Mine: I’m shamefully moralistic. I find it hard to be bad.
In Fallout 3 my status ended at ‘saint’. I couldn’t walk past the starved guy at rivet city without giving him at least one bottle of water.
I did not blow up Megaton. Despite the reward you apparently get for doing so (though this particular reward would have made the game easier, which I didn’t particularly want)
I sent dogmeat to vault 101 for the final battle because his chances of surviving this were slim. I felt bad for doing that (the dog made a dog’s whine sound) and I then felt bad when I realized I would never go back to get him.
Far Cry 2 is a nightmare for people who want to be right, stealing cars, doing missions for war lords, playing one warlard against the other.
Even carjacking in GTA4 makes me feel bad. Though I am able to go on a killing spree, (but am carefull not to save the game after that)
I could go on, but you get the idea.
You’d think I’m trying to make up for having no morals in real life, but that’s not true
Post your examples of shamefully moralistic, or un-moralistic behavour.
In games like GTA I will kill everyone. Not only will I sit on an elevated platform and snipe people, but I’ll also make up backstories. Like today is that cop’s last day before retirement, or that guy whose head I just took of was just running to the store to get his pregnant wife some ice cream.
But in games like Rainbow Six, I always feel bad about sending my squad to the dangerous part of the map. I don’t like it when they get hit.
In Fallout, I played things by an interesting morality. I refused to blow up Megaton, so I repaid Tenpenny Towers by slaughtering the Ghouls. I freed those kids from Paradise Falls, so I rounded up some slaves to replace them. I sold Lincoln artifacts to both the slavers and the freed slaves.
But in general, I do good work. I expect payment most of the time, but I sprinkle my actions with healthy doses of random acts of kindness.
I’m always a saint to my friends, devil to my enemies. Take Medieval II; which has a morality system, of sorts. An ally that betrays me; merciless, unrelenting brutality. A regular enemy; ‘neutral’ sacking of cities and ransoming troops. An ally, amiable diplomacy, military assistance against mutual threats, voting for their cardinals, etc.
Or Mass Effect; jerk me around, get a renegade response (the gang member who tried to blackmail me in Chora’s Den got a bullet to the face, for example). Friendly to me, get a paragon response (the fan on the Citadel, for example).
Black and White 2; shower my people with food and fountains, shower my enemies with fire and famine.
Unfortunately this method in games usually has you hovering around neutral, or often tipping straight into evil, given how many enemies you encounter in games as a rule.
To paraphrase Machiavelli; men should either be treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries. For heavy ones they cannot.
You can free the kids from Paradise Falls?
edit: I have just realized this is the best game ever to exist. I have recently aquired GTA4 which I thought would would be the BGETE, but as it turns out, GTA4 is only one of the BGETE. It’s pretty darn good, but it isn’t Fallout 3.
I’m always good, at least the first time around. Unlike a lot of people here I CAN be evil*, in fact, I tend to gravitate towards the Demon Worshipping Paragon of Darkness classes in RPGs, which makes my undying devotion to unicorns and rainbows somewhat interesting to justify from an RP perspective.
*How often that happens is another point entirely, I’m not usually one to replay games, and when I do it’s often not until years later.
This is more of a function of how evil is presented though. I’m more of the subtle mastermind of manipulation evil type. In player run RPGs I’m usually the one that ends up winning because I managed to get everyone against everyone else except me, and then laugh as they take each other out.** In games it’s usually a choice between save the prisoners for no reward (good), save the prisoners, but take a reward and possibly have some collateral damage (neutral), or slaughter the lot of them for the quest item you need (evil). I’d be more of the kind of person who plants seeds of doubt in everyone’s heads and then come back in a week when the riots are occurring and take what I need in the confusion.
** (Case in point, I was doing an alt reality modern RPG, and there was a simplified “religious” side and atheist side in every country and the goal to win was to be the leader of the dominant country. So as a member of the atheist side I managed to convince the leader (the “party” in power were the religious), via various acts, into imprisoning all the atheists as a “danger to society”, thereby causing a schism in the church, they took themselves out then I rose to power in a totalitarian dictatorship and took over the world because my country was the only one with uncontested leadership)
I hold a gamer’s morality: I base my choices on what are they going to do for me. In 95% of games being “good” equals bigger rewards ergo I’ll be good because I know the designer in a shallow attempt to define morality will make that the option with the most value in the game. A typical example of this is “evil” gets you a large pile of cash that you inevitably have too much of by the end of the game while “good” gets you experience points which you will always have less than you want (unless you’re playing an Elder Scrolls game).
I almost always play “good”… primarily because “evil” in games generally means “asshole”. If I’m going to play evil, I want to be motivated to be evil- I don’t want to be a jerk.
Ditto. I’m playing good in FO3 right now, but my next go-round, I’m going to play a smarmy bad guy. I used to have trouble playing morally bankrupt characters, until I wrote a novel starring an unrepentant assassin. It was the best book I’d written and landed me an agent. Turns out that’s what I write best. Now I can play anti-heroes without a problem (I’m going to take the assassin prestige class in our D&D game, and I thought the Dark Brotherhood quest line in Oblivion was the best one).
Of course, even my good characters aren’t exactly models of exemplary behavior. I have a rather lax moral code regarding property rights, for example.
Psychopathic. In Morrowind, I would routinely depopulate entire towns, just for the hell of it. I’d walk into some poor bastard’s house, kill him, and take his stuff. Or I wouldn’t even bother with taking his stuff - I’d just kill him for the fun of it.
I ended up stopping that, because even I found it creepy.
I hate it when they do that! In Bioshock you actually get more Eve (and goodies) when you save the little sisters then when you harvest them - so actually there is no point in being the bad guy.
Now, doing the right thing and getting less (and so actually having to make a choice), but most of the time it’s better to be good anyway.
I’ve never played White Wolf (I assume you’re talking about their Vampire: The Masquerade game), but my friend does and I thought the feeding in that was fairly harmless (depending on your clan, obviously SOME are a bit more… brutal).
