[quote=Professor Strix] <snipping heavily>
I like the fact that FL don’t make you be either good or evil - you can be grey, as most humans are. But I do find it irritating that, many instances in which the game gives you what seems to be a morally good choice (for instance, helping an elderly lady) and you think "hey, I guess I’ll be good on this one, this person deserves it", the game often ‘rewards’ with you with a text that basically makes you a petty creature, want you or not. It’s like they are saying "you can be everything in London, but don’t dare to try to be a nice, honest and socially functioning human being, we don’t like it here".
It’s not that I want to always be a girl scout, or to always have happy hippie-ish ends, but when you can’t be good, choosing an evil option for profit looses all emotional weight it could have. You either quit the game or stop caring, choosing just whatever is most profitable. While making profit to buy things is a draw for many people who plays FL, it’s not what hooked me in in the first place. I like my choices to be hard, and they cease to be hard when you don’t care anymore and just want profit.
Lastly, I don’t think it’s the writer’s fault. I wouldn’t have played as much content as I could until I reached the end of regular content if I didn’t like the writing. I’m just saying that no one can deny that the game don’t let you play with a lawful good character, unless you want to quit midgame and start a morally grey character. It might be a stylistic choice, it might be accidental, but it is something that happens.[/quote]
I think there’s some truth to the charge that the kinds of moral choices that most of us make, by preference, in our daily lives (e.g., not to kill, steal, defraudpeople) makes for a rather constrained set of choices in Fallen London. No one can deny that one of the four basic stats – Shadowy – is based on how effective you are at fraud, casual violence and other forms of criminal conduct.
On the other hand, options certainly exist in FL to do what most of us consider to be the "right thing." For example, you can choose to tell the Bluejacket the truth about his son in "Where You and I Must Go." You can pass on a little girl’s letter to her beloved former governess in "The Frequently Deceased." And the choice a player makes in one of the earliest FL stories–that of the Contessa–is wrenching precisely because it’s based upon what the player, functioning as we all do on limited information, thinks is right.
There is violence, pettiness, nastiness in FL as there is in human existence. If there were not, many of us would not like the game so well because it would not feel real. In fact, we are having this conversation precisely because FL does feel real, and it is disturbing to realize that in some ways we tend, after a while, to take Fallen London’s skewed moral choices for granted. If those choices alarm you, the player, you always have the option to quit playing the game, or to only play storylines where the actions permitted by the game are moral ones, according to your own morality or that of your game character. Or you can play the game with all of the immorality that is implicit and explicit in its stories, aware how those choices are not choices you would want to make if FL were real and you were living among all the mushrooms, tomb-colonists, and rats. Played on that level, FL throws what most of us would consider to be self-evident moral choices into sharp relief, which can be very enlightening.
But there are always choices, even if the choices put on offer in a particular ES are not ones we like.