Apart from the in character fact that their new ethics are reprehensible, is their any mechanical reason not to acquire a lot of positive value ethics and then succeed on everything all the time? It doesn't sound like there is any useful importance to the negative value ethics except as a mechanical ball and chain, that you would shed as soon as you can.

I think to make this work you need some mechanical consequence of those new ethics, something that gets harder as you get more, sort of like losing sanity in CoC as a trade off for gaining power. Maybe there should be morality checks when you want to not do something as well?

Perhaps instead of giving them negative and positive scores you should make them all positive, and then put one lot in an 'ethics' category and one in an 'expediency' (or similar word) category. Then depending on the type of test one or the other category is positive, and the other is negative.

So when trying to do something reprehensible but expedient the ethics traits are negative, and the expedient traits are positive.

On the other hand when trying to stop yourself doing something awful (or doing something nice) the expedient traits are negative and the ethical ones are positive.

Then as a result of conflicts you can either split or flip traits from one to the other. (e.g. with a split you can define a pair of opposite ethics and move points between them).

http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/

Having played in the Conception playtest I really like the idea of the game. I can see how it could be really tense, and I liked the way the game was generally formed. And, as you could probably tell from my comments at the time, I like the idea of ethics in general. I think however they need to have a stronger influence on the game than just if you fail or pass checks.

I think what goes to the heart of it for me is what Gaz and Rich said at the time. We're talking about the fate of the human race here, and at extremes like this ethics have to be very strongly held for a person to actually adhere to them. Someone who normally would not kill someone may well be prepared to stand by and let someone else do it, since the death of one person weighed against the fate of the race is a pretty easy equation to resolve.

So, how about starting with the premise that the characters are struggling to hold it all together right from the get go. Teetering on the brink of sanity, not even sure if reality is reality, they cling to their ethics as the only thing that can assure the PCs of their own humanity? In this case breaking their ethical code would result in some serious repercussions for their mental state and how they view reality. In game terms, this could result in a time penalty for the character who allowed their ethics to be breeched as they struggle to hold it together. Perhaps a 1 or 2 minutes being effectively unable to participate in what's going on? Or perhaps a 1,2 or 3 minute penalty for 5, 10 or 15 level ethics?

That way, a character could bring in their ethics skills to stop other characters performing actions that go against their personal code. If that action succeeds, then they get a time penalty and the level of the ethics "skill" is reduced as their concept of reality and sanity is eroded. Reaching low levels in all their ethics skills could have some other negative effect, perhaps tied into the idea that they barely know what's real and what's not, and what's right and what's not anymore. Perhaps a character with very low ethics could gain a "suicidal" or "unhinged" skill that the GM could bring in against that character as a negative modifier, prompting the other characters to support them more and more, especially if they are a specialist who has a skill essential to success of the mission.

David I like the idea but I think it would cause problems with the flow of the system. The idea of some being 'ethics' and other 'expediency' means a deciscion would have to be made as to the kind of conflict that could lead to argument and game pace slowing.

Greg, I like it in principal. Starting the characters as people trying to hold it together long enough to succeed on this mission is really nice. Maybe the penalites introduced could always be active rather than the GM having to do it. For instance if someone shot a child and that was against one of your codes then you would gain a -5 on all your skills until you could pull it together. This would mean you simply would be unable to do your lowest skil, and that you would need more help as the knot progressed.

In your debrief maybe you could choose to overcome that ethic, destorying your humanity but meaning you can hold it together a while longer. Perhaps you could choose to gain -ve delusions/ madness.

More comments please, but along the lines of Greg's idea.

Cheers

Iain

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(crossposted)

I think at the core of this there is a value judgement:

Do I compromise my ethics or save the world?

Well duh! Thats a no-brainer.

I think there has to actually be a story point to this degeneration. So how about this - what if the erosion of ethics caused ripples through time that effected the characters former existence?

So say, your caring maternal doctor figure who will never kill children is forced to kill off a kid in order to secure the future. Happy in the knowledge that she has saved 1000s of lives she returns to the future only to find herself being given a lethal injection - her loss of ethics having rippled through time to make her a child murdering psychopath rather than a heralded saviour of the human race?

Gives an interesting chance for an endgame denoument.

Neil

Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/

I’d be tempted to give the player characters negative traits to start with. Rather than angling from the ethics side, or well-balanced people going back to save the world, I’d consider looking at it from a more desperate angle.

The premise of the game is that there’s been some kind of apocalypse right? Well how about the best and brightest were some of the first to go (for whatever reason)? Or maybe it’s a representative selection of the world’s population that’s left, but whatever, you still haven’t got a massive pool of well-balanced and mentally stable people to send back in time to resolve the knots. You’ve got a bunch of people who under normal circumstances would be kicked out of the military/NASA/whoever because they’re deranged or suffer from hyper tension or what have you.

But the apocalypse is still going on and people are dropping like flies (or would be except the flies are multiplying exponentially on all the billions of bloated corpses), so the Program has to take whatever it can get. In fact it may actively recruit callous, murderous people to do the necessaries and send with them some more sensitive types for the more delicate parts of the operation? In this case you should insist on some negative traits for your characters and then guide your GM to press the buttons when creating Obstacles.

Rather than have ethics or moral choices, I’d build in traits that can and will effect the character. I also like the idea of flip-flopping negative and positive though. Is it possible to tag someone else’s trait?

For example
Captain Kruger – fought in the android wars, ninja in combat, absolutely callous about violence, sociopathic, incapable of performing social interaction in a meaningful way.
Doctor Bedford – excellent Psychologist, seen too many people fall to pieces in the Aftermath, riddled with self doubt

When trying to find the vaccine from a recalcitrant scientist, Dr B tags Kruger’s Sociopath -15 as a bonus saying “Let me know where the medicines are or he’s going to fnck you up”.

Or the GM can tag things the other way – the crew of the needle need to try a softly softly approach to persuade someone to help – while Dr B tries to use his calming bedside manner, GM tags Kruger’s combat training as a penalty - the killing machine gets Nam style flashbacks and wants to cut the Gordian Knot.

Essentially what I’m saying is, humanity is limited in its resources and sending back what it can in the shape of imperfect people to try desperately to do what they can. Character might be better off built with plenty of “issues”, but allow for traits to be used as a double edges sword still, or indeed for anyone to manipulate your traits to their advantage.

Did that actually help, or was I just rambling?

One thing that I don't have a handle on is how many games/sessions you want Stitch to be? That question is important to me because I think if it's either a multi-session thing, or a game where you have 5 or so knots played in one session, it's nice to have a little bit of change in the characters. Not to the extent of damaging the flow of the game of course, but from the perspective of players facing new challenges/restrictions/mind bending madness as time goes on.

Putting that in Gaz's suggestion, that would perhaps mean simply having a chance to tweak characteristics as the game progresses - for instance in knot 1 Doctor Bedford might have "excellent psychologist" as one characteristic but also having "pacifist" as another. In a later knot that might develop to "pretty good psychologist" as one, and "allows violence when he gets hacked off" as another to reflect how he has changed in reaction to what's going on.

In your build (Iain) on the ethics idea that's probably already in there with the ongoing penalty idea.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this one, I think I'm just making the point that if the characters are going to be used across several different knots it would be nice to have some (small) changes to the characters to keep people on their toes (not that the basic game doesn't do that already!)

I like the idea of the briefing/debriefing as the mechanism for doing that though. Especially if you've got a GM who's willing to be all shouty, officious military goon at you.

Hi guys,

Greg Stitch is hopefully going to be playable in an evening over about 4 hours, but it still needs more testing to confirm that to be honest. I would like it to be an intense one-off and will be guiding my design with that in mind.

Ok Gaz has sold me on the flip flopping of traits with that potential situation he outlined. I will have a think and come back to you on how that will be implemented.

Further comments are welcome but I think I pretty much have what I need from this thread. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Cheers

Iain

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'The Giant Brain':Small games, big ideas.