Thread by @zedecksiew

To contextualise my thoughts re: incentivizing ethical decisions in RPGs:

Yesterday I played in a game, running through @DonnStroud 's "The Isle of the Plangent Mage". At the start of the adventure, a scene of townsfolk slaughtering beached whales.

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The parent whale had already been killed; its three children were still on the beach, breathing.

The bulk of our session became: "How do we save these whale babies???"

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We were playing with Old School Essentials. OSE's rules-sanctioned incentive for play is as old-school as it gets: gold for XP; monsters defeated for XP.

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The townsfolk saw the beached whales as gifts from Mother Sea; we'd presumably piss off a poor seaside community for taking away a valuable source of food / resources.

But our Cleric had cast Speak to Animals. We knew the kid whales were scared. We *couldn't* not act.

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In the end, we managed to get the villagers to agree to letting three of the four babies go.

The final one -who had been a bit emo and had asked to die, if it matters- our dwarf gave a quick death, instead of being gutted while alive.

Not fucking ideal, but there you go.

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True: now there were three whales in the bay, who saw our party Cleric as their saviour.

But I don't think "potential allies" where at the forefront of our minds. More: "These are scared kids. We can't let them die like this."

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"XP for defeating monsters": the whales weren't monsters -but the risk of sour relations with the townsfolk who've fucked with "XP for gold"; this was our one access to a local economy.

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"We couldn't in good conscience let kids die."

This decision wasn't driven by any rules-sanctioned incentives.

It *was* made meaningful by a table that empathised with the fiction, and a GM / player group ready to play out meaningful "diegetic" consequences.

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In this way, you could argue that we as players were "incentivised" to act with empathy by the culture of our play, and the "solidity" of the fiction - framed by our GM; sustained by player buy-in.

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Our "incentives" weren't a matter of designing better rules or game systems -but in establishing better ways of communication and sharing of the fictional space, between players.

A matter of communications, as @greerrrr says.

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So, to me, the challenge for folks who make tabletop RPGs is less:

- "How do we design a better system to incentivise play we want?"

and more:

- "How do we foster a better culture of communication, so people sharing an imagined space can act with emotional truth?"

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We are humans and are capable of enough empathy to act out emotional truth in fiction;
Not coded robots that need the former to simulate and approximate it.

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ANYWAY:

This is also a long-winded way of saying: @benlaurence1 @yungdumbitch @nTs_qpop @throneofsalt @efnord -

I had a blast playing with you folks, yesterday.

Ball Bearing *still* feels bad about the pink emo whale baby we didn't get to save.