Morality/Vice mechanics

So, out of mechanical curiosity I'm looking into mechanics that reward a player for making bad decisions in character, usually after a flaw or vice of their characters, but that still leave the fact that what they did might not have been too good, and may have to pay a larger price later.
Stuff like the virtue/vice system in world of darkness.
Can you recommend any other examples that do this well?

Indulging in vices in blades sort of works i think? You restore stress by doing that.
>I'm looking into mechanics that reward a player for making bad decisions in character
Burning wheel beliefs system works great for this. You are going to get fucked up and/or complicate your life for acting according to your belief? Good job, here have some fate/persona for it.

You mean blades in the dark?
Either way, those sound just the type of things I'm looking into, will explorer deeper into those, thanks!

Yeah, blades in the dark. Though, i think Burning wheel is more close to what you are looking for, for what i understood. But BW is pretty intense to get into, so i would suggest maybe looking into Mouse guard first, it is BW fork, with much less rules, but it still have that lure to push your players into the "bad" directions in the narrative, while mechanically rewarding them for doing so. In mouse guard you get a "check" for describing how your trait interfered with the task at hand and actually subtract one dice for doing that. But without earning checks you can't properly recover or frame scenes in the player's turn. And you also get meta currency for playing your traits well. And you also get meta currency for following your beliefs, but in MG you only get one belief.

Cool, Mouse Guard is a game I've been supposed to look into anyways.

Also probably take a look at Tales from the loop, 3 out 5 xp prompts is about you getting in trouble.

>QUESTIONS FOR EXPERIENCE POINTS
>1. Did you participate in the session? (Each Kid present always gets at least one XP.)
>2. Have you been in Trouble because of your Problem or your Relationships?
>3. Did you use, or struggle with, your Pride?
>4. Did you put yourself at risk for the other Kids?
>5. Have you learned something new? (What is it?)

In Reign, you can have three Passions: a Mission (quantifiable, completable goal), a Duty (on-going code of behavior), and a Vice (self-explanatory). You get +1 to your dice pool while following a Passion, -1 if you're going against it. They stack and cancel each other out.

So if your Duty is Be An Honorable Knight Guy, your Mission is Escort the Princess to Place, and your Vice is Fuck Bitches, you get +3 if you're defending the princess and her slutty handmaiden. That's the book's example, more or less.

Is that all they do? Just add bonuses and penalties?

Mutants & Masterminds rewards you with Hero Points (a consumeable that lets you get big bonuses or scene-altering powers) if you're willing to play to your weaknesses or complications or even lose a fight.

okay so, mechanically, what would be the effects of high-cut outfits?

No DEX penalties, I imagine.

+5 to any kinds of attempts at seduction

Pendragon's entire character traits system.

My system has a Corruption mechanic where you can gain an immediate and permanent bonus or effect in exchange for losing part of your humanity. One or two Corruption is easy enough to deal with, but it gets cumulatively harder to resist new aspects of your character's behaviour, ethics, and appearance. When you max out Corruption you permanently become an NPC.

The fun part is, Corruption isn't evil. You can suffer it from angelic sources, nature magic, pure magic, and a dozen other sources of power in the game. The individual effects can even be benign at first, they can synch up with your character's existing morality and goals. The problem is that, in the end, the result is always the same - total and complete loss of free will. You become a slave to what you are, intrinsically. You lose the ability to change that, to choose your own path. You stop being the avatar of the player IRL, and you start being a part of the world instead.

Three of my five PCs have Corruption right now. One has a single point and is actively resisting getting any more, one has a few points and is taking them very sparingly, and the third is taking every point she can get and is about three sessions away from losing her character. The two who don't have Corruption either don't feel like they need it, or are ethically opposed to anything that makes them inhuman, even if it's 'good-aligned'.

Honestly instead of an alignment system, choosing a Devotion and a Depravity would be interesting, yeah. What system do you need this for? The mechanics are going to be different depending on that.

Details on that system? It seems really interesting.

World of Darkness requires you to fill in virtues and vices when creating a character. In paper, they are ways to reward good roleplaying with willpower, the resource of the game. Depending on the exact game or edition, some of its mechanics may lean towards making a virtue harder to fulfill but more rewarding (ie. regaining your entire willpower dots), while a vice is the inverse.

In practice, picking a good vice/virtue combo will make you have limitless willpower unless your Storyteller is onto you.

>Pragmatic/Sloth
>The most sensible thing to do right now is wait
>We also need to relax
>I brought a portable DVD player
>And some really good movies

Seconding.
Sauce pls?

Look a dirty world and other games in the One Roll Engine.

There is no traditional stats at all. Rather your character is defined with a list of competing sins and virtues which can help or hinder you depending if you're trying to the right wrong thing

Proving a point nets you pride. Conceiting points earns your humility. Standing up for the little guy in a fight takes courage. Kicking him when he's down takes wrath.

PCs in an RPG should never be lazy or unambitious. It's literally part of being a good protagonist, or hell, even an antagonist.

Well, I'm working on a homebrew system, so yeh.
The very basic mechanic is probably going to be 1d10+modifiers, most commonly attribute+skill.

I have seven 'good' qualities and seven 'bad' qualities that have some mechanical and roleplay effects. They're both a source of an expendable resource and for XP. It's a bit like old WoD but more involved, and not just the Seven Deadly Sins. It is more philosophical than that overall. There is overlap though, especially with the alternate stuff they put out later.

1d10+mods is your entire rolling system? Seems like it lacks variance. 1d10+attribute where attributes are like in Cortex/SW and are die codes. That could be cool. But I;m sure you already have something going.

Yeh, it's very simple. Though, most things that would add or reduce the modifiers of rolls in other systems increase and decrease the stamina cost of the roll here. If you have negative cost you get to roll 2d10 and pick better, if you can't or wont pay the positive stamina cost you roll 2d10 and pick lower.

The actually rolling system might be subject to change though, not that set in stone yet.

Haven't heard of Cortex, gotta check that out.

>stamina
Wait, I remember this from another thread. I thought it was a cool idea.

>Cortex
Oh, forgot to mention, it's a cool system if you don't mind using a lot of different die types. lowest stat is d4, highest is d12, and there are pips of +1 and +2 you can also apply depending. So if you have a Repair skill of d6 and an Intelligence of d8 you roll 1d6+1d8, basically. That's simplified, but it's essentially how it works.

>tfw I'm not sure at all if I've alredy mentioned it in some thread in here, or if someone else just had a similar idea.

Meta-currencies or systems are a mistake. They move the game from what it actually is about (playing your character) to something else (playing for the meta-currency/system).
If you really need to, make your players write down character traits.
Additionally you can do what every normal human bean would do, if someone did something that he thinks is good: Praise them for it (e.g.: That was cool, that you did X; Woah didn't think of that!; etc).

Furthermore, if you think you need meta-currency, you might need to rethink the problems you present your players. As a GM you should have at least a rough idea how the characters could behave in your game, and if you want them to make hard decisions, it is YOUR turn to create problems that challenge them in that way.
Do not try to rely on outside factors like meta-currencies/systems. Your players will end up trying to game the systems instead of playing their characters, which is what they should really be doing.

I dunno man, I just recall someone mentioning a similar system like a week ago and I thought it was cool. I don't even remember what thread it was in. Maybe some homebrew thread that wasn't the general? I think that was it.

Bad players detected. Resource systems are not inherently bad. Sure, you can make a shitty one, but you can also make a good one. It's like anything else. It's only a bad idea to you if your experiences with it are bad. That doesn't make it objectively bad.

> Your players will end up trying to game the systems instead of playing their characters, which is what they should really be doing.
Never happened in my table.

What about just simple mechanical benefits from doing things that these character traits would sensibly help with?

Always happens at my table, always leads to them playing their character traits and motives to 120%, instead of paying them a lip service and taking a highway to the goal.
Though i probably didn't understand what gaming the system would even mean in that context. Like, oh no, players manipulate the system for a desired outcome. By intensely roleplaying their characters. Stop right there RP scum! wat

The problem is that it may not work with autism. Telling someone they did something cool would work if they had normal social sensibilities, but for an autist, the only way to get them to roleplay well may be to give them in-game benefits.

Gaming the system is going out of their way to trigger metacurrency gains. Instead of doing what the character would logically so, they avoid that to go farm aspects or whatever. The easiest way to tell is if a lot of time is being wasted on inconsequential side scenes instead of ones that actually move things along, and it's a/the player(s) who keep pushing for pointless scenes.

>time is being wasted on inconsequential side scenes instead of ones that actually move things along
Why do you keep framing scenes for your faggy character go advance the plot i made reee. I'm being a dick, sorry.
Is it a FATE specific problem maybe? I certainly can imagine someone, for the umpteenth time, framing same old setup to tick his aspect as a problem. But i never really encounter that in games where you get your meta points at the end of the session. In my experience players have no problem ticking their check-boxes while moving forward, and because they know it, there is hardly ever any uncalled for diversions... or that's what i would say, but it's not actually true. Because both as GM and as player i enjoy and call for those slice of life character scenes. More often than not, liking them more than overarching plot. But then, can't call them uncalled for anymore i guess.
If you just want to move things forward, It must be annoying i admit. But from GM point of view, it seems to me like a, uh, better extreme i guess? Than characters being 100% goal oriented, never bothering to roleplay or always picking optimal way out of characters repertory.

Unknown Armies have characters' passions. If you're acting according to your obsession, or your fear or rage stimulus, you can reroll.

Anyone know good systems like this, where the player is rewarded for severly self-destructing their characters? Not straight up killing them, but seriously throwing a wrench in their own shit.

in 5e there is inspiration

FATE, of course. MAGE the Awakening, definitely - you only get better by using more magic, which ALWAYS fucks you in the end.

What you imagined at first hit the nail on the head, but then you kept going and now there's a big dent in the wall with a nail in the middle of it.

>stop doing shit I didn't plan for!
>the railroad don't go to that town!
>why did you add that complication?! It doesn't fit the plot!

>gaming metacurrency systems
That only works if there's no limit to the amount of currency the player can accrue, and/or it being RAW that the player HAS to acquire metacurrency for doing X. That's the big hole in most bitching about Savage Worlds; you don't HAVE to give the players bennies by RAW, they have to EARN them in your eyes. Most other systems are similar, so I don't see the gripe.

That's literally the least inspired system ever.

Nice strawman, it's sure to keep those crows away.

There is an optional belief system in the original Planescape books. The points were awarded for holding to a belief even when it had bad consequences. They could be used for a variety of things I think like dice rerolls.

>optional belief system
>Planescape
>belief
>optional

I know nothing of planescape, explain.

Can you be more of unsubstantial condescending cunt though? If you have shitty player or bad experience in your game and didn't know how to handle it, it's not a metacurency problem. It's you being shit.

Planescape setting is built on belief. If you can make a man believe he doesn't exist, he poofs out of existence

Bonus for eating icecream to all tests due to lack of mental stress. Also a penalty if you eat it too fast

Burning Wheel, with artha and corruption

>wants to decide how the character felt
And then you wonder why you're told you are a shit GM OP.

I hope all your books are burned in a freak fire.