I'm two sessions in to a new game and already there seem to be some creative disconnects among the group.  I'm the GM and its for my regular group that has, schedules allowing, seven players.  My group plays a lot of the usual D&D style games, as well as a few smaller games that we've experimented with but haven't played long term.  Most of the play tends to be strongly gamist, particularly the d20 module-style play of meatgrinder dungeons.  This happens to be my least favorite type of game, and so its the type I tend not to run.

This most recent game started just a few weeks ago and has gone three sessions, the initial jam session/pitch meeting, and two sessions of actual play.  The first session of play was slow getting started due to a combination of players getting used to new characters and me as the GM wanting to leave the storyline more open and not lock them into a linear plot right away.

The situation that has caused the most consternation occurred at the end of the second session, and so thats where I'll focus for now.  The characters are playing street urchins, for lack of a better term, who are young and low-level and finding their way in a pre-Punic War Carthage.  The game has as overt supernatural presence, and most of the group includes mythical creatures like a satyr and a giant that are considered normal races.  In the background, there is unrest in Carthage that has come with the stifling heat and drought of summer, and the nights are marked by violence as groups of armed men travel the streets settling old scores.  The group, in following up a missings person subplot, bluffed their way into the good part of town (walled off from the rest of the city) so that they could investigate a group of Greek actors and musicians who were passing through.  After watching the performance the party decided it was time to go back to the slums and found that the good part of the city had locked its gates for the night, and that parts of Carthage had succumbed to rioting and looting.

The party seemed mildly surprised that the town guard were not willing to open the main gates of the wealthiest part of the city during a time of violence and looting in order to let five or six teenagers walk home, and after a round of blown social interactions and some vague threats of violence back and forth, the group decided to move on.  As a GM I was aware that circumstance had trapped the group somewhere they didn't want to be, and I provided a way out in form of some drainage culverts.  The group considered this, decided they weren't wild about sneaking out in a drainage tunnel, and decided instead to visit a local bathhouse where their chaotic nature and general rowdiness chased off the high class patronage.

This fit in with the idea that they are a group of young, improverished punks.  When we were brainstorming the genesis of the campaign, the idea was that the group were not adventurers by trade, but people who would be in a modern context, working their high school jobs.  So the group of young punks ends up at the nice bathhouse and gets rowdy, and this draws the ire of the local brute squad who show up to give them a quick beating/eviction.

My motivation as a GM in introducing the light combat was to give the group a little directed action because they were floundering without a clear directive or immeidate plot goal to follow.  One of the characters had left the bathhouse to sleep in an alley and saw the brute squad, recognizable by their tunics and clubs, collecting in the street.  This character decides to infiltrate the brutes and so he walks up, apologizes for being late, and makes his bluff check.  The leader of the brutes, played by me, berates the new guy for being late and improperly dressed; but the player was enjoying "putting one over" on the guards.  As the squad then gets ready to rush into the bathhouse, the character pipes up and suggests that he go in first and scout out the place, and then come back out and tell the brutes where all the trespassers are.  Another, more difficult bluff check is passed, and the character enters the bathhouse to inform the other characters that they are about to be attacked.

Tactics aside, the party has a nice back and forth battle that goes about a half and hour of game time, leaves the brutes beaten unconscious, and two party members nearly killed by lucky rolls.  One character stabilizes the fallen characters, while the other two characters drown the unconscious brute squad members so that there would be "no witnesses".

At this point the session was at its normal stopping time for the night, so I took the opportunity to address the drowning of unconscious people.  It was a discussion we had to have largely by email over the next few days (which is never a good sign for my group), where a couple of the players said they felt I was imposing unneeded or unwanted morality on their characters.  I tried to make it clear that I'm not trying to get the players to play any specific morality, only that their characters decisions should be informed by some sort of moral viewpoint, be it good or bad. 

Personally, I don't think I'm asking all that much (but then again, why would I?  I almost always agree with myself.)  Most of the group seems fine with it, though a couple seem to be chafing horribly at the idea that their characters have to be able to explain why they are able to kill out of convenience.  And honestly, I can kind of see their point.  It does seem somewhat unfair to assume life has some value since, if you come out of a certain type of gaming background, it may never have had it before. 

Part of this srpings out of the fact that I think moral grey areas are interesting in games, and as a GM, I want to run a game I find interesting.  I think it cheats the dramatic potential of the story to have the moral questions skipped over because the players want to take the easy way (or, if you prefer, the Neutral Efficient way.  There's also this whole thing about why drowning unconscious people is "easier" than leaving them unconscious, but thats another topic for another day). 

I wonder if anyone else has any insight into this situation.  I'll be happy to clarify any points that I've left muddled.

Hi Mason, welcome to the forge!

Here's a bit of an actual play report from a tunnels and trolls session, reported in this thread: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=7863.0

I submit to everyone the following excerpts from our session yesterday, concerning buying or hiring an NPC to become the new janitor for the first level, as requested by the NPC Sergius Winterfrost. By the rules, players can buy slaves or hire hirelings pretty much as they can afford. The former cost 10 gold pieces per attribute point, but neither Luck nor Charisma is necessary to buy; their Luck is set by the Luck of their master and their Charisma is automatically 0 unless you feel like buying it up. The latter cost 2 gold pieces per attribute point, but you buy all six attributes and have to pony up 25% of your findings to them (even if they die).

Julie: "What do you guys think?"

GM (me): "About slavery? I think it's wrong."

Julie: "No! I'm not asking you; you're not a party member."

[discussion ensues, including the comment by Maura that "An Irish day-laborer would be cheaper." The concept arises that once the person is handed over to Sergius, the party's responsibility to him is ended.]

Julie: "If we're going with a disposable person, we might as well buy a slave."

I don't recall the respondent, but the next person said, "We don't have alignments in this game, after all."

I too think slavery is wrong.  I also think violence is wrong, but I do enjoy violent games and movies.  (It reminds me of a quote by a director, I forget who, who said its impossible to make an anti-war movie, because war always looks glamorous on the screen.  I am also reminded of Gwenyth Paltrow's question from the Talented Mr. Ripley when she asks, "Why is it that when boys play, they always play at killing each other?")  I understand that players instinctively seek the easiest/cheapest way to do something.  I think the quote about ethics and economics is apt in that topic, though maybe because some games focus more heavily on economics than they do on ethics.  (I also think this is probably why ethics loses frequently to economics in real life.)

Some games deal more with the morality of the characters than others.  The line about Alignment rings true to me, because I had a similiar experience in my youth after playing years and years of AD&D I got converted to Shadowrun, and that was very much my reaction.  "No alignments?  Whoopee, I can be evil!"  And I was very evil for a couple of years until that got boring, and I then came around to the idea that a character's moral and ethical viewpoint is something intrinsic to the character and not something that needs to be enforced mechanically.  Which is more or less where I am today. 

I am starting to realize that some of my players come at it from a different direction, though what those directions are I'm not sure.   My feeling is that some of them interpret any discussion of morality to be an Alignment discussion, or an attempt to force them to play a certain way.  In the opening salvos of the email debate (which was in fact pretty civil for my group, I think in large part because I ignored the inflammatory parts and tried to keep the discussion on message), I floated the concept that the violence you do to people leaves some mark on you.  My intent was not to keep the players from playing characters who killed, but to consider (or at least pay lip service to the idea) that there might be emotional ramifications to killing a lot of people. 

The point I am trying to get across to them is not that any specific moral behavior will be enforced.  I don't necessarily care what they do, I care why they are doing it.  One of the players responded with a motivation/background sheet that explained his character's outlook and why he had no regard for human life.  And to me that's a step in the right direction, because now the player has set down and explained why his character is the way he is, and where the character might be going.  (Of course, to get to that point it was fours days of pulling teeth in email, but at least we got somewhere.)

Will there be any consequences for the player characters getting reputations as ruthless killers?  Push the consequences, not in a punitive way, but in a way that shows player decisions having effects in the gameworld.  Maybe this crime won't become known.  But if they keep on the way they are going, they will get a rep for bloodthirstyness.  Then the nastiest gangster in the city hires them to do a thoroughly despicable job.  Or an innocent gets in the way.  Or the cops come after them. 

Mason wrote: Part of this srpings out of the fact that I think moral grey areas are interesting in games, and as a GM, I want to run a game I find interesting.  I think it cheats the dramatic potential of the story to have the moral questions skipped over because the players want to take the easy way (or, if you prefer, the Neutral Efficient way.  There's also this whole thing about why drowning unconscious people is "easier" than leaving them unconscious, but thats another topic for another day).

Well, one minor point is that my group plays a couple of different ways.  So some games will deal more with moral quandaries and some won't.  Being long time gamers, we tend to have default settings for games, and a lot of preconceived notions and habits, both good and bad.  I knew at the beginning I didn't want to run a typical ("typical" for my group, anyway) D&D game, and in the initial jam session, a lot of what the players were telling me was pushing the game away from our normal style of D&D.  My players with one exception are all GMs, and we all play in each other's games.  That's one of the reasons we decided to run the game using a subset of d20 rules that was closer to M&M, because stylistically I saw the game more like a superhero game than D&D game.  This took out GP's and XP's and replaced them with purposely vague wealth and advancement mechanics that are more story dependent, which has backfired slightly.  (The players who previously focused more heavily on the P's now focus on how there aren't any P's and how they don't even know how to get any.)

The problem came up when a player joined in the second session after missing the jam session and the first game, and he brought in a character that was fine for our style of typical D&D.  The problem is outside the context of our D&D games, nothing our D&D characters do makes much sense.  (This is something I had long tried to get my group to change, but they're happy with it so its something I've come to accept.)  In fact, most D&D attitudes come off as greedy and sociopathic, as well as racist and religiously intolerant... and these are the good guys I'm talking about.  At least the guy has recast his character as a sociopath, and reframed his belief that life has no meaning as a character trait, rather than assuming as a player that all npcs are there to be killed and looted. 

I do have some ideas about consequences, as well as where the games go from here.  I want to avoid trying to punish the players though, and its not about using in game consequences to enforce any specific morality.  Whatever the characters choose to do drives the story, and so their actions good or bad are going to up the dramatic stakes.  At least, thats my theory.  We'll see how it pans out in the next session.

Hi Mason,

I'm not sure about in game consequences enforcing any particular morality. But if the players had donated some gold to an old lady to help her with her rent, would you question them in the same way you did when they were drowning unconcious thugs?

From my understanding of narrativist play, any responce by the player needs to be accepted as equally as any other responce they could have made. If one moral act prompts a adamant request for explanation, while another doesn't, it does seem a bias against certain actions rather than equal acceptance.

In fact, most D&D attitudes come off as greedy and sociopathic, as well as racist and religiously intolerant... and these are the good guys I'm talking about.  At least the guy has recast his character as a sociopath, and reframed his belief that life has no meaning as a character trait, rather than assuming as a player that all npcs are there to be killed and looted. 

I do have some ideas about consequences, as well as where the games go from here.  I want to avoid trying to punish the players though, and its not about using in game consequences to enforce any specific morality.

Fair points, though my reference to "the good guys" was about the general D&D assumption of Goodly heroes, and not about specific characters.  (This goes back to my old discussions with a previous GM about how "good" in D&D tends to be violent, racist and religiously intolerant, and how my idea of "good" in real-world, highly subjective terms tends to be different.  Ganhdi might make a good character, but he wouldn't be a successful adventurer.)

I do take your point that their "evil" actions come under more scrutiny than the "good" action would if they gave a few gold to an old woman, but I would also take into account the magnitude of the good or bad.  Giving an old woman a few gold isn't life-changingly good, its about as good as taking a few gold from her would be (all things being equal).  Pushing her down a flight of stairs to make robbing her easier would be yet more evil, and would require more explanation from the character's perspective to justify than simply snatching her purse. 

In this case, my disapproval of the drowning came less from my moral objections to the scene and more from the fact that one of the players wasn't considering the morality at all.  It wasn't that he was playing his character as an evil person, its that he wasn't considering it emotionally.  Its one thing to play a character who can kill without thinking about it, its another to not think about it as a player.  If that makes sense.  I can say that with relative confidence because there was another character involved in the drowning that had made his character to be soulless, and his actions were right in line with his concept. 

Maybe I'm having a stance issue here.  To me, it seemed like one player was in Pawn Stance, in that he was having his character perform the actions the player thought would be the smartest or easiest way to deal with a situation, without considering the emotional consequences to the character, where the second player was considering it from the point of view of the character.  The end result was the same action, but one made me stop and say "Why are you doing that?" and one didn't.

You are right in that its easier for a player to get away with outrageous good actions than it is to get away with outrageous evil actions.  I am dragging more baggage along with me than I thought.  Good food for thought.

Hi Mason.  I like this subject because its been on my mind heavily since investigating Narrativism.  I think you've already identified the problem in that the game you want to play, with questionings of morality behind character actions, isn't the game some of the other's want to play.  Wade L lined it out perfectly in his first point, sometimes (or maybe even always) some people don't want to have to deal with all the heavy moral questions in their recreation.  There's enough of "what's right/what's wrong" stuff in my real life...why do I want to drag that into my leisure activities, especially if its not necessary.

And for lots of folks its never even been a question of whether to bring that into play at all anyway.  Its just not addressed.  Monsters and Bad Guys are there to be defeated and defeated means killed.  That's why they've got Hit Points, right?  If your group isn't used to having to justify their motivations because opponents are always obstacles to be removed, because its a game afterall, then I wouldn't find it surprising that they'd balk at having to shift into morality exploration on the fly.  And I don't think their reaction at this point even indicates that their not interested in doing that, not yet anyway.  If their accustomed to moral-light style of play (we always have been for the most part) and you threw a group of what looked like "Baddies" at them who were bullying people in the street then no surprise, they whack them without consideration and move on.

Now if they have some information to go on, some stuff that they really have to consider before making things lethal, that'll give you an indication I think of whether they want to play morality exploration or not.  Instead of just a group of thugs that are beating on folks, what if they knew beforehand that those "thugs" were themselves victims in some way, turned to the street out of necessity.  Then the players have to decide how they want to handle that, considering that their opponent is human and has his own moral dilemmas.  And make sure they know what those dilemmas are.  At least then if they balk they'll actually be saying, "This isn't fun, I don't want to have to make decisions like this in my game."

One of the things I've been chewing over is how poorly d20 (even this vague adaptation of it) does this kind of stuff.  You've got character design that's great for avatar/pawns but does nothing for thematic character design, and a combat system that punishes you for going less than lethal.  You can be merciful, as long as you can eat the -4 to hit.  Some of the posts over at Deep in the Game have been really helpful for me to isolate these hang-ups.  If only someone had warned me, perhaps in essay form, that System Does Matter. 

<shrug>  Like most of earth's allegedly intelligent species, I learn through trial and error.  Having gone a few rounds with the players who have had creative disconnects with this game's style (most of the group has grokked it fine), I think I'm a little better prepared to deal with it.  (Hopefully that's not ironic foreshadowing or hubris.)  I'll let you know in 16 hours or so.

Mason wrote:
One of the things I've been chewing over is how poorly d20 (even this vague adaptation of it) does this kind of stuff.  You've got character design that's great for avatar/pawns but does nothing for thematic character design, and a combat system that punishes you for going less than lethal.  You can be merciful, as long as you can eat the -4 to hit.

Thats one change I've already decided on.  (If I was really serious, I'd make lethal attacks be a -4.)  The game will probably still be a mix of lethal and non-lethal combats, but I want the life-and-death struggles to be different from the everyday struggles.  If every combat is to the death, there's nowhere to go dramatically.  We're also replacing the Conviction system of d20 with the more specific Belief system of BW.  We'll see how it works out. 

I'm imagining the situation like this: You see some players not considering morality at all. You don't want this to become the norm, so you push for them to explain themselves. My take is that the other players who are sympathetic to the style of play you'd like then get pissed off because you treat different expressions of morality differently. While the people who didn't express themselves, really just don't care about morality and they are the ones in the group who aren't bothered by the discussion you had by e-mail. To them it's a total non issue.

It'd be very easy for me to be wrong on this, but I think your pushing away the people who'd enjoy morality investigation, when your trying (forever unsuccessfully) to pull in the players who don't give a toss about it.

No, though I see your point, it shook out the other way.  Mostly the group is fairly agreed on the pathos invested in their characters, if not to the same degree than at least in the same direction.  Every so often we run a straight, tactical dungeon crawl where people bring their avatar characters and the only thematic characterization we bother with is to amuse ourselves while the GM (whoever it might be at that time) looks up stats or finds the right mini.  And then we have our more regular mode of play where we attempt, to the degree that interests us at the time, to develop a character thematically as well as mechanically.  (And then, on the other side, we have games where the thematic characterization takes precedence over the mechanical, but thats about as rare as straight mechanical play.)

Only a couple of the players read much game theory, and several (if not all and including me) are the abused children of dysfunctional play.  One player who enjoys both the mechanical and emotional side of character creation is an adamant non-nar, mainly because the only Nar play he has any experience with is the illusionist/railroady type in which the characters are supposed to contribute (ironically) the mechanics while the GM tells them the story.  ("Hey, thats not really Nar" you might say, and that's fine, but he hates the name so I avoid using it.  I'm passing the narrativist elements I want to include in this game as Simulationist in that I am simulating a work of fiction with dramatic elements.  He doesn't read the Forge, I'm probably okay in the short term.  Sometimes reading the Forge I feel like the first member of a crazy family to get therapy.  Which is not to say I'm not crazy, only that I realize it.) 

In this case, the morality discussion came about when a player joined late and blind.  It was unfortunate, but he came to the table without a clear idea of what we were doing and brought a character that would have fit in fine with most of our games, but it was a character conceived in a vacuum.  Turns out that wasn't the best way to introduce him to the game, but hindsight's 20/20.  The miscommunication came about when he thought I was trying to set the moral tone of the game, when I was actually talking the emotional tone of the game.  The great thing about email converstation is it allows you to write at length on a subject without any real communication; a five minute converstation at the table can easily be a five day back and forth which includes several variations of the phrase, "...pside your head."

Now the way the discussion shook out was one player agreeing that we should invest some pathos in our characters (though he had played in the first session and so already knew what the game was about), one saying essentially, "Don't tell me how to roleplay, mofo" and one swinging with "We should invest some pathos in our characters, but don't tell me how to do it."  And four other players who had already made characters, grokked the game, and didn't have time for multi-page email on the subject. 

So we came the long way round to the understanding ('went round our elbow to scratch our ass' if you prefer) that I wasn't trying to enforce morality on them-- at least, not to a degree I was conscious of, though as it was posted above, there are ways I may unconsciously push certain behaviors-- but insist that whatever morality they chose to play was backed up in the thematic character design rather than the mechanical.  Essentially the rewards of the game will be more devoted to chracter development than mechanical build, so thats where the focus will go.

Now, I'd like to say this was my intention from the very beginning, but thats not how I run games.  Or at least, not this one.  Sometimes what interests me is harder to define, and so I have to start the game in the same way I'd start a short story... that is to say blindly, until I stumble across stream-of-consciousness style the threads that interest me the most, and then thats where I put the focus.  I guess there are easier ways to do it, like knowing what you want and then actively working towards that; but thats not how I approach anything else in my life, so its unrealistic to expect it from my gaming.  One of the things the extended email give-and-take did, as well as posting here and getting feedback, was help me figure out what the hell I was trying to do, so I could explain it to them, so they could tell me what they liked about it and what they didn't which allowed us to come up with what we wanted to do collectively.  The player that had the most problem with the morality discussion didn't ultimately say, "I don't want to consider my character emotionally"-- he said, "This is the morality of the character I want to play."  It wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but thats a good thing.  It turned out to be a character that could justify his behavior (murder), and was in fact a character with no clear moral sense at all, who believes only his own life had worth.  However, thats the point of view of the character, and a thematic jumping off point for development, and not simply the way he acts because the player is more concerned with the most efficient path to mechanical rewards. 

So thats how we ended up at last night's session, where I opened with a discussion on lethality-- that some combats were going to be non-lethal and some would be lethal, and the players would play a role in setting the stakes-- and with Beliefs and Instincts as a way to flesh out the themes of the characters, as well as provide a mechanical incentive for their inclusion.  The game went pretty well, and I'd like to tell you guys about it, but it'll have to wait for another time.  Thanks for all the comments, I found them very illuminating.

A relatively brief report of play, in the broadstrokes, highlighting what worked and what didn't.  My most vocal player (in the email sense) had been complaining of a lack of direction in the game, which we hammered out to be a mixture of me leaving it up to the players and the players leaving it up to me.  Responding to this, the first part of the session was essentially a gauntlet.  The characters fled the scene of the crime, and we skipped over what had occurred after the bathhouse battle.  My feeling was some players felt this was me the GM wanting to avoid what had happened, so I tried to make it clear my intention was to leave it ambiguous, so that we could resolve what happened later.  Like a movie scene where it cuts out right before something significant or disturbing happens or doesn't happen, and that uncertainty leads into the next few scenes.  (I had hoped to button with session with the consequences of the bathhouse scene, but play went in a different direction.)

The next few scenes in my movie were the characters escaping the nice part of down through the drainage culverts that led into the city dump, though in this case the city dump was Gehenna.  Piles of smoking ash, brimstone, the partially consumed carcasses from temple sacrfice and huge rats (though I was clear to distinguish that "huge" in this sense was not D&D huge with 30' long rats, but "huge" in the sense they were about as big as a football.  Goes back to my theory that slightly too big is scarier than gigantic.)  Bodies of the condemned and feral dogs filled out the menacing nature of this place.  The party met up with the character of the guy who couldn't make it last week and an NPC Hoplite that was hunting the werewolf the party had fought way back in session one.  (Again, this game has an overt supernatural setting.)  The party joins in on the hunt, or at least, follows along after the NPC warns them that the werewolf will single out the weak, and is hunting them as surely as they are hunting him.

This part of the game, roughly the first two hours, was just shy of railroading.  I say just shy because if the players had objected, I would have done something else, but instead they didn't have much cooking on their side of the screen and were happy to have a series of short, direct goals provided.  The NPC was killed in the ensuing battle with the Invisible Demon (A Predator from the movie of the same name), and the pc's managed to beat the werewolf into submission with silver spears until it passed out and took the form of a boy about their age.

The group was split on what to do with the fallen Hoplite, with one wanting to loot him, the priest of Ptah wanting to bury him immediately, and the Roman giant wanting to take him back to a Greek temple for burial.  This provided the genesis of the first player goal, when the giant realized he would need to reclaim the Hopite's head (the Predator had taken it) so that the soul could rest.  They were also split on the unconscious boy, with one voting to kill him, and the others coming down somewhere on the "try to help" or "try to get a reward" side of keeping him alive. 

After that, the group was at the end of my railroad, and I started prodding them for what they wanted to do.  There was some difficulty here, and some things that went well.  The giant took the headless body to a temple for burial rites and realized he needed the head, though he had no idea how to get it.  This led another player to try asking the priests of the temple if they could do anything for lycanthropy, and though the game has an overt supernatural side (and Predators), the fantasy dial is set pretty low.  But the priests promised a cleansing ritual and the player decided his character would be looking for a way to make the werewolf SEP. 

The difficulty, and it wasn't a huge problem but it was something I noticed, is that some players took some prodding.  I would ask them what they wanted to do three or four times in a row to get past all the unimportant, daily life stuff until they came across something important that their character wanted to accomlish, something that led to action rather than, "I eat breakfast, I get a clean toga, I wash my face." 

Play wrapped with the characters going to the Greek Temple for the moonlight celebration of Artemis where the werewolf would be cleansed, hopefully.  This also tied in with a group of Greek musicians that the party had suspected of foul play.  This was the missing persons plot from the previous game, which the party later learned the musicians were Pythagoreans who had killed a friend of the scholar's, the only clue as to the motive of the murder being a drawing of a square the victim had sent to the scholar.  (A Werewolf, a Predator and Pythgoreas... probably the most diverse group of antagonists I've run in one session.)    This gave the session a nice cliffhanger note as the players realized all the important people were going to be in one place next game.

The consequences of the bathhouse battle are something I've been kicking around and plotting out for a few days now, and I was hoping to end the session with it, but the player's interest in the Greek Temple took the game in better direction, so thats what we went with.  And the consequences can be run anytime.  Essentially, whatever they decided actually happened in the bathhouse is unimportant except to character development (that is to say, unimportant except in the most important way).  The consequences will end up being other people, innocents let's say, paying for the group's actions.  I'm curious to see how that plays out.   

One question for you Mason, do you use alignment at all?  I realise it's not much but it is the only element in d20 that deals with morality.  I know it's often dropped and if you've done so what do you have left that systematically represents a characters morality? 

The d20 we're using is called True 20, and its somewhere between D20 Modern and M&M in terms of design.  There's no alignment written into the system, which is a bit of a dodge to your question.  My group plays variant d20 games like Arcana Evolved that is likewise minus the Alignment mechanic, and when we play straight D&D, alignment is usually only brought up as a class consideration.  (No barbarian paladins or barbarian monks, for instance.)  My feeling has always been that the Alignment System is better for enforcing morality than exploring it, and I've always been more interested in games with moral grey areas.  When I do run D&D, I use a modified Alignment that keeps the mechanical workigns but loses the morality but when we get into that we're going far afield of the topic.  I'd be happy to discuss it in PM or email, tho.

As for this game, True 20 uses a Virtue/Vice thing where you pick one good and bad quality and then get a Conviction point when you do something that highlights one of those traits.  I found it too vague to be useful, so for this game I'm using the BW Belief system as a way to enhance the thematic character design.