Morality Revisited

Originally published June 9, 2012

I've discussed morality before, but recently in my Mage: the Awakening game, I had some issues with World of Darkness's morality system. I had presented the characters with several options each of which had moral consequences to varying degrees. Specifically they had the option of killing several children to save a community or stealing the souls of the children (temporarily) and destroying a piece of magic to remove the problem. Either way they would need to make rolls to avoid losing a dot of their morality trait (Wisdom in this case).

In the end they went with option #2, deciding saving the children was worth more than the cost to their own souls. In this aspect the moral quandary was fine as several characters anguished over the decision over the course of the game session, seeking out their mentors for advice and praying for guidance (the characters are mainly practicing Catholics).

The problem arose at the end of the session, where having saved the children, they then needed to roll to avoid the loss of Wisdom (due to soul theft and the hubris of destroying an artifact to repair a soul). One of the characters, who had been particularly portrayed as feeling very guilty throughout the session, failed her roll.

Now the difficulty with this is that if you succeed in a Wisdom roll (i.e. do not lose Wisdom), then the character is supposed to feel guilty and depressed about the decision while if they had failed their morality is eroded and they no longer see that act as such a bad thing. But the way it played out and plays out in general is often the exact opposite. Losing morality is seen as a bad thing while making the roll tends to lift the mood of the players and the game as a whole.

There are a number of ways to handle this, such as replacing the morality system. I intend to experiment with this in the future. But one idea that the player brought up was to make the morality roll when a character commits to plan that would require it. So if a character plans to kill someone, they make the roll then, before the murder. If they succeed, they can then play their character as reluctant and apprehensive of killing someone. If they fail then they can go ahead with it but do not lose the point of morality until they actually commit the deed.

The concept is a little more relaxed than the default and adds to morality as a roleplaying tool. I’m interested to hear other people’s thoughts.