So I've been reading Jaqueline Carey's new book Banewreaker. Compared to the Kushiel's Legacy trilogy, it's fluff, but it's been an interesting read for a few reasons, mostly pertaining to role-playing.

The book has been written as a look at epic fantasy from the bad guy's perspective. Sympathy for the Dark One, so to speak. In it, good and evil are not so clearly defined as one finds in most epic fantasy (ie the good folks fight the good fight; the bad guys are identifiably evil). There are shades of grey, places where people fall into the middle, sometimes switching sides, sometimes confused as to their real motives and wondering if what they are doing is really right.

So. I propose: how do we make this work? This is a powerful tool, one that can be brought into a lot of games (I think it's an idea that Vampire should have capitalized on, but has failed to miserably). Let us take 3E D&D as an example: can one be a Lawful Good character if in the service of someone known to be Evil? Is a Neutral person really neutral, or are there increments of Neutral that need to be categorized? How do you build, systemically, a true Shades of Grey morality system, unhindered by the morals of the society in which we live?

Really didn't think this thread out much; just got the idea and started typing. I await your requests for clarification, as there usually are at least two. ^__^

Kris
"In the Savory Feast of the Mind, I am an M&M."

You can absolutely be a Lawful Good character in service to (say) a Chaotic Evil lord. All you have to do is to assume that the value of "doing ones duty" has higher priority than some other value that other people consider as being essential to goodness. I do, personally, find that such stories get more interesting if there is at least one value that's classically "good" that the character prioritizes above his evil-seeming ideals.

Like, say you've got elves that believe that harmony with nature takes priority over duty to ones lord. And then you've got a samurai who thinks that duty trumps everything except personal warrior's honor. When his chaotic lord says "Samurai! Go forth and burn this forest to the ground!", the Samurai is likely to do it. Duty trumps greenery.

This can draw him into conflict with an elven warrior, and maybe they develop a grudging admiration for each other, even knowing that their different duties will keep them forever at odds.

Imagine, now, that the chaotic lord captures the elven warrior and orders the samurai to kill him like a dog, giving him none of the respect due a warrior. That is likely to be an order that the samurai will disobey in some way, because warrior honor trumps duty in his mind.


As to how to promote it in a gaming system... well, Capes, TRoS, Sorceror and MLwM all address these issues in some ways. I'm sure lots of other games do too, but those are the ones I'm pretty sure of.

Heya,

Let's look at a couple things. First your examples. Can a Lawful Good type person be in the service of an evil person? Well, the answer is of course, anything is possible. But as designers we have to go beyond that and answer Why this person might be working for the evil dude. His alignment is lawful good, so lets think about the type of person who might be that. Just off the top of my head comes Law Man, Priest, Charity Worker, School Teacher. Certainly an evil lord would need to keep things in his towns under control and people are less likely to rebel if that control is not too heavy handed. A lawful good marshal might fit that bill well. Lawful would convey loyalty, good would convey justice. Or perhaps, the evil guy uses a charity as a front to deflect criticism against his other activities. A LG character could run such a place and therefore be associated with that person. Lawful taken to mean honest, and good to mean compasionate.

As for neutral, some might be working both sides to make sure there is a balance- a Flip-flopper if you will. A neutral person might exploit both sides for personal gain and therefore appear to helping each. Look to the character's motivation to understand thier actions or potential actions.

As for the question you posed in your title, which I feel is more interesting than the examples you gave (no offense btw), that's kind of a toughie. Certainly if the society you live in labels you as evil, for that society you are. But perhaps you are called by a higher power that defines good and evil differently than the inhabitants around you. So you still might be "good" though you are tarred as being "evil" by them. Perhaps it depends on persepective? Or is that too easy of an answer?

Peace,

-Troy

Nobilis provides for a fairly intelligent and effective morality system that is quite subjective.

Hello,

I'd like to point out that the Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic plus Good/Evil matrix has been criticized very nicely by Robin Laws, in that no human personalities can be mapped to it in any imaginable way, and that the terms properly apply toward character roles in a highly specific game context rather than toward any representational or prescriptive concepts.

Everyone, please don't type furiously in response that your cousin Bob "really is too" chaotic neutral or that you yourself are "obviously" neutral good.

I'm posting to suggest that your basic question is a great one, Kris, but that I don't think the D&D alignment system is a useful basis for addressing it.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: I'd like to point out that the Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic plus Good/Evil matrix has been criticized very nicely by Robin Laws, in that no human personalities can be mapped to it in any imaginable way [...]

To me, what's juicy about morality is not so much pinning a shade of gray. I like to press a value 'til it breaks.

e.g. #1: blacks must be kept down or they could subplant white superiority, but we need their numbers to win this war.

e.g. #2: duty is the highest calling, but our addition of force cannot save the outpost; and we would then be slaughtered, for nothing.

A pal of mine ran a long AD&D campaign in which he simply took all the definitions of alignments perfectly literally, but accepted no inferred context.

The whole thing was set in a weird Middle Earth alternate history 4th Age in which the Ring had not been destroyed because it was never found (no Gollum -- it rolled out to sea down the Anduin and was lost forever), but eventually Sauron just sort of lost the will to exist and collapsed. The Three Rings still worked just fine, so the Elves never took off.

One effect of this was that Paladins (commonly Gondorian) were very often essentially SS officers. See, you know that Orcs are inherently evil, and that they have this tendency to cross-breed with humans to produce more inherently evil beings. Clearly miscegenation is intrinsically an evil thing, and it's something apparently only Orcs (and evil humans) would ever want to do. Therefore an organized extermination policy is the Final Solution for Orcs.

Once that had more or less lost its zip, because of a loss of novelty, Mike (not Holmes) added a subtler point. The Silmarillion, the actual book, existed in this world. The Elves accepted it as known fact. But the Orcs, who had their own complicated society going, considered it Elvish propaganda and a manifesto for anti-Orcism. The way Orcish society worked, they had this theory of a kind Nietzschean social evolution: the Orcs were born in suffering and lived in suffering, and the point was eventually to produce Ur-Orcs who could transcend that condition. From their perspective, this made Sauron a messiah: he had not created Orcs (that was Morgoth/Melkor), but he had enslaved them to the most horrible suffering and torture -- which is how they had chance of self-salvation. Thus they had put a lot of work -- through enslavement of Orcs, naturally -- into transforming the Plateau of Gorgoroth into a kind of Eden populated with the most vicious and dangerous animals available. Pretty, lush, green -- and deadly.

This of course was intrinsically evil, but Mike went to a lot of lengths to make it seem captivating and complex. By contrast the Gondorians and a lot of the Elves were knee-jerk fanatics. Elves would essentially say, "Orcs? Evil. Don't talk to me about Orcs unless it's about killing them. I don't like to talk about ugly things." But since the Orcs had been set up to be sympathetic, if not exactly likeable, this made Lawful Good a deeply unpleasant option.

In the end, I think what he set up was a notion of Law and Chaos that made the former into absolutism. Good and Evil ended up subjective, but not within the game-world; that is, only Evil people ever claimed that the Good people were actually bad. The idea was at least in part to play with Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and the like, and it was necessary for this to have an explicit "known" moral compass built into the rules.

Don't know if that helps, but it is one reason why an alignment system like AD&D's actually lends itself to this sort of mucking about.

The only reason I would resort to utilizing the D&Dist alignment system is to provide a basis with which most (I would be so bold as to suggest perhaps all) of us are quite familiar with its workings, and it gives us a place to start.

In gaming, especially in the heroic epic vein, is evil really evil, or is it merely misunderstood? Are "evil" people working towards ends they believe are good, only to be lambasted for their efforts by people generally associated with goodness? Is there an inherent unfairness in heroics? Why do we not sympathize with the devil?

Let's look at a slightly different example, one from real-life.

A terrible empire of corruption and moral filth has been growing in power steadilly for over a generation. Its reach goes beyond it's typical hegemonial borders, pushing and pulling at nations that have naught to do with the Empire. The Empire supports the Enemies of the Free Peoples, providing weapons and military support, political weight and a power far greater than could be normally expected from such a small and inconsequential foe.

The Free Peoples, pushed beyond their limits, strike back, killing thousands in a mystical attack on a place of great importance to the Empire. The Empire is quick to respond, killing innocents, women and children in swaths while rampaging through the Free Countries. Where the Empire touches, death reigns. The Council falls. One of the Great Kings is pulled to his knees.

The Free Peoples fight on, but the war is going badly. Long-time allies become enemies. Warriors die by the hundreds in pitched battles across the world. When will the Heroes come? When will we be freed from the chains of the evil American Empire?

In sheer black and white, it looks like something out of Star Wars, but this is the War on Terror. Good people fight on both sides. Evil people fight on both sides. And the shades of moral grey are like a cloud over the battle-ground. Were one of these "Free Peoples" kept hostage, would he or she begin to see the good in the American Empire? Were an American soldier forced to stay with an Iraqi militant's family for a time, would he or she begin to see the good in the Insurgency? How could we play with this, systematically, that doesn't involve a set "alignment" system, or something akin to Vampire's "Paths" scale? Is there a way, or should it just be kept to the narrative?

~Kris
"Gamers should have their own nation... Let's claim Utah!"

There are a lot of ways to create a system to help players address moral questions. The important thing about them (IMHO) is to make sure that you aren't creating a "right" and a "wrong" choice in any given situation. Because if you're saying "Here's a question, think deeply about it and then discover that you agree with the foreordained answer" then... well, you're not really encouraging them to think deeply about it, are you?

The problem I've always seen with Paths is that they give you a variety of ways of viewing the world, but once you've picked one it's pretty much fixed. It doesn't provide a way that you can say "Ah! This experience has changed the way that I view the world, and what I consider good."

I think that the less deliberate effort a player needs to make in order for the game system to stay synchronized with the changing morality of the player, the better. If the game system is a step ahead, noticing trends in character behavior and then providing feedback to inspire the player, that's even better.

Mountain Witch seems (from reports) to be another really solid system in this regard... it's trust mechanic turns behavior into visible patterns of trust and mistrust, and then lets the players decide whether to embrace those patterns or defy them.

BTW, your analogy gave me shivers, not because of its nature or its emotional impact, or anything like that, but because I've seen similar innocent comparisons create massive and bitter flame-wars. I quite hope that Forge folks will be the exception in my experience.

I don't think it'll be a problem Tony. Forge is a group of fairly openminded types. If anyone disagrees, I'd also like to think civility will still reign.

Mark Twain once tackled something like this, a short story I saw peformed in high shool. This stranger shows up to a church one Sunday as the minister leads a prayer for congreation members and family of who are at war.
After the prayer the gentleman steps up and re-interprits the prayer by taking what the minister said and looking at the opposite- when asking the Lord to protect the children and allow them to be victorious, the other half of the request was that Lord turn his ear and favor away from the others and allow them to be massacred, etc etc. Its something all too soon forgotten- there are innocents and monsters on both sides of a war. An anime movie, Grave of Fireflys, addresses the aftermath of the US dropping of the H-Bombs from the point of view of a brother and sister who died as a result.
Personally, I don't think this is anything new. Twain and GoF are a pretty decent example of that fact.

Grey areas are a heavy issue, but one worth exploring. Anyone who flames because of looking at something from someone elses perspective really needs to sit back him or herself. We're all human~ We all love, cry, bleed, hate, rage and more. I think we NEED to look at the grey areas more to better understand why we do what we do.
As to formalizing it in a system, I don't think we can really. Many humans don't know what they're capable of until it is DEMANDED of them. And while some of us can act 'in character', a lot of us still like to think that when the time comes we would step up to the plate.

I disagree that you can't encourage the address of moral questions in the formal rules of the system.

You won't make a system that encourages people to explore the grey areas by imposing that exploration on them from the system up without their control. That would just be railroading without human intervention, having nothing to do with player choice.

But you can use the system to add weight to a decision, from the players point of view. It would be hard, but quite possible, to create a system that reinforced people who stuck to the same side of a moral divide, giving them more strength to ignore others but also less flexibility in their own actions. Likewise, the same system could reinforce those who stuck to their own morality in defiance of societal moral borders by giving them more flexibility in their actions but less strength to act with blind certainty.

Do you think that such a system, in practice, would help to reinforce the sort of exploration that we're discussing?

SlurpeeMoney wrote: The only reason I would resort to utilizing the D&Dist alignment system is to provide a basis with which most (I would be so bold as to suggest perhaps all) of us are quite familiar with its workings, and it gives us a place to start.

We shall henceforth not make mention of the D&D Alignment System in relation to this topic. Some others have been mentioned, few of which I am knowledgable about. Capes, TRoS, Sorceror, MLwM and Nobilis... I've not actually played any of these. Basic rundowns of the morality systems, anyone?

Kris
"God does not play dice with the universe... I do..."

Kris wrote: We shall henceforth not make mention of the D&D Alignment System in relation to this topic. Some others have been mentioned, few of which I am knowledgable about. Capes, TRoS, Sorceror, MLwM and Nobilis... I've not actually played any of these. Basic rundowns of the morality systems, anyone?

John Kirk wrote: [
The Nobilis “morality” system boils down to an alignment system, as far as I can tell. Please correct me if I’m wrong, Players select a “Code” for their characters in which they support the Power of “Heaven”, “Hell”, “Light”, “Dark”, “Wild”, or “Other” (of their choosing). The reason I say this is an alignment system is that, as far as I can tell, there is no reward for actually supporting these powers. Once you state that your player supports some Power, you are simply expected to do so without any further mechanical intervention.

neelk wrote: No; the player is absolutely not expected to live up to the code. Characters have a Code, and adherence to it nets them miracle points, and defiance costs them miracle points. However, each of the codes are designed so that faithful adherence to it will eventually call for dreadful and terrible acts, and the player (and in the setting, the character) is completely free to choose whether or not to adhere to their Code or not -- the character's Code is basically a bribe to make it tempting to be inhuman and divine rather than to show humanity and clemency.

neelk wrote: Characters have a Code, and adherence to it nets them miracle points, and defiance costs them miracle points.

Page 133, right-most column, middle of the page. It's... oh... one sentence in the middle of a huge page of poetic description of Heaven and Hell. I'm not surprised you missed it.

Tony,

Thanks for pointing that out. I see that the Codes have more of an impact than I originally thought. In fact, I also see that the Restrictions and Virtues have a similarly potent impact because of Miracle Point rewards. Players will tend to seek out situations in which their Codes, Restrictions, and Virtues apply. That way, they can demonstrate their characters' weaknesses, idiosyncrasies, and passions while racking up the Miracle Points. Those are some good story generating mechanics.

TonyLB wrote: Page 133, right-most column, middle of the page. It's... oh... one sentence in the middle of a huge page of poetic description of Heaven and Hell. I'm not surprised you missed it.

I, myself, not being too full of myself or anything, wrote: if the Crucial Little Rule is too small, you can read right over it and not realize it's crucial -- maybe even not realize it's in the game at all and go play without it. Lord knows I've done this.....So if your Crucial Little Rule is really crucial, better put have your layout put the equivalent of flashing neon lights around it.

TonyLB wrote: Page 133, right-most column, middle of the page. It's... oh... one sentence in the middle of a huge page of poetic description of Heaven and Hell. I'm not surprised you missed it.