I have
played Dungeons and Dragons for more than 15 years. Lately, I have not had access to any other
players and so I have just been kicking around ideas that normally would be in
a game and instead I am just going to post them on my blog. This is going to be a reoccurring thing as I
just keep hammering out things and not all of them can be turned into elements
in my “random fantasy novel ideas” folder.
What Have I Got: A Web of Alliances
Last week I talked about some other morality systems in geek culture, the not so black and
white dichotomy of “Babylon 5” and the traditional virtues and vices of “World
of Darkness”.
This
week I am going to take a look at an iconic franchise in RPG’s, “Fallout”.
Traditionally
in RPG’s a computer or the Guy running the Game, let’s abbreviate that to Game
Guy or GG for short, need a way to evaluate in shorthand how the world views
the player character(s). Are people
afraid, hostile, friendly, guarded, or horny?
The spectrum of human emotion is a broad one dictated by the personal
philosophy of the observer and the reputation of the observed. How do you try to box in these things?
Dungeons
and Dragons tends to rely on alignment for the default. If you are a good person and you meet an evil
person they will at best see you as naïve at the start, maybe someone to
exploit, maybe a direct threat to their interests. There is variation based on how much depth
the GG wants to give them, but that will usually be the rough starting point. Chaotic people clash with Lawful, Good with
Evil, and Neutral people presumably clash with other Neutrals about
what not to feel all that strongly about.
Anyway,
here are two examples of how the Fallout franchise has handled that
question. One is complete shit and the
other is adequate. I then give a bit of
an insight into my own attempts to harness one of these systems in my own games
and the pitfalls I found with it. There is also a lot of "Skyrim" discussion in there too.
 |
This is what "Web of Alliances" traditionally means.
This will make more sense later. |
Fallout 4: “I didn’t bother”
I chose not
to give any thought to Fallout 4, because I played that game as an extreme loner
and therefore missed out on most of what they decided was important, specifically
how your NPC allies feel about you.
Hey,
Bethesda, if you want to make interpersonal interaction and team building a
core component of the game’s story maybe don’t make “Lone Wanderer” a perk at
all. Maybe gear your game mechanics to
couple with your other game mechanics…. and the story instead of having such obvious
divisions between each of the parts. And
cut all the bloat, it is impossible that anyone in development thought “
Ghoulish”
was worth anything, whoever was pushing for it should be purged.
One of
these days I should go on a long rant about “Fallout 4” and its numerous bad
decisions and how they kneecap the ever loving hell out of the good decisions
which made the game fun. One of these
days.
Whatever.
 |
Endurance 9, are you high?
If you are going to have a shit perk you should at least make it the lowest ranking one. |
Fallout 3: “Murdered by an entire village over a fucking
fork”
There is a
youtuber I follow who made a 90-minute video delving into the depths of
“
Fallout 3 is Garbage (and Here’s Why)”.
You don’t have to watch it, but I feel it does present numerous things
about not only “Fallout 3” but the rest of the Fallout franchise and its value
as a game series and story setting.
I never
really connected with “Fallout 3” for many of the reasons he points to
primarily because of the shallow binary choice aspect to it. Blow up a town that has done you no wrong or
don’t do that. This is not a meaningful
choice. The idea that doing evil,
especially in a covert fashion, would have any effect on how people look at you
is questionable considering the amount of anonymity that the setting would
afford people in it. “Karma” is a
terrible system.
I mentioned
my issues with the bad over simplification of the morality system in 4th
Edition of Dungeons and Dragons, but “Fallout 3” takes it a step even further. The game’s AI is too stupid to have a rational
reaction to minor transgressions.
Go ahead
and steal something, doesn’t matter if someone sees you, you lose karma. Go ahead and steal something while someone
looks, and even if the object is literal garbage they will lynch your ass. I have been stabbed by the town doctor because
I grabbed the controller weird while shifting in my seat.
This is the
limitations of the technology, obviously you can’t make fully thinking
individuals, especially in town that could be obliterated at an early stage in
the game. A massacre committed by you. For no reason.
But, I point to this because this sort of draconian blunt simplicity is
used by lazy players and GG’s without thought.
It is not fun to punish characters who are not playing the way you think they should with
wildly disproportionate punishment or knee jerk in game terror. It is also not okay for players to get a kick
out of brazenly derailing the game because, “My character is going to steal,
and I am willing to burn this whole village down if they tell me not to take
apples without paying.” Hey, dipshit,
while you are trying to shock humor everyone with your edgy character everyone
else is waiting to get on with the story.
(If it is
not clear I am admonishing my younger self for having committed these sins, I
am trying to help you learn from my mistakes so that you can be a better
player).
Fallout New Vegas: “You can tell a lot about a guy by the
company he keeps”
This
system… actually works really well. If
you don’t know much about “New Vegas” (understandable, because at the time of
its release it was way too buggy and as a result failed to gain the traction I
feel it was due)
let me tell you a bit about it.
In it the
post-apocalyptic Mojave Desert. You are
a mailman that has survived being shot in the face and buried in the
desert. You are now out for revenge on
the guy who did it and along the way you meet a variety of colorful characters
and learn the intricacies of numerous factions.
There is a war on and thru chance you are drawn into the conflict as an
agent for one of the 3 primary factions… or you are out for you. You’ll need resources, allies, and an army to
win the war for your chosen side and that means either killing or winning over
the numerous groups of the wasteland.
There is no
good and evil (well, there is certainly an evil side, kind of hard to spin the
faction with all the slavery, misogyny, cultural extermination, mass murder,
and luddite sensibilities as anything other than “evil”) instead you are viewed
as being on good or bad terms with each primary group.
The three
primary factions differ in notable ways.
The democratic New California Republic are nominally the good guys but
they are stretched thin and plagued with numerous frailties, it seems
inevitable that if this war isn’t what beats them then something down the line
will. There is Caesar’s Legion, dozens
of tribes banded together into a grand autocratic military that is sweeping the
nation, they are the aforementioned “evil” side. And there is the leader of the powerful city
state of New Vegas, the notorious Mister House, who wants to run New Vegas as a
model of pre-war glory, utilizing his robot army to protect his glitzy city
from all threats.
Taken along
with the option of, “None of the above” you can actually populate the
traditional alignment system of Dungeons and Dragons with each faction, House
is Lawful, NCR is Good, Caesar is Evil, and taking control and pushing out the
others is Chatoic.
If it were
at all possible, I think
this sort of system would be ideal for Dungeons and
Dragons. It is not possible. A GG would have to first think up all of the
factions, their priorities, and their primary members. They would have to have a key central
conflict, WAR IS A GOOD ONE, and the players would have to understand each one,
which is difficult because inevitably one of them is going to look worse than
the others from the start.
For an
instance of how difficult it is to create a real parity, think of the Imperial
Legion at the start of Skyrim, it is really hard to justify why your character
would work with them after they were about to have you executed when you were
not even on the list to be executed, and it is really hard to justify joining
the Stormcloaks if your character is anything other than a Nord or maybe an
Orc. By the Eight they yell, “
Skyrim is for the Nords” when fighting, naked jingoism is not attractive. Make Skyrim Great Again, I suppose.
Beyond
that, a video game can keep a score card in the background keeping track of
favors and favor that the player has done and curried, a DM would be punishing
themselves if they tried to keep track of all of that information in any
consistent fashion, how do you measure the weight on an action or a
trespass? And good luck getting all the
players to agree to help any particular faction, better luck trying to get them
not to follow only one, better-better luck keeping them all from descending
into backstabbing.
How do I
know? Cause I tried it. Woof!
The Red Crusade: “Unfortunately the experiment ground to
a halt”
I had a war
campaign that I put a lot of creative energy into and while I still consider it
a great idea (I will one day just make a multi-week blog about the details of
it once I get past all of these more general topics) the campaign eventually
slowed down and then stopped. It was not
entirely the fault of the premise, we all had lives and there is only so much
mental energy two lawyers, one physicist, and a graduate student can put into
Dungeons and Dragons. That being said let
me show some ideas and my big failing.
There were
two big sides, the Maunder Empire which resembled Rome or Byzantium in a state
of confusion and in many ways collapse.
They were the Lawful to Lawful-Evil side of things, but they had their
strong points (if you were Human or Halfling and really liked having a well
regimented society with great architecture and functional utilities). They are led by the nephew of the previous
emperor and up till recently they were the most powerful military on the
planet, it is only because a dozen things went wrong all at once that they did
not handily win the war.
Beyond the “We
are really good at illustrating all of the best things about orderly state run
society, but are kind of racist” there were parts that were far more open to
reform and even saw the war as a time to push thru new ideas. It had an evolving
status quo.
The other
side was the Alliance, or “Barbarian Horde” as they were called by the
Empire. They were made up of a diverse
group of beings from the neighboring continent that had pushed off the colonial
yolk of the Maunder and were now on a counter invasion. They were led by the Infamous Red, a half red
dragon who married High Empress Jessica, daughter of the now dead previous
Emperor. The validity of the marriage
was suspect (as Jessica was 13 when they got married), Red wanted to install
himself as a Governor General with Jessica as a puppet ruler. He is the Chaotic to Chaotic-Evil side of
things.
That being
said, Red’s side was far more diverse, Jessica is legitimately in love with Red
and is no longer a child (she is currently 23 and their marriage was non-sexual
until she was an adult) and is looking forward to being the figurehead of an
empire while most of the real work is done by her friends in the Alliance. The Alliance was all about democracy,
plurality, and choice. But they were
also brutal, and many members had a biological need to destroy many, Many, MANY
functional structures and upend the Maunder civilization that would cost
millions of lives. And that is assuming
they would all manage to keep moving in the same direction rather than stall
out or
implode.
In
addition, each side had sub parts, The Empire had 12 different regions, each
under siege from some other threat (Yuan-ti, Demons, Undead). The Alliance had different racial factions
(Catfolk, Humans, Goblins), and there was a half dozen smaller satellite
countries that had pro-Empire and pro-Alliance positions within each (and I
based all of those countries off real life countries). There were also monstrous powers, churches
and cults, and criminal organizations, all of these were exploiting the chaos
of the war to push their agendas. My
creativity went into bloated and complex overdrive. My players couldn’t keep up and became less
interested in seeing any nuance.
The party
never even thought that joining the Empire was an option. Even though one of their first and greatest
allies was a Colonel in the Empire and that most of their crew and allies were educated
in the schools and colleges of the Empire.
And this really comes down to my fault I guess. I did the same thing “Skyrim” did and had
them start off in an island prison run by the Empire called The Salt Box along
with a bunch of other political dissidents.
They escaped the facility, destroying it utterly in the process, and
became a group of mercenary adventurers with a crew of political
dissidents. KIND OF HARD TO LOOK AT BOTH
SIDES WHEN THE FIRST IMAGE IS OF THE WORST PART OF ONE
SIDE.
I tried to
keep the idea of working with one side, then the other, but ultimately it
proved a bit fruitless. The party
committed to one side completely, so much so that one player COMPLETELY ignored
a major plot that I had designed specifically for his character. He didn’t think it furthered the interests of
Empress Jessica enough and he was playing things Lawful Stupid.
That issue
with his character kind of percolated into why I dislike the traditional
alignment system so much. Because his
version of lawful as being so inflexible and single minded and my conception of
lawful as being flexible enough to act without direct orders but be conflicted
about it were so at odds with one another that it killed the story dead.
Next Time: My Favorite Solution
I should
have kept to a golden rule, “Keep it Simple”.
But “Simple” is the issue I have the problem with. I like complex, my mind gets off on seeing
the linking parts and contrasts between actors in a story, and while I did
resent that my player did not take the quest hook I kind of resent that his
behavior up to that point hadn’t keyed me off to what he would do when I
offered it to him.
There is no
perfect solution here. But I do think
that there is a better system that Wizards of the Coast already has, and has
already put a lot of thought into. So
next entry (and perhaps the last on alignment) will be the system that I wish
they had just integrated into Dungeons and Dragons back in 4th
Edition.
WHAT COULD
IT BE!?
The Beg for Attention:
If you
venomously disagree with me, please tell me why in the comments. Feel free to leave links to your own blog on
the topic or articles that you have found helpful. Or write your own counterpoint to all this
(or parts of it) and come back and post a link.
Maybe you
had some kind of knee jerk visceral reaction to my bad mouthing of “Fallout 3/4”
maybe you would like to air your grievances in the comments. I actually do read the comments, maybe even
respond. Sometimes I think about them
for a while, ruminate on them, and then perhaps integrate them into my thinking
and grow as a person. Not often of
course the vast majority of internet comments and culture is toxic waste and
really needs to have been spanked more as children.
Alignment
is the most debated thing in Dungeons and Dragons because, as I wrote, we all
have personal values. So share your
feelings much as I have and experience the glorious indifference of the
internet.
Have Fun!
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