?

Not sure about Triumph or Stoicism, but Peace and Satisfaction seem to be quite similar in terms of emotion don't you think?

Though, if Peace/Stoicism were used to return something to it's 'neutral' form or position, or to prevent another PC from changing something, then it would have quite a number of uses...

Perhaps Triumph/Satisfaction would be used to overcome one of the negative emotions, either on its own or in combination with a positive emotion and/or Peace/Stoicism?

...your right it is tough! Hahaha...

[TempvsMortis]

Okie-Dokie, so I removed Triumph (seems like I'm getting back down to 5 again *sigh*). The thing is, it's really 9 castes but I planned on making one with no emotion of its own. *Then* I decided to make it the only one with the neutralizing "Peace/Stoicism", but with 9 castes and 6 emotions the temptation to even each out at 3 was too great, so I did. (Plus, what you said about Triumph being sorta close to Stoicism is right, and I think that was part of the problem.) (Also, you were thinking what I was thinking about Peace neutralizing other emotions.)

Here are the combos for the castes:

Passion, Rage
Passion, Peace
Passion, Terror
Rage, Peace
Rage, Anguish
Bliss, Peace
Bliss, Anguish
Bliss, Terror
Anguish, Terror

Three uses of each of the 6 emotions by tying each of the 9 castes to 2 of them (3 x 6 = 18, 2 x 9 = 18).

Of course, now I'm here and I wish it had worked the other way. I mean, this is fine I guess, but I had intended people to pick castes close to the personality of their character, and that each caste would be distinctly different in behavior and relations based on the fact that they had fairly distinct emotions. Now what use is their for their politicking when they're all the same thing? I might as well just let the player pick, but the sephirot are so important to the whole thing! Damn it, not again. The grass is never greener...

(Meh, I guess I'll come up with some worked up back-story reason for why none of them can get along aside from the personality differences I can no-longer use.)

[Mickey]

Noooooo! Don't resort to the dreaded backstory! HAhaha...

I can't begin to tell you how much I understand where your coming from, sometimes the numerology becomes more important than the game itself! I think it was Mozart or Beethoven or someone that said "A piece is finished when the composer decides to stop".

For the sake of further understanding on my part (my feeble brain still can't quite grasp the concept), I'm going to go back to the original post. In it you explain how some emotions are opposite to others (ie Anguish/Sorrow is opposite to Bliss/Joy). One thing I noticed is that Peace/Stoicism is actually opposite to Rage/Anger, yet you did not define it so?

Finally, back to the latest post, do you have singular names for the castes, even though they are binary in nature?

Just for my own fucking around (pardon my french), I came up with a variant of the latest groupings, that allows for singular categorization of the binary castes. I'm not sure if I'm even on track with this, so forgive me if I misinterpreted something

Ok so I changed the basic emotions to this:

Passion
Anger
Fear
Peace
Sorrow
Joy

Then combined them in the exact same way you did to create:

Passion + Anger = Rage
Passion + Peace = Love
Passion + Fear = Neutral/Ambivalent
Anger + Peace = Neutral/Ambivalent
Anger + Sorrow = Anguish
Joy + Peace = Bliss
Joy + Sorrow = Neutral/Ambivalent
Joy + Fear = Neutral/Ambivalent (this one smelt funny -see below)
Sorrow + Fear = Terror

I then came up with another one:

Anger + Joy = Triumph

While making the list I noticed that the 6 emotions can also be split into 3 groups of 2 'supportive' emotions:

Passion/Anger
Joy/Peace
Sorrow/Fear

In terms of opposites, they are grouped like so (with positive emotions to the left, and negative emotions to the right):

Passion/Fear
Joy/Sorrow
Peace/Anger

This could be important, because a 'spell' belonging to one emotion could be 'dispelled' or neutralized by its opposite. In this way passion would take in 'courage' as part of its dichotomy with Fear, for example.
The idea combined pretty well up until Joy + Fear, which isn't part of the 3 opposite pairings, and yet still felt like a neutral/ambivalent pairing :S

So that's are far as my sleepy mind is willing to go so far. Again yours is probably far more complicated than that (if there are other parts to your design you should share them or post the link/s), but there you have it. Apologies if this only serves to send you into even greater depths of confusion with an even lesser amount of green grass!

[MikeF]

To fill in the neutral blanks on Mickey's last post:
Joy + Fear = Awe
Passion + Fear = Possessiveness / greed

and then if Passion + Peace = Romantic love
Joy + Sorrow = Unrequited love

The tricky one is Anger + Peace, for which I want to say 'mad' - obviously not an emotion, but perhaps a catch-all 'chaos' emotion?

[Mickey]

Very intuitive Mike -couldn't have put it better myself (evidently, since I couldn't come up with anything!).

Perhaps Ambivalence could work exclusively for Anger + Peace then, which according to Wikipedia (and my own understanding of the word) is "a state of having emotions of both positive and negative valence or of having thoughts or actions in contradiction with each other".

[Mickey]

Not sure if I'm allowed to do this, but I can't edit my posts so I'll have to double post >_<

The following is a revised caste list with Mike's suggestions included:

Passion + Anger = Rage
Passion + Peace = Romantic Love (Lust?)
Passion + Fear = Greed (Jealousy?)
Anger + Peace = Ambivalence
Anger + Sorrow = Anguish
Joy + Peace = Bliss (Satisfaction?)
Joy + Sorrow = Unrequited Love (Rejection? Loss?)
Joy + Fear = Awe
Sorrow + Fear = Terror

And the additional suggestion has been changed to:

Joy + Passion = Triumph

Perhaps while your at it Mike you could come up with some terms for the three other groupings (Joy + Anger, Passion + Sorrow, Sorrow + Peace)?

[Mickey]

Actually to TRIPLE post I think that the OP has already gone through this whole process beforehand (as became evident after reading the initial post again) XD

[TempvsMortis]

Ayayay.... Okay.

I guess I'll have to give a way the whole damn backstory then. (I still don't think there's much of a way I could find 8 or 9 cardinal emotions. They'd have to exist first.)

10 – Da'at(Da'ot) [Knowledge] – Awe

9 – Khokmah(Khokmot) [Wisdom] – Bliss, Anguish

8 – Binah(Binot) [Understanding] – Passion, Terror

7 – Khesed(Khasadim) [Mercy] – Rage, Anguish

6 – Geburah(Geburot) [Severity] – Passion, Rage

5 – Tiph'eret(Tiph'arot) [Adornment] – Bliss, Peace

4 – Netzakh(Netzakhim) [Victory] – Rage, Peace

3 – Hod(Hodim) [Majesty] – Passion, Peace

2 – Yesod(Yesodim) [Foundation] –  Bliss, Terror

1 – Malkut(Malkuyot) [Kingdom] – Anguish, Terror

The name in the () is plural. The word in the [] is what it means in Hebrew. (You can look them up on wikipedia.)

Basically, in it you play the Grigori, also known as the Watchers, who in the apocryphon The Book of Enokh were tasked with overseeing humanity, but fell in love with us and so descended and took wives. They taught humanity the powers of god (magic) and they had children, who became giants with no sense of boundaries who would torture and rampage. God, hearing the cries of the the humans, who were being eaten by the nephilim and killed by each other's magic, threw the Watchers into a pit of fire where they would stay until the Apocalypse where they would receive the worst. Veils were cast over their faces, and they could not look up at god because it would burn them and cause them shame. As for the nephilim, God punished the Watchers to watch their children murder each other. After all this, God did the whole thing with the flood and Noah to banish the plague of magic from the earth.

Now, the whole thing is a little bit of a loose interpretation of it. It's what most of them think they are, anyway. They're divided according to sephirah, but the Da'ot are gone. They are perpetually resurrected into human bodies throughout time (which render's fights and political conflicts perpetual, because you may kill him but eventually his soul will come back, even if it takes 500 years). At the end of the Roman Empire something happened and all of the Grigori died, essentially destroying their civilization because they don't exactly recover all their memories at once or perfectly, and it takes them a few hundred years to reincarnate, so at the end of the dark ages they all resurrected with no-one there to tell them who they were or whatnot, so things were fairly chaotic. Eventually they found writings from their old selves which told them things, at the beginning of the renaissance, and there they discovered that almost everyone had resurrected, except a single Da'at, the highest caste. The Da'ot were their defacto leaders so politics got a little complicated.

There's WAY more to it than that but i don't have all day, and neither do you guys. Anyway, you should get the point: I want to divide them by sephirot, but I can't just remove ANOTHER caste, because it would be strange; one is enough. And I need the castes to actually *feel* like they're separate things, like when a player makes their character a Keter, or or Malkut, or a Tiph'eret, they know what that means (at least to some degree) know what it allows them to do, what they can do that other's can't, and how they would act towards other sephirot. At this point I don't know if good, definitive emotions that would actually translate into gameplay (that's the key there) can be thought of in enough numbers to warrant 8, or even all 9 getting their own specific emotion. I just don't think people's emotions are complex enough. Maybe if we felt garblefraz or something, I could put that in, but what the hell is garblefraz?

[Mickey]

Ahahaha Garblefraz... I actually googled that and came up with nothing

...Oh okay so the castes were actually embedded in the backstory to begin with? I thought it was just more of a general thing.

I understand what you mean about wanting to have the emotions/castes to each translate into a specific style or 'niche' of character, but not being able to have enough effects/spell types etc to warrant the need for 8 castes (they are needed for the story -as you said "the sephirot are so important to the whole thing!", but they might not all be needed for the gameplay).

See according to my understanding of current psychological theory (whether or not it is relevant to gaming), is that there are only a handful of primary or 'cardinal' emotions: Anger and Fear being two of them. The rest are all 'feelings' which are more elaborate than emotions.

Btw, have you posted anything else on the forum relating to this project?

>Mickey casts "Garblefraz" at Tempvs
>Tempvs becomes confused...

[TempvsMortis]

Nah, I haven't. I actually have a whole system I use for several of my rpgs, that uses malleable die pools like in Fireborn's Dynamic D6, but I use mind body and soul instead of the four elements, considering the four elements were stupid (they didn't know how the world works) and are bad for defining a being, but mind body and soul are good. The style in all of them is that I simplify things down to their cardinal basics, because I look at things like Mage and see the nine spheres, and I know that three of those could be collapsed into one of the other six, and they just added in extra ones because they wanted nine. Same with Werewolf, the shadow lords always felt inserted to even out the numbers, because despite the books always talking about how no-one was archetypical the shadow lords always seemed to be the exception to the rule.

This is the first thing about a game i've made that i've posted here because it's the only thing I've really had trouble with. I had 8, but I felt like there was something wrong, and as I've seen i was right about being wrong, because 2 of them were insufficient. I know the 9 angelic commandments, even though for a while I was stuck on 8 but I figured out a 9th one (and it's probably the best, because it's a total pain to deal with). (They had 10, but with the 10th caste went the 10th commandment, which makes them really paranoid because they don't know if that means it's gone, or it's there and they haven't broken it, or they're breaking it all the time and they're so used to it they don't notice the consequences.)

I've usually found a way to simplify things down and still get the right number. The only problem is now I'm not just restricted by my own number goal, which I can change, I'm restricted by an external goal. The division according to sephirot adds a lot to the atmosphere, but with such a high goal I'm afraid to reach it i'll have to arbitrarily insert things, which is what i just said i don't like, because as a player you can feel that. But of course, I can't just arbitrarily snuff two more sephirah, because at that point players think "what the hell are you even using the sephirot for anyway if you're eliminating a third of them?" If there was something similar to the sephirot, but 6, I would totally jump on it, but what I like about the sephirot is their connection to Jewish mysticism, because the whole tale of the watchers is from pre-christian apocrypha, and I wanted to give the whole thing a very old testament feeling, with the sense of an angry, vengeful old-testament God.