[OPR] A lesson on Morality learnt 30 years late (part 1)
Foreword
I am on Substack from March 2023 however I officially kicked off my VI·VIII·X project in March 2022: I ran for one year an “ordinary” blog with “ordinary” posts and then I moved here… Since some old posts are worth to be read to fully understand my work and purpose, I decided to re-post the most relevant ones in a new series entitled OPR (Old Post Revisited) where I simply resume these old texts, rephrase them (an ideally keep within the 4-minute length threshold I set as a golden rule) and present again since I consider them “worth to be read”.
May the fun be always at your table!
I was deeply impressed by an article I read and made me find a new vigor to write another post on Morality. Let’s do the things in the right way and set the play-field:
What is morality? It is compliance to a set of beliefs, the most inner ones which can hardly change. It is the behavior you have when nobody looks at you: this means that when you are alone you express yourself according to the rules you believe to be the right ones. A consistent moral attitude is when your behavior doesn’t change either you are alone or not.
As a second step, we can define morality vs immorality based on the common sense of ethic we have; the first is to be narrow to the common sense, the second is the other way round. If you find right stealing and you have it in your ‘code of morality’, then you are defined immoral simply because the human ethic sees robbery ‘wrong’. This means that a person can be immoral even if he consistently sticks to his true beliefs.
Lastly there is the concept of amorality and it is very simple to explain: the absence of an inner set of rules. I am not sure a true amoral person exists, if this case is possible, then it would labeled by our society as psychiatric disorder. This concept however can be applied to a fictitious world like a setting of an RPG (and here I want to land).
Now back to the article: it is dated 1994 and is from the first issue of Inter*Action an UK RPG magazine which lasted 4 issues only. The article is ‘Do the right thing - A commentary on morality in role-playing games’ by Allen Varney. The spark comes from a discussion he had about an RPG with no moral guidelines in it but one: come back home from abroad (useless to say that ‘abroad’ was a hostile land…); the author hence starts:
Can a role-playing game design be moral, immoral, or amoral? If it can be moral, should it be?
If I think to a game which has no moral framework in it both in the rules and in the setting, I would define it as amoral. The author makes a difference between rules and setting and he considers the later the ‘home’ for a moral set of guidelines: it’d be where the designer defines what the fictional society defines what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Fair point, however I believe it is not the setting where a mechanism of moral enforcement can be. In other words, I think it is not sufficient to use the setting as the only place where the players can perceive how their characters acted.
To better explain the concept, let’s consider an application: let’s consider an RPG with no specific rules on morality (or alignment) and a setting similar to Tolkien’s Middle Earth where the choice is: good or evil. The characters have a set of guidelines to apply the morality they follow. What happens if there are rules which reward who consistently complies with their own morality or, penalize who does the opposite? Those rules would greatly help the GM since he is not called to think about a solution within the setting in case of an incoherent behavior. The following main points are then a consequence:
Morality should be present both within the rules of the game and as a ‘standard’ in the setting.
Morality in the setting shows the target a behavior should aim.
Morality in the rules shows the reward in case a character sticks to it (and what happens if he doesn’t).
This means that the setting is the element where you find the ‘stardards’/guidelines to follow whereas the rules are the enablers of the consistency of a moral position (or the disablers in the opposite situation). …and what is important to stress out is that this works in both directions and it doesn’t matter which faction embraces the character. The only relevant detail is consistency!
Even if I quoted two rows till now only I found that a first point has been achieved: why is Morality important in an RPG? To learn the importance of consistency. In a nutshell: morality in an RPG, if present, has its roots in the setting. However the rules should encompass a mechanic which provides a reward to the players who role-play consistently (and penalize or those who behave inconsistently).
Now, back to the original article:
‘What’s the problem with that game in particular? Many games are like that. Nearly all post-holocaust settings, most of the cyberpunk games, and many fantasy RPGs give no thought to ethical values. (“Okay, let’s go down into the lair of the monsters who haven’t been bothering anyone, kill them, take their possessions, and then head back to town.”)’
Spot on! In an amoral RPG (both rules and setting!), there are no guidelines to what is right or wrong and this ‘freedom’ enables also inconsistent behaviors (‘Today I help my comrade for a certain reason - or no reason at all - and the day after I kill him as I realized I was wrong the day before’).
Almost any setting’s inherent morality rewards examination. … Morality itself, or a vicious parody of it, can become the subject in these games. …
Or better, it can be the backbone where actions have an explanation, or stories have consistency, or behaviors are reasonable. That it is the difference between a deep setting and a ‘mere landscape’ where a character moves.
‘What should a game do, then? Should it impose a moral code on the PCs? “You can’t legislate morality,” either in society or in games.’ <…> ‘But a good campaign setting should offer unlimited options. I don’t like games that build in brute-force rules like ‘hero points’, mechanics that reward a specific agenda. A designer who tries to force the players into a mould just restricts adventures and players alike.’ … Rules differ from campaign settings, though. Just as a setting doesn’t necessarily make for good adventures simply because you can do anything you want, so the reverse is true, that a good setting doesn’t necessarily imply unlimited freedom of action.
Both these self-questions seem to be rhetorical but they are not at all indeed. And my answer is yes, you can’t legislate morality in a game (as a game designer) however if you have defined morality in a setting you have implicitly opted to force the GM to legislate, even if that was not the intention.
(continues in part 2)
Very interesting discussion of morality here. I've never really played a game where morality or alignment has been strictly enforced except with clerics and paladins who rely on the favor of the gods.