Character Creation: The Impact of Medium on Virtue Ethics in Tabletop And Digital Roleplaying Games

This thesis investigates how the material differences between tabletop and digital roleplaying games (RPGs) result in divergent designs for their constitutive mechanical and narrative systems and how those divergent designs influence the player's roleplay, in-game agency, and by extension, opportunities for reflection on their character's moral conduct. This thesis renders Aristotelian virtue ethics as a procedure, one which roleplaying games, in possessing the capacity for procedural rhetoric, can craft conversation around. The first two chapters explore the structure of this conversation in comparing the systems of tabletop and digital RPGs. Chapter one specifically examines how medium interacts with and shapes the mechanical systems of these RPGs to produce opportunities for players to reflect on their character's ethos formation. Chapter two examines narrative game systems in the same manner. Chapter three then analyzes the digital RPG Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (2021) and its blending of tabletop alignment systems with digital morality meters to demonstrate how medium-influenced design techniques can mesh and create unique systems with equally novel opportunities for ethical reflection. In total, this thesis demonstrates that the materiality of games, particularly roleplaying games, affects (but not completely determines) how those texts structure conversations about morality and involve the player.