[RPG]: Tome of the Mysteries, reviewed by C.W.Richeson (3/3)

[bergec]

Originally Posted by King of Old School

Willingness to do something isn't necessarily the same as believing it moral.

To go the next step, believing something to be moral doesn't lessen the psychological impact of it, which is what the morality meters are more about than actual morality. Losing points in the morality scales represents a loss of barriers. You become fine with stealing. You are okay with having to kill people now and then. Torture is okay, so long as it is for a good cause. As you lose points, the barriers on your behavior crumble under the force of your rationalizations and soon you have lost any ethical constraints. Any action can be justified. As you reject the idea of right and wrong for your own personal judgment, you eventually reach the point where anything you want to do is right because it is what you want to do. You've made yourself the ultimate authority. This is the essence of hubris.

[DaveB]

The Guardians know that they're committing evil actions for the "Greater Good". The Order as a whole, in their book, comes across as having one big martyr complex.

I gave some thought to the Wisdom (Humanity at the time - I was running Vampire) and Morality mechanics when I started running nWoD games. As I see it, being able to justify your actions in the manner of the Guardians makes you *more* likely to lose your Morality stat of choice. Maintaining your Morality is a function of feeling guilty about it.

This is maybe the opposite way around to how some nWoD books place it - some portray people as "being driven mad" (ie, gaining Derangements) "with Guilt".

But it's a fun alternative. And puts the Kybosh on "but it was self-defence!" arguments. As they result in negative modifiers.

[Black Flag]

Originally Posted by C.W.Richeson

As it stands there's one way to go about it, and all characters are judged by that scale. I doubt most mages feel sinful for retaliating against an attacker using magic, and many Guardians have few problems with altering the minds of others in order to keep their secrets or maintain the Labyrinth. Yet the system will force Wisdom degeneration checks on those characters, whether they feel sin or remorse or not.

As I see it, they're judged by the human scale (with additional considerations due to their special powerz). When a character on a WoD Morality-equivalent track "sins," one of two things happens: either they feel remorse, or they become increasingly callous and eventually lose the capacity to feel remorse for that action. The first is what happens when you pass a Wisdom check; the latter is when you fail. Guardians who have few problems being stereotypical Guardians are the ones with low Wisdom, which ties nicely into their whole martyrdom complex.

Does that mean there's no room for subjectivity? I'd say no, but it's not a cop-out free-for-all like V:tM, either. Murder wounds all people psychologically. They either feel deep remorse or grow callous, but either way it's some heavy shit and you can't ignore its impact. Now, one's personal definition of what exactly constitutes "murder," well... Murder is universally condemned by all human societies, as are theft and so forth, but the specifics vary. Is killing the insane/sick/handicapped/foreign/infidel/heretic murder? Many people throughout history didn't think so. Jewish scripture states "Thou shalt do no murder" and then proceeds to prescribe death for all sorts of infractions. Is capital punishment murder? Millions of people think so. There's a small but quite vocal minority who consider abortion to be murder. Some say that eating meat and wearing fur is equivalent to murder. Now, what about vampires? . . .

See what I mean? Murder is wrong. Period. But what exactly is it? That's where individual perceptions come in.

[Yo! Master]

Originally Posted by bergec

To go the next step, believing something to be moral doesn't lessen the psychological impact of it, which is what the morality meters are more about than actual morality. Losing points in the morality scales represents a loss of barriers. You become fine with stealing. You are okay with having to kill people now and then. Torture is okay, so long as it is for a good cause. As you lose points, the barriers on your behavior crumble under the force of your rationalizations and soon you have lost any ethical constraints. Any action can be justified. As you reject the idea of right and wrong for your own personal judgment, you eventually reach the point where anything you want to do is right because it is what you want to do. You've made yourself the ultimate authority. This is the essence of hubris.

I'm so so stealing this as a concise & to the point explanation of Morality mechanics in WW's games.

[Grafster]

Originally Posted by C.W.Richeson

I doubt most mages feel sinful for retaliating against an attacker using magic, and many Guardians have few problems with altering the minds of others in order to keep their secrets or maintain the Labyrinth. Yet the system will force Wisdom degeneration checks on those characters, whether they feel sin or remorse or not.

Ok. I'm not a huge fan of White Wolf. But this complaint is fairly absurd.
It's a white wolf game. Their games have -always- included morality as a game component. I.e. Sure your supertough bad-ass can rip peoples heads off and he's got superpowers and so on, but he's not an uber-character he's actually just a psycho.

Someone who attacks people in self defense will have his/her wisdom drop to a certain point and then it will stay there. Unless they start killing school children they won't drop lower than that level. They -will- be slightly disadvantaged by playing a burned out sociopath (can't remember what the effects of the low wisdom are).

For those people who want to play Mage like it's 24 then they can just ignore the rules, but it's not like they're something wrong with suggesting that killing people has moral implications that could damage a person's psyche (especially since the game struggles to explain that mages are more prone to imbalance than normal humans).

[C.W.Richeson]

Welcome to RPG.net, Grafster!

It is true that Wisdom will bottom out at a certain point through acting in self defense. I just feel a disconnect between my every day life, where self defense is seen as virtuous in many situations, and the game which writes it up as sinful. In the States we have a complete defense to many crimes called Self Defense and it's a complete defense because we recognize the necessity of such a thing and that there's no need for punishment. I would prefer to have seen self defense be a non-Wisdom issue.