This episode went live early: so here’s the transcript folks! Thanks to Imreal on the forums for the new tag line.
Many early roleplaying games had a strong division between good and evil, so that violence was just. In Ars Magica, many sagas are more interested in the results of the use of power than in the combat itself. In a saga that’s relatively combat-sparse I find it more interesting to make villains who have a different version of good than the player characters. It helps explain why the setting doesn’t devolve into a series of firefights between magi.
Nagel believed there were at least five incommmesurable sources of value. By this, he meant that they could not be collapsed into each other, so that they could be compared on a single metric. When you have two people arguing what is best, if they are each arguing from a different one of these five, then there is no way to resolve that argument.
Nagel’s five sources are:
- Specific obligations to organisations or people.
- General rights of all people
- Utility (performing actions which provide the greatest good for the greatest number)
- Perfectionist values (this includes things that make the meaning of being human expand. Examples include scientific discovery, artistic creation and space exploration)
- Personal projects. This can seem like the most difficult to defend, but Nagel’s point is that these draw dedication, sacrifice and effort from people, so they can’t be treated as mere selfishness.
Many virtues or flaws can be mapped to one of these incommesureable definitions. To have a conflict between different forms of good, find one style of good to which most of your player characters cling, and then design a rival whose metric of good is from an another list. One trick I enjoy is pitting two characters who have the same virtue, but hold it for different reasons, against each other.
Ars Magica’s virtues and flaws weigh heavily toward specific obligation. That’;s a relic of game design: it means that you can most easily create a rival with one of the other four choices. I’d suggest specific obligations encompass versions of Clerk (church), Clsoe family ties, Covenfolk, Craftsman (guilds), Custos, Dependant, Favours, Friar, Gentleman/woman (nobility), Hermetic Prestige (other heirs), Hedge wizard (others in the tradition), Knight (your lord), Landed noble (your lord), Oath of fealty, Redcap (the Order or your house), Peasant,
Interest in the general rights of all people may be vested in the Church, which means it includes features such as Compassionate, Friar, Generous, Guardian Angel, Pious, True Faith. I’d also put the Indiscreet flaw here.
Utility is a modern idea, which allows you to hand a bundle of suffering to some people, on the excuse that it allows a far greater bundle of joy to land with other people. This isn’t a usual mindset in most medieval writing, but a sort of bounded utilitarianism, avoiding truly atrocious things, is often implied in the actions of the players. Why free a particular village of peasants from a horrible master? Why fight a particular monster to save people, and decline to fight an even greater monster that might cause you harm? It’s because the moral imperative to fight the monster is a bounded consideration, which doesn’t suit either general rights or perfectionist values.
Perfectionist values can be expressed by drives such as Ambitious, Pious Higher Purpose, True Love in the chivalric sense, The Enigma, and Obsessions with impersonal goals like Original Research.
There are many personal projects which are expressed by an interaction between the virtues selected at character creation and the choices made when spending experience. The most obvious are Ambitious, Avaricious, Compassionate, Driven, Optimistic, Landed Noble, and Knight, in an errantry sense.
So, to recap, if your player characters, like many characters in Ars Magica, are usually driven by specific obligations to people or organisations, try creating enemies who draw their moral compass from one of the other four drives.
Photo credit: Photo on Foter.com
Games From Folktales 