Gameplay aspects to stress moral ambiguity?

[Carduus]

One thing I've seen time and time again on these forums is that gameplay should be used to reinforce a game's theme or overall desired 'mood', but oftentimes, that's easier said than done. A mood of childlike joy could be enhanced by simplistic skills, bright, geometric shapes, and a very user-friendly UI. A mood of gloom or despondency might have five skills just to survive the world or use grim means like fueling powers with blood or souls.


But I decided to take on a stinker of a theme: moral ambiguity, the idea that there is no clear moral/ethical answer to any one question, and that 'good' or 'evil' can often be subjective. To reflect this, I've added many more social skills than I otherwise would in a video game rpg, am using a two-axis relationship system (each faction and each NPC gives you a Love/Hate rating as well as a Comfort/Fear one, allowing for more nuanced relations with each faction), have created a lot of very detailed NPCs with motivations other than the classic Kefka-esque one of waking up and deciding to do evil stuff, am creating many different ways of 'beating' the game as well as solving individual problems, creating ambiguity within the very physics of the world, etc. This has been a helluva thing to implement within the RPGMaker framework, and has given me many a headache.


So first, I'm curious how others would change gameplay for something as difficult to define and nebulous as 'moral ambiguity'? How would you craft the imagery, the skills/spells, the story, the combat, whatever, to reinforce a theme like that?


And second, tell me about the theme/mood of one of your games where you had to change major gameplay elements in order to make the gameplay fit. How did you go about brainstorming the issue?

 

[Pierman Walter]

If you have multiple endings, don't have unambiguously good or bad endings where you only do good things, then have good things happen, and vice versa. Make it possible to be punished for doing good things, and rewarded for doing bad things. For example, if you are fighting the rulers of an enemy kingdom, but choose to spare the lives of the innocent little princes and princesses, later in the game, they show up and try to kill you. Or you could massacre an entire dwarf mine to loot all the gold, but nobody ever finds out, so you never pay for your actions.


In my game, the main character is persecuted by everyone because the media reported his actions in a slanderous way, but he could either be a falsely accused sweetheart who genuinely means well, or a perverted murderous lunatic, depending on how you play and what dialogues you choose. Either way, people who don't know you will continue to hate you, no matter how good you try to be. There are also multiple endings, the two main ones being the ending where you choose to follow a totalitarian government and live to a ripe old age, telling stories of your awesome space adventures to your friends and loving grandchildren, and the ending where you choose to rebel and die from getting your head smashed in with a brick by a crying teenage girl because you accidentally killed her father in an attack against the aforementioned totalitarian government. There are other less poignant endings, but they mostly involve retirement and particularly fascinating deaths. The main point of the game is that you are not special in any way. Throughout the game, you go on space adventures and do cool things, but you constantly hear on the news or in person about other people going on huger space adventures and doing even cooler things. However, you shouldn't let any of this get you down, which brings me to the second point of the game: the world is awesome and you should be able to do and see awesome things without worrying about being the bravest and the best. To emphasize this point, there are lots of secret places and interesting NPCs all over the place that are easy to miss if you only focus on hunting down the area boss or listening to plot-important audio logs. 

 

[BigToastie]

The problem is I dont want to give away how my system works (its a decision system/morality system I guess), but my approach to creating it was... what decisions could genuinly make people be concerned about their decisions.


basically rather then the linear model where you get 'choices' it doesn't really impact the games end / main events.


choices in my game will completely change villages, how certain people are round you, what items are available to you and you can equip, what companions you will come across, what bosses strengths will be.


To not go into detail but, every decision you make should lead to some sort of change in your game, this makes your game feel more impactful, for instance simply refusing to help someone may give you a worse reputation, so when you talk to NPCs they give you a bit more sass then usual.

 

[Lunarea]

There's a couple of things I would consider, personally, in terms of gameplay.


First is to tie in itemization, skill and level progression to the different factions. So, choosing to become ally of faction 1 will unlock skills A and B. Choosing faction 2 will unlock C and D. This would serve two purposes - giving the player an extra thing to consider in their choice to help a faction (aside from the ideology of the two factions), and presenting them with occasional moral challenge. For example, you're allied with Faction 1 and have a side event giving you the task to steal documents in return for a new weapon or special skill. You can choose to do it and lose some faction points, or choose not to and lose out on the weapon or skill.


The second thing is to have a special cost assigned to skills or equipment. For example, the player unlocks a spell to resurrect an ally with full health, but casting the spell also damages the entire party for X amount. Or a powerful magic spell that does a lot of damage, but puts an "exhaustion" debuff on the caster that weakens their defenses. Same system could be put on equipment -- a really powerful armor has a persistent poison that knocks off 1-2 points of health every 3 seconds. The cost is enough to make the player refrain from using it all the time, but not so much that they're discouraged from using it altogether.


My 2 cents, anyway.

 

[Wavelength]

My take on trying to create gameplay in the vein of the "moral ambiguity" theme would be to divorce the clarity between the decisions a player makes and the outcome of those decisions, while still trying to convey to the player that their decisions do still affect the outcome of things even if they seem like separate gameplay elements.  This would be hard to do!


As an example, combat.  Normally, it's a pretty straight shot - run into enemies, attack/shoot/fireball enemies, kill enemies, take their loot, move on.  From a macro perspective, you understand what consequences your actions in combat will bring.  However... what if you made some of the gameplay aspects of combat "blurrier" in their consequences?  What if you gave combat encounters personalities or motivations, and allowed combat to end in other ways than "Killed all the enemies", "Ran Away", and "Lost Battle - Game Over"?  What if you could talk enemies down, bribe them, join up with them, convince them to join you, turn them on another enemy, plead for mercy, accept their pleas for mercy?  What if battles didn't start on sight, but after a period of mistrust where either side might make the first move or try to de-escalate things?  And better yet, what if the outcomes of these battles was more unclear - sure it's obvious what happens if you're killed in battle, but what if things go on behind the hood when the player decides to let a weakened enemy run, or bribes them, or disengages peacefully after a really weird conversation, and those things only become apparent later once their butterfly effects are felt?  What will these people or monsters do next?  I think these would really set the player in an inquisitive, anxious mood that would reflect "moral ambiguity" well.  Similarly, if the player decides to kill enemies but you don't ever give clear "Battle Rewards" like experience points or job points or gold - you can leave the player wondering "Do I feel happy about doing this?  Did I need to do this?  Did I want to?"  Having other characters ask these kinds of introspective questions to the player without hitting them over the head with "You did this and saved our town, thank you!!" or "You just murdered a bunch of innocents, nice job rear end in a top hat" can bring a really powerful moral layer that few games aspire to and even fewer actually deliver on well.


Each of your gameplay elements will probably need to be tweaked to the theme in a different way, but this is an example of something you can do to really deliver the theme, if you have the chops to do it.