Do you prefer it when WRPG's have morality systems

[McNum]

More often than not, a mixed alignment character is a much more interesting to play in these kinds of games, but you are so rarely rewarded for doing so.

Since we're talking Mass Effect, I just can't play fully Renegade. Sure, everyone outside the Normandy can kindly go space themselves, but my crew? They're my crew. And nobody hurts my crew, especially me. I played a Shepard like that, she was honestly one of my favorites, and though she racked up a lot of Paragon points by, you know, not treating her allies like dirt, she was pragmatic enough to take those Renegade interrupts and be utterly ruthless to her foes. After all, they shot at her crew.

Mass Effect 3 making reputation points additive when it came to unlocking all but a few conversation options was a great change. It meant that finally my Paragade Vanguard could take the red options a few times. Telling off the Quarians just how dead they'd have been several times over and that this time, Shepard won't get between their stupidity and certain doom was great. That wouldn't have happened with the systems from ME1 and 2, but in ME3, it worked.

Sure if the world has elemental Good and Evil, then you can appeal to those with your actions, Star Wars is a big example here, but honestly... I'd rather roleplay and live with the consequences.

 

[JuniperAndSage]

Gray morality as a term gets thrown about too often. However, I'd prefer "bad" choices where the nature of the action and outcome may benefit the player at the expense of an NPC or faction without painting the player-character as an over-the-top psycho with eyes that glow red because they kept feeding babies to the evil machine.

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This is all just about appearances though. Softening and obscuring the evil they do. This is how you end up with people stanning evil characters and rationalizing evil acts.

 

[Morrigan]

I like a system of choice and consequence, but morality systems often fall flat. Even in Fallout New Vegas, the karma system is... kind of useless? I can't recall it having much, if any, effect. What did work well was how the different NPCs or factions responded to your actions (depending on whether your actions benefited them or not). This makes a lot more sense and gives much stronger world-building.

Greedfall actually followed this New Vegas "faction/NPC reaction" template too, rather than a binary moral system, and it was stronger for it.

Not an RPG, but I actually liked Dishonored's chaos system. Wasn't a fan of how the first game did act a bit judgmental on high chaos at times (with high chaos resulting in Emily suddenly turning into Joffrey because she looked up to Corvo), but I appreciate that there were nasty consequences if you went on killing sprees and so on, and the endings weren't completely black and white, especially in 2. Hell, sometimes the low-chaos mission choices were bleaker/more depressing, lol

Like I'm playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker right now, as a Paladin (that must maintain Lawful Good alignment) and am slowly getting fucked by the way the alignment decisions are tied into every dialog choice. There's no way to roleplay because the only way to maintain the alignment is by conforming to the game's incredibly arbitrary notions of what "good" and "lawful" are, where most of the time you're given Neutral Good or straight up Evil options.

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This is weird and feels like it's missing the point of the alignment system. Like, I'm no tabletop expert... but I thought the whole point of the alignment system was to describe a character's actions, not determine their actions. It's descriptive and evolves with time, it's not supposed to be deterministic. No?

 

[RedshirtRig]

Nah, I prefer a factions system like Fallout New Vegas. More interesting to me.

 

[EntelechyFuff]

I can't answer the poll because it really depends.

I prefer when an alignment or morality system is mostly hidden. Playing Dragon's Dogma now, you can clearly make choices, but it rarely signposts decisions 100% good or evil, and never indicates the clear consequences of making a choice--I usually learn the outcomes far later. It also doesn't affect stats, which is usually nice, except...

Rise of the Argonauts had a very interesting morality system that did impact the player's skill growth. It wasn't binary good-evil either. Instead, your dialogue choices would indicate Jason's problem-solving affinity, and his learned abilities would reflect that. Being aggressive and pushy in dialogue would unlock direct combat options, while being political or suave would unlock skills that matched that kind of approach. I'd love to see that system implemented in other games in the future, but I'm pretty sure Argonauts didn't sell super well.

But yeah, I'll take it when it's good. The issue is that a good implementation can come in a lot of forms, so it's hard to just outright say I like it all of the time.

 

[Brinbe]

KOTOR 2 does it right but most of the time it's not too interesting. There really haven't been many games to persuade me to not go with the 'good' choice, but there probably shouldn't be good or bad in the first place. that's not how morality works unless you're a sociopath lol

 

[TheGhost]

I don't really care, I go into every western RPG with the intentional of being a complete asshole and without fail from the very first decision I decide to be the good guy / knight in shining armor instead.

 

[decoyplatypus]

I prefer it when CRPGs have substantial reactivity to my decisions. Morality systems, for many reasons cited in this thread (definitional issues, limited appeal), tend to be a less effective way of doing this than going down a level of abstraction, but they're usually better than nothing.

 

[jonjonaug]

I like a system of choice and consequence, but morality systems often fall flat. Even in Fallout New Vegas, the karma system is... kind of useless? I can't recall it having much, if any, effect. What did work well was how the different NPCs or factions responded to your actions (depending on whether your actions benefited them or not). This makes a lot more sense and gives much stronger world-building.

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Cass will leave if you have negative Karma, and it affects like one ending slide. That's basically it.

 

[nullref]

Having visible morality stats or whatever distracts you from actually role-playing your character, toward gaming that system. And it also tends to lead to writing choices and outcomes that are simplistically aligned with that system. So I don't think it's very good design, generally. (It's of course fine if a game wants to track hidden stats about your choices and use those to control dynamic aspects of the game. But I think it's better obscured from the player.)

 

[Deleted member 80231]

This is weird and feels like it's missing the point of the alignment system. Like, I'm no tabletop expert... but I thought the whole point of the alignment system was to describe a character's actions, not determine their actions. It's descriptive and evolves with time, it's not supposed to be deterministic. No?

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The source of a Paladin's power is supposed to be the God or Goddess they worship. If they ever stray too far from its path (aka they do stuff their divinity doesn't like) the can lose all their powers as punishment. At least that's how it's on Dungeons and Dragons. As far as I know, Pathfinder is derived from an older Dungeons and Dragon version, so it should work similarly.

If I had to make a videogame around that concept, I'd probably give much more room to the Paladin than I would in a tabletop game. In a game of Pathfinder, alignments are a basic framework that you need to keep in mind, but there is room to improvise or justify why you think an option fits into your alignment. In a videogame you don't have that luxury.

I'm no dev, but I'd probably give different scored depending on how far your choice is from your alignment, and keep an internal tracker. Once you go past a certain threshold you'd lose your powers temporarily.

If you're Lawful Good, it could work like this:

Lawful choices reduce your score by 1 point. Neutral choices increase it by 1. Chaotic choices do so by 3.
Good choices reduce your score by 1 point. Neutral choices increase it by 1. Evil increase it by 3 points.

 

[snausages]

My preference is something of a complex morality 'economy' where it's not so much about binary good/bad decisions that are taken to min-max your character into a certain alignment but a bunch of systems that react to your actions and make doing certain things easier/harder.

The game I always bring up is Pathologic where you've got to balance your reputation in a town where society and the economy is fast collapsing and morally 'righteous' options can evaporate fast, but go too far down a certain direction can leave you in a spot where 'bad' decisions are all you have left to you.

Games are really not good at providing for these sorts of clockwork morality systems I feel like, or at best they offer a 'grey' system which doesn't comment so much on your decisions like Witcher 3.

 

[misho8723]

I feel like "hidden" morality systems are the way to go. Having a visual indicator straight up telling you if you're good or not is pretty arbitrary at this point. At the same time, the "good/evil" choices shouldn't be so explicitly obvious either.

Having said all that, the way The Witcher 3 handled it's ending was kinda bs though, wasn't it determined by a handful of dialogue choices made right towards the very end?

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Your decisions with Ciri determined which one from the 3 different epilogues you would get - and in my personal opinion, it was one of the best systems in any game .. I hate, hate how for example in Deus Ex games or Vampire Bloodlines that you could choose your ending right at the end - the more quests you do, the more choices you have at the end.. what? That's so silly and banal .. like you can do every quest in the game for the different factions in the game, they don't have any problem with this and pretty much before the last boss fight/last cutscene you can choose who you're going to pick? Absolutely horrendous system.. you can save right at that moment, and pick one ending, then load that save before the last decision and pick different ending and so on.. it totally destroys the replayability of the whole game this way

The same problems I have with black&white moral systems in games - are you killing (these obviously bad) people? Bad ending.. you're not killing (these obviously bad) characters? Good ending.. good system maybe for kids games or fairytale stories but adult games having this system? Get the hell out of here.. Dishonored and Mass Effect games, I'm looking at you.. and obviously I hate some kind of moral meter in the inventory screen or somewhere similiar

And maybe even worse is when choices have some gameplay rewards (or content) behind them - so your decision isn't based on the moral problem, but is based on the fact what gives you better reward (more content).. BioShock games, mainly the first one come to mind

In Witcher 3 it made sense, it was about the relantionship between Geralt and Ciri - you have as Geralt many dialog scenes where you're talking about everyone's destiny, responsibility and role in the world.. if you're always making decisions for her - for someone who is an adult - and never give her a chance to decide something for herself, then why would you think that is something that makes a person stronger, more confident? That she is the one who makes decisions, that you trust her with her decisions, etc.. The only small gripe that I had was with the decision for her to calm down or destroy Avallac'h laboratory.. but otherwise I think their system is one of the best - it makes sense, it ties directly with the relantionship between Geralt and Ciri and with Ciri's role in the whole story, which is far, far more important then the one of Geralt's
+ all the Witcher games in general are one of the best when it comes to grey moral choices and consenquences, Thronebreaker deserves special mention here

 

[C J P]

Speaking only for myself: video game morality systems have rarely made me think about actual morality. Like Megaton in Fallout 3 is a straightforward binary where there's a shitty, awful choice that makes your dad hate you and a good choice that makes people love you. It's a decent satire of how far property developers will go for a nice view, but it doesn't prompt any serious ethical inquiry.

Compare that to the dilemma with the tree spirit in Witcher 3, for example, or various choices in the Telltale Walking Dead series - where, at the end, it asks you not if you're a shitty guy or a good guy, but what kind of person you think Clementine should become - and the drawbacks of the "ten points for giving the baby a bottle, minus ten for eating it" approach are pretty clear. Like even in New Vegas, a game with admirable moral complexity, it sort of hinders rather than helps things.

 

[JuniperAndSage]

This is weird and feels like it's missing the point of the alignment system. Like, I'm no tabletop expert... but I thought the whole point of the alignment system was to describe a character's actions, not determine their actions. It's descriptive and evolves with time, it's not supposed to be deterministic. No?

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Assuming you're asking about D&D, these are worlds in which good and evil, law and order, are very real, literal forces. There are spells and magical items that work for or against particular alignments. And if you're getting powers from a particular force and your alignment changes or you act against it, you may lose access to those powers. So alignment is descriptive, but there are also consequences to your alignment, and to changing it.

 

[Eamon]

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic & Fable were formative games for me as a player, so I definitely have a nostalgic affection for those sorts of morality systems. But ultimately, I probably am more inclined towards a more complex system nowadays (say, a factional approval system, etc.)

 

[Hella]

This is weird and feels like it's missing the point of the alignment system. Like, I'm no tabletop expert... but I thought the whole point of the alignment system was to describe a character's actions, not determine their actions. It's descriptive and evolves with time, it's not supposed to be deterministic. No?

Click to shrink...

Because there's no DMs, the dialog choices are doing both, and, yeah, it's a flawed system. In theory it allows you to gradually change your character's alignment via dialog choices, showing how experiences change them... but you really need the story to back you up; and in Pathfinder's case, it ain't doing that.

The problem is especially pronounced for Paladins because more than any other class, a paladin is defined by their actions. Paladins take oaths that they can never break, and need to repent from any errs in judgement, or else risk being forsaken by their god, and losing a) all class powers, and b) the ability to advance as a paladin. In video game terms though, this means they must always remain 'Lawful Good' alignment. The dialog system (and heck, game itself) just isn't designed with Paladins in mind.

One core difference between Pathfinder: Kingmaker and other tabletop-based video games is that PF has zero class dialog choices that I've seen. That would be an easy way to resolve the conundrum without ballooning the dialog trees exponentially.

The source of a Paladin's power is supposed to be the God or Goddess they worship. If they ever stray too far from its path (aka they do stuff their divinity doesn't like) the can lose all their powers as punishment. At least that's how it's on Dungeons and Dragons. As far as I know, Pathfinder is derived from an older Dungeons and Dragon version, so it should work similarly.

If I had to make a videogame around that concept, I'd probably give much more room to the Paladin than I would in a tabletop game. In a game of Pathfinder, alignments are a basic framework that you need to keep in mind, but there is room to improvise or justify why you think an option fits into your alignment. In a videogame you don't have that luxury.

I'm no dev, but I'd probably give different scored depending on how far your choice is from your alignment, and keep an internal tracker. Once you go past a certain threshold you'd lose your powers temporarily.

If you're Lawful Good, it could work like this:

Lawful choices reduce your score by 1 point. Neutral choices increase it by 1. Chaotic choices do so by 3.
Good choices reduce your score by 1 point. Neutral choices increase it by 1. Evil increase it by 3 points.

Click to shrink...

Yup 100%. Pathfinder is basically 3.5e with the serial number filed off.

The only way to really do Paladins justice is to make the game specifically for them, I'd say. The extreme restrictions on being a paladin is why they're so interesting, but next to traditional roleplaying classes it just makes them seem... y'know... restrictive.

 

[Deleted member 80231]

Because there's no DMs, the dialog choices are doing both, and, yeah, it's a flawed system. In theory it allows you to gradually change your character's alignment via dialog choices, showing how experiences change them... but you really need the story to back you up; and in Pathfinder's case, it ain't doing that.

The problem is especially pronounced for Paladins because more than any other class, a paladin is defined by their actions. Paladins take oaths that they can never break, and need to repent from any errs in judgement, or else risk being forsaken by their god, and losing a) all class powers, and b) the ability to advance as a paladin. In video game terms though, this means they must always remain 'Lawful Good' alignment. The dialog system (and heck, game itself) just isn't designed with Paladins in mind.

One core difference between Pathfinder: Kingmaker and other tabletop-based video games is that PF has zero class dialog choices that I've seen. That would be an easy way to resolve the conundrum without ballooning the dialog trees exponentially.

Yup 100%. Pathfinder is basically 3.5e with the serial number filed off.

The only way to really do Paladins justice is to make the game specifically for them, I'd say. The extreme restrictions on being a paladin is why they're so interesting, but next to traditional roleplaying classes it just makes them seem... y'know... restrictive.

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I feel like it's one of those ideas from table top RPGs that just can't be translated into videogame design easily. It's why tabletop is still really enjoyable to me, since you have a lot of freedom as long as your DM is good.

Is the game good if you leave that aside? I've always been more of a Bard/Rogue person myself, but I've been curious about Kingsmaker for a while.

As others have said, as far as videogames go, I'd say it's probably better (and easier) to have different factions, each with its own reputation, and have the world and stories change depending on what you do with those. The Outer Worlds (which I recently played) did that and it was quite satisfying overall even if the game didn't have the biggest budget all things considered.

 

[Hella]

I feel like it's one of those ideas from table top RPGs that just can't be translated into videogame design easily. It's why tabletop is still really enjoyable to me, since you have a lot of freedom as long as your DM is good.

Is the game good if you leave that aside? I've always been more of a Bard/Rogue person myself, but I've been curious about Kingsmaker for a while.

As others have said, as far as videogames go, I'd say it's probably better (and easier) to have different factions, each with its own reputation, and have the world and stories change depending on what you do with those. The Outer Worlds (which I recently played) did that and it was quite satisfying overall even if the game didn't have the biggest budget all things considered.

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Kingmaker's OK. The writing is pretty shaky, party members are basically nonexistant, and the story is just an excuse to clear entire rooms of monsters, but it certainly tries. If you like planning builds and parties or just powergaming at all at all you could lose dozens of hours to it. Combat is like 99% of the game though so you have to get something out of it to really have fun. There is a kingdom management angle but it's tedious busywork that you could automate and miss nothing.

Kingmaker's kinda disappointing as a roleplaying game (in terms of actual roleplaying) but as a hack and slash adventure it's a good time, basically.

 

[Deleted member 80231]

Kingmaker's OK. The writing is pretty shaky, party members are basically nonexistant, and the story is just an excuse to clear entire rooms of monsters, but it certainly tries. If you like planning builds and parties or just powergaming at all at all you could lose dozens of hours to it. Combat is like 99% of the game though so you have to get something out of it to really have fun. There is a kingdom management angle but it's tedious busywork that you could automate and miss nothing.

Kingmaker's kinda disappointing as a roleplaying game (in terms of actual roleplaying) but as a hack and slash adventure it's a good time, basically.

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Thanks for the quick answer!

 

[TheEchosOfTheCyborg]

I agree with most people here that morality systems are bad most of the time, Fallout 3 for me was just silly for it because again like so many, it's silly (not cartoonish because if you've watched many modern cartoons like Avatar, Steven Universe or even SpongeBob, they do morality better) it is, you got less rewards do the evil way so why would you ever do it and it didn't even make much sense of how you were losing it, like in New Vegas I was punished with Bad Karma from "stealing" or picking locks of murderers and slavers even though I could only finish missions to save people by doing so... Like why?

However I hate Alignment systems even more and kind of resent D&D for popularizing it, it's a shoddy system that does nothing but make caraticures and punish you for roleplaying or even acting like a normal human being most of the time, no roleplaying allowed, just follow the script. As those images you see on the internet demonstrate, you know the ones that show batman as all 9 alignments, we aren't so binary that we can be placed into a box. Doesn't help the writing for those systems are terrible most of the time. I refuse to play game with shoddy systems like that are present.

Also because of arsehole DMs who'd punish you like taking away items or de-level you for breaking "alignment" (aka what they think you should have done) or trying to roleplay instead of being stuck as your pantomime character.