Morality Alternative Ideas

Now in bright red letters. There is no ACTUAL PLAN to do this. This is to get some ideas as to A) If it is feasible, and B) if it would work on Darkwater.

If we were to remove morality-traits as a 1->10 scale that you have to spend XP on. We might do this:

1) When you commit a sin against your morality trait, you roll the dice listed in the book to see if you gain a derangement.
1a) If you are currently suffering from a derangement for a particular sin and you commit it again you do not roll again.
1b) Derangements could be removed through RP to work out what you did, such as working with a counselor or therapist.

2) Clarity
2a) Perception penalty if you gained a derangement you have -#number of derangements to your perception checks.

3) Harmony
3a) Rituals would need another system. (A thought about be rituals + primal urge, with say -1 for every derangement the werewolf has.)
3b) Death rage would require a new system. (Perhaps basing it on willpower instead of harmony for the chart.)


Why?
The morality system for all that it is a "core" part of the system doesn't seem to actually touch the day to day RP. And ontop of that it can be needlessly punitive. For example changelings drop clarity easily, they can drop clarity for things other people do. Ontop of that it often penalizes players (going crazy and having to spend XP to become uncrazy) for being out and participating in plot.

AGAIN. There is no definite we will do this. This is just to get some ideas of how we could if we did. Please only comment on what ideas might be feasible.

I can't speak about Werewolf, but the fragility of Changeling Clarity is one of the defining aspects of the game's theme, including the idea that you can lose Clarity for things that have nothing to do with any choices you've made. This is why Lost are supposed to seek out stability, routine, and grounding interactions with mortals...and why those things are simultaneously dangerous to strive for. I strongly oppose making any changes to Clarity, except perhaps to make it easier to regain through therapy...but not harder to lose.

I do not see how this can be a workable system for the game at all. It will be more restrictive by far that what is currently part of the game.

For instance, nobody currently has to roll on Derangement for lvl 8 or 9 or 10 (because they start at lvl7) With this proposed system, you will have folks rolling to see if they gain a derangement every time they: (until they fail and gain a derangement)

* Enter the hedge
* Use a token
* Injure another

The system in the book works. You have given no reason to change it other than 'You might loose clarity and have to spend xp to regain it for role playing normally.'

In its place you have proposed a broken system that ensures every who role plays at all will incur derangement.

Please, don't change it.

From the werewolf side (yes, Alexander is not a werewolf, but yay alts).

Primal Urge has a penalty to it that Wyrd does not. Half of your PU is a penalty to all Social rolls. Having to have Primal Urge increased in order to do rites will force Ithaeurs and others with a lot of rites to suffer a penalty just to do the rest of their jobs.

Something more dynamic would be fun. I'm not quite the alarmist that others seem to be.

A simple change would be to say that Moralirty regains don't cost xps, but must be doen via therapy or appropriate RP. See Milesstones in Promethean, and Practical Experience in Hunters: The Vigil.

If it's mainly to be a RP consideration, then leave it mainly to roleplay. Removing the xp cost makes it a story element, and not a build element of a character.

I would no longer allow more xps for dropped ratings, or if you still wanted to keep that, it would take serious staff run plots to raise it, like the extra xps gained from major plot arcs.

I agree with Sanger.
If it is a rp driven system you want, and xp is the prime concern - then just drop the xp component of the current system.

It seems that, the replacement system presented, could result in a a PC, through a single event, going from 'normal' to multiple kinds of fucked up all at once, gaining a potentially staggering number of derangements, where as under the current system there'd be a single test. It would depend on what the final proposed list of sins were for the new system? Otherwise you'd have:

Clarity 5 Changeling going into the Hedge with friends to hunt down a Loyalist and kill them before they can get back to their Gentry contact...one Clarity 5 roll for the premeditated murder of a Lost.

The same Changeling under the new system rolls for entering the hedge, killing the lost, injuring anyone else in the attack, etc...

It does sound like taking away the XP costs and bonuses associated with Morality might be a better solution. Instead, perhaps modifying the severity of Derangements based on the level of sin that inspired them? A Derangement earned due to the commission of a level 5 sin is harder to resolve than one committed for a level 7 sin? Makes it harder to 'get better' after doing something truly atrocious?

Short and sweet: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

There are some of us, NotOtter, who feel it is broken. And again: If you do not have ideas, please do not post. This is not the time for no's. This is the time for ideas. Should any idea floated seem sound enough, staff will ask for yes/no votes. Thank you.

Cobalt - you know I respect you, but you cannot expect honest input if you refuse to acknowledge that an acceptable opinion from a player on your game is simply that they like the current system and do not want it changed

You asked for suggestions on your proposed 'new system' and people are giving them. They are giving them by pointing out flaws in your system, pointing out flaws in the concept of a new system, pointing out issues with new player expectations, and indicating that they don't want a new system.

This is feedback. It just may not be the feedback you want to hear.

And I am listening to those people who are pointing out flaws. And I appreciate those comments. However. Comments such as "Do not want", with no comments on the flaws or on suggestions of how to change things are not productive.

I think people are panicking and assuming that were are going to change the system, no matter what. This isn't the case. I am curious as to what people think could be possible alternative systems. Just because I want to know what people think we could do, does not mean we'll do it. As some ideas might be a) too complicate, b) too difficult for new players to grasp, c) require too many changes to things in game.

Please keep comments productive.

We have the benefit of having good Morality traits to work with. Harmony and Clarity have significant benefits for buying them higher, unlike Wisdom which has shitty benefits and Humanity which has minor benefits and is more certain to drop than Clarity. Morality itself is kind of eh, and only useful if you want to activate cursed items, use Locus Drinker or exorcise/abjure ghosts and spirits, but that's a different issue (and if you want to play with Morality 8+, there are ways to make it more valuable).

I have two ideas for altering Morality that I believe address the concerns that prompted this thread, but I'll first state that I agree with Gattaca and the downsides Cobalt admitted entirely for why I don't like the suggestion.

1. Change the cost of Morality. New dots x 3 works at a low level. Buying Morality up to 4 is pretty reasonable for what you're getting, but past that it gets expensive. If Morality 5, 6 and 7 cost (4 x 3) + [(n - 4) x 2] and Morality 8, 9 and 10 cost (4 x 3) + (3 x 2) + [(n - 7) x 1], then you'd have Morality 8 costing 19 XP. The main downside of this is that it's complicated, and doesn't save that much. Alternatively, Morality's cost could be done as a Merit, so that each level would cost twice its dots in XP, and Morality 8 would cost a mere 16 XP, which helps but I don't think addresses the core issues here.

2. Change the structure of Morality. It sounds complicated, but it's really easy. Instead of having one Morality score, you'd have your permanent Morality and your temporary Morality. Temporary Morality would get rolled, determine what sins affect you, all that stuff we associate with Morality. Permanent Morality would be what you've spent XP on. Someone who buys Morality 8 and then degenerates still has a permanent Morality of 8, and he would regain this moral high ground as a permanent plot reward, as spelled out in "news plot rewards". Skinthieves and people who sell Morality at character creation would start out with a lower permanent Morality. I like this the best, as it addresses the primary concern (not making an XP sink for people who have fluctuating Morality) while still keeping Morality 8+ as a valuable milestone (and one that can be regained without spending XP again if you slip).

Hhmm. I actually really like that second idea. To see if I understand you let me try an example:

Bob starts with clarity 6, he gets into a fight with a loyalist and kills them. His temporary clarity drops to clarity 5. He decides that his character likes killing loyalists. So he continues to attack dropping to clarity 4. (Which I believe 5 is the break point for killing other changelings.) So he can keep killing loyalists all he wants, until one day he decides to kidnap and torture a loyalist. He drops still in clarity and then realizes he's degenerated a lot. After that he spends time working on things that are opposite of the sins he's committed (attempting to keep people from killing other changelings, advocating about how kidnapping and torture is wrong) and spending time with a therapist. Over time his temporary clarity slowly raises back up. But the max it can go to is clarity 6, until he spends XP to try and raise to clarity 7.

So you wouldn't roll to lose it; you'd automatically lose it, roll for a derangement, but over time (weekly? monthly?) the point would regain and the derangement would slip off? Or maybe the derangement stays but can be bought off with xp (2xp per derangement, needing justification a-la merits)?

Cobalt wrote:

Hhmm. I actually really like that second idea. To see if I understand you let me try an example

Exactly. Degeneration still has oomph, but you don't have to pay lots of XP to climb back up, especially if you're a fighter character. Speaking as a player of two fighters, that's really attractive. I want Carina to get up to Clarity 8 eventually, but I don't want to do that until I'm sure she can be Summer without actually harming people (she's most of the way there with Wild, Hours and Blood-Binding). Black's supposed to hover around Clarity 4, but killing changelings is a Clarity 4 sin, so if he has to do a lot of Loyalist-hunting, he's going to lose Clarity 4 regularly. If I can get that back via plot or RPing with counselor characters, I like that a whole lot more than spending 12 XP every so often.

Alexander wrote:

So you wouldn't roll to lose it; you'd automatically lose it, roll for a derangement, but over time (weekly? monthly?) the point would regain and the derangement would slip off? Or maybe the derangement stays but can be bought off with xp (2xp per derangement, needing justification a-la merits)?

Per my suggestion, nothing changes except for the institution of the permanent score. You still roll for degeneration, derangements still attach themselves to you if you don't already have one at that level and derangements still lapse when you regain sufficient Morality. This seems like it'd make derangements easier to get rid of, but I think that if Morality doesn't cost an arm, a leg and a load of XP to regain, people will feel more free to let it drop in the first place. Losing Morality is fun RP, but right now it's fun RP with a price tag.

This would also solve a little thorn in the side of the rebuild system: what happens when people rebuild after losing Morality. Per the attempt at XP equality, everyone should have equal XP, but everybody who's ever had to buy back Morality is working at a deficit compared to the rest of us. This is obviously not a fatal flaw, but I think it'd be a positive change overall.

Wow. This is why I like Sammi.
I really like the idea of splitting morality into temp and perm.
I may just have to steal that idea.

Let me begin by saying that I don't know the first thing about Clarity. I am not a Changeling player. It's never been one of those things that I got into.

Now, that being said, I am a werewolf player, and as a werewolf player, I know for a fact that Harmony is entirely too integral of a system to simply remove and replace with a different system, because you'll end up just making a clusterfuck of alternative and various rules that are entirely too difficult to keep track of. Some examples of things that Harmony is currently used for:

* A werewolf rolls Harmony to perform a rite.
* A werewolf rolls Harmony to attune themselves to a fetish before they can use it.
* A werewolf rolls Harmony to activate a fetish.
* A werewolf rolls Harmony to regain essence from a locus.
* A werewolf's Harmony rating determines his starting essence.
* A werewolf's Harmony rating determines the duration of the Ghost Step gift.
* A werewolf's Harmony rating determines the duration of the Maschinegeist gift.
* The Banish Human rite keeps a human from returning to the spirit world for a number of days equal to the Ritemaster's Harmony.
* Harmony determines what actions around a werewolf risk the werewolf flying into the Death Rage. Characters with high Harmony are at less of a risk than low-Harmony characters.
* Harmony determines if a werewolf can access the spirit world at all. (See Zi'ir).
* A werewolf's Harmony score is part of what determines how well, or poorly, the spirits react to them. This includes the Totems, the binding spirits of a pack.

So, just from this list alone, you can clearly see that 1) if you remove Harmony as a mechanic from the game, you're going to have to come up with a rule to replace it for every one of those situations, thus needlessly complicating it, and 2) if you remove Harmony, you're thematically neutering werewolf.

So please, just don't. Let's not talk about it. Let's not look for alternatives. Let's just leave it alone, shall we?

Edit

I'd be ok with Sammi's suggestion, as all of the mechanics are there, and it ends up making it cheaper for us to work with the Harmony scale. Her suggestion leaves everything as it is, and changes the cost of the trait. Personally, I'd go for 1xp per dot, since it's subject to many changes, and the xp progression is so slow here.

First, I have to say that I think that 'because I want my character to be able to do X' is possibly one of the worst reasons to consider making a system-wide change. And I say that as someone who has already spent 18XP to buy Thomas back up to 6 Clarity, and is looking at spending 21 more to get him back to 7, since there aren't any therapists or Bishops on grid who he would trust farther than he could throw them (or any that advertise, at least).

The risk of losing Clarity is part of the central internal conflict for Lost. Do you 'do what needs to be done' - like killing Loyalists - knowing that every time you do, you risk losing something you /can't/ get back, and becoming the very thing you ran from, or do you try to be human and risk the chance that your enemies are so far gone that they're not playing by the same rules and will do what you won't. It should not be a case where people can wade through Loyalists until they're covered in blood, because that sort of callousness is the mark of the Fae. And the fragility of that system, the chance that your sanity could be irrevocably damaged /just by having a really bad day/ is also part of the internal horror of the theme.

You can already get half-price on Clarity spends if you seek out IC therapy. Unfortunately, that's not an option available to a lot of people, due to schedule conflicts and lack of knowledge of available therapists, or lack of trust.

If you're worried about plot-based losses of Clarity, might I suggest that a less disruptive change might be for people running plots to take potential Clarity losses into account when designing their resolutions? Maybe not everything needs to end in death. We've got this spiffy little system of social rolls and pledges that could allow loyalists to be exiled from the Freehold, with death as the sanction. For run of the mill loyalists or privateers, it should do fine, even if they have to be sworn in by swordspoint. For bigger fish, someone or a group of someones gets to make the choice of being heroes and taking the risk to their mind and souls. Not only does it allow a wider range of resolution in plots (and perhaps incentives for resolving some things through diplomacy or intrigue), but it's a lot less jarring than changing the basic rules in the middle of the game.

If, however, staff has already decided to make the change - and just from the responses here it rather sounds like you have, whatever the redtext says - then I think the temporary/permanent Morality system sounds like an acceptable kludge. Presumably you plan on refunding everyone who has spent XP on Morality, as well?

As I have said several times there are no plans to actually do this.

Cobalt wrote:

As I have said several times there are no plans to actually do this.

Then why bring the subject up? As you can see, people are rather riled up. There have been some good suggestions and comments, but the overall tone is that there is an expectation that staff is going to move forward on this.

The temporary/permanent idea seems to work decently as a compromise should something be changed. Though honestly I don't know the clarity system that well. And overall it does seem a bit strict. Does it have a clause for self defense, if you're left no choice but to kill or be killed? I don't know.

But given that it is an integral system, changes should be minor and should directly address concern. And I'd say the above suggestion is one of the better ones.

scaryclown wrote:

Cobalt wrote:

As I have said several times there are no plans to actually do this.

Then why bring the subject up? As you can see, people are rather riled up. There have been some good suggestions and comments, but the overall tone is that there is an expectation that staff is going to move forward on this.

EDIT: Sammi says it better below. Idle musing.

Thomas wrote:

The risk of losing Clarity is part of the central internal conflict for Lost. Do you 'do what needs to be done' - like killing Loyalists - knowing that every time you do, you risk losing something you /can't/ get back, and becoming the very thing you ran from, or do you try to be human and risk the chance that your enemies are so far gone that they're not playing by the same rules and will do what you won't. It should not be a case where people can wade through Loyalists until they're covered in blood, because that sort of callousness is the mark of the Fae. And the fragility of that system, the chance that your sanity could be irrevocably damaged /just by having a really bad day/ is also part of the internal horror of the theme.

Removing the XP price tag on lost Clarity doesn't harm that theme. Yes, it makes the loss of sanity feel slightly less irrevocable, but I think (without having gotten to playtest the system or anything) that it will highlight better the struggle to keep your Clarity in that you'll have fewer people who decide, "Well, I'm just going to lose it again, so I'll stay here." More incentive to fight to regain Clarity would, I hope, mean that more people fight to regain Clarity. If more people put more effort into regaining Clarity, those levels of Clarity are going to feel more valuable and thus those people will try to keep their Clarity and fight to regain it when it drops.

As a plot reward, you would still have to work for it. You would still give up something that can't be gotten back (that month's plot reward) and you would still have to do something to earn back your Clarity. You just wouldn't spend XP on it.

Quote :

You can already get half-price on Clarity spends if you seek out IC therapy. Unfortunately, that's not an option available to a lot of people, due to schedule conflicts and lack of knowledge of available therapists, or lack of trust.

Anybody who can't find a PC counselor can get a PrP run.

Quote :

If you're worried about plot-based losses of Clarity, might I suggest that a less disruptive change might be for people running plots to take potential Clarity losses into account when designing their resolutions? Maybe not everything needs to end in death.

This totally isn't what you're talking about, but I would love to see more plots precipitate losses of Morality. Wind up on the business end of a nasty rejection from someone you thought loved you? Bam, breaking point. Get ambushed by one of Pure and the only available weapon is the silver blade she carries? Risk your Harmony to save your life. These are awesome things, but if you have to spend XP to buy back up lost Morality, it's kind of a dick move to drop that kind of situation on someone. I'd feel a lot more free to be evil as a Storyteller if the evil didn't amount to losing large sums of XP.

scaryclown wrote:

There have been some good suggestions and comments, but the overall tone is that there is an expectation that staff is going to move forward on this.

I see a few people claiming such, yes. Do you think that people don't trust members of staff to think in terms of hypothetical situations? Some kind of Word of God Syndrome, where the idle musings of someone with power are enough to cause frenzy? Maybe I'm immune to it because I've been staff before and am often prone to idly musing, myself. I thought Cobalt's big red letters were overkill, personally.

Lawless wrote:

Does it have a clause for self defense, if you're left no choice but to kill or be killed?

Not the Clarity system, no, but in all cases of Morality a justifiable or otherwise mitigated crime may have a dice bonus to the degeneration roll.

This really seems overly complicated for redefining the backbone of the Wold of Darkness system.

Alister wrote:

This really seems overly complicated for redefining the backbone of the Wold of Darkness system.

Why do you think it's overly complicated? The dichotomy of temporary versus permanent scores is repeated over and over again. My system is no more complicated than Willpower, and probably less so in that Willpower is a derived trait while Morality stands alone and buying back sold dots of Willpower has a different cost scheme than buying more Willpower.