For kicks, I just took the “Dante’s Inferno Hell Test,” which I found out about from the Morbidgames blog. Yay, I ended up in Purgatory! (If you’re a gamer, you may consider the personality disorder identification quiz instead.)
| Level | Score |
|---|---|
| Purgatory (Repenting Believers) | Very High |
| Level 1 – Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers) | Low |
| Level 2 (Lustful) | High |
| Level 3 (Gluttonous) | High |
| Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious) | Very Low |
| Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy) | Low |
| Level 6 – The City of Dis (Heretics) | Very Low |
| Level 7 (Violent) | Low |
| Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers) | Low |
| Level 9 – Cocytus (Treacherous) | Low |
Anyway, this brings up an interesting question as I plan to run a cleric in our next campaign, which will be a Pathfinder Beta playtest running through the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path. Real-world moral systems have a lot of weird fiddly bits in them, but they are taken quite seriously by large numbers of people. It’s not all about “do I kill the baby orc,” but what you do with your money, what you eat, et cetera. D&D has tried hard to shed even the limited amount of this it contained (paladin poverty, etc.) over time. But in a living, breathing world, this should be part of it (I know, many of my fellow gamers, being inherently amoral, prefer a world without anyone but maybe a couple bad guys that have any kind of serious moral code… We all do a little wish fulfillment in RPGs but I’m not so into that.)
IRL, there are a host of moral rules in terms of dealing with the dead. In D&D, even party members are lucky to get a burial with their looting. The simplistic domains of most D&D deities don’t provide a lot of help – “I’m the God of Wrasslin’!” Uh, so in everyday life I…. Wrassle? I don’t know. This leads to the common stereotype of the paladin being the only guy who ever has a moral code, and his is so restrictive that it’s annoying.
One of the things that attracts me to games like Legend of the Five Rings is that they do have a strong societal code that impacts the game substantially – I guess it escaped the chopping block on the grounds that “it’s cool cause it’s Asian”.
What games have you been in that have had reasonably realistic moral codes, and how did that play out?
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