How do you deal with morality in games?

How do you deal with morality in games?

Objective morality like alignment charts do not make any sense, it's all relative.

I do not make it scientifically measurable

For the most part, common sense.

When that doesn't work, pic.

Spooks all the way down.

Cause and Effect without fairness. The thing that would reasonably happen is what's going to happen, regardless of the "good" or "evil" behind it.

Code words for a 4-way war between various divine factions. There's a Team Good, a Team Evil, a Team Law, and a Team Chaos. People throw in with the team they're rooting for or don't as the case may be.

The main reason I do it this way is so that the divines involved can disagree with each other even if they're still on the same team, and on several occasions divines ended up working across team lines temporarily. There's no "master list of right answers" available to anybody to crib from, only loosely defined group goals.

I incorporate reactions into actions and that's about it. I'm not gonna put morality on a chart or some shit like that, that would be silly as shit!

>alignment
>morality
I believe you have missed the point.

As a GM?
The world goes on, everyone has their motivations and what they are willing to do for them.
As a player?
My pc does as they feel serves their particular mindset.
>actual answer
This thread is stupid.

Playing a game with alignment run by a post-modernist must be like chewing tinfoil. We get it, morality is metaphysical. That's the point. Alignments are the result of actual living divine forces, they embody ideals, they make the metaphysical physical. To reject them in such a setting is idiocy.

Also saged for bad thread.

>How do you deal with morality in games?
I'm currently running a Black Crusade game, in that game morality is something that happens to other people.

As DM: I write through all the setting details and converse with players before the game so that they understand what are we aiming for / what are they are getting into. Basically, imo it's about synchronizing our points of view. If it's a "morally gray" or "evil" party everyone should be ready for vile things to be included beforehand.

As for mechanics, in 5e alignments don't connect with much.

As player: by studying setting before the game, asking DM questions about what tone he's going for so that I won't end up autistic related to the party.

The problem is that most official settings do a bad job at handling alignment because they weren't made with attention to what a world with objective morality would be like

>most official settings do a bad job at handling alignment because they weren't made with attention to what a world with objective morality would be like

This. If you could get regular 100% Truth verifications that your actions were in accordance with Universal Morality, shit would be really weird.

Actually that sounds like an interesting setting

It's actually very simple!

I don't run D&D

For DnD specifically, I use objective morality as the forces that impact the world on a cosmic level. There are objectives goods, objective evils, objective forces for law and objective forces for chaos. But everyone on earth, from mortals to monsters and everything in between, is fluid. They have the choice to act however they wish, and are not constrained into a box of morality. They can be more aligned one way than other, but they are still complex beings that don't fit the mold as cosmic forces do.

Congratulations, you actually bothered to read the books because that's fucking exactly how it's described in them

Yep. No idea why everyone gets so pissy about them, it's a cool set up.

Because our modern understanding of morality is so deeply rooted in subjectivism that people can't wrap their head around the platonic ideals existing

That and nobody reads the books outside of combat rules

ITT: Spooks.

I mean the way the book as written doesn't really do objective morality justice, the authors seem to have trouble with objective morality

Who you callin' a spook, ya spook?

I ain't your spook, ya spook.

I find that real strange. You can still tell complex stories with gray morality while also having objective goods and evils in the world.

I played a paladin as if this were the case once. It was when I was reading some Kierkegaard. Fun times fear & trembling.

You could probably do it as the Celestial Bureaucracy that actually worked instead of how we tend to think of bureaucracy. Could be interesting. I think the trick with a more traditional pseudo medieval dnd thing is trying to sort out if the mortals understand the Morality or just have to take the God's word for it.

It determines the side they pick in the great planar conflict.

That's all.

I have a few ideas scratched down but nothing concrete, I figure a monotheistic cosmology would be best, each religion would be a flawed interpretation of the one true gods wishes, clerics would derive power from angels and saints instead of god

Yeah, it might work better if you keep it rough/vague burning bush style and let the characters interpret it.

Alignment was designed in part to represent morality, it is a fair comparison.

>Alignments are the result of actual living divine forces, they embody ideals, they make the metaphysical physical.

Sounds like spooks

Play it however you like, you can pretty much justify anything you do to be in accordance with your alignment.

I never understood why the "evil" alignments were even a thing people chose. Wouldn't each side in a conflict think of themselves as the "good" and the other as the "evil"?

>I never understood why the "evil" alignments were even a thing people chose. Wouldn't each side in a conflict think of themselves as the "good" and the other as the "evil"?

yes, and both of those sides can be good within the D&D alignment. There is nothing within it that would stop two good parties from conflicting.

Evil would be "Fuck doing the right thing, I'm in this for me and me alone."

I don't fuck with alignments, I just have my players each write a paragraph about their character's sense of morality. EZPZ.