Morality within Role Playing Games

As my adventures continue with game design I’ve hit a potential snag. You see, my game concept is blending the dark, grittiness of Cyberpunk with the light-hearted humor of my favorite anime shows. The problem is death is like unheard of in anime comedy, whereas it’s an hourly occurrence in a Cyberpunk setting. And that got me thinking, a lot of role playing games just flat out kill the adversaries. Kill the monsters, sure, but what about those NPC’s as adversaries. A lot of role playing games have a combat mechanic, and as a natural result, death is usually the outcome— unlike in real life.

And while death does occur within anime, it’s usually a very reserved event that rarely goes without major consequences— usually for the other characters to experience. That’s why early on in the development of my game, I decided that I wanted to shy away from Death as a part of the core mechanic. But I hadn’t give very much though about Death towards adversaries, at least not until this morning.

So I thought about how I would handle the concept of Defeat in my game. Since Death is a reserved option for Players toward their characters (sometimes, you just want to retire, right?), but I needed something for dealing with adversaries. Look no further than your typical Magical Girl anime! My hero(ine)!

Magical girls typically deal with subduing thier opponents in one of three different ways:

• Imprisonment. Let’s look at Cardcaptor Sakura. Granted, her foes were originally trapped in the Clow Cards, but being only ten years old, Sakura wasn’t about get her outfit all messy with gore and guts from her monsterous foes, right? No, she captured each one of them back into a Clow Card— an imprisonment device. Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has a similar tactic. Nanoha, only being nine years old was dispatched on a mission to collect the Jewel Seeds— wish-granting devices that often morphed into monsterous entities. Nanoha would battle Fate to collect the Jewel Seeds to keep her (Nanoha’s) neighborhood safe and sound. The world of Nanoha leads me into the next Defeat Device, however, imprisonment into inanimate objects isn’t the only form of prison for the Bad Guys. Sometimes, these people are truly criminals and justice is served.

• Rehabilitation. This is a much more difficult tactic that Magical Girls (and other anime heroes) utilize to defeat their nemesises. Again, looking at Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, we see in the first season that Fate, Nanoha’s rival ends up not being quite so bad. This mechanic is further enforced with the introduction of the Wolkenritter. Nanoha and company managed to rehabilitate their new enemies into joining forces at the end of the Season.

• Banishment. This is the final variety of plot devices that I can think of off the top of my head for how anime protagonists would handle their foes in a humane, non-lethal way. I think the Antagonists from Sailor Moon best fit this method. Although the adversaries are demons, they are overpowered and forcably removed from the Earth Plane. I feel that this could be interpreted as a form of banishment. Once the Demons gain enough power back, they’re welcome to try again, right—even if it never happens.

There’s probably a few other methods that I’m just not seeing right now, but at least I now have a few decent consequences for how Anatagonists are going to be defeated. After all, it doesn’t make too much sense (to me for right now) if Antagonists have to add Quirks to thier chararacter sheet. And that make the job of the Game Master more difficult. The goal is to reduce the work load!