Embodiment, Conviction, and Morality

Kingdom Come is an extremely robust game system that encourages players to explore different combinations of Embodiment, Conviction, and Morality.

F'rinstance, you can choose to play a character who embraces sin and immorality, but who does so in the name of of Divinity. You could choose to play a character who embraces virtue and morality, but who chooses to do so in spite of the existence of the Creator.

The system is designed to encourage those kinds of juxtapositions in character development. It prompts you to ask yourself the question - what motivates my character? Is my character a good person? From where does the inspiration for my character's actions come? The game is based on intent, so:

Does your character do good things?

If so, and your motivation (which is the point, in terms of intent) is selfless and/or inspired by love/devotion, then chances are good you're a moral character, regardless of your Conviction or your Embodiment.

If you do good, and your good actions are motivated by hate or are selfish in nature, you're probably immoral, regardless of your Conviction or your Embodiment.

For instance, if you show mercy to your enemy because your enemy deserves a chance to learn and be rehabilitated, you have chosen a good action that is motivated by selflessness.

If, on the other hand, you show mercy to your enemy because you think it makes you look magnanimous, your good action is motivated by selfishness.

The difference is that in the first example, you are performing an Act of Grace. In the second example, you are not.

Discuss.

"Every revolutionary is motivated by a great feeling of love." - Che Guevera

Intent is really a tough one, expecially when it comes to morality. It makes sense to me to require noble intent for an act of grace, but for immoral acts I personally don't think intent makes that much of a difference. An immoral act is still immoral even if done for good reasons. I think it also requires the same hardening of one's conscience to commit those acts.

Hmmm.
Well, it's certainly more difficult to justify the 'rightness' of immoral acts, but what I was trying to get at was that "right" or "wrong" isn't tied to your Conviction or Embodiment. Which is to say that the overarching themes of 'Good' and 'Evil' are omnipresent in the Kingdom Come setting, but they are not synonymous with Virtuous/Sinful Embodiments or Divine/Infernal Convictions.

But "Good" and "Evil" are too simple to describe the richness of what each character can do and can be. The Divine are, for lack of a more comprehensive word, working on the side of Creation. The Infernal work on the side of Destruction. It doesn't mean that if you choose to play a Moral character, you HAVE to also choose a Virtuous Embodiment and/or the Divine Conviction. Similarly, if you're playing an Infernal character, you are absolutely not encouraged to only play Sinful Embodiments and/or Infernal Conviction. In touch-feely non-game mechanics terms, I guess you can reduce this down to the fact that Bad Things happen to Good People, and Bad People sometimes do Bad Things in the name of Good.

Jeez. I'm kinda blathering around without making a point.

It's like saying Albert Einstein was immoral because he didn't believe in God. Or that David Koresh was moral because he *did* believe in God. Nothing is that simple; not in the real world, and not in Kingdom Come.

That's the only point I'm trying to make.

In my uneducated opinion, it comes down to this. If you are infernal, you have issues with God. That doesn't mean you're evil, it just means that you don't love God, and you don't believe you're going to get back into heaven. If you are divine, you do love God. That doesn't make you a good person, oh no it does not. It just means you love God.

It's pretty simple, and there is absolutely nothing simple about it.

I love giving the speech about how not all Divine are Good and not all Infernal are Evil. It's my favourite right now. I'm not sure why... ::grin::

I think there is a predisposition for Sinful to be Evil and Virtuous to be Good based on the nature of the embodiments. Then again, it depends on what the definitions of Good and Evil are. Convictions, on the other hand, seem more about the individual character's personal story rather than Embodiment or their morality.

I'm not sure I agree with the Pro-Creation and Anti-Creation representations for Divine and Infernal. I think that if you are a moral Infernal you can still care for Creation and hate God. After all, if you ruin the playground, where will you and your friends play? I also think that an immoral Divine could systematically destroy Creation in the pursuit of what it sees as God's will - say in the return to a more primitive and holy lifestyle where one had time for true faith and worship.

I totally agree that not all Divine/good/Infernal/evil. (You know what I mean). I also fear, however, that our current player base has gone a little overboard on that. We have THREE sinful infernal in the game right now. Outnumbered 2:1 by divine infernal (before Shappurnipal went missing). It's good to have those who go against the grain, but then again, there would probably be a stronger tendency for divine=virtuous and infernal=sinful than we are currently representing. I think we all (myself DEFINITELY included) went a little crazy (heh) on the playing around with possibilities.

Oh well, it's all meant for fun anyway.

I don't know about that. I think it's fantastic to have a pile of characters in the game who aren't one dimensional stereotypes. In all the KC games I've played, I really enjoy toying with the whole conflicted character. Playing a divine who is NOT nice, but righteous. Or a conflicted infernal. It can be fun to play straight evil, or straight good, but I think that there needs to be more than that to bring depth to a game. Also, it's more fun to play a character and watch it develop....rather than starting at what I consider the ending point, I like to start in the middle, and see where I end up.

The problem that I have with some of these arguments is that the lore of this game in the book is being presented pretty selectively here. Really, I think that when the lore presented in the book is taken as a whole, the point that should arise is that there is no absolute, correct position OOC: the only absolutes are those that characters create, hold, and debate IC.

To argue that the Divine should, as a whole, be moral, to me ignores much of the history of the Fallen. As I recall, it was the Faithful Divine that first started strapping their opponents to the cross. Not only did they utilize one of the most painful, torturous means of execution that humanity has ever devised, but they also inverted what is, to at least one religious tradition, a symbol of love and sacrifice into a tool of bitterness and hatred of sin. Then they left it there as a grisly display and testament to their hatred. Faith has a dark twin, and that's fanaticism. Why shouldn't just as many Divine Fallen as those who think that to love God means to foster growth of virtue think that service to God means to destroy sin in his name? I'm not saying that the two are mutually exclusive, but some will say that the former is the best way to accomplish the latter, and some will argue the opposite.

As to the moral Infernal. I have never heard any Fallen argue that God casting the Fallen out of heaven was anything other than a punishment*, and also much of Fallen lore suggests that part of the reason for this punishment was that certain Fallen began to use their angelic powers and presence to provide aid to humanity. Now, once the Fallen were cast out of heaven, in order to spite God, doesn't it make sense to continue wallowing in the sin that sent them here, helping humanity? Or, to take it from another angle, protecting humanity from a spiteful God that clearly doesn't have their best interests at heart? More sense, at any rate, to trade one spiteful God for the Morningstar, a spiteful fallen angel.

It seems to me that a more appropriate focus for this debate is on Virtue and Sin: the paths that God chose for his angels and the paths formed by rejection of that choice. Of course, even then, the book does say that there are Virtuous and Sinful in all three Convictions, and of every type, and arguments can easily be made for the Moral, Sinful Divine, and the Immoral, Virtuous Infernal, among many others.

I'm not going to make the argument here that most Divine should thus be immoral and Infernal the opposite. When players decide, individually or in coteries, to create a unique conception of what God means to them as a Fallen angel, it adds depth to the game no matter what they choose. We don't have two stereotyped groups glaring eachother down at every census with the Deistical moderating, and I think that makes the game more interesting, and much, much more dynamic, rather than less. And that's whether or not there is some party line that provides guidelines as to what people should play (which, frankly, I don't really think is true).

So it seems to me, anyway.

Sacha

*I think that it would be interesting to see a Divine character argue that God actually approved of his Host helping humanity. He put them into bodies of clay so that they could better understand the position of his children: not knowing God's light, bound by mortality, struggling with the material. The only way to be truly helpful to humanity is by understanding their plight, and the only way to really understand it is to be human.

I think an important point here is that while your points are all very well made and thought-provoking, the fact remains that in every socio-political faith-based group of people (I have to argue that every character in this game is necessarily faith-based, since your understanding of your own existence kind of hinges on there being a god or a set of gods who created you and with whom you are currently have the universe's biggest snit), you have a whole bunch of people clumped around in the middle of socio-political/religious philosophy, and you have a few folks spread out at the very edges of the spectrum.

In political terms, this is the right wing-left wing argument. You have extremely hard-right hardcore conservative views that often include extreme social conservatism (less government control/interference in social systems, lower taxes, free enterprise, extreme religious integration with government (such as outlawing gay marriage and abortion)) [editor's note: apologies for the retarded repetition of 'extreme']; while on the other end of the spectrum, you have hard-left extreme socialist views that espouse individual freedom of expression, higher taxes to support higher government involvement with social systems, and the responsibility of each person in the society to contribute to the support of every other person. This is the Conservative party and the NDP (actually, the Green Party these days).

But in the middle, you have the Liberals (in theory). People who take a bit from each end of the spectrum.

And I think that the following argument could be made for Providence:
There are plenty of "Liberals" (folks who take a bit of philosophy/theology from both the Moral camp and from the Immoral camp; the Divine camp and the Infernal camp; and from the Virtuous camp and from the Sinful camp, and then mix and match as they choose), but we haven't a whole lot of hard-right Conservatives (Divine) or hard-left Socialists (Infernal).

Yes, I know the metaphor breaks down when you start to think of things in terms of the political spectrum.

I think the point has been made that in Providence, there really are very few of the 'baseline' or hard-line characters from either end of the spectrum. And there's nothing *wrong* with that, necessarily. It just means that philosophical debates don't tend to encounter the extremes; just the middle.

So what I'm saying is that the leading and trailing ends of the bell curve are fairly short in Providence.

In this case, cenobyte, I am forced to disagree with you. I think that it's fair to argue for bell-curves of moral spread within all three convictions, but I don't think that one bell-curve can express the entirety of Fallen philosophy, with Divine on one side and Infernal on the other. To me, that's like arguing that a Divine Faith, driven by religious fervour and hatred of sin to the point where he seeks to destroy it by any means necessary, comes closer to expressing a moderate, Deistical (presumably) point of view than a Divine Gluttony who isn't all that sincere about God, but likes to hug kittens and give to charity. This is why I've always thought that it's your attitude toward God, love him, hate him, or dismiss him, that is the only determinant of your Conviction. Or maybe I'm misinterpreting your point?

Sacha

That's not what I said.
I didn't say that one bell curve would express the entirety of Fallen philosophy, with Divine on one side and Infernal on the other.
I said that there will be extremes of belief at either end of the bell curve. I used Conviction as an example, but in any system, there will be extremes at either end of a bell curve. That's why it's a bell curve and not a checkmark curve or a boot curve.

The point I was trying to make is that if you take a bell curve of the Convictions, then there will be extreme Divine at one end and extreme Infernal at the other. Deistical will probably, for the most part, be part of the middle.

I didn't say that bell curve should express the entirety of Fallen philosophy. I said that in **Providence**, we don't have a whole lot of folks playing those two edges of the bell curve. We have maybe one or two "Typical" Divine or Infernal, and the rest of the characters fall somewhere in between. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's tough to compare all those folks in the middle to the hardline 'ends of the bell curve' if we don't *have* any 'ends of the bell curve'.

And sure, you can have little bell curves within each embodiment. That's why not all Conservatives, f'rinstance, support banning gay marriage, or why not all Green Party voters support home schooling. Sure! Yes! Within each group there will be differences of opinion, and there *should* be. But that wasn't my point. My point was on the larger scale of this particular game, we don't have a whole lot of 'typical' Divine or 'typical' Infernal. I wasn't saying that was good or bad. I was just saying that's the way it seems to be.

This leads to a discussion about game balance, because I like to encourage a game to be as balanced as possible, and for the first six months of this game, I've been asking new players to try out Deistical, because the rigours of playing someone who is vehemently either Divine or Infernal can be, I think, a little intimidating to new players (particularly if the player is also new to LARP). With more experienced players, or with folks familiar with this system, I've been asking them to consider Divine or Deistical, because IMO, we have plenty of Infernal at the moment. But it's a delicate balance.

And I haven't been asking for specific embodiments, with the exception of telling folks "we haven't any gluttony" or "Just the one Hope, I believe".

So, yeah. It's a game balance thing. I prefer the bell curve model for Convictions. And, for that matter, for Moralities. If we had one or two players who wanted to play either Innocent or Irredeemable, I'd certainly entertain the idea. But a whole game of Innocents? Bleah. "What shall we do today?"
"Oooh! Devotional Needlepoint!"

Not my bag of cups.

When it comes to a basically binary model like that of Embodiments, I just strive to represent each one at least once, and after that, it doesn't much matter to me. And having said that, I also recognise that it's *not* a strictly binary model, since you can have withering embodiments as well.

Hm. I appear to be blathering.

Carry on.

Hm. I still disagree, since I don't believe in the concept of a 'typical' Infernal, Divine, or Deistical. The only thing that seperates people into different convictions, to my way of thinking, is their attitude toward God. An irredemable serial Killer embodying Wrath could think that 1)God calls him to cull humanity, sending the good to Heaven and the evil to Hell, 2)He spites God, whom he hates for having cast him out, by raping Creation or 3)His murder is an art, he creates in destruction, and God is dead, but has left a magnificent canvas. In the same way, an Innocent could see God as benefactor, fearful destroyer, or non-entity. I don't think that Conviction assumes either Virtue or Morality: Just an attitude toward a Creator that everyone knows once existed, but that no one really understands or remembers.

Sacha

But then you've just trumped your own argument that there are bell curves within each Conviction.

I think, once you look on a grander scale, it becomes possible to see that there are groupings of individuals with similar points of view. And I would argue that there is a "typical" rendering of the Divine as "those who believe in the Creator and who believe in upholding Creation"; and a "typical" rendering of the Infernal as "those who no longer believe the Creator is relevant, and who do not care to uphold Creation"; and a "typical" rendering of the Deistical as "those who aren't sure or who don't care about the continued existence of the Creator and whose main purpose is hedonism".

If there weren't "typical" understandings of the Convictions, there wouldn't necessarily *be* Convictions listed. You have the option of playing a 'by the book' Conviction, or your own interpretation of it.

Actually, it was totally consistent with my argument that there are moral bell-curves within Convictions, but that one bell-curve to represent them all is a flawed conception. To my mind, the reason that Convictions exist is because, in a game where the characters are Fallen Angels, God has to be central. What God is, and how God should be related to, can, are, and should be topics of discussion.

That being said, just because Convictions represent a central part of the game does not mean, to my mind, that there needs to be anything that unites its members beyond love, hatred or dismissal of the Creator. In fact, to my mind I don't think that there should be anything else that unites them, including an attitude toward Creation. It seems to me that having to accept your brother in faith (or lack thereof) despite finding many of his beliefs repugnant is a tension that makes the game better. A game where the moderate religious person feels compelled to accept the one whose sincere faith means that he wants to hasten the apocalypse is one with depth, feeling and tension, while the one where he can easily dismiss that guy as the crazy who doesn't 'represent' his Conviction lacks it.

Sacha

For me, the Convictions were initially based in action, and the seeds of that action colours the entirety of the Convictions. Also, I think it's reasonable to think that, little as the Fallen remember, there is some kind of a limited consensus among them about "what God would want", if only because it is so deeply a part of them.

Which isn't to say that there isn't room for the kind of tension that Sacha is describing. Certainly, I don't expect everyone in a Conviction to believe the same things, or for someone who has a strongly different viewpoint to be immediately kicked out. I just think that there is a 'baseline' view, a 'typical' understanding of the meaning of the Conviction.

In terms of game mechanics, the Convictions exist to make it easier for someone coming in to this game to find others who are like-minded. The degree of that like-mindedness gives you the bell curves within each Conviction, and the existence of that mechanic at all gives you the overall pendulum-like spread of philosophies.

Mike: To clarify, this action being to decide whether to uphold or scour Creation? Because, if so, I'm still skeptical that that's what served to form the distinction initially, rather than simple guilt for breaking God's will or confusion and anger at being cast out. Besides which, it strikes me that the seeds that you're referring to would have been pretty hard to maintain in millennia of bitter, brutal warfare, defined by torture, hatred and betrayal.

Jill: I buy that, sure, but what exactly is meant by people who are like-minded? Doesn't a desire to serve God or a hatred for God provide that common mindset?

Sacha

Sure, but in any group with more than two people, you will have degrees to which people adhere to or believe in that desire or hatred. For some folks, they will have absolutely nothing to say about God either way. Others may be vehemently in favour of serving God; yet others will be vehement about hatred for God. In any case, when you have two opposing points of view, you get folks at either end who are (or who seem to be) diametrically opposed.

But you have the majority of people not as passionate; people whose beliefs lie somewhere in the middle. Folks who figure that serving God is probably a good thing, but they won't necessarily go out of their way to mention that that is their motivation (versus the one who names the Creator in every sentence). There might be those who figure that God has betrayed them, but wouldn't go so far as to say they have 'hatred' for the Creator. And yet others who don't care or who don't care to choose sides.

And that lends itself to a bell curve.

I agree completely. However, I question what one's level of conviction in wanting to serve God or reject him has to do with morality. Or, am I missing something, and does it not have anything to do with morality?

Sacha

I don't think this discussion that *we* are having has anything to do with morality. That was my initial point...that morality and Embodiment and Conviction really haven't anything to do with each other.

Sure, there's a possibility that many of the Divine were initially moral and virtuous, but nobody really knows that for sure. And we all just assume that the majority of the Infernal are immoral, but I think those are presumptions that you make on a character by character basis.

No, I was just talking about Conviction in the last few posts.

Ah, we have been in agreement for the last few posts, then. Everybody wins!

Sacha

I told you I was right. Bewbs over Beards!

i believe you are underestimating the power of the beard...