Core Rules deep dive: Morality

I stick to the notes I have on the desk and as promised I will try to provide you with some insight of the "new" game mechanics that I introduced in my  VI·VIII·X game.

Let us start with Morality: it is a concept similar to alignment and to my eyes this is one of the weakest features in rules of "traditional" RPGs... I am well aware the topic is extremely "slippery" as you may find yourself with accusations of Satanism and media campaigns ruining your reputation if you push too much into a strong direction. However this reason is not enough to give up and make up a solution to preserve the detail of the character's alignment however completely empty of contents. If you think for a while what is the meaning of a chaotic-good alignment, for instance, you will soon realize that you can do whatever you want in the game and nothing will be affected by the fact that you have an alignment and you can follow this or not without any consequence. IMPORTANT: please note that this is not an elegant way to say that this model is wrong! I have played with this rules and enjoyed them a lot!

My goal is fill the empty part of the rules in order to make the role-play consistent with a precise choice of the player: the player decides a Morality and then this will be the "inner voice" of the character, always! If this will not be the case, the character will have consequences in the game.

Now, let's have a look at the contents: there are 4 Paths of Morality, these are taken from the theory of Carlo Cipolla written in the brilliant essay "The laws of human stupidity" (from the book "Allegro ma non troppo", 1976). A summary is present on Wikipedia here: Carlo Cipolla - Laws of human stupidity

Every character follows one the Paths (I assumed that the one of the "stupid people" is not applicable to PCs but only to NPCs). This means that the character starts with a score in that Path (yes a score, like a stat!) and then he increases or decreases this score according to the acts he undertakes. ...and sticking to the KUP approach: while the Path is decided by the player (and I suggest as a guideline not to disclose it to the other players), the score in Morality is not know by the player! This is one of the information available only to the GM.

The score affects some relevant game mechanics, among these, the threshold for the level up, the channeling (aka divine) spellcasting, the reaction and the State of Mind of a character (the latter will be one of the next "deep dives" here).

The overall effect I got from this approach is that:

  • Morality should be a parameter which a player looks after more than "traditional" RPGs
  • Morality should be a real constraint to character's choice, otherwise it could generate an effective disadvantage to him
As a final note, the second point is the most important point I want to outline: this is a criticism to the overall human society, not to games, hobbies or RPGs (on the contrary, these could be good levers to bring back the importance of having a value to follow!). Nowadays we are more and more often witnesses of events where people brings up a value as a flag (i.e. "I am ready to die for this!") and the following day that value is denied by the same person... The topic, useless to say, is extremely "dangerous" therefore I want only to leave this cue here in order to let the readers know that I am not a fan of alignment/Morality in RPGs, I am a fan of mankind and would love to see values high in the hearts and souls of people. Please do not blame me for this: I feel it an essential topic and if through an RPG I can raise awareness, I'm happy and proud of it!

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