Storytelling in RPGs with moral systems

I'm curious how RPGs with moral systems (good/evil, etc) handle storytelling. It doesn't matter if the systems are visual or "behind the scenes", both types are relevant in this particular case.

So my questions are:
If you've played RPGs with moral systems both as a "good" and as an "evil" character, what were your experiences?:
- Did the plot and characters react differently/change?
- If so, was it in a meaningful and interesting way or more gimmicky? A few (non-spoiler) examples would be great.

Personally I usually never replay RPGs, and the friends I've talked to about the subject couldn't provide much insight either, since they usually don't play "opposite" characters in each playtrough. But I have the feeling that RPG stories usually are structured so they work best if you play as a mostly good character.

EDIT: Based on some of the comments a small clarification may be in place: When I talked about characters in this post I was talking about player characters/player avatars as well as NPCs.

Yeah, I agree with you jaes: one example that for now comes to my mind regarding the first question (story twists because of the morality changes) is in the first Mass Effect, especially for the ending (I won't say nothing about it if you haven't played it, but I've found the 'evil' ending more interesting).
About the second question, the majority of commercial RPGs now have a linear central plot, with just one ending, so whichever your morality is it doesn't matter because the conclusion is almost the same (e.g. KotOR, or NWN).
Anyway, I greatly prefer games where there's no true black or white, but many degrees of "grey": one example could be Geneforge, where you have three factions, and you can choose to help one of them, all of three or neither of them (I won't tell you how, of course: you've said no spoilers after all).
Nice topic by the way...

I remember arguing no end for how good/evil systems worked, then I read philosophy and ever since I couldnt handle that kind of game.

Obviously it's not exactly a complex RPG morality system, but I found the ME1 and ME2 paragon/renegade system extremely frustrating.

It discourages any sort of roleplaying because you are heavily penalized for simply choosing dialog responses that appeal to your sense of the character. Instead you must choose every single "paragon" or "renegade" dialog option if you have any hope of being able to unlock special paragon/renegade interrupts.

And it is all a bit nebulous what a "paragon" and a "renegade" mean in this universe. Sometimes the "nice" dialog option results in "renegade" points if it supports the Illusive Man's goals and in other very similar situations, it is results in "paragon" points.

Ultimately it makes it difficult to cultivate any sort of identification with the player character.

I found the system in Fallout New Vegas to be much more satisfying to the extent it foregoes traditional "good/evil" in favor of a stat that tracks your reputation with each of the various factions based on quests or crimes you may commit.

I want two things; context and consequences. Not a character.

JemyM said:

I want two things; context and consequences. Not a character.

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Well said; have you played Geneforge? There's a certain degree of liberty in choices and relative consequences, also the "character" is just the class you choose.

I'm generally against good and evil systems in games, regardless of type. They don't even really work in PnP games, where I've always ended up dumping the concept of alignment.

People will always have varying ideas of what a certain action should mean, or slavishly keep to some defined set of rules and ignore what makes sense for that character. Yeah, the Stupid Evil option that most Biowaresque games give you, like eat all the puppies while their owner Timmy watches, tend to be fairly unanimously evil, but then you'll get something where asking for a reward, any reward is evil, or politely responding to someone is good. You can't do a good thing for an evil purpose, or an evil thing for a good purpose. Characterisation tends to break down to a choice of either Cartoonish supervillain with no depth or someone so squeaky clean that Superman would think they're a square, and in the end the only difference is some different cutscenes in the final stretch.

What works best is a game that just lets you play, and if it has some kind of karma meter at all, bases it more on reputation (You helped Bill, so you're alright) than on some mystical aura that constantly misinterprets your actions. Then you can be a villain with good publicity or a jerkass hero if that's what you want.

Ball_Breaker said:

Well said; have you played Geneforge? There's a certain degree of liberty in choices and relative consequences, also the "character" is just the class you choose.

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No, I only played Exile III and Avernum from him. I believe Dragon Age: Origins and Fallout: New Vegas are the best recent examples of what I want in a RPG even if New Vegas still kept the karma system. Other examples of this include Call of Pripyat and the Gothic series.

The worst examples were the games from Bioware after they moved from Baldur's Gate. Dungeons & Dragons have the other axis, Lawful-Chaotic which is quite interesting. Remove that one and you only have the Good vs Evil axis. KOTOR was the first game that made me forced to play only one character, reason is that I did not feel that evil was a choice and I didn't see it as a feature either. Mass Effect continued this broken morality system. ME2 did remove the restriction which was a good thing.

Vampire and some versions of Star Wars emphasize control over emotion. Let the beast or dark side control you and you gradually lose yourself. I find this to be an interesting take on morality.

I rarely ever see any type of evil storyline in games. It's just completely unnatural for me to play evil, so even when I try, I end up drifting back to good.

I remember reading an interview a while back about the problem with writing dual stories in games. I believe it was person interviewed was from Bioware. Essentially they said that most people don't replay games and most people tend to play good or neutral, so when you put in a complete separate evil path, you double your work but only around 10% of the players ever see it. One of the fallouts of this was that most games that do have a evil track, don't flesh out that evil track near as much as the good/neutral one.

I've played a few games where "good" and "evil" were fairly obvious choices:
- Heroes of Might and Magic 2. The choice between Archibald and Roland. HoMM2 is a strategy game, so it might not be worth mentioning, but I figured I'd include it anyway.
- Might & Magic 7. Rather simple choice between good and evil when picking a new judge. Affects the entire rest of the game with two completely different cities and lots of different people to interact with. Perfect example of such a choice.
- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Again, a fairly obvious choice between good and evil. Become a Sith if you play the evil path, a Jedi if you play the good path.
- Mass Effect. Choice between Renegade and Paragon. Not really a choice between good and evil, but still worth mentioning in my opinion. Had very little impact on Mass Effect 2, but it might just have an impact in Mass Effect 3, so I'll wait for ME3 before I make up my mind on whether or not it worked well.
- Obsidian, Black Isle and Troika games generally tend to have moral choices, but very rarely good/evil - they're often grey.
- Plus a bunch of other games that I seem to have forgotten right now.

Personally, I tend to play the good path first and then the evil one later on. If I play through a game 3-4 times, only one of them is evil. I overall prefer playing good and usually only play evil for the sake of seeing what difference it makes.

Since I don't believe in the concepts of good and evil, I have a hard time taking any attempt to represent them seriously.

As Jemy, I just want a plausible set of options with a plausible set of consequences. I don't need the game to "teach me" what I should have done, or what the result is when you behave in a certain way.

I think the best games for that kind of experience in this genre, are the Gothics and The Witcher 2 (Haven't really played the first one). They were reasonably plausible and the end result wasn't vomit-inducingly black/white. Most american games - just like their movies - have this horrifically stupid idea of having to teach - and especially through these concepts of good/evil/right/wrong. It really gets on my nerves sometimes, but I've learned to adjust.

Ironically, when given the choice - I inevitably play a "good" character, even though I don't agree with that label. So, I suppose it doesn't really bother me all that much - except for the blatant moral lessons involved.

At least when it comes to the more recent iterations, I think Obsidian´s dynamic trio, aka Mask of the Betrayer, Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas, quite rules this problematic with an iron first.

General main reasons would be granularity, reactivity and connections to other game systems.

F:NV´s karma system isn´t well implemented, but fortunately it plays relatively minor role and major role is being played by developing relations to various factions.
That means the good/evil axis is largely suppressed in favour of faction relations "tracker" - the factions perceive your character based on actions related to them, not based on an aura. "Absolute" morality takes a backseat and, without going into specifics, the result is that it´s mostly you, a player, who decides what is evil, good, grey, opportunistic and so on within the post-post-apoc context of the game, the game does not do that for you.
Having good reputation with one faction opens more content, but getting good rep with that faction may mean loosing rep with another, etc. It´s not "perfectly" evenly spread, but overall I haven´t experienced a better system in a similarly big open world game yet.
Gothic 3 was on the right track though.

Alpha Protocol takes similar approach, but replaces factions with characters.
You get similar level of content/benefits regardless of your choices, but the content differs based on them. Your handler likes you - you get a bonus, you pissed off the same handler - you get a different bonus. Sometimes good reputation nets you more info and further choices, sometimes it´s bad reputation that does that.
Difference between playing an arrogant ruthless bastard and a peaceful diplomat is that you´ll get different skill bonuses and other combat benefits (new stores, discounts, some slightly different combat scenarios) and, most markedly, different outlook on characters and the story, as well as different narrative development.

Mask of the Betrayer is perhaps the most on-topic game of the three, since it features the good/neutral/evil system and imo it takes the best advantage of it.
"Good" playthrough will be substantially different from an "evil" one, both in terms of story content and gameplay mechanics.
The game offers a lot of choices to nuance your character and actions result in alignment shifts, thus playing different degrees of good/evil is possible.
The spirit-meter is a significant gameplay feature and how you deal with it and what kind of benefits it may net you is largely tied to your character´s morality.
Difference between playing a character who is inclined to suppress "the hunger" or uses the mechanics to do "good" and a character who gives into craving, "devours" people and uses their souls to craft powerful items is substantial.
Based on your morality and choices, you get to solve quests in often very different ways and with different outcomes, there are two mutually exclusive companions who affect flow of the story and gameplay quite significantly and there´s a good variety of endings as well.
If you play an "ultimate" evil char, in the course of the game you may even kill (devour) all of your companions and use their souls as means to craft an extremely powerful item that will allow you to easily finish the game solo .
I don´t think I´ve ever played a game where differences between "good" and "evil" playthroughs were so notable (and worthwhile).
Though I have to add, playing an ultimate evil mofo makes the game somewhat more difficult so I wouldn´t recommend such approach on a first playthrough.
However, playing a non-ultimate evil character, as in, one who just doesn´t give into spirit craving (which is where the difference in difficulty comes from), is possible and doesn´t bring any notable differences in difficulty.

CountChocula said:

Obviously it's not exactly a complex RPG morality system, but I found the ME1 and ME2 paragon/renegade system extremely frustrating.

It discourages any sort of roleplaying because you are heavily penalized for simply choosing dialog responses that appeal to your sense of the character. Instead you must choose every single "paragon" or "renegade" dialog option if you have any hope of being able to unlock special paragon/renegade interrupts.

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Well for the record, when I played through ME1 and ME2, I went mostly renegade but I didn't always pick the renegade option. I kind of played my character as an anti-hero, but as someone who still did good things. I never felt at all penalized for this, in fact there are times when you are rewarded for not always blindly going one path.

But in general I still understand what you are saying. When I was picking conversation options, it was often hard not to just automatically pick the renegade option because that was the way I was going. I can understand why someone would feel the need to always pick one no matter what. I often find that's an issue in most games. Even without a big [RENEGADE] or [PARAGON] in front them, it's usually really easy to figure out what the good or evil option is and people tend to automatically pick the one that corresponds to how they are playing.

DeepO said:

F:NV´s karma system isn´t well implemented, but fortunately it plays relatively minor role and major role is being played by developing relations to various factions.
That means the good/evil axis is largely suppressed in favour of faction relations "tracker" - the factions perceive your character based on actions, not based on an aura. "Absolute" morality takes a backseat and, without going into specifics, the result is that it´s mostly you, a player, who decides what is evil, good, grey, opportunistic and so on within the post-post-apoc context of the game, the game does not do that for you.

Having good reputation with one faction opens more content, but getting good rep with that faction may mean loosing rep with another, etc. It´s not "perfectly" evenly spread, but overall I haven´t experienced a better system in a similarly big open world game yet.

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Yes, my thoughts exactly!

It is promising that from what I've seen so far, Skyrim's system for tracking the PC's reputation with individuals, factions, towns and Holds seems to have a lot more in common with New Vegas than Oblivion or FO3. Hoping it delivers on this.

fadedc said:

Well for the record, when I played through ME1 and ME2, I went mostly renegade but I didn't always pick the renegade option. I kind of played my character as an anti-hero, but as someone who still did good things. I never felt at all penalized for this, in fact there are times when you are rewarded for not always blindly going one path.

But in general I still understand what you are saying. When I was picking conversation options, it was often hard not to just automatically pick the renegade option because that was the way I was going. I can understand why someone would feel the need to always pick one no matter what. I often find that's an issue in most games. Even without a big [RENEGADE] or [PARAGON] in front them, it's usually really easy to figure out what the good or evil option is and people tend to automatically pick the one that corresponds to how they are playing.

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Didn't you experience a lot of situations where you couldn't do a Renegade interrupt or the Renegade dialog was greyed out?

IIRC, you had to have almost max Renegade or Paragon for some of these. I believe I picked the Renegade option nearly every single time except for those occasions that were misleading, and I still couldn't do all of the interrupts or access all the Renegade dialog.

Maylander said:

I've played a few games where "good" and "evil" were fairly obvious choices:
- Heroes of Might and Magic 2. The choice between Archibald and Roland. HoMM2 is a strategy game, so it might not be worth mentioning, but I figured I'd include it anyway.
- Might & Magic 7. Rather simple choice between good and evil when picking a new judge. Affects the entire rest of the game with two completely different cities and lots of different people to interact with. Perfect example of such a choice.
- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Again, a fairly obvious choice between good and evil. Become a Sith if you play the evil path, a Jedi if you play the good path.
- Mass Effect. Choice between Renegade and Paragon. Not really a choice between good and evil, but still worth mentioning in my opinion. Had very little impact on Mass Effect 2, but it might just have an impact in Mass Effect 3, so I'll wait for ME3 before I make up my mind on whether or not it worked well.
- Obsidian, Black Isle and Troika games generally tend to have moral choices, but very rarely good/evil - they're often grey.
- Plus a bunch of other games that I seem to have forgotten right now.

Personally, I tend to play the good path first and then the evil one later on. If I play through a game 3-4 times, only one of them is evil. I overall prefer playing good and usually only play evil for the sake of seeing what difference it makes.

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I can add another example: Fable.
Choosing between good and evil is even more easier, because very often there is an NPC that asks you to do so... But in the end the conclusion is almost the same, and the only real difference is in character's appearance.

CountChocula said:

Didn't you experience a lot of situations where you couldn't do a Renegade interrupt or the Renegade dialog was greyed out?

IIRC, you had to have almost max Renegade or Paragon for some of these. I believe I picked the Renegade option nearly every single time except for those occasions that were misleading, and I still couldn't do all of the interrupts or access all the Renegade dialog.

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Well in ME2, I was about 2/3 renegade and 1/3 paragon and I think that there might have been 2 or 3 times when I couldn't do the renegade dialog choice because it was greyed out. I didn't really feel all that punished by this. I'm not sure what renegade interrupts I might have missed, I got a lot of them, but I'm sure if I missed one it wouldn't have shown up and I'd never have known about it. At the same time I got a lot of paragon interrupts as well and I frequently used them when I felt it was something my character would do. I sometimes got paragon dialog options as well, though I rarely chose to use them.

CountChocula said:

IIRC, you had to have almost max Renegade or Paragon for some of these. I believe I picked the Renegade option nearly every single time except for those occasions that were misleading, and I still couldn't do all of the interrupts or access all the Renegade dialog.

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I think that interrupts are always available, regardless of the paragon/renegade meter, it´s just some dialogue responses which require certain amount of points to be selectable.

IIRC, the game uses a sorta level scaling for the red/blue dialogue options, at least the second one does. It tracks the total amount of p/r points you could gather in the areas you visited up to the point of a given check, and options are un-greyed only if you surpass a certain percentage of that possible total, which means that sometimes the more difficult checks may become even more difficult further into the game.

Speaking of Mass Effects, my only major problem with the system was that neutral responses were pretty much redundant. In picking a neutral response player was giving up the p/r points increase reward and pretty much never got any compensation for that. Few material rewards or even side quests only available for neutral responses would go a long way toward balancing this.

As for the p/r stuff itself, personally I hadn´t much problems with it.
Difficult checks were usually difficult for a good reason and I think it´s a good thing one couldn´t always "have one´s cake and eat it too", so to speak.
Though for what it´s worth, based on my experience, while I don´t think "playing" the meter 50/50 and passing all the difficult checks was possible, doing so in a 70/30 or even 60/40 fashion was viable in this regard.
In ME1 I was putting points into charm/intimidate whenever I could and in ME2 I maxed the class power fairly early (and went with the variant that gives 100% bonus to p/r) and my character whom I´ve played in a roughly 60/40 fashion (didn´t go far for a punch, but wasn´t generally ruthless in more serious situations, like when lives were at stake) was able to pass all the checks in one way or the other (and finished ME2 with both paragon and renegade bars being 100% full).

I think the variety of consequences of good/bad decision took a step back along to the more graphical presentation. which is totally ok. (Although of coure I would appreciate it )

What I don't like is Nowadays companies pretend to/advertise with this possibility, but in the end it is all the same ending…

I.e. take your Savegame over to ME 2 !!! (had almost no impact )

Thanks for the comments, it's been interesting to read about your experiences (and sorry for the late reply, I've been swamped with work).

In general I think, as a rule of thumb, that a high degree of player freedom/player agency and strong authored narratives are more or less polar opposites. What we're discussion here probably belongs in the 'emergent storytelling box'. I don't think we're quite there yet, but as we get more powerful hardware, and developers get better tools and gain more experience, within the next five years or so, we'll probably see a game that allows for extremely convincing emergent storytelling.

And maybe a small misunderstanding: Some of you talked about characters not being important. To clarify; when I talked about characters in the first post I was talking about player characters/player avatars as well as NPCs