Good/Evil points?

Some of the best RPGs of all times have incorporated good and evil points where the character's choices and behaviour throughout the game determine whether he is one of the good guys or an evildoer. Is there a plot script or something to put this in the OHR? I could see it being done through an elaborate setup of tags, but that could be limited by the text box conditionals among other things. Figured it was worth a shot to ask.

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I'm thinking globals would be the easiest way to go about it. And you'd just have a plotscript attached to textboxes to increment or decrement the value of said global. Then you'd just use a script that checks that global before doing whatever it is you want to do.

And yeah, tags would be an extremely cumbersome way to go about it. Doable, but impractical.

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I've come to the opinion that global variables would be better than tags for organising many forms of plot progression and dialog trees. That sort of thing currently requires using a whole sequence of tags, and even if you could define tag groups (which would be a great feature), tracking it with numbers instead seems simpler.

Unfortunately you currently can't even specify arguments to scripts when invoking them from a textbox...

Well, you could just have a set of different scripts:

incGOODone
incGOODfive
incGOODten
decGOODone
decGOODfive
decGOODten

incBADone
incBADfive
incBADten
decBADone
decBADfive
decBADten

Or however many you need.

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Never been much of a fan of the good/evil point systems.

Anyways, the answer to the question is that there's almost nothing you can't do with plotscripting. The problem is learning how to do it. Now we can offer some pointers or even examples here, but the bulk of the work will still need to be either done by you or someone you recruit into your project. There's really no getting around it, if you want to have interesting mechanics like good/evil systems you'll need a scripter for your game.

Yeah, this. They tend to be very binary: save baby or eat baby?

And, of course, if you save five babies and eat five babies, then you're neutrally-aligned.

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I imagine a pretty easy way to keep track of (and make it readily available to the player without extra menus/text boxes) good/evil points would be to use one of the extra stats (like ctr or hits). Say 5 is neutral, 1 is pure evil, 10 is pure good (or on a larger scale, 1-100), and just have each action add or subtract so many points. This will still require some basic scripting but will keep your stats tidy, and easier to keep track of.

Yeah, good/evil *sounds* like a good idea until you actually get around to trying it.

I understand about wanting to have earlier good/evil choices change what happens later in the game, but I think this is better to do with tags.

Taking mogri's example, if you have eaten a baby even once (no matter how many babies you spared) then that should turn on a tag, so later when you reach the temple of Moloch the Baby-Eater, he will bless you with the legendary baby-spatula sword.

However, that being said, I have no objection at all to TMC's suggestion that we make it easier to use global variables directly from text boxes.

A text box conditional to increment or decrement a global would be great, and it would also be nice to have conditional chaining that could be based on whether or not a global had passed a certain threshold.

Just because I don't think it is a good way to model morality-based story-branches, doesn't mean it would not be a great engine feature.

I would want to convert the textbox storage format to RELOAD before we implemented such a feature.

Yeah, the big problem with the "save baby/eat baby" type choices is that the opposing choices tend to be weighted the same even when one is a much bigger deal than the other (not like, say... "return 3 missing gold coins to owner/put 3 missing gold coins in your pocket" or something, where it's such a relatively minor thing that either choice shouldn't have a big effect on how good/evil the game considers you.)

Most people, whether they're truly good or just average or even kind of an asshole, would at least try to save a baby that was in immediate danger... only somebody that's really messed up in the head would see a baby of their species crawling around helplessly somewhere and decide "yeah, I'd better eat that before it gets hit by a car or falls off a cliff or something."

And, in real life, if you eat a baby once nobody is ever going to trust you around their babies again...

Which makes me think of how Link's Awakening handled stealing--if you steal something you can't go back to the shop without getting zapped to death by the owner, and everyone else in the game will always address you as THIEF rather than your name from then on.

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Baby Eating...
Not even once!

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I've never liked a Good/Evil spectrum either. Mainly because there is some sort of ability/advantage to becoming 100% bad, or 100% good. It stresses me out to make sure all my decisions are good, or all are bad so that I can achieve the ultimate abilities in the game. I suppose if this was pulled off the right way in which there is unique advantages to being at any given point in the spectrum, then I'd really like it. Even greater yet is if you had a cyclical spectrum (although this wouldn't make any sense for a duality like good-bad). Something like this wouldn't be too much harder to script, and the advantage is that once you reach the other side of the spectrum you can simply continue around to explore the advantages of other points in the spectrum that were missed.

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I just remembered one game that did a decent job of morality points!

Ogre Battle for the SNES. That game had a good/evil meter, and a popular/hated meter.

The only reason it worked, is that you had very clear visual feedback of how your morality was currently doing. Both meters were displayed clearly in the corner of the screen whenever you were on the map, so any time you did something good or bad, you would get immediate feedback.

I think one reason I never enjoyed good/evil moral choices in games is that it's more about the player having to anticipate what the game designer had in mind, rather than the game designer anticipating player choice and making the game adapt to their choice so it feels like it's being respected.

Who wants to play a videogame that tries to make you feel guilty or "oh, I guess that was the incorrect 'free' choice..." for doing what you choose within the limits of the game's design? Make the game tailor itself to what the player has fun doing, if at all possible. More fun is good.

There were a few games that did the morality thing interestingly. U4 comes to mind, but that's less good vs evil and more just being a good guy to become the Avatar I suppose. Still, it was rather interesting. Though of course, by the time it came to U7, my avatar was pretty much insane enough that it was much more fun to see how much crap he could get away with before Shamino and company decided to gang up on him.

"Is this virtuous, Avatar?"


Anywho, back to the topic. Generally, and I suppose I'm in the minority here, I like good/evil systems in games. Granted, sometimes it is rather annoying especially when it comes to random flavor text (I'm looking at you FO3), but most of the time I do find it enjoyable.

One thing that is rather annoying with good/evil systems though, is when everyone in the world telepathically knows how much of a slimehole you are. You steal from some dude in one city, then airship/magic carpet/blink/whatever to another city hundreds of miles away, and everyone there somehow knows of your descent into a life of crime even if you mad sure *cough cough* that no one could report you.

Anyways, not really sure what I'm saying here, and I'm prolly just rambling, so I'll shut up now.

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