[MUD-Dev] Alignment (very long)

[Travis Casey]

On Thursday, April 20, 2000, Paul Schwanz - Enterprise Services wrote:

[snip most]

> There are many interesting moral subtleties that I am still trying to work my 
> way through.  One is the fact that two people can have a high regard for life, 
> yet act very differently upon their values.  For instance, I think the Amish 
> place extremely high value on life, thus their pacifism.  However, the patriot 
> might place a similar value on life, but choose to fight to protect it.  Perhaps 
> one values life in a passive way and the other in a more active way.  Or maybe 
> one values life-through-peace and the other values life-through-chaos.  Perhaps 
> a lawful/chaotic modifier will help resolve this.  

> The other issue is the issue of motive.  If an assassain does a bunch of really 
> good deeds so that he can gain the trust of his mark, is he really doing good?  
> Should the system be changed to handle this, or should the "good" actions 
> detract from the assassain's "evil-ness" and adversely affect skills?

Well, I'd gotten most of the way through writing a long reply when I
got to these two paragraphs.  (Note to self -- read all the way
through long posts *before* beginning replies to them.)

I think that these two problems would most likely come up too much to
allow an automatic implementation of a system like this very useful.
To really judge someone's actions, you need full knowledge of the
context of them -- what that character knows/believes about the world
around him/her, what's happened previously to the character, etc.

To go over the two examples you gave quickly:

> Once we give every character a values profile, the next step is to give each
> significant action in the game an appropriate profile as well.  Knocking another 
> character unconscious and taking a small amount of gold from them might result 
> in a values profile of H-1, W-1.  Killing someone from your own town and 
> removing from their body a priceless gem might result in H-5, W-4, P-3.  To find 
> out how well an action lines up with a characters stated value, you could simply 
> multiply the value categories of the person and the action and sum the results. 
> If Bubba the merchant, with the values given in the example, were to kill 
> someone from his own town and remove from their body a priceless gem, the math 
> would look like this:

I can hit a lot of variables just in these two examples that could
affect the profiles given:

 - What if that "small amount of gold" was all the money the first
   character had, and he needed it desperately (say, to pay off a debt
   so he won't go to prison) -- and the robber knows this?  Wouldn't
   that reasonably give it a worse values profile?  What if that were
   true but the robber *didn't* know?

 - In the second example, what if the gem is being stolen for some
   other reason than money?  E.g., what if I'm stealing it *back* from
   someone who stole it from me?  What if it's a crown jewel, and I'm
   a guardsman who knows the person who has it is the thief?

 - In the second example, what if I don't know the person in question
   is from my own town?  For that matter, why should I feel loyalty
   towards someone just because they're from the same town -- that's a
   hidden assumption there.  If I was abused by the townspeople,
   branded a thief unjustly, and cast out by them, I may feel no
   loyalty towards them at all.
   
What if I rob someone without knowing how much money they have?
Should I get moved less towards "greed" because I was unlucky enough
to choose a victim who didn't have much money?  What if I just want to
knock someone out and rob them, but accidentally kill them?

I could go on in this vein, but I think the point is clear already.

A second concern -- not all players are ready to define their
character's personality in detail at character creation.  On
rec.games.frp.advocacy, they have the terms DAS and DIP -- Develop At
Start and Develop In Play.  These are two basic ways of developing a
character's personality.  Some people don't really know what they're
character's personality is going to be like until they've played that
character for a while.  A system such as you describe is going to be a
poor fit for that sort of player.

Since this has all been negative, it's probably sounding like I hate
your idea.  Honestly, I don't -- I'm just not sure that it'll work
well in practice.  However, I don't think that any purely mechanical
alignment system can reflect the realities of how people are.  :-(

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_        Travis S. Casey  <efindel at io.com>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)





_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev