mcmanusaur

I agree, and in this thread I mean to ask how PE might use novel abstractions (more complex than those used by other RPGs) to give the impression and of a real economy, without actually doing a simulation.

Well, it depends on the larger economy (how much money all the gold sinks drain, and how much surplus there is), but I would say that a 5-10% price difference adds up like Lephys said without making the more convenient choice financially paralyzing. I'd say it should be balanced such that the party should at least always have access to about the amount of gold required for equipment upkeep/restocking and the like, but in terms of funding excess spending on strongholds and that kind of thing, I think it's fair game to require players to be a bit more mindful financially. If you want your character to become rich then you must rely on those small profits that compound over time, but if a comfortable lifestyle is good enough you can ignore them. Hmm, whatever, but- joking here- at least this would give an in-game reason for fetch quests, so that you're not left asking why you can't buy however many doohickeys you need from next door. Seriously though, I think it should always be related to geography, unless there is a good political reason for it being otherwise (embargoes, contraband, etc. as someone mentioned). By the way I hate healing consumables in general but that's neither here nor there. Personally I don't decide where I go based primarily on loot dividends or damage resistancies, but this would just be yet another thing for the player to take into consideration; it need not dominate decision-making. Well, I think the argument those players would make is that it introduces such systems (politics, economy, etc.) into the character's sphere, albeit in an arguably artificial manner from my perspective. For me, they're just things that can only add to immersion if presented correctly, not more opportunity for my character to show how special he/she is.

This may come as a surprise to some people who are familiar with my preferences, but I'm slightly ambivalent towards "jobs" (in terms of repetitive employment routines), and I don't really enjoy skill-based "mini-games" of any sort (I'm assuming this is what OP means). That said, I do like the idea of having multiple avenues for making money, and I do appreciate a good bit of strategy/management (almost to the point of being a mini-game), but I'm somewhat more interested in ways to spend money than to acquire it.

Punishes the player arbitrarily? Taking a small but significant hit on certain prices because one doesn't want to bother with a realistic mechanic is an arbitrary punishment? Why do you play roleplaying games: for the sake of interesting characters in a believable setting, or for the sake of managing your profit from loot as optimally as possible? I for one probably would only spend time optimizing my finances in such a way if it made sense for the character I was playing, and for other kinds of characters I would find the nominal penalty quite easy to rationalize. You make it sound like players are either blindly going wherever the central narrative leads them, or simply wandering lackadaisically with no sense of purpose whatsoever. In reality, it's not so simple as either of those extremes; a player might have one or more motivations for traveling, among which plotline questing may or may not be included. If a player decides that a bit of outfitting in preparation for some other objective is in his party's interest, then perhaps armor and weapon prices might affect the trajectory of the party's travels. Conversely, the player could act like a mindless drone whose ultimate goal is to breeze through the narrative as quickly as possible, and in this case they would not take regional price differences into account. I'm not really suggesting restricting the purchase of certain items to specific locations, so in theory the player should never become "stuck" or have to backtrack if they don't want to. However, even if I am not suggesting that the party should go broke unless they travel far and wide for the best prices, convenience has a price like anything else. I once facetiously suggested that Project Eternity should imitate MMO's merely for the sake of trolling, and I have in several entirely unrelated instances decried the extent to which many traditional RPG's stroke the player's by making everything about their extraordinarily exceptional character, as if one's enjoyment of the game is simply a function of how awesome and special one feels while playing the game. I believe that in the same breath I may have said something along the lines of the notion that the more an RPG feels like an MMO (without actually being one), in the sense that your protagonist isn't the only character that behaves in a convincing, living, and human-like manner, the more impressive and enjoyable I find it. At any rate, I have read nothing about this issue in relation to Project Eternity, though do let me know if I've missed something.

This sounds mostly reasonable to me, but I will say that perhaps the reason that the economical (and other simulation-oriented) aspects of RPGs have historically been so boring is that most games tend to utilize the same kind of simple, conventional system. Maybe people will disagree with me, but I tend to find "more complex" to be "more interesting" (within reason), and the fact that something has been boring in the past is a reason to try to add depth to it in the future as much as it's a reason to keep it simple and painless.

Herp derp. For one, you assume a linear, restricted progression through the game environment, which in my mind is only remotely excusable in space settings like KotOR that involve hopping between separate planets. Otherwise, I find the notion of arbitrarily partitioning off whole regions and settlements more comparable to adventure games like LoZ:OoT; even if the narrative might advocate a sequential progression, it should always ultimately be the player's choice. However, I suppose that gets into the general merit of "open worlds" (and we all know how many posters feel about that newfangled phenomenon) and narrative points of no return (which I personally find minimally compelling), which is largely a separate issue, but I will say that I don't at all mind a bit of backtracking in the overworld (while on the other hand backtracking in dungeons is pure evil). In specific regards to mercantile/economic stuff, you also make a lot of unwarranted and incorrect assumptions. No one suggests that the price of "everything" should vary by location; rather I suggest that the local price of specific goods should realistically be affected by resource availability, which is a function of geography. For example, resources required for weapon and armor-related crafting might be cheaper in a town whose economy is based around mining operations, or food might be cheaper in an agricultural hamlet than in a city. This would simply be yet another aspect of place differentiation that creates a deeper and more convincing world, and yet it's something many RPG's neglect (and will likely continue to do so if people mindlessly cling to the genre's conventions). I also take issue with your apparent insinuations that the game's economy serves primarily to balance the looting/progress of the PC's party, rather than to characterize the setting. I don't understand how we could expect a game system designed to focus exclusively on the player's experience to be even remotely immersive, but I suppose that's a broad difference of outlook on roleplaying.

Seriously Lurky I credited you with more intelligence than someone to make such an absurd comment or believe that any company isn't concerned with sales and increased profitability. Please read this interview and see the date, its trumps your link with its relevance and the date it was published. I'll quote the section you need to focus on Geraldo] For the future, it's Eternity, what do you see beyond Eternity? [Chris] We'd like to do more games in the Eternity universe. We have the expansion plan, we'd also like to be able to do sequels to the franchise if the initial one sells well enough. http://www.gameranx.com/features/id/15876/article/project-eternity-an-extended-interview-with-chris-avellone-rezzed/ Lurky what world do you live in if you can't see why any company would want good sales of a product? So yes the Sales question is very relevant to the longevity of PE. I didn't respond to Amentep because we have discussed his points many times before and I am sure he is well aware of my view. I would respond to someone who genuinely didn't know my answers His point was that there are certainly other factors at play besides sales, and that it's not even established that simply adding romances would increase sales when there are so many players who are opposed to their inclusion, even if there is also a lot of players who support their inclusion.

Less than the amount present in the D&D 4E handbook. Hmmm... so to me that suggests something along the lines of KOTOR. I guess that's fine if the skills are adequately substantial in their application. If there is a maximum of six party members, that would mean that you could possibly cover all the skills at a rate of two per character, which seems alright. At least that means there will be little redundancy, but at the same time the more or less guarantee that you'll have all skills covered at the end of the day is a bit of a double-edged sword. Sure, you won't be tinkering with any different skills on successive play-throughs, but I guess that means you experience the full skill content the first time around. Hmmm.

Project Eternity will be as mod-friendly as possible. Nobody questions that. The main point of contention I've seen is that romances have this tendency to overshadow many other companion interactions and story elements. Sure, some people love them, but if their presence could be harmful to the experience of other players, surely you can understand why they would oppose them. How can they be harmful if they're optional, you might ask? Sometimes it's because the characters lose depth and reactivity in their overall interactions, because that is reserved for the romance path. Sometimes it's because their optionality is "pursue romance path or have nothing else to do with a certain character", which is not an equal choice and not very optional, actually. Sometimes it's because the story has to bend over awkwardly in order to acommodate their presence. The points are various and I don't remember them all, but they are legitimate points, and should not be ignored. Some people have tried to come up with solutions, with ways to build a romance path that also pleases the people who aren't interested in that content. But they haven't been embraced by many, and they have been lost in the sea of posts and flames. How many times has BruceVC said something along the lines of "yes, I understand what you say, but I still want to have lots of hot bikini-clad women I can romance and have sex with" in the various threads around this forum? Making sacrifices for the sake of other people's game experience is hard, both for antiromancers AND for proromancers, and when the topic in question is something as emotionally charged as romances, expecting consensus is pretty much wishful thinking. And now to you, Bruce. Actually, Avellone has gone on record saying that financial success is not that important to them. There are several interviews of him where he has said that. Here's the most recent one. The reasoning is this: thanks to Kickstarter, Obsidian doesn't have to return any monetary investment. If they manage their budget well and don't pull a Double Fine, they're already even, and any sales made are net profit for them on top of the rest of income Obsidian makes. He'd like the game to sell well, sure, but that's because it's the kind of game he loves to make and would like to continue doing so, not because he wants to get rich. That means that he wants it to be a game he likes doing. And Avellone has also gone on record expressing his dislike for romances. The point is, sales or popularity aren't really that important to the developers. Therefore, these arguments are irrelevant when arguing for the inclusion of a feature. Now, if you've read the interview, you're probably thinking "Hey, he wants the backers to be happy. I am a backer, and romances would make me happy. Isn't that a reason to include them?" To which the answer is "Hey, other backers would be happy if the kind of romances you like were not present in the game at all. Isn't that a reason not to include them?". Which brings us to the point I outlined before: expecting consensus on a topic like this is wishful thinking. We're not going to be able to decide how this should be handled, so it's up to the developers to decide. As long as their decision is informed and well thought, there isn't much to do for us but to accept their decision. And being well informed means that all sides of the argument have to be presented. Dude, Amentep already gave you some reasons in the top post of the last page. And you didn't counter them, you just basically said "I could counter them but I won't". Why not? You have what you asked for, right there for you to pick. What are you waiting for?

Hopefully I'm not taking your argument to far out of context, but I must disagree. In so much as role-playing is a form of simulation, formal systems and computers may be worse at simulating human interactions than they are at simulating weapon physics (though in fact hardly any RPGs do this), but that doesn't mean we should give up on other aspects of roleplaying games besides combat. For me, the issue is often that computer RPGs tend to feel beholden to their tabletop roots, which leads them to adopt very simplistic mechanics in the interest of facilitating gamist approaches. I personally believe that all of the challenges that real people face on a regular basis (other than perhaps romance) can eventually be simulated in an engaging manner, as long as we accept that they may remain more abstract and open-ended, and thus incapable of being "gamed" in the same way that combat encounters are. For me there is no good reason why combat should be considered more engaging than other RPG endeavors (unless you consider channeling aggression a valid design consideration).

Ah, well that sort of changes things in that it diminishes the purpose of offering optional speech-related skills, if the optimal strategy would always be to take these skills with your PC and to have your companions take other skills. But who knows... I've seen it done before (I believe KOTOR was like this?). But all in all, I'm perfectly happy to hear that speech skills likely won't be emphasized in P:E, because even if I like that sort of approach it always feels like quasi-magical force powers rather than simple persuasion. To go off on a slight tangent, I'm starting to wonder roughly how many "non-combat" skills we'll end up having, since obviously if P:E has too few then it jeopardizes the whole point of being able to choose skills. in other words if the only skills to choose from are stealth/lockpicking and a couple crafting skills, that only allows for two types of non-combat characters, which would become repetitive. I for one would like to see something remotely close to the variety in classes/combat approaches for the range of non-combat approaches, since the latter is arguably a more general category. And just in case Obsidian feels like they can get away with one, things like "balance", "concentration", and such don't count as non-combat skills if their main application is to combat, but hopefully the developers already realize this.

Hmmm... although I agree that it's safe to assume we'll see NPCs that fit a variety of merchant archetypes- if that's what you mean- this poll was more related to the capacity in which PCs can fill the merchant role. In most RPGs I've played the PCs are restricted to the smooth-talker/haggler approach to business, and the party is just as well off selling their stuff anywhere as long as they have their "supernatural speechmaster" handle the transaction. I find this very generic and dubious, and the only exception is when all the general stores offer worse prices than specialized shops, which is still a bit shallow in my opinion. While I do prefer faction-specific favor over a global morality meter, I hope that the faction system isn't too formalized because that feels a bit contrived and inauthentic to me. It tends to end up creating black-and-white scenarios of "friendly faction/enemy faction" and often your character's faction affiliation becomes known by all NPCs without any explanation. It's as if you're walking around wearing a badge, except you're not. So for that reason, I'd lean toward avoiding general faction-wide discounts and "Hail, fellow [faction name]!" scenarios. Discounts from individuals that your character has actually interacted with is one thing, but discounts from your guild/brotherhood/whatever just seem generic. Hence, I suggest alternative methods for adding depth to mercantile gameplay, such as those listed in the poll. However, I'm not really sure what or which you are referring to as "real", since situations like this are cases of multiple degrees of "realism". For me, simply transferring the treasure haul to the party's high-charisma, designated loot seller and simply clicking away has never been fun, so I see this as an opportunity to make things more interesting, without necessarily simulating an entire economy.

It may just so happen that in their view including romance more or less for the hell of it might in fact compromise their core principles, especially when you put it that way by alluding to the success of Bioware RPGs, which in my opinion Project Eternity has little business imitating (assuming you mean recent titles like Dragon Age and Mass Effect).

Hmmm... I don't have a verdict on multiple currencies without more specific information, so hopefully we learn more in that regard. I do like the idea of smuggling contraband, as long as it is handled in a more convincing way than "Is that Moon Sugar you're carrying? I don't think I can do business with you...". But yeah, balancing the reward is the difficult part here. While I realize that people don't want an economics simulation mini-game, I can really only see persuasion and haggling skill having a somewhat smaller effect on prices than actually lugging the goods to a different locale. So part of this thread is about asking whether people are fine with not having easy-mode persuasion skills that will do the job regardless of the circumstances. As much as I like non-combat approaches, for me the smooth-talker archetype is a bit bland and sometimes unrealistically effective.

This topic is more straightforward than the ones I usually post, but here I'm simply asking how you'd like the mercantile skills to work in Project Eternity. In most DnD-based games I've played its given an abstraction centered around haggling and persuasion, and while this is part of getting favorable prices it obviously isn't the whole picture. Historically, there was of course quite a strong tradition of traveling merchants in medieval times, and I'd guess that this is because prices then varied between locations, just as they do now. Very few games make use of this in my experience, and I think that this could make mercantile activities interesting while refraining from making it into its own little mini-game. So do you find glorified speech skills an adequate portrayal of business acumen, or would you instead prefer the majority of profit stem from strategy rather than salesmanship? I myself am no economics expert, so a full-on economy simulation probably wouldn't be necessary for me to suspend my disbelief, but other people might be more knowledgeable.

Im 12 and wat is this?

I tend to forgo the whole morality question in favor of collecting candlesticks and other miscellaneous tableware.

As far as durability goes, I didn't really mind its inclusion (though I wasn't convinced about the "no effect until the meter reaches zero" approach), and I guess I can come around to its exclusion. I'm personally more concerned and currently unclear about what does or does not constitute a skill in Project Eternity, but I suppose that will all be revealed when the time is right (or maybe I've simply missed something). I mean, currently we have what... stealth, lockpicking, persuasion of some sort, presumably medicine, mercantile skills, some subset of the "crafting" mechanics (alchemy, cooking, enchantments, but not smithing?)... That still adds up to a slightly meager list of skills, though I suppose it's preferable to have a few deep skills than many shallow ones. I just hope we don't get an incoherent list of insubstantial DnD-esque skills.

I'm not sure Project Eternity is the type of RPG you're looking for. It sounds like you want a skill-heavy, Fallout or Realms of Arkania type thing: The Infinity Engine games were never this skill-centric and it was never a given that Project Eternity would go that way. Past "skill-heavy" games have tended to handle what constitutes a skill in a completely arbitrary and unintuitive manner, in my experience. However, as Project Eternity has long been touted to include "crafting", I don't think it's out of line to wish that this new feature is treated with a decent degree of complexity, given that the games responsible for inspiring Project Eternity omitted it entirely and thus there is no established model for crafting. Personally, I think that inconsistent criteria in what constitutes a skill was one of the weak points of many "classic" cRPGs (including those utilizing DnD-based systems), and I merely hope that "crafting" isn't treated as a monolithic gimmick with no depth, and to me it seems that Obsidian has the right idea. In fact, I'd rather see crafting omitted than have a single, shallow catch-all skill, since the latter can quickly become very tedious; a certain level of depth is required for crafting to constitute an interesting and worthwhile mechanic in its own right.

In the future I'd suggest using an outline or different sections with descriptive sub-headings when writing something of this length as it make it much easier to follow. I'm not sure I really understand what your main argument is... is it that including combat-related functionality in an otherwise "non-combat" skill is a mess, or that item degradation affects different characters unequally, or that this will lead to crafting being relegated to a "one character per party" role? I suppose I could agree with all three of those concerns, but for me the most glaring issue is the nature of "crafting" as an amorphous, all-encompassing non-combat skill... I tried to clarify in the announcement thread whether it was truly a single skill, as the post seemed to suggest, but I was never answered. I have to say I would be quite disappointed if this was the case... and I sincerely hope that I am simply misinterpreting things here. To me it's no better than having a single, catch-all "combat" skill. I'd even say that clumping weapons, armor, and clothes all into "smithing" is too generalized for my tastes, but hopefully at least cooking, alchemy, enchantments, and smithing are all separate skills from each other. Damn you Minecraft for making everyone believe that crafting is an adequately specific term!

Not necessarily: Black and White morality stories and settings are perfectly capable of creating drama and depth, they just do so in a different way. Take LotR for example: Frodo and pals are unquestionably The Good Guys and Sauron and his orc army are unquestionably The Bad Guys. Blandness and shallowness are the products of a bad writer, not a property inherent to black and white morality. EDIT: Haha, yes Elerond, I made a typo. Okay, maybe that's not bad writing if we're feeling generous, but I wouldn't exactly call it "depth". In the morality aspect LOTR is pretty shallow, but it makes up for this in other regards.

Awwwwwwwwwwww yeahhhhhhhh... *Sigh* Let me try one last time... In your Judea example, the consequences of one's actions might be called evil, which I have not denied. However, it's not a situation that one would likely arrive in if one's intention was to simply play an "evil" character. To play such a complex character, the player would have to have other things in mind, and lobbying for such a path under the black-and-white term "evil" is counter-productive when the player should be considering what those other motivations are and how they could be implemented into the game. It's not that the term "evil" doesn't possibly describe such characters adequately, but using the term in this way is counter-productive, confounding very different kinds of characters and keeping the discussion at the shallowest of levels. As I've tried to make clear, to talk about characters as "evil" has two very different meanings. The game world in your example might provide you feedback in your example that your character (or more acurrately the moral consequences their actions bring about) is evil, but what is of concern to player as they go through the game and play the character is their motivations, among which "evil" itself might not present. Morality is merely an output that the game returns to the player based on their character's actions and decisions, and various character motivations are the kind of input that should be accommodated by the game. The latter is what this discussion should be concerned with. The alternative dialogue options are precisely ones that correspond to other motivations, and the way that these would get added is not by trying to make the evil choice "more complex", but rather thinking about which motivations a character could have than "good" or "evil" themselves, which is the point I'm trying to make. Starting at "evil" and trying to grow more complex from there is like trying to solve the problem backwards. Yes, for broader gameplay purposes any kind of dilemma is satisfactory, but as far as decisions that will impact your character's moral standing are concerned, I think dilemmas in which a character wants to do the right thing and simply doesn't know which choice that corresponds with are much less ideal. Is it really fair to call the player's character immoral if the player has no idea which choice is the moral one, or if they have a different metaethical view about what being moral is (within reason)? Such decisions define a player/character ideologically, not morally, teven if they are indeed decisions about morality, as I said. However, they're not really anything to base a character's moral standing off of, and thus they should be considered separately from more explicitly moral dilemmas.

No, I understood you just fine. But you said pl1982 wished for a more serious "gratuitous evil" approach (and that this didn't make any sense), which I wasn't sure about. As I said, the most common complaints are actually that being the "bad guy" means being gratuitously evil, doing something that doesn't really fit into the storyline and/or not being rewarded well enough. And like I said, my opinion in this is that I just don't know. I can remember many situations in RPGs where I wanted to say something that seemed obvious to me, but wasn't available; where the only choices were "ridiculously monstrous", "materialistic as hell" and "holier than Jesus". And I know that I don't want to see choices like that in the game, but I don't know if most RPGs actually were constructed in such a way or if my memory is playing tricks on me. What I said concerning this was, "does it matter?". I'm mainly trying to discuss what I want to see in Project Eternity. So my point about those three complaints was not whether they are valid for old games or not, but how these complaints can/should be adressed in order to create a better P:E. My point about Game of Thrones wasn't Grey and Grey Morality, either. I actually emphasized the difference between The Witcher 2 and GoT by saying that the latter did not have a Grey and Grey Morality where all you do is choose the lesser of two evils (at least if you ask me, but I guess this is highly subjective). And anyway that wasn't my point, my point was that while knowing they're the bad guys, you can see where the bad guys in GoT are coming from. And that they wouldn't call themselves evil. That has nothing to do with Grey and Grey Morality. Altruism is yet another point. I don't mind if there are choices where I can be altruistic from time to time. But moral choices shouldn't always be designed around altruism or selfishness. There are moral dilemmas that are so big that it doesn't matter whether you chose altruistic or not. (A little bit of utilitarianism never hurt a narrative.) I said that he wanted a more serious "evil" approach, and that anything other than evil for its own sake ceases to be labeled usefully as "evil". What I've come to realize over the course of this thread is that the moral spectrum is so ingrained in people's minds... I've tried to argue that to say that a character is morally good or evil before there have been consequences to their actions is an altogether meaningless statement. Rather than whine that evil isn't fulfilling enough, players should ask what exactly their characters aim to fulfill in their "evil" actions. If the player is just "trying to be the bad guy", they're doing something wrong and shouldn't expect better results than gratuitous evil. Instead, how different motivations are accommodated in the game is what we should be discussing. Ostensibly, the desire for good or evil could be motivations in and of themselves (however this is clearly not what the OP seeks), but often there are also other motivations at play (money, power, revenge, etc.), even if these other motivations usually end up being classified as good or evil based on the results they bring about. However, that does not mean that it's useful to pigeonhole these other motivations as "more complex evil"; rather, simply let intrinsically moral motivations remain black and white but accommodate a number of grey paths of nonmoral (not to be confused with immoral) motivations. In regards to evil "not fitting in with the storyline", I'll have to ask you to be a bit more specific. I am also curious for examples in which games do not reward evil "well enough"; do you think there should be more materialistic rewards, or should it be more "rewarding" in non-material aspects? Something that seemed obvious to you why? Perhaps due to some nonmoral motivation that wasn't anticipated? I'd also tend to believe that it's important to demonstrate the validity of complaints before they are addressed... "Where the bad guys are coming from"... in other words, what motivates them, correct? And if these characters wouldn't call themselves evil, then really why should we go about lobbying for similar characters by labeling our target as "evil"? As far as altruism/self-interest goes, I think it's notable for being a case in which a clear moral trend exists, and that is also commonplace in everyday experience (unlike the issue of killing for fun). When there actually isn't any clear moral contrast, in some ways it ceases to be an ethical question in that moral motivations aren't what decide the issue; rather, even though the question is about morality in such cases, the answer has more to do with one's abstract metaethical views than it demonstrates the moral character of the person in question. That doesn't mean these scenarios aren't fun, but I don't necessarily consider them true moral dilemmas as much as philosophical dilemmas, unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean. It's pointless to talk about characters that don't exist in terms of the moral consequences of their as yet nonexistent actions; their morality is a function of their motivations, and not the other way around. Instead we should focus on which motivations our characters possess; these include both moral motivations (which are necessarily rather shallow and/or simplistic by nature) and nonmoral motivations. The latter variety can certainly have morally significant consequences in the long run, but not necessarily in a particular direction (for example, loyalty to one's family could conceivably lead to good or evil outcomes), and thus it's best to leave directly moralistic language such as "evil" to characters' explicitly moral motivations, and to handle any nonmoral motivations by name.

But that was the whole point of the OP - That they wanted the 'evil' options to be morally complex options, not juvenile ones. But that is exactly the point of his and my rebuke of the OP: "Evil" is only useful as a descriptor for the juvenile and senseless evil for its own sake; it's completely contradictory to call anything else evil, when you should be calling it by what adds that "complexity".

Right, I'll try to address those concerns again since I wasn't clear enough the first time around. 1. To call a choice "moral" is to convey an attitude toward it, usually in retrospect. It is true that these can be rather shallow and simplistic evaluations of choices, and this is because morality does not capture the motivations for an action in my opinion. Character motivations are what the game should directly facilitate, and if it wants to churn out a moral result after the fact then that's fine. When it comes to the "evil" approach, my point is that evil for its own sake simply cannot be made that much deeper, and that "evil" is an inadequate descriptor for any other path. Put quite simply, if you choose only the word "evil" to decribe your character then you deserve to be lumped in with the "gratuitous evil" camp in my opinion. If the path you're looking for makes some kind of sense, then there's a better word for it than "evil". 2. Preferred in what way? What choice is preferred should always stem from the character's motivations, or at least the player's motivations. As far as the narrative goes, I suppose you mean the fact that since our characters are expected to be the hero in the case of the main plotline, the consistency would suffer unless they were altruistic? I'm not really sure about that, and I think some games have accommodated an anti-hero (though never to the point where I'd consider playing one), and I'd just as well have a good old sandbox game as soon as the developers put effort into allowing the player to be either the hero or villain of the main narrative. 3. And you would suggest that it shouldn't be this way? There should always be reward or at least feedback for the player's choices, and I suspect that the people complaining about how the good guys get all the cool stuff are neglecting to differentiate between material rewards and emotional rewards. In my experience, "evil" selfish characters tend to get more of the first, and altruistic "good" usually get more of the second, which makes sense given the fact that the former spend the whole time trying to loot everyone's house/get paid as handsomely as possible, and the latter continually turn down said pay. Lastly, I would argue that altruism should only disadvantage people in a zero-sum world, and I hope that the interactions between systems in this game are complex enough that this is not the case. -------- In regard to the Witcher and Game of Thrones series, that is what we call "Grey and Gray" or "Grey and Black" Morality, and in my opinion it can be a bit limiting. While I like a setting full of grey morality, I think that black and white options should always be open to the player at certain times. That is, we shouldn't always have to search for the "slightly less evil" choice, though I'm certainly fine with that kind of dilemma sometimes. I personally don't feel that the selfishness/altruism issue is overdone, as it's responsible for many of the central questions we struggle with to this day, and this will likely never change. The most important thing to me is that we actually recognize things for what they are, instead of taking the morality meter as an excuse to ignore what is actually motivating our characters. I feel that both greed/selfishness and altruism are both realistic motivators, but they're not the only ones.