I do apologize in advance if I come back once again on the Morality topic… that is a need I feel more and more important and, as a consequence, it has a higher priority over the rest of the project. I realized that this is almost recurring and after some months I find necessary to revamp the strongest point in my agenda (and in the whole VI·VIII·X project!).
This time I was deeply impressed by an article I read last week 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, otherwise it could be easily misunderstood given the sensitivity of the topic under discussion:
What is morality? It is compliance to a set of beliefs, the most inner ones which can hardly change. If someone needs a more pragmatic definition, morality 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. This doesn’t imply that the rules are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, it is not relevant at this stage. What instead is desirable is that your behavior doesn’t change either you are alone or not: this is a consistent moral attitude.
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 an upset view of the first one. If you find right stealing and you have it in your code of morality, then your 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. This brings a person to behave in an unpredictable way. Let me add: I am not sure a true amoral person exists, if this case is possible, then it would labeled by our society as psychiatric disorder. I won’t go ahead in this discussion because (again) of the sensitivity of the topic, however this concept can be applied to a fictitious world like a setting of an RPG (and here I want to land).
Before speaking of the article, or better the essay, I want to introduce an exercise which can help me to better provide my vision. Look at this (beautiful) picture (which btw will be for sure present in the upcoming VIII·XII·XX book with the expanded rules!):
So, someone has severed a head! (if you know the story, it doesn’t matter: that is not the real point) Is this act ‘good’ or ‘bad’? I kindly ask you to stop reading and think to all the thoughts you had by reading the question here above.
…
Now I can finally get 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 (let me say that’s really a pity as the first issue was really oxygen for the brain of an RPG fan). The article is ‘Do the right thing - A commentary on morality in role-playing games’ by Allen Varney.
I had the honor to get in touch with the author and he kindly gave me the permission to quote the article (kudos to Allen!). 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 (this has not a negative connotation itself). Before going ahead in the discussion, I want to point out that the author makes a difference between rules and setting and he thinks the later the ‘home’ for a moral set of guidelines. It’s in there the designer defines what the world, or the society, thinks it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Fair point, however it is not in the setting the presence of a mechanism of moral enforcement. I have the impression that is not sufficient to use the setting as the only place where the players can perceive how their characters acted.
That concept is damn hard to explain, sorry. It’d better use an example: let’s consider an RPG where there are no specific rules on morality (or alignment) and there is a setting similar to Tolkien’s Middle Earth. In this case any character has a dual option: good or evil (let’s stay on a basic approach for the sake of simplicity). The characters, once defined their own morality, have a set of guidelines to follow. What happens if a character who has chosen the ‘good’ side in the story doesn’t stick to this alignment? The GM has no levers in terms of setting… what happens if instead there are rules which rewards who is able to consistently comply with his own morality and, on the other side, penalizes who does the opposite? That rules would greatly help the GM since he is not called to think about solution within the setting in case of an incoherent behavior.
Looking at this kind of example I hope it is clear two, or better three, main points:
Morality should be present both within the rules of the game and as a ‘standard’ in the setting
Morality in the setting shows the goal deriving from the application of a behavior in line with the selected morality
Morality in the rules shows what is the way to stick to it (and what happens if this doesn’t occur)
This means that the setting is the element where you find the ‘stardards’/constaints/guidelines (call them as you prefer) 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 (I am referring to the previous example again, good vs evil) and it doesn’t matter which faction embraces the character. The only relevant detail is consistency!
Even if I quoted two rows only I found that a first point has been achieved: why is Morality important in an RPG? To learn the importance of consistency. This goes along with the character’s background and other similar features which leverages on ‘soft concepts’ since the rules are not too tight around them. Just simply think to D&D and find how is considered the background and the alignment among the hard-core players…
Since my post is getting long (and likely boring), I will split it up in two parts: the first one stops here with the (unexpected) finding of something often not considered by the mainstream (or, even worse, considered as rubbish)…
The second part is here enjoy!