Taint Systems

[Honest Tiefling]

Basically, I want to add a taint-like system to a game. But the first question is, which system had the best taint sub-system? Is it enjoyable, or is it needless homework? And any tips anyone has about using it would be greatly appreciated. And of course, I cannot say no to amusing DnD stories involving it.

[j_spencer93]

I have used taint in almost all of my games. It is a little more book keeping but can add some nice role playing options to the game. Like allowing good characters to use evil spells (obviously only in times of great need) but they build taint by doing it. One of the 3.5 books doesnt have a bad system if a little confusing.

[BWR]

Basically, I want to add a taint-like system to a game. But the first question is, which system had the best taint sub-system? Is it enjoyable, or is it needless homework? And any tips anyone has about using it would be greatly appreciated. And of course, I cannot say no to amusing DnD stories involving it.

Depends on what you mean by 'best'. How nasty do you want it? How different from the original L5R mechanics and intent? What do you want the Taint to do?
I'm partial to the L5R versions since the d20 versions are a bit too kind.

[Honest Tiefling]

Hrm. Unsure yet, and I don't know how lethal I want it. I think a system with interesting side effects would be perferable, as opposed to killing them outright. I am not terribly familiar with L5R, however.

[Chronos]

With any taint system, you want to keep an eye out for what will happen if the players just don't care. There will always be a few who will say "OK, so my soul's a twisted mockery of what it should be, but I got a lot of power out of it, so it's all cool". So make sure that there are consequences that will matter even to those folks.

[Amphetryon]

There are also going to be those who approach taint as simply "Okay, so the DM is requiring us to invest X portion of our money into silk/jade/taint-preventative ABC, but will (hopefully) be giving us enough extra wealth options that we're not actually behind on WBL. So, the point was. . . making sure we had certain items on our character sheets, apparently?"

[j_spencer93]

I use it, but at higher taint scores they start running the risk of creatures coming after their souls. Having to much taint attracted evil outsiders wishing to manipulate or take them. This keeps them from abusing it to much, for they will either die or their partners will make them pay for their choices. however, a good character having the option to use evil spells through taint, and twisting part of their soul is a great RP hook

[Segev]

If we're talking D&D, Heroes of Horror has the best implementation of Taint in 3.5e. It still has some flaws, but as long as you don't let players become undead in order to abuse it, it's mostly just plain a bad thing to get.

Stepping away from specific games (even L5R), philosophically, I like the idea of taint (like other things) offering both incentive and penalty. I like the idea of mechanics which make it just as tempting to the player as it's supposed to be to the character, and the consequences just as fearsome.

As an example NOT directly related to taint systems, Exalted 2e's Fair Folk had mechanics for feeding on mortal souls. However, the mechanics didn't let you get a whole lot out of doing so, so doing so in the ways that the Fair Folk of the setting were described to was...stupid. They got nothing more out of ravaging the souls of entire towns than they did out of gently supping on a select mortal or two, or even livestock.

New rules eventually came out that made over-feeding give really impressive boosts, especially if one gorged oneself and slaughtered the spirits of people. They were temporary boosts, so you'd need to do it repeatedly. Finally, there was reason for a PLAYER to want to have his Fair Folk act the beautiful, ravenous monster. To risk the ire of powerful defenders of mankind coming after you for your atrocities.


I think taint rules need to do something similar. Taint needs to be a source of strength. One that gets more accessible and more powerful the more you use it. It also needs to have a variable negative impact. Something die-pool related, rather than flat-DC related. That way, the moment you "cross the line" is never quite clear.

Taint also needs to do bad things that players will care about as much as their characters.

A good taint system might offer "taint points" from some source, which you can spend on various powers, mutations, boons, etc. Perhaps there's an automatic curse with a little bit of taint, just to make having it without buying any powers purely negative. A character struggling with taint he did not bring on himself or did not want and trying to stave it off suffers with no benefit.

Maybe, if a player is trying to do something, and his character is just shy of success but the GM realizes there's a taint-power that could help, the taint points spend themselves to give it to him, and the power activates itself. Give the player the activation for "free" this time; no additional taint gained. But he has the power now. It's his to use...if he chooses. And he'll know it's there, and that it CAN make the difference, because it DID that one time.

Taint-powers should probably not directly increase one's taint. Certainly not trivially. They might increase susceptibility as they're used, but they shouldn't actively create it.

Instead, they should have...requirements. The weaker ones require evil actions (which might or might not open one up to more taint just performing them) to fuel them. The stronger ones might come with downsides which require evil actions to mitigate. Caniballism, vampirism, a power fueled by the sacrifice of stolen objects important to other people... these things make good downsides to tainted powers.

The mechanics of taint should tempt and reward with power acts that bring more and more corruption on the character.

Do not worry if a player says, "sure, I'm a twisted mockery of what I 'should' be, but I have all this power." That just means the taint is doing its job. If you need the players as a whole to stay "good" despite the risks of taint, your best bet is to make the social repercussions ghastly. Tainted people are pariahs at best; those actively using tainted powers are subject to execution...or worse.

This isn't even arbitrary; because tainted powers require horrific deeds of those who use them, they're dangers to civilized society and innocents. This means societies will want them dealt with swiftly and effectively. Provided your players are okay with playing good guys, there will come a point where the sufficiently tainted character is so reliant on vile, horrible activities that he just can't stay with the party. He becomes an NPC when the party drives him out.

If the party won't drive him out, then they're probably becoming tainted by virtue of tolerating or condoning his evil. Eventually, society will drive them out. If you don't want to run an evil campaign of tainted minions controlled by evil (through the things their tainted powers require of them), then you declare the whole party to be evil NPCs when you find you cannot run the campaign of heroes you had planned. Offer to let any who stayed untainted and turned on their tainted former friends to remain, and let the others make new characters. Make villains out of the tainted ex-PCs. Your players will probably love it.

(If they don't, then there was something wrong with the social contract and expectations at your table, and you'll need to reexamine it with everybody to make a better game in the future.)

[j_spencer93]

He is right, it needs to be more then just a penalty (obviously allow them to access corrupt spells if used by a mage). I allow those with taint to also choose things that require evil alignments. but this also tends to push them farther evil...not the best solution honestly.
Honestly Segev has the right idea about it.

[Honest Tiefling]

I wanted to make the Taint more Undeath themed, so I was entertaining the possibility of having Evil Outsiders not be immune to it, and probably hesitate to be fully consumed by it. I think I'll enforce a rule that once you become too tainted, your PC has become an NPC hellbent on destruction and is now under my own control.

I wonder if giving out powers based on a score I keep track of and not letting them have a choice would be a bad idea? I sorta like the idea that it cannot be harnessed fully, but I wonder if that might lead to some problems.

As for the price...I was thinking that they start taking a hit to saves and HP. Perhaps a little too basic, but I like the idea of it taking a toll upon living flesh, and hopefully causes the PCs to hesitate a bit. Maybe that one gains these bonuses back if they do something, but for the life of I cannot come up with anything better then bathing in blood, killing or consuming flesh of sapient creatures.

The corrupt spells look interesting. Has anyone done a conversion for them for Pathfinder?

I don't mind evil campaigns, I mind PvP more, actually. Perhaps I'm a little odd in that.

Thanks everyone has commented thus far!

[ExLibrisMortis]

The taint system in Heroes of Horror essentially adds flaws, including the corresponding bonus feat (for stages 2 and 3, not stage 1 - stages progress based on taint points, and your constitution and wisdom scores, you have no direct control over when you get the feats), every time you become more corrupted. The flaws are a lot worse than the ones listed in Unearthed Arcana, though, and have some pretty nasty visual manifestations. Once you reach stage 4, you become an NPC with a nice (cough) template. It sounds like it would fit what you had in mind - just modify the rate of taint acquisition and removal to suit your campaign.

[Andezzar]

Like allowing good characters to use evil spells (obviously only in times of great need) but they build taint by doing it.Arcane casters and even some divine ones (archivist, ur-priest) can already do that anytime. That will eventually change their alignment to evil and possibly taint them, if you use that system, though.

[j_spencer93]

ya that was the idea, but applied to all magical classes.

[Andezzar]

I just wanted to say that there is no special permission to use evil spells, most casters are already allowed to do that.

[j_spencer93]

mainly aimed at divine classes and adds some cool flavor to the game lol just my opinion. but ya normally there is not.

[Honest Tiefling]

I think that is in reference to the fact that Clerics cannot cast spells in opposition to their alignment.

[atemu1234]

I think that is in reference to the fact that Clerics cannot cast spells in opposition to their alignment.

Yeah. I always figured it was a broad deity choice as opposed to the multiverse being pissed you got four zombies to carry your crap.

[Segev]

I always hesitate to condone taint systems where the player flat-out loses control of his character just because the score got too high. Don't get me wrong, it has its place. When the player is bound-determined never to do anything to give in to the taint, and isn't feeling the temptation from the standard munchkin-granted boons, but his character is still getting more and more tainted (to the point where he SHOULD be having trouble resisting just based on the taint alone; he SHOULD be making mistakes that the untainted player does not)...you want there to be a mechanic to "force" the bad choices. I get it.

There's a reason that being too tainted makes you so dangerous that you have to be put down, no matter how good your intentions.

Still, my preference is to never, ever make a player "roll a will save" for his character (however that manifests in the system), such that failing the "save" causes him to take actions the player did not dictate.

It just always feels lame, to me. It also creates "alignment hit points" which make it so that there's a "save-or-die" eventually that takes the character away completely. And that always feels less tragic and more like the player was cheated, somehow. (I'm also not a huge fan of save-or-die effects that can one-shot somebody who was otherwise succeeding, but that's a different thread.)


So. I am assuming (and correct me if I'm wrong) that you want taint to directly alter a character's...conscience, to a degree. To change his motives, at least in the "there's something whispering to me that I should do this evil thing" sense, and in the "I don't feel nearly as bad about that as I should" sense.

That's hard-to-impossible to engender in a player without being supremely skilled as a manipulator, yourself. That's what the "you have N points of Taint, so make a saving throw to not do something evil here" mechanics are best used to apply.

I think what makes me dislike them is that there's less feeling of responsibility for it. If, like me, you tend to think of your character's "true" will as being "what I say he does," when something - anything - lets another player (e.g. the GM) dictate his actions, it feels like "my character didn't really do it."

"It wasn't me, it was the Taint," might be an argument in fiction. Heck, it can go the other way: "It wasn't you, it was the Taint that took over. Stop blaming yourself." Both are cool, dramatic mainstays of the sort of tragic drama Taint (and other curses) can bring about. But it loses its drama when it's a blithe dismissal by the player. "It wasn't my character. We'll just acknowledge I'm carrying around this psychopath who might take over, and set up controls to restrain him when he does."

And then it just feels like there really are two people, rather than one person slowly being corrupted.


It's a little easier if the choices are to give in or go mad. While the narrative of somebody who's emotions start going darker and colder and more violent is cool, and how they deal with whether it's a good idea or they will regret something or not (or not feel guilty for something they would have before beign tainted), it's the hard one to pull off for the reasons listed above.

If the Taint tempts you to do evil, comforts you if you're conscience is bothering you, and drives you mad if you try to resist its blandishments, that can stay "in your control" even as it sends you spiralling into more depravity. This approach would involve hallucinations and delusions. The GM becomes less reliable a narrator of what the PC is seeing as the madness takes hold, until it's hard to tell enemies from innocents. The player is forced to either become a whimpering ball, to take beatings from things which are dangerous but he can't be sure, or to regularly risk harming innocents he thinks are monsters tearing into him.


A final thing I would suggest, however: Don't penalize saves, BABs, etc. in any sort of blanket sense. Penalize them under certain circumstances. Heroic self-sacrifice? Penalties galore, particularly on checks and the like to GET the character into position to be personally in danger. Trying to make somebody feel better? Penalties to social skills, unless you also manipulate them to be in some way useful to or used by you (in which case you start getting bonuses).

Start applying the penalties to actions which are not justified to serve the self or the cause of evil. Apply bonuses the more actions cause harm to innocents, abuse trusts, or otherwise play into corruption. All the better if the player is justifying to himself how it's for the greater good, and that his selfish motives are just to "trick" the evil within.

Do NOT reward enlightened self-interest just for being self-interest. Don't penalize actions which can be clearly justified with enlightened self-interest, but only if it's very clear that the tainted soul is getting at LEAST as much out of it, personally, as he's putting in. Even if it's long-term. It has to be CLEAR how he expects this to serve him. (And again, if it's a fair trade that harms nobody and has no negative moral element, don't reward it. Just don't penalize it.)

[NichG]

There are also going to be those who approach taint as simply "Okay, so the DM is requiring us to invest X portion of our money into silk/jade/taint-preventative ABC, but will (hopefully) be giving us enough extra wealth options that we're not actually behind on WBL. So, the point was. . . making sure we had certain items on our character sheets, apparently?"

There's a bit more to it than that, in terms of game design. The way I'd put it is, a Taint system means that there's a tag that the DM can add to encounters to change the trade-off between short-term resource management and long-term resource management in that encounter. It's a more extreme case of what ability drain does on long dungeon crawls, except now it's introducing a resource which must be managed across multiple dungeon crawls rather than just across multiple encounters in a day.

For example, lets boil this down to the bare minimum and look at what it does to a party's tactics:

- Taint is only inflicted by a certain kind of attack from special, somewhat rare types of monsters
- Taint cannot be prevented (aside from preventing the attacks of said monsters from hitting), nor directly healed (e.g. Taint is not fungible with other character resources).
- There is an effective 'sustainable Taint rate' at which the passive mechanisms for dealing with Taint are balanced with influx of Taint. A player who disregards Taint will end up above this rate, whereas a player who is as cautious as possible will end up below this rate.
- The DM supplies a regular stream of 'above the baseline' benefits which creates an effective penalty for bringing in a new character. This could be storyline integration, wealth above WBL, occasional random perks associated with in-game events, whatever. Taint above a certain amount creates a mechanical penalty which is undesirable, but which is less severe than the effective new-character penalty.

So, if you know that these are the rules, then you might decide to sneak past Taint-inflicting monsters rather than fight them directly. If there is a particular pattern to the attacks of Taint-inflicting monsters, then you may modify your tactics in a way that makes you less effective in those fights in order to avoid the long-term negative effects of Taint.

For example, if Taint accrues whenever you cast a spell on a Taint-bearing monster and it makes its saving throw then you're more likely to stick to ranged touch attack styles of spells and eschew things that use saving throw mechanics against those monsters, even if the saving throw-based spells would be the tactically better choice in the immediate scenario.

The game-design consequence is essentially to induce locally sub-optimal tactical decisions in favor of long-term strategy. Or to put it another way, it's a way to model fear. You don't know how much Taint you might be inflicted with over the rest of the campaign, so some players may overestimate its danger and restrict their tactics more severely than is needed, while other players may be overly brazen and get in over their heads.

[weckar]

3rd edition Ravenloft's 'Taint ladder' always appealed to me. I like the idea of a spiraling sand pit that's actually quite attractive to go down - for a while - and that you COULD always climb out of if you so wanted... until you get to the bottom....

[Honest Tiefling]

I always hesitate to condone taint systems where the player flat-out loses control of his character just because the score got too high. Don't get me wrong, it has its place. When the player is bound-determined never to do anything to give in to the taint, and isn't feeling the temptation from the standard munchkin-granted boons, but his character is still getting more and more tainted (to the point where he SHOULD be having trouble resisting just based on the taint alone; he SHOULD be making mistakes that the untainted player does not)...you want there to be a mechanic to "force" the bad choices. I get it.

This I get. I'll take precautions that if one falls to the Taint, either you got super unlucky fighting an extremely powerful foe and you probably should have been expecting that one (As in, a campaign ending boss or otherwise super powerful creature that yes, you should hesitate running up to and trying to take on) or the result of dabbling too much with the taint. As in, the player really should be expecting the undead lich in charge of a giant army to probably be bad news over all.

I'll have to think regarding the effect I want it to have upon the players, I think being a tempting but ultimately dangerous source of power that might lead to corruption (i.e., character is now mine) is the sweet spot.

[Segev]

It does seem so, yeah. I would venture to say that, if I were designing it, my preferred means of "character is now mine" would never involve a numeric comparison that declares it so. That is, no "will save, because you're at Taint X, or become an NPC," nor "If your Taint is ever higher than insert-stat-on-your-character-sheet-here, you become an NPC."

I would always prefer it to be a point wherein the character has DONE THINGS which make him so corrupt that he cannot function as a member of the party anymore, not without the party effectively turning evil (and becoming outcast from good society) to stay with him. This kind of thing is usually obvious to tables when it happens.



As a thought, normally the advice given to DMs is to give warning to players if their character seems to be taking questionable actions that might lead to consequences the player might not have thought of in the heat of the moment, but which a character living in the world might realize. The old, "are you sure you want to do that? The guards might take exception," or "You do realize that's rather evil, right?" routine. This is to prevent a player from having a character-ruining moment due to the player forgetting something or making a "it's just a game" choice that bypassed his normal filters. To make sure he knows what he's getting into.

Perhaps more tainted characters, you the GM warn less about these sorts of things. Maybe you even offer other warnings, suggesting hazards that would be best solved with more vile acts. "Are you sure you want to reach into the water to pull that kid out? You know you're tainted, and water can have painful effects if it's got the right gods in it." "You're going to take the captured prisoner's word that he's surrendered? He could escape those bonds."

[dascarletm]

I wanted to make the Taint more Undeath themed, so I was entertaining the possibility of having Evil Outsiders not be immune to it, and probably hesitate to be fully consumed by it. I think I'll enforce a rule that once you become too tainted, your PC has become an NPC hellbent on destruction and is now under my own control.

I wonder if giving out powers based on a score I keep track of and not letting them have a choice would be a bad idea? I sorta like the idea that it cannot be harnessed fully, but I wonder if that might lead to some problems.

As for the price...I was thinking that they start taking a hit to saves and HP. Perhaps a little too basic, but I like the idea of it taking a toll upon living flesh, and hopefully causes the PCs to hesitate a bit. Maybe that one gains these bonuses back if they do something, but for the life of I cannot come up with anything better then bathing in blood, killing or consuming flesh of sapient creatures.

The corrupt spells look interesting. Has anyone done a conversion for them for Pathfinder?

I don't mind evil campaigns, I mind PvP more, actually. Perhaps I'm a little odd in that.

Thanks everyone has commented thus far!

You might want to look into how Fantasy Flight did their corruption rules for Rogue Trader and other such WH40k games. It might be right up your alley.

At 100 points the player becomes an NPC.

[Honest Tiefling]

Sadly, I do not know how those systems operate. As for NPCdom, I really only mean that for people who get unlucky while dancing on the edge of taint or someone who does something completely stupid like eating an evil artifact.