Trying to understand The Morality System

[Crowley]

I got The NWoD book, cant get CoD yet. But could someone give me An explanation On how does morality operates system wise?

[Charlaquin]

It works basically like Humanity in Vampire the Masquerade. Each level of Morality has associated sins. If you commit a sin associated with a Morality level equal to or lower than your current level, you roll a number of dice according to the Morality level the sin is associated with. If you succeed, you're fine. If you fail, you lose a dot of Morality and make another roll to see if you get a Derangement.

[RickmanUK]

Integrity in the Core CofD/nWoD... Isn't Morality. It's about how well you can Operate in Society.

It's a Trick Bag to explain, But i think the best way of saying it is that Hmm... You can Operate Normally while ignoring some of the messed up stuff in the world, your Morals are never in Question... It's not like being Lawful Good in D&D. You see a Dead Body and that can shake you, your integrity Drops by a point or 2. No-one will notice it too much, and it only effects you because you can't get the idea of it out of your Head. It Doesn't make you Less "nice" or Social, just makes it harder for you to associate with people that haven't been though the same as you.

I'm... Making a Hash of it i can tell.

[Charlaquin]

Integrity in the Core CofD/nWoD... Isn't Morality. It's about how well you can Operate in Society.

It's a Trick Bag to explain, But i think the best way of saying it is that Hmm... You can Operate Normally while ignoring some of the messed up stuff in the world, your Morals are never in Question... It's not like being Lawful Good in D&D. You see a Dead Body and that can shake you, your integrity Drops by a point or 2. No-one will notice it too much, and it only effects you because you can't get the idea of it out of your Head. It Doesn't make you Less "nice" or Social, just makes it harder for you to associate with people that haven't been though the same as you.

I'm... Making a Hash of it i can tell.

To be fair, it was a Hash already in 1st edition. It couldn't decide wether it was an alignment system, a karma system, a sanity system, or some mix of the three. Integrity in 2nd edition is much more clearly defined and has fewer unfortunate implications.

Crowley was asking how it works systems wise, though.

[PenDragon]

As Charlaquin said, 1st ed Morality is very similar to Humanity. There is a fairly cut and dry moral scale, and the further you fall down the scale the more awful a person you become.

2e replaces this with Integrity, which IMO is a much better metric. Integrity doesn't measure how good you are, merely how stable. A character with high integrity holds together well under pressure and can stare down the supernatural with some degree of confidence. A low Integrity character is a gibbering wreck, suffering depression, PTSD or some other cocktail of psychological problems. It's key to remember however, low Integrity does not make a character evil, nor does high Integrity mean they are good. It's possible to be a very stable, clear minded psychopath or a broken souled saint.

The biggest functional difference between them would probably be that while Morality is a static scale, Integrity is highly subjective and different characters will break from different things.

[wyrdhamster]

When finally dwelling in to 2ED Integrity rules, I highly recommended reading this two topics - they clear a lot what is and what is not Integrity. But quick saying could be pointing as variant to Sanity rules from Call of Cthulhu, only done in 10 number scale, sorta.

What Integrity mean

What is Integrity of war veterans

[Errol216]

I think of the "morality" stats as subjective stats. This is me appropriating a term from the Dramatica system, which is a theory about narrative structure rather than an RP thingy. In Dramatica, there's an objective story (let's go find the MacGuffin!) and a subjective story (this is my journey of self-discovery). The objective stat is arguably the power stat: you gain power and become more capable of punching through the plot-provided obstacles to the end of the story; as your power stat increases, you're faced with bigger and badder antagonists until you can face down the biggest bads of your chronicle. The subjective stat is the "morality" stat; it tells the story of your internal struggle with yourself, who you are, why you are, what you believe, and so on. If you have a True Friend or a nemesis, or friends and family, it covers how you relate with them, how you grow through your interactions with them, what the consequences of what you are are upon them.

For a mortal, that subjective story is about your psychological Integrity in the face of a worldview that's losing coherence and lets you see the supernatural behind it. System-wise, it's milestoned by Breaking Points, which are personally significant moments that make-or-break your Integrity and decide why you lose some, or how you keep it together. Breaking Points are opportunities for you to focus on character development in terms of that personal story (rather than the traditional RPG development of skill-gain): the extent to which the stat moves in your game (either up or down) is basically the extent to which your character progresses on the default narrative provided by the game. You can buy a dot of Integrity for 2 Experiences, which translates to 10 Beats, which come from session progress, exceptional successes, dramatic failures, condition resolutions, and so on, so you can actually move up and down the scale quite a bit if you choose to focus everything on it. (That gets a little... narcissistic, though, and probably doesn't advance the objective story's plot very much.)

You can also completely ignore the Integrity stat and focus entirely on the objective story plot. Minimize the number of Breaking Points that are thrown at you and spend all your Experiences at skills and merits and attributes. Or choose to drive a personal story plot that isn't related to the default one, such that Breaking Points are much less relevant to your character. But the subjective stat provides some mechanics for you to use for a default personal story.

[Charlaquin]

That's a really neat take on it!