Thus Spake Zargrabowski/VirtuesVsMorality
On 21 Mar 02, at 10:43, Paul Beakley wrote:
- the Virtue system can easily suggest that you often act in a not-good way: Starting fights with everyone who challenges you, refusing to side with your friends if they're wrong, killing swaths of soldiers to save a small village, refusing to back down from a goal.
So good backs down from goals, protects its friends even when they're wrong, and will sacrifice the innocent because it cannot bear to shed blood? I think it's easier to say that the Virtue system operates independently of good and evil.
G.
On 23 Mar 02, at 18:26, Robert Barrett wrote:
- Could we use some language other than "crutch" here please? I've been gaming as long or almost as long as most of the people on this list (since 1980), and I like personality mechanics, whether they be EXALTED's Virtues or PEDNRAGON's paired Personality Traits. I enjoy relinquishing some control over and authorship of my character to an external source--it keeps me honest and ensures that I'm not always playing optimally/efficiently. I *like* and *choose* to play characters who *are* subject to outside forces, both in- and out-of-character.
I agree. I like Pendragon a great deal and deliberately did my best to emulate what I thought were the good parts of its effects in a more compact package. I made it possible to take the personality traits out and ignore the mechanics because I knew some people would have an anaphylaxis-like reaction to them, but I personally use them constantly in play.
Personality mechanics aren't a crutch, they're just a mechanism for modelling character irrationality. Maybe you trust your method acting, but human choice seems to me to be a poor way to model genuinely arbitrary or capricious events. We as a metaculture have accepted that things like 'conflict of interest' and 'implicit bias' can color matters as important as government administration and judicial practice. It seems like you think an awful lot of your roleplaying when you're immune to the stuff that tempts the judges. This is especially so when you choose it over an indifferent determinor like dice, which you have on hand and with an established context where there are used to resolve other arbitrary events.
I know that in my game, Virtue rolls frequently change a character's planned course of action in midstride. People do things that they otherwise wouldn't, and no, I don't think you can reproduce the sudden intervention of the character's tendency toward self-inculgence properly through roleplay. Obviously, this is a religious argument, not a factual one, but since you're one of the game's most frequent writers, I figured it might be wise to weigh in with a counterpoint.
I know that most of the posters to this thread have contended over this bloody inch of ground on rec.games.frp.advocacy off and on for years. The game is written for both factions, and I think the chances of movement among the ideologues present in the discussion are small. If you're not about to reveal that you've had a Damascus Road conversion, the people arguing about the validity of personality mechanics should probably consider that all they're doing is hardening the opposition.
Geoffrey C. Grabowski\\ Exalted Developer, WWGS\\ raindog@white-wolf.com
