Haunt your party with moments where they'll always wonder if they made the right choice.
Playing good vs. evil games is great! You get to take down baddies, fighting your way towards ultimate and definitive justice! Morality, though? That's a whole different kind of fun. For the role-player, it’s the fun of putting a character through the trenches of what defines them. For the DM, it’s turning the party into a group of philosophers, debating the best path forward, and accepting its consequences. That's why in this episode we break down moral dilemmas, and figure out a way to build them up so we can present the most powerful, customized problems for our party.
In The Strategy Stateroom, we talk through three steps you can take to end up with a great dilemma.
Determining two factions and values to pit against one another.
Adding in competition, stakes, and the price of inaction.
Balancing and complicating the choice, so it's as meaty of a dilemma as it can be.
Throughout, we oversimplify some real-world ethical concepts for the purposes of game design. Seems wrong as I type it out, but we did it. Here they are for reference:
Ethical Frameworks:
Utilitarianism. The net pleasure of the outcome
Kantianism. Universality. If everyone did it, would it be ok?
Care ethics. Our relationships, and caring for others.
Virtue ethics. The virtue of the self
Ethical Fallacies:
The law informs ethics
Morality is subjective
The fallacy of sincerity
Then we jump into The Extra-Dimensional Gateway to talk about a few of our favorite moral dilemmas in video games, and how we can use them to inspire our games.
As always, huge thanks to the support of our patrons for making this episode a reality.
Garr the Pirate, Time Warp, Nico Y., Zach G., No Ma'am, Michelle T., Hentenius, Alan E., Matthew T., Felix R., Chris F., The Senate, Lucas D., Lyla G., The GM Tim, Nevermour, Thomas W., Tyler G., Ty N., Heavyarms, Erik R, Aldrost, Leprecan, and Will H-P.