Narrative Engine

Write it like you stole it

- JON INGOLD

So I was working on a game today which includes that most old-fashioned of systems: morality. A staple of RPGs from the early medieval times, a morality system allows you to define your character using binary choices with easily grokkable moral values.

Will you murder the leprous peasant or take him to hospital? Will you feed the cow to the starving child, or feed the child to the starving cow? Reform or Green? The problem is, given a range of obvious moral binaries, players feel compelled to choose good options, against their own best interests and even against what’s interesting.

Such binaries must be clear to feel fair, but in being clear they actively remove choice. (This is why more modern versions of this idea tend toward nihilism, offering a menu of equally awful options despite this being as much fun as eating in a Wetherspoons.) Curiously, though, players are rarely paragons of virtue. Should the game offer an exploit, most players will take it.

If NPCs can be pickpocketed, most players will do it. If a player has to smash streetlights to shave seconds off their time to the next mission hotspot in