I dislike overall "Karma"-points (or whatever you call the unit of "Good" and "Evil") even more than reputation systems. The latter usually still lack an authentical and therefore believable as well as predictable system to reflect the influence of the players actions on the different reputations. Usually, relevant NSCs know of your doings as soon as they are done. Furthermore, that one reputation value usually tries to cover too many, usually less closely connected aspects - priece of goods, emotional relationship, reliability, whatever.
What many games are trying is to provide a world with own rules, in witch the player decides to follow these rules or his own. Some even try to provide different rules in the same world, that sometimes lead to moral dilemma. It is common here to have different parties reflecting different moral standards, giving the player a set of options to choose from. Supporting one or another party can be messured with the help of a reputation system or (much more work for bigger games) completly scripted individually for each quest.
You seem to try going even one step further by not giving any moral at all, leaving the player alone with himself. I don't regard this as gameplay.
The only way you could help the player to make his decision is indeed utilitarianistic - as this is the way life goes - or at least, as humans work.
We ourselves decide between what our will tells us (i want to be "evil" like a mafia-boss), what feelings we get, thinking of different consequences (raping feels so wrong, not even a mafia-boss should do that) and - last but not least - what we expect our environment to react like (a mafia-boss should be cruel to proof he is not weak/ you should not be a mafia-boss at all).
The only thing a game can decide is the moral standard of the environement. What can be influenced a bit is the will of the player, for example by giving a limited choice of character types, skills, possible actions.
Not leading a player, encouraging him to find his own "good" or "wrong" will result in him making the same theoretical process as in real life: Evaluating the consequences. There are several steps during maturing, each concentrating on different aspect of own action's consequences.
One starts thinking of "right" as what does yourself "good", only slowly accepting authority. First not seeing any bad in doing whatever authority does not forbid or at least not notice (egocentric), you start accepting limits and punishment (moral of absolute obedience).
The next 3 steps are the following guidelines:
- An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
- Do unto others as you would have others do unto you
- law-and-order/ what would happen, if anyone did this?
You can expect an adult to follow one of the latter 3 guidelines, as this is common progress, but not everyone reaches stages 4 and 5. In RPGs you might even have players choosing their options from an egocentric view (D&D alignments: _ evil) or following absolute obedience (D&D alignments: : lawful _), as RPGs are a perfect environment to test uncommon behaviour.
You, Lar_q, obviously reached stage 5:
...but other than an utilitarianistic (what a word) moral system (where you measure the moral value by its overall utility), I can't think of any impartial method of assigning value to moral choices. Brilliant ideas more than welcome
Not even "overall utility" is impartial, for it depends on what you consider useful/more useful, which is given by a moral standard.
When creating a situation that provides a moral dilemma, there
has to be a set of moral standards, all beeing
equal but conflicting.
This is quite specific, so there is no room for moral-free spaces in which the player might form his own standards. Doing so (i wouldn't know how to make a game of it) would result in the player choosing (from real life) or inventing a moral standard for his behaviour, following it with his personal guideline any time - and therefore not resulting in any dilemma. Several problems would occur:
- Not giving a moral standard means not giving knowledge about people's reactions - for these reactions would be determined by moral standards which then become more or less obvious. Not having any clue what his options are, the player might guess from real-life-knowledge or quit. Thinking is not of much use here, because you just don't know what to do. In fact, it doesn't even matter, for it has random (=unknown) results. I don't regard Sophie's choice as interesting, she just thought too much (What will happen to her daughter when she lets her live? She does not know. How would her son take it? She does not know. Will the guard keep word, or kill both anyway or none of them, but tell them of her mother's choice? SHE DOES NOT... you get it. Maybe the senselessness and therefore unlimited space for speculation fascinated you? I just don't get what you thought to learn from it)
- If the player should nevertheless try to follow some self-made rules, he will never be in a dilemma, because no one tells him to do different. As much as any action could be considered as bad, it might as well be good. Or both. Or sometimes this, sometimes the other.
The dilemma starts, when the same guideline meets different morals, different evaluations of the same action. Therefore, you need to give at least one moral for the player's orientation. More common are several, usually not conflicting morals, that lead to dilemma in very special situations.
I would recommend you not to try the impossible, but to make the possible better than it has ever been done before <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
You can have variations of morals seeming to work well when followed strictly, but later reveiling as less positive or just not ready for practice. Or present a change in moral standards and let the player experience the consequences for peoples' lifes. Let him influence which of sereral conflicting morals gets greatest influence and how people refusing the moral standard of the ruling class are treated when presenting their alternative system. For the presentation of different morals, you can always take different religious backgrounds. They can be disguised as regional or racial morals, if one region or race is or was dominated by a certain religion and sticks to it's moral standards. Sometimes, the same moral can be used with differnt results, using different guidelines. E.g. Worshipping life can result in refusing death penalty when using "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you", while it makes you accepting it with "Eye for an eye,...". This conflict can also be shown by letting the player decide what is better in a certain situation. Might be a nice frustration to later see the same guideline used by a NPC on the same moral in a different context, where suddenly the opposite result is logical.
It is more difficult to decide for or against death penalty when using "law&order": on the one hand, you would kill several people for sure, on the other hand that might prevent others from doing a murder and therefore save lifes.
Just playing with differences and similarities between morals and guidelines of how to use them should already give enough plot for the whole game - at least, if you add some narrative passages and some less complex decisions. Else it could change from being a game to being work <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />
