Journey: Ethos

D&D alignment is silly.

But having some idea of a character's values is a useful thing to have around. Thus we're going to talk about that...

Ethos

Terms like "good" and "evil" shouldn't really be bandied about as much as they are. These are hardcore metaphysical philosophical terms, and they've got some hefty connotations. Not only that, but dividing the world into two colors seems ridiculous: goblins might be evil, sure, but are they as evil as Sauron? Is Sauron as evil as Melkor? How do we define those differences?

Some folks might want to say that it doesn't matter: evil is evil. Or we start getting into discussions regarding differences between "regular" evil and what I've started calling "cosmic" evil - regular being gobbos and mortals and such, cosmic being demons and devils and whatnot.

In Journey, we've had the idea of personality come up; the idea is that personality will play a role in social combat, somehow, as well as possibly playing a role in motivation and doing some character-building stuff. So far we've been dealing with the Myers-Briggs type indicator, but that seems a little excessive and not exactly the easiest thing to understand. We need something a little more basic, without resorting to D&D's Cartesian plane of alignments.

How do we do this? Well, there is a game that does this sort of thing...

Enter: The Color Wheel

Magic's color wheel is already philosophically divided, which makes it an easy-to-use philosophical model when attempting to understand an individual's goals and motivations.

In general, the values held by a given color tend to be rather connected - that is, it's easy to see how one belief in a color could readily lead to the others in it. Of course, this is not necessarily the case, which leads us into hybrid philosophies, but the game we're modeling our ethos system on already handles that, so it shouldn't be that big of a deal to import that here.

Just in case we get a bit lost here, linkage to the article that this image is taken from, which also happens to contain some nifty short descriptions of the colors. Also, some more articles on specific colors: white, blue, black, red, and green. If you didn't have a good feel for each color's philosophies before reading this page and checking those links, you will now.

Color Philosophies

In general, it seems that each color consists of two predominant beliefs. In turn, each color has a "at its best" and "at its worst." Even if the colors as written themselves don't have these conveniently divided into a grid, it could easily be arranged as such.

So each color will have two virtues, which are then either "light" or "dark," with light corresponding to "at its best" and dark to "at its worst." This then leads us to each color having four possible interpretations, so we're already at 20 possible, reasonable alignments.

Alternatively, we could simply divide the colors into light and dark, saving us the headache of having to divide the color's philosophies in half. That would allow us to keep the ethos system somewhat simple, while allowing for reasonable variety - if we just go light/dark, we get 10 standard philosophies.

I feel rather confident that you could reliably group most individuals you meet into one of those ten.

We could also turn the color wheel itself into a sliding scale, with each color having three slices for its part - one firmly in its ethos, and the two other side wedges representing parts of the ethos closer to the ally on that side. The further from the center is one direction in light or dark, and towards the center is the other. Multidimensional ethos, woo!

Other Colors? Hybrids?

What about adding another color? What about hybrids?

These are both reasonable things to consider. I'm not sure if you could reasonably fit another color in via this model, though - with some reshuffling of concepts - it might be possible. Personally I enjoy the idea that each philosophy has two allies and two enemies; if it were at six, you would have one direct enemy, two neutrals, and two allies. That might be too much to handle, though it might also make the philosophies a touch less polar.

In terms of another color, it would also be sensible to add a color in the center, an undecided color that isn't really sure of where it's going; let's call it brown. Brown would be the color of children and animals, things that don't really think about their personal goals and motivations too much, or are simply still sorting things out.

Hybrids are relatively easy, at least for allies. For enemies, it's a bit tougher, but they made it work in Ravnica, so I'm sure we can make it work here. In particular, this examination of the guilds in Ravnica and specifically how they combine their composite colors is of interest. Of course, WotC has more awesome ones: W/G, G/B, U/B, W/R, R/G, U/R, W/B, W/U, U/G, B/R.

Also, because I'm a completionist: W/G/U, U/B/R, W/R/G, W/U/B, B/R/G.

Implications

There is no good, no evil, no lawful, no chaotic. We remove the idea of objective morality and throw it into subjectivity.

Alignment-based damage is gone, alignment detection is now useless (since alignment is subjective). Each color could be given their own particular kind of damage, which might reinforce stereotypes (ie, white gets holy, black gets shadow).

Certain creatures would have alignments. Angels, for instance, would generally be white; demons would tend towards black. I would strongly argue against these beings absolutes (ie, all angels are white), and encourage such creatures to oftentimes have hybrid philosophies.

We'll also need to avoid the possibility of ethos being a straight-jacket. I have no interest in characters being slaves to their ethos, nor of upholding every single aspect of it. While characters of such a nature can be neat and interesting, not everyone should need to behave in that manner.

In general, this seems a lot more organic and useful than D&D alignment. We can use ethos as both a probable-action-indicator as well as a possible motivation-indicator. We can also use it extensively in social combat, which would rock all kinds of awesome. I think that this vision of alignment holds a lot of promise, and could be a much more useful tool for a system that encourages a "shades of grey" world.

Ethos and the System

Okay, so now we have an idea of what we want ethos to look like: a wheel of five or six colors, each with a few virtues that stand out above the rest, that oppose to some extent or another one or two other ethoi, along with a general indicator of how those virtues are put to use (light or dark); along with a central color that indicates a general lack of any particular tendencies or beliefs, used to represent those without the means to think about their beliefs (animals and constructs) or those who simply haven't thought about them (children).

What does all this mean, systemically?

Developing an Ethos

For starters, we need to talk about how one goes about acquiring an ethos.

At character creation, the character is a blank slate - that means strongly brown. If the background generation system is used, the choices made there will determine the character's ethos when he comes out. I'm envisioning an essentially point-based system that, at the end, you take your point totals for each color, and the one that comes out strongest is the one you go with, with a method for indicating hybrid philosophies.

If you don't go with the background generator, you get the standard 30 XP... and lack an ethos. We'll just go ahead and say that you can pick your character's ethos, up to three colors, any shade. Any more than three colors and you start getting into weird ethos territory (not to say that it can't be done, but for starters? KISS, yo).

Ethos and Reaction

Ethos should play a roll in your character's general reactions to events and people. If you're blue, you should be curious, for instance.

I envision a rather Pendragon-esque system for this; basically, if a situation comes up that involves one of your color's virtues, you should make some kind of roll to determine whether or not you go for it. Obviously this would indicate a need for an indicator of your ethos' strength; you might be just a little blue, at which point you might not be too curious, or you might be Tutankhamun Deathmask Blue, at which point you'll do anything to play with a puzzle.

Also, there are clearly opposed virtues in colors that oppose (ie, blue and red). There should be a method to see if your ethos gradually starts shifting to other colors.

ROLL to see if act in accordance with VIRTUE
  IF ROLL < VIRTUE
    act according to VIRTUE
    VIRTUE++
    OPPOSED VIRTUE--
  ELSE IF new ROLL < OPPOSED VIRTUE
    act according to OPPOSED VIRTUE
    VIRTUE--
    OPPOSED VIRTUE++
  ELSE
    act according to either, player's choice

Obviously such a system is rather up to interpretation, but that's something that we just have to deal with. We can try to firmly define opposed virtue sets in such a way as to make it clear how the character should act, and try to inform the LM as to what kinds of things should trigger virtue rolls and such, but in the end, this is all in fiat-land.

Failing to act in accordance to the result of a virtue check is largely a function of the social contract; there's no mechanical ramifications either way (though perhaps there could be, but that seems to me to be wandering into dangerous territory). Virtue checks aren't going to result in any kind of mechanical advantage or disadvantage.

Ethos and Combat

Ethos is largely irrelevant in combat. There might be some ways to make it relevant, but... I'm just not seeing it.

Ethos and Social

Ethos will impact social combat. In particular, there will probably be ethos-dependent disciplines (ie, one for each) that you can only access if you have that ethos. Ethos-specific specials could require a certain amount of ethos strength in that ethos (ie, you must be at least light blue 5 in order to use this special).