Morality and Sanity (WoD/Generic)

[Sylrae]

I personally dislike the WoD Morality/Sanity system for a number of reasons. I'm working on an alternate Morality/Sanity system, which while I intend to use it for WoD, it should in the end be generic and modularized enough to use in pretty much any game, and should be useful in Most Horror Games.

Here is my first draft, I'm looking for input.

Let me know what you think, and any suggestions you have.

 

[Celebrim]

I suspect based on past conversations with you that we won't be able to come to agreement on this.

I'm not familiar with WoD's current morality system, but I use to play (and sometimes judge) on alot of the old WoD inspired MU*'s and I can say that from the perspective of a game master/judge a morality system that is relative to the character is useless in a game.

Under the old WoD, morality (humanity, etc.) varied wildly across game systems (VtM, WtA, Changling, etc.) and sometimes wildly within a game system (Camarilla vs. Sabbat, for example). When you tried to run a setting in which the different groups interfaced, there was no way to translate between the two. And, if you let each idea stand on its own, then in practice it never had any bearing on the game (at least, no enforcable bearing) because when everyone defined their own morality in practice everyone was perfectly moral by default. No one ever had to make hard choices or ever found themselves faced with moral delemmas because those delemmas had essentially been resolved at character creation and all that was left was to play the character out. The morality system in practice put no constraint on the character or player, and as such could be all but completely ignored.

If sense then WoD has adopted a more univeral morality system, I strongly suspect it was based on input they recieved from actually playing with relative systems.

Personally, for D20 I'm a fan of the Ravenloft system(s). I'd probably tweak it a little if I ran it, but I wouldn't feel like it ought to be tweaked if I was a player because the basic system(s) are so strong as they are.

 

[Sylrae]

That's a pretty reasonable assessment Celebrim. Recently they've moved to where everyone uses the vampire "Humanity" table, sometimes with one or two additions (with the exception of werewolff, from what I hear).

As for thinking we cannot agree on things, I often agree with your posts, and if I remember correctly you have often agreed with mine, when it comes to mechanics, the main difference seems to be taste of what we are looking for in our games.

You make a good point about hte difficulty for the GM. You would need to have the table in front of you for each player. In a game with 3-4 players that's not as big a deal, but I can see it being easier if you have a flat standard for everyone. If I have to pick between the flat morality system that IMO Doesn't work or no Morality system, for GMing purposes, I'd likely scrap the system entirely, and just come up with a separate madness system where the calls are determined by GM discretion with recommended modifiers, without Morality.

I'm not saying that it should have so many morality systems that you can play bad characters and have them count as full morality, such as many of the paths in vampire allowed you to do. I still want good characters to be good characters, and bad characters to be bad characters, but with slight differences in outlook. A good character from any morality path should still appear to be a good character to human beings, and they shouldn't have totally alien mentalities. I'm looking more for morality systems that ARE human in nature.

I'll use my girlfriend as an example: Under the WoD humanity/morality system, she has a morality of 6, because (sometimes to my annoyance) she doesn't see anything wrong with shoplifting from large companies whose stock is all covered by insurance. Under WoD's system, this would mean she is okay with hurting other people, withholding charity, and selfish thoughts, but these things cause her a great deal of guilt when they come up. She doesn't see things from an abstract right/wrong or legal/illegal perspective so much as from a "this is bad because people are hurt when you do it". She isn't a huge oddity. There are many people who have values differing from the standardized one in World of Darkness who are still Decent People, but according to the World of Darkness table, they are horrible people and they have to be okay with all the acts above the ones they ARE okay with (even if that realistically is not the case). I'd have a morality of 2, because I don't see a problem with vigilante justice, and the system doesn't differentiate between premeditated murder of an innocent person and premeditated murder of a murderer/rapist.

The second gripe I have with the system is that if I do something that could lower my humanity, I also have to make a derangement roll. The roll to see if i go crazy is not related to the fact that I did something bad, as opposed to trauma like in Ravenloft/cthulhu. (I can go crazy from burning down a house, but not from watching an axemurderer eat the neighbors). Of course, if you're the cannibalistic Axemurderer, seeing another Cannibalistic Axemurderer shouldn't make you go mad either.

Finally, you have no defense against going mad. Someone with a strong will who can shrug things off goes mad as fast as someone with a weak will.

 

[Celebrim]

Well, far be it for me to argue that the people that write for WoD have ever had a good grip on good and evil. The original VtM book that started it all probably had the best grip on it, but there was a huge disconnect between the mechanics and the flavor that resulted in the game in practice being nothing like the game as outlined in the examples. And it just went all downhill from there.

But speaking as a sometime judge when you have werewolves, vampires, changlings, wraiths, and what not all walking around at once, the biggest headache was when by the rules someone was supposed to be able to sense someone elses morality and react to it. These sorts of rules worked ok provided you just used a single system with a single scale. But, with everyone's score being based off an entirely different scale (and sometimes one not well defined), it was in practice just about impossible to make any sort of ruling about how someone else was judged in terms of someone else's morality system. In theory, if you knew every action the character had ever done, you might be able to wing it, but the fact that judges were often called in with no clue as to a particular character's history made it impossible to do anything but pick a number out of the air that wouldn't lead to too much argument.

As for your example, the general approach I've taken to alignment in D&D is you get more latitude to not live up to your morality if you have a low wisdom. The lower your wisdom, the less you understand the consequences of your actions, and the more easily you can justify ideas like, "It's not wrong to shoplift because it doesn't hurt anyone."

(In point of fact, it kills people. The cost that society pays to secure itself is probably about 20-30% of its productivity, and thats in the US were corruption is relatively low. If no one engaged in property crime, then there would be no need to pay for security (of all sorts) and with the excess productivity we could easily afford to put every person in America that needed it in a shelter and give them food. However, because the crime and need is persuasive and each individual act only a small part of it disconnected from its effects, people don't see the relationship between their action and the destruction it causes. Also, people are champions at providing justifications for their greed and selfishness. Still, between our selfishness and our sloth, we are all probably at least a 1/3rd as wealthy as we might be and poverty does in fact kill.)

I'm not going to do too much bashing of your friend, becaus you wouldn't understand that I'm not thinking ill of her when I said it. However, I will say that I'd be somewhat suprised to discover the the average morality of people was as high as 6 on the WoD table. A person with a 6 morality is not a 'terrible person', but probably about average and maybe a little above it. That is not to in any way vindicate the behavior, but merely to say that I don't think 'decent people' are really as common as you think. In fact, none really exist. We are all basically indecent and inhuman. I'm not sure that the WoD system is as far wrong as you think it is.

To give you an example, your morality is not '2' under the WoD system if you empathize with vigilante justice. Because, quite obviously, empathizing with vigilante justice and actually carrying it out are two different things. You have to actually kill someone to have morality '2', not merely consider that hypothetically, killing someone might be ok. Under the WoD system, empathizing with vigilante justice is merely a 'selfish thought', and not that depraved at all. You'd have to spend alot of time obsessing over violent revenge to lose humanity. You might find that push come to shove, you don't believe in killing quite as much as you think you do. (I'm here presuming that you haven't actually vengefully killed someone.)

That isn't to say that I think you are entirely wrong. I think that there are mitigating factors in the commision of evil acts that reduce the depravity of the person performing them, and WoD is overly simple. But I think you are looking for ways to make it not work, rather than trying to interpret it in the best possible and most pragmatic light.

 

[Kingreaper]

(In point of fact, it kills people. The cost that society pays to secure itself is probably about 20-30% of its productivity, and thats in the US were corruption is relatively low. If no one engaged in property crime, then there would be no need to pay for security (of all sorts) and with the excess productivity we could easily afford to put every person in America that needed it in a shelter and give them food.

We (the western world) already HAVE the productivity necessary to do that.

The fact is, we don't do it. People not shoplifting wouldn't change that fact in the slightest.

So, no, shoplifting doesn't kill people.

 

[ValhallaGH]

So, no, shoplifting doesn't kill people.

You've apparently never seen a shoplifter a) killed fleeing the scene or b) executed as part of their sentence. You're a lucky individual, but that doesn't make you correct.

 

[Kingreaper]

You've apparently never seen a shoplifter a) killed fleeing the scene or b) executed as part of their sentence. You're a lucky individual, but that doesn't make you correct.

A) Neither of those are cases of shoplifting killing someone (they're cases of someone who'd shoplifted being killed, there's a big difference.)

B) The example was the US. In the US only a) ever happens, and given as people who've skateboarded occasionally get killed leaving the skate-park, attempting to blame shoplifting for that is stupid.



I'm sure if you really reach you can find examples of shoplifting killing people.

But then again, if I really reach I can probably find examples of playing computer games killing people, or eating bread killing people, etc. etc.
should eating bread be considered hugely immoral?

 

[ValhallaGH]

A) Neither of those are cases of shoplifting killing someone (they're cases of someone who'd shoplifted being killed, there's a big difference.)

Granted. But my point of "people die as a direct result of shoplifting and it's associated effects" is in no way invalidated.
Does all shoplifting kill? No.
Do all gunshot wounds to the head kill? No.

And shoplifting isn't "hugely immoral" (even in WoD). It's petty theft.
"petty - of lesser or secondary importance, merit, etc.; minor"
"theft - the act of stealing; the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another; larceny"
So, a "good" person, one that obeys the laws and standards of their community, respects others and their property, and assumes that stuff belongs to people and not a fictional entity (corporations are fictitious, if legal), doesn't want to steal from others. If forced into it, they may loosen their moral code, causing them to become meaner, more selfish, and more tolerant of similar behavior.

While WoD starting morality may be 7, they want most PCs to be around a 5 or a 4, "because it creates a more dramatic story".
Your typical adventurer engages, regularly, in mass property damage and (often fatal) injury to others, potentially lowering their morality to 3.
Normal people usually don't engage in grand theft, but most engage in petty theft and similar levels of illegal activity with surprising regularity, placing them around a morality of 6.
Just sitting in a coffee shop, listening to random conversations for a few hours will pretty quickly give you a sad view of most people's morality. (Or work in / talk to Convenience store clerks. It's scary how many people walk in each day asking, one way or another, if the store sells crack pipes. It's scarier how many people present themselves as models of terrible parents / guardians.)

Where WoD fails miserably is determining when Derangement happens.
Their system is actually pretty good for if it happens (check out the effects of combat stress on veterans; no matter how strong willed you are, exposure to certain events screws up your head), but the when is terrible.
What you see and experience plays a big roll in how messed up you get. What you do is even more important, but what you see can be a major issue (for those that need evidence, research mental disorders among law enforcement, where most only witness the terrible things people do to each other).