I would never trust a girl who cheated on her husband.

  I do not know the events which occasioned this comment from my second son, as I was not privy either to that conversation or to whatever preceded it.  Nor would I, if I knew for certain that it referenced a particular young friend of his, divulge that secret.  However, it echoed in my mind from something I have expressed many times in the past to many people.  I cannot say to how many girls I have tried to explain that in the end the man who is cheating on his wife to go out with her is not going to be a good husband if she ever does succeed in getting him to leave that wife.  Even if by some miracle he indeed did find perpetual happiness and bliss in her arms, could she ever know for certain that he who cheated on his previous wife would not cheat on her?  In some version of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde I partly caught on television decades ago, Jekyl’s wife is having an affair with some other man; Hyde manages to maneuver that man into a terrible situation, and then insists that it can all be fixed if the man will arrange for him to have Jekyl’s wife.  The man balks; he’s in love with this woman.  Jekyl argues, what trouble can there be to arranging for a man to have a romantic tryst with a proven adulteress?  And so we see the point.

  It was most clearly expressed in my mind through an otherwise long-forgotten western I saw when I was a child:  a man’s only got his word, and if that’s ruined, he’s got nothing.

  Whom do you trust, and why?  Whom do you distrust, and why?

  My wife knows quite a few people who attempt to coddle her friendship by sharing juicy tidbits, gossip and secrets of mutual acquaintances.  She is always kind to these people; she is friendly, listens to them, converses with them, makes them feel valued.  But she never tells them any of her secrets or discusses her problems or concerns.  After all, a person who buys your friendship with the secrets and problems of others will almost certainly buy their friendship with yours.  In a very similar vein, Dave Barry is quoted as having said, The person who is nice to you but mean to the waiter is not a nice person.  The wise measure a person by how they treat others who are absent; it is likely that anyone who has the confidence of others has been nice in their presence, and the fact that they are nice to you when in your presence tells you nothing of what they think of you or how they act in your absence.

  I could go from here into a fine sermon about the importance of being trustworthy people.  We could all do well to look at ourselves and ask whether we are the sorts of people who can be trusted by others.  But this is not the forum for such a discussion; this is a forum for addressing issues related to games.  Let me assure you that this does relate to games; it relates to characters and how they interact.

  Elsewhere on this site you can read Morality and Consequences:  Overlooked Gaming Essentials, the first article I had published here or, if memory serves, on any Internet site which was not my own.  There I suggest that while good characters will build good reputations and so gain the support of the non-player characters in the world, so too evil characters will experience the backlash which comes as knowledge of their deeds spreads.  Certainly if you are running a game you need to pay attention to how people are likely to react to the known facts of the player characters.  But even if you are just another player in the game, you must ask yourself whether the characters with whom yours associates are the sort that he would trust.  There probably is little honor among thieves; it is undoubtedly a legend created by thieves to fool the uninitiated into lowering their guard when they are most vulnerable.  Take note of the actions and the words of those other characters, and consider how your character would take them.  Is he so foolish as to think that the brigand who killed and robbed hundreds of men will stop at taking down one of his comrades under the right circumstances?  Or is he wary, watching every move his so-called friends make, waiting for some hint that they are about to turn on him?  Or is he in fact the one whom they should not trust?  One friend reported of a game in which he played, the closer the party got to home, the less everyone slept, and the fewer remained alive; in the end, there was no difficulty dividing the treasure, as it went to the one person who managed to get home with it.

  Not so long ago someone expressed a problem to me; the problem is not important here, but the background is.  A group of friends were playing an ongoing campaign.  From time to time, one of the characters would be seriously wounded or even killed.  At that moment, another character who had skill in first aid would render assistance, and no one paid much attention to this; but each time he did so, he would remove valuables from the stricken man’s body.  Usually the victims were saved (the game allowed for the restoration of the dead to life, as many games do); and usually they did not notice the missing objects in time to connect the loss with the event.  But on one occasion when the offending character was wounded and another came to his aid and saved him, moments later, that other was stuck down, and this character reached him too late to do anything but take his body back to be revived.  However, this time when he removed a valuable piece of bejeweled equipment, the others noticed.  Recognizing what the man was doing, they also realized that they had discovered where all of their lost valuables had gone.  They had an in-character argument; it was particularly offensive to them that he should steal from the man who had just saved his life.  He was indignant, arrogant, angered that they should object to his actions, and attacked them.  He was a strong character; but it was four against one, and he lost fatally.

  What mystifies me is not that the character stole from his companions, nor that the character attempted to justify his actions when confronted.  It seems that the player, after all this, thought the other players had been unfair and should not have attacked his character.  It concerns me that this person would have such an attitude, and makes me wonder whether I should trust the person.  But it’s clear to me that once his character’s conduct was uncovered, the other characters would never trust him again.  I don’t see how he could think otherwise.

  Of course, some of us are trusting souls, tending to forgive the offenses we’ve suffered in the past in the expectation that those who have offended either did not intend it or have repented.  Others are suspicious by nature, requiring significant proof of the integrity of those we meet before we will entrust as much as our thoughts with them.  That certainly should be considered when creating a character.  Yet we should never overlook that aspect of trust, the perception we have of how trustworthy our character’s friends really are–or really aren’t.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.