[freeroleplay] [FRINGE] Personality Traits vs. Alignment
- From: Ricardo Gladwell <president@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: FRPGC <freeroleplay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 19:25:38 +0000
Hi All,
I've been pondering personality traits and there relationship with their
primitive "ancestor" - alignments. In D&D alignments serve the simple
role of dividing characters into fundamental personality types.
Basically, characters are either good, evil or neutral indicating their
inclinations and likeliness to behave in certain ways.
Modern advances in RPG personality modelling include the personality
traits from Ars Magica, where personality traits are far more free-form
range of traits: you can select any personality adjective as a
personality traits, and each personality trait has a score representing
the influence of the trait. It creates a far more "multi-dimensional"
model of personality which is more realistic.
What is nice about alignments is that they create simple categories that
can be integrated into the rules. For example, evil characters are
penalised for using good-aligned magical items. The disadvantage is that
they are hopelessly confining and universally despised. Similarly, the
advantage of Ars Magica personality traits is that they allow a
character's personality to be very clearly defined, but they are so
free-form that they have no clear categories that allow the rules to
interact with and discriminate personality types.
In FRINGE I've created a compromise: personality traits are fixed like
the Lawful-Chaotic and Good-Evil spectra in D&D. However, there are many
axis instead of one: I've created about 10 basic personality trait
"types" like Angry, Hate, Caprice, etc. Each personality trait has an
opposing trait. Characters select their personalities by choosing ranks
in these traits and decide where they lie on each "spectrum". For
example, a head strong fighter might have Anger 3 and Caprice 2.
In this way, personalities are still free-form (you can select
specialities for personality traits to make them more descriptive) but
you can still make in-game statements about a personalities. For
example, if you have an order of monks you might want to require that
all character's who join have a minimum score of Calm 3 before they can
gain any of the advantages of the group, such as Kung-Fu Kick.
Kind regards,
--
Ricardo Gladwell
President, Free Roleplaying Community
http://www.freeroleplay.org/
president@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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