Moral Core as a Source of Conflict

Salutations, my curious congregation. Today I'm going to be talking about something I've been tossing around in my head regarding character, and while this is going to be mostly in regards to writing it can apply pretty heavily to roleplaying characters as well. That thing is what is at your character's moral core, or if you play 5E, their ideal, and how that can be a good authentic source of conflict.

TWs: The sheer insinuation that morality is flexible and not always measured on the same metric and my usual dose of irreverence.

Alright, so you might be sitting here thinking 'wtf are they talking about'. Which is fair, because I'm not 100% sure myself, I'm still teasing this one out, but I have enough to share it and need something to write about today so here we go.

Obviously there is room in fiction to have some characters who just revel in being the soul of evil. That's actually okay. Sometimes, what the plot calls for is an uncomplicated villain and that can actually be incredibly compelling to read about. But that isn't what we're talking about right now. I just want to hang a lampshade on the fact that those exist before we go forward.

What are we talking about, you may be asking? Well, more the complicated sorts. We're talking about stories where there isn't an explicit bad guy so much as Character A, in fundamental disagreement with Character B. They are both doing what they think is the right thing.

After all, no one goes into a situation thinking 'I am going to be a terrible person'.

So what happened? They're both trying to do right so how did we end up with both of them dead set on taking the other one down?

They had different definitions of what it meant to do the right thing.

Moral Crux

What I want you to ask yourself, is what is the metric by which your character measures what the 'right thing' is? What defines evil to them? What defines good? And the answer to this is going to feed you the basic motivation for what this character will do a lot of the time.

For example, one character might have a moral core based around personal consent. Forcing somebody to do something is the most appalling thing that they can think of, and anything that damages somebody's agency is evil. This is a character who will take unlawful imprisonment very seriously and mind control to be the most heinous thing in the world. Character A.

Then, take a character whose moral core is based around preservation of life. The right thing to do is the one most people are going to survive. Murder is the worst thing they can think of off the top of their head, but they might actually be willing to kill someone if they run the numbers and think it's going to save more lives in the long run. Character B.

Both of those things seem like pretty good things to base your moral code around, right? You might even see those characters on the same side?

Except then you get to a part of the story where Character C is badly wounded in a way they won't recover from completely. They've been bitten by a zombie and the only way to save their life is to take an arm, for example. And Character C wants to die.

Is it okay to force them to undergo an amputation to save their life?

Character A would not think so. Character B would almost call it necessary. Suddenly, you have a point for them to clash over that comes up organically without making either character suddenly hold the villain ball; Character B might argue that C is feverish and unable to make an informed decision just at the moment. That if given the opportunity to live they might choose differently. A would argue that it's still their choice to make and if A and B weren't here to influence it, this would go one way and what right do they have to change that?

So often, conflict arises simply because the plot needs it to, and it doesn't actually make any sense for the characters involved. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of that. It takes me right out of the story any time I'm reading along and the villain does something just to make things more difficult for the main characters but doesn't actually have a reason to want to do that.

Like, he's just trying to make money, why does he care if what he's doing torments protagonist guy in the process?

But if you have a character whose idea of morality is what's most in line with the law as written, and one whose idea of morality is what is best for their own people, but the laws are written to be stacked against those people, you're going to have a fight that neither of these characters can walk away from. I am instantly engaged.

The people are driving the plot.

And that's basically what I've got about this for the moment. I might revisit it later once I've given it more thought, but now you've got an idea of where my head has been the past couple of weeks while I've been sick.

Fortune Favors,

Robin