Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5108023" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

Verification