The main thing I’m tired of in RPGs is lack of a middle ground.
“Excuse me young man, can you help me get my cat down from the tree?”
Help the old lady.
There is no 2.
RAAAAAAAAAGHH!!! STAB STAB STAB!!
The other thing I dislike, at least in simplistic good/evil RPGs like the Mass Effects… Playing as wholly good or wholly evil = the only way to unlock some conversations, and get extra loots or the best endings. Then I play, and pick the conversation choices based on my own morality, and get screwed because I actually roleplayed rather than picking one of the two predefined personas in the game.
Basically I just hope ‘morality bars’ go the way of the dodo, so that I don’t have to placate a colored bar. Make the choice matter, sure, but only in context. Choosing to save the orphan means the orphan nabs the guards keys for me later on when I’m locked up… This is good. Choosing to save the orphan so that my morality meter goes up another 4 points, meaning i can pick the ‘Convince guard to give me keys’ option is bad.
Otherwise I’ll just keep cheating in unlimited paragon and renegade points so that I can choose what I get to say and actually play my character.
Fallout 3 at least tried to fix the extremity problem. There was often a neutral option, and a perk or two that required you to be neutral. The three paths had their own companions as well. In reality it didn’t seem as developed as Good or Evil (no Neutral town/house etc.), but was a decent start.
Yeah, the first ME wasn’t so bad about it because you could drop points in both dialogue skills anyway, but ME2 was horrible in that regards : the difficulty check to determine whether or not a given Paragon/Renegade option is available to you is based on… how many Renegade/Paragon points you do have out of the sum total of points you *could *have accrued by the point you run into the check.
So if you go “neutral”, or what feels right from one situation to the next, you’re actually shooting yourself in the foot since the late game checks will be indefinitely out of your league (such as the ones to soothe the bruised egos in your team just before the final mission). GAH!
Yeah, but why would you want to? Unless you’re playing soldier (yawn) and decide to concentrate on assault rifle (with maybe a few points in sniper for good measure) you won’t really have any free points to spend into your dialogue skills if you want an effective character at higher difficulty levels.
Besides, the game throws up to four points each in charm/intimidate your way for free, and the charm and intimidate extra conversation options don’t really buy you a whole lot, though, they can have a bit of an impact on some minor NPC’s status come ME2. But most of those conversations have low charm/intimidate requirements in ME1 anyway. And the only real important conversation that can be overcome by charm/intimidate (i.e. Wrex on Virmire) can be accomplished through normal conversation options if you helped Wrex get his family armor back.
This is wrong - you have the same idea that so many designers do. Being good does not mean being stupid. It does not mean being a doormat. And it should be rewarding. it should not be about immediate rewards and gain, I agree, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t get the +30 Sword of Buttkicking. But you get it later, and maybe even get something much more powerful than the evil guy. You’re probably going to need that sword to kill the bad guy who’s taken the other road and stolen all the magic/tech/stuff for his own use.
I didn’t feel that way in Fallout 3 at all. I did what benefitted me; sometimes that meant killing someone, and sometimes it meant just not helping someone. Being a Slaver was about profit and plunder, not mindless killing. I didn’t kill people when there wasn’t a reason to. Kill a random wanderer in the wilderness who has something I want? Sure, who’ll know any different. Wander into Rivet City and gun people down? Not so much.
I’m also not saying that every single good action leads to a big reward, either. I’m saying that in the end, you shouldn’t and don’t need to screw people out of reward just because they play good. Good is not stupid, and I don’t expect good players to constantly pass up every possible reward. Just because you are “good”, or even saintly, doesnt mean you will never accept payment or a gift. Moreover, people in power who aren’t just plain evil may offer considerable rewards and prizes. And even the best good guy isn’t going to feel any damn guilt over taking the bad guy’s treasure or goodies. Unless you deliberately set up a world just to nail a
First off, that’s not a Bioware game. It’s a Bethsoft game, which a somewhat different list of isssues.
Second: Megaton. The plot reasons for destroying are outright insane. It’d be suicidally stupid, and that’s even related to the nuclear bomb aspect. There’s simply no rational reason to do this. You’re cutting your own throat by destroying one of a very few settlements available. Even Tenpenny, who supposedly ordered it (or maybe Mr. Burke is just too evil for his own common sense), gains nothing by it. He doesn’t trade much, there aren’t many visitors to his Tower, and
Third: Roy Phillips. This was a reverse quest for some unknown reason, which an awful lot of people tried to mess with heavily. In this one, the so-called “good guy” is a psychotic loon and ultimately makes a huge massacre, even if he gets what he wants. There’s no reason for it, and getting justice punishes you with bad karma!
Fourth: You Gotta Shoot 'Em In The Head. Kinda pointless and not very interesting, frankly.
Yes, there were a few really good quests, but mostly it you couldn’t be really evil or good. It wasn’t that the “evil” path made you be good as much as it forced you into the nature of “some random dude.” This was a lot more excusable in the earlier Fallout games which were a lot more experimental and and developing new storytelling techniques after the death of the cRPG’s.
I think people were just saying, if the gamer chooses the good / altruistic / sympathetic option, it should often be materially worse. I agree with this: that’s closer to expectations based on real life.
(Of course, you can make such expectations void: you could set a game in a culture that works very differently to 21st century earth. But this should be followed through consistently).
I got something more, uh, hard-core about what they were planning. It sounded to me as though they were trying to keep “good guys” from getting almost anything. This is not only really, really dull, it’s not fun and not realistic in the fantasy setting! If there is powerful magic about, people other than the evil bastards must have it or there’s really no defeating them.
You didn’t finish your sentence. Over.
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Sorry:
“Unless you deliberately set up a world to nail the player for doing good, it doesn’t make sense. People won’t always reward you for doing good, but they will thank you and will make your life easier if they can. And rewards need not be material in nature.”
I mean, there’s world’s where things sometimes suck and then there’s stuff like Song of Ice and Fire, where everybody seems to be nasty and the best “good” people can do is die while killing bad people. The latter worlds are vastly more fnatastic than the most whimsical fantasy precisely because human society can’t sustain that level of evil before collapsing and the evil people all starve.
Being selfless is *not *being a doormat. You calling Jesus a doormat, son ? Didn’t think so :D. But seriously, though, yes, in a sense the classical hero (well, romantic really - classical heroes sleep with their moms and such) is “stupid”, because ultimately notions such as honour and fairness are just that.
Being good means returning the lost hundred dollar bill, letting the dream girl go without a word because she’s already married, owning up to breaking the priceless vase even though you could totally have gotten away with it, putting the sword back in the stone after you’ve killed the dragon with it because nobody should have that much power, handing out your big cash prize to the war widow because she needs it more than you, and giving even the worst bad guy a fair fight because if you don’t, you’re no better than him.
It kinda sucks, basically. But that’s what being a hero’s all about.
Which is not to say that there isn’t a place for a more “realheroik”, modern, gritty, do-what-you-gotta-do, end-justifies-means kind of hero - it’s just as valid an outlook on the whole saving the world biz. But it’s not what I would call “good”, nevermind saintly.
Nor am I saying that the good path should always screw the player over, which is why I prefaced that outline with “generally”. Sometimes, good deeds really arerewarded. But it’s the exception rather than the rule.
Besides, I’d rather see the reward being of a social rather than material nature however (e.g. what Mijin said : be nice to people, and down the road they’ll do you a solid in return, solving another challenge.)
Well, why else would you invest points in non-combat skills ? Roleplay. Sometimes, even the most conciliatory guy in the world gets the urge to push some random asshat against the wall and shove a gun in their face :p.
My take on a moral system is one where morality is in direct conflict with other stats - allowing choices leading to moral development or other development.
This requires a better moral system than simply good vs evil.
For example, what about a greed/altruism scale. Make it the direct opposite of your net worth (money + items). Players must make a deliberate sacrifice of money-gaining options to gain on the altruism scale.
Another example is a humility/reputation scale. Anything that gains humility loses reputation.
A third is a violence / pacifism scale. Killing anything gains experience points which can be spent on violence related skills, but loses pacifism.
Altruism, humility and pacifism would then have either attribute or plot effects, but there is no “optimum” path. Evil IS its own reward, and being good requires sacrificing the easy gains of evil for less obvious and more nebulous advantages.
Altruism isn’t about how much you sacrifice, it’s about how much your sacrifice helps everyone else. It is not altruistic to ignore a money-gaining option out of incompetence or a misguided belief that accruing money is bad, and it is not greedy to equip yourself with the tools you need to continue performing altruistic acts.
Humility and reputation are not opposite ends of the same scale. Humility itself is an entirely internal matter, which should have no effect on gameplay.
To what end? Unless you’re planning on turning the PC cyberpsycho if the kill too many people, how violent they are is far less important than who they’re violent to.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos has a puzzle in it that exploits this trope for great comical effect. Essentially you are sword-fighting in space with a bad guy, and at one point you knock his sword out of his hands, leaving him unarmed, and the sword flies toward you. Now if you attack him in any way, he will flip over you and grab his sword, no matter if you put the sword in your inventory, even. And the fight will continue, until once again you knock his sword away. And if you attack him, he’ll have the sword back. Meanwhile, a damsel in distress is being attacked by a space alien. Now the game gives you about 10 opportunities to beat this fight the correct way before the bad guy finally kills you because you become to exhausted to fight on, but to actually win the game, you have to beat the fight before the damsel gets carried off which is usually by the second time the sword comes free.
And how do you beat the fight?
When his sword comes lose and drifts towards you, you are supposed to pick it up and give it back to him. The bad guy then realizes that this is proof that you truly are the good guy hero, and so he has naturally no chance to win this fight, so he saves you the trouble and impales himself on his own sword.
Role-play should be something independent of skills as a general rule (this applies to tabletop RPG’s as well). Role-play comes out of the skills and abilities you have, it should not be a direct mechanic. You shouldn’t have to buy points in “role-play”. But even in a ham-fisted system that ties role-play to a mechanic that costs you something else, there should be a real benefit for such an investment and you shouldn’t be punished for not investing in combat skills. The charm and intimidate options in ME1 let you avoid a few combats, but they’re typically easy combats. And if you talk your way out of combat, you lose the XP for the kills you would have had. (You still can get the completion of quest XP, but the combat XP is lost.)
So in order to get extra story elements, you have to sacrifice something else in a way that can actually be detrimental to your character, rather than a true trade-off. That’s bad design. ME2 fixed that in that the charm/intimidate options are tied directly to your paragon/renegade meters, so that your general attitude determines what options you have. It’s a much more elegant, and realistic, mechanic. And you don’t have to give up anything for it. (Though, you still have the issue of having to almost always go pure paragon or renegade in order to get the full charm/intimidate options in all the conversations, which kind of forces your roleplay into a tunnel, but that’s why CRPG’s will never be as good from a roleplay perspective as tabletops/LARPs).
I thought TVTropes has one which fit well with the “doormat good” some people are talking about. Perhaps Lawful Stupid or Stupid Good. Basically, someone who is concerned with doing what is good at that moment, even if it has negative repercussions in the future.
Never played Ultima? Especially Ultima IV, Humility was one of the 8 virtues, and it was necessary to keep up in order to do well.
Well, I don’t know about that - social skills are skills all the same. Your character can’t be good at everything, where’s the fun in that ? He can spend time honing his killing machine style, or learn how to work that silver tongue (hum… that sentence could have ended somewhere else…). I don’t have much of a problem there - eloquence is work.
Which is why, BTW, I don’t let my players get away with good speechifying as a crutch if their character is a lummox in PnP RPGs. I know you’re smarter than your Charisma 3 Int 2 Barbarian, but you’re not getting away with it. Roll Diplomacy !
And there we can agree. Which is why Fallout 1&2 were so cool : you could totally win the game without fighting once. Speech alone got you half the way, sneaking dynamite in people’s pockets did the rest
I can agree there too, but there’re difficulties in such a system.
I think Mask of the Betrayer (NWN2’s fabulous expansion) had a neat concept there : on the one hand, your various decisions in the game shifted your alignment, kinda like Planescape ; and on the flipside not all alignments had access to the same dialogue lines : a fully evil player could not express truthful compassion for example. And vice versa : a saintly character was barred from the more exploitative choices. A more neutral character had more options, but was barred from the extremes of both sides. And of course, the same was true of the Law/Chaos axis.
It could have been more elegant, but that’s the problem with sticking to D&D’s clunky Alignment system. I could see something like that working great with a 7 Virtues/7 Sins system similar to Pendragon’s (the PnP game), for example.
One problem I have is that people seem to assume that role play means making up a character and playing according to it. And in games where you have character creation, I guess that’s fine.
But I consider role play to mean when you are given a character and pretend to be that character. My skills should be irrelevant. It’s my character’s skills that should be relevant. And my morality should be irrelevant. I’m not going to ask what would I do, but what would my character do?
I used to do the other, but I always wound up dealing with ButThouMust style plots. I had to learn to accept that I’m playing out a story, and what my character would do is not always what I would do.
For me, the game that perfectly illustrates the main problem with incorporating morality into a game is Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires. Simply put, over the course of your conquest of Zhongguo, you have four distinct moral paths, each with different rewards and consequences:
Straight down the pipe, solid gray, perfect harmonious yin-yang neutral. Never donate so much as lunch money, never hurl so much as a harsh insult at a poor peasant. You have the same armies, disasters, friends, enemies, cash, etc. as a generic province chieftan, your rank maxes out at “King”, and you get the standard ending when you win.
Vile, demonic, savage, soulless, iron-fisted bloodsucking tyrant. You take what you want whenever you want it, and your people are nothing more than slaves to be picked up and sent to the killing fields at your whim. You roll in cash and cheap troops at the cost of frequent peasant rebellions and divine retribution in the form of increased disasters. You get the Evil Emperor ending when you win.
Shining, benevolent, incorruptible savior. Basically, you give until you bleed, and then you really get generous. You not only spend tons of cash, you suffer a huge drain to your forces due to all the troops you release with a pension; needless to say, this makes warfare a dicey proposition. On the plus side (if you can call it that), disaster become a little less frequent, and you’ll occasionally gain a peasant unit for battle (provided you use it the same turn they call it up). If you somehow manage to win, you get the extremely hard-earned Good Emperor ending.
Mix. Go with what feels right at the moment, or adjust your outlook based on changing needs. BTW, this nets you the exact same ending as 1 (since you don’t get to be Emperor unless you commit to a side).
Here’s the thing: Not only are the only stances that make any sense 1 and 2, it boils down to one question: Do you need a lot of quick cash? If so, go with 2; if not, stick to 1 and save yourself the wrath of the gods. 4 is pointless and generally ends up morphing into 1 or 2 anyway. 3 is just a monumentally bad idea. The ONLY time I ever did this was to get that ending, and I ended up sticking with 1 until I had all but 1 territory. I literally spent several minutes doing nothing but giving away cash and sending off troops when I was on the very brink of triumph. On top of that, it takes forever to actually reach Emperor status; if you come up so much as an inch short, it’s the boring 'ol non-Emperor ending for you (something a lot of players learned the hard way).
So here’s my proposal: Keep it simple. Go one way, get these benefits and liabilities; go the other, get the opposite. Every 500 gold you pilfer results in peasant unrest and increased hostility among the neighbors; every 500 gold you contribute has the opposite effect. Stick to an all-volunteer army and you have fewer troops but high morale; callously press peasants and you have a large but dispirited force. Tradeoffs, sacrifices, taking sides, that’s all there is to it. And have these choices throughout the game; don’t allow a 6-year plan one inch from the finish line.
I think it’s a workable idea. I don’t see how making good a lot harder will improve things. That’s exactly what doesn’t work here.
True. But that’s where you have social skills built into mechanics. But social skills are not role-play. As a GM I would never let a low-int character be able to understand complex designs, or a low wisdom character come up with a complex strategic plan that didn’t tie in directly to background (e.g. a less-than-average wisdom isn’t going to really hurt a verteran soldier in battlefield tactics, because experience can compensate for the lack of being naturally wise, but they would have a fairly lousy chance at understanding the complexities of the rational mind outside of military matters). You role-play your characters stats. But CRPG’s aren’t really role-play. The original Fallouts came probably closer than anything before or since, and they still lacked a large amount of the nuance that exists in tabletop. Mainly because CRPG’s are limited in what people can program.
And Mass Effect isn’t even a true CRPG. You had to fight. You couldn’t talk your way out of really any significant portion of the combats. And doing so penalized you anyway. Pumping social skills was a losing bet. It wasn’t a trade-off, it was a penalty. That’s ham-fisted. (And don’t get me wrong. ME was one of my favorite games ever. But as an RPG, it fails. Big time.)
I think the ending of God of War III would have been a perfect opportunity to provide the player with a moral choice, especially since you’re not given any in any of the GoW games:X: Stab Athena
O: Stab yourselfI’m pretty much in agreement with the argument that being bad should sometimes give better rewards than being good. I almost universally choose the good option, since I know it’ll benefit my character’s progression more.
One game which handled morality/ethics extremely well was Planescape: Torment. Being good, evil, chaotic, lawful, or neutral all had its benefits and drawbacks. It was very hard to choose the best course of action!
