I should be prepping Arden Vul, or at least I should try to create some electronic picture albums, or read books… And instead I’m blogging again.
I’ve now read two blog posts about honour but neither really strikes me as a great idea and the problem – for me, at least – is that I suspect that the material doesn’t make for a great game in the first place. I’m putting this right here, in the first paragraph: I have no solution, either. I have some doubt and I wonder whether thinking about these imagined problems leads me to running a better game, that’s all.
Single Class Paladin Campaign Book - First Glimpse
I wonder about representing honour in a game. I’m reminded of my rejection of heroism in my games. The problem is this: In real life and in books, heroism doesn’t work like it does in a book – at least if you take the definition of heroism that I care about: “voluntarily risks your life, knowingly, to an extraordinary degree, while saving, or attempting to save, the life of another person”. That is to say, many people doing heroic deeds risk their lives and die. Their stories end as they drown alongside the drowning victim. Their stories end as they are slaughtered alongside the people they are trying to defend.
I see various ways this plays out: We tell stories of heroes that died, which doesn’t mesh well with popular role-playing games – or we tell stories of in-game heroes but we know out-of-game that their lives was never in danger, so it ends up celebrating a fake heroism. The characters never risked their lives. They had plot protection. The purported value (heroism) turns into a farce. There’s more in this old blog post of mine, 2017-07-17 Heroic Scenes.
As for honour, there’s a similar problem. The way I see it, to be honourable is to live up to the high expectations of the social group you’re in. The honourable thing to do differs on your social group. Knights, thieves, bureaucrats, partners, merchants – every social group has expectations and since you belong to multiple groups, there are overlapping sets of expectations. You can read more about it on the Wikipedia page, Honour.
Now, to put it crudely, the expectations of honour are the prejudices of your peers in a context were law does not apply or in a time and place where there is no law that applies. Honour is how the land-holders tried to keep each other in check, how citizens keep each other in check, how family members keep each other in check. I think it’s important to understand that in my life, honour does not play a big role because it has been superseded by either the rule of law or my conscience. These days it’s more important that I follow my own inner moral compass than to follow the expectations of my peers. And we all understand this. People like me no longer live in a world of overwhelming peer pressure and unchecked violence. Sure, it still exists, but it is not front and centre. If people cheat their partners, there’s some recourse in the law, but there’s no public naming and shaming and exiling and duelling. Unless the law demands it, nobody looses their private property for being a dishonourable person. Not any more.
So how do we put this back into our games? For honour to mean something, it must mean something that isn’t governed by either law or conscience. That is to say, honourable characters are duty bound to do things that either aren’t governed by the law and aren’t dictated by our conscience. This is important: if the honourable actions are all governed by law and conscience, then there’s no point in talking about honour. What remains are law abiding citizens doing good deeds. Honour demands us to break the law, or go against our conscience, for the sake of the opinion of our peers, for it to be recognizable.
I wonder whether I’d want to play such a game. I’m in love with a woman but have promised to escort her home to marry my lord? Percival and Isolde. Assuming that no court of law could hand down judgement based on a promise made, nor my conscience contradict our love, the only thing that pushes me to act against my heart is honour: In the eyes of my fellow knights, the oath I made weighs more than my heart.
Perhaps it’s important to consider the Zeitgeist. With the sexual revolution, the role of our conscience and our heart has been gaining ground where as the judgement of our peers has been losing ground. The heckling of our peers, the grousing, slandering, rumour-mongering, all of these activities that make up honour have been discredited. The stories people tell each other celebrate breaking free of this: people break free from the iron grip of tradition, of family values, of community values; people follow their heart.
We still hand our rewards, medals, there are still speeches made to honour the dead… but the effect in my life is zero. Perhaps it’s more important in the military or in academia, I don’t know.
This is the point I’m trying to make: The stories we’d tell at the table would not be stories of our characters following their hearts. It would be stories of keeping promises even though they break our hearts. It would be stories of upholding our honour even though it breaks the law. It would be stories of sacrificing our friends and family for our lords, because the obligations of our positions demand it. An honour bound society is a terrible place to be, from our vantage point.
Of course, back in Homeric times, back when the Mahābhārata was written down, there was no law. The strong ruled and the only thing that kept them in check was honour. Therefore, stories written back then celebrate honour. As the rule of law gains traction, however, the role of honour fades. Sure, we still care about our reputation. We still care about slander. But we teach our children to ignore the stings; we solved the problems using the law – or not at all. The role of honour is far diminished.
Thinking about the Mahābhārata: Would I enjoy a role-playing game where my character was a gambler and gambled away everything, including myself and my family? Would I then enjoy playing a character dutifully enduring this state because I was honour-bound by promises I had made? Would I enjoy playing a character going to war against family members because they belong to the other side? I suspect that the game would focus on the adventuring years: 13 years of exile, travelling through endless forests, forging alliances, hiding in strange courts – all of this is adventure but has nothing to do with honour. Honour would be but a very small part of this game.
Maybe I’m just incapable to imagine a game where honour is important as opposed to a game where following or breaking the law or following our heart and acting upon our feelings is important. Perhaps I should read the Bhagavad Gita and learn more about Dharma before writing a blog post. Or perhaps I’m just infused with the anti-authoritarian Zeitgeist and cannot fathom finding joy in a game where duty and the expectations of others are fundamental cornerstones of the game. I cannot help but imagine burning it all down. It would embody values I was taught to despise – village life where people spy on each other, social control forcing people to use violence against their own family in order to uphold honour, the intense self-sacrifice necessary to uphold the illusion of a position one can no longer afford… all of this I find so terrible that the only game I can imagine myself enjoying would be a game where one struggles against this oppressive society.
I guess that’s a good point to end with: I know nothing about honour and playing a game where honour is central would be a bewildering experience.
#RPG
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The big question to me is why it would even appear to be desirable to have honor prominently in a game. We can play without it, and we do, and it’s fine. It’s not a piece that would fill a hole in our games that is causing problems.
– Yora 2023-08-09 16:46 UTC
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Totally. But I understand people reading books and thinking that here’s an interesting idea that I’d like to play with… I just happen to think that not all interesting ideas seem to work well in the medium of role-playing games. Like you said, it works well without.
– Alex 2023-08-09 18:31 UTC
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It might depend upon the specific game. With Pendragon, the setting does imply a shared cultural understanding of Honour, and the mechanics it introduces to reflect that do feel very genre appropriate.
– Simon Brunning 2023-08-11 11:26 UTC
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I don’t know. It has a Honour stat and leaves the question unanswered. It is up to the referees and players to decide when trait rolls are called for, no? It’s been a while since I ran a few years of The Great Pendragon Campaign.
– Alex 2023-08-11 17:19 UTC