Breaking the Negative Moral Feedback Loop in RPGs

What is the Moral Feedback Loop in RPGs

The negative moral feedback loop in RPGs is a situation where a player identifies on some level with his character and either reinforces his own questionable morals through play or explores new frontiers of immorality through play. This is to be avoided. Better to never play RPGs than to let them drag you to hell, or help others go there. (You should seek a positive moral feedback loops whenever possible!)

Why can't I play an Evil Character?

You can for short periods, if you are morally and psychologically developed enough that the negative feedback loop won't take hold. Mr. Wargaming explains this much better than I can in a recent video:. The thing is, this is an elite level of RPG play that the vast majority of modern RPGers simply aren't ready for.

What can be done for those working towards elite level play?

The rest of this article addresses one experiment. As a preview:

Identifying with a Specific Character

Any player that 'sees' some of their own personality in a character they are playing is succumbing to identifying with their character. This may be intentional or unintentional and may showcase the best or worst of a person. Some modern RPGs treat this identification as the highest form of RPGs. Gross!

An elite player should be able to be handed virtually any character sheet randomly generated by someone else and play using it. But we're not here for the elite player, we're here for the beginner to mid tier.

Breaking the Single Character Identification

What I did in the experiment to break the identification is give everyone a specific set of characters at the start. Everyone got:

Initial stats are assigned. Everyone gets to pick the alignments for their characters, except for Paladins which HAVE to be Lawful Good. One new player cheered and immediately said essentially, "I'm going with Chaotic Neutral for my Scout because then I can do whatever I want" (this is generally an ammonal random psycho alignment choice or someone who really wants to play Chaotic Evil). I responded, "That's fine, but keep in mind if you're Paladin adventures with that character and sees negative actions your Paladin will either have to challenge your Scout or loses all his Paladin powers." At this the player immediately wanted more time to consider the impact of alignment choices for all of his characters.

Why did this work?

The player was faced with an immediate loss of all those Paladin goodies if he made a maladjusted choice. I didn't have to use any coercion beyond that standard Paladin rules. Faced with the loss alone he rethought. If he had chosen to go ahead with it, things would have eventually played out and turned his Paladin into a mediocre fighter or he could have demonstrated some real role playing proficiency by playing out the conflict between two of his own characters.

How The Campaign is Setup

I rolled up a random campaign map with a corner of Ocean. From there I went in a spiral using the random map generation tables in the 1e DMG. I rolled up the 17% chance of a building of a habitation. Each hex is 24 miles, there are roughly 200 hexes and close to the correct number of cities/towns/etc. I let the map dictate the story, so there was in recent memory an apocalypse generated by a society with more magic and population than today. There is one major city, by rolling on the random personality charts I find it is run by a Paladin and is a bit overstretched defending itself from ravening hordes to the north. If anyone is going to help civilize this fallen continent it is going to have to be the PCs. Plenty of towns and villages around, some notable ruins and caves.

The PCs were expelled from the previous place they were in for meddling with local politics (they were framed). The PCs were exiled and loaded on to a pirate ship, but weren't sold off as slaves. There were roughly 25 characters and henchmen after all, and neither the pirate captain nor the PCs wanted to see how many losses would result a fight. During a tense ship ride a massive storm blew up and the pirate ship was blown far off coarse and had a minor crash into an unknown island. Minor in that almost no one died.

The pirate captain gave up the ship and directed his crew to inhabit an abandoned castle near the shipwreck. He then expelled the PCs threatening them with death and enslavement if he sees them at nightfall. Having a fight force of roughly 25 PCs and henchmen vs nearly 150 pirates led to a quick decision on the part of the PCs to leave, but eventually return to deal with the evil pirates once a fighting force could be raised.

From this point onward any hex with a known habitation is treated as Inhabited for rolling encounters and Uninhabited if it does not have a known habitation. Newly discovered towns will be rare and treated as either, 1) magically macguffined into the world due to the apocalypse OR 2) as having cut themselves off and hiding from the world once the nearby road disappeared in the apocalypse.

Map Exploration

At the end of each session the Scouts can go out and explore a hex and report back, but doing so means that Scout is unavailable in the following session. In between sessions I roll 7 days worth of encounters for the given terrain type. The Scout is mostly able to avoid any actual confrontation and can report back all the 'interesting' things in one given hex. This is to give the players an immediately tangible use for downtime, and a consequence of said downtime.

Session Reports

Session One

Most of session one was taken up with the aforementioned shipwreck. The PCs explored inward and had a minor encounter that very luckily resulted in a few valuable gem stones. (Option Q had come up a lot from random encounter treasure).

Session Two

The PCs explore a hex and find some surprise some spiders! After a brief fight and getting used to having spells, they triumph and find a nearby hamlet. The player that almost had a chaotic neutral scout, immediately latches on to the wargame aspect and hires every available man in the hamlet. One of the other players wants a house and is willing to trade the groups gemstones for it. After a brief discussion all the players agree and talk to the leader of the hamlet. It's agreed that the PCs, either through manual labor or paying for a road to be built may have the one abandoned house in the hamlet. Workers are then hired to build ~30 miles of connecting road.

Session Three

Two scouts were sent out, too tired after a week of wilderness exploration to adventure, but report in on wildlife in the areas, as well as some moderately primitive tribes. The PCs opt to go talk to one of the tribes. Realizing that reaction adjustment scores are important after a tiny hint, they have one of the Paladins lead the way in talking to the tribal elder. The reaction score is phenomenally high, so the tribal leader offers control of the tribe to the Paladin, if he can lead them to victory in a battle. The PCs go off to explore rumors of a kobolds in the area. The go to where the scout indicated and find a large tribe of kobolds in a hillside, mining away.

Here I present them with two options. The PCs can either bring a small force into the dungeon and sneak around fighting and looking for loot, or try and lure out the bulk of the kobolds and meet them in a straight up battle. The PCs upon realizing that a magic-user or cleric can be attached to a troop of fighting men, and be the last ones in the troop to die, choose wargame style over dungeon exploration style encounter. The Paladin goes and collects all the tribemen warriors for glorious battle. One player has a gnome illusionist and uses Improved Phantasmal force to make the kobolds think a force of gnomish warriors is attacking.

6 PCs, a force of tribemen and force of illusionary gnome warriors attack a the kobolds. Enraged by their genetic enemy, the kobolds call every available fighter to repel the attack. The tribesmen are first to engage, and after a few rounds of melee their moral breaks. Things don't look good for the PCs. But next are the illusionary gnomish warriors. The kobolds have heard nightmare stories of these creature their whole lives. Even though a few kobolds break through the illusion and start warning their brethren each round, more die to the fighting. The PCs inflict a reasonable amount of casualties. The kobold morale never breaks until they are almost all defeated, and neither does that of the illusionary gnomes (but only thanks to being illusionary). The last few kobolds eventually surrender or try to flee, but are cut down to stem the flow of evil.

The PCs are then free to loot the lair without fear and the Paladin is given leadership of the tribesmen. The PCs forces have swelled to roughly 60 fighting men.

Two scouts are sent out to new hexes.

Session Four

The two scouts find surprisingly little, most just regular wildlife.

The players have all decided they want to increase the size of their fighting force. They send in a fighter to try and talk to the other tribe they had discovered in-between session two and three. This is a rookie mistake, as the fighter doesn't have a charisma bonus. The discussion goes poorly, but the PCs are allowed to flee with their lives, after leave some gold as tribute.

The PCs then stumble onto a nest of giant ants. One of the Clerics uses 'Speak With Animals' to communicate with one of the worker ants. Finding out the size of the nest and that the ants are searching for protein, the PCs devise a plan to direct the ants to the tribesmen as a form of revenge. After walking the worker ant to near the tribesmen and back to the nest the ants start streaming out. The PCs then enter and after a tense fight with the few ants tending to the queen, they dispatch the queen. A small amount of treasure is found on a nearby corpse.

There will have to be some repercussions from this sessions, since the motivation was revenge on an otherwise peaceful, if isolationist tribe.