As many gamers likely are, I’m a great game designer… in my own mind. While listening to a podcast recently, I heard someone mention how the protagonist in Red Dead Redemption helps Bonnie the rancher round up cows, and then immediately goes and murders twenty people at the behest of a snake oil salesman. Not exactly consistent, and it makes the character that you’re playing feel like less of a character. So many games take this tact – they allow for a great diversity of choice, but provide no penalty for inconsistency of action. Is the character magnanimous? Is the character self-serving?

Thinking about this, I immediately imagined the tried-and-true linear one-dimensional scale of good and evil, and imagined points up and down this grid, each of which represented an action. +2 might be a mildly nice action, and -60 would be a downright evil action. Perhaps the best approach would be to rate in-game actions on this scale, and move the PC’s alignment slider up and down accordingly, based on the appropriate algorithm. The trick is to only allow actions that are 20 points below or above the character’s current alignment. Thus, if you’ve just murdered twenty people, your alignment might slide from 0 (neutral) to -30 (dastardly), and disallow you to undertake a quest rated at +2. Obviously, this system requires some work before it would be usable, but I think the jist is apparent.