moral relativity, slip-slidin' down the slope Options

[mfb]

morality is an interesting thing in any RPG, because the premise of most of them is that you spend a lot of time killing things. it's pretty easy to bypass the weirdness of a character who can put an entire village of intelligent beings to the sword and not be impacted emotionally or psychologically in the least, but it is weirdness if you think about it at all. in SR, it's especially interesting because you can't fall back on the old "they're evil" crutch. the gangers or secguards you wipe out aren't any more "evil" than the PCs, most of the time.

but the whole killing thing--honestly, that's old ground. it's been covered over and over again. what i'm really interested in is the other immoral activities runners could conceivably participate in, and how players would respond to a character who does so. i'm not, generally, talking about crime-related stuff; selling bodies to ghouls is as boring as killing people. and, likewise, i'm not talking about the extreme stuff--serial killing, bug shamaning, blood magic, whatever. that stuff is too over-the-top to be really interesting.

but how about beating up your wife/SO/kids? this can't be uncommon in the shadows. it's rampant today, when there's law enforcement that nominally cares, hotlines to prevent abuse, big societal pressure, and so on. how about in the shadows, where all of your friends are multiple murderers? think they'll give two shits about giving your pregnant girlfriend a shiner? moreover, if someone at your gaming table decided to play a character who beats his wife, what would you think?

how about racism? racism in SR is all cute and fluffy, partly because it's applied only to things that don't exist (orks, trolls) and partly because most of the material on racism presents it as "bad". even the voice for the 'reasonable Humanis guy' is patronizing and fake--you can't generate any sympathy for him at all, possibly because he's presented as the 'reasonable Humanis guy'. shadowrunners are, for the most part, presented as being equal-opportunity guys who buck the system by accepting their trog brothers. the only racism in SR is in the corporations and some of the governments--not us, not anybody who'd actually be playable. hell, racism isn't even an available flaw. so what would you do if someone sat down at the gaming table and said "my ex-ganger character is a card-carrying member of Humanis. he'll work with metas, but he won't like it."

there's other "bad" behaviors that the shadows should, reasonably, allow or encourage. what of 'em? would you have a problem with them at your table? would you play them? understand, i'm not criticizing anyone who chooses to keep their games "clean". but is there anyone else who likes pushing the moral envelope in realistic, believable ways?

[fistandantilus4....]

I've had a few games where things went into the gray areas and a bit beyond. Characters who have killed S.O.s for cheating, characters that have been raped, or raped, pressured in to putting out, putting out for drugs, using people for their own ends and discarding them. There's a lot of room in SR, especially with tech, for controlling people, exploitation,and abuse.

You really have to know your players but I find it really interesting to push in to these gray areas. I never make things just out right happen to characters. But I give them the moral slide, where they have the oppurtunity to make moral choices and can go farther and farther down the scale. Some have gone down, some have come back up, some have died from it. Makes for very interesting games.

[knasser]

The thing with someone giving their girlfriend a black eye is that it is uncomfortable. People will quite happily play someone who machineguns security guards. That player is never going to actually do it, no-one at that table is going to wonder if the player is really living out his fantasies in doing so. If the same character belittles his girlfriend and says "I smack her around a bit to teach her a lesson," then you can almost see the chairs edging away.

Of course it's not realistic. A lot of the characters that get played are certainly the sort that could also do such things. But because of its immediacy to our very real lives, it's very much does not lead to a fun game. Speaking from personal experience, when you have seen a man kick his girlfriend in the stomach, it's just not something you want to include in a game.

At least for a lot of us. You can run a very dark game successfully which is fine if you have strong role-players who are comfortable with that.

As to racism, no-one who plays with me is conciously racist, but I'm comfortable with them playing a racist character. Racism occupies a special place in my game. But I think it's realistic that Shadowrunners would generally not be racist. They are on the whole marginalised sections of society and don't get the opportunity to isolate themselves in little racially "pure" communities. And racism is about isolation, whether the walls are built out of national borders or violence of extremist members of different groups. A humanis shadowrunner might be racist when they join the team. I don't see it surviving a fight or two. At least not where the particular metahumans in the team are considered.

[treehugger]

Very interesting thread.
I used to game master 7thsea, a cloak and daggers game with pirates magic and mousqueteers ... It was all about being a heroe, but once you had some experience, players had to think about their actions their motivations and their consequences.
Not all players like it, they sometimes want just to chill out and not think about that stuff.
Shadowrun is in my opinion not a game where you can just blast everything with little consequences (like in D&D style of games).
I always push my players to have a clearly defined code of conduct, not in an honorable sense, but just to think about who his/her character is and what he's willing to do or not.
Having a racist character is imho the same as a drug addicted character : its in a way a "flaw".
I always say that the more flaws and problems a character have, the more interesting it is to play it.
So i always encourage it.
All my players and myself used to do a lot of LARP, so if a player creates a racist character, then i know he'll play it to the end even if it could harm his character.
In exchange, i always try to reward this sort of good roleplaying : a player that plays his character to its limits deserves some kind of reward.
As rewards i dont mean karma or cash (well not necessarely), but i've noticed informations and contacts usually where more than enought for the characters.
Lets say you have a racist character.
The player makes good roleplaying, risking his char's life for his beliefs.
On the long run, he'd meet important humanis npcs. He could meet Alamaise, or general Yeats and be part of the grand scheme of things.
You could give him the opportunity to go far into his way of thinking.
As for roleplaying, it could be excellent, the player could find out that humanis is really really bad and messed up with powers above imagination, and try to get out of it. Again good RP possibilities :)

For more "mundane" misbehavior, i'd go for a totally different approach.
I'd push the player to go farther and farther on the "dark side" giving him some opportunities to do meaner things.
Once he starts to be really "dark" then i'll go to the first option i mentioned.

Whatever the case, i always tell the players that every actions will have its consequences, for good or bad.

[mfb]

[FrankTrollman]

[mfb]

it's not that they're not playable, it's that the ethical questions surrounding them are boring--pretty black and white, cut and dried. ritual murder, investing innocent people with life-devouring bugs--where's the moral dilemma in that? you could play them as conflicted people with realistic goals and emotions, but even then, the path you're going to follow in playing out their lives/careers is pretty predictable. fun, on occasion, but predictable.

[Wounded Ronin]

I don't know why everyone's so squeamish. I don't really have a problem with the abstract concept of a racist or girlfriend-kicking player character. Hell, I have played a pretty evil character.

Later I wrote some fiction from the perspective of that character for a contest on this board and a lot of the respondants seemed to agree that the character was evil on some level:

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...3334&hl=harvard

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...3335&hl=harvard



I say, the darker and more depressing the better.

[eidolon]

I don't have a whole lot to add at the moment, just this one thought.

Where do SR players get the idea that characters aren't racist? It isn't spelled out in the books. In fact, in the earlier days of SR material, where racism was more present in both rules and the source material, I'd say that it's just as expected that a PC be racist as not. I'd say that any idea that "shadowrunners aren't racist, they're above that" comes from the players' discomfort regarding the subject.

I've played a racist character and GMed for several. Racism is part of the SR world, and so are the characters.

[bibliophile20]

[treehugger]

My opinion always was that "most" runners where more leaning towards a neo anarchist mindset.
A runner need to accept the fact he is a criminal but also that there are rules he must follow (a runner cannot be just a criminal living by the law of the strongest, else his employers would really doubt his loyalty).
A racist runner would have a hard time working for a non-human or a non member of his race, and even a harder time working WITH such people.
Not because he could not get along with them, but that THEY would not get along with him.
Now the racist character could hide his thoughts, but what the point then ? it needs to be played in someway, so other characters would notice at some point.

The philosophy behind Shadowrun always felt very humanist ( in a sense of opposing seggregation of any kind) as shown by comments of people laughting at the 20th century racism when you consider facing an 8 feet tall troll ...
In fact it always showed the idiocy of being racist by pointing out stupid behaviors in shadowrun and making an easy parallel with our world ...

One of my players play an Elf from Tir Nan Og and raised in the belief he was of the superior race etc ... (clearly some kind of neo nazi education)

He's playing quite well and distrusts any non elven person, even if he realises that those that truely mean to harm him are of his kind (he escaped his "educators")
While this is an easier way of playing racism, i dont really think that plain racism is the kind of "flaw" a character could have and stay a long time alive in the shadows.

[mfb]

[hyzmarca]

There are two different types of people who beat their spouses. Idiots with anger management problems and nice people who are making calculated attempts to give a deeply masochistic person exactly what he/she wants.

Take, for example, the third season episode of The Shield in which Vic roughs up a prostitute and forces her to fellate his pistol. Now, we know from previous experience that Vic isn't the sort of dude who gets off on that but it is quite obvious from the scene that the prostitute is getting off on it. And it works. After that, she becomes very co-operative. She isn't co-operative because of fear, however, but out of some bizarre sort of love.

And this is the difference between domestic violence that is stupid and domestic violence that is acceptable at the gaming table. The former type of domestic violence is the hallmark of someone who shouldn't last three seconds in the Shadows. It's the kind of thing that gets you shot in the face in your sleep by your life-partner. The latter is, in some cases, heroic. If she likes being beaten, if it makes her wet, then the only things you have to worry about are knocking her out too soon and causing more physical damage than can be healed with a first-aid or a spell. That isn't being an asshole. Thet's being a nice person with an unusual relationship.

There are two types of people who stay in violent controlling relationships. People who have lost all of their self-worth and people who want to be violently controlled. The former is the kind of person that a nice individual would help up rather than continue to beat down. These are the kinds of people who eventually snap and get off on Battered Woman's Syndrome if they don't commit suicide after. The latter, however, is the kind of person who you have to violently control is you want to have a good healthy relationship and is you don't she'll seek out someone who will.

The former kind of spouse-beater is nothing more than a bully and being a bully is, in general, uncomfortable for players. Bullies aren't smart people. They're idiots just asking to be put into place because they can't control their need for violent ego-gratification. Being a bully is very unshadowrunnery.

[treehugger]

[treehugger]

Excellent point Hyzmarca :)
I'd like to have characters like that on my table :)

[Kagetenshi]

[Moon-Hawk]

I think it would be fun if someone really wanted to explore playing a racist, sexist, whatever character, but everyone at the table would have to be clear that it was strictly play.
I had a player in one game once who submitted a character with the flaw, "Hatred: Fags" which I promptly vetoed. As a matter of fact, that game died shortly thereafter and I haven't gamed with him since. If he had really wanted to explore the issue of playing someone who had a real problem with homosexuality, that would've been fine, but he was just trying to get free points and justify being a bigot with the excuse of "roleplaying" at the same time. Not cool.

edit: Oh yeah, and for our friends across the pond, we're not talking about a hatred of cigarettes, here. ;-)

[treehugger]

Racism is used most of the time instead of the better term of "xenophobia" or even better "ethnophobia".
Xenophobia could be translated as "mad fear of strangness" ethnophobia as "mad fear of different ethnic".
Like other "phobias" it is a pathology, a mental illness, nothing more.
So the average Humanis member is Xenophobic, he just "hates trogs" and that's all.

Racism, is a belief that the other races are evil/weak/inferior/dangerous etc ...
This belief has always been used as a political tool to hide other problems, unite a people to fight another regardless of "good" reasons, make potential rivals dissapear etc ... using hate and fear to drive the masses.

In both cases i dont see how i could take someone racist or xenophobic seriously ...

[Kagetenshi]

Fags are pretty obnoxious, but that's what we have fagging for. That way it doesn't need to be you who gets all fagged out.

treehugger: I'll make a longer answer hopefully after I've finished the work I've got now, but the short answer: look back fifteen years, then look back forty years.

~J

[Moon-Hawk]

[Kagetenshi]

It's the other British use. Look up "fagging"—if it has a reference to British public schools (that being the British use of that phrase, too), you've got the right meaning.

~J

[Backgammon]

[hyzmarca]

There are two different types of people who beat their spouses. Idiots with anger management problems and nice people who are making calculated attempts to give a deeply masochistic person exactly what he/she wants.

Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Really, do you have studies you can point to backing up this idea? Any at all? This smells strongly of the "wisdom" of repugnance.

I think treehugger is also tapping into the same source of "wisdom".

~J

The wisdom of repugnance works very well at the gaming table; after all, it is the repugnance of the act that is at issue. It is, of course, a simplification, just as damage codes are.

I didn't get into things like provocation, violent arguments, and mutually abusive relationships because they are highly unlikely to come up in a gaming session. If the GM has an NPC girlfriend provoke a PC into a violent argument then that is a hell of a lot different from a player just randomly announcing "I make a melee attack against my girlfriend for the fun of it."
When the GM provokes the conflict, it is a very grey thing. If the NPC SO is verbally abusive then many would see physical retaliation to be justified. However, this situation isn't going to come up very often and it is very difficult to roleplay. You need a very good group, not just a comfortable one, or else you risk the players coming to physical blows.
It is easy for players and GMs to be coldly dispassionate when the characters are just shooting at each other. When you have a verbal argument it isn't throwing numbers at numbers, anymore. It is real abusive words coming from a real person's mind and mouth directed at a real person's ears. When that happens, the line between character and player can blur in some very bad ways. Its why heated abusive verbal arguments between characters are most often caricatures of a real argument consisting of lame putdowns that would not anger any real person, rather than a well role-played passionate violent thing.

For the record, my statement that wifebeaters are either bullies or doms in a BDSM relationship assumes a lack or reasonable provocation. The term "anger management issues" was an unfortunate oversimplification. Like bullying, unprovoked domestic violence is mostly about exercising control.

[Shev]

[eidolon]

mfb, James had similar comments in response to my post. Here's my response, since it applies somewhat here as well.