The difficulty arises comes from trying to stick to the strict concepts of Good and Evil, and applying them to a more gray-shaded world or story.

If in your game, you play a holy, unselfish saint trying to stop a horde of demon-summoning baby eaters...then Good and Evil can be applied pretty easily. However, if your character is a royal soldier who's simply defending his kingdom's borders from bandits or trolls, then that's not exactly a "Mission of Good".

Your soldier may be dutiful, loyal, honor-bound, and even a nice guy. But if you try to make him "Good" in the grandest sense of the word, then he probably wouldn't be out in the wilds kicking ass. Or if he did, he'd probably reserve his wrath for true Evil, most likely sparing underlings or hungry monsters.

Your best bet would be to not worry too much about Good vs Evil, but maybe rather focus on Law vs Crime, or Faction-1 vs Faction-2 (ie, two warring kingdoms). If your character's motivations are his duty to his kingdom, then you can justify slaughtering a disgruntled mob that may or may not be dangerous. However if your character's motivations are ultimate Good...then you're going to have a rough time justifying most all "gray" matters.

[edited by - Veovis on May 19, 2004 5:11:12 PM]

quote:Original post by TechnoGoth
The problem with that though is how do balance law and moral, duty and honor? Would following unjust laws raise you law and lower your moral?

For instance in your example, say you where a paladin protecting the sheiff of Nottingham or better yet prince John.

You couldn''t be a such a paladin in the roleplay sense of the word. A paladin must be lawful/good, meaning that (s)he both follows the ruler''s law and is "global-scale" good. There can not be paladins standing in for a system that hurts people. That''s also why most - if not all - paladins are followers of a clerical institution, they circumvent the first alignment component by making it a divine one, thus acting on a globally "good" scale in both contexts.

quote:Original post by TechnoGoth
As earlier stated there could be an intuition and judgement test. The results of this test would determine you characters opinions the npc. This could be represented by an auras, a simple circle around the base of all npcs the colour of the circle determines what you perceive the npcs reaction to you is.
Green for friendly
Red for Hostile
Blue for Afraid
Yellow for Intrigued
Purple for Suspicious
Grey for Neutral

That given scale would basically call for a two-dimensional rating scheme. Determine friendly/hostile and then the strongest of the remaining ones. Someone could be generally friendly towards you, but also afraid, intrigued and suspicios at the same time. The possible attributes would of course have to be tailored towards the nature of the game to avoid unnecessary complexity.

Generally, having a primary "friendly/neutral/hostile" primary reaction seems sensible and pretty much generic to me. Perhaps make it gradual, e.g. on a scale from 0 to 100 with 0 being hostile, 50 neutral and 100 friendly. That could be worked into a faction system with certain biases between factions (faction A is friends with faction B resulting in the reaction getting a +25 bonus or something).

quote:
Now again the problem of intent comes into play, here this would simply be a way to determine reaction not intent. After all the group of bandits could be very intrigued by you. So would it perhaps be better to show intent rather then reaction?

Intent should IMHO only be shown when it''s obvious, e.g. people cheer at you, start drawing weapons, etc. Someone might be your strongest supporter but still shy away from coming to your aid in a fight when (s)he thinks it''d be unwise at the moment. Perhaps an emphathic character could "foresee" actions by being granted an intent check a short time before actual action is taken. This would need a system in which some basic "drive" ist accumulated up to an acting threshold, for example being close to a hostile character would increase the char''s "attack drive" over time until it discharges. An emphathic character would have a chance to register the drive getting close to the threshold and run away, a non-emphathic character would just see the outcome.

Just a thought. I think that the D&D system is on the right track, it just needs one small addition: lawful/chaotic should be more like "loyalty", towards each different faction. So you''d have a "gauge" for good/evil, and then another one for loyalty for each faction. A paladin would be generally good since he generally doesn''t like hurting creatures and being mean, and he would be loyal to the people he protects, and have a low loyalty towards the orc and evil creatures. Robin Hood would be also good, but loyal to the farmers and not loyal to the duke of what''s-its-name A thief that steals to survive would still be counted as neutral (not good or evil) as long as he doesn''t kill "for fun". I think this wouldn''t be too complex and it would still manage to overcome most of those problems you described.