Are there any decent Virtue mechanics out there?

[Woot]

Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean.

I've been continuing to think about the campaign I first alluded to here and I've changed the focus considerably. I've shifted gears to basing the culture on the culture and religion of the ancient Greeks, which I've got a fair bit of experience with (and enjoy learning about anyway!) Something that immediately comes to mind is that their culture really didn't think about ethics in the way we do - it's not that they didn't have concepts of "good" or "evil" but that those terms didn't really dominate their thinking.

This gives me an excellent reason to dump the entire Good/Evil & Law/Chaos alignment system in a ditch on the side of the road, and since a lot of mechanics in 5e have become more-or-less divorced from that, I'm not seeing any immediate downside to doing so. Problem solved!

However, the Greeks did think a lot about ethics, and one of the most familiar models is the notion as virtue being the mean between two vices. Ex: courage is the mean between cowardice and rashness. I'm tempted to merely leave that as a MTP suggestion for the players, "Hey, this is how people here think about stuff, you should try it to!" but I wanted to ask if anyone here has run into a system that handles virtue in some not-totally-shitty way. I'm a little skeptical it can even be done, actually, but I figured I'd ask.

[angelfromanotherpin]

It basically comes down to what your goals for the mechanics are. Pendragon is a game with a very specific setting and morality, and the stories it's based on are much concerned with conflict between virtues. So in that game Chaste is an actual stat you roll to resist seduction and it works in context, but it would be pretty ass in another context.

So what do you want your virtue mechanics to do? Define particular behaviors or just encourage them? Enforce a particular morality or allow characters to develop their own? Reward for following, punish for straying, or both?

[Woot]

That's a insightful point, and I suspect it reveals the flaw in my thinking: I'm not sure myself what I want that mechanic to do! If I can't figure out a good purpose for it, it's probably best to leave it out.

The best I've been able to come up with in a few minutes thinking is some sort of situational modifier: "You excel in courage, so you have advantage on this fear check," or "You have cultivated a reputation for prudence in town, so you have advantage on your diplomacy check to get them to agree to your plan." The problem is that deciding whether or not a player fulfills that virtue is mostly a judgement call on the part of MC, which, meh.

This contrasts with a "sacrifice to the gods" mechanic I'm still hashing out which seems more well-defined: spending an afternoon and sacrificing a ram to Ares gives you advantage once or twice in your next battle, or Demeter helps you find a lost child, or whatever. Gods having a temenos (sanctuary) where you sacrifice to them has a few other benefits as well: if you want the benefit, you have to travel to the location and spend time and money. You can't enter if you're impure in some way (murder is a big one; no murderhobos need apply!) and you must respect the sanctity of the temenos: your worst enemy can seek refuge there and you can't harm them - not without really pissing the god off, anyway. There I've got a definite idea of what I want to do - the fact I'm not sure what to do with the virtues is a strong argument that they should be flavor and not mechanical.

[deaddmwalking]

If you're okay with it being an MC-generated reward, you can tie it to your sacrifice mechanic. If you show courage, you can gain the favor of a god; you can cash it in exactly like you could if you had sacrificed a ram. Alternatively, if they've pissed off a god, they can spend it to pay off the debt.

Greek myths tend to have a lot of questions around which gods you have heat with; planning on doing something to negate that heat gives you a good seed for adventure. It should be possible for oracles to tell you 'do this thing and you can earn Apollo's forgiveness' - but if they don't seek out an Oracle, you can just pay them a chip.

I'd recommend making them fungible. If you please Apollo enough, you can buy off Ares' displeasure. He won't mess with you if Apollo favors you enough.

[Username17]

As AFAP noted, there are a lot of things that "virtues" can do, and the mechanics you'd want to use are going to be very different. Let's talk about the most obvious:

Encourage the player to roleplay a certain way.

Rewards work better than punishments. White Wolf's "Wrath" that lets the player get Willpower back for acting angry is better than TSR's "Lawful Good" that lets the MC dock the player's XP for doing bad or chaotic things. Both are an encouragement of sorts, but by making it player side and also positive you get the person making the RP choices be someone who is incentivized to "remember" the text on the character sheet. The person bringing it up is making the choices that determine when it gets brought up and also physically looking at the character sheet it's written on.

-Username17

[Woot]

As a game mechanic making them fungible makes sense, though it steps away from how the Greeks would have thought about it. In fact, it was actually worse: you might make offerings at the temple of Poseidon Soter (Poseidon the Protector) to protect you during a sea voyage. A few miles away, there's a temple to Poseidon Hippios (Poseidon of Horses) where you might pray for him to cure your sick horse. Even though he's understood to be the same deity, his locations are NOT fungible: Poseidon Soter isn't going to help you with horse problems. Dealing with that level of specificity seems kind of irritating, and I'm still trying to decide if I want to include that or if I say fuck it, any sanctuary of Poseidon is Poseidon's and you can make all the prayers about naval battles, horses, and earthquakes you want at any of them.

[angelfromanotherpin]

As far as god relationship points go, I'm against distinguishing between the Gods' various aspects. It's just a level of bookkeeping that's going to bog things down. I can see a thing where there are specific effects you can only get at specific temples to create travel quests, but that should be high-degree stuff, not standard don't-drown-me prayers.

As far as virtue mechanics go, I think it would be very Greek for each character to have a Philosophy. You'd write up a list of Principles (each with an associated benefit) and every character would have a handful of them. Then you'd have some prebuilt packages to represent the more popular philosophies (e.g. Stoicism), as well as a default for people who didn't want to think about it (Traditional). Finally, at some reasonable interval, people could swap out one of their Principles for one of their friend's, representing off-camera discourse and persuasion. It encourages players to put some thought into what their character believes in, which is good RP material and setting-appropriate.

[Iduno]

As a game mechanic making them fungible makes sense, though it steps away from how the Greeks would have thought about it. In fact, it was actually worse: you might make offerings at the temple of Poseidon Soter (Poseidon the Protector) to protect you during a sea voyage. A few miles away, there's a temple to Poseidon Hippios (Poseidon of Horses) where you might pray for him to cure your sick horse. Even though he's understood to be the same deity, his locations are NOT fungible: Poseidon Soter isn't going to help you with horse problems. Dealing with that level of specificity seems kind of irritating, and I'm still trying to decide if I want to include that or if I say fuck it, any sanctuary of Poseidon is Poseidon's and you can make all the prayers about naval battles, horses, and earthquakes you want at any of them.

Agree with angel: that's worth abstracting. It's not the way we think about their religion, so you'd have to teach players something just to give yourself extra work writing up a table of versions of each god and how much they like each player.

As for the original question, I never played Mouse Guard, but I think they've got a mechanic where you choose a description for your character, and get a bonus for acting that way.

[Woot]

That's an interesting though, AFAP. Just shooting wildly from the hip (and playing rather fast & loose with the notion of 'philosophy'):

Traditional: no bonus or penalties
Epicurean: Bonus effects from potions
Cynic: Advantage on Detect Lies and Survival
Sophist: Advantage on Persuasion and Deception
Socratic: Advantage on Insight and Perception
Stoic: Advantage on Fear checks (or other checks based on emotion), Con save bonus
Aristotelian: Advantage on Nature and Arcana
Hippocratic: Advantage on Medicine and Investigation

I'm not sure that's necessarily exciting but it's probably not game-breaking, either. I'll stew on that some more.

[Suzerain]

Oh, you're using D&D5? You'd really be better of switching to a system with more meat to it to pull off the sort of things you're looking to do here. Advantage/disadvantage is a passable ad-hoc adjudication method, but like a lot of rules light games it ends up being "you can do anything" translates to "you can do anything but it ends up being the same as anything else".

[Pseudo Stupidity]

That's an interesting though, AFAP. Just shooting wildly from the hip (and playing rather fast & loose with the notion of 'philosophy'):

Traditional: no bonus or penalties
Epicurean: Bonus effects from potions
Cynic: Advantage on Detect Lies and Survival
Sophist: Advantage on Persuasion and Deception
Socratic: Advantage on Insight and Perception
Stoic: Advantage on Fear checks (or other checks based on emotion), Con save bonus
Aristotelian: Advantage on Nature and Arcana
Hippocratic: Advantage on Medicine and Investigation

I'm not sure that's necessarily exciting but it's probably not game-breaking, either. I'll stew on that some more.

What Suzerain said in regards to 5e, but also Stoic and Epicurean are way better than the other options because they offer effects that are useful in combat and have rules attached to them. And you should pick skills that have synergy. Sophist and Socratic are good right now, but anyone going for Aristotelian or Hippocratic is still going to suck because they won't have a major stat bonus to both the skills they consistently get advantage on. Not that those aren't chump options when "die less" and "be more efficient" are on the table, but yeah.

If you want the bonuses just to be to skills expect the players to not give a shit at all, because the skill rules in 5e are...well they aren't. They don't exist. If you give little combat perks the players will care immensely, because 5e combats are grindfests.

[OgreBattle]

The two mutually incompatable approaches seem to be...

"Broadly applied virtue" You have a virtue and when you do a thing driven by that virtue you get a bonus, this is more like alignment to a cause

"Virtue bonus to specific things" you have a virtue and it gives you a bonus on specific things like lies, bad weather, boning, etc. This is more like a skill or defense specialization.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

For what it's worth, Scion 1E, Exalted 1E, and Exalted 2E played around with virtues. In Scion the virtues changed depending on your character's pantheon.

[fectin]

Your god-favor system already covers virtue. If you are too unvirtuous, you can’t go to their temenos. If you’re especially unvirtuous, some of them start hating you. If you’re extra virtuous, you get sacrifices at a discount. Some gods can favor some virtues, but it doesn’t have to be 1-for-1.