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Originally Posted by Avianmosquito
What motivation could be provided for player characters that are members of an organisation to follow (or at least pretend to follow) their organisation's rules when they're not in a position for that information to make its way back to their superiors? Especially when the party is around, what motivation could they have to follow their rules or hide breaking them when the party probably isn't going to rat them out?
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Tell me, why would anyone in this world (NPC and/or PC) follow these (from what I understand often inconvenient or problematic) codes of conduct when there is no danger of being found out? As you say yourself, those in power or in cahoots with those in power break them regularly. As a consequence it makes sense for the party as well to tolerate certain indiscretions of their fellow teammates and look the other way occasionally -
if they trust each other!
If the PCs don't trust each other, then it's obvious that they wouldn't violate their codes in front of other players. There are quite a few systems that integrate PC-PC mistrust and betrayal into their world such as Paranoia, Vampire: The Masquerade (the old one), and the various Warhammer systems. One way you could create such a game world is by having all these organizations be antagonistic towards each other and always looking for ways to bring other organizations down. Consequently there would be institutional rewards for players who would rat out other PCs out if the violation would reflect poorly on the opposing faction. You could even create a whole system around institutional favors and violations that would allow players to advance in rank and gain favors based on rank. This will change the game entirely though, and introduce strong pvp elements. My guess is this is not what you were after.
There is one thing you have to keep in mind: How much trust there is between the party, how they play out their loyalty to their organization, and how much the GM enforces codes of conduct is
entirely up to the players and the GM, and as you have pointed out repeatedly, you are neither. As a game designer it's not up to you to enforce a certain type of roleplaying. That's entirely the GMs job.
So my advise is, rather than introducing an arbitrary reason to make players mistrust each others or tell the GM to enforce such and such, simply provide a discussion on the different possibilities on how to structure PC-PC interactions, and leave it up to the GM to resolve this. Is this a game where players are encouraged to rat each other out to gain favors in their organizations as in Paranoia? Tell the GM to make institutional benefits the primary motivation for the game. Is this a game where the players start out as naive novices who become aware of the inherent corruption of the organizations during the course of the adventure? Then the GM and players should roleplay that naivite and the growing tolerance of minor indiscretion over time (as in the players
agree to follow the rules in the beginning because that's what their PCs believe in). Is this a regular adventure game where the organizations play only a minor part in the day-to-day activities of the players? Then the codes of conduct shouldn't be enforced anyway and be relegated to background flavor. All of this is up to the GM though, not you.
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I am asking how to non-mechanically motivate player characters to behave in a way that makes sense for them but makes no sense for their players. That is the core premise. Is it still confusing?
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It's not so much confusing, but simply impossible. If a player understands that their PC believes this-and-that is the right way to act, then it makes sense for the player to make their PC act that way even if the player wouldn't do so themselves in the real world. That's called roleplaying. If the player however, comes to the conclusion that the PC themselves have no reason to follow these arbitrary rules, (aside from punishment) then it stands to reason that neither the player nor the character would do so. That's also roleplaying. The only way what you describe can happen is if players completely ignore their character's motivation and background and act out their whims. That's bad roleplaying, and there are oodles of essays written about it in numerous game systems.
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Basically, I'm looking for advice to give to Game Masters in the rulebook to make sure players think about the rules and find some intelligent workaround, rather than ignoring them entirely. That's a simple thing, expressed exceedingly poorly by me ten hours ago.
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You just tell them that right there: "make sure players think about the rules and find some intelligent workaround, rather than ignoring them entirely" and leave it up to the GM to figure out how much they want to enforce this. It's not up to a game designer to regulate meta-gaming.